The helicopter wasn’t tumbling anymore, but the altimeter was still spinning like a buzzsaw blade, and the air speed had too many digits for Jack’s taste. The speed was dropping, but not fast enough. , The rotors would shear off if he tried to extend them, destroying any chance of a controlled landing. He needed to drop a lot of weight and fast.
He flipped the cargo panel open and punched the door release, then looked back over his shoulder and watched the ramp lurch down. At half-way open, he activated the cargo ejectors and watched the two heavy pallets tumble out into the sky, where their parachutes popped and gently lowered them to the Earth.
“At least they’ll make it,” he mumbled into his mask.
With the pallets gone, the Leviathan’s descent slowed down to something reasonable, and Jack breathed a sigh of relief. He leaned forward and slapped the EXTEND button, but nothing happened. He slapped it again without response. A blinking light higher up the console caught his eye, and it didn’t take an expert to realize what “JAM” meant. It meant he was screwed.
Why would it be jammed? He burned through options. The cover could be damaged, or the rotor destroyed completely. There was no hope in either line of thought. No possibility of recovery, so he abandoned them. Power cables could’ve been severed, but that would have a warning light. He was missing something. Then he remembered: the rotors wouldn’t extend without the engines running.
Jack moved the throttle and listened for an engine response, but it was impossible to hear anything over the thousand kilometer-per-hour winds whipping through the craft. There should be a STALL light somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where, and there was no time to look for it.
With the furious Earth rushing up at him, the only thing Jack could think of was the auto-rotate procedure, and it would have to do. His hands flew across the controls, flipping switches that disengaged the transmission and overrode safety protocols. Paying no mind to the hundreds of lights blinking across the console, he once again reached forward and mashed the EXTEND button. The blades unfolded and began to spin.
The leviathan wouldn’t travel far without power, but the rotating blades would make an effective parachute, and even offer minimal steering. The only thing left to do was bring his bird down to the ground.
Jack finally looked around and got his bearings, and it didn’t look good. There was no trace of the other leviathans or the tranzat, and God only knew how far he’d traveled before getting things under control. The air above was thick with those strange vehicles, now too distant to see clearly, while below there was only a thick dust cloud that stretched to the far horizon.
The barely stable leviathan dipped down into the dust cloud, and once inside, vicious winds tore at it from every direction. Jack held onto the controls tightly, and as he dropped into the darkness, he prayed that he’d seen the worst of this day.
Chapter 8:
Jonah and the Great Fish
Rumours spread through the Shackleton like a plague, and the crew were up to speed within an hour. They had found an alien vessel. What followed was overwhelming excitement and fifty-six astronauts trying against all odds to squeeze into an eight-man bridge compartment. Still, the Shackleton did nothing the first day but survey, traveling up and down the length of Zebra-One like a mosquito buzzing around a buffalo, scanning, observing and recording every strange feature of the artifact’s surface. Each new discovery elicited bursts of conjecture and heated debate.
Faulkland eventually banished the crowd from the bridge, but they wouldn’t be deterred. Instead, the lot of them crammed into the maximum-occupancy-twelve dining hall where they monitored progress by CC-TV and somehow managed not to suffocate.
It was a long day mapping Zebra-One’s surface, and at its end, Marcus didn’t sleep at all, nor did he bother trying. He knew from experience that he would have lain awake, running every possibility and contingency through his head. Commander Faulkland claimed that he could sleep at will anywhere in the universe, but he spent the whole night on the bridge with Marcus, staring in perfect silence at the sleeping giant just outside their window.
Meanwhile, Mason Shen sat off to the side and tried to solve the communication puzzle. When morning hours rolled around, he was still at his console and no closer to an answer. He was in contact with Ares Colony on Mars, but Earth remained morbidly silent for them as well.
“I’m about ready to give up,” Mason said around 0800.
Marcus was still staring at Zebra-One, now with dry and sore eyes. He asked the obvious question. “Still no luck, Mason?”
“I wouldn’t say none,” Mason replied. “I’ve been chatting with this Martian comm operator, and she sounds pretty cute. Earth, though… Boss, if I didn’t know better, I’d think everybody just packed up and moved away. There’s nothing.”
Marcus felt like that should bother him more, but he was so far away that it didn’t matter. “No worries. I’m sure there’s a simple answer.”
“Yeah,” was all Mason said, his voice lacking enthusiasm.
“Have there been any signals from Zebra-One?” Marcus asked, switching back to the important topic.
“Not a peep, sir. I’ve been cycling greetings in every language I know and some I don’t, but she’s just as quiet as the Earth. If she’s awake, she ain’t talking.”
“Just as well,” Faulkland said. “It’d be a little anti-climactic if she called us back.”
By 0915, two teams of eight were assembled, briefed and ready to get on with the show. Marcus’ team included himself, Commander Faulkland, Dr. St. Martin, and a handful of the eager miners. The second team was Rao’s, and included Crew Chief Hector Pacheco, the paleontologist Professor Caldwell, and their own team of miners. As much as Marcus pretended there was some deep strategy to the team rosters, they were actually divvied up based on personality. He knew who got on well with whom, and he preferred his teams not be at each other’s throats until after a mission started.
