Alien Artifacts

by Seanan McGuire

  There was a too-long pause, and she shivered from her soles to the top of her head.

  “Help’s coming...” Brad said, his signal fuzzy and uncertain.

  It was right about then that the blue spot of sky overhead blinked once, and then closed for good.

  The walls shook, and Seika tried to keep her balance as thudding objects dropped around her. The air roared, and she saw lights flashing in sequence just before she stopped seeing anything at all.

  * * *

  “Ninety point two,” she said. The thermometer’s green light was close to her face, and she remembered she needed to report. Other than the tiny green light there was a radiance about, a pulsing, rhythmic thing, like twelve bar blues without the sound. Close, that light, close, almost as close as the sled she was lying beside. The sled was warm, the seat still working, just as the light was warm, still pulsing. She ought to sing. Maybe they’d find her if she was singing.

  “Ninety point one.” Yeah, it had blinked. She said it, heard static in reward.

  Needed a way to get out of here. A hammer. One in the repair kit. She could...

  More noises and rumbles.

  “Eighty seven with zero.” It meant something, to somebody, and if they wanted to know so bad, they could come look for themselves, that’s what she thought.

  She dropped the thermometer, which tweeted release.

  Tired and hurt, sleepy.

  Somewhere close, there was music.

  She raised her head, and it was right there, the—the artifact—right next to her, glowing, and pulsing in a twelve-bar progression that she wanted to remember. Her left hand twitched, and realized she was holding her harmonica.

  The progression repeated itself—no, not quite, there was the vary, she could hear it plain right inside her head, and she pulled herself closer to the thing. The artifact. She put her harmonica on it, so that it was out of the snow, and curled next to it. It was warm, and there was music, and she tried to keep her eyes open, to learn where it was going with this variation it was playing around with, but her head hurt, and the rest of her did, too, and—

  She drifted off to sleep with good old-fashioned blues going round inside her head.

  * * *

  She was home, Antarctica nine months in the past. The sprained ankles had healed without much fuss, though there were a couple pins in her leg, holding the bones together. The concussion’d been the worst of it, though.

  That was what they said.

  They also said that there had been no artifact, no gemstone from elsewhere, playing twelve-bar blues with light—so what did they know?

  Well, that was just it, they did know. Had to know. She almost knew—almost remembered—even given the concussion and the course of heavy-duty medications for her pain.

  That was what they said.

  She told Aminah how it had been, after she got home. She flew out to Colorado, to visit her mother, and told her how it had been, too. She wasn’t supposed to talk about it, but she didn’t have secrets from Aminah, and her mother was a professional.

  Aminah…didn’t believe her. Oh, she believed Seika thought she had seen something—that concussion, you know.

  Her mother said she was reserving judgment.

  But it had happened, exactly this way, Seika remembered it:

  The ice had given way one more time just as the copter flew over to reconnoiter, and the intrepid Navy rescue crew had a good old time digging her out. They’d gotten to her, though, and strapped her into the stretcher, then they scrambled out of the ‘way, leaving her with the medic and with Brad, who would escort her to the nearest hospital.

  She’d been fuzzy and none too coherent, but she heard it, plain as plain, the opening riff for “After Midnight,” and she’d gotten her eyes open just in time to see the artifact ascend in a spray of ice-shred, and turned, carefully, as if it was taking a picture of Brad, and of the medic, and of her.

  “Quick!” she tried to yell, but her voice wasn’t working, and the two men were frozen in what might’ve been amazement.

  The song increased in volume, there was a flash that seemed to contain every color in the universe, and then—

  It was gone.

  Brad told her it had never happened. The people in uniform told her it had never happened. The doctors said that concussions were funny things.

  Eventually, she agreed that it had never happened, and that she wouldn’t talk about it, and came home.

