by Isaac Hooke
I gently plucked a sheet from the ceiling and brought it to my helmet. Faded script ran across the fragment in neat lines. It cracked beneath my touch, breaking into dust and diffusing into the void.
Lafige swung around a corner, his carbine braced against his shoulder.
“Got something,” he said.
Around the corner was a metal desk bolted to the far wall. The flooring around the desk still had some color, the rest washed out by UV rays spilling through gaps in the ceiling closer to the center. The desk had ornate engravings of an alien forest, a single image wrapped around the sides and drawers. The top was a deep black, like polished obsidian. On the wall just above the desk, there was a three dimensional poster of a sun setting behind purple mountains. High in the image’s sky, a space station made of several large rings attached to four long spars that ran along the outer edge.
Lafige unsnapped a utility knife off his belt and pried open a drawer.
“Bingo.” He took out a small slate that glinted in the light. “Whatever’s on here will be worth something. Even if we can’t translate it, some eggheads on Earth will pay a fortune for the chance to do it. Looks like there’s a power button.”
“No, wait—”
Lafige pressed a thumb to the side, and broke the device into a thousand pieces. He swore and hurled the remains at me. Bits and pieces bounced off my helmet glass.
“Told you this was a waste of time!” Lafige glared at me as he stomped out of the room.
I took a holo recording of the poster, then tried to open another drawer. It snapped apart, releasing what looked like pens and electronic styluses into the room. All crumbled to dust when they touched the floor and walls.
The rest of the drawers were empty. Was this the study room of some well-to-do alien? A monastic retreat for the preservation of culture? There were too many possibilities and not enough evidence for me to make any kind of informed decision. I could see the parallels between this planet and Earth; was their culture so different than ours? What had happened here?
If Shiroyama ever sent a proper archaeology team, I don’t know what they’d manage to piece together when everything turned to dust at the slightest provocation.
An alert popped up on my visor. One of the survey drones a few hundred miles away had entered orbit on a large asteroid, nearly the size of a stadium back on Earth. A surface scan video of the sand colored rock raced past my screen, coming to a sudden stop over a metal sheet exposed to the void, just below the surface level. I zoomed in, and saw light grey hexagons making up the sheet.
The drone sent another image, a perfect square cut into the side of the asteroid, the size of an elevator shaft. The shaft ended in darkness deep within the rock. The drone asked for further instructions.
I tapped into the drone’s sensor logs…and smiled. Heat, well above the near zero of the void, radiated out of the shaft and off of the exposed metal. A power source.
“Lafige, it’s our lucky day,” I said.
***
I floated just outside the square shaft leading into the heart of the asteroid. Lafige’s flashlight ran up and down tracks embedded against each side of the wall. His light faded into nothing against the darkness within.
“You go first,” Lafige said.
“What? You’re the one with the gun,” I said.
“You found this, you get to go first.” He motioned forward with the barrel of his weapon. “Something attacks and I’ll be right behind, ready to save you.”
“And die in the same wild hail of bullets. I can’t wait.” I grabbed the rails and pulled myself into the shaft. I floated into the darkness, giving myself a boost forward every few seconds with another grasp and tug against the rails. Smooth rock walls went by, illuminated by the lights on my suit.
“You die and I get your stuff, spacer’s law,” Lafige said. I looked toward my feet and saw him following me down the shaft, slower and with plenty of space between us.
I reached for the rails for another boost…and missed. The near wall moved away as my second reach missed too. I rolled over and got my arms out in time to soften my fall against one side. My suit kicked up dust as I skidded to an inglorious stop. An alert on my helmet told me what my body already knew; I was in gravity.
The familiar pull felt a little stronger than Earth normal as I stood up. Just ahead, a shining metal door on large hinges ended the shaft. A small glass-covered circle was the door’s only noticeable feature. No handles. No control pad. Nothing else.
I walked up to the door and touched it with my gloved fingertips. A slight sensation of warmth seeped through my hand.
Lafige slid to a stop behind me.
“Could have said something about the gravity. Hello? What’s this?” He stayed behind me, his weapon clutched in both hands.
“Airlock is my guess.” I took my hand away and ran my thumb over my fingers. “Hard to say if the same culture we looked at earlier made this too. The regolith in here looks granite, intrusive and igneous by the grain.”
“What?” Lafige asked.
“This asteroid was deep beneath the surface before the planet broke up,” I said. “This may have been built after the disaster.”
“Claim jumpers?” Lafige snapped the safety off his rifle.
“Could be…we need to get an excavation bot from the Moonshot, have it carve out the sides of the vault door. We’ll need to seal off the shaft for atmo pressure and—”
“Or we just set charges against the hinges and blow the damn thing open.” Lafige’s fingers tapped commands on his forearm screen.
“And ruin whatever inside? I thought you wanted to make money.”
“You know how many stray ‘roids are in this system? The longer we hang around, the higher chance we have of micrometeorites breaking something delicate on the Moonshot, and I do not want to be ten years into our return flight home when a damaged system goes tits up. We are to loot what we can and high tail it back. The hydrogen scoops on the forward module already look like Swiss cheese. Now you either figure out a way to jimmy that door open or we’re going to do it the boom-boom way.”
