The Galactic Arena Prequels (Books 1 & 2): Inhuman Contact & Onca's Duty

by Dan Davis

  He had wondered whether to make a profound statement as his boot touched the surface but he suspected that it would be a wasted effort. There was no chance humans would allow it to be known that an AP was the first to board an alien spaceship, the first to make actual contact.

  And yet. He felt an overwhelming urge to say something. To mark the occasion somehow, if only for his own amusement.

  “Well, Navi,” Max said, looking around at the huge space around his capsule. “We made it.”

  It seemed so much larger now that he was out of his capsule. The size of his tiny craft giving scale to the place he was in. It dwarfed him. It was utterly beyond his experience. Everything in his whole life had always been just beyond arm’s reach. The UNOPS Ascension was the largest spacecraft ever constructed, at least at the time it was launched, and yet the largest open distance in the ship was the six meters across the mess hall, not counting the gardens which were divided with walls of green.

  The Orb’s shuttle bay or hangar or airlock was so vast—one hundred meters a side—it made his head spin. Vertigo. He felt like he was about to float across the space or even freefall into the far distant wall. He clutched the landing leg ladder until it passed.

  “Your vitals are spiking, what is happening?” Sporing said.

  “Nothing,” Max said, trying to stop himself from vomiting inside his suit helmet. “But I think I’ll take another dose of antiemetic meds.”

  A moment’s delay, then. “I would advise against it. They will only make you drowsier and it seems as though their efficacy has decreased dramatically.”

  “I already took them, Doctor, so please do not concern yourself. I have enough stimulants pre-loaded into my suit that I could raise the dead. Now, I have had no sign nor signal for five minutes since stepping on the surface and I will therefore proceed with the Mission Parameters and attempt to find a door or any other information.”

  “Actually, Max, it has been only three minutes and—”

  “It’s close enough,” he said. “I’m not waiting any longer. I don’t have much time left.”

  Coughing, he made his way toward the only feature in the entire room. A fifty-meter opening opposite the great hundred-meter doorway, appearing to lead deeper into the space station. A square opening set inside the larger square of the wall around it. The base of the opening was flush with the floor that he walked on.

  Sporing was in his ear. “I am amazed that they have mastered gravity to such an extent that they can create it or at least replicate its effects so perfectly without physically accelerating the station in any way. Do you think they came here in some kind of gravity drive?”

  Max did not bother to respond to such pointless speculation. He did not have the breath to waste on speech in any case. Walking in the suit required far more effort than he was used to.

  “Where is the light source coming from?” Sporing said, out of nowhere.

  Max stopped halfway to the vast door. “My helmet lamp, chest and wrist lights.”

  “No, no,” Sporing said. “Your suit lights can’t penetrate a hundred and fifty feet of darkness and yet I can see every surface of the room you are in, even the far corners. But if it’s not your lamps then I am puzzled because I can see no other light sources.”

  “You’re right. It is casting no shadow on the capsule. In fact, even the underside is cast in the same level of light. I think perhaps it is coming from everywhere at once.”

  He heard Sporing sigh at the wonder of it all. Max walked on.

  The passageway deeper into the Orb made him feel small. Overawed.

  “They must be a truly gigantic species,” Max said. “Perhaps this vessel is not, in fact, small for them.” He stopped to cough and swallowed down the phlegm or blood that he brought up from his lungs. “Perhaps a four-kilometer spaceship is simply of a scale for their vast bodies. If all the rooms are this big, hundred-meter cubes, if the corridors have fifty-meter ceilings then—”

  He broke off to cough again then kept walking. No time for speculation, he reminded himself. Get in, meet the aliens and get home before Navi dies.

  That’s all that mattered.

  “Where is everyone?” Sporing said. “Obviously, someone is home or else who has been signaling us all these years?”

  “Automation,” Max said. “A race of AIs where the station itself is their body or host to a countless multitude of digital individuals. Remotely operated outpost. Long abandoned by—”

  “Yes, yes,” Sporing cut in. “I know the hypotheses, I am merely narrating my thoughts out of my own nervousness and also to keep the channel with you open, I want you to know you are not alone. Speaking out loud, like you do to soothe a child.”

  I wouldn’t know, Max thought. “And I am the child?” he said.

  “No, I am the child,” Sporing snapped. “Clearly, I am the one needing the soothing. Can you see anything up ahead?”

  “Nothing. The wall, ceiling and floor continue to be fifty meters’ square in cross section. Although the diffused light is everywhere, it is still darker than the ambient daylight settings on the Ascension.”

  “Any signs on the wall? Writing, pictograms? Images?”

  “Every surface is featureless.”

  “No doorways or even air vents or anything?”

  Max felt like he had already answered that question so he concentrated on walking. He could only manage a pace of about 0.5 meters per second, which was approximately half the average walking speed of an unencumbered human on Earth. In the core of his own ship he could propel himself around with grace and speed but in the gravity ring he felt sluggish, no matter how many thousands of kilometers he had put in on the treadmill over the years.

  “Why don’t you have a rest, Max?” Sporing said, no doubt scratching his chin while he looked at the screens showing Max’s heart and lungs struggling. Max could imagine him with his other hand touching the hypoxia warning line, as if physical contact could somehow avert it. Max almost smiled.

