The team watched their objective as the climber descended, until the view became obscured by a long ridge in between. Skyler shifted his focus then to their landing site, which consisted of a large black disk embedded into the ground—the tail end of a long spike, in truth, which anchored the space elevator cord in place. Skyler had seen an identical attachment point years earlier, on the outskirts of a dead city in Brazil. Memories flooded through his mind. Of the slow descent he made with the now-deceased Karl, and the obelisk towers they’d found there. The exodus towers, they’d come to be known. A simple push would send them gliding over the ground for kilometers. Not just the ground, he reminded himself. They’d even crossed the Atlantic, from south to north, all the way from Brazil to Ireland. Part of another test that Eve, and her race known as the Builders, had foisted upon humanity.
One test of many, as it turned out, all of which humanity had passed. Or, at least, Skyler and his companions had passed. As a reward, they’d been invited to help the Builders regain their lost home world. A world, indeed an entire solar system, held captive. How any of those tests factored into their goal was still rather infuriatingly vague. Eve felt that explaining it all to them would poison their judgment. Improvisation was, evidently, a big part of humanity’s suitability to the job, and their current mission only served to prove the AI’s point. It had been Tania’s idea, not hers.
He’d lost sleep over this stonewalling, at first. It made no sense to him. Eve’s information about what actually awaited them at their ultimate destination, still light-years away, would be woefully outdated by now. All of the Builder tests humanity had been subjected to were based on old information. Very old, by her own admission. What harm could there be in sharing it, of telling them at the very least what had not worked in the past?
“Maybe she will,” the young scientist Tim had said, a week ago, “but only if the need arises. Maybe her silence means we’re on the right track.”
Skyler wasn’t so sure. In fact, he’d become more and more worried Eve had absolutely no idea what was really going on, or what awaited them.
“Sky?”
The voice sounded distant. It took him a moment to realize it was Sam, standing right next to him. He also realized she’d repeated the call a few times. “Yeah?”
“What the hell’s up with you? Daydreaming?”
He shook his head, turning off his group comm at the same time so they could talk privately. She caught the gesture and did the same.
“Just thinking about all the shit the Builders put us through.”
Her mouth tightened, no doubt holding back criticism.
“A waste of time, I know,” he went on. “It’s just…it all seemed so specific, you know? Timed down to the minute, looking for precise capabilities.”
“Yeah, and?”
Skyler took his time to answer, watching the alien landscape below move ever closer. “It bothers me that Eve’s data is all so old. What if our abilities, the criteria we supposedly meet, are all irrelevant now?”
Sam gave a shrug of her shoulders, looking off toward the horizon. “Fuck if I know, Sky. The goal is the important part. Their home world is held captive by sinister bastards, and we’re going to help them get it back. Whatever abilities they sought in us, creativity is what they really needed. They’re machines, after all.”
“I just figured Eve would have a better plan. Or, hell, any plan. Instead it was us who came up with this”—he gestured off toward the giant seedpods—“wild idea.”
“It was Tania who came up with it, if I recall.”
“You know what I mean. It wasn’t Eve’s plan.”
“Probably a good thing. What plan ever survived first contact with the enemy?”
“Fair enough,” he said. Then, after a moment, “Hey. You doing okay? With your, uh, friend, I mean.” She and Vaughn had begun a relationship just before leaving Earth. She’d been a prisoner in Nightcliff and he, of all things, the guard. Not the best story to tell the grandkids one day, but it was very Sam. Vaughn, at a shade under two meters tall, was well matched to her physically, and they’d been virtually inseparable since escaping that wretched place. Since then, though, the man’s attentions had become quite a bit more attentive than Samantha liked, not that she’d said anything.
“What’s it to you?”
He shrugged. Skyler learned a long time ago not to tell Samantha Rinn he was worried about her.
She turned her comm back on. He followed her example.
The climber reached the ground with a smooth, uneventful tap against the landing disk. Skyler stepped off and scanned the ochre horizon. Looking for threats, he supposed, though what threats might exist here he had no idea.
