The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1)

by Noah K Mullette-Gillman

  She walked over to him, stepped up on one of the rectangular rocks, leaned forward so that their helmets were touching, and then kissed the glass on her side. He mimed a kiss back, but didn’t lean forward to touch the glass on his side.

  The Captain’s voice spoke in their ears. “Well, no Proximans on this world either, but that’s no surprise. Mr. Hughes wants you to check out the valley over the next ridge. We’re not going to find skyscrapers, but it is partially shielded, so he’s hopeful there could be rudimentary plants and animals.”

  Ordways replied, “Captain, that’s a three hour walk.”

  “Your systems are rated for 48 hours. You’ll be fine. I’m sending Mapple down, he’ll keep you two from getting bored.”

  Sally frowned. “Right, Captain, because you know Kevin and I would have no idea what to do on our own.”

  “That’s just what I’m afraid of.” The captain laughed affably.

  Officer Robyn Mapple was a thin and wiry man with thick, but receding blond hair. He had a large forehead with a jutting brow which always seemed to shade his eyes from any possible sources of light. His lips were unusually thin, and often dyed blue from the raspberry flavored Raytha-drinks he never seemed to stop sucking on.

  As well as his distinguished background in geology, Mapple was a cartoonist, who amused, and often offended, the crew with the doodles he would scratch out during the long and boring hours they all spent in deep space between worlds.

  Sally was pretty sure he had a crush on her.

  He descended from the ship to the surface wearing the same dark blue metal suit that Sally and Kevin wore. As he dropped down, the wind picked up and the silver seemed to swirl around him like water splashing against his back.

  He saluted his two superior officers and then asked, “What kind of monsters do we have down here?”

  Ordways replied, “Probably nothing. Almost certainly nothing. In my opinion, we’ve been extremely lucky with how many worlds we’ve found life on lately. But for a geologist like you, this place should be fantastic enough as it is.”

  “Oh, it is. It’s a dream. My grandmother used to own an old edition of The Arabian Nights, and all of these swirling sands remind me of the genies and efreets. I’m going to be spending months pouring over the video we’re taking. Imagine a city hidden under these waves of silicon and mica. Imagine halls and temples buried under the sands for thousands of years.”

  “We’ve got a long walk,” Sally hurried the two men up.

  They began walking towards the target zone.

  “What was the scariest monster you ever saw?” Mapple asked.

  Sally smirked as she walked. “Don’t look for them. Don’t want them. The first time I met alien animals, they ate my captain. I had to drag two bodies back with me.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Frogs. The nightmare of frogs. They cut holes into the rocks with their saliva to make their houses. One of them tried to chew through my face-plate.”

  “There’s video in the archive,” Ordways added.

  “They built houses? So, they were intelligent?”

  “No. They were just animals. Ants build houses,” Sally answered him.

  “How will we know when we find real intelligence?” Mapple asked.

  “When they have television, advertisements, and popcorn.” First Officer Ordways laughed.

  The three of them walked on for a while, constantly taking readings and making sure to get the best angles as possible on their recorders. They took the time to make sure all three of them got a good image of anything worth observing. Redundancy was considered very important. The official reason was that they wanted to avoid subjective observation, but Brightly had long suspected that the real reason was that they didn’t want to lose anything if some of the crew didn’t come back. She had seen a lot of good adventurers fall down crevasses or get eaten by the locals.

  The dunes were receding. The ground beneath their feet was growing more and more stable. In some sections it was incredibly pock-marked and wounded, but other large sections were unnaturally smooth and flat – the work of millennia of sand smoothing the planet like a stream would a pebble.

  “What if the aliens are intelligent, but not the way we are. What if they don’t want movies and stories and all the stuff we do?” Mapple asked.

  “Then maybe it won’t matter that we don’t notice how smart they are? If our intelligence and their intelligence were that different, we just wouldn’t have anything to say to each other.”

  “Like dolphins and whales?”

  “Oh, I know what the dolphins say: Fish! Fish! Fish!” Sally laughed.

  They walked over a long flat plain. The ground was so smooth that it appeared almost to be a long carved table. Every now and then there was a crack, and now and again a pile of the silver sand, but for a mile or more it was just an unearthly tan perfect surface.

  When they found the bones, they didn’t understand what they were looking at. They were old and partially bonded to the stone beneath them, but unlike the bones inside of terrestrial animals, these felt like rubber. They were soft and flexible, even though they had apparently been dead for many years.

  All three of the explorers independently took their samples and stored them in their backpacks. The computers began analyzing them immediately.

  The creatures had been huge, comparable to the dinosaurs on Earth, but it was hard to immediately imagine what they had looked like. The formations were far more complicated and ornate. The patterns of bones more closely resembled spider-webs than the sturdy structures on the homeworld.

  “Nature doesn’t have this kind of luxury,” Ordways commented as he looked over the fields of long dead aliens. “It always does the simplest it can. These structures are… indulgent, fanciful.”

  “Are we certain that they’re skeletons at all?” Sally asked.

  “Yeah, look at the microscopic level. This is clearly carbon-based life. I just don’t understand how it could have ever evolved.”