“Settle down.” I went to the door and leaned toward the small glass circle in the middle. Light reflected off a small lens the size of a fingernail.
“Looks like there’s a sensor here,” I said. “I’ll need a multi-spectrum broadcast antennae from the ship. If it’s still powered up we can use a brute force attack to—”
The lens clicked and I sprang back.
“What’d you do?” Lafige asked.
Red lights lit up around the outer edge of the door, all shining through the metal. The door popped open and a wisp of air escaped into the shaft. It swung to the side, revealing a small antechamber and another circular door within. White light poured through a square window.
“Airlock,” I said.
“Call in a drone?”
A white laser beam shot between opposite railings from behind us. The beam held steady, then another beam created a cross through the center of the shaft. More lasers appeared, connecting each beam to the others and forming a lattice that neither of us could get around.
“What did you do, man?” Lafige backed towards me, his rifle at his shoulder, sweeping from side to side.
“Hell if I know!”
The laser beams moved towards us slowly.
Light flashed from the rifle and a bullet sprang off the floor railing in a hail of sparks. The lasers picked up speed.
I stepped over the airlock’s threshold and grabbed Lafige by his life support pack. I hauled him into the airlock a second before he would have figured out the hard way what the lasers would do to his vac suit.
The outer door slammed shut with a whump that sent chills up my spine. Air hissed into the lock.
“Told you we should have just blown the door.” Lafige bashed the butt of his rifle against the metal door. He kept hitting the door, shouting a different expletive with each strike.
The airlock wall
s were bare. If there was a way to open the outer or inner doors, I couldn’t see it. My suit pinged an alert on my helmet; the air pressure was rising. A mixture of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen, not exactly a match for Earth air, but close enough that I could breathe without asphyxiation or lung damage from too much oxygen.
“Let us out!” Lafige kicked the outer door and lost his balance. He stumbled into the inner door…and fell back when that portal opened without a sound, sinking into the walls. He let off a yelp and landed in a thick patch of grass and branches as thick as a finger. Wood snapped as he clambered back to his feet.
A hedgerow of mossy trees and waist-high switch blades of grass blocked the new opening. Air flowed around the two of us and my suit’s sensors went green as the atmosphere nearly matched Earth’s.
“I hate nature.” Lafige brushed bits of grass and tiny heart shaped leaves off of his suit. “What the hell is this? Who puts an airlock where you can’t get in or out?” He grabbed a tree with dappled marble bark and gave it a shake.
I picked up one of the small leaves and passed it over the sensors built into my gloves.
“It’s not nature,” I said, “no chlorophyll…nothing organic at all. Some kind of polymer.” I grabbed my helmet and twisted it open.
“Hey hey hey!” Lafige tried to grab my arms, but I twisted aside and took off my helmet before he could stop me. “You know the bio protocols! You catch some kind of alien smallpox and Shiroyama will void the both of us.”
“There’s no life readings. Check your suit,” I said. The air was cold and crisp. I held the leaf to my nose and sniffed, catching a faint aroma of sandalwood.
“Son of a bitch, not even a touch of bacteria in the filters,” he said.
The foliage trapping us within the airlock rustled, opening a path wide enough for one of us.
“Nope. Big ol’ nope,” Lafige said, “got ourselves an alien intelligence here. FCF will lock us away if we screw around with first contact protocols. We bring anything back from a living civilization and the feds will be all over us. Let’s cut our losses and leave. Pretend this never happened.”
The branches shook briefly.
“Looks like we’re guests. Don’t think we have a choice,” I said.
“We stay right here. Eventually they’ll figure out we don’t want to play and let us go.”
“Or,” I took a tentative step onto the path, “they’ll lock us in there, drain the air, and wait until our life support fails. They could have killed us with the lasers. Could have left us in that little box. Instead we’ve got an invitation to take a look around.”
“What do you think’s in there? Bunch of green dancing girls and mountains of gold?”
I walked through the narrow opening, twigs scraping against my suit as I made my way to a clearing ahead.
“I want to find out. Neither of us came all this way to leave empty handed,” I said.
“You get me killed and I will haunt your ass,” Lafige grumbled as he joined me on the path. “This place has more plastic plants than my grandmother’s house. You—hey!”
A tree branch swiped through the air and ripped the rifle out of Lafige’s hands. The woods pressed in around him, holding him in place as his weapon went from tree to tree before getting tossed into the open-air lock. The doors slid shut without a sound and vanished behind a veil of thick trees that came out of nowhere.
“Now we’re dead.” Lafige squirmed against the crush of branches, but accomplished nothing as a vine wrapped around his helmet. A slight twist and the helmet popped away.
I felt a tug at my waist and saw my own helmet disappear into the trees.
The forest waved from side to side, then branches dangled our helmets on the path behind us.
“Guess we’ll get them on our way out,” I said.
The branches shoved Lafige forward.
“Knew I should have gone on the Thetis,” my partner said.
I walked out of the thicket and onto a glade of shin high grass. The sky was pale, overcast. I looked back to the trees and saw nothing but a forest extending into darkness. Had I not come through an asteroid to get here, I would have sworn I was standing on a planet.
