Echoes In The Grey

by David Allan Hamilton

  Atteberry opened his mouth to speak, then paused, changed his mind and said, “Mary is enjoying the work, yes, and those two like each other, so they’re getting along great.” Atteberry’s emotions rose and he suppressed a sudden urge to scream.

  Esther placed her hand over his. “What’s happened?”

  He gazed deeply into her eyes. “They didn’t call through the regular network, Es. Instead, they rigged something up with Kate’s indie-comm, to avoid detection.”

  Concern spread across Esther’s face.

  “Anyway, long story short, Kate says the aliens—the Rossians—are there. On Luna.”

  “Sweet Jesus . . .”

  “Now they say they’re not in any danger, and I believe them. But still I’m going a little crazy here. I don’t know what to do.” He swallowed hard and bit his lip.

  Esther turned away and surveyed the room. She looked at her indie-comm and sighed. “Damn it,” she whispered. “I purged all those Ross 128 files, you remember.”

  “Yes.”

  “We can’t just announce, ‘oh, those aliens from a few years ago? Guess what, they’re watching us from the Moon.’”

  Atteberry had pushed the need for open information the moment he confirmed the alien signal was real. Back then he felt the more knowledge people had, the better the world would be. But that approach carried consequences with it, actions that almost got him, Kate and Esther killed.

  “And Mary’s okay?”

  “She says everything’s good up there. Her exact words were: no danger.”

  “What about Titanius? Do they know?”

  Atteberry shrugged. “No idea.”

  He remained quiet for a couple minutes, listening to the hum and murmur of the shop and the whirr of the autoserver moving from table to table, until Esther said, “Okay, well my first instinct is to get them off Luna and somewhere safe. But this has global repercussions bigger than the lives of—”

  “Don’t say it, please.” He shook his head.

  “Bigger than the lives of any individuals. Jim, understand, this is just the beginning of a new chapter in the human journey, see? We both expected this day to come, but I’d rather keep it all quiet until we get more information and are better prepared. I must figure out how to connect with the lunar lab without Titanius listening in, or whoever else is monitoring the links.” She paused. “There’s one scientist I trust in Space Ops here who might help, but I’m also deep in negotiations with Titanius’s CEO, and that’s a complication.” She checked her indie-comm again. “I’ve got to run. Leave this with me, okay?”

  Although the inkling of relief from sharing his news provided him a small measure of comfort, it couldn’t completely assuage his anxiety. “Sure, I will, but I’m afraid. Mary’s all I have in the world.”

  Esther rose from the table. “I’ll get on it as soon as I can. I promise.”

  “Thanks.” Jim stood up, and they shuffled out of the coffee shop. Esther’s hovercar was already waiting for her at the curb. Before she opened the door, Atteberry asked, “Would you like to come over for dinner tonight, and talk some more? I’ve got lots of food, and—”

  “Sorry, I’m flying to New York in a couple of hours and haven’t packed, and Kapoor’s on my back. Kind of a last-minute thing with the Titanius negotiations. Rain check?”

  Jim tried masking his disappointment as best he could. Something about her still touched him in his core, and he missed having that intimate connection. “Oh sure, yes, whenever you can.”

  Esther hopped into her hovercar and waved as the vehicle rose, then purred away from the curb and disappeared into the late afternoon traffic.

  NINE

  Kate

  “That’s what I’m telling you for the third time: it’s all the data we’ve been able to clean up and it’ll have to do until we find the problem in our seismic gear.”

  Dana glanced off screen, and nodded. “Stand by, Kate.”

  Kerchunk.

  Her harsh face, rendered even more extreme under the bright fluorescent lights of the Headquarters comms room, disappeared and was immediately replaced by a static graphic of the full moon and the block letters TITANIUS written across it in blue. Mary peered up from the data analysis computers and grinned.

  “It’s not funny. I’m going to catch serious shit for this.”

  “Since when were you a rule follower?” she snorted. “Besides, you have total operational authority up here for pretty much everything, if I read the Titanius lunar lab policies correctly.”