Like Marcus, hardly anyone slept the night before, and they were running on a mixture of high octane coffee and lipid bars. Combining stimulants and sleep deprivation never added up to a level head, and Marcus had a sneaking suspicion that most exploration had begun in a similar fashion. It would explain why so few natives survived first contact.
He was about to say a prayer for whatever natives they might encounter, when he realized his own people were completely unarmed. The tone of his prayer changed very quickly.
With the Shackleton stationed fifty meters from Iris Charlie, the exploratory teams entered the EVA module, which housed a dressing room and airlock. The pressure suits were skin tight, as close as a human could get to naked in space, and the only clothes worn beneath were thin thermals that left little to the imagination.
It took the team less than ten minutes to suit up. Then, with everyone helmeted, sealed, checked and double-checked, they entered the airlock. The heavy door closed behind them and the lights switched from green to red: depressurization was under way. At the same time, a digital gauge on the wall began to tick down from 101 kilopascals. The process was never speedy, but with history awaiting them on the other side, it was glacially slow.
When the gauge read zero, the round outer door popped inward, rolled to the side and revealed the vast iridescent wall of Zebra-One, so large that Marcus was struck by vertigo as if he were hanging fifty meters above the ground.
His discomfort must have been apparent because he felt a hand on his shoulder, and heard Faulkland’s voice in his ear. “Everything alright, Doctor Donovan?”
“Fine,” he said as he regained his composure. “Just haven’t gone EVA in a while.” That wasn’t true. “Donovan to Base, we’re exiting the bay now.”
“Roger that, Donovan. Good luck.”
The pressure suit read his body-language and engaged its cold-jets, thrusting him out away from the Shackleton. The other astronauts followed and together they slowly drifted out of the chamber and into the void, while one of the ship’s life-rafts a
utomatically detached and moved to intercept them. Once they were all hooked up to the raft, its own engines lit up and carried them over the last leg of the journey.
As he approached, Marcus formed different theories about the ship’s surface. He’d long believed it to be some sort of metal, but at fifty meters, he started to entertain the idea of a metamorphic silicate shell. Ten meters after that, the translucency became more pronounced like quartz. Yet another ten meters on, he began to notice patterns swirling within the surface, like viscous fluid in a clear casing. In the final stretch, he finally admitted that he had no damn idea what it was.
The life-raft came to a halt just a short distance from Zebra-One’s hull, and Marcus couldn’t unhook himself fast enough. While the rest of the team were still detaching their umbilical cables, he was free and floating towards her. Finally, after all those long years, he was there beside her. He knew it was reckless, but it didn’t matter. He had to touch her.
The color of the wall shifted as he approached, so slightly he thought it was just his imagination. The surface was flawless, without seams, panels, scratches or any other imperfection. During the survey, his team had detected geometric surface patterns—grooves and protrusions both—but on a large scale separated by hundreds of meters. They assumed they’d find similar patterns on the small scale, but there were no such details, no signs of anything mechanical nor any hint of the artifact’s manufacture. For as far as Marcus could see, it was simply a wall of clear glass with subtly swirling colors trapped beneath.
His thrusters brought him to a graceful stop mere inches away from her, and he reached out. Without any jitter or hesitation, his hand rose up with his fingers spread, and he touched the unimaginably large creature in front of him, the way a diver might dare to touch a passing whale.
Nothing happened.
He wasn’t sure what he expected. He didn’t know if his hand would sink in or be repelled, or if she might crumble at his touch like a mummy rashly exposed to fresh air. He half expected to wake up back home in bed, covered in sweat, with only a vague recollection of his strange adventure. Instead, there was no response other than the feeling of his gloved hand against something solid. And with that, he was satisfied.
“How’s she feel, Marc?” Rao’s voice crackled over the radio.
“Real,” he said. He looked at the wall directly in front of his face, and now he was sure it had changed. On their approach, Zebra-One had been the same dull yellow-green she’d been throughout the previous day’s survey. Now, the wall in front of him had become a vibrant, living green. It was the green of fertile hills after spring’s first rain. And there was something else.
“The color of the wall is changing, Doctor,” Faulkland said.
“Yeah, think you’re right,” Marcus replied, while something even stranger had caught his attention. Around his hand, there was a flickering pattern that branched out from his finger tips. He waved the hand back and forth, and the pattern followed, pulsing and waving, slowly growing in strength. It reminded him of the chintzy plasma globe he used to keep on his desk. “Now that’s interesting.”
“What?” Rao asked.
“I’m not sure. Galvanic skin response maybe. One way or another, she’s reacting to me.”
The rest of the crew were finally unhooked from the life-raft, and Rao came up beside him. As he approached, the rich green colored area expanded to surround him as well. He reached out his hand toward the wall and lightning-like patterns appeared around his fingers, their ends disappearing into the mysterious depths of the alien material.
“Surface temperature is rising,” Juliette St. Martin said with a little worry in her voice. Marcus turned to look over his shoulder, and found her behind him with a multifunction probe in her hand. The pen-like piece of metal was attached to her wrist by a thin cable, through which it transmitted information to her heads-up-display.
