Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  She tried to orient herself by looking around, but the landscape made no sense. Everything was taller than she expected, cliffs jutting up on every side, craters so deep their bottoms were full of shadows. She saw the other shuttle land some distance away and it seemed tiny, a child’s toy. The tender set down nearby and finally she was able to put some scale to what she saw. They had set down on a narrow shelf of rock that stuck out from the outside of a crater rim, a crater that must have been much larger than Walden Crater back home. The rim towered above them, perhaps a kilometer over their heads.

  Everywhere on the rock shelf engineers and volunteers shuffled about, taking long loping strides as they unpacked the cargo pods on the side of the tender, as they studiously set about learning how to walk here, as they milled about aimlessly, waiting for someone to give them instructions.

  These were not long in coming. Engineer Derrow leapt up onto the top of the tender, making it look easy. She could be recognized by the hexagons painted all over her suit and by a light just below her helmet that flashed when she spoke.

  “I know this place is weird,” she said, and dozens of helmets turned toward her. “We don’t have time for sightseeing. We need to get to work right away. We’re going to climb up that slope,” she said, pointing at an impossibly steep pile of scree a few hundred meters away, “and then head down into the crater. What you see in there might freak some of you out. Try to cope, okay? We’re all professionals here. If you weren’t one of my employees back on Niraya, you are now.”

  She jumped down from the tender and loped toward the jumbled boulders of the slope, then seemed to dance up them like a mountain goat, her feet barely touching the rocks. One by one the engineers followed. Elder McRae was very glad to see no one else had Derrow’s effortless grace.

  Of course, Derrow had been here before. She’d come here with the pilots, though the elder still knew few details of what they’d done on Aruna.

  Up at the crest of the rim a couple of engineers bent to assemble a rover, a simple cage of pipes with four balloon wheels and a compact motor. A parabolic dish stuck up at the top of a pipe mounted behind the driver’s seat. The rover was just big enough to seat Derrow. She took it over the edge of the crater and disappeared. The engineers and the volunteers like the elder had to walk.

  Moving carefully, checking every foothold before leaping to the next, she followed a line of engineers up the slope. She was breathing heavily by the time they reached the top and they could look out over the massive crater. Despite Engineer Derrow’s urgency regarding time, everyone up there was just standing and gaping at what they’d discovered.

  Elder McRae couldn’t blame them.

  Below, inside the crater, the enemy had built a massive installation of towers and hangarlike structures and things like giant seed pods. None of it looked remotely like human architecture. The elder, who had trained in building when she was still an aspirant, who had built, in fact, her own office back at the Retreat, couldn’t see how any of those structures were erected. The shapes were all wrong, round and sculptured where there should have been right angles, or minimally worked out of thin girders and tangles of pipes where a human designer would have put solid walls. Much of the crater’s contents looked as if it had been smashed or burnt—she supposed that was the work of Commander Lanoe and Lieutenant Zhang—but everywhere that things were still intact metal glittered weakly in the orange light of the far sun. There was no color anywhere in that tangled mess of construction, nothing ornamented or decorated at all, not even any writing or signage to help the human eye make sense of it.

  Derrow rolled past in her rover, pointing out details of the crater to an engineer who jogged along beside her. “Main problem is we have no power,” Derrow said, her voice broadcast to everyone’s suits. “We’ll pull it from the tender’s reactor until we find a better solution. Plenty of scrap metal; get some teams on sorting through it to find the alloys we need, use anybody who doesn’t have specific skills. Everyone needs a job and they need to keep doing that job until I say stop. And keep an eye on your sensors—any depleted uranium you find, tell me.”

  One by one the engineers around the elder hurried to find tasks, to begin their labors. The elder looked around for M. Wallach, but the woman was gone, probably already hard at work.

  “You,” someone said, an engineer with a blue stripe painted down the sleeve of his suit. “What are you standing around for, damn it? Oh. I’m sorry, Elder, I didn’t recognize you.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Just tell me what to do.”