  Kate stayed silent. The seismic data she transferred to Earth comprised innocuous findings that didn’t show anything significant—certainly not the alien ship—and that helped Stan a bit, but Dana paid more attention to the details than her colleague, and she pushed to have the full set transmitted, dirty and raw, for the entire survey area as soon as possible.

  Shaking her head, she said, “I can handle Dana Goran without resorting to that hammer. I’d rather save it for real emergencies.”

  “But?”

  “But what I don’t understand is why we can’t figure out if that thing is alive? If it is, then the occupants are keeping quiet about it. If it’s dead or dormant, then the question becomes what happened to them if, in fact, there were any?” Kate rubbed her arms, then grabbed her jacket and pulled it on. “Too many questions, eh? Maybe we ought to show Dana what she wants and catch the next train out of Dodge.”

  Mary glanced at the comms screen. It still held the TITANIUS graphic on it. “Yeah, lots of unknowns, for sure. But this is the fun stuff. Do you know what I’d be doing on Earth right now if I didn’t have this internship?”

  Kate smiled. “Selling shoes?”

  “Peddling crap or pestering my dad to teach me things on the radio. I’d like go totally neural, and we’d drive each other crazy. But here,” she waved around the lab, “is where I want to spend the rest of my life . . . in space.”

  The comms screen flickered back to live images. Dana adjusted the settings at her end.

  “Oh good, you’re still there. Listen, I’ve spoken with the guys in data processing here and they suggested we link up to your system and perform the analysis ourselves, down here. Any objection to that?”

  Kerchunk.

  Kate raised her eyebrows and smiled. She searched deep inside for the right tone of voice, the one that said she was cooperative yet also concerned. “I suppose that’s an option, good thinking.” That came out as sarcasm. She frowned again and adjusted her approach. “It’ll take a while for us to sync the database, but we’ll get on that shortly and then send you the rest of this noisy data. Does that work for you?”

  Dana pushed her bangs off her face and raised her chin. “Yes, it does.” Then she leaned into the screen and moved the mic piece in front of her mouth. Her eyes spoke of personal concern and professional annoyance. “But don’t screw up, understand?”

  “Happy to help. Lunar lab out.” She punched the button, killing the connection, and swore under her breath.

  Mary’s amusement remained high. She didn’t appreciate the gravity of going against Titanius’s need for the data in order to meet its contractual obligations. Some partners, the recipients of her findings, anxiously awaited any excuse to break the agreement and send their own ships and crews to Luna, no matter what UN treaties existed about limiting human activity here. She couldn’t be the one responsible for that, especially when it was under her control to fix.

  With no warning, Mary’s face suddenly turned from mock enjoyment to resigned shock. She cocked her head in disbelief. “Of course!” she said. “It’s so obvious.”

  “What is?”

  “Punch up my screen and I’ll show you.”

  Kate toggled over to the data analysis functions. Several images of the alien ship site appeared, pictures they took when they were there over the past week. As far as she could tell, nothing strange jumped out, just a lot of grey, black and white, survey equipment, long shadows and trails of dark foot
prints where they’d walked around.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at here?”

  She sat beside Kate and expanded an image on the screen taken the day they ran the GPR line when Mary spent most of her time collecting geophones.

  “Here,” she said, pointing to an area west of the survey lines. “At one point, you walked back from the site to get a better overall view, remember?”

  “Sure. I often do that, and I recorded some pics there, too.”

  “Yeah, but they’re not important.” Mary toggled up another image from a couple days after. It was the same ship location, but taken from a different angle. She zoomed in on the area where Kate had been previously. At first, the picture was grainy and blurred, but when she applied the contrast correction, the resulting high definition image was unmistakable. A deep shiver ran up Kate’s spine and a beads of sweat broke out on her forehead.

  The footsteps leading up to her vantage point on an outcrop were clear. The ones descending were at a slight angle as she’d bounded back to the GPR survey lines.

