Authors: Edward Lee
We’d just hypervelled through the Zuby System, using grids piped to us from the Hubble 6 matrix, and we weren’t thrusting through this white-dwarf system for more than an hour before the MADAM went off. The OAC called General Quarters, and all we could do then was wait. Wait for the tri-wave scans to bounce back to the sensor-slats and tell us what was out there.
The OAC told us this:
:-mADAM cOORDINATES vIA hOME pLATFORM aS zERO: sEVEN-sIX-tHREE dEGREES sIX mINUTES oN mENISCUS cHART. pROBABLITY cOMPUTATIONS iNDICATE nINE-nINE-pERCENT lIKELIHOOD oF eXTRATERRESTRIAL vEHICLE oF hIGHER tECHNOLOGY dERIVATION tHAN iS pREVIOUSLY iNDEXED-:
I’d been sitting in the chow hall, eating gengineered monkfish-steak when that call came through. The Army grunts were scrambled, and thrusted out on a retrieval skiff in less time that than it takes to fill your piss bag. About an hour later, they were redocking and asking for ingress countercodes. The OAC passed them through, and that’s when I was ordered to r-dock.
***
You’re still wondering what this has to do with me shitting my EUDs, right? Well, I’m getting to that. I’m standing on the lock-rails in r-dock when the grunts bring the victor in and tack it down to the stulls. They close the dock door but wisely don’t represh; we all keep our CVC helmets on with defoggers set on high. This victor—vehicle—looked stunning, a perfect crescent with no seams, no doors, no visual outlets or propulsion vents, no indiction even of a gravity-amplification node.
Just a thirty-meter-wide crescent, a giant boomerang.
The laze scales put the thing in at just under two-hundred pounds. Something that big? It should’ve weighed at least a couple of tons. Which meant that whatever unknown element it was made of had very little weight, very little photon mass. It was at the least a kick to have the grunts following my orders. Federal Military didn’t like it when civilians told them what to do. But I was the expert here, at least the best that this mission could provide. My expertise involved cutting bugs open. Therefore I was the best candidate to cut open an alien vehicle.
“Pop this can,” one of the field privates muttered, wide-eyed behind his glexan visor. “Crack it open.”
“Do it,” SSG Yung said.
“What do you think I’m going to do? Play paddycakes with it?” I strapped on the force harness, then closed the chuck on the Black & Decker neutron drill; the treated black-phosphorus bit would make a million-and-a-half cycles per minute but it wouldn’t get hot. No heat conduction, no sparks. “And if this doesn’t work, I’ll try the nuclear spanner.” I raised the massive drill on its waist-bracket, then planted my nanoboots on the floorwall and pressed the bit against the victor’s hull.
“Hardcore,” someone said.
“Last chance to evac, guys,” I reminded them. I winked at SSG Yung.
“Just rev that fuckin’ thing up and go!” Yung yelled.
Suit yourself.
I toggled down the charge lever, flipped open the safety. Just as I was about to hit the power detent—
“Wait a minute!” a platoon Spec 4 shouted. He was standing on the other side of the victor, running a hand-held photon-activation-analysis scan on the hull.
“What?” I said, the drill harness weighing down on my hips.
“You ain’t gonna believe this...but I’ve got double-pozz poroscopy on the hull, and residual chloride ions.”
“
Bull
shit!” I practically spat into my mic.
“I shit you not, man,” the Spec replied. “Ain’t nothing else this could be.”
It’s got to be a mistake,
I thought, but I unstrapped the drill anyway.
“What the fuck are you fuckin’ talkin’ about?” Yung complained. “Chloride
what?
’
“Chloride
ions,”
I said. “It’s part of a typical sebaceous amino acid secretion, unless that OAC’s glitching. Your man just found a
fingerprint
on the hull.”
Yung’s eyes opened as wide as a condenser slug behind his visor. “The
fuck?”
“It looks overlayed a bunch’a times,” the Spec 4 observed, focusing the p/a/a screen. I checked it out myself and he was right.
