Wayfarer: AV494

by Matthew S. Cox

  Don held up a finger until he swallowed. “Indeed. In the eighty-two years since the commercialization of translight travel, there’ve been over forty-six finds at various colony and research outposts. We’re well beyond wondering if aliens exist, and have moved on to trying to understand what they are… or were.”

  “Were?” asked Corporal Guillen. “That kinda sounds like you think they’re all dead.”

  Don offered a whimsical shrug. “Based on what I’ve seen… dusty relics and half-buried sites, there’s been no evidence of activity within the last seven centuries. For all we know, any aliens proximal to Earth, or with the technology to get there, have died out already.”

  “Maybe they got close enough to get a look at us, and said ‘fuck that.” Foster glanced around. “We’re a pretty screwed up species.”

  “The galaxy is over a hundred thousand light years across.” Paula tapped her fork on an empty tray in thought. “Billions of stars and planets. It’s a mathematical certainty that there’s some other life out there we just haven’t run into yet.”

  “So, what’s got everyone so worked up over this place?” asked Marco. “The plants?”

  “Precisely!” Don thrust his hand up for emphasis, accidentally tossing a glop of mashed potato from his fork to the table. “Thus far, on every planet where we’ve discovered signs of intelligent construction, there’s been no active biological life. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of there being life on the same world at the time humans find it.”

  “Most of the other sites appear to have either experienced extinction-level events or been tiny, almost like remote outposts,” said Kerys. Hundreds of still images flashed by in her memory. “I can think of three: Demeter-11, IX144, and Ptolemy Major, where the site teams did find fossilized evidence that suggested water had been present in the past, but none remained.”

  Paula looked impressed. “I worked with the Demeter team when I was your age, doing analysis from a lab safe on Earth. It’s true. We found geological evidence of prior water, but something tore away that planet’s atmosphere eons before human boots ever touched its surface.”

  “Sorry… you are?” asked Marco.

  “Kerys.” She stabbed more green beans and nibbled.

  “Marco Trem.” He offered a hand. “Since you’re wearing blue, I guess you’re on my team. Xenoarchaeology?”

  “Yeah.” She shook hands. “I studied at Berkeley. This’ll be my fourth site.”

  “Nice. Second for me.”

  “You’ve met Doctor Bouchard,” said Paula. “He’s our project lead.”

  Kerys looked at the white-haired man for a few seconds before her gaze slipped over to Corporal Guillen.

  Paula grinned. “As you know, the military subsidizes most interstellar travel. Ships this size always come with a security detachment.”

  “Rick Guillen.” The corporal offered his hand. “Private Foster here and I are rotating in, assigned to Wayfarer Outpost for six months. Maybe we’ll catch the same ship back home.”

  “You can call me Ed.” Private Foster smiled at Kerys.

  “Good Lord, is that boy even eighteen yet?” asked Paula. “My son looks older than you.”

  Don chuckled.

  “Twenty, ma’am.” Private Foster saluted.

  She couldn’t remember how long the job contract stipulated, having been too excited for this chance to retain such a trivial detail. “Umm, I’m not really sure how long we’ll be here.”

  “That all depends on what we find.” Don dropped his fork in the empty tray. “However, the shortest amount of time we’ll be on site is six months.”

  Marco laughed. “That’s weird to think about. The ship that’ll take us home is already on its way here.”

  Corporal Guillen looked down at the table, as if staring deep into the metal at some other reality. After a moment, he spoke without looking up. “Two years, nine months, twelve days, and three hours. I’m legally thirty-nine, but biologically twenty-six since I’ve pulled so much cryo time.”

  “Wow, that’s―” Kerys froze as metal groaned and banged, the sound emanating from everywhere.

  The corporal disregarded the noise, twirling a fork around in his fingers. Everyone else looked like a pack of startled raccoons caught raiding the pantry.

  “Please tell me that’s normal.” Marco stared at the ceiling. “That’s gotta be normal right? The ship’s supposed to sound like it’s being bent in half?”

