“Understood?” I asked, looking from face to anxious face.
They said yessir in unison, and then I was off.
***
I couldn’t be sure, but the pyramid seemed far larger on the inside than it had on the outside.
Of course, with how the ramp spiraled rapidly down into the interior, the pyramid’s total cubic volume was increasing enormously with every story I descended. Just how big was the damned thing? A hundred meters tall? Two hundred? How far into Titan’s crust had it sunk? Or had it been deliberately buried? Or had unknown eons simply allowed ice to accumulate over the artifact, sliding down the sides and piling up at the base, one layer at a time?
I found myself huffing and sweating as I jogged along the ramp. There’d been no junctions or forks so I had to assume that as long as I kept moving, I’d find Captain Bednar eventually.
I practically ran into her when I hit the bottom of the ramp. She grunted as our suits thunked together, then I noticed what had made her stop short.
We were in a rectangular room perhaps fifty meters long by thirty meters wide by ten meters tall. Everything—the ramp, the walls, the ceiling—was made of the same seemingly impervious black material as the outside of the pyramid. But from a circular depression in the exact center of the floor of the room, came an unnervingly eerie, green light.
The Captain began walking slowly towards the depression.
I followed five steps behind.
“Hell of a way to lead from the front,” I said, annoyed. “You’re proving to be very good at doing whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you feel like it.”
Captain Bednar spun and looked at me, our face shields almost touching. Her eyes were hot with anger.
“I don’t particularly care if you’re still pissed at me for pulling rank. You’re not the one who got passed over for the Europa flight because you wouldn’t polish the Assistant Mission Director’s knob. I had to bust my ass to find a way to work around that lovely little problem, and once I got posted to the Titan flight I knew in my bones there was no way anybody was keeping me from coming down to the surface.”
“You broke the rules,” I said, matter-of-fact.
“Chief, don’t be dense. Who cares about the rules now? Look at what we’ve found. This is it. This is the proof we’ve been searching for, ever since the dawn of the Space Age. No humans built this place. No humans even knew this place existed until now. Whatever it is—whatever it’s meant to tell us—is going to be of enormous impact back home. This changes everything. We aren’t alone. In fact, we were never alone. Ever. How long has this pyramid been here? How long has it been waiting for us to find it?”
“You make it sound like the thing’s a message in a bottle,’ I said.
“Isn’t it, Chief? Why build a thing with a doorway sized more or less accurately for humans? Why create a passageway sized more or less accurately for humans? Why construct something that’s deliberately stealth-guarded against sensors, and cloaked from above by the atmosphere? Unless the point was to wait until we were here—in the flesh.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” I said. “So how about we retrace our steps to the surface and put together an actual plan before we do anything more rash than we’ve already done? Maybe you’re prepared to break rules, but I’m still the goddamned second-in-command on this flight, and I say we be methodical in our investigation of this—”
But I could already tell my words were useless.
The light from the depression had entranced Bednar.
She turned away from me and walked slowly towards the depression. I heard her quietly gasp when she got to the edge.
I took a few quick steps to catch up with her, then I froze as I saw what was in the concave bowl in the floor.
Was it alive? Had it been alive once upon a time?
I honestly couldn’t tell.
It was big. Bigger by far than a horse. Elephant big. A sinewy body with armored sections along its spine lay curled numerous times, like a millipede. Only each of the legs was tipped with what appeared to be three digits, and the head... the head was an unspeakable cranial collection of grotesque, melon-like lobes interspersed with darker-colored fontanels and punctuated with six oversized, albino-pink eyes—each wide open and seemingly staring at nothing. A mouth-like orifice was in the center of the head, studded with viciously sharp teeth, and disgorging three snake-like tongues that hung lifelessly to the floor of the depression.
The bowl glowed, if ever so softly. Like a weak chem light.
“Christ, what a horror,” I said, resisting the urge to put my hand up to my face. Getting sick in my coldsuit helmet at this particular juncture wasn’t a good idea.
“Horror?” Bednar said. “I think it’s breathtaking.”
“A breathtaking horror,” I said.
Captain Bednar turned to look at me, her expression most disapproving, then she turned back to the creature.
“A pet?” I guessed.
“Or the architect herself,” Bednar corrected.
“How do we know it’s a she?”
“We don’t. But I think we can be reasonably certain this place is not a galactic kennel.”
“The creature can’t be alive.”
“I believe you’re right, Chief. It is dead. Or at least in a state approximating what humans call death. Stasis, maybe?”
Captain Bednar got down on her knees and reached a hand into the bowl to touch the thing.
She suddenly yanked her arm away.
“What happened?” I said.
“My arm went numb. Instantly.”
I got down on my hands and knees and reached hesitantly towards the creature. As soon as my fingers were over the precipice of the bowl, they went numb in a heartbeat. I left them there for a brief instant, a tingling sensation at my knuckles, then I drew my hand back. Quickly, feeling flowed back into my fingers as I flexed and moved them.
“Whatever’s kept the corpse from decaying, I wouldn’t try climbing down in there to find out. Your whole body might get short-circuited. If we’re going to examine the creature more closely, we’ll have to have equipment to pull it out.”
