Authors: Eric Brown
Without
replying, Hendry turned and almost stumbled from the hangar. In slow motion
desperation, careful not to lose his footing on the ice, he moved into the
darkness. There were two more cryo-hangars somewhere, and one of them contained
Chrissie.
He
was aware of movement beside him: Olembe, keeping pace. He felt a strange
concern that the African shouldn’t be aware of his desperation.
Something
loomed up ahead, the black shape of a hangar. He made out a tall white number
Three stencilled across the corrugated flank. Beside it was another hangar, this
one a smaller provisions store.
Hendry
indicated the storage hangar. “We need to see what provisions we’ve got, okay?
You do that, I’ll check in here.”
Olembe
looked at him, the expression in his eyes registering Hendry’s need to do this
alone. He nodded.
Hendry
turned to the hatch and tapped in the entry code with clumsy gloved fingers.
The
hatch cracked and sighed open, easing outwards on lazy hydraulics. He paused on
the threshold. A vast fear stopped him from taking that first important step.
He wanted to know so much, wanted confirmation of Chrissie’s survival, that he
was too afraid to initiate the movement that would bring him the knowledge, one
way or the other.
Like
someone afraid of water and facing a vast ocean, he took a deep breath and stepped
forward.
The
automatic lighting failed to respond to his presence, and he knew.
He
stumbled over to the com-screen set on the gallery rail, and with shaking
fingers initiated a diagnostic routine.
The
screen pulsed to life and a second later flashed up three lines of script. The
words were in English, yet his brain refused to acknowledge the meaning of the
simple message.
He
read it again, then again, and felt grief fill his chest like something
physical, as hard and cold as ice.
TOTAL PRIMARY
SYSTEMS FAILURE.
AUXILIARY
PROGRAM INOPERABLE.
LIFE-SUPPORT
MECHANISMS DYSFUNCTIONAL.
He
swung his headlight around the interior, and a second later saw it. Across the
chamber, where the banks of self-regulating fuel cells should have been, was a
jagged, gaping hole in the corrugated wall revealing the darkness beyond.
He
pushed himself away from the gallery rail and stumbled down three steps to the
deck of the cryo-hangar. Maybe there was still hope. If the malfunction had
occurred on crash-landing, and the resurrection program had already kicked in,
then perhaps there was still a chance.
He
stopped, swept his beam across the ranked catafalques. He found the third row
and set off along it, counting the cryogenic units as he went. Chrissie was in
Unit Seventeen. She had always claimed seventeen was her lucky number.
He
approached Unit Fifteen and slowed, trailing a hand across the cold surface of
the catafalque. His footsteps clicked on the ceramic floor, loud in his ears.
He
came to Chrissie’s unit and stopped.
He
should have turned then, walked away. He should have saved himself the sight
that he would never, to the end of his days, forget. But a tiny futile hope
pushed him forward. He reached out and took the lip of the crystal cover, and
raised it, briefly.
His
daughter was blue, and still, and when he reached out and touched her cheek it
was frozen as hard as marble.
He
wanted to lift her, to cradle her in his arms. He had the irrational desire to
tell her that everything was all right, that she had nothing to fear, as he had
done countless times in the past.
Instead
he closed the lid, then turned and fled, following the crazily spinning disc of
his headlight. Once on his way back to the hatch he stumbled painfully into a
hard, unyielding unit. He fell to the floor, hauled himself upright and
continued.
He
emerged into the cold dark night and stopped, grabbing the frame of the hatch
for support and taking deep breaths. For the first time he became aware of the
wind, keening through the skeletal remains of the destitute starship.
He
looked up. Fifty metres away across the ice was another cryo-hangar, this one
marked with a giant number Four. As he watched, a small figure emerged from the
shadow of its flank and approached him, growing larger. Olembe signalled with a
wave.
“The
sleepers in Four are fine,” he called out. “But the stores are badly damaged.
The fliers are wrecked. A couple of the trucks are operable, but...” He
stopped, peering closely at Hendry. “Joe?”
It
was all Hendry could do to shake his head, but the gesture conveyed all the
meaning necessary.
“Christ,
man. All of them?”
“All
of... A thousand. All dead. Chrissie...”
“Christ.”
Olembe gripped Hendry’s arm in a gesture both consoling and supporting. “Come
on. Back to the ship.”
He
allowed Olembe to take his weight and somehow, his feet trailing through
compacting ice crystals, they made their way back towards the towering
structure of the
Lovelock’s
distant nose-cone.
Halfway
there, Hendry made out Lisa Xiang’s small figure waving and running towards
them. She skidded once or twice and almost lost her footing, before finally
coming to a halt before them. “I was in the hangar—”
Olembe
interrupted. “They’re dead, right?”
Wide-eyed
behind her faceplate, Xiang shook her head. “They’re all fine. But while I was
in there... I heard something.”
Hendry
was hardly aware of what the pilot was saying. He could only think of Chrissie,
and the fact that of the four cryo-hangars only hers had malfunctioned.
“...So
I came out. I was going back to the lounge when I saw it.”
“Saw
what, Lisa?” Olembe said.
She
shook her helmeted head, as if in wonder. “It was... I don’t know. A being...
an extraterrestrial being.” She looked from Olembe to Hendry, her expression
behind the faceplate ecstatic. “It was over there, behind the microwave relay.”
She pointed to a downed antenna, perhaps twenty metres across the ice.
Hendry
turned to look, his heart beating fast.
“We’ve
been dreaming about this event for years, centuries...” She laughed, a little
nervously. “Maybe... I don’t know. Maybe they can help us. If they can survive
in this climate, then perhaps—”
Olembe
cut in, “Get real. Any creature making this their home is adapted, right?
