by Rick Partlow
“We are decelerating,” Olivera declared, wonder in his voice. “At something like fifty gravities.”
The velocity readout on the overhead screen confirmed his words, counting down like the bomb timer in an action movie and even a dumb Marine like me knew it was entirely impossible.
“I don’t feel a damned thing!” Julie exclaimed.
I didn’t waste time on words, just hit the quick release for my safety harness and kicked forward, beating Gatlin to the move by barely a second. We both ignored the outraged squawking from Strawbridge and Olivera, hanging above them, oriented the other way over their acceleration couches to get a better view out the ports.
The ship was so close it seemed unreal, a mountain of metal hanging from nothing, outshining the Moon with silvery glory. The metal was smooth even up close, with no visible break or striation, though it seemed to be covered in gently curved, elongated ovoid bumps over the entire surface.
“I don’t see any visible effects of whatever they’re doing to us,” I said, able to tell by our approach that we were still decelerating. “But I guess I wouldn’t.”
“I wonder if it’s electromagnetic or gravitational,” Gatlin mused, fingers stroking the window as if he could reach out and touch the starship.
“You can ask them when we get there,” I said, nodding toward what seemed to be the bow of the ship, though that could have been my earthbound prejudice—the narrower end, anyway. A whole section of the hull was sliding aside, and my mind boggled when I realized how huge the opening had to be given the size of the ship.
“Neither of you is asking them anything,” Strawbridge reminded us. You could see her irritation level rising like the damage meter on a video game boss. “All four of you are staying in this ship.”
“Yes, Mother,” Julie said, sotto voce.
I ignored them both; the opening in the side of the alien ship was dark and yawning and getting closer. I’d felt fear many times in my life: the first time I’d been shot at, when my son had trouble breathing just after birth, when my wife had taken him and left during my fourth deployment and I’d come home to an empty house, when the Osprey I was flying in had been hit by antiaircraft fire. All of them had their own unique quality, a special taste and smell to the moment. This one was a giant, empty pit in the stomach, the sensation you get when you’re driving in your car and you know you’re going to be in an accident but there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do and all that’s left is gritting your teeth and waiting for the impact.
We were inside. The transition had been quick, so abrupt I nearly blinked and missed it. The darkness was gone— there was a gentle light that seemed to be off in the distance yet from everywhere at once. No one made a sound, as if all seven of us were holding our breath. Around the Selenium was some sort of…catwalk? Sort of? A spiderweb collection of structures that seemed like they should be familiar, as if I should be able to guess their purpose but I couldn’t quite do it.
“Can you tell if there’s atmosphere out there?” Dr. Patel asked.
“Sorry,” Gatlin said with a chuckle. “I didn’t put exterior atmosphere sensors on my interplanetary spaceship.”
“So, we thinking Klingons or Vulcans?” Jambo asked, fishing a spacesick bag out of a dispenser on the back of the pilot’s acceleration couch and spitting his chew into it, then sealing it and tossing it in a receptacle.
“I’m afraid there won’t be any humans with funny looking bumps on their heads, Mr. Bowie,” Dr. Shaddick told him, almost giggling with excitement. She’d been waiting for this her whole life. “I’d be willing to bet they have aural and optical senses, but I’d be shocked if their brains were even located in the same place as ours, much less their equivalent of eyes and ears. Despite what the science fiction Mr. Clanton writes might tell you, the existence of an alien species that evolved independently of ours in another star system and still came out as similar to us as the Klingons or Vulcans would be almost incontrovertible evidence of an intelligent creator.”
Through the viewport, I saw part of the spiderweb structure beginning to stretch toward us, the gaps between the threads gelling into a solid surface and the pit inside my stomach grew just a little deeper.
“I think we’re about to find out.”
There was the slightest of vibrations, a kiss from a feather, and the Selenium was motionless.
“There is an Earthlike atmosphere outside your vessel.” I spun around instinctively, expecting one of them to be standing behind me. The voice hadn’t come from the speakers on the comm panel, it had seemed to come from just over my shoulder. “Your environmental suits will not be necessary.”
“Shit,” Jambo drawled, eyes darting from one bulkhead to another, the fingers of his right hand twitching as if searching for a gun. “Hope y’all don’t mind if I keep mine on anyway.”
“If they wanted us dead,” Olivera pointed out, “there are easier ways.”
“Sure,” he acknowledged, holding onto his helmet like a life preserver, “but maybe not as funny.”
Somebody knocked on our airlock. All eyes went to Strawbridge and Olivera except their own, which each went to the other because no one wanted to make that call. I sighed and pushed across the cockpit to the airlock, spinning the locking wheel counterclockwise.
“I, for one,” I threw over my shoulder, “welcome our new alien overlords…”
The inner lock open with a slight squeak and I thought I heard Olivera start to object when I went to the outer hatch. I yanked down the lever to unlock it and pulled it inward.
I would have lost the bet. It was a robot at the door.
“Oh shit,” Jambo muttered from behind me. “A toaster.”
Well, not quite, but I’ve got to admit, it was the first thing that came to my mind, too. The thing was vaguely humanoid, at least to the extent of having a dome-shaped silver head I could look at when it talked, its eyes glowing blue in a way that I totally did not find creepy. At least they weren’t red.
