by Samuel Best
His words trailed off into mumbles, then transitioned to quiet snoring. Jeff watched the bag of amber liquid spin slowly in the corridor.
A hollow metal clunk came from one end of the station. Jeff looked out of his sleeping compartment as the door swung open to reveal Hideo. He wore gray slacks and a sweat-stained blue sweatshirt. His face was smudged with dirt and his feet were bare.
He motioned for Jeff to join him.
“Is he asleep?” Hideo asked as Jeff drifted into the compartment.
“I’m pretty sure he’s drunk.”
They were in a storage room of sorts, with supplies strapped to the walls of the spherical space with elastic bands. Hideo had fashioned himself a small workstation consisting of a storage crate atop long cardboard tubes for table legs.
“I am Hideo Tanaka.”
He extended his hand, and Jeff shook it. Hideo was about the same age as Jeff, early forties, though the exhaustion Hideo couldn’t hide aged him a few years more.
“Do you really think he’s trying to kill you?” Jeff asked.
Hideo’s eyes darted out to the corridor, where Erikson was sleeping.
“On an emotional level, no. But I must explain what I’ve seen.”
Jeff chuckled nervously. “I have to be honest. This isn’t what I was expecting.”
Hideo looked at him severely. “Neither were we.” He nodded toward an open laptop on his makeshift workstation. “Come. See for yourself.”
Jeff grabbed a handhold on the wall and positioned himself next to Hideo, in front of the laptop. Hideo typed quickly, pulling up a data file packed with long lines of text.
“What do you know about our work here?” Hideo asked.
“Nothing. They only told me I would be more help here than back on Earth.”
Hideo nodded. “So we start from the beginning. The three of us have been working in twelve-month shifts since the station arrived at Venus.”
“Three of you?”
“Listen closely,” said Hideo. “Our primary mission is to figure out the alien’s purpose for being here. Why Venus? But it has never responded to any external stimuli, nor has it attempted to communicate with us. We were stumped. Sandra figured out a way to retrofit our dish to send controlled bursts of varying wavelengths every time the station passed the alien.”
“Sandy,” Jeff said quietly.
“We thought that if we ran the whole spectrum, eventually we’d get a reaction.” He typed at the keyboard and a line of text was highlighted in bright red. “And we did.”
Jeff leaned in to get a closer look.
“Each string here represents a compressed data dump from the station’s sensors. Sandra was working alone that night. I was asleep in this compartment with the door open, as was my habit. Dr. Erikson was preparing for sleep when I closed my eyes.” He paused and frowned. “There is no way to know what happened between Sandra and Erikson after I fell asleep. What I do know is that Sandra saw something in the data we hadn’t seen before. It was the closest thing to a reaction we had received from the alien. A simple, narrow-band wavelength it seemed to be broadcasting into space. Later that night, someone opened the airlock without authorization, and Sandra was gone when I awoke.”
“Gone? You don’t think she went out the airlock...”
“Dr. Erikson was asleep in his compartment when I discovered Sandra was missing.”
“Could she have gone outside without telling anyone and had some kind of accident? Snapped her safety tether?”
Hideo swallowed hard and looked down at his hands. “Her suit is not missing. She went outside without it.” The words hung in the air for several long moments. “Sandra...was not suicidal.”
“That doesn’t mean it was Niels,” said Jeff.
“I have no other explanation. And now, in his guilt, he believes her spirit haunts this station.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t help us to dwell on it. I just wanted you to know. That same day, we lost long range communications.”
“A glitch?”
Hideo shook his head. “The relay panel is missing.”
He tapped a key on the keyboard and an audio spectrogram popped up on screen. He pressed the spacebar and a low-frequency rumble played from the speakers. The line in the middle of the spectrogram wobbled slightly with bass-filled undertones. Then it spiked as a metallic screech swelled and vanished.
“This is the signal Sandra recorded before she went missing,” said Hideo. “We managed to send it back home before we lost comms. Their response was...curious. Does this sound mean anything to you?”
Jeff listened a moment longer, then shook his head. “Should it?” he asked.
Hideo muted the signal. “I had hoped so. After all, it’s why they sent you all this way.”
“What are you talking about?”
Hideo sighed. “I’m not surprised they didn’t tell you. Who would travel all this way if they knew the truth?”
“Hideo, come on.”
“The powers-that-be think the signal is meant for you,” he said. “They want you to go outside and talk to the alien.”
13
KATE
“Samples!” shouted Santi as he bounded through the camp. “I have more samples!”
Kate stood outside her long canvas research tent, watching his approach with a smile on her face. He deftly side-stepped government workers and science professionals who were rushing about their own business within the small city of similar tents that had been erected almost overnight after Kate arrived two weeks ago.
Since then, she had spent eighteen hours a day with her attention split between the ground and the sky.
Kate shielded her eyes from the beating Sun and wiped dirt from her chin. Her team had been experimenting with the saplings again, planting a fresh line of them for testing inside the greenhouse section of her research tent. Brighton’s government contacts were handling the dirty work within the crater, while most of Kate’s team had been tasked with monitoring the approaching comet and figuring out the effect the blue plasma from the impact crater was having on Earth’s flora.
