Thing One, seen from orbit.
Another line of tracks led away from it, and converged on the same place where the first set of tracks vanished. Kate had marked this location with an X.
Alexei said, “Do you think they also stole the engine of Thing One?”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it?” Kate said. “Do you see what’s at that location I’ve marked X?”
“I would say it’s a hill.”
“And that’s what I would’ve thought, too, but look at that line just north of the hill. It’s about two hundred meters long, and very straight. It may be a shadow … or something else.” Kate’s voice hardened with anger. “They stole our shit! Guys, they fucking took our shit and carted it back to, God knows what the fuck that is, but I want to find out.”
Jack and Alexei exchanged a delighted glance. So this was what it took to get Kate on board with the spirit of exploration: they stole our shit!
Up until now Kate had been the consummate professional. She’d played it safe all the way, to the point of making up orders to destroy the MOAD before it could hurt the SoD again. But now she was pissed.
OK, maybe she was pissed at them, as much as at the aliens. Either way, this was, Jack decided, a big improvement.
“I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this,” Kate continued. “I’m going to notify Mission Control right now, but what are they gonna say? Either leave it alone, or go and check it out. Those are our only choices. So you know what, I’m going to preempt their decision. You’re all fueled up and ready to rock. Let’s go check it out.” An unpleasant edge entered her voice. “I know how much you guys love danger.”
Jack grimaced. She was daring them to demur. But what she didn’t know was that he and Alexei had already planned to board the MOAD (let’s be truthful) and go stalking aliens through its mysterious interior, armed with DIY crossbows. In comparison with the Ridley Scott-inspired menaces he’d already imagined, component-filching, footprint-leaving aliens sounded like a pushover.
“They must have abandoned the MOAD and taken refuge on the surface,” he said. “Some refuge.”
“I want you to exercise due caution,” Kate warned.
It was far too late for that, of course.
*
After two hours, Kate finally cleared the Shenzhou Plus to launch. She said, “Jack and Alexei are safely down on the ground. At present they’re preparing to EVA from the Dragon.”
Meili tasted envy as bitter as a mouthful of turnip greens. “It’s not fair,” she heard herself say. “Why them?”
She glanced at Skyler, in the left seat, and knew he felt the same way.
These are our aliens!
We discovered them!
Why should Jack and Alexei get to meet them first?
Meili had already made history by becoming the first person to walk on Europa, but she wanted more. She wanted it all. She wanted Skyler and she wanted a big house in Texas for her family and she wanted her name on streets, and a movie made about her.
“That’s the way the cookie crumbles, hon,” Kate said. “Your job is to get back up here with that water. Honestly, why would you even want their job? It’s dangerous as fuck, what they’re about to do.” She chuckled. “I wish I would’ve sent Giles down with them, too. Oh, well.” She reverted to CapCom-style formality. “You are cleared for launch, Shenzhou. Godspeed.”
“It’s not fair,” Meili muttered. She sighed, and opened the throttle.
The Shenzhou soared off the surface of Europa.
Skyler grunted as the thrust gravity spanked them. They were only pulling 0.6 gees, but they’d been living in low gravity for so long that it felt like the 3G punch you experienced on lift-off from Earth. Both of them had their suits on, which helped a bit.
Watching the fuel monitor, Meili said on their suit-to-suit link, “This will not go well. Those two are not trained in diplomacy.”
“And I am.” Skyler punctuated his words with gasps. “I had to practice on actors wearing rubber forehead costumes. I shit you not. We went through every version of the first contact scenario they could dream up. Nobody believed there would turn out to be actual, living aliens, but that’s what the NXC does, we cover all the bases.” He breathed heavily. “Now watch those douchebags fuck up our one and only chance to make a good first impression on our interstellar neighbors.”
Meili laughed. She liked Skyler’s sense of humor. On second thoughts, maybe he hadn’t been joking.
“But, on the bright side,” Skyler added. “maybe the aliens will vaporize them on sight. Betcha that’s what Kate is hoping for.”