“What then?” she asked.
“I won’t be surprised if it blinks and jumps up after us, roaring for blood.”
“Silly,” she said.
“Yeah, maybe. But tell me honestly—that thing doesn’t make your skin crawl? I certainly wouldn’t want to see it revived. Though I wager you can add a Nobel to your name once the biologists back on Earth carve this thing up. The first extraterrestrial life form ever discovered, and it looks practically as brand new as the day it croaked. I wonder if it laid any nasty eggs in here for us to find? You know, like they always show in the movies?”
“I hardly think this race would have gone to all the trouble of constructing this place if their only goal was to entice us here for the purpose of impregnating or eating us. An alien civilization capable of traveling the stars is doubtless well advanced beyond our own. Their purposes are probably well advanced beyond ours as well. Imagine cave-dwellers encountering the mummy of an astronaut in his capsule. They’d be baffled too.”
“Maybe so, Captain,” I said, “but now that we’ve actually seen the freaking thing, I’m going to have to insist—despite your wishes to the contrary—that we get back up to our two Specialists and decide on a sensible course of action. You’ll have your name in the history books. There’s no more worry about that. Now let’s get our shit together as a team, okay?”
Captain Bednar turned around and approached me, her eyes hard.
“Since I don’t think anyone else can hear us right now I think it’s best if you and I get square,” she said.
“If you’d stayed in orbit like you were supposed to, there’d be nothing for me to get ‘square’ about, ma’am,” I said.
“Can you honestly say you’d have just done as you’re told and remained aboard the return module?”
“Do
ing as I’m told has gotten me pretty far in life.”
“Ah, right. Your military background. Thankfully this is an all-civilian expedition, and in the civilian world it’s people who think on their feet who get ahead. I did what I had to do because I don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, and that’s what’s gotten me pretty far in life. So either we can keep butting heads about it or we can work together. You don’t have to like me, I don’t have to like you, but we’re here. And there’s important work to be done.”
I considered telling her where to stuff it, but held my tongue. She had a point. The only way back to orbit was aboard the ascent module attached to the top of the descent module. It was a one-way trip. We all came down as a unit and we’d all go up as a unit, no exceptions. With the pyramid having been discovered and now this alien corpse on our hands, it was probable we’d push our reserves to the limit getting samples and recording data. And even I didn’t want to spend the next couple of weeks engaged in a cold war with my boss.
“Okay,” I said, “you’ve got me on points. But I want you to know I think it was a damned selfish thing you did, breaking protocol for your own ends. You might have a PhD. You might be smarter than me. But you’ve got a ton to learn about real leadership. Right now nobody on this mission trusts you. Not anymore. Because you’ve proven you’re willing to put your own interests ahead of theirs.”
She wanted to retort. I could see it in her eyes.
But she didn’t. All she did was let out a long, slow breath.
“You’ve got me on points,” Captain Bednar said.
We stared in silence for many uncomfortable seconds.
Then she slowly walked past me and began to plod stubbornly back up the ramp.
***
It took all day for the four of us to get all the necessary gear moved into place.
When it became apparent that we didn’t have anything with enough torque to lift the alien out of the basin—despite the reduced gravity—we decided it would be better to just get fluid and tissue samples. Then leave the monster where it lay. Another job for another time.
For no particular reason that any of us could discern, the room maintained a perpetual temperature of 41.3 degrees Celsius. Warmer than the human body, and far, far warmer than the surface outside. There was no door to close at the bottom of the ramp, yet no constant rush of warm nitrogen atmosphere fleeing up the ramp while cold nitrogen atmosphere flooded down it.
Neat trick, I thought. A barrier-free airlock.
Though what might be generating it was beyond my ability to guess. I only knew that at some almost imperceptible point halfway up the ramp, things got very cold very fast.
Kendelsen took hours of pictures and video footage while Majack rigged a scalpel on the end of a telescoping pole, along with an IV feed that would draw blood out of the beast. Assuming it even had blood in the first place.
I helped Majack balance the cutting tool, a bit like using a bridge with a pool cue. One by one we carved out little hunks of the alien and deposited them into specimen bags which were sealed tightly and labeled by Bednar, who was keeping a fastidious catalogue.
Interesting thing: None of the wounds oozed even a single drop of liquid, but as soon as we took some of the meatier samples out of the mystery numb zone surrounding the bowl, the pieces bled like crazy.
“I can’t wait to get these under a microscope,” Bednar exclaimed as Majack and I turned our attention to the thick-gauge hypodermic needle on the end of the second pole. Kendelsen stood by with the ten-liter collapsing container while Bednar scrutinized the various places we’d already excavated, looking for exposed veins or arteries.
“There,” she finally said. Her finger aimed at a particularly engorged vessel running along the underside of one of the eyelids.
Majack was slow and deliberate, seeing as how there wasn’t much chance of the subject running away. She pushed the hypodermic into the creature’s flesh, adjusting her trajectory a bit so that the shaft of the needle slid into the vein, as opposed to puncturing through into the tissue beyond.