  “Maybe some alien civilization engineered them?” Mapple offered shyly.

  Ordways’s voice was sharp with annoyance. “Who? The Vulcans or the Klingons? There is no alien civilization. In any case, to what end? It wouldn’t make them more useful. I don’t imagine it would have made them more beautiful…”

  “They were horrific. Any way you picture flesh on these, they’re just chaotic shapes,” Sally added.

  “We should get back to the ship,” Mapple said firmly.

  “Why?”

  “I’m not like you, Sally. I can’t do this.”

  “Can’t do what? I don’t understand the problem.”

  The cartoonist suddenly turned and began to run back in the direction they came from. Almost immediately, he tripped and fell over one of the long rubbery bones. With a crash he fell flat against the unnaturally smooth stone ground.

  Inside of her suit, the bone sample was being analyzed by Sally’s computer. Just at that moment it informed her that the sample she had harvested was only roughly ten years old.

  “Kevin? These aren’t ancient.”

  “I’m getting that. Maybe Robyn’s right? Should we head back?”

  Mapple was awkwardly standing up again. As he turned, Sally could see a spot of red blood on the inside of his mask. Ordways rushed over to check on him.

  Sally found herself staring at the pattern of bones on the ground in front of her and a thought began to materialize in her brain. “What if these shapes are not the shapes the animals had in life at all, but what if something with an artistic sense reassembled them after they died?”

  She bent down and lifted up the largest of the bones which she felt she could. Insects began swarming over her hands before she could even see underneath.

  She immediately dropped the rubbery skeleton and began wiping the miniature xenomorphs off of her hands and arms. An alarm inside of her suit informed her that they had begun to chew through the fabric.

  Swat
ting as she ran, Brightly raced over to the two men. “We need to run. We need to get out of here right away.”

  Behind her, the mites had begun pouring out from under the bones. She turned back and saw mounds of them, uncountable thousands already. She took out her pacifier and began powering it up.

  Mapple was the first to begin running, but Ordways wasn’t far behind him. Sally waited in position, even though the swarm was quickly approaching. She didn’t mind being close, as long as they didn’t over-run her. Her weapon beeped and she turned the dial to the incineration setting.

  Then, she poured the inferno out.

  A white-hot flame flowed from her weapon out to xeno-mites. She could hear them screaming, even through her thick helmet. The light of the flame made it difficult to see them, but she watched a few of the bodies actually melt. She held her position and emptied her weapon before turning and running after the others. By the time the light died down, she could only see a few dozen scattered and wounded insects climbing over the smoldering bodies of millions. But behind them, more were continuing to rise up.

  When she caught up with the men, she took Mapple’s weapon from him and transferred the power source to her own superior pacifier. She ran with it charged and ready, but didn’t need to use it again.

  By the time the three of them ran into the pod, slammed the door behind them, and began the decontamination cycle, they were all exhausted and ready to pass out.

  “I’m out,” Mapple said as he removed his helmet and looked at his broken nose in the mirror. “I’m going home.”

  “What… what will you do there?” Sally asked.

  “I’m going to spend the rest of my life telling everyone about you, your adventures. By the time I’m done, everyone in the solar system will know the name Sally Brightly. You’ll be the new Marco Polo.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she frowned.

  “It’s not for you. I’m grateful for what you did, but it’s not for you. The people deserve to know about your adventures across the universe. And I’m going to get rich telling them.”

  6

  Nayara had a shuttle bay in her building. There were spaces for three shuttles. One of them was missing. Another didn’t look like it had ever been used. The third was in need of cleaning and basic repairs. Umbra went to the front of the ship and examined the controls.

  “She’s run the engine to hell. I don’t think she knew how to fly it properly. The hull looks solid enough, but it’s riddled with micro-tears. I don’t want to know what state the power-source must be in.” Allambree ducked down as he entered the ship. His long dreads hung down almost to his waist when he bent over to fit. He went over to the cargo hold. Charlie remembered Mew finding their rations in the same place.

  “Why would she want to hide all of this? Was she doing something she shouldn’t have done, or did she have a reason to not trust us?” Charlie asked.

  “She had every reason to trust us,” Kalligeneia answered. “This is the work we were all brought here to do. A better question would be why we weren’t doing the same thing as a group.”

  Charlie shook his head, He didn’t understand what had happened to the crew, what the previous versions of himself had spent their time doing. She was right. They should have known all about the bat-creatures, and pod-people, and anything else in such close proximity to their home. The more he learned, the more of a disaster the mission up to that point seemed to have been.

  The big Aborigine walked out of the cargo hold carrying a large blue metallic oval. He took it out of the vehicle, walked a few meters from the shuttles and placed it down on an empty table.

  “What’s that?” Charlie asked.

  Allambree shook his head. “It doesn’t look like our technology. I haven’t seen anything like this.”

  “Is it functional?” Kalligeneia asked, walking over.

  Allambree wrapped his large hands around the object and turned them. He then pulled. The oval seemed to open wider. Inside there were yellow and red lights. They were lit up. He took a step back and rubbed his chin. “Is it a robot? What do you reckon?”

