by Rick Partlow
“They’ll be three hours behind our Orion. If I were you, I’d hop into the capsule and be gone before they get there.”
Chapter Two
They fucked it up, of course. This is the government we’re talking about.
We were all back in our suits, helmets on just as a precaution, when the Orion docked. Julie was talking them in over the tight-beam secure laser comms, on video with some bland-looking Space Force colonel named Michael Olivera. Listening to him drone on about approach vectors and riding the beam and the specs for the docking collar, I idly wondered if the Space Force had anyone on the payroll under the rank of colonel. I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone on the news who wasn’t a colonel or a general.
What the hell did they call an E-1 in the Space Force anyway? Spaceman? No, that would be sexist. Maybe Spacer? No, that sounded like a part from an Ikea dresser. I should have known; I write science fiction, after all. I could ask Colonel Olivera once he got on board, but I didn’t think I’d have time. Even talking to Julie on the comms, he sounded eager for us to be back on Earth.
I would have been angrier about the whole deal if it weren’t for the aliens. Well, the ship anyway. There was no guarantee there were any aliens aboard. They might have sent robots. Hell, they might be robots, might be some big web of artificial intelligences looking to come make peace with our cell phones. Either way, being in space when the aliens came was going to sell a shitload more books than me circling the fucking moon. The next book I wrote that got optioned, PrimeFlix could kiss my ass, I was going straight to the damn House of Mouse.
“I really wanted to see the Moon close up,” Dr. Patel lamented, less phlegmatic about the whole thing. His long, horsey face was even longer than usual and if we’d had gravity, I was sure his shoulders would have been slumped. “It would have made history, you know?”
“This is history, doc,” I said, gesturing at the bulkhead to indicate what was happening. “Just being up here will get your name in the history books.”
“Unless they kill us all,” Julie pointed out. I assumed she’d muted Captain Cosmos of the Space Force, unless she just didn’t care if he heard or not.
“If they wanted to kill us,” Gatlin pointed out reasonably, “there are much more practical ways to go about it than flying their starship into Lunar orbit and shooting us with their death rays.” He waved a hand in my direction. “All apologies to your wonderfully fanciful stories, Mr. Clanton.”
“No, you’re right, sir,” I agreed readily. “Anyone who can get here from another star system could just set Ceres or Pallas heading straight for Earth and wipe us all out. There’d be nothing we could do about it at our current level of technology.”
“Or they could infect us with a genetically engineered plague,” Patel suggested, seeming quite cheerful about the proposition.
“Or that,” I conceded. “If they’re here, it’s because they want to talk.”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll like what they have to say,” Julie murmured, then went back to guiding the Orion capsule in.
“There’ll probably be a lot of people who won’t like what they have to say,” I ventured, leaning over her shoulder to see the latest from the news networks. Among the breaking stories scrolling across the bottom of the screen was the loss of the signal from us, which was the handiwork of the US government. “Starting with a bunch of churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, etc.…”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Patel said. “The Catholic church has been fairly openminded about the possibility of intelligent aliens.”
“It’s easy to be openminded until you’re staring a bug-eyed monster in the face.”
“Orion, you’re on the beam but you’re coming in hot.” Julie wasn’t yelling, but in the few weeks I’d known her, I’d become used to her unflappable attitude, and she was…well, flapped. It caught my attention where volume might not have. “I repeat, you’re coming in too hot, hit braking thrusters now.”
I didn’t know what to expect when the Orion mated with the shack’s docking collar, but the resonant boom thundering through the hull of the construction shack was not it. There was yelling on the comm channel, yelling inside my helmet that I’m pretty sure was me, and those of us who hadn’t anchored themselves to a handhold on the bulkhead were sent floating across the width of the station.