“Where the hell are we?” Lafige asked.
I held my hand to the sky and activated the laser range finders.
“The ‘sky’ is only a hundred meters away,” I said. “We’re still in the rock, just surrounded by top tier holograms.”
“FCF sim pits aren’t this good.” Lafige kicked at the grass and a swarm of insects leaped up and away from us. They bounded once toward to the opposite end of the oval shaped glade.
I walked toward the mass of bugs and they jumped away again.
“That way,” I said and followed the swarm.
“You’ve got some business experience, right?” Lafige hurried behind me, keeping at my heels like a scarred puppy. “You made the Neptune-Ceres run couple times before your…incident. You can talk us out of this.”
“Assuming there’s something to talk to and we figure out some way to understand each other. Good thing I insisted Shiroyama give me a language primer. This kind of atmosphere, the size of the artifacts we’ve seen…makes sense that the aliens use air over a larynx to talk to each other. We’re not dealing with sonar or pheromones.” I touched a box the size of a deck of cards on my belt. The computer within could teach an alien computer English, assuming our unseen hosts had a computer that could understand binary and elementary YES/NO code sets that would grow in complexity until conversation was possible.
The AI developers on Earth swore the device could teach English to anything but the oddest intelligence…sparks within a nebula or sentient lichen. All their assurances didn’t mean much to me this far from human space.
“I thought Bennington Industries charged a fortune for those,” Lafige said.
“This one is black market.” I stopped and pointed. There, at the edge of a glade was a seated figure covered in bright cloth. She, based on the pair of bulges on her chest, sat in a lotus position, her head bowed and covered by an orange cowl. Stacks of books extended away from her knees, enclosing a worn patch of grass.
“What do we do?” Lafige maneuvered to keep me between him and the seated woman.
“I’m not exactly sure…”
The swarm of insects bounded toward the woman and landed all around her. The bugs jumped up and down repeatedly.
I made my way over, stopped ten feet away. A red veil obscured much of her face, but the features were almost human. Her head was wide, tiny bone fangs jutted out from her chin. Beads covered her face from the nose to her forehead. Both hands were a pale grey, withered and bent with arthritis.
I slowly removed the Bennington device from my belt and held it to my mouth.
“Hello. I am Derek Jenson…we’ve come to trade.” Wave forms appeared on the box as it broadcast my words across the electromagnetic spectrum.
The woman didn’t move. She didn’t even seem to be breathing.
“Maybe the books are all they’ve got,” Lafige said. “We come all this way and maybe we’ll get alien fairy tales. Great.”
I repeated my greeting.
The bugs jumped away in several directions, leaving me unsure what direction they wanted me to follow.
The alien’s head snapped up with a rustle of cloth and beads. Fear dumped adrenaline into my bloodstream as primal instincts demanded I choose between fight or flight. I held my ground, muscles tense.
One of her gnarled hands lifted up and a finger pointed to the Bennington box. Her hand flipped over, palm up. The beads around one eye parted, and a pool of polished obsidian looked me over.
“This is so weird,” Lafige said.
“This is progress.” I slowly passed the box to the old alien’s hand. My gloved fingers brushed over her skin and my suit’s sensors went to work.
She tucked the box into her gaudy colored robes, then pointed her other hand to a trail leading away from the glade.
“What do you want for this?” Lafige reached for a stack of books. The growl of a predator sounded out of the woods and Lafige snatched his hand back.
A pair of glowing eyes appeared in the woods, then vanished.
“Not for sale, got it,” he said.
I looked down at the screen on my forearm. I frowned and glanced back at the alien.
“She’s not alive,” I said. “No heartbeat, respiration, neural activity. Her skin’s at ambient temperature.”
“An android…that’s good news. FCF says they’re not really alive. So, we’ve still got salvage rights to whatever we find.”
Her hand bobbed up and down.
“Let’s keep moving.” I followed the path, little more than a game trail worn into the grass. Around the trees was a circular meadow with two shaggy equine creatures. Both bore leather saddles, one much smaller than the other, and stood still as statues.
I swept my glove’s sensors over the horse creatures, and got the same artificial readings as I got from the seated alien.
“Nothing is alive here,” I said. “I’m not even getting a hit on mitochondrial DNA.”
“Just get us out of here,” Lafige said.
We came to a tree line next to a furrowed field where an alien was frozen solid, a foot against the flat of a shovel half in the dirt. It was broad shouldered and lacked some of the female android’s features, so I assumed it was male. He wore a simple long-sleeved tunic, trousers and boots. The bone protrusions on his chin extended half way up his jawline. His skin was bright red.
Beyond another tree line, on the other side of the plot, was a small village of six-sided buildings. A tendril of smoke rose from a chimney, carrying the smell of burning wood and cooked meat.
“Since when do androids need to eat?” Lafige asked.
“Maybe they’re cooking for our sake,” I said. “Plenty of Earth cultures welcomed guests with a meal. Though judging them by our standards will be a mistake.”
“Weren’t there some cultures on Indonesia that would eat visitors? I don’t think it’ll be a mistake to be on the lookout for that.”