The IV tube remained conspicuously empty.
“We’ll have to siphon,” I said.
Kendelsen unplugged the tube and crushed the plastic container back down to its flat shape, then re-attached the tube and began to pull the container open again by its handles. The pressure differential wasn’t enough at first, but as Kendelsen pulled harder a thick stream of fluid issued into the IV tube through the needle, and eventually into the bag.
We all stood and watched transfixed as Kendelsen kept pulling and the container kept filling.
“Probably enough,” I said when we had a couple of liters.
“No,” Bednar said, “get as much as you can. Every university on Earth is going to want its own sample for study. The more blood we take back with us the better.”
“Whatever you say, ma’am,” I said, and did not argue the point further.
When Kendelsen had extracted enough liquid to fill his container to four-fifths capacity, he put a pincher on the IV tube and uncoupled it from the container’s mouth, screwing an air-tight cap into place before carefully hefting the container over to a small, wheeled sled that we’d brought down from the rover. On it were all of the samples arranged according to Bednar’s ad hoc categorization scheme.
“Want more?” I said to the captain.
“Maybe, if I am not satisfied after taking a closer look. Let’s get all of this back to the descent module for safe keeping.”
“What about the rest of the structure?” I asked.
“It’s not going anywhere,” she said. “And neither is our alien friend here. There will be time to do a more thorough examination of the hardware once I’ve sent a full preliminary report back to the return module for transmission to Earth. Thus far we’ve not disclosed anything specific to Mission Control. That’s going to have to change, or they’re going to begin getting nervous.”
Truth be told, I wasn’t exactly sure what else it was I could be looking for. I’d already given the room at the bottom of the ramp a thorough examination, and had found no other doors leading to any other parts of the pyramid. There were no obvious display panels or control boards or knobs or switches of any kind. And when I ordered Kendelsen to apply a cutting torch to one of the walls, it didn’t even leave a scratch.
I had begun to wonder if perhaps the alien pyramid wasn’t just an analog of Earth’s ancient pyramids: a tomb. Perhaps for some bygone alien ruler who’d decided he wanted his final resting place to be in orbit around Jupiter?
Not a bad choice, I thought. Assuming you could see Jupiter’s rings through the murk in the atmosphere. Maybe the nitrogen air had been cleaner at some point in the past?
Unable to break off or obtain even a sliver of the pyramid’s structural material, I hoped that a carbon dating analysis of some of the alien’s tissue would be able to give us an accurate estimate as to how old the thing might be.
We gathered up what tools we needed to take back with us on the rover, snapped off the tripod lamps which had been giving us enough light to work by, and went back up the ramp, pushing our sled full of samples as we went. An insulated lid over the top of the sled kept the samples more or less at their ambient temperature as we crossed into the cold. A thick power cable wound its way along the side of the ramp—like a piece of familiar string in a strange and forbidding maze.
The cable took us unerringly to the top, and the open sky. I dutifully uncoupled it from the auxiliary power jack on the side of the rover, then helped Kendelsen and Majack get the sample sled into the rover’s cargo bay. Then I took shotgun as Captain Bednar slid into the driver’s station, with Majack and Kendelsen pulling rumble seat.
We rolled in relative silence.
If the first half of the day had been a cacophony of excited speculation and chattered hypotheses, the second half had slowly wound down to just occasional sentences and practical exchanges. The mood was... tense. Not the sort of overt tension tha
t snaps tempers, but a very subtle tension that underlay mildly creased brows and put little downturns on the corners of every mouth.
It was the place, I decided. Titan. Gloomy as Hades. Like being stuck perpetually in the shadow of a range of pregnant thunder clouds.
The headlights of the rover lanced into the yellow haze as Bednar followed the mild ruts which had been worn in the ice over successive trips. We knew from experience we wouldn’t actually see the descent stage of the Gossamer until we were practically on top of it.
Upon arrival we gingerly got the sample sled up the descent stage’s main ramp and into the airlock. Then Kendelsen, Majack and myself went to climb the ladder up to the auxiliary airlock. We’d not be exposing any of the samples to our living space. There was no defined protocol for handling xenobiological specimens, but even Captain Bednar wasn’t going to take chances. We’d leave them in the main airlock where they could be kept quarantined.
Once Bednar was through with her examination we’d move the samples to one of the outboard cargo pods on the ascent stage. If they froze in there it wouldn’t matter. They’d have to be frozen sooner or later for the long trip back to Earth.
We quickly moved some of the portable science equipment from the descent stage’s lockers over to the main ramp, where Bednar carried it all up piece by delicate piece. Once she was satisfied she had everything, we all went back to the auxiliary air lock and went inside for the night, quite exhausted.
***
After dinner and a quick check-in with the Gossamer’s return module, we retired. After months in microgravity it felt good to lapse into the deep sleep afforded by a day of manual labor. I had barely gotten my bunkbag zipped when my mind swam and I was drifting off towards pleasant dreams of home.
Only, the damned alien kept bothering me.
Several times I startled awake as visions of the alien in the pyramid suddenly came to life, writhing and awful.
Space Eldritch Page 21