  She’d been helping Aminah in the noodle shop, doing some small gigs around the neighborhood. There’d been a couple of job offers, right after she’d come home and the news outlets had fun with the tapes of her serenading the ice and snow. She’d turned them down, and in her spare time finished that song about Uncle Bly and how to ride a snow machine, in and around playing with a certain twelve-note progression, trying to see where it might go.

  Her cellphone gave out with the opening bars of “Smokestack Lightning.” She glanced at the number, and brought the phone to her ear.

  “Mom?”

  “Seika, I just thought you’d like to know that we’re getting a signal from those dark matter threads we’ve been following, out toward Scholz’s Star.”

  “A signal?” she repeated.

  “Yes,” her mother said, and Seika could swear she heard the grin in her voice. “There’s some pretty good twelve-bar blues coming out of there.”

  THE CAPTAIN’S THRONE

  Andrija Popovic

  Sophia’s breath fogged against the hazmat suit’s facemask. A massive sphincter sealed the flight deck behind interlocking green scales. She played her suit lights over the doorway. Condensation dripped along the jade-green surfaces onto the chitinous floor. Bone-like corridor supports arched overhead. Cool blue light leaked from unseen sources. Ancient hard suits, nestled in larynx-like openings, flanked her like an undead honor guard. The exoarmors, built more like actual skeletons than re-enforced spacesuits, looked down on her with hollow eyes.

  “So, didn’t anyone think to bring a heater? Maybe a dehumidifier?” She caught a fat drop of water on her glove as it fell from an exoarmor’s snout. “This can’t be good for the ship.”

  “Enough commentary, Ms. Odwele.” Drayson’s voice rattled through her skull. The implants fed communications directly into her ear, and sent telemetry on her condition back to RTG IntraSolar’s Campus ship. “Please begin. You copy?”

  “I copy.” Sophia unsealed her glove. The ship was cool, but not cold. There was a bite in the air, like a late fall day back on Earth. No humidity sticking clothes to your back; just a light wind and the rattle of falling leaves against the concrete.

  Finding the door switch took a few moments. She felt around the airlock, imagining where she would put a switch if she was an inscrutable alien with a hatred of angles. But it was a simple thing—a sphere set behind an eyelid-like opening in the wall. It was warm to the touch, and soft, and gave easily when squeezed.

  The door irised open and a spray of warm air fogged her visor, blinding her. She tried to wipe it away with her bare hand, but just streaked the plastic. Sophia unsealed the helmet. A gush of biting air smacked her in the face. She expected the metallic tang of recycled atmosphere, but instead got a burst of cinnamon from beyond the door.

  Like the rest of the ship, the flight deck was grown more than built. Ribs melted into banks of coral-like instruments. No jagged edges or harsh angles. Every apparent control was smooth, like the door mechanism. She touched one of the larger spheres. It was warm, like a stone left in the sun, but there was no reaction.

  Three great pods sat before the coral banks; two to the side and one in the center, the largest of the trio. The Captain’s throne. They reminded her of mussel shells stuck onto an errant bit of concrete. Hundreds of tiny filaments—ribbed cables the size of capillaries and wires as fine as cat hairs—flowed up from the floor and wrapped around the shells. Control connections?

  Sophia reached for the Captain’s throne. Her fingertips
brushed the surface. It felt like a big beetle shell, glossy and lacquered. When she rested her hand atop the carapace, an itch dug its way into her palm. She yanked her fingers away just as the pod spun around.

  The throne split down the middle. The outer shell folded up and back, stretching open like a mouth. Inside was an acceleration couch carved from ivory. There was no other way she could describe it. It was intended for someone much taller, with very different limbs, but humanoid nonetheless.

  “Well?” Drayson buzzed her. “What the fuck are you waiting for, Ms. Odwele? Have a seat.”

  * * *

  “Why am I out of the box?”

  “We’ll get to that in a moment. Can you please state your name and position for the recorders?”

  A long pause, followed by fingers tapping against a plastic table top. “Sophia Odwele, navigator and pilot for Outer System Shipping.”

