Noumenon Infinity
Page 34
Yanking one of her meters from its Velcro fastening at her chest, she began performing the requisite scans. Carmen approached a far wall, clearly preoccupied with finding how the aliens entered and exited the bay from within. Ratha stuck to the shuttle’s hide like a barnacle on an old carrier ship.
“Okay,” Justice said, glancing at the meter’s reading, talking to herself out loud. Carmen turned in her direction—the scrolling dialogue in her helmet letting her know Justice was speaking. “Gravitational strength is . . . nine-point-eight meters per second squared. That’s Earth standard.” It was also convoy standard, so nothing to get too worked up about. Most likely, the aliens had made it comfortable for them.
After all, the humans couldn’t fly like the aliens could. How they managed that, no one had been able to guess yet.
“Still no atmospherics,” Dr. Ratha added, one shaking hand raised with equipment beeping away. “They’re keeping us in vacuum, just like we did with them.”
Justice unleashed her sampling brush and went to work sweeping at the soft decking. If there were any little bits of dirt or skin or otherwise, she was going to find them.
“Any follicles yet?” Carmen asked after a time.
Justice dipped the base of the brush into a receiving tube on her hip, capping the vial and changing out the brush head. The little red and green lights, which indicated excess particle presence in the vials, were all still red. “I got nothing,” Justice said. “There aren’t any seams for anything to catch in.” She did another cursory glance around the space, searching for a lip or vent to take her brush to. But everything was smooth. “Maybe this space is always in vacuum?” she suggested. “I see no way in or out besides the hatch—for air or otherwise. Maybe they don’t actually come in here personally.”
[Keep looking,] Carmen signed.
“How are we doing?” the pilot asked over the comms channel.
Carmen turned to his window and signed that they were still busy, for everyone on the shuttle to sit tight.
Justice guided her brush over the outside of the shuttle, thinking that perhaps some static discharge from their craft might have attracted a few stray particles. She outlined Dr. Ratha where he stood, like she was outlining a murder victim in chalk.
“Very funny,” he groused at her.
“Well someone’s got to liven up this amazingly uneventful mi—”
The brightness of the bay intensified. A snap-flash. Brilliant, blinding white engulfed everything. Everyone cried out, and Justice ducked away from Dr. Ratha, pulling into herself, throwing her hands in front of her helmet’s visor, which did nothing. The light streamed in past her fingers, past the UV protective layering of the glass, past her eyelids even.
It was so bright she could see it with her eyes closed.
She took a stumbling step back and her boot heel caught on the side of the shuttle’s stepladder. She tumbled, spinning herself so she could put her hands down. But instead of a firm smack of suit-to-ground, falling to the alien deck was like falling into a marshmallow.
The light went on, and on. She crouched on the deck, faceplate pressing into the soft floor, hands over the back of her head, knees pulled into her chest.
Everyone shouted and cussed, but no one was really saying anything. It was pure distress, all chatter and no substance. Not even a coherent cry for help.
Their pilot slammed on the emergency call button that bypassed the shuttle hangar and went straight to the bridge. “We can’t . . . Too bright. There’s so much—they’re blinding us!”
And with that cry, the light winked out. It could have gone back to its previous luminosity, or it could have gone off altogether, leaving them in utter darkness. But Justice couldn’t tell. Her vision was completely wiped out. It wasn’t a blackness—it was more like a giant sunspot in her eye. Like she’d stared directly into a star for a full five minutes and now there was nothing but a bright pink smear and static grayness beyond.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Why did they do that? Oh my god oh my god oh . . .
“Carmen?” Justice called. “Carmen, do you copy? Are your gloves working? Carmen?”
“Yes,” Carmen said over the audio—not answering her questions, simply giving an affirmative that she was present and could feel that Justice was talking.
Thank heaven for small blessings, Justice thought. Carmen had specialized gloves with an emergency backup communication indicator. They were meant for blind crew members in case audio went out—but Carmen had insisted on a pair for herself.