“Rising? How quickly?” Marcus asked.
“You’re not going to be barbecued anytime soon, if that’s what you’re wondering. In fact, it’s leveling off now at… thirty-six degrees centigrade.”
“Human body temperature,” Marcus said.
He thrust backwards and watched the color of the artifact fade to dull green-grey again, while the vibrant circle around Rao persisted. He stopped only a few meters away. “Ideas?”
His question was met with silence. “Alright then. Donovan to Base, still reading us?”
“Crystal clear, Doctor. We’re receiving mission data from all units.”
“Good. We’re proceeding to the iris.”
“Roger. We’ll be watching.”
The structure dubbed Iris Charlie was one of the smaller irises; all of them were identical in shape, but differed in scale. They were elliptical, and this one measured twelve meters by a little over seven. Its dome protruded out from the smooth surface by four and a half meters. These features, just as every part of Zebra-One measured so far, related to each other by the golden ratio.
As they moved toward the iris, the finer details became apparent. There was a convex ring surrounding it which was broken into five equal sections, each covered in a tiled pattern of overlapping scales. Marcus couldn’t decide if the pattern was biological or mechanical, of if such a distinction would even make sense to the race that manufactured it. The iris itself was the same color as the wall and was just as smooth. It was so smooth, in fact, that it might as well have been a bubbling liquid frozen in place.
The team came to a stop in front of the iris and waited. Marcus was studying the bubble, looking for any clue to its purpose, and it occurred to him after a moment that everyone else was waiting for his move.
Rao broke the silence. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “Should I say open sesame?”
He was hugely glad the door remained closed. He’d already had plenty of “strange”, “alien” and “amazing”; he wasn’t in any mood for “ridiculous” to join the party. Options started running through his head, and before he noticed, he was brainstorming out loud. “If it’s a door, there’d be some way to open it. A handle, a button, maybe a remote control we don’t have. If it’s an eye, it’s watching us right now. Not much of a show, I’m afraid. I guess it could accommodate some internal equipment that needed the extra space, but when the damned ship is already most of a kilometer wide, I can’t imagine another four meters making much of a difference.”
“Maybe,” Hector Pacheco said, breaking Marcus’ rambling stream of consciousness, “you should try knocking.” As usual, the grizzled crew chief had managed to be serious and joking at the same time. It was a fine talent, and one of many that Marcus envied.
Fighting against the stiff shoulders of his pressure suit, Marcus Donovan shrugged, then maneuvered toward the iris. He raised his hand and curled his fingers, then reached out to rap on the surface.
Just as his knuckle was about to collide with the iris, the glossy material shrank away from his hand and raced toward the edges, like hot wax poured over glass or a soap bubble popping in slow motion. Inky darkness waited inside.
Marcus was glad no one could see the look on his face. “Or maybe it’s automatic, like bloody near every door on our entire planet. Should we go in?” he asked.
Before anyone could answer, the decision was made for them. The doctor and his fifteen companions were all drawn into the cavity at once, and the force that attracted them was accompanied by an oddly familiar feeling. It was the feeling of falling. They were falling into the ship.
“I hope this isn’t their idea of hospitality,” Hector said in his gravelly voice.
Professor Caldwell, the geologist, replied, “Never mind that. I just hope this isn’t how it eats.”
Then the iris shut behind them and all was dark.
Chapter 9:
All In
It was pitch black inside, and the first thing Marcus Donovan noticed was something thumping all around him. One-two, it beat slowly, rhythmically, like he was
trapped inside a massive water drum. He could feel it thumping in his chest, where his heart echoed the beat. One-two, one-two.
“Base to Donovan, what’s your status? Please respond.”
“We’re alright. Just a little disoriented. Let’s get some lights on,” he said, and their pale blue head lamps flicked on, illuminating helmets and precious little beyond. The lamps were only on a moment before the walls all around began to glow. They were dim and red-orange at first like a finger in front of a flashlight, then gradually brighter until the light settled into the warm amber of autumn at sunset.
“Was that in response to the words or the lamps?” Faulkland asked.
“Or something else?” Marcus added.
Before he could invest himself in that question, he noticed another puzzling thing. They were in a long corridor with glowing walls, broken into equal segments by an interconnected lattice work of curving, molded columns that might have been structural supports. The puzzling part was that Marcus and his team were sitting on the floor.
Rao looked to be mulling over the same thought. He detached the lamp from his helmet, held it out at arm’s length and let go. The lamp fell down with a clatter.
Marcus’ mind raced. Maybe there was a simple answer he couldn’t see from his perspective. “Mason,” he said into his microphone, “Zebra-One didn’t start… I don’t know… spinning, did she?”
“No, sir. I’m looking at her right now, and she’s as still as a stone.”
“Artificial gravity,” Rao said in a reverent voice. He sounded like he was whispering the secret name of God.
“How?” Marcus asked.
“If I knew that, I assure you I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be sitting on a solid gold toilet, sipping cocktails and counting the decimal places on my bank statement.”
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