“Right,” he said. “So far so good. Let’s—”
“Skyler, Christ!” Sam interrupted.
He spun, ready to engage the suit’s weapons. “What?”
She laughed, and shook her head. “You just became the first human being to set foot on an alien world and ‘so far so good’ is the best you’ve got? That’s one for the fucking history books, you clod.”
“I didn’t even—”
Vaughn was laughing. Even Vanessa joined in. He could hear Tania, Tim, and Prumble doing the same through the comm. Sam just shook her head like an embarrassed parent.
“All right, you can all piss off,” Skyler said. He waited for the laughter to die out, then put as much authority as dignity allowed into his voice. “We’re not here to plant a flag, we’ve got a job to do. Vanessa, stay on the climber until we know we’re safe. Vaughn, Sam, do a perimeter sweep out to twenty meters. Everyone stay within view of everyone else. Got it?”
“Sure, fine,” Sam said. She stepped off the climber and then, two steps later, off the circular landing platform. Her foot slid half a meter and she almost toppled over, barely righting herself. No easy task in a tenth of Earth’s gravity. “The hell?” She knelt and examined the ground, wiping her armored index finger across the surface.
“What is it?” Skyler asked.
“Damn slippery,” she said. “It’s not the ground, either. This is…I don’t know. Like rotten moss.” She used her whole hand now, brushing aside what looked like clumpy topsoil to Skyler’s eye. The fungal growths disintegrated at her touch, as if no more solid than soap bubbles. The result was a sludgy, oily mess. Beneath was something like wet sand flecked with small rocks. As Sam’s hand cleared a patch, the pebbles wiggled down into the sand, out of view, leaving behind little puckered mounds.
“Life,” Vanessa whispered.
“I wonder if they’re edible?” Vaughn asked.
“Ugh,” Sam said. “Find cave. Make fire. That it?”
“What can I say, I’m sick of that paste Eve makes.”
Sam shook her head in frustration. “This is starting off great. Skyler’s famous first words, and now you want to greet the locals by eating them.”
“Can’t exactly shake their hands, now, can I? Besides, you just stepped on an entire colony. Killed a million, probably. I bet their supreme leader was among the welcoming party.”
“A lot of dead scientists are rolling in their graves right about now,” Vanessa observed.
“Tim and I are, and we’re not even dead yet,” Tania said through the comm.
Tim’s sudden and awkward laugh came through too loud on the comm. Skyler winced. The young scientist added, “You know, Vaughn, some very smart people carefully outlined how we should approach life when we find it in the universe. This is not what they had in mind.”
“Enough, for fuck’s sake,” Skyler snapped. Too sharp, he realized belatedly. Tim would take it personally, see the slight as evidence of their supposed rivalry for Tania’s affections. More drama that he did not need. He added, “All of you, relax. Vaughn, a little care is probably in order.”
The words killed a no-doubt snarky reply on Vaughn’s lips. “Sorry,” he managed instead, but notably to Sam. The couple—together only a few months now, Skyler had to remind h
imself—exchanged a look that he’d come to know well enough: It was time to get serious.
When he had their attention he pointed to a series of beige, roughly circular sections of ground sprinkled across the landscape. “We can hop between the sandy patches. It’s already hard enough to move here, weighing so little. The last thing I want to do if we encounter hostiles is feel like I’m standing on an oil slick. High ground and sure footing, those are our priorities.”
Sam studied the terrain again, more carefully this time. “Works for me.”
She moved back onto the elevator base, crouched, and jumped. Sam sailed six meters or so to a patch of sandy ground, landed easily, and came up with her arm pointed as if she held a pistol in it, which in a way she did. The suit had a beam weapon built into the forearm, which would protrude and ready itself when it sensed the wearer wished to fire.
Vaughn took another patch, in the opposite direction. The pair made a rough circuit of the landing site like this, until Vaughn came to stand where Sam had started, and vice versa.