The humanoid resemblance ended about waist level, which made sense. Why saddle a perfectly functional robot with legs and make it walk like a human when you’re on a spaceship with no gravity? Its base was some sort of rounded pedestal and a pale wash of what could have been steam puffed out of a port in its side, and I thought it might have been steadying itself in front of the airlock.
“Um, hello,” I said. “Thanks for having us over.”
“I’m Delia Strawbridge,” the government rep finally kicked her brain and mouth into gear, pushing past me and nearly running into the robot before she stopped herself. “I represent the government of the United States of America, the largest and the most powerful of the nation states on the planet Earth, and I bring greetings from the President.”
“We know who the United States is,” the robot informed her, its voice the same one which had assured us the air was breathable. “You need to accompany me to the bridge.” The blue-tinged eyes, not metal or plastic and definitely not biological either, looked through the hatchway at the gathered crew. “All of you.”
Chapter Four
“There’s gravity,” Olivera was murmuring as we walked. “How the hell is there gravity? It’s impossible.”
I had been just as shocked as anyone when I went through the hatch and found myself being pulled down to the web with gradually increasing force, but by the time we’d passed out of the docking area and into the main part of their ship, I’d forgotten it among all the other unlikely things. Olivera didn’t seem to be able to move past it.
“This is all impossible,” I reminded him. “Faster than light travel, aliens, floating robots. Just roll with it.”
The robot bothered me more than anything. I’d assumed it was just maneuvering through the microgravity with on board maneuvering jets, but it was still floating while the rest of us clomped along, looking stupid in our space suits.
Hell, even the corridor seemed impossible. Not that they had corridors—form follows function, after all
—but I could have sworn we were walking nearly straight up at some points but the gravity stayed constant-down was under our feet and I was never sure if it was just my imagination.
The corridors were three meters across and empty. Not a hide nor a hair, not so much as another robot. Was the ship a living thing? Maybe the robot was built just for us…
No, then there wouldn’t be corridors.
No one else seemed to want to talk to the thing, like they were embarrassed at the idea, but someone had to ask the question.
“Are you all robots?” I blurted. “I mean, is the ship like, an artificial intelligence?”
Strawbridge shot me a glare, as if I were somehow breaking diplomatic protocol, like bringing up politics or religion at Thanksgiving dinner.
“If we were all computer intelligences,” the robot pointed out with frustrating logic, “why would I be taking you to the bridge? An AI would have no sense of personal space nor any need to bring you to meet it face to face, as it would have no face. I am simply here to soften the transition for your first meeting with the Helta.”
“The Helta?” Strawbridge interjected. “Is that what you’re called?”
“I am called a robot,” the machine corrected her. “But yes, the Helta are the race who wish to speak with you.”
“And they’re worried enough about how ugly they’d look to us that they sent a robot to run interference,” Jambo muttered. “What are we talking here? Wormfaces with tentacles for arms?”
“Through here,” the robot said, ignoring the question. It motioned with black fingers on a silvery hand at a closed hatch to the left side of the corridor, broad and sturdy-looking, like something meant to keep out vacuum in an emergency.
“Whatever it is,” Shaddick said, her voice trembling a little with what I took for excitement rather than fear, “you can bet it will not only be stranger than we’ve imagined but stranger than we can imagine.”
The hatch slid aside. Shaddick’s breath caught in her throat. Patel gasped, and Julie swore softly, and whatever smartass response that had been about to tumble out of me from acerbic instinct died aborning. In the end, it was Jambo who spoke the first words from a human being to an alien species.
“You have got,” he uttered with appropriate gravitas for the historical event, “to be shitting me.”
They were koala bears.
Oh, I know, they weren’t really koala bears. Koala bears aren’t five feet tall with opposable thumbs, and they don’t wear uniforms reminiscent of a Napoleonic-era Prussian infantry soldier. Okay, that’s not totally accurate either, but the knee-high black boots and the white pants and shirt with a short blue jacket sure brought it to mind. And once I had the image of koala bears wearing Prussian uniforms in my head, it just wasn’t coming out anytime soon.
I was so mesmerized by the sight of them, it took a moment for the rest of the picture to come into focus. The compartment the robot had called the bridge didn’t resemble the fictional Enterprise or any of the real US Navy vessels I’d served on. I’d visited the Hayden Planetarium in New York once, and the vessel’s control room was about as large as the main auditorium, a sphere with a squared-off deck but lacking the tilted seats. The surface of the sphere was a featureless slate grey, but as we neared the center of the room it gradually darkened into an image of space, of the Moon, startlingly close.
It might have been designed to impress us, but my eyes were on the Helta stepping forward to meet us. I had this one pegged as a male, though I couldn’t have explained why, since there were no obvious differences between any of the half a dozen of them on the bridge besides their height, and this one happened to be the tallest.
“I am Joon-Pah,” the Helta said, and I nearly jumped at the words. The fact he knew English wasn’t surprising since the robot had already spoken to us, but I just didn’t expect a thing that looked like a were koala to have the vocal cords to handle it. “I am the appointed master of this ship, and I greet you in the name of the people of Helta and the Alliance of Free Worlds.”
