Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (28 page)

“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, along 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.

When Kendelsen had extracted enough liquid to fill his container to four-fifths capacity, he put a pincher on the IV tube and uncoupled it from the container’s mouth, screwing an air-tight cap into place before carefully hefting the container over to a small, wheeled sled that we’d brought down from the rover. On it were all of the samples arranged according to Bednar’s ad hoc categorization scheme.

“Want more?” I said to the captain.

“Maybe. If I am not satisfied after taking a closer look. Let’s get all of this back to the descent module for safe keeping.”

“What about the rest of the structure?” I asked.

“It’s not going anywhere,” she said. “And neither is our alien friend here. There will be time to do a more thorough examination of the hardware once I’ve sent a full preliminary report back to the return module, for transmission to Earth. Thus far we’ve not disclosed anything specific to Mission Control. That’s going to have to change, or they’re going to begin getting nervous.”

Truth be told, I wasn’t exactly sure what else it was I could be looking for. I’d already given the room at the bottom of the ramp a thorough examination, and had found no other doors leading to any other parts of the pyramid. There were no obvious display panels or control boards or knobs or switches of any kind. And when I ordered Kendelsen to apply a cutting torch to one of the walls, it didn’t even leave a scratch.

I had begun to wonder if perhaps the alien pyramid wasn’t just an analog of Earth’s ancient pyramids: a tomb. Perhaps for some bygone alien ruler who’d decided he wanted his final resting place to be in orbit around Saturn? Not a bad choice, I thought. Assuming you could see Saturn’s rings through the murk in the atmosphere. Maybe the nitrogen air had been cleaner at some point in the past?

Unable to break off or obtain even a sliver of the pyramid’s structural material, I hoped that a carbon dating analysis of some of the alien’s tissue would be able to give us an accurate estimate as to how old the thing might be.

We gathered up what tools we needed to take back with us on the rover, snapped off the tripod lamps which had been giving us enough light to work by, and went back up the ramp, pushing our sled full of samples. An insulated lid over the top of the sled kept the samples more or less at their ambient temperature as we crossed into the cold. A thick power cable wound its way along the side of the ramp—like a piece of familiar string in a strange and forbidding maze.

The cable took us unerringly to the top, and the open sky. I dutifully uncoupled it from the auxiliary power jack on the side of the rover, then helped Kendelsen and Majack get the sample sled into the rover’s cargo bay. Then I took shotgun as Captain Bednar slid into the driver’s station, with Majack and Kendelsen pulling rumble seat.

We rolled in relative silence.

If the first half of the day had been a cacophony of excited speculation and chattered hypotheses, the second half had slowly wound down to just occasional sentences and practical exchanges. The mood was … tense. Not the sort of overt tension that snaps tempers, but a very subtle tension that manifested as mildly creased brows, and put little downturns on the corners of every mouth.

It was the damned place, I decided.
Titan.
Gloomy as hades. Like being stuck perpetually in the shadow of a range of thunder clouds, their bellies pregnant with water.

The headlights of the rover lanced into the yellow haze as Bednar followed the mild ruts which had been worn in the ice over successive trips. We knew from experience we wouldn’t actually see the descent stage of the
Gossamer
until we were practically on top of it.

Upon arrival we gingerly got the sample sled up the descent stage’s main ramp and into the airlock. Then Kendelsen, Majack and myself went to climb the ladder up to the auxiliary airlock. We’d not be exposing any of the samples to our living space. There was no defined protocol for handling xenobiological specimens, but even Captain Bednar wasn’t going to take chances. We’d leave them in the main airlock where they could be kept quarantined.

Once Bednar was through with her examination we’d move the samples to one of the outboard cargo pods on the ascent stage. If they froze in there it wouldn’t matter. They’d have to be frozen sooner or later for the long trip back to Earth.

We quickly moved some of the portable science equipment from the descent stage’s lockers over to the main ramp, where Bednar carried it all up: piece by delicate piece. Once she was satisfied she had everything, we all went back to the auxiliary air lock and went inside for the night. Quite exhausted.

• • •

Following dinner—and a quick check-in with the
Gossamer’s
return module—we retired. After months in microgravity, it felt good to lapse into the deep sleep afforded by a day of manual labor. I had barely gotten my bunkbag zipped when my mind swam and I was drifting off towards pleasant dreams of home.

Only, the damned alien kept bothering me.

Several times I startled awake as visions of the alien in the pyramid suddenly came to life, writhing and awful. The last dream was the strangest. Because it wasn’t about the alien. It was about the pyramid itself. I dreamt I was standing on the surface of Titan, only my eyes were able to penetrate the haze and survey the ice all the way to the horizon. One by one I saw the tips of pyramids identical to the one we’d found, all crashing up through the ice. Thousands of them.

It terrified me. So much so that when the alarm went off and we each began to stir for the morning routine, I couldn’t quite wash the feeling out of myself. Seeing all of those identical pyramids come up through the ice had filled me with panic. I wasn’t sure why.

I intuited that I hadn’t been the only one who’d had bad dreams. Nobody said much in between bites or slurps. I noticed also that all of us kept our eyes away from the portholes. The deliberately bright lights in the galley were a relief compared to what it was like outside.

Only Captain Bednar seemed energized. She finished her food quickly and changed into a HAZMAT outfit—thinner, and more work-friendly than a coldsuit.

I got up from the galley table and went with the captain to the main airlock doors. Unlike the auxiliary lock, the main lock was actually a double: an exterior compartment with a door to the outside, separated by a middle door, then an interior compartment, followed by a door to the rest of the craft. I could just make out—through the windows in each of the doors—the sample sled sitting in the outer compartment.

“Make sure the recorders are running the whole time,” Bednar said.

“Roger that,” I replied.

The HAZMAT suit was like a head-to-toe body stocking, but with a helmet designed only to keep air out, and with a hose leading to a tiny backpack filter that ensured air coming in was clean and pure.

I watched as the captain went into the inner compartment, closing the interior door, then entering the outer compartment through the middle door, which closed behind her. A red light on the airlock panel told me that the inner compartment was now in vacuum, so that the outer compartment was effectively sealed off.

Captain Bednar’s monotone forensic-type narrative droned through the overhead speaker while Majack, Kendelsen and I finished eating. Today we’d let the alien be, and focus our examination on the pyramid itself. Since the artifact was invisible to most of our sensors, I’d gotten the idea to try some seismic analysis—to determine the pyramid’s full size and shape beneath the ice.

We checked in again with the return module, prepped our coldsuits for the day’s EVA, and were just about to head for the auxiliary lock when Captain Bednar began cursing loudly.

I was the first one to the inner airlock doors.

I slapped a suited hand on the airlock communications panel.

“What happened?” I said to mic grille.

“Nothing Chief. It’s just that you won’t believe what this blood is made of.”

She wasn’t angry or upset. She was in awe.

“Try me,” I said.

“The organic component is not too different from ours. Simple oxidizing cells to carry oxygen to the tissue, several types of what appear to be antibodies and white cells for combatting infection, plus a couple of unusually-structured cells for which I can’t begin to guess a purpose.”

“You said organic component … is there an
inorganic
component too?”

“Yes,” Bednar said. “I’d call them nanotechnological devices, but far more sophisticated than anything we’ve ever manufactured on Earth. They make up one third of the blood’s total mass. Right now they’re just drifting in the fluid. Inert. I’m going to take a small portion and put it into a petri dish, then dip in some voltmeter wires and see what happens if I give the blood just a hint of an electrical charge.”