Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

Was this yet enough banter for whomever was listening? If there was a trick to acting normal and relaxed, he hadn’t found it. Moving right along then …. “So, how’s Simon? I’m lucky if he answers one text in three.” And then, it’s brusque.

  “Busy, too, I gather. Enjoying the sailing. The weather’s been cooperative.”

  Except Simon’s camp session was for beginners. He would be on the water only by day, whereas texting worked whenever. And it wasn’t as if the lights in the boy’s room ever went off before eleven. “Reading between very terse lines, I gather he’s unhappy with me for staying up here.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Marcus. He’s not happy with either of us. I’m the one refusing his help, telling him not to come home.”

  “Don’t beat up yourself, either.” Because you have a damned good reason.

  Given what Simon knew, or thought he knew, why wouldn’t he be upset? Why wouldn’t he be disappointed with Marcus? With that dreary thought, a new timer opened on his HUD: in thirty seconds their comm window closed. “Running out of time, hon. Anything else”—appropriate for public consumption—“going on there?”

  “Sean texted to ask if I needed anything. I told him I had things under control.”

  “Hmm. I’ll shoot him a thank-you.” When his jerk of an older brother offered to help, appearances were truly bad. “Val, I do wish I were there for you. With you.” For the presumed eavesdroppers, he threw in, “Don’t overdo. You’re on bed rest for a reason. And I love you.”

  “Love you, too. Don’t work too ha—”

  Mid-syllable, their connection dropped.

  With a sigh, Marcus switched channels. “Okay, Nikolay, I’m back on the clock.”

  * * *

  Marcus found loping down the lava tube without fear of mummycide delightfully novel. But not everything had changed: he, Yevgeny, and Ekatrina still relied upon fiber-optic cables long after the staged radioed prattle on the surface had dissolved into static. The stakes were too high to take any chances with their security.

  Halting three meters before the airlock, they unpacked an assortment of spotlights, portable fuel cells like those powering their suit electronics, and collapsed-and-telescoped tripod stands. Any of them could have assembled the lighting, but they left the task to their electrical engineer.

  Arms folded across his chest, Yevgeny moved farther out of her way. “I am surprised to have gotten the go-ahead so soon.”

  “Miracles do happen,” Marcus agreed.

  Because how else could one explain, a mere three days after the alien autopsy, Dirtside’s green-lighting an effort to enter the underground facility? Even though Goliath (as they had dubbed their mummy; Ethan’s was Paul Bunyan) and, by extension, whatever else might wait beyond the airlock, had died millions of years earlier. Even though the aliens’ biochemistry, while carbon-and-oxygen based, deviated from terrestrial norms in more ways than Marcus had yet internalized. Even though, apart from a few gross similarities, like two arms and two legs, the alien anatomy differed from anything present on Earth or in the fossil record. He had gleaned from Donna’s enthused explanations that, biologically speaking, humans had more in common with anchovies than with these aliens. And that to judge by the fine, 3-D mesh of electrodes a high-res CAT scan had shown permeated much of Goliath’s brain, great chunks of human technology might also be closer to that of anchovies.

  Ekatrina grunted, whether as an editorial comment or with frustration at awkward gloves and balky connectors.

  Of course, the biology team hadn’t decided that quickly. “While there is no obvious risk of biological contamination of, or from, anything we’ve seen,” the doctors at Base Putin and Dirtside astrobiologists had concurred, “we’ll need more time to be certain.” And proceeded to dispute among themselves as to the time frames, and the conditions under which, they might attempt to culture cells of alien biochemistry before they could accept the obvious. Weeks? Months? Longer?

  “You can thank folks like me,” Tyler had confided.

  “Meaning?” Marcus had asked.

  “Meaning there’s never certainty with your lot, and my lot said waiting was the bigger risk.”

  Your lot, Marcus had interpreted, being scientists and engineers. “Don’t get me wrong, Tyler, I’m relieved to have the go-ahead. But what”—doubtless scary reason—“sold your lot?”

  “The MSS. Intrusion detection software deflected a hack of the network at Base Putin.”