“There’s an Alliance of Free Worlds?” I asked, feeling like a kid on Christmas morning finding out Santa is real after all. “You mean like a Federation of Planets?”
“Shut up, Clanton,” Strawbridge snapped, finally coming into her own now that there was someone to be a diplomat to, even if that someone looked like a furry at a science fiction convention. “Captain Joon-Pah, my name is Delia Strawbridge and I am here as a representative of the President of the United States to bring greetings to you from the people of Earth—”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Shaddick interrupted, exasperation in her voice, “but this is just fucking impossible.” She pointed at Joon-Pah and I cringed, imagining all the human cultures who didn’t like people pointing at them and then transferring that feeling into an alien with a hyperdrive and artificial gravity. “Just look at them! This isn’t parallel evolution or form following function! There is no way something like this could have evolved naturally even on Earth, much less on some random alien planet!”
“Dr. Shaddick,” Strawbridge hissed. “Control yourself for God’s sake.” She turned back to the alien. “I am so sorry, Captain Joon-Pah. Let me assure you—”
“She is correct,” Joon-Pah acknowledged, and Strawbridge’s jaw dropped. “We did not evolve naturally, and the story behind how we came to be is one you will need to hear. But it is not as important as the reason for which we’re here.” The guy was an alien and even if he’d been a real koala, I had no idea how to read the emotions of a koala, either, but I got the impression he was scared, or perhaps uncomfortable with what he was saying. “We are, by nature, a peaceful people who seek to avoid conflict at all costs, yet we find ourselves in a brutal war with an implacable foe. And we are losing, badly.”
“You’re at war?” I asked, the words nearly catching in my throat. “With who?”
The Heltan’s eyes were dark and liquid, and they fixed on me with what I’d taken before for fear or reluctance.
“Why, with you.”
***
The image of the moon had been replaced by one of Earth, but not the Earth we knew. I wouldn’t have been able to tell that from the picture of the world from orbit, but the view dove and soared, a magic carpet ride taking us all the way from high orbit down into the atmosphere and through mountain passes, scraping the tops of redwoods impossibly high before hugging the dunes in desolate deserts.
There were no cities in this version of Earth, just wilderness, broken here and there by the occasional village where men and women dressed in skins tended fires or knapped flint. It was a world of at least ten thousand years ago, maybe even earlier, and I was too astonished to remember to ask how they’d obtained the footage or, assuming it was just some sort of simulation, where they’d gotten the information they needed to make it.
“This is the story,” Joon-Pah intoned, his voice as sonorous as if he was sitting at one of those stone-age campfires, “of all life in the known galaxy, and it all begins below us, on the world you call Earth, a hundred thousand years ago. Back then, there was but one technological civilization in all the galaxy, a race we call the Elders, for lack of a better term. They had existed for millions of years, and in all that time, they searched diligently for other sentient races to share the universe with, and yet had found none, had found nothing but primitive, one-celled life. Until they came across Earth. Until they found a treasure trove of complex life forms. And you.”
The video showed the primitive humans again, focusing on them, bringing their filthy, hairy, fur-clad shapes into sharp relief, but somehow managing to show the glint of intelligence in their eyes.
“It was then that the Elders knew their purpose, knew what they must do. They were powerful beings with technology that makes even ours seem childlike and impotent. They began to transform the moribund planets of the galaxy into living worlds using their own mighty powers…and using the life they’d found on Earth.”
The image shot out acro
ss the water and over to another continent, where it found some species of bear I didn’t recognize, though it wasn’t actually a koala. Maybe it was a sun bear like they have in India, but I couldn’t be sure. There was a whole family of them, a female and three cubs wandering through some forest, and then a beam of light hit them and they were gone. Others, a lone male, then two juveniles kicked out by their mother but still traveling together, vanished as well.
What came next was definitely computer animation, though of a quality that would have put the special effects on my streaming show to shame. The bears were brought to some sort of futuristic laboratory, where machines probed at them and took fluid samples, though no image of the Elders was shown. I wondered if it was because they didn’t actually know what the Elders looked like or if there was some sort of religious reason, like Muslims forbid images of Mohammed.
The bears were being genetically altered, I inferred. The samples were put in some sort of device that glowed and shook and did all sorts of weird shit, and then were implanted back into one of the bears and it changed—shown in time lapse—and then the whole thing was done again. It sped up and finally, what came out was something that looked like the Helta.
The next shot was of a family of Helta living in a wattle hut in a forest clearing, on a world very Earthlike but subtly different, things like a different shade to the sky.
“And it was not just us,” Joon-Pah said. None of the rest on the bridge had spoken as of yet. I couldn’t tell if it was out of discipline, deference to Joon-Pah’s leadership or fear of us. “Many other species were altered as well, brought to sentience by the Elders and deposited on their newly-habitable worlds along with other, simpler life engineered to survive in their new environments.”
A panning shot across multiple continents this time, and this time other animals were taken for experimentation: wolves, ravens, mountain lions, hyenas, and even out into the ocean for dolphins, killer whales, octopi…