  “No time,” Max said. “My condition is both degenerative and accelerating. Have to keep moving.”

  “Fine, fine,” Sporing said. “But you’re no good to our civilization if you drop dead before you get to the other side.”

  Our civilization. Was Max actually part of that civilization? Or was he just a product of it? A tool to be used. Was a car a member of civilization? What about a food refrigeration unit or an in situ resource processing factory on the surface of Mars?

  “What if there is no other side?” Max muttered.

  “Your suit telemetry shows you are proceeding directly to the center of the Orb,” Sporing said. “That must be where they are waiting.”

  “Navi and I have watched many fictional entertainment films and shows over the past decade. There is a curious custom that is often portrayed. It is called a surprise party.”

  Sporing laughed. “They’re not as common in real life as they are in the entertainment industry. It is a cliché, a trope. But yes, they do exist. They intrigue you?”

  “We could never understand the appeal of them. It makes no sense for the person to feel unwanted until the moment of surprise comes. Why does the family of the person enjoy deceiving them for so long about their intentions?”

  “I take it you see parallels to your current situation?” Sporing sounded wary. Or perhaps it was weariness. Or disappointment.

  “I’m starting to think no one is here,” Max said. “This place is dead.”

  He coughed and swallowed down a blood clot so large it made him retch. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he upped the air cooling another notch, even though it was costing him battery life and he was already shivering.

  “Please, Max, if you reduce your temperature further you are risking hypothermia.”

  “Almost at the center. There is something up ahead. I can see… something.”

  “What is it?” Sporing’s voice was taut with excitement.

  “Another room,” Max said when he stepped into
it. He stopped. “It’s just another room.” Another great big cube of a room, just as vast as the huge capsule bay through which he had entered the Orb. Surely, it was exactly the same dimensions of 103 meters a side. “Empty.”

  “Move your head cam around,” Sporing instructed.

  “There’s no one in here, Doctor,” Max said, feeling tired. Exhausted. As empty of energy as the Orb was of aliens. He leaned on the wall by the entrance, resting his life support backpack on the smooth black surface. He sighed.

  “The far wall is different,” Sporing said. “Look at it, Max. Get up and look at the wall opposite you. It is lighter, paler. Is it… moving, somehow?”

  “My vision is somewhat hazy,” Max admitted, his eyes closed. “Every wall looks like it is moving, somehow.”

  “Max! Wake up. Stand up straight. Approach the opposite wall. That’s an order.”

  Max laughed, eyes still closed, making no move. “Really, Doctor? How are you going to enforce that order? You think I’m here because of orders?”

  Sporing took a breath so deep that Max heard the doctor’s mind whirring. “I apologize. I’m sorry, Max. Please, you are so close. Just a few more steps.”

  “Just a few more steps and then I can lay down and die, is that it, Doctor?”

  “No, no, I-”

  “It’s alright,” Max said. “Honestly, it’s alright. This was always a one-way trip for us APs, wasn’t it. I don’t mind dying. I just wish I could have done it with Navi.”

  “Go and touch the far wall, Max. Then you can come home. You can make it home, I know you can. Navi is waiting for you. She’s back here, you can see her again if you stand up straight and move.”

  Max smiled, tasting blood. “I know what you’re doing.”

  Yet, he pushed off the wall and shuffled forward. His thighs were burning. So was his back. The radiation sickness had attacked his liver recently which was disrupting his glycogen cycle and also releasing additional toxins into his blood stream. But it was clear to him that his heart and lungs were finally succumbing. He was too exhausted for it to be otherwise.

  Step by dragging step, he made his way to the opposite wall. It certainly was different to every other surface on the Orb. It was gray rather than black and seemed to be lit up by a backlight or some form of illumination. And the perfectly flat surface of it was swirling and churning like smoke or like a fire burning up against a window. Standing within arm’s reach of it, Max could see through into an immense space beyond. A space so big he could not see the other side, could not grasp its scale. But the whirls and tendrils dancing past his eyes obscured the view.

  He raised a hand to swipe it away.

  It looked like it had no more substance than smoke or some kind of suspension of liquid, a profusion of laminar flow against the millimeter-thin width of the thing. Something subject to fluid dynamics with considerable yet steady energy being fed into the system to maintain that motion. It was a monochrome, two-dimensional version of the clouds of Jupiter. An infinitely stable system made from ever changing chaos, no one second freeze of the surface ever to be repeated before the heat death of the universe.

  Fingers about to touch the surface. Imagining the way the spirals of liquid smoke would break apart into clusters of short lived eddies.

  A blast of noise, a discordant note sounded, loud enough to penetrate his suit and make him wince.

  He looked all around him, expecting to see a giant alien stepping forward or an information screen or something, anything. There was nothing.

  “What the hell was that?” Sporing shouted, though all was silent again.

  Max looked at the swirling smoke screen wall before him. Then he looked at his hand.

  “A warning.”

  “About what? They invited us here, for Christ’s sake.”