Meili twisted her mouth skeptically. She doubted that Kate would actually try to get her pilot and co-pilot killed. She believed Kate was a good person and a conscientious commander, and Meili rarely erred in her assessments of people. For instance, everyone hated Skyler, but Meili had always felt that he was a sweet, sensitive guy … and see, she was right! Or take Giles. Everyone else made fun of him. But he had an inside track on the Earth Party, so Meili often talked to him about the movement. He was really cool when you got to know him …
A flashing alert from the auxiliary power unit interrupted her thoughts.
Low fuel.
The APU was running in the red.
“That’s not possible!” she cried in her own language.
“That reminds me,” Skyler said. “When we were climbing back into the Shenzhou, you were talking in Chinese. You kept saying impossible. They were correct. Impossible. What was that about?”
“Oh, I was talking about the Earth Party. They’ve believed in the aliens from day one. That’s why they set up the moon base,” she said distractedly.
“Typical cargo cult behavior,” Skyler said. “Sorry.”
“The APU is out of fuel.”
“What’s an APU?”
“The auxiliary power unit! It feeds the turbopumps for the main engine—”
The main engine cut out.
The Shenzhou’s acceleration gave way to a sickening mushy drift, like when you run out of gas in your car. That had happened to Meili a couple of times back home. She could be a little bit absentminded. But not about the goddamn APU! This was life and death! She knew its hydrazine tank had been 72% full, precisely.
“What’s happening?” Skyler shouted, as they floated up against their straps.
Before Meili could answer, the main engine surged back. A pulse of acceleration threw them back against their couches. After a second or two the engine died again, jolting them forward.
Meili scanned all the consoles, desperately trying to figure out what was wrong. Could she or Skyler have inadvertently dumped the hydrazine tank on the ground? No, she’d have noticed!
Another surge, this time so violent that her helmet snapped back against her couch. The helmet’s padding cushioned her head. She was going to have a sore neck.
The engine died for the third time, tossing them forward again.
Skyler was yelling and screaming in full-fledged panic. “Shut up,” Meili shouted at him. “Did you touch anything? When we were on the ground, or at any point? Tell me right now!”
Reading status displays, she confirmed that the computer had switched the main engine off, because it wasn’t getting any fuel, because the fucking APU was fucked. And so were they.
“The only thing I touched was that,” Skyler said, pointing at the control panel for the pumps. “I turned the fueling pumps off, like you said. That’s all. I didn’t touch anything else.”
Meili swiped a gloved finger across the special reactive touch-screen. Her heart sank as she saw what he’d done. “You turned the APU heater off.” She turned it back on.
“No, I didn’t!”
“I told you to turn off the valves! But you turned off the heater for the APU pump! So the hydrazine froze! And now the tank is full of slush, which clogs the APU pump, so it thinks it is out of fuel. Oh dammit, Skyler.”
“Why are those two things on the same t
ouch-screen anyway?” Skyler shouted.
“I don’t know,” Meili said. “It’s like Windows 10.”
“Or iPhone updates. Remember those?”
“Every time something is updated, it’s worse than before.”
“I think that just means you’re over thirty,” Skyler said. They floated in an unearthly silence and stillness. “So what happens now?” Skyler said after a moment.
Meili half-heard him. She was trying to contact the SoD. “Kate, come in, come in.” The mission commander did not respond. She must be busy talking to Jack and Alexei. Sadness swamped Meili. She had wanted to meet the aliens. She had wanted so much.
“What happens now?” Skyler repeated. “We’re floating! Are we in orbit?”
Meili had to laugh at that. His cluelessness was both annoying and sweet. She couldn’t even blame him for switching the APU heater off. He hadn’t known any better. She should have been clearer in her instructions. “We’re not in orbit. The SoD is 430 kilometers up. We’re not even at twenty kilometers.”
“But we’re in freefall!”
“That means we’re topping out, and—” Right on cue, the sensation of falling arrived. “Now we are going down.”
“You mean we’re going to crash.”