Right now, Carmen had Justice’s name in braille rolling over her fingertips.
“My pressure indicator is beeping,” said Ratha, voice a high panic. “External. They’re pressurizing the bay.”
“Yes,” Carmen said again. Once more, only an indicator, not an answer.
Justice did her best to crawl in Carmen’s direction, having only a general idea of where she was when everything had whited out. Someone flopped to the ground beside her—not Dr. Ratha—probably one of the security guards. They must have stumbled out.
“This is bullshit,” somebody grumbled. “This is all . . . Get back in here! The three of you need to get back into the shuttle right this second! This is bullshit.”
Whump.
Justice didn’t hear it so much as feel it. There was, simply put, a strange, deep whump that blasted into her core. It immediately made her feel woozy, and she stopped crawling.
Whump. Whump. Whump.
Was it a deep bass? Was it just a sound? So low she couldn’t hear it, but could feel it in her organs, reverberating through her suit?
“What the fuck is that?” shouted Mac.
The sounds of someone puking in their suit followed.
Then everyone began shouting again, all of them barking orders.
“I don’t know—I don’t know!”
“Get back inside!”
“Pulse? Captain Tan? Captain, anybody, come in.”
“I am here,” Carmen said. “What’s happening? I’m here.”
“Stay put!”
“No, get inside!”
“Captain? Pulse, come in.”
Whump. Whump. Whump.
More puking.
Justice’s head throbbed. As the deep whumps came on faster, each cresting through her only a moment before the next, her ears began to ring. She clutched at her middle, at her head, and thought This is a really complicated way to kill us, before she blacked out.
Justice was beyond surprised when she woke up. She hadn’t fought dying, like she always assumed she would when she found herself facing the void. Maybe her body had instinctually known it wasn’t dying, though her mind had insisted it was.
Either way, she was conscious now. And half of her wished she wasn’t. Her skull felt like it was split open along the sutures, and she swore she could feel her brain throbbing. A quick, panicked thought before she opened her eyes had her wondering if her skull was cracked open—there was no end to the alien dissection fantasies she could conjure.
None of this made sense. If they had wanted to hurt the convoy, they’d had a year to do it. So why now? What had changed?
Her hand went to her face and hit plastic. She was still in her suit. Her vision was still slightly blurred, but now her eyes felt burned instead of blinded—like they’d been open to the wind for too long.
Blinking tears out of her eyes, she sat up. Rolling her neck, she looked at the ceiling, expecting to see the white of the supplies bay.
Boy was she wrong.
She looked straight up—or down—into the faceplate of an alien sitting at some kind of desk-like structure. It, too, had its neck craned back, as though her rustling had drawn its attention.
Why the hell am I on the ceiling? Maybe I did die. I died and I’m having an out of body experience before I disappear forever.
Out of her peripheral she detected movement. She shrank away from it, scrambling back. She elbowed someone in the stomach, and over her comms sh
e heard a distinct “oof.”
Everyone was there—all of them. Carmen, the pilot, Dr. Ratha, and all of the security team, were laid out to her left and right on some kind of platform, equally as squishy as the bay’s flooring.
Like meat in a market . . .
Stop that!
The movement in her periphery was another alien, standing near the platform, gathering all of the human’s instruments, scanners, and loose accessories into a clear bowl.
Since first contact, the same Lùhng had never come aboard the convoy twice. Their preparation for this trip had included a flash card test, wherein Tan had shown them multiple pictures of the aliens they had on record, just in case they were to encounter one of their visitors. But these two hadn’t been in the stack.
She tried to focus on them, to blot out the bizarreness of the room—in which every wall was covered with equipment, so much so that it was obvious that wall was the wrong term. Every centimeter of the room was a floor, bowing out and up and over. It was mind-bendingly disorienting.