Luckily for my agent, we weren’t livestreaming, because I was fairly certain I looked stupid tumbling head over heels backwards, arms windmilling until I fetched up against the opposite bulkhead hard enough to drive the air out of me. Julie was still cursing, but over her imaginative anatomical suggestions for the crew of the Orion, I could hear a persistent buzzing, and I saw an ominous red light flashing above the airlock.
“Keep your fucking helmets on,” Julie said, as if any of us had other plans. “We’re venting atmosphere; hull’s breached.”
Yeah, I could see bits of debris the construction crew had left behind on the last mission, food wrappers, a plastic spoon, a crumpled checklist spiraling toward the lock, toward what had to be a ruptured seam. Gatlin was moving with desperate urgency, ripping open a locker built into the bulkhead beside the airlock and pulling out something very much like a caulking gun. In retrospect, it probably was a caulking gun, because what he did with it was what I remembered my dad doing with a caulking gun under those mysterious circumstances where you use one of them. I, personally, have always been willing to hire someone to do that shit for me, so I had never actually owned one and sure wouldn’t have known how to use one to seal a leak.
Whatever he was doing, I assumed it was enough, because Julie didn’t offer to help him. She’d abandoned the one-sided yelling “conversation” with the Orion and pushed over to the airlock, grabbing the locking lever and setting a foot against a chock mounted on the bulkhead to give herself the fulcrum to yank upward then pull inward. My eyes went wide for a second and I opened my mouth to object, thinking she might be opening the hatch too soon, but I shut it just as quick, wishing I could kick myself. If there was a vacuum on the other side of the hatch, she wouldn’t be able to open it at all.
You could tell by the spacesuits these guys were government. Gatlin’s suits were a cool, streamlined blue, the product of a professional fashion designer working with an engineer. The GI suits were bulky and clunky, and day-glow orange like they were about to go deer hunting in the Great Orbital Forest. The first one through was the Space Force colonel, Olivera, and he was shorter than I’d imagined, too narrow and wiry for his square-jawed face, like one of the Mercury 7 astronauts. Behind him was a woman, and by her wide eyes and look of total incomprehension, I judged she was a civilian, and one who’d never been to space before. The name tape across the right breast of her suit read “Shaddick, C.” and I was guessing she was a research scientist of one type or another.
“Is everything okay?” she was asking on an open channel, the microsecond delay between the transmission in my earphones and her mouth moving in the clear faceplate of her helmet making it seem like a badly-dubbed foreign film. “Did we break it?”
“Inside please, Dr. Shaddick,” Olivera snapped, guiding her out of the docking umbilical to make way for the next crewmember.
This guy…this guy I knew. And he wasn’t Space Force and he wasn’t a scientist.
“Jambo,” I said, half in horror, half in disbelief.
“Hey Clanton,” the bearded man grinned, squeezing his broad shoulders through the too-narrow passageway. “We run into each other in the strangest fuckin’ places, don’t we?”
James Bowie. Master Sergeant the last time I’d run into him in Venezuela, God alone knew what rank he was now. Special Operations Detachment Delta, or Combat Applications Group, or “the Unit,” or whatever the hell name they called themselves this week didn’t exactly advertise their ranks. Jambo was one hell of a soldier and not a bad guy; my horror came from the realization they’d brought a Delta operator along for a first-contact situation.
The
last one through was a bureaucrat. There was no two ways about it, she just had that look. Too much confidence for someone in this situation was the first clue. The second was when she opened her mouth.
“Colonel Olivera,” she said in a commanding tone, “we need these people off the station immediately.”
Her face was pinched, not by nature but rather by the expression subletting it on a semi-permanent basis. That was how I knew she wasn’t a politician: no one had ever gotten elected wearing that face.
“We’re not going anywhere in your capsule, lady,” Julie told her, head sticking through the docking umbilical, legs dangling out through the airlock. “Whoever the hell was driving this bitch shouldn’t have been let out of command school without a refresher course in docking.”
“It was piloted remotely,” Colonel Olivera told her, sounding a bit put out, perhaps partly because he wished his commanders had let him fly the docking maneuver himself. “They did the best they could.”