“Clear,” Sam said.
“Clear,” Vaughn echoed.
Skyler nodded. He turned back to Vanessa. “Right. The three of us should go scout the space clams, or whatever they are. Do you mind staying here in case we need to make a hasty retreat?”
Before she could answer Prumble’s voice came through the comm. “Have you learned nothing, man? Don’t ask, give the order!”
Skyler sighed. Despite all that had happened he still could not understand why leadership fell to him. “Vanessa—”
“No problem,” she said, and winked.
“Thanks.” Skyler turned toward the ridge, and the valley beyond. “Sam, you take point.”
“I know.” She leapt in that direction. Skyler followed, with Vaughn bringing up the rear.
Just below the ridgeline Sam paused to let them catch up. “No sandy patch up there,” she said, “we’re going to have to trample more of the locals.”
“The little bastards have it coming,” Vaughn said.
Skyler landed next to Sam and saw she was right. “Fine. We go single file, then at least only one of us has to get our feet caked in that sludge.”
“Hold on.” Tania’s voice, watching via remote feeds from the ship high above.
“What’s wrong?” Skyler asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just do us a favor and jump straight up, high as you can. We’ll get a clear view of the, um, space clams I guess we’re calling them? We’ll review up here and advise.”
“Jesus, we suck at names,” Prumble muttered. “If only the Builders—I rest my case—had included a test for efficient taxonomy.”
“You’re just grumpy because we left you up there,” Skyler said.
“Skyler, it has always been my absolute pleasure to send you out to do the dirty work while I sit back and take a percentage.”
“Understood, Tania,” Skyler replied, ignoring the big man. “We’ll get you a better look.”
He glanced at Sam. She had her arms folded across her chest and darted her eyes upward. “Fine,” Skyler said.
He crouched down and pushed up as hard as he could. The leap took him a good fifteen meters into the air, high enough that Skyler felt a strong gust of wind, absent at ground level, press against his Builder armor. It pushed him off course, toward the ridgeline. Pushed him surprisingly far, in fact. “Bit of a problem here,” he said.
“What?” Sam asked. Then she saw. “Oh, wonderful.”
He sailed across the lip of the hill. Ahead of him the valley spread out. The basin looked like a dry riverbed, studded by the upright forms of the giant space clams. Silent pillars, glowing softly amber in the heavily filtered sunlight. Something about them wasn’t right. They didn’t look like the footage Eve had supplied; a brief video recorded from incredibly long range of one of these creatures drifting through the vacuum of space. These were different, but Skyler couldn’t figure why just yet. He had other things to worry about.
His feet hit the fungal surface and immediately shot out from under him, leaving two greasy smears. He fell on his back and began to rush down the valley wall. On the slick surface of fragile gelatinous mushrooms his speed climbed rapidly, as if he rode a waterslide. Skyler dug his hands in and scraped at the ground, but his fingers only made grooves in the loose, damp sand below.
He looked to the valley. At this rate he’d reach the bottom in maybe ten seconds and be traveling at a hundred kilometers per hour. A pillarlike clam creature loomed dead ahead. One of the larger ones. A hundred meters tall, he estimated. Big as a skyscraper, yet held to the ground by only a small root system half-buried in the grime-covered sand. It suddenly looked very menacing, towering over him so.
He tried to use his hands to steer, but the soft sand below the fungus provided no purchase. Skyler did the only thing he could think to do. He slammed his elbows into the ground. In the low gravity this motion sent him upright to a near stand. Then he crouched like a skier, and jumped up into the air again. Not high, this time. On Earth it wouldn’t have even gotten him off the ground, but here it sent him up a meter, maybe less. Feet slightly in front of him, he invoked the beam weapons in his arms, just for an instant. He’d used them only once, during a brief practice stint in one of the biomes aboard the ship the day before.