  Lanoe and Thom had left Niraya but they were still hours away. Even patching Lanoe into the conversation meant waiting long minutes for Zhang’s signal to reach him, then minutes more to hear his replies. She was used to communicating over such distances but that didn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating.

  “We all heard that signal,” she said. “Every radio in the system picked it up. Somehow, though, Valk heard something different. I can’t explain it, so don’t ask me to. I’ve got Derrow on this call; maybe she has some ideas.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Derrow said. “I don’t exactly have a lot of free time down here, but I’ve dedicated some computing power to analyzing the signal. I didn’t learn much.”

  Lanoe’s voice cut in, words from nearly a quarter of an hour ago, just catching up. “What did Valk hear? Just tell me what he heard.”

  “Ignore that,” Zhang told Derrow. “We’ll fill him in as best we can. Go ahead with your analysis.”

  “It sounded like static at first. Just white noise. When I ran a basic Fourier analysis, though, it turned out that it wasn’t random, it was compressed data. A lot of data, hundreds of megabytes squeezed down into a few seconds of high-bandwidth transmission. Data I can’t translate, though. It’s not in any kind of human language. It’s not even in any kind of human protocol—every poly has their own proprietary way of talking to machines, but this doesn’t look like any of them. It’s all in base fifteen, just like the software onboard that lander I studied. So it’s definitely from the enemy. Beyond that…I’m at sea here. The first fifteen digits are all zeroes. That looks like a handshake to me.”

  “A handshake?”

  Derrow sighed in frustration. “When a computer contacts another computer for the first time, it sends a short, recognizable signal. Something to say, ‘Hello, I am prepared to send you information.’ A handshake can be as simple as that or it can contain information about how to process that information—the transmission rate, the protocols to use, things like that. Those fifteen zeroes look, to me, like a signal to another system, telling it to pay attention. Of course, that’s just a guess. I have no idea how alien drones talk to each other.”

  “It’s a place to start. Lanoe, we think the orbiter was put here just to send this message. It slagged itself in the process. The message means nothing to me or any of us—but somehow it got through to Valk. Engineer, any thoughts there?”

  “M. Valk was the closest person to the orbiter when it transmitted. Maybe it sent a second message, one in clear text, but with a weaker signal. One that didn’t propagate far enough for anyone else to pick it up.”

  “It’s not that,” Valk said. “I checked my comms logs—”

  “Damn it,” Lanoe said. Fifteen minutes in the past. “Zhang, you’re going to have to figure this out before I arrive. Have some kind of conclusions ready for me when I get there, will you?”

  “Everyone, please ignore that,” Zhang said. “Valk—you were saying?”

  “I checked my comms logs,” Valk repeated. He sounded nervous. Like he was on trial here. “They didn’t record anything except the same gobbledygook you two caught. There was no second message. Just the one—except to me it sounded like a voice speaking. Not a human voice. It sounded synthesized—you know, like a drone voice. Flat. Weird inflections, no rhythm to it. Just words.”

  “That should be impossible,” Derrow pointed out.

  “I hea
rd what I heard!” Valk shot back.

  “Okay, okay, let’s all calm down. Valk,” Zhang said. “For Lanoe’s benefit—tell me what you heard.”

  Valk cleared his throat. He repeated the message word for word, raising or lowering his voice to match the inflections. “IF(conditional; signify compliance) would (subjunctive) speak. THEN (allow? deny?) speak: this system, false-mind.”

  Zhang had heard it before. It still spooked her out to hear him repeat it. For a while no one spoke, as they digested the words. Then Lanoe cut in again, still well behind everyone else.

  “Thom, it was some kind of signal from the enemy. The first time they’ve tried to communicate at all. I know. I know! Kid, I’m working on it—Zhang’s trying to decode it now. Clear this channel until I say otherwise. Zhang—what the hell is going on?”

  “I wish I knew,” she said, catching herself too late before she said it out loud.

