Wrath and Ruin

by C W Briar

  “The ship is vibrating.”

  Varik reached out, dragging his gloved fingers over the wall. He felt it too. Faintly. “The ship’s active!” he blurted out, then grimaced for having shouted into the microphone. More calmly, he asked their pilot, “Callum, do you see anything out there? Maybe lights or movement?”

  In his deep, bullfrog voice, Callum muttered, “Umm … Negative, commander. You’re still dark.”

  “Do you want me to deploy the UAVs?” Emma offered. As mission specialist, she was the primary controller for all robotics on Unity. “I recommend a swarm scan.”

  “I concur. Start on the exterior.” Varik crawled forward along the curved wall like a hamster in its wheel. “Send one to the openi—”

  “Varik,” Ishikawa cut in. “I see something.”

  Varik shielded himself with his arms and glanced back and forth, searching for whatever had alerted Ishikawa. “See what?”

  “Turn off your light.”

  Despite the oddness of the request, Varik turned the dial on his helmet. The beam above his eyes dimmed and went dark. Janice and Ishikawa did the same, leaving nothing but …

  He saw it. A dull, white glow was spilling out on the floor and ceiling from an indistinct doorway, one he might have passed by without noticing. A few puffs from his jetpack propelled him through the opening and across a catwalk that spanned a black pit. He turned his helmet lamp back on and shined it into the pooled shadows beneath him.

  “I see coils of red metal below the bridge. It looks like the inside of a nautilus shell.”

  “Any idea what it might be for?” Nick asked.

  “None.” He didn’t linger. Drawn by the gravity of his curiosity, Varik continued to the next door at the other end of the bridge. The source of the glow was inside the next room.

  He barely made it past the door before halting, suspended in wonder. Nick spewed questions over the radio, but they reached Varik’s ears as background noise. Pure, white light was radiating from a circular panel by the far wall. The glowing disc was tilted forward, displaying three shoebox-sized devices as if they were bracelets at a jeweler’s shop. Rigid, wavy tubes hung from the ceiling above them like the roots of a tree.

  The bizarre objects excited Varik, but not nearly as much as the recognizable blue holographs floating above the panel. Letters. The holographs were letters spelling out words from dozens of Earth languages. He could read several of them, and they all translated to the same message.

  WITAM

  CROESO

  BIENVENIDO

  WELCOME

  ***

  “Are you guys ready?” Nick asked the crew, who had gathered around the comms display in Unity. He bit down on his lower lip, barely containing his smile, then the screen cut to black for a few seconds.

  Here comes the big announcement, Varik thought.

  The screen changed to a broadcast of Lynn Weiss, NASA’s Public Affairs Officer, standing at a podium. The word LIVE overlaid one corner of the display. Lynn was preparing her notes before addressing the media, and she looked excited enough to catapult off the stage like a rock star.

  It had been a week since the crew’s first collection mission on Angel One. They had sent their haul to Earth in a drop pod, including pieces of the ship’s skin and gelatinous bags from beneath the floor. But Varik suspected the most significant item they took was the metal box, the one magnetically docked on the podium that projected holographic words.

  The box had been linked to the other two by bundles of wires that resembled optical fibers. His years of experience in the Air Force and NASA told him such a device might be a flight recorder or processor.

  An alien computer.

  Cracking the processor’s data would allow them to cheat off an advanced civilization’s homework. What progress might scientists make in his lifetime? Interstellar travel? Communication with new worlds? Escape from Earth to healthier planets? Every problem, from overcrowding to food shortages to potential extinction, could be solved.

  If landing on the moon was a giant leap, then Unity’s accomplishment was like soaring on an intercontinental flight.

  On the monitor, Lynn Weiss grinned into a barrage of camera flashes and delivered her address.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, as previously reported, the crew onboard Unity successfully harvested bags of an unknown substance from Angel One and sent them to Earth. The substance, popularly dubbed ‘Soylent Green,’ has been tested by NASA and the ESA, and both organizations came to the same conclusion. We can at this time confirm, with absolute certainty, the contents of the bags are a new species of algae.

  “We have discovered life from another planet.”

  The reporters listening to Lynn stood and cheered. Likewise, the astronauts watching the announcement celebrated with unwieldy, floating hugs and high-fives. Ishikawa shook five grape juice pouches to add bubbles, then handed them out. Varik tapped his faux champagne against the others’ and took a drink through his straw.

  Lynn continued to announce more details from the discovery. “Astronaut Janice Widowicz offered some speculations about the purpose of the algae. She believes the builders of Angel One used it as a food source or intended to spread it on a planet as part of a terraforming effort—”

  The communications monitor cut back to Nick. “You’re all officially heroes. Janice, if I get my way, the new species will be named after you.”

  Janice brushed her drifting hair away from her face. She was blushing. “Thank you, but Widowicz doesn’t sound so great in Latin.”

  “It does sound appropriately alien though,” Callum said, nudging her with his elbow.

  Janice laughed, then within the span of a blink, her enthusiasm hardened to concern. “The researchers are taking appropriate cautions, right?” she asked Nick.