  “Heh.” Corporal Guillen flipped the fork up and caught it. “It’s from the ship decelerating out of translight. I’m no astrophysicist, but something about moving at that speed does funny things with matter. The hull stretches out a little.”

  Kerys dropped her fork in her still half-full tray, appetite gone. “That’s… umm… interesting.”

  “Our primary objective here”―Don cleared his throat―“is to evaluate and assess suspected signs of nonhuman civilization the Avasar Biotech people found. According to the information I’ve been given, the site is only a short distance from Wayfarer Outpost. A complete accident that they decided to set up there.”

  Paula examined her e-pad, a six-by-eight-inch handheld. “They chose the location for its proximity to the largest… I suppose ‘forest’ would be the best term. Aerial photography shows a rocky ridgeline passing northeast to southwest at the bottom of a downgrade, a little farther than a half mile from the outpost.”

  The e-pad got handed around. Kerys took it from Marco, and spent a few minutes staring at a jagged line of dark grey mountains surrounded by a black field interspersed with shiny flecks.

  “What’s the composition of that soil?” asked Kerys.

  “Mostly silica,” said Don, “as well as traces of other crystals, and an element or two we’ve never seen before. I’m told it can have sharp edges. Disturbing it raises clouds of micro-fine particles that would be like breathing razor blades.”

  Kerys shivered.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that.” Corporal Guillen traced a circle around his head. “The atmosphere’s not compatible with humans. If you go outside without a suit, you’ll have much bigger problems than accidentally inhaling dust.”

  The smell of food from her tray shifted from uninteresting to nauseating. She nudged it away.

  “Wayfarer Outpost was set up four years and two months ago,” said Don. “There’s no need to experience anxiety. The facility is a series of individual pods connected by modular tubes. Each building is capable of lasting quite a while if isolated from the rest.”

  Paula gestured at the e-pad. “I didn’t see any reports of weather patterns indicative of concern. The planet has water, and rain.”

  Kerys stared at the glittering black sand, smiling at the prospect of new scenery. A far cry from Earth, not at all safe, but a welcome change for a while. Despite the danger of the alien landscape, she couldn’t help but find it beautiful.

  “Hey, you done with that?” Foster reached across the table toward her, flicking his fingers closed against his palm a few times.

  She handed him the e-pad.

  “Gonna finish your… whatever that is?” Marco gestured at her half-eaten tray.

  “I’m full. Go right ahead.” She pushed it toward him.

  “Much obliged.” He winked, and dug in. “Oh, hey―pot roast. I didn’t know they made Hydra pot roast.”

  “They don’t. That’s the steak,” said Foster.

  Kerys’s gut churned. “How long until we arrive?”

  Corporal Guillen checked his armband. “Four hours nineteen minutes. Everyone’s got an assigned stateroom on Deck B. There’s also a small fitness center at the aft end of the hallway there. Med crew’s made a mess of the lounge, but they’ve got some vids there if you need to kill boredom.”

  It didn’t seem real that she’d been asleep and motionless for almost three years. They’d said she wouldn’t even dream, but she had a few… though for all she knew, those dreams had occupied fleeting moments between the onset
of the anesthetic and the initiation of the freeze. Getting her body moving again seemed like a good idea, though considering she’d just eaten, nothing too strenuous.

  “Right.” Kerys stood. “Guess I’ll walk around a little, maybe check out the fitness center.”

  Don got up and offered a hand. “Glad to have you with us, Miss Loring. I’m sure your experience will prove valuable planetside.”

  “Thanks, Doctor.” She shivered with anticipation, much the way she figured the first humans to set foot on a planet outside the solar system did so many years ago. “I can’t wait.”

  Kerys crossed from the café to the ladder and climbed up one level to Deck B. A few of the plain metal doors had strips of white tape with names written on them in black marker. She stopped at the third on the right, upon which someone had written ‘Loring, K.’ Curiosity got the better of her and she pulled the sliding door aside to peer in at a modest stateroom with a foam pad bunk, grey blanket, and a tiny desk.