  The Chinese would not have hacked into just one destination for the “ore samples.” So be it. If they wanted to dig through construction plans and radio-astronomy data, at that point Marcus was prepared to let them. “And the FSB shared that?”

  In answer Marcus had gotten only a Sphinx-like stare.

  For the umpteenth time, Marcus wondered if anyone in this circus trusted anyone. And what all the distrust portended for once they did make their way into the alien base. And whether any sane person could trust the minds behind seizing Powersat One, and all those deaths ….

  With a sotto voce expression of satisfaction, Ekatrina swept a spotlight across the closed hatch. The sudden, brilliant oval of light yanked Marcus’s thoughts back into the present. As she switched on and aimed four more spotlights, he turned off helmet lamps that were useless by comparison.

  Hatch, frame, and concrete, many million years old, all appeared … pristine. Except for the few grooves low on the wall—decoration or alien script for all he knew—nowhere did he notice as much as a hint of fracturing or corrosion. After more hours than he cared to remember spent eyeballing metal and mooncrete constructions, he trusted his impressions. “These guys knew their materials.”

  “Let us hope,” Yevgeny said, “their machinery held up as well.”

  A small, featureless glass plate was mounted to the wall about a half meter to one side of the hatch, at about Marcus’s shoulder level. Controls for the airlock? For a biped the size of their aliens, the positioning seemed plausible. Marcus gestured, “Yevgeny, you can do the honors.”

  Touching, pressing, poking, swiping: they did nothing.

  “The wonder would have been for anything so old to have worked.” Ekatrina shrugged. “Or that any form of energy storage would have any juice left after this long.”

  They studied the barrier in silence, contemplating what breaking through might entail.

  Marcus said, “Suppose the lack of power is the only problem. Ekatrina, can you fix it?”

  “If the controls are simple enough, then perhaps. I can maybe remove that panel and see what is behind it. Still, even supposing I make some sense of what I find, I am not optimistic. If the motor has somehow not vacuum-welded itself into a lump, the hatches and frame will have.”

  The spontaneous binding of contact surfaces was the bane—one of them, anyway—of construction at Daedalus. In vacuum, everything tended to weld, even the dust. “Do we have anything to lose by trying?” Marcus asked.

  Ekatrina shook her head.

  “Then let’s have a go at it, shall we?” Yevgeny said.

  The royal we earned Yevgeny a snort, but Ekatrina got straight to work. The flat tip of a screwdriver sufficed to pry the glass panel from the wall. Nothing more sophisticated than spring-like metal clips had held the glass-fronted assembly in place. She repositioned one of the spotlights to point into the opening. “Simple, brushless DC motor, not at all efficient but super-reliable. What looks like a power feed from inside the facility hooks up to the control panel, but there is also a parallel connection to a little two-terminal box. I expect that is a rechargeable backup battery for when main power goes pfft. So maybe I just unclip the leads to that battery and supply the panel with DC from a fuel cell. I will need a few items from our supplies.”

  Starting with low voltage, and cranking it up till something happened, Marcus interpreted. “Two of everything, please. There’s also the inner doo
r.”

  “I admire your optimism,” she said.

  Fifteen interminable minutes later, Ekatrina returned with a bulging satchel. In addition to DC/DC converter modules, she had multimeters, a bundle of multihued, alligator-clipped, jump wires, and an assortment of hand tools. Humming tunelessly, she connected fuel cell, alien panel, DC/DC converter, and two multimeters.

  With two volts applied to the dangling panel, nothing happened. Or at three, four, or five volts. At six, colors flickered on the panel and it began drawing current. And approaching 6.5 volts—

  “Well done,” Yevgeny said.

  The awakened controls were simplicity itself. The panel displayed two squares, one yellow and one green, the former square the brighter of the pair. Likely the black, squashed-spider squiggles on the squares denoted open and close.

  Yevgeny gestured. “Your turn, Marcus, to do the honors.”

  “Vacuum welding,” Ekatrina reminded. “Nothing will happen.”

  Only when Marcus tapped the yellow square, without the slightest hesitation the outer hatch retracted into a hidden wall recess.

  “Damn,” Ekatrina said. “These guys are good.”