They’ve evolved to the hostile conditions. We couldn’t live here, even with
help. And anyway, what makes you think they’d help us? What makes you think
they’d understand a fucking thing about us?”
Xiang
stared at him. “This is a momentous occasion, Olembe. Need you be so cynical?”
“I’m
being practical, sweetheart.”
Xiang
turned to look at Hendry. “What do you think, Joe? Should we try to make
contact?”
He
wanted to tell her that he was in no fit state to make such a decision. His
head was too full of what had happened to Chrissie to contemplate the enormity
of the fact that they were not alone in the universe.
He
just shook his head, mute, and for some reason he recalled a book he’d read as
a boy. It had been billed as an epic of first contact, and told the story of
humanity’s discovery of an alien race, and how the contact had brought
humankind to another level of understanding...
It
had awed him at the time, and later it had been one of Chrissie’s favourite
novels.
First
contact... If it weren’t for the nascent grief burning in his chest, he would
have rejoiced.
He
found his voice, “Perhaps Lisa’s right. Perhaps we should try to establish some
form of communication. We might learn from them. I don’t know... perhaps
they’re technologically advanced. They might be able to help us repair...” He
gestured around him at the wreckage, hopelessly.
Olembe
snorted. “Look, we can talk about this all you want when we get back inside.
Come on.”
Hendry
moved towards the nose-cone.
“Stop!”
Xiang yelled. She was looking across the ice, pointing.
Hendry
wheeled, made out a movement perhaps twenty metres away. Something emerged from
behind the microwave relay, paused and regarded the three humans.
He
made out a vague, silvery form, starlight coruscating in bursts from the angles
of its attenuated limbs.
For
perhaps ten seconds—though it seemed an eternity to Hendry—human and alien
stared at each other across what was at once merely a matter of metres, and
also a chasm of wonder and ignorance.
Without
warning, Lisa Xiang stepped forward. She moved towards the alien, step by slow
step, and raised her right hand in greeting.
Olembe
said, “For Chrissake, Xiang! Get back here!”
“It’s
okay, Olembe. I know what I’m doing...”
Olembe
snatched something from amid the wreckage beside him—a length of metal, which
he held like a club.
Xiang
paused, midway between Olembe and the alien, then adjusted the radio controls
on the epaulette of her atmosphere suit. Her voice, when it issued from her
helmet, carried across the ice to the extraterrestrial. “We come in peace,”
Xiang said. “We are from Earth, and we come in peace.”
She
would go down in history as the first human being to establish verbal contact
with a member of an alien species.
And
it was the very last thing she would do.
The
alien moved.
Later,
Hendry would have plenty of time to look back on what happened then as if it
were a nightmare. An overwhelming terror eclipsed his grief, and the moment
seemed to go on forever. He and his colleagues were transfixed, rendered
powerless.
The
alien advanced with lightning speed and was upon Xiang before she had a chance
to flee.
It
was over in an instant. There was no time to register surprise or fear as the
thing approached. One second Lisa Xiang was standing, knees flexed as if frozen
in the act of flight, arms still outstretched, and then she disintegrated.
Hendry
saw sections of body explode in every direction. Almost instantly she was no
longer where she had been. In her place, stilled now and facing them, was her
killer.
Hendry
had the fleeting impression of something insect-like, bristling with a dozen
scintillating blades, a glimpse that lasted a fraction of a second before
Olembe acted.
The
African leapt forward and swung his improvised club, and the metal made ringing
contact with Xiang’s killer. The creature moved, its retreat as swift as its
attack. Hendry blinked and it was gone. Then he saw it again, fifty metres
away, blades snickering the night air.
Olembe
grabbed him. “You saw how fast it moved! Let’s get out of here!”
Hendry
was ten metres from the crumpled opening of the lateral corridor, though it
seemed a mile away.
Olembe
sprinted. Hendry scrambled over the ice after him, falling and crying out in
panic. He climbed to his feet and took off frantically. It seemed an age before
he reached the mouth of the crumpled corridor and passed into its shadow. He
chanced a backward glance, heart thudding, fearing what he might see. The thing
was still out there, watching them. It could attack at any second, cover the
distance between them in an instant.
He
sprinted along the uneven surface of the corridor, Olembe ahead of him. They
came to a bend and Hendry almost wept with relief as he made out an open
hatchway. Olembe dived through, grabbing Hendry and pulling him inside. He
slammed the hatch shut and both men collapsed against the wall, breathing hard.
Olembe
swore.
“What?”
“The
fool! The fucking stupid, idealistic fool!” Hendry looked at the African, and
realised that he was weeping. “I told her, Hendry, I fucking told her! I should
have stopped her!”
“You
weren’t to know, Friday. Christ, I said maybe we should communicate with the
thing,”
“First
contact,” Olembe said. “What a fucking disaster! First contact. It’s been
written about for centuries, the glorious day when we’d meet sentient aliens—”
Hendry
said, “That thing was
sentient?”
The
African stared at him. “You didn’t see those choppers?”
Hendry
shook his head. “I honestly don’t know what I saw.”
“It
was armed to the gills, man. It wore armour. The mother meant big business.
Sentient aliens, with manufacturing capability, and they welcome us like that.”
He slapped Hendry’s shoulder. “C’mon.”
All
Hendry could think about, as they made their slow way back along the tortured
passageways, was how they were going to break the news to Kaluchek and
Carrelli. A thousand colonists dead, and Lisa with them—and they were
imprisoned within a dysfunctional starship surrounded by a race of homicidal
extraterrestrials on a planet that made Antarctica seem hospitable.