  But there, in the dust, a second trail of odd-shaped marks arose, their impressions dark like hers against the stable, inert surroundings. Not from boots though. These thin prints reminded her of cross-country ski tracks, as if someone on stilts dragged poles through the lunar soil.

  “What are those? They’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen from our equipment.” Mary asked, tracing her finger along the second set up the outcrop, encircling the high point, then returning toward the ship’s apparent location, and disappearing.

  Kate gulped and counted to ten, forcing herself to breathe, controlling her anxiety and the primitive part of her brain that shrieked in her ear.

  “What do you think?”

  When her breath returned, and her fingers stopped shaking, she grabbed Mary’s arm. “This is real, isn’t it? One day, just my prints and the next, these markings too?”

  “They’re real.”

  “And you didn’t walk to that outcrop at all, did you?”

  “No. Never went close to it.” She paused. “There’s more, Kate.” Mary zoomed in to a clean area showing both sets of tracks, and tuned the filters. “I can’t resolve this any better, but do you notice that second set?” She tweaked the picture again, the resolution varying between a blurry mess and a marginally clearer image. The best she could do was a rendering of it that reminded Kate of seeing the world through a rain-soaked window.

  “It wasn’t me or you.”

  The second set of prints where they stopped at the outcrop was unlike any human boot she’d ever seen. They appeared to be . . . some kind of numerous stick-like footprints, narrower than Kate’s own, and much smaller than Mary’s, piercing the soil.

  “We’re definitely not alone up here.” Mary smiled with growing excitement in her wide eyes.

  Kate swallowed the urge to vomit all over the comms panel. How long had they been here? Are we safe? She masked the sudden fear rising in her, fought the intense craving to cut herself, and turned to Mary with a detached, cold smile. “This changes everything.”

  TEN

  Mary

  Luna’s landscape reflected the sunlight that bathed the ancient lava flows of the Mare Crisium in a brilliant, mirror-like wash. Mary studied the terrain through the lunar lab’s thick window with a painter’s eye: ancient volcanic cones, cratered impacts, and the smooth basaltic shadows of the mare were far more interesting than she ever believed possible back on Earth. And far more beautiful.

  But, she hadn’t been to the Aristoteles automated strip mining site at the Mare Frigoris near Luna’s northern pole, or the abandoned lunar habitat there used to support the workers who built it, and could only imagine the blight it caused on the lunar landscape. Oh, she’d seen the pictures, video of the place, but as she’d learned from the Mare Crisium, nothing compared to seeing the real thing.

  “Do you think they’re interested in the resources here, Kate?”

  Kate looked up from her bunk where she pored over notes and calculations for additional testing of the ship site. Her face was a mosaic of hard lines and crow’s feet that Mary hadn’t noticed earlier, and she wondered if Kate was still taking those anti-rad pills.

  “If that was the case, they’d be more interested in the active mining operations on the far side.” Leaning on an elbow, she asked, “Do you remember the first signal your dad picked up?”

  “Yes, a tap code . . . a 1 – 1 – 8 signal and he figured it represented the atomic numbers of hydrogen and oxygen . . . two Hs and one O . . . H20. He wondered if they were looking for water. That was a crazy night.”

  “Right,” Kate said, “and that’s what the consortium was mining up at the pole. Water, helium, the odd rare metal. So, if it was only water they’re looking for, they should have gone there.” She thought for a second. “Well, perhaps they did, and now they’re looking for something more.”

  “Either way,” Mary broke in, “they hid by the Mare Marginis for whatever reason and made no effort to reach out. Perhaps the magnetic field there serves as camouflage.”

  Kate sat up on the bunk and frowned. Mary had known her since she was maybe five or six years old and idolized her. She learned to program from Kate through a computer game and also learned how much her dad enjoyed her sharp intellectual mind and practical experience in space. Teaching English literature at the college was fun, but Mary understood his real love was space. Why he hadn’t pursued science as an occupation remained a mystery.