Her initial assessment was that it killed everything it touched.
Santi Nangolo held out a cardboard box for her, his face beaming with pride.
“All the way from the University,” he said.
“I thought the Colonel didn’t want any third parties involved.”
“He is desperate, according to his own words. I know many people there. They are good people.”
“Is that where you went to school?” Kate asked, accepting the box.
The Namibia University of Science and Technology was nine-hundred kilometers north, in Santi’s hometown.
“That’s where I was going to school when all this happened,” he corrected, gesturing toward the meteor crater behind him. Still many friends there.”
Neesha emerged from the tent behind Kate, wiping her hands. Her black hair was up in a messy bun and dirt smudged her cheeks.
“Oh, hey Santi,” she said. “Want to help me with the trees?”
His smile almost split his face in half.
“Of course I do!”
They ducked back into the tent, leaving Kate holding the box of samples. She lifted the lid to find three rows of vials, each one containing the glowing blue substance that arrived with the meteor.
The heart of the meteor recovered from the crater was mostly unremarkable. Over ninety percent of it was iron, and the other ten percent was comprised of easily identifiable materials that offered no explanation as to the meteor’s origin. Brighton’s government scientists were still trying to figure out why it didn’t cause more damage on impact, but so far they couldn’t offer a single working theory.
Kate carried the box of samples into the tent and set it atop the stack of empty boxes she’d been collecting since she arrived.
Wasting no time, she withdrew the first sealed vial and studied its label. It described the date and depth at wh
ich it had been taken. This one was the deepest she’d seen—scraped off the crater wall nearly one hundred meters below the surface.
One of the biggest surprises to her, and to everyone else who visited the meteor impact site, was the depth of the hole. Instead of creating a wide, relatively shallow bowl upon impact, the meteor had somehow drilled one-hundred-and-twenty meters into the ground at a forty-degree angle.
Brighton’s engineers had rigged an ingenious tube system out of thick, clear plastic so workers could descend into the sloping tunnel without being exposed to the blue substance. There were sample collection sites along the tube that allowed one to reach out through a self-sealing diaphragm to scrape goop from the tunnel walls.
The entire mouth of the crater was covered by a rigid inflatable dome, with a clean room on one side where hazmat suits were donned and disposed of. They were never reused.
On the far side of the long tent, Neesha and Santi struggled to drop the root ball of a heavy sapling into the hole she’d spent the last hour digging. The ground near the impact site was hard no matter where one stabbed it with a shovel.
Between them and Kate were a series of metal tables scattered with the equipment of discovery: microscopes, sample centrifuges, even a rock tumbler.
Kate carried the vial over to a transparent box on the nearby table. Inside the box was a series of tubes and compartments on one side, and a small terrarium on the other. A layer of soil covered the bottom of the terrarium, out of which a leafy plant grew, reaching up for the lights lining the roof of the box.
Kate inserted the vial into a slot on the side, and a protective shield slid over it. With a mechanical whir, the vial twisted in place as a needle penetrated its seal and dipped down into the glowing blue substance.
Soon, a steady trickle of the blue goop was suctioned through the tubes and compartments inside the box, moving from one to the next as the areas behind it were sealed off. All told there were thirteen layers of quarantine before the substance reached the terrarium.
Neesha and Santi appeared on the other side of the table, leaning down close to the box. The light from within lit their sweaty faces and reflected in their curious eyes.
The first drop of blue fell from a hole in the roof of the terrarium. It struck a leaf of the plant and splatted onto the soil.
More drops fell. Soon it was raining blue inside the box.
Within seconds, the leaves began to curl and blacken. The blue substance sank into the soil, seemingly crystallizing and turning it into an oddly-reflective, transparent gray.
Kate sighed and stood up, cracking her back.
“That was the last of the stomata blockers. We now officially have nothing that will slow this blue stuff down once it makes contact with a plant or tree.”
“Or grass,” Santi added.
“We should bury the crater,” said Neesha. “Dump a million tons of dirt on top and quarantine the whole site.”
“It’s not this one so much as what’s still headed our way,” Kate replied.
“The Colonel said it was an Extinction Level Event,” said Neesha. “Big enough to vaporize everything on the planet.”
Kate nodded. “If the Odyssey can’t stop it, yeah. But let’s say they manage to knock it off course, and maybe a chunk breaks loose. If that chunk is big enough and hits us, we’re going to need all the information we can get our hands on. How are the saplings coming along?”
Neesha sighed. “Two more to go.”
Kate strolled to the entrance of the tent and took her floppy hat from a hook on the wall. “I’ll leave that in your capable hands.”
“Hey, where are you going?”
“To talk to the Colonel. We need more sealed injectors for the trees.”
I also want to look at the crater, she thought as she emerged into the sunlight.
Kate had found herself drawn back to the meteor impact site over and over again since her arrival. At Brighton's request, she was one of the few civilians who could enter the quarantine dome. He spent a lot of his time in a hazmat suit on the edge of the crater, overseeing the various operations involved on the scene.
