by G. P. Eliot
“The first part?” Steed raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, well,” the Professor enlarged the code-sphere of the Message, still with large parts of it in darker blue, and only about a third of it in green. “I have managed to translate the key nodes of information, and it is unequivocal that the coordinates are leading directly to this very patch of space.”
“And this planet,” Hank had to shrug. Space was, after all–very big. What are the chances that those exact coordinates lead to a planet? “This has got to be the place.”
The problem was that the planet below them just didn’t look like a super-advanced civilization at all. There were no satellites, and no space elevators or platforms. There didn’t even appear to be the glow of any power from any cities or settlements at all.
In fact, Hank thought as he winced at the miles upon miles of grey rock and brown below… “It kind of looks like a dead world to me. Does it even have an atmosphere?”
“High methane and carbon dioxide mix,” said Steed from his command desk. “The Dalida’s scanners are picking up organic molecules, but no complex cellular life.”
“Vegetables.” Hank said. That was what it meant when people said organic molecules, wasn’t it?
“No sir, probably fungal mold. Nothing more complex than a toadstool, I’d wager. And the surface certainly can’t support humans. There isn’t a high enough oxygen content.” Steed said.
“Maybe whoever sent the Message wasn’t a human,” Hank shrugged. He wasn’t about to stand around debating the situation. Now while the clock was ticking.
Eleven hours and counting before Lory can feel pain again.
“Check suit seals. Again.” Hank commanded as the shuttle thumped down on the alien surface of the planet. He saw Madigan roll his eyes, but the Captain didn’t care. This was a routine that he’d picked up a long time ago, and it had served him well.
“Look at you, being the big-shot military man,” Ida cooed at him.
“Thanks,” Hank took it as a compliment.
Each member of his expedition team–Steed, Madigan and he–were in their environment suits due to the planet’s hostile atmosphere. The suits were larger and cumbersome than the simpler encounter mesh suits that they habitually wore in space–but still not as large as the plated soldier suits that they could be wearing. The other two remaining members of the crew–Serrano and Cortez, were still far above them on the Dalida, orbiting this strange planet. Serrano was working non-stop to decode more of the Message, while Cortez was running the ship’s functions.
“Checked,” both Steed and Madigan checked off, and Hank nodded.
“Okay Ida, open the doors and let’s take a look at this sucker,” Hank said, as Ida initiated the door release button for it to slide open—
Revealing a jungle.
“What the crap?” Hank muttered. He checked his HUD again. But yes; there were the sensors picking up the foliage all around them in wide sweep of greens and yellows.
“I thought this place was dead?” Madigan muttered, leveling his heavy laser blaster at the door. Hank advanced down the ramp with his laser pistol up, scanning both right and left.
“It was. The sensors said there was only primitive biological life,” Ida confirmed.
“Then the sensors must have been wrong,” Hank muttered.
“Or they were fooled,” Steed said from the back of the party.
“Move out.” Hank stepped down from the ramp onto the springy, mossy soil and looked at the vegetation around him. Thick vines with scaly barks twirled and twisted around each other, while long and spiky leaves jagged everywhere out of the air. Strange blue-petal flowers quivered slightly at their passage.
The party had no sooner got about ten meters into the Jungle when all of their suit sensors suddenly jangled.
“Energy Wave Detected!” Their HUDs read, showing a fluctuating, expanding and diminishing circle at the edge of their sensor abilities.
“Serrano? Are you picking that up?” Hank hit their suit-to-ship channel.
“Serrano here. Yes sir. There appears to be a large–a very large energy source located somewhere ahead of you. But I’m having trouble reading precisely what kind it is. There’s something wrong with the Dalida’s sensors…”
“On me,” Hank growled, picking up his pace as he started to jog forward.
Less than eleven hours and counting.
It was a constant litany inside of his head. He hadn’t even stopped to consider what he should be saying if he did end up meeting an advanced alien life form.
First Contact. No one would pick a guy like me to be the ambassador for humanity.
But no one had picked him, had they? That was why it was him. He was here because he had friends whose lives were on the line.
If I have to grab their little scrawny grey necks and throttle the secrets out of them, I will, he thought, just before all of their suits once again blipped.
“Thermal Load increasing +20%” His HUD bleeped at him.
“Ida? Are you getting this?” Hank had the time to say, just before he started to feel the heat rising through his boots.
“Uh–Captain?” Madigan was stepping awkwardly in place, looking down at the ground. The matt of moss was curling on itself and wilting visibly, turning brown and desiccated.
And still the temperature was continuing to rise.
“Thermal Load increasing +35%” His suit chimed, and then.
“Redistributing suit coolant,” The Captain felt a wash of coolness over his back, legs, and neck as their suits kicked in their automated features.