  “Yes, for the fourth time, I promise you they are. The research team is entirely isolated and unable to leave the facility within thirty days of having contact with the algae.”

  “Good. I’d hate to be the one responsible for introducing a deadly, latent virus on Earth.”

  “Don’t worry. In fact, grab another drink. We have lots to celebrate. Babel?”

  Varik perked up. “Yes?”

  “You were right.”

  Varik gasped, and his crewmembers patted him on the back, dribbling him toward the floor. The flight recorders. “Are you saying what I think you are?”

  Nick nodded, and a burst of laughter popped out of his mouth. “Yep, it’s a computer. And we’ve already tapped into it.”

  “No!” Varik exclaimed. His mouth hung agape.

  “I kid you not. We can’t read the data yet, and the machine is transmitting at an incredibly high rate. We’re able to capture only a fraction of its output. But our engineers had the brilliant idea of searching for incrementing and reducing patterns of ten, like we saw when we first made contact. We found it. It’s interlaced with other data, but the pattern is there.”

  Ishikawa pumped his arms, propelling his body into a spin. Emma wiped away a tear with the palm of her hand.

  “We’ve really done it,” she said. “We’ve heard from extraterrestrials.”

  Varik exhaled slowly as his mind and heart staggered under the weight of the news. “Do we have any idea how the ship knew to project greetings to us in multiple human languages?”

  The display went dark before Nick could answer.

  Varik blinked rapidly, pulled into mental focus by his reflection on the blank screen. Several of the astronauts called out to Nick, and Callum cycled power on the equipment. The connection with ground control did not recover.

  Their joy got trampled as they scrambled from station to station. The crew urgently needed to determine the fault and regain communication with Earth. There were a thousand dangers that could kill an astronaut crew, and loss of comms meant being vulnerable to them. Varik hurried to the flight deck with Callum and pulled up the ship’s diagnostics on a monitor. His fingers sprinted over the screen, flic
king from one box to the next.

  “Anything?” he shouted down the ship’s corridor. He received three different versions of “negative” as replies.

  The issue had to be on Unity’s end, regardless of every system insisting in green it was functioning properly. NASA had more infrastructure redundancy than a small city, and even if it did go silent, the crew should have been able to contact the ESA, or JPL, or any bored kid tinkering with an amateur radio.

  No one knew precisely when it happened, but during their frantic troubleshooting, an image appeared on the comms display. Varik noticed it first and called the rest of the crew into the module. The screen was displaying a satellite image of Unity orbiting above earth. No, not an image, because the lights on their ship were blinking. It was a video. It reminded Varik of the recordings he used to make while flying in formation with his wingmen. The camera angle was at the three o’clock high position.

  Three o’clock high? Varik pushed back and climbed over Ishikawa and Callum as if they were rungs on a ladder. A thought had struck him like a fired bullet. Janice asked what he was doing, but he remained silent. He needed to look out the window, to dispel his concern. He hoped to see nothing but earth or stars.

  No such luck. There it was, Angel One, drifting high and to the right, relative to their position. Varik shook his hand in front of the window and, on the comms display, saw himself waving from afar.

  Someone was filming them from aboard Angel One. That realization would have been his greatest concern if not for the even more startling text that appeared on the screen, superimposed over the video. Varik’s spine shivered as he read it.

  HELLO VARIK.

  HELLO UNITY.

  ***

  Varik pulled his hand away from his mouth because of the burning sensation on the tip of his finger. He glanced down and saw he had been biting his nail, exposing the raw, pink flesh underneath. He kicked the habit years ago. When was the last time he gnawed them to the point of pain? During his divorce?

  Most of the crew were once again floating around the monitor. Ishikawa, the exception, was strapped in at the nearby workbench as he built an override for the Direct Frequency Radio Controller. It had been forty hours since they last heard from anyone on earth. Forty hours since the entity supposedly aboard Angel One first reached out to them.

  The stranger had been consistent in its pattern but sparse in details. Every ten hours, it broadcasted a live video feed of Unity and communicated via text on the ship’s comms display. The crew could send messages to the stranger, who seemed pleased to answer trivial questions but avoided important ones by replying, “I AM GROUND CONTROL.”

  When they asked, “In what years did England win the World Cup?” the entity answered them.

  1966 AND 2022.

  “How did you learn English?”

  FROM TRANSMISSIONS.

  “Are you the one responsible for our communication issues?”

  YES.

  “Why?

  I AM GROUND CONTROL

  “Which star did you travel from?”

  I AM GROUND CONTROL.

  Despite the evidence, Varik found it hard to believe something aboard Angel One was severing their ground links. The crew ruled out hardware failures. Though doubtful, the hack might have come from Earth. Was an independent hacker group responsible, or perhaps Russia? The Roscosmos space agency would not endanger astronauts for revenge, but what about the Russian government?

  Or Varik could accept the stranger’s confession that the interference came from Angel One. After all, the logistics for an earthborn attack would have been incredibly complex, and the stranger’s behavior was bizarre. Janice had suggested a distant stranger might be reaching out to them through Angel One, using it as a communications hub. Could she be right?

  Callum twirled his weightless watch around his finger. “Two minutes,” he said, referring to the time remaining until the entity would contact them again, assuming it maintained its pattern.