“Well, they fucked up.” She pushed back out into the station and jerked a thumb towards the Orion. “When you hit the damn docking umbilical, you jammed the mechanism open. Your airlock won’t be able to close without a repair.”
“Colonel,” the bureaucrat said, “can you check that?”
“No, I can’t, Ms. Strawbridge,” he said. “I’m a pilot, not an engineer or a technician, and you didn’t seem inclined to bring one along with us, despite my recommendations.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Strawbridge insisted, and I had the sense she’d be pouting with her hands on her hips if there’d been gravity. “They’ll simply stay on board the station.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Gatlin said, floating up to grab a handhold next to the lock. “There’s no way in hell! How do you think we’re going to survive in here until the damned airlock is repaired?”
“I told you the Soyuz capsule is heading this way…” Olivera began.
“Even assuming they’ll help,” Julie interrupted him, “which they have no reason to, by the way, where do you think we’re going to ride? A Soyuz carries a maximum of eight crew. There’s four of us. Do you want to assume they only brought four like you did—which was damned stupid, by the way? You’re going to bet our lives on that without even asking the fucking Russians? ’Cause I’m not.”
“Neither am I,” Gatlin declared with a tone of finality. “And I very much doubt you’re going to be able to access the Selenium’s systems without my personal passcodes.”
There was what must have been an epic staredown between the two of them, but I couldn’t see shit because of the glare of the lights off their helmet faceplates. I assumed Gatlin had the better stare because Olivera finally sighed in surrender.
“Ms. Strawbridge,” the Colonel said, “we need to make a call.”
Chapter Three
“My goodness,” Patel said for probably the fiftieth time since we’d boarded the Selenium. “I wonder what they’ll look like.”
This time I decided to indulge him, mostly because the Selenium had proven to be a bit of a letdown. Oh, it was more comfortable than the Gatlin Aerospace Wyvern crew capsule we’d come up in, roomy enough to have its own little space-toilet, but all I cared about at the moment was getting to that alien ship.
“It’s not robots,” I told him, pushing against my safety restraints to try to get a glimpse through the tiny front view ports around Delia Strawbridge’s fat head and bun hairdo. “I mean, not like Voyager or any of our automated probes.”
“How can you be so sure?” Jambo asked me. Neither Strawbridge nor Olivera had much to say to any of us once we boarded the ship, and Shaddick had volunteered she was an expert in exobiology before Strawbridge stared her into silence, but Jambo had proven as garrulous as I remembered him and tickled pink just to be here.
“If they were robots,” I reasoned, “they wouldn’t bother with the theater of all this.” I waved a hand at the image of the ship on the display above the pilot’s console. “They’d just send something small, something that could make radio contact with us.” I shook my head. “No, this thing, just appearing in space right next to us with no warning? Gotta be some sort of intelligence. Maybe a machine intelligence, but something that wants a conversation.”
“You don’t need to worry about the conversation,” Strawbridge snapped, finally deigning to address any of us, “because you won’t be part of it.”
“You’ve been in contact with them,” Gatlin said, “haven’t you? It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
No response, though I noticed Strawbridge sharing an uncomfortable glance with Olivera.
“Of course they have,” Julie agreed. She’d said about as much as the government types, just as annoyed to have been pushed out of the command chair by Olivera as he and Strawbridge were at the President’s orders to take us along. “I bet the Russians and Chinese have, too.”
“That what you think, Andy?” Jambo asked me. He had this look, a look you wouldn’t notice if you hadn’t lifted weights and played video games in the same FOB with the guy for months. He was telling me they were right without telling me.
“I think they told you the first one to reach them gets the goodies,” I ventured. “They must have been watching us, they know we’re fractured into power blocs. They wouldn’t care who’s the most technologically advanced because they’d be offering us stuff that would make what we have look like rocks and twigs. They want to see who has the old can do spirit.”