  Chapter 16

  Yevgeny stepped through the open hatch. By helmet lamps, his body blocking the spotlights behind him, he could see dimly through the polarized inner porthole.

  The tunnel widened past the airlock, offering hints in the farther gloom of side passages. Convex mirrors were mounted high on the walls near tunnel junctions for visibility around what would otherwise have been blind corners. Just inside the airlock, to both left and right, several doors hung open. From placement, he supposed those were lockers for vacuum gear. Stuff, little of it but rock or concrete chunks immediately recognizable, lay scattered on the floor. What by human standards would be an oversized chair lay on its side. Crouching, he spotted a sinuous crack in the ceiling, the fissure widening as it receded into the darkness.

  “They had an explosive decompression. Direct meteorite hit overhead?” He backed out. “Have a look.”

  Ekatrina peered inside, then Marcus.

  Marcus said, “I’m thinking Goliath struggled into his vacuum gear, made a dash for safety before the roof could crash down on him, only to collapse and die out here from his injuries.”

  “Sounds right,” Yevgeny said.

  Ekatrina mused, “And Paul Bunyan escaped to the surface, or he was aboveground at the time of the accident. He ran out of whatever they breathed, waiting for a rescue that never came.”

  Marcus said, “Maybe because the meteorite strike, or strikes, that cracked open the base also took out the antenna we found up above. Maybe Paul Bunyan had no way to repair it, no way to call for help. Assuming there was anyone in the neighborhood left to call ….”

  Could such ancient misfortune still matter? Yevgeny did not see how. But the alien technology waiting inside did matter—especially any tech that could be kept from the Americans. “Okay, let’s get the inner hatch open.”

  Ekatrina glowered. “And I suppose I am expected to shut myself inside the airlock and hope for the best?”

  “You saw the ceiling,” Yevgeny reminded her. “There is no pressure within, no reason to close the outer hatch. You cannot get trapped.”

  “Maybe there is no pressure,” she said stubbornly. “Probably there is none. But what if we are wrong, and it is some weird corrosive atmosphere?”

  Yevgeny countered, “Nothing from the biology team even hints at—”

  “No need to argue, you two,” Marcus said. He unclipped a plastic, pistol-like gadget from his tool belt. “Infrared temperature gun.” He aimed it at a tunnel wall outside the airlock, at the closed hatch, and at surfaces glimpsed through the porthole. “The same minus-thirty everywhere, inside and out. The biologists are confident these guys had a water-based biochemistry, like us. I don’t imagine they’d have kept their facilities way below freezing. I can’t believe life support is operating in there. And if I’m wrong, we’ll be outside to reopen the way. ”

  “All right,” Ekatrina conceded.

  Once she identified and bypassed a mechanical override intended to prevent both hatches being open at the same time, the inner hatch retracted without a hint of escaping air. They moved a spotlight stand inside the gaping airlock. The intense light revealed stuff scattered far into the facility, and clearer glimpses of the two nearest open side passageways. Wherever walls, floor, and ceiling remained intact, they drank up the light.

  Yevgeny checked his life support. “I have oh-two left for a bit over four hours. You?” As expected, their tanks held about the same. “Marcus and I will have a quick run-through. Ekatrina, do not set foot inside. No matter what.” If a hatch should somehow close and refuse to open from the inside, they could all die before someone came to check on them. “If we’re not back in an hour, and I mean not a minute longer, go get help. Understood?”

  “Got it,” she said unhappily.

  Yevgeny unplugged her from the fiber-optic daisy chain. “Shall we?”

  “Down the rabbit hole we go.” Sniffling, Marcus stepped through the open hatch.

  He and Marcus made their initial foray by helmet lamp, spotlight and fuel cell left behind by the airlock as being too awkward to tote. It felt like being in a cave: walls, floor, and ceiling, all matte black, giving back little of their lamplight. Yevgeny felt puny beneath the high ceiling, although Goliath might well have found its three-meters-or-so height cozy.

  They sidestepped widespread detritus (or was it detritus? The aliens might just be messy) and rubble fallen from the cracked ceiling, taking care not to snag their suits on anything. As the illumination from the spotlight petered out, the ancient ruin became eerie. No, eerier. By tacit agreement they stayed close, linked by cable: able to speak but often struck silent by wonder.