  A thin-screen terminal bore bright amber lettering: ‹New Messages: 14›

  “What?” Kerys blinked, clinging to the wall while staring at the display. Once surprise wore off, she eased into the room and slid the door closed behind her.

  After taking a seat at the desk, she poked the screen, which presented her with a green fingerprint login box. She pressed her thumb to the monitor, waiting for a thin blue line to sweep past. A second later, the black background changed to a generic flowery meadow with bright blue sky and fluffy clouds. Kerys tapped the icon flashing with the shape of an envelope, opening a black window with fourteen individual tiles.

  Each small box had her little brother Jaden’s face in it, mostly smiling. On the far left, he looked much like she remembered, about ten. In the most recent message on the other end, he appeared noticeably older.

  Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. He’s gotta be thirteen now. Jaden had been a surprise… Her mother had him only five months before Kerys had moved out to go to college. I’m shocked Mom kept him. She’d seen him on and off for holidays and the like, until he discovered she’d gone into space―at which point he wanted to know all about everything. The last site had been a mere seven-month cryo trip, so she hadn’t missed too much.

  “Three years…”

  She tapped the first message.

  “Hey Ker! I know you’re like sleeping now while the ship is flying, but they said I can send you these vid mails, and you’d get them when you showed up. I got an A on the project you helped with. Mr. Davis didn’t believe me at first, thought I made it up. He was gonna fail me, but Mom went off on him. He wound up calling the people you used to work for and they verified it. Now I’m like a celebrity.”

  Kerys draped herself back in the seat, listening to her little brother talk on and on about how excited he was that she got another chance to ‘research alien ruins and stuff.’ One message into the next, he filled her in on life back home. He got a new game system for his eleventh birthday, and spent twenty minutes talking about how one of the games made him think of her roaming around an alien planet. In the fifth video, a bright green plastic lattice encased his left arm. He’d broken it playing lacrosse and had to wear the ‘stupid thing’ for two days until the nanosurgery finished.

  Watching him get older before her eyes summoned a lump in her throat. She grasped the front of her neck on the twelfth video when he let slip that he wished she could be there for Christmas. His somberness didn’t last long, and soon he resumed barraging her with questions about her expedition.

  Though he projected excitement, the sense that he missed her grew stronger with each successive message. She left the last second of the final video on freeze-frame. Not since the rep from Avasar made contact had she once hesitated at their offer. The chance to visit another planet and find alien civilization had been too strong a call to resist. Only now, staring into her brother’s slate-blue eyes, did she feel a pang of doubt.

  The boy hadn’t paid much attention to her until he’d turned nine. Before that, he’d been a bit of a brat, snapping that she couldn’t tell him what to do because he already had a mother and didn’t need two. For reasons she still didn’t quite understand, Kerys had gone from unwanted ‘second parent’ to adored ‘big sis’ overnight. Six years was a lot of time to lose from her brother’s life. Even if she turned around right away, he’d be sixteen before she got back to Earth. In a paradoxical way, she’d ‘be there’ during what remained of his childhood more from far away, even if the video messages took a month to make the trip.

  Once, she tried to wrap her brain around how they could manage to send transmissions through space folds, but pages of technical documents made her head explode. She only remembered something about the folds being tiny. They hadn’t developed the technology enough to squeeze starships into them, which could’ve cut the travel time on this trip to four weeks instead of three years. Of course, a data transmission from AV494 orbit to Earth via the SFT took a month, that didn’t mean a ship would too. Her brain swam with jargon about exponential power curves.

  “Ugh.” She rubbed her nose, stared at Jaden for another few minutes, and hit a key to record a message.