She made a point of focusing on the Lùhng so as not to think of the mobius floor. The alien nearest her was the type with spines. Its hair was thick, straight, and very dark—almost black, but with hints of browns and tans. It reminded her a little of porcupine quills, with the ends tapering into somewhat lighter shades than the rest. And it was big—thirteen feet tall if it was an inch. Around its neck it wore some kind of chain from which an incredibly thin, hand-sized black rectangle dangled.
So far the humans had identified five “classes” of aliens. It was difficult to discern individual species because some appeared to have cross-traits of others. It was also difficult to pinpoint the social and biological configuration of Lùhng society. They hadn’t seen enough alien-to-alien interactions to distinguish any sort of hierarchy. Genders weren’t readily apparent—and Justice knew just how misleading physical traits could be in that department. Some aliens wore mechanical suits, some thin clothes, others seemed to be completely naked save a few accessories like helmets or braces.
Unlike the other hairy ones they’d made note of, this one’s arms weren’t covered in the same follicles. Instead, these looked strange, holding the bowl, like they didn’t actually belong to the creature—or like the hair was a suit.
She imagined what a man wearing a full bear skin would look like, with his arms independent of the bear’s arms. It was like that—thin, pale, nearly translucent arms threaded their way out from beneath the spines, so narrow compared to the rest of its bulk, and placed so far beneath what she thought were shoulders, that they looked like spider’s legs with sharp, grasping fingers needling away from its wrists.
Again, its anatomy was unique. It had attributes of those that had come before, but had to be a completely separate species.
I cannot wait to map their genetic tree, she thought, holding on to the notion because it was a comfort. Genetics, yes. Let’s think about biology. Taxonomy. Concrete things. Things that don’t have too many downs and too many dimensions and no doors—oh, god, why don’t they have any doors?
She shut her eyes and breathed through her nose. Stop. Look at the other one. What’s unique about the other one?
With a harsh swallow, she glanced up again, and suppressed a reeling sense of vertigo. Beside her, Dr. Ratha and Mac both started to stand up.
The creature was about three meters above her. Okay, that one’s got four limbs. Four limbs, is it weird that most of them have four limbs?
Most aliens in science fiction had never been alien enough to her mind. They always recalled terrestrial things—lizard people, fish people. She thought of Star Trek with its barely-altered-cranium people.
These weren’t people-like, for certain. But there were familiar patterns. Which felt so wrong.
Was that just how life was? Certain structures were just statistically more likely than others? Four limbs were stable. Four limbs were hardy. Was a four-limbed creature that much more likely to evolve a big brain and grasping hands and survive long enough as a species to make it into space?
Okay, four limbs. And it’s got the bead-like scales. And it looks big—as big as this one. Another twelve-footer.
Its middle was a bit obscured, but there was something unusual about it. There were colors there she didn’t remember seeing anywhere in the flash cards. Pinks and purples and blues.
She noted that—presuming the sasquatch’s hair wasn’t a bear suit—neither of them appeared to be wearing clothes, except for the faceplates and the rectangular necklaces. They had yet to see any of the aliens without the masks on. If that was their one protection against contamination, it was likely here to stay.
Contamination—the word sparked something in her. Was that what the bright light had been, maybe? Were they preparing to bring the humans aboard by flash-frying the exterior of their craft and suits to ensure all exterior microbes had been eliminated?
The bigfoot-looking alien—Sasquatch. I’m naming you Sasquatch, buddy—pulled its flying/floating trick and sailed over to where the other alien sat, doing a barrel roll midflight to orient itself to the new floor.
The second alien pushed itself away from the desk, presumably to receive the bowl of goodies, and that’s when Justice got a good shot of its abdomen.
Son of a—
Her stomach roiled. The alien’s abdominal cavity was completely transparent. Enough so that every organ was visible. The purples and pinks and blues were muscle and blood.