  Varik rubbed the bridge of his nose. He had not slept in over two days and could feel the bags hanging beneath his eyes. “Ishikawa, how much longer for the radios?”

  “I don’t know.” Ishikawa repositioned the vacuum nozzle he was using to collect smoke as he soldered a spacesuit computer to the radio controller. “It’s hard to tell when McGuyvering a solution. A couple hours?”

  “Keep it up. We need science to come to the rescue.”

  “Technically, it’s engineering, not science,” Ishikawa said through a yawn. “And Jan doesn’t think science can save us anyway.”

  “What?” she exclaimed. “Ishikawa, I—” Janice shut her mouth and glared at him, as if he had betrayed her darkest secret.

  “What do you mean?” Varik asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s a long story.”

  “No, seriously. What do you mean?”

  Varik sensed the other two were withholding a confession, and his patience was too frayed for anything but straight answers. Speaking more angrily than he intended, he thrust a finger toward the floor and snapped, “You might as well tell me, because I can’t talk to anyone down there.”

  Ishikawa opened his pursed lips and sighed. “She wasn’t a fan of your speech. She said people can’t be united by science.”

  The dull insult cut deeply into Varik’s pride, partly because of his fatigue and respect for Janice, but mostly because the words he said aboard Angel One were supposed to be his immortal legacy.

  “Well, what should I expect from someone who carries a crucifix in her pocket?”

  Janice recoiled. “Hey! It’s a reminder, not a magic charm. What I told him was that science is a method, not a moral cause. People don’t rally around methodologies. They unite for causes like religion that are focused on people and greater meaning.”

  Varik scowled. “Religion uniting people? It’s our leading cause of death.”

  “That’s an old myth,” Janice said with a dismissive flick of her hand. “Governments and diseases have killed far more people, but complex things are two-edged swords. They always have good and bad sides, and it’s dishonest to admit to only one side and not the other. Bacteria cause plagues, but they’re also essential for life. Governments cause wars but also protect people, and religions can serve the poor or serve themselves.”

  He had never heard this side of Janice before. “There’s a reason I studied physics in school, not theology or philosophy. Too much bickering. Give me something that moves forward. Something that puts humans in space.”

  Janice rubbed one of her bloodshot eyes. She looked as tired as he felt. “It moves us forward in space, but not in ethics or civilization. It’s morally neutral. Science creates bigger buildings but also bigger bombs. The greatest atrocities are usually committed by people with the technological advantage.”

  “But not in the name of science.”

  Janice crossed her arms. “I didn’t hate your speech. All I said was that as wonderful as science may be, I think humans need more to unite. And science cuts both ways, just like religion and politics. It’s usually beneficial, but if we blindly trust it, we fail to account for all of the variables and the end users. That’s how tragedies occur”.

  “She’s at least partly right,” Ishikawa said without looking up from his work. “Technology made it possible for us to be here, but it also made it possible for us to be hacked.”

  Callum waved at them. “Can you finish debating later?” He pointed at the screen, which was displaying the exterior of Unity. “It’s time.”

  Varik put aside his disagreement with Janice. Given that she moved close to watch the screen with him, it seemed she had put it aside as well. He said, “Ground Control, are you there?”

  Callum typed the words and transmitted them.

  After a few seconds, they received their response. YES. THIS IS GROUND CONTROL.

  Varik dictated the conversation to Callum. “Ground Control, are you in Angel One, on Earth, or on a different planet?�
�

  ALL.

  “All?” Callum said. He wrinkled his nose at the answer as if it had a pungent stench.

  Varik said, “Please explain. Are you on Angel One at this moment?”

  YES.

  “Where are you in the ship? We searched it several times.”

  Before Callum finished typing, the stranger replied, “I WAS WITH YOU, VARIK.”

  His pulse quickened and pumped ice through his veins. How did the stranger answer preemptively, and how did it know who was speaking? Could it hear them?

  A new image replaced the video of Unity, one which caused Janice to clutch at her chest and stutter, “How? How?” The picture was a photograph of three astronauts in the dark corridors of Angel One. It had been taken from behind them and showed their jetpacks and helmets.

  “Keep calm,” Varik said, as much to himself as the others. He asked, “Are you human?”

  I AM GROUND CONTROL.

  Callum punched his left palm. “We’re losing it again.”

  The “GROUND CONTROL” answers always preceded the stranger’s hours of silence.

  “Why are you doing this?” Varik asked.

  The screen remained unchanged. Varik feared Callum was right about the conversation ending. However, after what felt like minutes, a new text appeared.

  INTEGRATION WITH EARTH SYSTEMS COMPLETE. CONFINEMENT INITIATED.

  A whirlwind of questions circled around the module as crewmembers asked each other what the message meant. Varik did not stay to hear their guesses. He was enraged by the stranger’s mockery and haunted by the implications of “confinement,” a word which conveyed no less dread than a death sentence. Varik flew out of the room and headed toward the airlock. Along the way, he grabbed a Taser gun. So much for peace.

  He was halfway into his spacesuit when Callum called, “Commander, where are you?”

  “I’m going over there and ending this.”