“No ridge patterns,” I said more to myself than to him. “The pore pattern’s relatively intact, but that’s it. Then it looks like...”
“A smear?” the Spec ventured.
“Yeah, I think so. Digigraph it a couple of times and save the files in the OAC,” I said. Then I turned to SSG Yung, who still didn’t get it.
“Someone or some thing touched this victor, Sergeant Yung. And whoever touched it, touched it repeatedly in the same place.”
Behind the glex visor, Yung’s face twisted up. “You mean a
human?”
“Well, something clearly human
oid,
” I corrected. “Something that has sebaceous secretions similar to ours.”
“All right...uh— Just get back on that drill and cut this fucker open,” he said.
Be as dumb as you can be—in the Army,
I thought. “The nute-drill could take hours or days. Let me try something. If it doesn’t work, then I’ll power the drill back up. Is that square with you?”
Yung smirked, reached up and tried to scratch his chin before he remembered he was wearing a sealed CVC. “Yeah, fuck, all right.”
“Represh the dock to six-five,” I told the Spec. Yung nodded consent. It took a few minutes but I needed enough PSIs in the dock to take my EUD mitt off. Then I grabbed an SV probe off the hardware lock.
“What the fuck are you fuckin’ doin’?” Yung asked.
I didn’t bother answering. The sub-violet lume element would show me the same spot where the hull was touched. “There it is,” I muttered. It was a downward streak. Someone had pressed his or her fingertip against the hull at this precise point. Then they’d dragged their fingertip down in a straight line...
With my mitt off, then, I did the same thing. I pressed my fingertip on the same spot, then dragged it down.
A small ingression on the high quadrant of the hull formed. And for you earth-loving no-hackers who don’t know what that means... It means a doorway opened.
***
“He did it!” Yung barked. “The candyass civvie fuck
did
it! First Platoon! Lock and load.
”
Yung shoved me back out of the way as his troops charged their Colt M-57 Squad Assault Systems. “Cole, Alvirez, take firing positions at the bulkhead! Filips and Bensin, cover the entrance at one-five meters! Come on, Roburts! It’s me and you.”
“Sarge, Sarge,” I interrupted. “The G.I. Joe stuff isn’t going to be necessary.” I showed him my fileflat which was now out-indexing the atomic chromatography specs from the p/a/a scan. “Check this out.”
Yung frowned at the readouts, his trigger finger twitching. “The fuck am I supposed to know what that shit is? I ain’t no wirehead—I’m a fuckin’ Army Ranger!”
Tell me about it.
“This is a radio assay and carbon-date of the fingerprint. It’s over 2,000 years old, Sarge. Any life form inside that victor is long dead.”
“Balls,” the platoon sergeant replied. “Cover me, Roburts!” Then he raised his weapon and entered the craft. I guess these guys had their games to play, so what the hell. They had to go through the motions, I guess to maintain their identities. And I guess I did the same thing, in my own way, too.
But when Yung entered the victor with his wrist-light and rifle—it seemed like a whole lot of time went by with all of us just standing there staring at the doorway. Yung didn’t respond. We couldn’t even see his shadow moving in there.
“Hey, Sarge?” I called out.
Nothing.
“Sergeant Yung! Relay your status!” one of the other grunts cracked.
Nothing.
Then—
“Holy everlovin’ motherfuckin’ shit...”
It was Yung’s voice that carried back to our CVCs. I turned to the SGT E-5 next to me. “You’re next in command, pal. You better send someone in there.”
“I-I-I—,” he stammered.
What the hell,
I thought. I grabbed the SGT’s wrist-light and stepped into the victor. The cabin walls were black but somehow tinged with silver. I saw no evidence of an operator’s seat, instruments, or controls. Just the weird silver-black, which sucked up the 1000-candle-power sodium light I was carrying.
“Down here,” Yung’s voice drifted to me.
It was like walking through black fog. I seemed to take many more steps than the depth of the craft would allow, but eventually Yung’s form came into focus. He’d dropped his weapon on the victor’s floor and was just sitting there on a starboard protrudement.