  “Hey, kiddo. We just woke up about forty minutes ago. It’s hard to believe I’ve been asleep for so long and missed so much.” She concentrated on not choking up. “I’m sorry for disappearing on you, but you know how important this could be. I’m higher up the food chain this time, so if we find something, I won’t get left out.” She waved at the wall behind her. “This is my luxurious stateroom, a little bigger than your closet. I won’t be in it long. A couple hours from now, a shuttle’s going to take us to the planet surface, and then this ship will turn around and head right back to Earth.

  “No one’s really sure what’s down there, at least as far as alien stuff goes. People have been on this planet for a while already, studying the plants. There’s water here, so I’m really excited that we might find something that’s never been documented before. It’s going to be a lot of hard work, but I’m so anxious to get started, I’m shaking.”

  She held up her hands, allowing the camera to record her fluttering fingers.

  “This is the chance of a lifetime. If someone at Avasar decided to put this outpost a little farther north or south, they never would’ve found the excavation site. Ugh. The few hours I’m stuck in this ship waiting are going to feel like forever. At least since I’m awake now, I’ll be able to send you messages back. I’ll try to send one off every couple days.”

  Kerys bounced in the seat, commenting about random things she could remember from her brother’s messages. Eventually, the file size limit flashed a warning.

  “Okay, bud. I’ve only got twenty seconds left. Wish me luck!”

  The video window shrank to a small square, flashing in time with the word ‹sending› beneath it. Eighteen seconds later, it flashed ‘transmission successful,’ and returned to the main messaging window.

  “Ugh.” Kerys moved from the chair to the bed and stretched out.

  Anxiety, anticipation, guilt, and fear got into a battle royal in her gut.

  Despite that, she grinned at the drab ceiling overhead. In a little over two hours, a shuttle would take her team down to Wayfarer Outpost, and hopefully, a career-making discovery.

  “I can do this.” She closed her eyes. “I have to do this. We’re going to make history.”

  2

  Reentry

  Hours of staring at her stateroom ceiling dragged on forever. Fifty minutes prior to launch, Marco poked his head in to let Kerys know Don asked everyone to help load their gear. For whatever reason, all the archaeology team’s equipment had to make the flight in the starship’s cargo hold instead of being pre-loaded in the shuttle. She’d gotten up with little protest, as having something to do would make the time vanish in a blur of activity. After she lugged her two duffel bags packed with company-issued jumpsuits and other clothes to the shuttle, she helped the rest of the team carry the rigid
cases containing the team’s research equipment.

  She learned the Avasar 4 had a length of 184 meters, and its designers thought the cargo area needed to be as far away from the shuttle compartment in the nose as possible. She also learned that 184 meters feels like five hundred when walking backwards while holding up one end of a two-hundred-pound trunk. Fortunately, the shuttle’s rear door opened downward into a ramp that offered direct access to its cargo hold. Two immense ion thruster pods jutted out on either side of the opening, each bearing one folded wing.

  “I can go first if you want,” said Marco, “just swivel the box around.”

  “S’okay.” Kerys grunted, straining to look back over her shoulder as she edged toward the ramp. “Besides, you just wanna give me the heavy end going uphill.”

  He chuckled.

  Grunting, she heaved up on the handles, lugging the ponderous burden into the shuttle’s hold. Six steps in, Marco stopped without warning. She yelped and almost fell over trying not to drop it.

  “Hey! Careful! Why’d you stop?”

  He nodded toward an open space beneath a rack. “Let’s drop it here and push it. If you back in there, you won’t be able to get out.”

  “Oh.” She exhaled. “Yeah, good idea.”

  They set the case down and took a momentary breather. When he nodded, she moved to his side and they shoved the coffin-sized box in against the wall. Don strolled up the ramp, holding an e-pad and counting boxes.

  Marco took a knee to secure a strap over the case. “At least the outpost’s built already. My last hop, we spent the first week living in inflatables while we put the damn pods together.”

  Evidently satisfied, Don smiled at them before exiting the cargo hold via a bulkhead door at the center of the inner wall.

  “Ugh.” She shivered. “I don’t think I could’ve handled ‘tents’ again. Bad enough only having an inch of steel between me and death on this ship.”