Meili switched the APU off and switched it on again, repeatedly. Every time she prayed for the pump to start, and every time it failed. “The heater doesn’t have enough time to work. The fuel is still frozen.” Her stomach was being sucked downward. Her brain screamed Falling, falling. Mama, catch me. But her mother was millions of kilometers away.
Skyler said, “Well, crap. I don’t want to die.”
“I don’t want to die, either.” She almost lost control there. She had only just clawed her life back from the Communist Party. How could the universe steal it from her? She said with desperate optimism, “We might be OK. The gravity is very weak.”
Subjectively, they seemed to be falling ass-first. The engine bell would hit the ground first. That was good. Meili mentally reviewed the specs of the crash couches. These, too, were good. The best. You can’t ‘update’ a crash couch …
“Meili,” Skyler said. “I love you. I’m so fucking pissed we didn’t get to spend more time together.”
She caught back a sob. “I love you, too.” It was the first time she had ever said this in English to anyone, although she didn’t tell him that.
The APU fired.
Meili screamed in joy.
She restarted the turbopumps.
A few tense seconds later, the main engine growled into life.
“Oh thank fuck,” Skyler whooped. “I believe in God now.”
But they were still falling.
“Mama catch me,” Meili whispered.
The Shenzhou smashed into the ground.
CHAPTER 18
Jack stood in oxygen snow and ice moss, crossbow on his shoulder, looking up at a radio mast.
It rose as high as the tall masts at Rugby Radio Station, in Warwickshire, that you used to be able to see from the A5.
A dead white, tapered rod, like an octopus tentacle electrified to perfect rigidity. From space, all you’d see would be a suspiciously linear shadow.
“Now we know how they HERFED us,” he said over the radio to Alexei.
“I don’t see any cables,” Alexei said, walking around the far side of the mast. “No power distribution unit, nothing.”
In its starkly minimalist, unadorned construction, devoid of any fussy bits, the radio mast looked so palpably alien—despite being recognizable as a radio mast, going off the receiver dishes and active antenna mounted at the top—that it seemed silly to expect it to have power cables and that sort of thing.
“I expect the support infrastructure’s buried,” Jack said vaguely. “Maybe over there.”
Beyond the mast, a quarter-kilometer from where they’d set the Dragon down, stood a small hill. They were awaiting Kate’s OK to explore around the back of there. If she didn’t hurry up and get back to them, they’d go anyway. It was not smart to hang about in this radiation-soaked environment. They’d budgeted fifteen minutes for this exploration and five of those had already gone by. “Kate?” Jack said, opening a channel to the SoD. “Have you had a chance to look at the pictures of the mast I just sent?”
Unlike Skyler and Meili during their walk on the surface, Jack and Alexei could communicate directly with the SoD, using the Dragon’s transmitter as a re-broadcast station. The Shenzhou couldn’t do that. Frequency mismatch. These things happen when you’ve got thousands of people worldwide ‘cooperating.’
“Fuck it. Let’s go.” Alexei started toward the hill.
Jack followed, with a worried glance back at the Dragon. He didn’t like leaving it alone. But what could happen to it? “Six minutes.”
They bounded towards the icy bulge. From space it had looked like any one of the other blisters that memorialized old water vapor eruptions. Tiny volcanoes, in fact. Cryovolcanoes. But cryovolcanoes had jagged crater rims, whereas this one was flat-topped. It reminded Jack of Wembley Stadium with the roof shut.
“That’s not a hill,” Alexei said, echoing his thoughts. “It’s an igloo.”
“They’ve roofed over the crater.”
“Ice makes a good radiation shield.”
As they loped towards the roofed hill, a new star shone out in the sky to the west.
“That’ll be the Shenzhou,” Jack said. “Funny. We shouldn’t be able to see it from here.”
As he spoke, he realized the star was moving the wrong way.
Down.
It vanished over the horizon.
“That did not look good,” Alexei said, staring in the direction the Shenzhou had gone.
A scarcely-perceptible tremor travelled through the soles of Jack’s boots.
“Guys!” Kate’s voice blared into their helmets. “Jack, Alexei, come in!”
“This is Jack,” he snapped.