As she walked through the camp, it was impossible not to think of it as an archaeological dig site. It was a dusty environment. Most of the tents were canvas, and many of the people scurrying around the site wore what she would consider traditional archaeologist attire—traditional meaning what she had seen them wear on TV.
Someone called to her from the entrance of a nearby tent. Her radio analyst, Rajesh Nanjani waved to get her attention.
“How’s it going, Raj?” she asked as he held the door flap open.
Kate stepped into the dark tent, happy to trade the cool, stuffy air inside for the stifling heat outdoors.
“Big news,” he said, hurrying past her. “Big news.”
He shared the tent with several analysts from other teams. One of them nodded at Kate in acknowledgment, but the others didn’t look up from their work. Raj sat on a tall stool at one of the long tables stacked with equipment. To Kate, it looked like an overly-complicated home stereo system.
Raj placed a large set of headphones over his ears and began twisting dials on the equipment. Several tablets had been daisy-chained to function as a multiple-monitor setup. He swiped each screen to pull up a kaleidoscope of data readouts.
“I detected the signal when I first arrived last week,” he said, precisely turning a dial.
“Using my scanner,” someone said from the next table over.
“Not now, Steven,” Raj scolded.
Kate glanced between the two men as Raj continued.
“At first, it seemed benign. A simple FM band signal being emitted by the blue substance in the crater. It was not dissimilar from the signals scientists detected emanating from Io or several other moons in our solar system. Just a byproduct of their composition, yes?”
“You’ve mentioned it before,” said Kate.
“Right,” he said, holding up a finger. “But wait. If I widen the scope to monitor a broader wavelength, I get this.”
He took off his headphones and handed them to Kate. She lowered them over her ears and heard a soft, static-laced crackle over a deep, constant background thrum.
“You hear how wide it is?” Raj exclaimed, smiling. “It sounds like it would fill a concert hall.”
He unplugged the cable and stuck it into another machine, then gently turned up the volume.
“And this is what you get when you narrow the spectrum so tightly that you shouldn’t be able to hear a thing.”
He tapped a button on one of his tablets and an ear-splitting shriek blasted over the headphones.
Kate yelped in surprise and slapped them off her ears. Raj laughed and almost fell off his stool.
“I’m sorry!” he said, waving his hands. “I’m sorry, it was too loud. But you see?”
“What was that?” she asked, handing him back the headphones.
His laughter quickly faded and he sobered up instantly.
“The real signal. I’ve spent all my time analyzing the broadband, assuming it was all data that was going out, if it was anything at all. But this is like a laser. Very narrow, very focused. And if you follow it as it goes into space, you’d expect to see at least some widening of the beam. But no.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it’s artificial. Not from a natural source.”
“There’s nothing else in the crater besides the blue stuff.”
Raj shrugged. “Then that’s what’s causing it. Kate, I don’t think it’s a data stream. It’s the same kind of narrow beam the military uses when they laser-paint a target for a missile launch."
“It’s a beacon,” she said softly. “The signal is guiding the other comet.”
14
JEFF
“I can't believe I'm doing this,” said Jeff.
Hideo checked the seals on Jeff’s spacesuit as they floated in front of the inner airlock door.
“We are almost in a stationary position beside the alien creature,” said Hideo. “Venus Lab can only maintain this lower altitude for fifty minutes before it must return to higher orbit. We can’t spare the fuel.”
Jeff laughed and shook his head. “I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do out there.”
“Neither do I,” said Hideo. He cast a quick glance at Erikson, who still snored softly in his sleeping compartment. “Hopefully it will become clear to you when you are outside of the station.”
“You mean before or after the thing eats me?”
“I don't think you believe that will happen.” Hideo tapped a few commands on Jeff’s wristpad, then nodded with satisfaction. “I’m going to suit up as well, just in case you need me. If not, I’ll be ready to let you back in at a moment’s notice.”
Jeff pulled on his helmet and slid the neck lock into place. “Can you hear me?” he asked.
“I hear you,” Hideo replied, his voice tinny and distant inside Jeff’s helmet.
“What’s your official job on this station?” Jeff asked.
“Data analyst.”
“And Erikson? Sandra?”
“Systems Engineer and Project Specialist.”
“Any of you have kids?”
Hideo frowned. “Is that relevant?”
Jeff smiled sadly. “I hope not.”
A countdown timer on his wristpad beeped, and he turned to face the airlock door as Hideo swung it open. Jeff slowly drifted into the spherical airlock as Hideo sealed him inside.
“You will be approximately five kilometers from the creature when you emerge from the station,” Hideo told him.
Jeff nodded to himself as the white halogen lamp in the wall flicked to yellow while the airlock depressurized.
“Expect a seven-minute journey, depending on how close you want to get,” Hideo continued. “I recommend not getting too close. When you’re at a comfortable distance, we can try sending it the same frequency that got a response last time.”
“Fool-proof,” Jeff said, more to himself. “What could go wrong?”