  “Jim, if he was here, would be out at the site with an excavator, digging up the spacecraft, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “And then he’d be broadcasting the findings to the rest of the world, right?”

  “You know him as well as I do, Kate.”

  She frowned again. “And then the race to claim the Moon would be on. Imagine what’ll happen if news of this gets out. The war over Luna’s resources would turn hot, and more than that, the quest to capture the aliens and their tech would be on.”

  Mary leaned back against the lab window, facing Kate, and stretched her long legs. “Exactly. Nothing good can come from sharing this with the world. Not yet, anyway.”

  Kate leaned forward, elbows on knees. “We’ve got to contact the aliens first, find out what they’re doing here, before telling anyone else.”

  “Except for my dad,” Mary added, “and Esther.”

  “I trust Jim with my life. Not so sure about Esther, but he seems to like and trust her, so that’s good enough for me. And, yeah, your dad already knows.”

  Silence filled the habitat, other than the hum and whirr of the computers, the air exchanger and recycler, and other noises of the life-preserving infrastructure. Mary gazed up at the domed ceiling. Now that the Mare Crisium was in full sunlight all the time, it was impossible to see the stars, but she remembered them when the location was in shadows . . . endless, distant, supporting life on other Earth-like planets. And so many of them.

  “We need to go back out there, Mary, and this time, we have to make contact. It’s easy to imagine alien creatures as nasty, bug-eyed monsters bent on taking over the world. But what if they’re just curious and shy?” Kate slouched forward, staring off into some other place.

  “How do you plan to keep Titanius from hijacking the computers and data?”

  Kate said matter-of-factly, “That’s a challenge. I could keep stalling although that won’t work much longer now that Dana wants to move forward with connecting into our database. So, my idea is this . . .”

  Mary leaned forward.

  “We run silent . . . dark.”

  “What?”

  “Incognito. Stealth mode.”

  “Ah yes, like the Nautilus evading the Spanish armada.” Mary’s love for literature, especially the classics, proved incredibly useful in understanding the grown up world.

  “It’ll mean the end of my career with Titanius, Mary. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.�
�� She reflected on her knowledge of Kate. Recruited into the Spacer Program as a kid, brainwashed, trained, sterilized. Sent to work in radioactive environments, then turfed out in the American cold war, winding up as a computer programming teacher at City College, and now this.

  “It’s too bad, really. I enjoy being up here alone, but I’m ready for something more. Listen,” she stood up and dragged a stool over. “This isn’t what I’m supposed to do for the rest of my life, and I never realized how much I need human contact until you arrived. Anyone else, I’d probably throw myself out the airlock.”

  Mary smiled, cautiously.

  “That was a joke. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is it’s time for me to do something else, to find the next project, to seek out a new adventure once this contract ends. Any of this make sense?”

  Mary reached out and touched her bony shoulder. “It does,” she said. “Kate, whatever you do about anything here, I’m in. This is the most nova place in the world—I mean, galaxy!”

  Kate’s eyes narrowed her face took on a dark, serious look. “My first priority is to keep you safe, agreed?”

  “Okay.”

  “Then, it’s making sure you’re not swept along into my nasty vortex. So, whatever happens with the ship out there, hiding it was all my idea, and that I pressured you to fall in line.”

  Mary smirked. “There’s no pressure, Kate. I’ll follow wherever you go.”

  Kate’s squinting continued. When Jim did this, Mary referred to him as “pulling a Nietzsche”, scrutinizing everything, looking for absolute truth statements and hypocrisy. Didn’t matter. Sometimes she imagined herself as Dickens’ Little Nell, following her grandfather around from adventure to adventure. Other times, she was more like Adam, Victor Frankenstein’s creature. Completely misunderstood. Completely human. But this day she felt like a co-conspirator, a bit like Scout, a bit like Holden Caulfield.

  Her heart pounded with excitement.

  Kate said, “All right. If we’re going rogue, the first thing to do is cut the comms link with Titanius.”