“The Shenzhou’s gone. It crashed a few minutes after taking off.” Delivering this unthinkable news, Kate sounded icy calm. “We’re in trouble now. I want you to immediately stop whatever you’re doing—”
Jack started to run in the direction—half-remembered, half-guessed; the whole smooth curve of the horizon looked the same—where the Shenzhou had come down.
Alexei tackled him from behind.
“Get off!” Jack shouted.
“They’re dead,” Alexei grated.
“They don’t have to be dead! It’s perfectly possible to survive a power-off fall. They crashed near here!” He threw an elbow into Alexei’s midriff. Alexei’s suit absorbed the impact, but the momentum of Jack’s blow toppled them both over sideways. Clumsy in the micro-gravity, they rolled over and over, wrestling.
Kate shouted in their helmets, “I can see the debris field. They are dead. The Shenzhou is totaled. Parts from that thing are spread out across a square kilometer. So if you want to be a hero, Jack, how about being a hero for those of us who are still living? Get back to the Dragon. Haul ass to Thing One and pump that goddamn water. Without the Shenzhou, we need the Dragon more than ever. It will have to make eight trips to fill the SoD’s tanks, and you will have to make more EVAs than planned. We’re fresh out of wiggle room. We do not have time to screw around with alien radio transmitters! Do you read me, Jack? Acknowledge!”
Jack wound up sprawled on his back with Alexei on top of him. The sun silhouetted Alexei’s helmet. Pinning Jack’s upper body, Alexei panted, “Are you going to do anything stupid?”
Jack moved his head from side to side. The sun came into view, so distant, so small, and then winked out again behind Alexei’s helmet. The digital clock in the heads-up area of his faceplate glowed green. “Eleven minutes,” he rasped.
“Good,” Alexei said. “So, we go on.” He rolled off Jack and went to retrieve their crossbows from where they’d dropped them.
Kate said, “Look, we’ll destroy the radio mast from orbit. I can do that, but firs
t you have to get out of the way!”
Jack stood up. He hoped they hadn’t damaged their suits rolling around like that. Thank God there was no sharp stuff on the ground, anyway—just crushed ice and oxygen snow, which now coated them both, melting off the slightly-warmer outsides of their suits and sublimating into wisps of vapor.
“Jack, do you read me? Acknowledge!”
“I read you,” Jack said, staring past Alexei at the hill, or dome, or whatever the hell it was. A black dot grew on its sunlit side. Became a circle.
“So return to the Dragon,” Kate said. “That’s an order!”
“Something rather interesting’s happening,” Jack said. “Alexei, look. No, behind you.”
Spiky shapes crawled out of the hole. One, two, three. Crawled, yes, on all fours. The motion was perfectly recognizable. When they stood up, that movement was also recognizable, and the pins they stood on were legs, impossibly long and thin.
Alexei scuffled back to Jack’s side, keeping his face turned to the …
… aliens, yes, here we are, and here they are …
… aliens.
Oh my flipping God. Aliens.
Alexei reached for the duct-tape ammo belt he had made. He ripped out a quarrel and slotted it into the groove of his crossbow, between the two angle irons that made the stock.
Jack loaded his own crossbow. As he reached for the cocking lever, he reconsidered.
They aren’t carrying weapons.
They might be friendly.
Anything’s possible.
He reached over and pushed Alexei’s crossbow down, so it wasn’t pointing at the approaching beings. “Don’t scare them,” he said.
The aliens and the humans walked towards each other and stopped a couple of meters apart. The aliens had two legs. Two arms. Their oversized heads looked like they were wearing squids on their shoulders, with waving tentacles behind and elongated bits before. Twin bulges halfway up the elongated bits could have been eyes but they were blank white, dead white, just like every other part of the aliens’ bodies.
The creatures stood about seven feet tall, not the twenty that Skyler had excitedly reported.
Tusks curled out of the bottoms of their headparts, and went over their shoulders to small, rectangular backpacks. Tusks? Or breathing tubes? Perhaps the aliens were wearing advanced, form-fitting spacesuits.
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 13