The beams gushed outward, blue-white and blinding. They seemed to boil away the air in front of him, sending tendrils of superheated air outward in wild patterns. Where they hit the ground, mushrooms and sand flew up and out like dust in the wash of a chopper. The weapons killed his forward momentum, and also left a huge oval-shaped blackened patch on the ground. He could only imagine how terrible it must smell. He still slid when he landed, but not nearly as fast as before. And, at the edge of his little man-made landing pad there was a berm a meter high. A pile of smoldering mushrooms and clumpy, cracked cakes of sand. His legs buried themselves up to the knee when he hit it, and kept going. Skyler tumbled through the mound, rolled over twice through the charred and gloopy mess. His back slammed into something hard. He slid sideways off and collapsed to the ground with a grunt.
“Jesus,” Sam said in his ear. “Are you okay?”
“What’s happening down there?” Tania asked.
“I’m fine,” Skyler said. “There’s a stiff wind above us and it pushed me over the ridge, that’s all. I had to fire my weapons to stop myself from sliding right into one of the, uh, clams.”
“And yet there you are,” Sam observed.
“To stop myself from hitting it at a hundred kph, okay?” he replied, rubbing at the base of his back. In truth it hadn’t hurt much at all. He’d felt his alien-made armor harden at just the right moment, then release and go all flexible again a fraction of a second later. He propped himself up on his elbows and studied the looming object. If it had noticed or cared about his impact, it didn’t show. It seemed completely inert. Or dead.
“You should get the sample and return to the Elevator,” Tania said over the comm.
Her words forced his mind away from the fall. Did she speak out of concern for his safety, or for the mission plan?
A simple enough plan as these things went, and that was just fine with him. Get a sample of the rough, barklike skin of this creature, return it to the ship, let Tim and Tania analyze it with Eve’s help. With any luck it could be replicated, and the hull of the ship remade to match its properties. “No ship has been able to penetrate the defensive array set up around the Builders’ home system,” Tania had said after weeks spent researching the problem, “but these have. They’re not ships, but life-forms, and for some reason the enemy ignores them.”
If Eve’s hull could be reconfigured to match these creatures, perhaps they could slip in without any confrontation at all. A big if, in Skyler’s view, but no one had a better idea, not even the super-intelligence that was Eve. Indeed, the AI that was the brain of their ship seemed as delighted as anyone at the creative solution Tania had found.
Only
…only the skin before him was not the rough, near-black bark of the examples in Eve’s database. This was smooth, and beige, like the surface of a shelled tree nut.
“Tania, are you seeing this?”
“I am,” she replied.
“I think we have a problem.”
“Me too.”
“What’s wrong?” Vanessa asked from her position back at the Elevator.
“This is not the same animal Eve showed us,” Skyler said. “The size and shape is right, but…” He trailed off.
Beneath him, the ground had begun to shake.
Kepler-186f
9.JUNE.3202 (Earth Actual)
SKYLER FORCED HIMSELF to his feet, ignoring the charred sand and fungal sludge that fell in clumps from his arms and legs. He glanced to his left in time to see Sam and Vaughn reach the valley floor, standing in the oval-shaped patch of ground Skyler’s beam weapons had charred.
His mind desperately wanted that deep vibration in the soil to be the effect of his companions stomping down the hillside, but here they were, standing still, and the rumbling only grew.
“Something’s happening,” Vaughn said.
Sam looked down. “An eerily well-timed earthquake?”
Skyler activated his comm. “Vanessa, do you feel any shaking back there?”
“Negative,” came the reply.
“Double shit,” Sam said. “Localized.”
“Back to high ground?” Vaughn offered, already one step back up the hill toward the ridgeline. He stopped dead, neck craned toward the boulder-strewn ridge.
Following the man’s gaze, Skyler saw the source of the quake. Of all the rocks along the ridge, those closest were shaking. Bits of dust and small pebbles sluiced off and rolled or slid down the steep valley wall, leaving clear trails in the grimy surface cover, like tears on dirty cheeks.
Injection Burn Page 6