  “OSS doesn’t exist anymore. You are an employee of RTG IntraSolar. Please remember that.”

  Sophia laughed, bitter and sharp. She remembered. She remembered her company and her crew. She remembered the lean times and the fat. She remembered their first true ship. She remembered Leslie, and the way they lounged in the pilot’s seat. You can fiddle with my controls anytime...

  And then she remembered the buyout. She remembered the shock of being stranded on the edge of the solar system, her life now owned by another company. She remembered Leslie, coughing blood, unable to afford anti-reversion drugs under RTG’s “health plan.” She remembered the box, swallowing her, freezing her.

  “Don’t worry. Human Relations doesn’t let us box babies forget who owns us.”

  “And please refrain from using that term. Use cryo-worker if you must.” The executive assistant, Milodrag, ran his fingers across his tablet. “Now, it says here you’ve mostly been working on synthetic intelligence synchronization and integrated ship navigation testing, correct?”

  “Yes. They’ve had us slaved to an ice hauler on the old Oort-Neptune run.”

  “Please, refrain from using the term ‘slaved’—you and your interface partner are ‘guiding’ the ship.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake...”

  “Language! In either case, you have one of the highest synchronization rates with your synthetic intelligence partners. Your acceleration levels are almost preternatural. Congratulations.”

  Another long pause, followed by: “This is important because…?”

  “Well, Ms. Odwele, we have an opportunity for you.”

  * * *

  “Fuck you, you fucking bitch.” Drayson stared at the alien ship, grimacing and knocking back another scotch. He yanked at his collar, feeling it tighten against his clammy throat. The ship spun over the conference room table, a translucent sphinx painted in shades of inky blue.

  “Sir, please, you know how HR feels about that kind of language in public spaces.” Milodrag, his assistant, clutched his tablet like a religious icon. The first generation of his family to reach executive status, he feared reprimands from HR and imbued them with a patina of divine retribution.

  “Fine, fine. Can’t even swear in one of our conference rooms.” He crossed the room and dropped his glass into the auto-bar. It filled with another dose of scotch. He peered out the window at the Campus ship’s inverted world. The landscaping, the office buildings, all curved upwards and wrapped around the central light column running the ship’s length. Green views were a reward. Outside of the office spaces, only executives and the occasional Shareholder were allowed to live there. Everyone else saw the green only during working hours. “And here I thought I’d earned the right to swear.”

  “I’m just not sure why you’re upset, sir. The project is progressing well. Material sciences is on track to meet their intellectual property quotas.” Milodrag threw up a fistful of charts. Drayson whipped his hand through them, scattering the holodisplays.

  “Yes, but that’s the problem. Material sciences, shipbuilding, the grit of how this thing was grown. We’re locking it down, trademarked RTG. But so is every other company with an alien artifact.” He pushed the ship aside and drew up a chart of intellectual property filings. Trillions in possible profits scrolled by. “I’ve run the comparison numbers—we’ve yet to place down any claims which don’t have similar counter-claims out there. We will make our return on investment, but we’re not surpassing it.”

  “It’s only a matter of time, sir.”

  “We don’t have time. And we shouldn’t need it!” Drayson grabbed the virtual model of the alien vessel and expanded it. “We have an intact ship! This thing in pristine condition. Everyone else is working from wreckage. Drive system is whole, life still left in the power source and yet it’s dead in the water.”

  “Water?”

  “Figure of speech. It’s a hunk of rock. No better than that coral stuff the techs say it’s made of.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “If it didn’t have mechanical overrides on the airlocks, Shareholder’s help us…Have we gotten anything from the biological testing?”

  “We’ve confirmed the ship is reacting to living beings. So far, the piloted rats and raccoons we’ve sent have activated doors and lights.” Milodrag pulled up another handful of results, mingled with point-of-view footage from the rat and raccoon drones. Riddled with sensors, piloted from afar, and extremely expendable, the rodents let them test the environment and collect intellectual property data in the process.