  “I think it’s kind of obvious,” Derrow said. “I mean, okay, it’s confusingly worded. But it sounds like they want to negotiate.”

  “I didn’t hear anything like that,” Zhang said.

  “Yeah, it sounds like a computer having a stroke. But to me that’s exactly how a device just short of artificial intelligence would ask if we wanted to talk to it. ‘IF you want to speak, THEN speak.’ It’s like a line of computer code for a system that wants to negotiate. Maybe to stop this war.”

  “Lanoe won’t see it that way,” Zhang said.

  “Let’s have some perspective here,” Derrow said. She was still talking. “I know we’re all scared. But this is one of the biggest moments in human history, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it? First contact with an alien species?”

  “First contact,” Valk said, “was when they started killing farmers on Niraya.”

  Derrow growled in frustration. “We don’t even know—maybe they didn’t understand, maybe they didn’t know we were sentient, maybe they were just…exploring, who knows? I don’t know! But neither of you do, either. We have to take this opportunity. We have to try to talk to them.”

  “Elder McRae said—back in the very first briefing we did, back at the Retreat—that they’d been trying for weeks to contact the enemy, long before Lanoe even started recruiting us. There’s never been any response.”

  “Maybe they just didn’t know how we communicated, maybe—”

  “Enough,” Zhang said.

  “Please just listen,” Derrow said.

  But Zhang was done. “No. Hold that thought. This is too big a decision for us to make. We need to wait until Lanoe gets here. Engineer, thank you for your assistance. When we’re ready to discuss this again, I’ll let you know.”

  She cut Derrow out of the call before she could say anything else.

  “Zhang,” Valk said, when it was just the two of them, still circling Aruna in their BR.9s, still within shooting distance of the slagged orbiter. “Zhang, she could be right.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “No, look,” Valk said. “She could be right. But I don’t trust these bastards. And that ‘false-mind’ bit, that doesn’t exactly sound friendly to me.”

  “Nor me,” Zhang admitted. “Even if I had any idea what it meant. I’d be a lot happier if I knew why they sent this message to you. Just to you.”

  “There’s one possibility,” he said. “Maybe I’m the only one who heard it because I’ve gone crazy. Maybe the voice was just in my head.”

  Zhang laughed, though she knew he hadn’t been joking. At least not entirely. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”

  Mostly, the elder found herself gathering things and carrying them from one place to another. Pieces of debris and junk, parts of broken drones. She carried them to the smelters, where the engineers were busy casting long, perfectly straight iron rails. They fussed and argued over their calipers and their geodesic lasers, always trying to get the rails that much closer to some hypothetical ideal of straightness. The elder didn’t understand any of what they were doing. So she just kept carrying things, walking them over to the glowing mouth of the smelter. Casting them in.

  In the low gravity she could lift objects that, on Niraya, would have been ludicrously too heavy for her. Boulders so big she could hardly get her arms around them. Whole legs of destroyed landers. It was almost comical how much she could carry. There was a problem, though—their weight might be different than what she expected, but they still had mass. Just because everything felt like it was made of packing foam, she couldn’t beat inertia. If she moved too fast, so did the thing she was carrying. If it massed more than she did, when she tried to stop it would keep moving, and carry her with it.

  It would be easy here to break an arm, or a leg. The cheap suit she wore had no safety measures built in to protect her or keep her working if she was injured.

  She had to learn a whole new way of moving. Shuffling along the ash-covered ground wasn’t enough. She had to think through every step. Which quickly grew exhausting. Every muscle in her legs screamed to be set free, to walk again in the normal way. Her back ached from the simple exercise of bending over and picking things up. The heating elements in her suit scorched her abdomen but couldn’t seem to keep her gloves warm. Her fingers grew first numb, then prickly in the incredibly cold wind of Aruna.

  She wouldn’t allow any of it to get to her. Lead by example, she thought. It had always been the way of the Transcendentalists. When this was over, they would say she had lifted more rocks, fed the smelter faster than anyone else.