Hank’s suit started to pick up the strangest sound he’d ever heard–it was the sigh and whine as sap started to extrude from the trees and vines around them. He could see it forming beads between the scales of the bark. It was bubbling.
“Captain, I’m not sure that I like this…” Steed was saying. He sounded worried.
Hank was worried too.
“Holy crapola!” Hank swore, as one of the twisted tree-vines nearest to them suddenly started to spurt gusts of flame. He jumped back.
Another tree burst in flames on the far side.
“Sir-?” Madigan was waving his heavy blaster about him–not that Hank could see what good any of that would do at all.
“Team, I think we need to…” Hank was saying, just as there was a crash from deeper in the Jungle as a smoldering vine gave way in a great shower of flames.
“Thermal Load increasing +60%”
“Back to the shuttle!” Hank shouted, as the Jungle all around them started to roar and thunder.
Steed was at the back of the party, and the nearest to the shuttle. He was also much quicker than Madigan was and quickly disappeared up the path. Madigan pounded after him, with the Captain close behind.
“Boss! Look out!” Ida called at the last moment, just as a flaming tree-vine crashed across the path in front of Hank. There was no time to slow or skid to a halt, Hank merely lengthened his stride and vaulted through the flames.
“Oof!” Only to land on heavy feet on the far side and see that the shuttle was now in the center of an inferno. Blackened and burning leaves were falling all around him like confetti, and even the internal cools of super-cooled liquids in his environmental suit were starting to heat up.
“Captain!” Steed had turned and was standing at the still-open door of the shuttle as it started to rise from the floor. Steed extended a hand, and Hank jumped.
One of Hank’s boots hit the lip of the shuttle ramp. For a dizzying micro-second Hank was balancing, starting to fall backwards—
“Gotcha!” Just as Steed grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him into the safety of the shuttle, as the world below them burned.
23
“Electrical, Radionic, Nuclear isotopes…” Professor Serrano muttered to himself as he looked at the fluttering image of blue, orange, and green on the console ahead of him.
The Professor still stood on the Bridge of the Dalida, with the gr
ey and brown hemisphere of the planet occupying half of the forward view screen in front of him. To one side of him was the blue-green holo sphere of the Message hanging in midair.
But Serrano wasn’t looking at that. He was looking at the pulsing image of the energy source that the Captain and the others had detected. He had taken a recording of the energy reading with the Dalida’s sensors, shortly before they had cut out and apparently diffused in the planet’s magnetosphere.
“What is it?” Cortez asked over the ship’s intercom system.
“It’s big, but unlike anything that I’ve seen before,” Serrano said, enraptured with the new discovery. On the adjacent command console–the very one where Lory would have been sitting had she been here–there was a flashing orange warning light. If the Professor had been paying any attention at all to it, then he would have realized that his expedition team were about to be flame-grilled.
But Serrano wasn’t paying attention. His mind was burrowing into the mysteries of this energy source.
“It has all of the normal elements of a self-sustaining molecular reaction,” Serrano said with obvious enthusiasm. “But I can’t recognize its signatures on any Union database…”
“Molecular reactions–like nuclear fission?” Cortez said, the Cook-Engineer’s own interest peaked.
“Yes, precisely,” Serrano replayed the blob of orange, blue and green over again. “But just how it is managing to keep itself stable is a mystery. For it not escalating into an atomic blast, for example, is a mystery.”
“Why would the Message lead us here?” Cortez asked–which was the sort of question that Serrano realized he would never ask. Context, he reminded himself.
“Well, there are a few hypotheses: that perhaps this was where the Message was sent from some time ago, but the original creators have long since died out,” he said.
“Wouldn’t there be ruins?” Cortez prompted.
Presumably, Serrano thought, moving to the adjacent console to try the Dalida’s sensors once again. This time he watched as the waves of sonar hit the planet surface, and the long-range spectrometer tried to take a reading of what lay below the surface.
Once again, the sensors diffused as soon as they had penetrated no more than a hundred meters or so–but what they did show was that the planet did not have ordered plate tectonics like any other planet. There were certainly complicated arrangements of geology–but there were entirely too many of them.
“I’m no exo-planetary geologist,” Serrano murmured to himself. “But that doesn’t look right to me.” He paused, and stepped back from the console as he tapped his chin with his long fingers.
The small orange warning light on Lory’s console continued to flash, unknown to the Professor.
Serrano expanded and pulled up the blue and green code-sphere of the Message, finding the elements that pointed to this planet’s coordinates. The middle of ‘dead’ space–a patch of the Milky Way as yet uncharted by the Union. No signs of life, not even any interesting solar systems or star clusters.
This is not the sort of space where I would colonize, if I were an intelligent alien species… Serrano considered, pulling at the decoded parts of the Message again.