  “Yes, yes. The structure is bioreactive. Nothing new. What about the controls? The command chairs? The medical bays?” The biotech division diddled themselves while dreaming of unlocking the medical cocoons. Remnants from previous wrecks contained “royal jelly”—a substance which acted like a mutagen, a micromachine carrier and aphrodisiac all at once. Exposure to damaged pods created unusual, and rather dangerous changes in test subjects. An intact pod could be the secret to reshaping life.

  Or, at the very least, curing stretch marks and male pattern baldness.

  “Nothing, sir, sorry. We’re testing with chimps now but it is mirroring earlier results. Key systems have to be handled by an organic, sapient creature of human cognition levels.”

  “So we should send someone in.” Drayson smiled. “We’ve got shirkers all over this ship. Just look at the box babies. One of them could be useful.”

  Milodrag swallowed and coughed. “Um, HR would be furious if we ordered anyone in. Liability issues. This would have to be completely voluntary.”

  “Then get the intelligences working on a profile.” Drayson tapped his fingers against the table. The sphinx-ship spun and flipped. The fore docking section—the face of the sphynx—gaped open, as if caught mid-snicker.

  The fucking thing was laughing at him.

  “We’ll see if we can find the right person to ‘volunteer’ for this mission.”

  * * *

  Sophia approached the throne. Open and opalescent, she imagined Venus standing upon it, trying to keep covered while Renaissance artists gawked. Gingerly, she touched one of the spine-like ridges running along the interior. The ivory surface shimmered and fluoresced like a cuttlefish. It was surprisingly warm under her hand.

  She backed away from the throne. “How are my vitals? Anything worth patenting yet?”

  “Very funny. Now please, sit in the chair.”

  “Negative. I’m going to see if I can activate any other controls. For all I know, this thing does nothing but give you good lumbar support.” Her in-suit monitors displayed no changes in vitals. The company would be disappointed. They’d hoped her blood would be riddled with biotech artifacts rewriting her brain with the ship’s operating manual by now. All safe and easy to patent from several hundred klicks away.

  “Now, this looks like a view screen. I’m going to make contact.” Sophia pressed her hand against the sapphire blue surface. Lights, subtle and coruscating, danced under her dark brown fingers. For a moment, she expected a burst of energy from the screen. But all she got was cool blue and the sound of ai
r circulating through the room. It sounded like an ocean tide.

  “No reaction, Ms. Odwele.” Drayson’s voice grated. She imagined him, arms crossed, sweat pouring out from his perfectly coiffed management hair, furious at the disruption. “No more playing around. Have a seat. You copy?”

  “I copy.” In defiance, she dragged her hand across the control surfaces and the monitors and the bone-coral in between. The sapphire blue light followed her fingers, streaking behind her. Then it faded into the depths of the ship once again.

  The throne waited. She tried to spin it around, but it would not turn. Carefully, she inched herself into the seat. It felt wrong, poking her in the back just above the hip. The creature intended for this throne bore its weight in different ways. The leg sections were strangely shaped, made for a being with kangaroo feet, not stubby human ones.

  Her palm rested on another sapphire globe. It warmed. Veins of blue light grew and spread through the chair. A hazy glow covered her, but no reaction otherwise. The throne did not shift.

  “This thing is a rock. I’m getting small reactions but nothing worthwhile.” Sophia pulled herself out. It grew warmer, but didn’t even bother to rotate or close. “I’m going to try a few more controls, you copy?”

  “Negative. The team has another suggestion.”

  “Suggestion?”

  “The ship is responding to biological contact. So give it more contact.” She could hear Drayson leer over the next word. “Strip. There should be nothing on you but the monitors. You copy?”

  Sophia wished she had a handset, or something else she could throw. “I copy.”

  She unsealed the boots first and stepped clear, expecting the shock of a cold metal floor beneath her bare feet. But the surface felt more like carpet than deck plating. It curled under her toes.