“Guess I just wasn’t ready for it,” he said. He sat there with the rim of his helmet in his palm. He looked out of it. He looked whacked.
“What’s that, Sarge?”
“Seen a lot of fucked up shit in my time. Seen guys die, my own men, seen whole transport plats blow up ‘cos some mech jockey forgot to close a vent-line. I saw the P-4 quake split the whole planetoid in half and swallow fifteen thousand colonists five minutes after my thruster took off. It’s fucked up shit, man.”
“Straighten up, Sarge,” I said. For whatever reason, he was going down memory lane, and the scenery wasn’t too great. “Get yourself squared away. Sure, we’re standing inside an alien spacecraft—the first one ever discovered—and you’re right, it’s fucked up. But we gotta keep it together. We got our jobs to do. You got men out there shit-scared. They’re counting on you.”
His CVC turned toward me. Through the glex visor, I could see his blank eyes in the light. “Since I was a little kid,” he droned, “I always thought that this would happen someday. But it was just a fantasy, you know? Some kids fantasize about being president, some kids fantasize about seeing an alien.... Man, this is fucked up.”
The tone of his words wrapped me up. “Seeing...a what?” I said. But now I guessed his point. We knew there must have been something inside this ship, however long dead. What else could it be but an “alien?” A “spaceman?” Something every man, woman, and child in the Federate had thought about, dreamed about, but something, by now, that nobody really believed in anymore. Like afterlife, reincarnation, spirituality. Just myths now. Mankind in the 23
rd
century no more believed in spacemen than they believe in Santa Claus.
Yung’s voice cracked like tinder. “Take a look, civvie,” he said.
I let my light follow his gaze. Some kind of a molded object rose from the floor, something like a chair, and sitting in that chair was the victor’s obvious pilot.
***
An ecstatic chaos filled the plat, everyone running around like meth-freaks. Time seemed to stand still. The OAC ordered most of the crew to analyze the victor. As for the dead pilot, of course we couldn’t analyze
him
until we got his suit off. That was my job: to decorticate the pilot, so to speak. To remove his environmental suit and extract the body for digigraphics and autopsy.
We’d moved the body to the medcove, lain it out on an exam table under the lumes.
“Twenty-one May, 2202,” I said into the mission recorder. “Jonsin, Dugliss, FOS 95C20 decortication technician for mission survey on DSP-141. The Operational Analysis Computer has ordered me to attempt to extract the body of the victor’s apparent operator for analysis and archives indexing. For this record, the victor’s operator will be referred to as VO from here on...”
Oh, damn. Some story teller I am, huh? I forgot to tell you what the guy looked like. Humanoid and bipedal. Two pronating arms, two pronating legs, and a head. Each hand showing four fingers with three phalanges, and an opposable thumb. One hundred and forty-six point four pounds via specific earth gravity, and seventy-one inches long in extremis. For all intents, it was a guy in a spacesuit with a general surface anatomy similar to ours.
But it was still an alien, and it was the ev-suit that kept reminding me of that. Same color, same hue as the ship: a flat silver-black. To the touch, the material felt like something polycron or cloth, but if you pressed down on it, it wouldn’t give at all. I tried a particle vise on the right thumb and
nothing happened.
The vise broke at 750,000 psi. But if you grabbed the hand, you could bend the fingers in their natural direction. Same with the rest of the body. The suit was pliable...but then again, it wasn’t.
The head was the weirdest part. Not a helmet, nothing like what you would think of as utility headgear. Just a bullet-shape extending from the shoulders. No visor, no visual ports, no bumps where the ears should be. Just imagine dipping a doll in wax enough times that only the basic shape remained.
This was my company for about the next seventy-two hours. First thing I tried was a standard scan of the suit, same way I’d scan a bug before cutting it open. But this was no bug. X-rays, V-rays, triax tomography, nuclear-resonance scans—all negative. And it was no big surprise that, like the victor, the VO’s suit showed no signs of any sort of opening. No zipper on this spaceman. And I tried touching the suit, like I’d touched the ship, but...no such luck.