Explorations: First Contact

by Isaac Hooke

  Side tunnels occasionally branched off. She and Anderson kept to the main tunnel until they reached one particularly wide branch, which they took. A map of the previously explored passageways overlaid Jenna’s vision, courtesy of the augmented reality display embedded in her faceplate. They approached the cavern that existed in the quadrant labeled 3C on the map.

  Jenna and Anderson had placed motion sensors throughout the ruins, among other remote monitoring instruments. That morning, something had shut off the cameras in quadrant 3C. The motion sensors in the same quadrant had fired a moment later.

  She reached the opening that led into 3C and stepped inside.

  She found herself in a cavernous chamber. Silky strands and translucent, web-like sheets draped the walls and hung from the low ceiling. Resinous humps and knobs protruded from the ribs between the floors, similar to the structures they had seen jutting from the floors of other caverns in the ruins. Jenna and Anderson hadn’t yet been able to determine the function of those knobs, though Jenna guessed they were holographic storage devices of some kind, perhaps containing the entire history and culture of the lost civilization. The trick was figuring out how to read the data contained on them.

  Scanning devices on tripods were located beside many of the protrusions, but without fail, every last one of them had been knocked down. The motion detectors themselves had fallen over.

  “Looks like we had a visitor,” Anderson said.

  “Could it have been seismic activity?” Jenna said.

  “Why didn’t we detect it from the outpost?” Anderson asked.

  “Good point. Check camera B.”

  As Anderson moved toward the assigned camera, Jenna made her way toward camera A. When she reached it, she picked up the tripod from the floor and examined the device at its tip. The camera seemed intact, but it refused to respond to her activation requests. A quick scan told her the battery had failed.

  “As I guessed,” Anderson transmitted from across the room. “Battery’s dead.”

  “Same with camera A,” Jenna said.

  “It’s still weird, though,” Anderson said. “Both cameras were rated for at least fifty-two weeks of operation. We only got six weeks.”

  “I know,” Jenna said.

  “What the hell could have drained them?” Anderson asked.

  Jenna didn’t answer.

  “Grange, you getting this?” she asked the AI of the orbiting ship. The communications node of the outpost would relay her signal to the vessel in orbit.

  “I am,” the AI of the Thetis returned. The voice warped slightly, due to the range.

  “What do you make of it?” Jenna asked.

  “It is peculiar,” the AI returned. “I believe it may be some anomalous property of the moon.”

  “Like what?” Jenna said. “What would drain the batteries in the cameras, but leave the motion detectors unaffected? And what would knock everything over?”

  “Unknown,” the AI admitted.

  “Maybe the Sphere was wrong about this system?” Anderson said. “Maybe it’s actually inhabited.”

  “No,” Jenna said. “Like the AI said, it has to be some natural phenomenon.”

  “Either that, or some automated defense system,” Anderson said. “Told you we shouldn’t have sent all the robots away.”

  Something caught Jenna’s eye near one of the knobs on the floor.

  “Well, what do we have here?” Jenna approached and knelt beside the protrusion. She set down her suitcase of scientific instruments.

  Anderson joined her. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” She retrieved an instrument from the case.

  Below her, on the resinous floor beside the knob, a small amount of mirrorlike liquid had collected. At least, she thought it was liquid. She held her instrument over the shiny mass. “According to the scans, it seems to be a mercury-carbon-silicon composite.”

  She fetched a sampling stick with her bulky gloves and prodded at the substance. When she lifted the stick, some of the mirrorlike liquid remained on the tip, connected to the main mass via a long, glutinous thread.

  “Shouldn’t it be frozen at these temperatures?” Anderson said.

  “No,” Jenna said. “Not with its current molecular structure. Have a look.” She relayed the preliminary results of her scan to his augmented reality display, then grabbed a vial from the case. “I’m taking a sample.”

  “Is that wise?” he said.

  “It’s why we’re here,” she replied as she scooped the thick substance into the vial and replaced the stopper.

  ***

  Jenna sat in her lab aboard the cramped outpost. It was good to be in a pressurized environment once more and out of that bulky spacesuit. Still, she felt a little vulnerable: if any of those polymer walls should develop a breach, even a small one, she and everything inside would be sucked out into the cold void.

  The vial resided within a glass chamber in the center of her lab. The telescoping limbs of a scanning microscope descended from the roof of that chamber, and focused on the vial.

  A completion tone sounded as the microscope finished its last pass, and Jenna pulled up the results on her augmented reality glasses.

  She stared at the molecular structure presented in three dimensions before her eyes.

  “So?” Anderson said, joining her with a fresh steaming cup of coffee in his hands. “What do we have?”

  She zoomed in, manipulating the molecules until she had isolated a small subset of them. “I don’t know. The results are basically the same as the preliminary scans. Mercury, carbon and silicon are definitely the major constituents. There is a smaller subset of impurities. A few trapped oxygen molecules, forming silicon dioxides. And some aluminosilicates mixed with potassium, sodium, calcium.”

  “So, basically nothing that we wouldn’t be exposed to in a materials science course.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Jenna said. “It seems too... organized. Orderly. To be natural.”