Olivera’s eyes flickered toward me, just an involuntary tick, but enough. The Colonel would have made a bad poker player.
“Oh Jesus,” Gatlin moaned, rubbing a hand across his face. “And no one back in Washington or Moscow or Beijing ever wondered why aliens would be so interested in who was the most ruthless and efficient?”
“Don’t you guys ever read any of my books?” I asked, shaking my head in wonder. “Because the ones that start like this never end well.”
“What would you suggest we do?” Olivera asked me. Strawbridge tried to shush him, but he waved her off. “Oh, please, who’s he going to tell that won’t find out soon anyway?” Back to me, his pale face reddening around the edges. “When the aliens pop into existence out of nowhere, out of hyperspace or whatever you call it in your novels, and tell you to drop by for a chat, what do you do? Ignore them? Count on international cooperation?”
“I write science fiction,” I said, sniffing at the thought, “not fantasy.”
Jambo sniggered. “If the Russkis needed us, that’d be different. They’d be fallin’ all over themselves to get a place at the table. But they knew they could here have it all to themselves.”
“That’s why we couldn’t wait for an engineer, or a physicist,” Olivera confirmed. “We went with what we had or could get in an hour, because the Soyuz capsule was already being prepped for launch. As it was, that Orion skipped nearly all the normal safety protocols to get it into orbit first.”
“I think you’re right, Mr. Clanton.”
It took me a second to realize who had spoken because she was strapped into a seat behind me and to my left, and because she hadn’t said a word since being dressed down by Strawbridge. Dr. Shaddick was somewhere in her forties if I was any judge, with shoulder length brown hair and the sort of nearly-green shade to her face I used to see shipboard when I was in the Corps. Spacesick this time instead of seasick, though.
“I’m right about so much,” I told her. “Could you be more specific?”
“They won’t have sent robots,” she clarified. “I think they’re biological. Sentient machines wouldn’t even bother doing the research and investing the resources it must have taken to develop a method of faster than light travel. Time would mean nothing to a computer intelligence because it couldn’t die, and it wouldn’t need to worry about the resources needed to send a ship on a slower than light voyage to the stars.”
I frowned. She was right, and it bothered me because I hadn’t thought of it first.
“I’d guess they’re very much like us,” she went on, winding up for a classroom lecture. “Probably evolved on a terrestrial world, likely with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.”
I felt the need to show off. “You’re thinking that because they were able to figure out our language,” I said. “Because they understood we used modulated sounds to communicate.”
“Check out the brain on Andy,” Jambo murmured. His words were a bit distorted in a very familiar way and my eyes went wide.
“Jambo, did you seriously manage to sneak a chew into space?”
“It helps to keep me calm.” He smiled around a disgusting mouthful of chewing tobacco.
“You better get rid of that shit before you put your helmet back on, soldier,” Julie warned him. “And by the way, we did our last boost five hours ago. Shouldn’t we be flipping around and starting our deceleration burn by now?”
I tried to get a look over Olivera’s shoulder at the Lidar readings, still couldn’t see past Strawbridge.
“We’ve been assured it won’t be necessary,” Olivera told her. I got the impression from his tone exactly how much he thought of the assurance, but the Colonel was a good little spaceman and followed orders.
“Assured by who…” I started to ask, then trailed off, realizing the only possible answer. I began to entertain the possibility we were all going to die, not from any malevolence but just on the chance the ETs might not know little details about the human body, like how many gees we could take without being squashed flat.
The alien ship was growing alarmingly large in the view screen hooked to the external cameras, and I wondered how much the view was magnified. I really wished I had a better seat; this felt too much like watching the whole thing on TV.
“I think we should hit the braking boost…,” Julie said, tensing against her restraints as if she were about to launch herself at the controls. Colonel Olivera wasn’t paying attention to either her suggestion or her behavior; his eyes were fixed either on the ports or the instrument panels.