And that was when he saw it. There was a small collection of code at the end of each of the coordinate markers. And it was exactly the same. With a burst of inspiration, Serrano now reordered the sphere, using this code as the central point and rearranging the information around it.
“Babylon Software: re-translate please…” Serrano said.
“Processing…” the computer chimed, and the small green circle slowly filled up making a dull chime and a new word appeared on the screen, underneath the coordinates for this planet’s coordinates.
“Resupply.”
That’s it! Serrano clapped his hands together. “I’ve found it! I know why the Message sent us here!”
24
“You’re telling me that this planet is a glorified supply depot?” Hank groaned. He and the others of the expedition stood on the Bridge, still swabbing at their necks and arms with cool and damp towels.
“Yes, uh…” Serrano’s eyes finally registered that the entire expedition team was kind of steaming. “Did something happen on the surface, Captain?”
Their shuttle had barely made it back to the Dalida, where it had thumped into one of the launch bays with blackened scorch marks covering its undersides.
Madigan growled, but Hank merely rolled his eyes. “You see that little flashing light over there?” he pointed at Lory’s console. “If you see that, I want you to call us, you got it?” Hank wondered how under the stars he ever thought that leaving Serrano in charge up here was a good thing to do. The guy was as bright as a pin, but he had all the tactical and strategic intelligence of a doughnut.
“Oh. Yes, of course. That’s the alarm system, isn’t it?” Serrano said a little sheepishly.
“That’s the ‘argh, my crew is about to die system’” Hank said dryly. “But we made it. Somehow. Now you might as well tell me what was so interesting that you didn’t register the fact half the crew were being flame-baked.”
The Professor lowered his china and managed to look even more like a scolded child than he already did. But he opened his mouth and talked, anyway.
“I re-ordered the Message around this planet’s coordinates, and the next section translated,” he said. “It read ‘resupply’–so I believe that this planet is just supposed to be a stopping-off point for those following the Message.” Serrano concluded.
Hank nodded. It made sense–but it was Steed who pointed out what that had to mean.
“That the journey is going to be a long one, or that we’re going to be faced with some pretty hostile situations if they pre-programmed a supply depot on the journey.” The Confederate General said.
As if what we had already gone through wasn’t hostile enough? Hank groaned. He checked the time on the overhead viewing screens. All of that departing for the surface and running around and getting back here had put the timer down to eight hours and something.
Eight hours before the Jackal has complete control over Lory, Hank gritted his teeth. And from what Steed was saying, that also meant eight hours to get whatever they were supposed to get down there, and then travel to the real destination of the Message.
It’s not long enough. Time is running out.
But fine. He threw the towel into the corner and walked to the command chair. “Ida? Kindly ask the ship to provide some all-round anesthetic, if you please,” he said.
“Boss? I’m not sure whether your condition warrants it…” the personal A.I. started to say.
“Ida,” the tone in Hank’s voice wouldn’t admit any argument.
With a hiss, a small port opened in the chair and there extended a small medical injector, which Hank jammed into the side of his neck in one smooth motion.
“Right. Do what you have to do and suit back up, we’re getting back down there!” Hank said, already zipping up his under-mesh suit and reaching for the rest.
“We don’t get to eat first?” Madigan rumbled.
“No, Madigan–we don’t.” Hank felt like his heart was a black cloud of determination and anger.
“Captain, one moment…” Steed said, turning to Serrano. “We need to know where we’re going. This mission is to resupply, right? So, what does the planet have to offer? Is there water? Food? Fuel?” He asked the scientist.
Serrano’s eyes flickered to the console and then back to the Confederate. “Uh, no sir–there’s nothing at all. Unless they want us to collect base minerals–but I can’t see why or how that would be of any use…”
Hank saw the Professor’s eyes suddenly widen. “Unless it’s the power source itself! Of course–we’re here to collect that power supply or tap into it in some way.”
Come on! Everything felt like it was moving far too slowly for the Captain’s liking. He marched to the forward console. “Ida? Can you isolate where that power source
is?”
“Accessing the Dalida’s sensor array, sir,” she dutifully said. There was a hum from the console ahead of Hank, and then a bleep. “Ah, I don’t think that you’re going to like the news, boss,” she said.
“If you’re about to tell me that there’s no way to tell, then yes, I’m not going to like it,” Hank said.
Why did whomever programmed this Message make it so difficult!
“Well yes, there is that–but you’ll be happy to know that I am amazing,” Ida said proudly. “The Dalida might not be able to penetrate the surface with her scanners–but that’s because she’s all the way up here and there’s miles of magnetic–and weirder–interference running. I, on the other hand, have been down to the surface of the planet, courtesy of you, and I’ve managed to combine my findings with the Dalida’s mainframe.” The A.I. said.