  “Robots don’t work,” Charlie said.

  “How would that work?” Allambree countered. “The people who made us could block our robots from functioning, but all robots built by anyone anywhere in the universe? I don’t see how they could manage that.”

  “An alien robot.” Kalligeneia just about drooled as she said it.

  “There were only basic construction robots on Griffon, drones really. Even if this one comes from an extinct civilization, we could learn an incredible amount from a true alien robot.” Allambree was speaking quickly, full of excitement.

  “We could solve our labor problem,” Charlie added.

  Allambree looked at him, nodded, and then turned back to the device. He pressed an illuminated yellow button.

  The device made a loud metallic sound and lifted up as four silver metal rods shot out of the bottom and elevated it. The item’s torso was spinning in two different directions. They separated and a screen appeared. It reflected Allambree’s image back at him.

  He took a large step backwards.

  Two more metal tubes shot out, these ones forward-facing.

  Charlie heard a clicking sound. He’d heard it before. He understood.

  “Get back! It’s going to attack!”

  Allambree raced behind the shuttle. Umbra dashed out of the room. Charlie and Kalligeneia backed up towards the door.

  The device rose up into the air. There was a shimmer of heat underneath it. It turned to the left and the right, scanning.

  It began firing into the shuttle which Allambree hid behind. Charlie couldn’t tell if the projectiles were bullets or energy, but they quickly began to dent and melt the spaceship’s hide.

  He motioned for Kalligeneia to run, and she did so.

  Charlie ran around behind the machine and jumped into the air behind it. He came back down slamming his fists into the device.

  The force of his blow bloodied his hands, but it also knocked the flying object down against the floor. Charlie felt the heat from its exhaust against his face, singeing his hair.

  The machine bounced against the floor and then rose up again at a diagonal angle, trying to right itself.

  He shouted, “Now, Allambree, run!”

  The giant rolled out from behind the other side of the shuttle and ran as fast as he could towards the door. The alien machine was shooting at him, but the angle was wrong and it was missing. Instead, it blew giants chunks out of the wall. In the next room beyond them, Charlie could see a shocked Kalligeneia, who then turned and ran for the stairs.

  The archeologist gone, the machine began turning and scanning the room again. Charlie struggled to stay behind it and hope that it couldn’t see or shoot him. There was no chance he could make it to the door without getting torn to shreds.

  He looked around the room for a weapon. He should have been prepared. They shouldn’t be unarmed, even on their own “ship.” It was just one more thing wrong with the crew, with the way they went about things, which had to change.

  He’d destroyed robots before, but he’d had weapons then.

  The machine was turning towards him faster than he could move out of the way. He reached out and grabbed it around the middle, to turn it or throw it. But the heat from the exhaust burned Charlie’s left hand. He managed to weakly toss the device a short distance, but much less than he expected.

  He saw a wisp of smoke rise up from his palm. The skin was as red as Kalligeneia.

  Umbra grabbed him and the two of them ran out of the room. The machine was firing behind them, and some of the shots sounded like they came very close. The entire wall came crumbling down as Umbra and Charlie ran out of the room and made their way to the stairs. His hand was throbbing. The burning was as painful as anything he had ever experienced.

  As he ran up the stairs behind Umbra, he couldn’t help but watch her long white hair trailing behind her.
It didn’t make sense, but in his imagination, he thought it would be cooling and stop his hand from hurting if he could just bury it underneath her fur.

  A sudden crash behind him brought Charlie to his knees. The lower part of the stairs had fallen down. He could hear the machine still firing, even without an immediate target. Was it supposed to do that or was it malfunctioning?

  Kalligeneia was holding a very large gun. Charlie was surprised that she could lift it. It was half the size of the red woman. Her legs were bent to bear the weight and she was aiming past Charlie.

  Umbra dove off to the side, behind an antique-styled red leather couch. Charlie ducked down and slid past the mother of monsters, just as she opened fire on the machine behind him.

  The sound of Kalligeneia’s weapon was deafening. Charlie’s ears were ringing and his eyes shut involuntarily for a moment. He found himself bent over with his hands over his ears. His burnt hand was hot against the skin of his face.

  The ringing was loud and high-pitched as he turned around to see what had happened.

  He saw a shimmer of yellow energy in front of the machine. There was fire burning against a transparent wall. Charlie had never seen a force-field outside of the movies, but he had seen enough science fiction to understand what he was watching. The machine had protected itself from her shot.

  It fired back.

  Charlie screamed as he watched the bolts fire into her body and undo her shape. What had been a woman, with defined bones, a face, arms, legs, breasts, and hips, became an amorphous red and black smear. The floor she had stood on was broken and thrashed, until even the puddle of her body dropped down through the ground and disappeared from sight.

  A dresser, or some large brown piece of furniture like that, flew through the air towards the machine, but crashed uselessly against the force-field. The splinters fell in a heap on the thick ornate carpet. It was Allambree who had thrown it.

  The machine turned on him and began flying towards the giant at a far greater speed than it had demonstrated before. Allambree fell over backwards with his hands up, as if he could fend the attack off that way.