Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen

by Brad R Torgersen

  But who had put the pyramid here, and why, and for what purpose, were a complete mystery.

  Captain Bednar’s arm slowly dropped to her side. I looked at her as she continued looking at the artifact. The expression on her face, as seen through her helmet’s clear face shield, was almost greedy with anticipation.

  I felt a twinge.

  Technically, she was a mutineer. According to the mission plan established years before leaving Earth, Bednar was supposed to have remained in Titan orbit with our two crew who were manning the Gossamer’s nuclear-rocket-powered return module. Instead she’d handily ripped that page out of the plan—upon our having entered Saturn space—and there’d been precious little any of us could say otherwise.

  After all, what was Mission Control going to do? Fire her?

  She was the captain. And this far from Earth, the captain’s word was law. Once her intentions had been declared we were more or less helpless to prevent her from going down. So we’d bundled into a craft originally built for three people—some of us gritting our teeth—and made our way down via parachute and, then, hot air balloon.

  “Is somebody getting pictures?” asked another voice.

  Specialist Majack—our other female on the descent team. She’d lingered back at the rover while the rest of us approached the pyramid in slow steps. I got the sense Majack found Titan as unsettling as I did. Visibility was only about a hundred meters or so, before things just kind of … faded out. The horizon was a murky blur in the distance, and the sun was a small, semi-bright disc that seemed too far away to give any comfort.

  Specialist Kendelsen cursed, and remembered his media recorder dangling from a cord attached to his torso. All of the coldsuits had digital cameras integrated into their helmets, recording every second of our time on the surface. But Kendelsen had the high-res device that would get the good stuff our bosses back on Earth would want to see. No flash bulb necessary. The device had been designed to compensate for Titan’s perpetual low-light conditions.

  Kendelsen held it at waist level and began a slow, steady reconnaissance around the pyramid proper.

  Excited jabbering—from Pilot Jibbley and Engineer Gaines, above—told me that they were getting the recorder feed being beamed to the rover, then back to the descent module, then up to the return module.

  “Historic,” Bednar said to no one in particular.

  “That’s what you wanted, right?” I said.

  Captain Bednar glared at me for a moment, then she went back to staring at the artifact.

  “They’ll be talking about this discovery for decades,” she said. “Maybe even centuries. Nothing else like it in over one hundred years of probes and landings. And it was just … dumb luck that we happened to pass over it as we floated down. What are the odds, Chief?”

  “Million to one,” I said. And meant it. I too was feeling more than a little impressed by the fact that if our landing zone had been even a few kilometers further in any direction, we’d have missed the pyramid completely.

  “There’s something on the south side,” Kendelsen said with obvious excitement.

  “What is it?” Bednar demanded.

  “I might be wrong, but it looks like … a door.”

  Majack, Bednar, and me all hop-trotted in the relatively weak gravity, our path taking us around the way Kendelsen had gone until we too could see what he was talking about.

  And sure enough, it had the looks of a door, albeit buried halfway beneath the icy surface. I walked up to it and ran my suited hand along the door’s edges. I couldn’t tell if the material of the pyramid was hot or cold. My coldsuit’s fingertip sensors didn’t seem to register a temperature at all.

  When I spotted the small circle in the door’s middle, and tapped it reflexively with a fist, I didn’t actually expect anything to happen. I fell back into the crumbled slush at Captain Bednar’s feet as the door rapidly slid up and out of the way: a ramp lowering into the black bowels of the pyramid proper.

  All four of us were dead silent.

  Then Captain Bednar sprinted past me and down the ramp, disappearing almost immediately into the darkness within.

  “Chief . . ?” Specialist Majack said, half-questioning, as she and Kendelsen stared down at me.

  I spat a couple of choice curses, stood up, and tapped the small control panel on the forearm of my coldsuit. My helmet lamps came on, throwing thick shafts of yellow-tinged white light into the air in front of me. The lamps would drain battery power even faster than the reheaters, but I reasoned there was no choice now.

  “Kendelsen stays,” I said. “Majack, get back to the descent module. Grab as many spare coldsuit batteries as you can, along with the augers and surface sample lockers containing our smaller tools. I’m going in to see what our beloved commanding officer is up to.”

  “You don’t want me to come with?” Kendelsen said, disappointed.

  “No,” I said. “If neither myself nor Captain Bednar return, somebody’s gotta stay outside to help Majack. I’ll keep sending audio and telemetry as long as I can.”

  Which didn’t seem like it would be too long. Already we’d lost Bednar’s feed. Whatever was blocking exterior electromagnetic examination was cutting off our suit-to-suit communications too.

  “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 nor 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 messag
e 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.

  “Yah, 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 onboard the return module?”

  “Doing 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 onboard 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 push-and-shove 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, alo
ng 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.