  No, she thought, her discipline straightening her spine. No. That was unnecessary competitiveness. Making this a game that someone could win meant everyone else had to lose. This was a group effort. When it was over they would say she’d done her part, and done it competently. That was all the praise she needed.

  She found a rock that glittered a little in the faint orange light of the sun. A sensor on her wrist started to tick unhappily when her hand got too close to it. She knew what she had to do. She sent a signal to her supervisor indicating she might have found something radioactive. She flagged it on a map on her minder, all the while moving carefully away from it.

  Her suit didn’t protect her from radiation, either.

  She found another piece of debris—a long pipe that had fallen from a high column made of similar pipes. She picked it up. Carried it toward the smelter. Its unwieldy shape kept swinging her around but she struggled up a long ramp and pushed one end of the pipe deep into the orange light that burst from the smelter’s mouth. The pipe resisted, as if it had caught on something inside the smelter.

  She pushed, as hard as she dared. The pipe slid forward a few centimeters, then stopped again. She looked around but she couldn’t see any engineers nearby. Anyway, what would she say? I’m sorry, this pipe is being stubborn? I can’t handle it by myself?

  Self-reliance was one of the Four Eternals. She pushed again. The pipe gave a little, slid a little farther into the glowing pool of metal inside the smelter. She pushed a third time and it just stuck there, sticking up in the air.

  Her helmet muffled external sounds. She could barely hear the keening of the nitrogen wind. When she heard the gurgling, glooping noise she had no idea what it was at first.

  Then a trickle of molten metal spilled from the top end of her pipe. A spurt of bright orange liquid iron followed, jetting high up in the air.

  She’d pushed the pipe down into the smelter and now it acted like a giant straw. Or, in this case, a deadly hose.

  She staggered backward, lifting her hands as droplets of metal, no longer glowing but still soft, pattered all around her. A fat drop smacked against the front of her helmet and she almost screamed, except there was no time. As she ran she saw the iron solidify in a thick nodule against the carbonglas, right in the middle of her view.

  If any of the hot metal fell on her arms or back, she would be incinerated. The thin fabric of her suit couldn’t take the heat the way her helmet did.

  Behind her the pipe slouched and be
nt as it melted, sagging until it pointed out of the smelter at a forty-five-degree angle. Hot metal jetted from the end, flicking out in great tongues of fire.

  She threw herself to the ground, her hands over her head—stupidly, since her hands were far more at risk than her helmet. Behind her the pipe crimped and collapsed, one last gout of molten metal drooling from its end. All around her the hot metal cooled on the ground, coagulating and turning dark.

  People came running from every direction, calling out to see if she was all right, demanding to know what had happened. A young man grasped her arm and helped her up to her feet.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Did you get any on you?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. She checked her arms and legs and they looked all right. The glob of metal adhering to her helmet was the only thing she could see.

  Suddenly a wave of exhaustion rolled through her muscles and she sagged in the young man’s grasp.

  “Hold on,” he said. “We’ll get you some help. Maybe—maybe you should go back to the shuttles. Have a little rest.”

  “Hey!” someone shouted.

  She looked up and saw M. Wallach come loping toward them. “Hey—she’s fine. She should get back to work,” the woman said.

  “She’s an old lady!” her benefactor, the young man, insisted.

  “She’s a volunteer,” M. Wallach replied.

  Looking disgusted, the young man released her, then headed off toward his own next task.

  The elder looked up at M. Wallach. The engineer looked back, studying the elder’s face through her helmet.

  Then Elder McRae nodded her thanks, and marched away from the smelter, looking for some other piece of debris she could salvage. She felt inordinately grateful to M. Wallach. Had the engineer not shown up just then, if the young man had continued to suggest she should go lie down—the elder was pretty sure she would have agreed. She would have gone and found a bunk and lay down in it and who knew how long it would have been before she got back up?