  “You think it’s xenogeneic to this moon?”

  “Obviously,” Jenna said. “It shouldn’t be here. And I’ve never heard that word used in such a context.”

  Anderson smiled. “I like to squeeze whatever mileage I can from my words.”

  A high-pitched klaxon abruptly sounded.

  Jenna glanced at Anderson urgently. It was the proximity alarm.

  Something’s out there.

  Jenna bounded toward the nearest viewport. Without her spacesuit she was even lighter, and quickly covered the necessary distance.

  “Where did the moon go?” Anderson said from her side.

  The white surface of the moon had been replaced by more of that mirror-like substance, forming a veritable lake of the stuff that extended as far as the external lights from the outpost could illuminate.

  Via her glasses, Jenna accessed the video feeds from different cameras stationed outside. The mirror-like lake surrounded the outpost on all sides. The nearest portions stopped approximately one meter away from the polymer walls.

  “Grange?” Jenna transmitted via her glasses.

  “I see it,” the AI returned. “A very peculiar circumstance. I would advise caution.”

  “Thanks,” Jenna said sarcastically. “But how easy would it be to evacuate us?”

  “I could have a shuttle down in five minutes,” the AI replied. “I would have to land it on that mercury lake, of course. And you would have to wade through it. Who could say what adverse effect that would have on the craft, and your spacesuits?”

  “I think they want their friend back,” Anderson said.

  Jenna glanced at the vial in the glass chamber. “Then we’ll give it to them.”

  She and Anderson suited up, and together they carried the glass chamber into the airlock. She sealed the inner hatch, waited for the air to evacuate, then opened the outer hatch. She retrieved the vial from the chamber and stepped outside onto the bare surface of the moon. She took a careful step toward the edge of th
at mercury lake and then knelt.

  “Here goes,” she said.

  Jenna unstoppered the vial and poured the substance onto the lake. The viscid liquid oozed down in one big globule. The foremost tip touched the surface, forming a long thread between the portion that yet remained in the vial. She waited several moments for the liquid to work itself down, and gently shook the container in an effort to accelerate the process.

  The last of the substance touched the surface, and in seconds the small lump it had formed was completely absorbed by the lake.

  The edges of the vast liquid began to retreat.

  “Anderson...” she said, stepping away, reaching for his gloved hand.

  “It’s working,” her assistant replied, gripping her glove firmly.

  She checked the feeds from the external cameras on the outpost. The lake was retreating on all sides.

  In about thirty seconds, the receding lake passed beyond the illumination of the outpost lights, and their own headlamps, leaving only the stark white moon in its place.

  “Well then,” Jenna said. “I think we just made first contact.”

  ***

  Jenna sat in the small kitchen of the outpost, drinking a special concoction of brown sugar, green tea and black coffee. She held the cup in her hands, warming her fingers. She tapped her right shoe impatiently on the deck.

  “I want to go back out there,” she told Anderson. “Study them.”

  “Assuming we’ll even find them again,” Anderson replied.

  “We’ll find them,” she said.

  He regarded her with a cautious expression. “We should wait for the robots to return. As backup, at the very least.”

  “No,” she said. “The inhabitants—if that’s what they are—never appeared the entire six weeks the robots were with us. It’s like they were shunning them. If we want to meet more of these... aliens...we have to go on our own.”

  And so it was that several hours later found Jenna and Anderson back inside the ruins once more, wearing their spacesuits. Jenna carried the familiar suitcase of scientific instruments. They had spent the past hour scouring the tunnels, but so far had spotted no further sign of the mercury creatures.

  “You’re going to have to admit I’m right at some point,” Anderson said. “They’ve gone, and they’re not coming back. We spooked them.”

  “And how exactly did we do that?”

  “By kidnapping one of them,” Anderson said. “Or a part of them.”

  “A part?”

  “Yes,” Anderson said. “How do we know the original blob of mercury we found wasn’t a single entity, and you scooped up the equivalent of its arm? How would you like to have your arm lifted away?”

  “I never thought of it like that,” Jenna said. “I guess I always supposed I’d taken a whole entity. But you’re entirely right.”

  “So we turn back?”

  “Let’s finish exploring this quadrant,” Jenna said. “There’s only one more cavern, and that’ll be the last of them.”

  Sure enough, they found no immediate sign of the entities upon entry into the final cavern.

  “I’m reading elevated butane levels in this chamber,” Anderson said, his scanning device held in front of him. “It’s almost like an air pocket, of sorts. But that’s impossible.”

  “Butane?” Jenna said.

  “Yeah,” Anderson replied. “I’m guessing hydrocarbons present in the rock strata could have leaked out, but I have no idea how they pooled here: this chamber is joined directly to the outside. There are no airlocks.”

  “There would have to be a containment field of some kind,” Jenna said.

  “Maybe,” Anderson said. “But why didn’t we detect any elevated energy readings anywhere?”

  “I don’t know.” Jenna paused. “Hydrocarbons, you say? Hydrocarbons would imply organic lifeforms inhabited this world at some point. These... entities...certainly don’t seem organic.”