  The doctor was unnerved but Max’s weariness had taken him beyond concern, beyond emotion. Perhaps emotion was a luxury that humans experience when they had the energy to do so. No, that was not correct. Humans were almost nothing but emotion, with a veneer of reason and intellect over the top that was as thin as the smoky screen wall.

  “It didn’t want me to touch it,” Max said.

  “Why the hell would you want to touch it in the first place?”

  Because it is beautiful. “Because there’s nothing else to do here and I’m running out of time.”

  The doctor said nothing.

  Max wanted to make sure there was no hidden lever or button on the solid walls so he spent twenty-two minutes shuffling around the rest of the room, feeling and pushing against as much of the surface as he could easily reach. He was sweating and shivering.

  His suit weighed more and more with every passing minute. If only he could get a breath, a real breath and feel the cool, dry air of the Ascension on his skin again.

  The thought of it was almost an elixir in itself. Just the idea of being free of its burden gave him energy.

  Energy from hope or fatalism, he did not know. Nor did he care.

  He checked his suit sensors. No detected pathogens or toxic substances. The sensors had less than one hundred percent effectiveness and that was only on known substances. Max knew there could be all kinds of nanoscale problems suspended in the air outside his suit.

  But he was dying anyway and he knew, now, that he did not have strength enough to make it back to the capsule. Before boarding he had assumed he would be weightless or somewhere close to it during his visit with the aliens. But now he was sure he could not bear the weight of it on his shoulders and back while retracing his dragging steps all the way to the capsule. Not while wearing the heavy suit.

  Once he had decided, he could not rip the thing off him fast enough.

  While Sporing shouted warnings in his ear, Max broke his suit seals and opened his helmet latches.

  Air, his precious atmosphere, rushed out through the neck and face. Urgent, whooping alarms sounded in his earpiece that he quickly silenced.

  He took a deep breath of the cool air, the tang of hot metal filling his nose and the taste of plastic on the back of his tongue. Probably just trace hydrocarbons he’d tracked in from the capsule hull or even, perhaps, some particles from the barrier screen. He hoped they were not toxic. He stripped off the rest of his suit with what little strength remained, stopping every now and then to focus on coughing and spitting out whatever he brought up. Once, he vomited. Having eaten no solid food for a while, it was little more than gastric acid, stomach lining and blood that spattered onto the shining black floor.

  “Hope the aliens don’t mind me messing up the place,” Max said, wiping his mouth and hooking his comms gear back on.

  “What are you doing, Max, what are you doing?” Sporing appeared to be livid. “You are completely ignoring protocol. You have been exposed, completely exposed. You know the protocol, we’ve been over it—”

  Max silenced the audio feed and sat on the floor next to the piles of his spacesuit pieces. He hugged his knees, shivering and sweating. He thought of Navi. She would want him to push on, to go through the barrier and into the center of the Orb. Forcing himself to his feet, he walked to the barrier in his suit underwear. He took a small camera with him along with his radio. Standing before the swirling screen, he took a deep breath that turned into a hacking cough. And walked right at the screen.

  From somewhere, a noise. A chime, an artificially created ping like the clear ringing of a bell.

  The screen vanished into nothing as he reached it.

  He stepped through into the other side.

  The size of the room beyond caused him to stagger. Physically stagger A circular room that was surely hundreds of meters in diameter, even larger than the capsule bay and the previous room. He looked up at the blackness of the domed ceiling above, twice as high as the space he had just left. The silence was overwhelming. His ears thrummed, almost burst with the silence. The curving walls and ceiling were so far away there was no echo. No vibrations, no fans moving the air, no alien voices
or music, no footsteps other than his own. No sound other than his own breath and heartbeat. It was like being thrown into space itself but being able to live and breathe. Featureless and empty and yet the scale of it moved him to tears. They ran down his cheeks.

  Perhaps his dying body could afford some emotion after all. It took him a moment to understand what he was feeling.

  Awe.

  For the first time in many a year and perhaps to a greater extent than ever before, he felt humbled. He felt a sense of wonder, or rather, incomprehension. As he walked out into the room, toward the center, there was just one single thought, one question, churning around inside his skull.

  Why?

  All this distance, all this effort. For what? The place was dead. Automated, clearly, but devoid of life. Was there supposed to be a crew that had died on the way but the craft continued with the mission, just as the APs had on his own ship? What was the purpose of the recent, clear invitation to come? Well, they had come, here they were. Max looked up.

  Where are you?

  Did the Orb know he was not human? Were they waiting for the genuine article? It hardly seemed credible, after all, how would they even know the difference? The aliens were monitoring their communications, as it had communicated using human encoding and language. So perhaps it had intercepted a signal meant for the Ascension from Mission Control and discovered that there were non-human slaves onboard and it wasn’t going to send out the alien crew until humanity sent a proper human?

  At least they could always remotely bring the capsule back to the Ascension and Doctor Sporing could try to rouse the aliens with his own presence.

  But what could Max do but go on?

  He lifted each foot, dragged it forward and slumped down onto it, then pulled the next one into the air. One step at a time.

  The center of the vast, domed space beckoned to him. He meant to reach it. The ultimate destination. The mission would not be complete if he did not go all the way. Even if the effort killed him.