  What might be robots were everywhere. One, apart from its intact treads, was a twin for the tank they had encountered in the lava tube. On this one, the turret access panel had been opened for repairs. The rest were like six-limbed, giant starfish, limbs and central mass tiled in a gray-black mosaic. Their arms offered a wide range of tools and grippers, sometimes with several distinct limb tips per bot. Except for those shiny appliances, the starfish were hardly distinguishable, at least under limited light, from the dark walls and floor. Flattened, and with their limbs extended, each starfish spanned more than a meter from tip to tip.

  Like the airlock hatches, interior doors, and walls, the bots were all but dust-free. Regolith tracked indoors was the bane of every human lunar undertaking. Merely the secret to how the aliens treated their surfaces, how they hadn’t tainted their facility with the ubiquitous dust—if someone should manage to reverse-engineer the process—would be worth a fortune.

  But alien remains? They saw none.

  Marcus charged deeper into the facility, in his enthusiasm twice tugging loose the fiber-optic cable that linked them. They began with the left-hand side tunnels, gingerly opening doors as needed, elsewhere stepping over whatever debris had kept interior hatches from closing with the loss of pressure. Four large rooms off one such corridor had wall-mounted wire-rack bins, a few holding what might be folded garments; a wall-mounted display; and a large, low platform. Based on Goliath’s size, that platform—examined up close, a sturdy box with a removable lid—could serve as a one-alien bed. Personal quarters, they concluded.

  Another side tunnel offered rooms with benches and often unidentifiable apparatuses. Yevgeny tried, and failed, to decide if these spaces had been labs, workshops, offices, storerooms, or maybe a little of each. Rooms off a third side tunnel had unambiguously served as storage. Some had stacks of the “bed” platforms, others row upon row of shelving units piled high with pouches, canisters, and boxes—all burst. Food? The containers had ruptured when pressure was lost, leaving behind residues as shriveled as poor Goliath.

  Perhaps
thirty meters inside, beyond an open door clogged to waist level with debris, the main tunnel continued. There, too, side tunnels branched off. How much of the facility was within the lava tube? How much had the aliens excavated? Unknown. Yevgeny couldn’t tell if a shadowy surface seen in the distance was another wall, its shiny bits perhaps from a burst metal hatch, or a floor-to-ceiling heap of rubble and debris. He would have bet big money on the latter.

  His HUD showed twenty-six minutes elapsed since they set boot inside the alien base. “Shall we start back? Check out the other side as we go?”

  “Agreed.”

  They turned toward the airlock, exploring another set of side passages. Three consecutive corridors held row upon row of metal troughs beneath nozzle-equipped pipes and suspended lamp fixtures: hydroponics. Traces of dust in the troughs must be all that remained of whatever algae or plants or whatever had once grown there. Yet other spaces defied identification as he and Marcus made their way forward. And then, behind the door to the side passage nearest to the airlock—

  “Pay dirt,” Marcus declared.

  Yevgeny went to the middle of the latest hallway. Slowly turning, he swept headlamp beams over giant wall displays, a half-dozen work consoles, three shoulder-high metal cabinets with ventilating louvers, and a light-gray panel replete with black squiggles like the markings on the airlock open/close buttons. Two pairs of glasses or goggles, for heads the size of bowling balls, sat folded on a console ledge. “The control room.”

  “The control room,” Marcus agreed. “And whether inside a console, or one of the cabinets, or by tracing wires, I expect we’ll find Goliath’s main computer. Good call having Ekatrina on your team.”

  Their hour almost up, they strode to the airlock. After granting Ekatrina a quick peek inside, they started back up the tunnel to report—separately—to Dirtside.

  * * *

  Valerie bounded from her recliner at the sound of the bell. The front-door peephole revealed Jay Singh standing on her porch, shifting from foot to foot, with a potted plant in hand. He was to-the-minute punctual, and she wondered how long he had been standing there. Despite mid-July’s muggy heat, he wore a sports coat and tie.