  “Maybe they were at some point in their history,” Anderson said. “But they’ve transcended to some higher plane of existence.”

  “What bothers me,” Jenna said, “is why we never detected anything like this six weeks ago when we first explored the chamber, or in the weeks since.”

  “Maybe the entities are trying to communicate with us somehow,” Anderson replied.

  “Too bad we have no clue what they’re trying to say,” Jenna said. “Record the molecular layout of the gas. I want the point cloud set to the finest granularity. Send the data to Grange for analysis.”

  After splitting up to completely explore that final cavern in a gridline search pattern, scanning the butane gas wherever they went, the pair rendezvoused in the middle.

  “Any sign of them?” Anderson asked.

  Jenna shook her head behind the faceplate. “They have to be avoiding us.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you that for the past hour,” Anderson replied.

  Jenna sighed. “All right. Guess it’s time to head back and refill our oxygen tanks. We’ll come back another day.”

  She crossed over a jagged area of the floor that was covered in crystals. The beautiful hexagons formed a rainbow of colors that jutted from the surface at slightly different heights. She had noticed it earlier during her search, but she passed closer now to admire the formation.

  Without warning she found herself flying across the room, her vision consumed by bright white.

  She landed hard, smashing into the rock. The brightness faded from her eyes, but she still couldn’t see, thanks to the afterimage burned into her vision.

  She also couldn’t breathe.

  Warning indicators flashed on her faceplate.

  Warning. Suit punctured. Warning.

  She tried to speak, but no words came.

  Text appeared on her faceplate.

  This is Grange. It appears your suit had an oxygen leak. You must have caused a spark when your boot contacted the crystal. The resulting interaction between the oxygen and the butane created a fireball. I’m dispatching a rescue shuttle to the nearest opening in the ruins. I’m marking the coordinates on your map. Try to make your way there.

  Her vision began to return, and Jenna had the presence of mind to glance at Anderson’s status, as displayed on her faceplate. He was down, like her. And his suit was punctured, too.

  She struggled to her feet. Her vision filled with phosphenes and she nearly blacked out. She fell to her knees and crawled toward Anderson. He, too, was trying unsuccessfully to stand.

  She pointed toward the far tunnel. Like Grange had transmitted, they had to try to make their way from the ruins. With luck, they might even reach the rescue shuttle in time.

  Somehow she doubted it.

  Sure enough, she collapsed before making it three paces.

  Darkness filled her vision and she succumbed to oblivion.

  ***

  Jenna sucked in a deep breath and opened her eyes. She was still lying in the cavern.

  She glanced at her oxygen levels. The main tank was completely empty. Her suit had automatically switched to the backup.

  She sat up. The floor around her had flooded with the mirror-like entities, forming a mercury lagoon that extended to the limits of her headlamp. Her spacesuit was coated in the substance, so that her body looked like the parts of some bulky robot.

  “Are you all right, Lieutenant?” Grange asked over the communications band.

  “I don’t know,” Jenna replied.

  Beside her, she saw Anderson, also sitting up. Like hers, his suit was coated in the mercury, everywhere except for his faceplate, which remained clear. His eyes shone with a mixture of awe and fear.

  “They’ve sealed our punctures,” Anderson said.

  “The question is,” Jenna said, “for how long? Come on.”

  She struggled to her feet. The liquid on the ground parted before her, clearing a path. She joined Anderson, and the two bounded toward the exit. The mercury continued to move aside, the viscid liquid part
ing with surprising alacrity before them. The entities coating their spacesuits continued to cling to the fabric, maintaining the suit pressure.

  They reached the waiting rescue shuttle and clambered inside the airlock. She overrode the foreign matter warning and sealed the outer hatch. Air filled the chamber as the chamber pressurized. The mercury entities sloughed down from their suits and onto the deck.

  Jenna glanced down at herself and slid a gloved finger inside a rip in her arm assembly.

  “Nice,” Anderson said.

  Jenna approached the inner hatch; the mercury cleared a path for her on the deck. She opened the inner hatch and stepped inside the pressurized cabin with Anderson.

  “Do you need immediate evac?” Grange asked.

  “Not yet,” Jenna replied.

  She turned around. The mercury remained inside the airlock. She closed the inner hatch, evacuated the chamber, and remotely opened the outer door. The entities flowed outside onto the moon as a single unit.

  “I think,” Jenna said breathlessly, “that we’ll be studying this moon for quite a while.”

  Isaac Hooke Bio

  USA Today bestselling author Isaac Hooke holds a degree in engineering physics, though his more unusual inventions remain fictive at this time. He is an avid hiker, cyclist, and photographer who sometimes resides in Edmonton, Alberta.

  Sign-up to his top-secret Readers’ Group here: http://bit.ly/isaacrel

  Visit his website: www.isaachooke.com

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  The Mission

  By PP Corcoran

  1

  With a perceptible flickering, the overhead lights came to life. Air conditioning fans droned in the empty room as the blades sucked up the stale air for recycling. Stray particles of dust were kicked up by the long inactive machinery and floated in the circulating breeze like pollen on a summer’s day.