The glimpse was quick—too quick to gather any specifics about what their internal structure really looked like. But it was significant that the colors were familiar. Their blood had to have a similar iron content to terrestrial-evolved blood. Perhaps their biological bases were the same—perhaps there was only one reliable set of chemicals that animal life could use to evolve a complex circulatory system.
That would be an amazing discovery—a fact of biochemistry that could not be proven without interaction with extraterrestrial life.
The see-through one sat back down, and Justice strained for another glimpse of its belly, to no avail. And you I dub Cinderella, she thought to herself, fighting off her growing anxiety with levity. Because you kind of remind me of a glass frog. And, well, glass frog, glass slipper—it makes sense to me, it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. I need designations for you, regardless.
Sasquatch and Cinderella. She wondered casually if anyone else had come up with their own private names for any of the other dragons.
“No. Stop. Stop it!”
Justice whirled to her left. Sasquatch had come back and was pawing at one of the security guard’s helmets.
The guard—Steve, of course, it had to be Steve—had upchucked in his helmet. Perhaps it was trying to be helpful?
It. She hated calling them “its,” especially now that she’d named them. Okay, your pronouns are they, them, and theirs for now, she decided.
She reached for her atmosphere gauge, to try and figure out if the air was breathable and the room appropriately pressurized, but of course it was gone.
And of course, even if the aliens could understand what Steve was saying, they couldn’t hear him in his suit.
Carmen, who’d only awoken moments previous, quickly slid to Steve’s side. [No,] she signed. [No. Dangerous. No.]
Now they’d see if sending the ASL lexicon had been a futile measure or not. Justice knew Carmen had signed to a few of the other visitors, that these might have been words she’d used before. But that didn’t mean the Lùhng had made any attempt to learn, and the humans had never truly been given a chance to teach.
Meathead—okay, Mac. Maybe she’d been too hasty in assigning him the nickname—joined her in franticly signing [No.]
Steve struggled with Sasquatch, pushing their spider-hands away. He tried to crab-walk backward, but the Lùhng caught him by the ankle. Those arms might have looked frail, but they held him fast.
Justice joined in the signing. [No. Dangerous. No.]
Carmen moved in front of the alien, still repeating her gestures, trying to keep its focus on her. [No. Dangerous. No.]
As though exasperated with her interference, they held up the rectangle dangling at their throat.
The blackness left the shape, and Justice realized it was a screen. Up popped a fragment from the ASL lexicon Tan had sent, followed quickly by a second. A brunette woman in a purple T-shirt first signed [yes] then [safe.] The two signs looped over and over again.
Carmen froze. Justice knew the aliens had only ever mimicked before. They’d never shown any indication of understanding, let alone replied.
Having stunned her, Sasquatch gave chase to Steve, rounding the smoothed edges of the platform, following the security guard with long strides, though Justice could not see their feet or legs.
Without thinking, Justice jumped down herself. Even if the atmosphere was suitable for humans, there was still the possibility of contamination. Before, she might have doubted that their biologies could interact. But the mounting evidence in this room alone suggested they might share enough similarities to contaminate each other with their microflora.
“Stop!” she yelled at Sasquatch, for her own benefit more than theirs. She wound herself up, getting ready to do something incredibly stupid.
Steve ran up the wall, never once losing his footing. The room was like a bubble—mostly round, with all surfaces equal in gravity. Justice kept her head down in her pursuit, sure that a glance upward or to the side would throw her off balance.
Steve dodged under a structure to his right, giving Sasquatch the slip. The alien tried to dodge with him, but their reflexes were marginally slower than a human’s due to their size. Sasquatch skidded to a halt before changing direction.
And that’s when Justice pounced.
She barreled into the spiny fur, gloved hands outstretched, clasping, looking for purchase. Not to pull, not to drag down, but simply to anchor. She needed them to understand, to accept the humans’ rejection. Sasquatch wanted to lay hands on them, so her only recourse seemed to be a similar level of physicality. But she didn’t want to be a threat. She didn’t mean to injure or alarm.