Still, such reports were not noted for furthering the careers of those who made them.
Just had to take command of the last of the
Washington
class ships in Mars orbit for the evacuation to Phoenix Prime, didn't you?
DiFalco gibed at himself.
Couldn't make the trip in cryo hibernation, could you? Couldn't even travel awake on a ship commanded by one of your juniors and spend the trip dumping words of wisdom on the younger generations!
(He was all of thirty-five.)
Oh, no! Perish the thought!
He reached a decision. "All right, Terry. Have Gomez do an EVA with her photo equipment. The UFO"—there, he had said it—"is within ten million klicks, and she might be able to get something we can analyze. And laser a message to RAMP HQ at Phoenix Prime, in Level Three code, for General Kurganov personally." Sergei had ridden the
Boris Yeltsin
out to the asteroid base earlier, hibernating like a gentleman and leaving DiFalco as acting military CO of the Russian-American Mars Project. But now he was awake and back in command, at least until DiFalco relieved him early next year when the top spot rotated back to an American. He needed to be told . . . and he would have the sense to sit on the information until they had learned more.
"Give him," DiFalco continued, "all the data we now have on the UFO. And tell him that I intend to continue to try to communicate with it. If it attempts a rendezvous with us"—no need to even check the figures to confirm that it was strictly up to the UFO to do so;
Andy J.
was committed to this Hohmann transfer orbit and lacked the reaction mass for any funny business, at least if it wanted to be able to choose an attainable destination afterwards—"I will do whatever seems indicated." And, he knew, Sergei would back him to the hilt. He unclipped his perscomp from his belt and consulted it. "It will take a few minutes to get a reply. Ask Major Levinson to join me in my cabin as soon as he can get away from Engineering. And buzz me as soon as you get any response from the UFO, or from General Kurganov . . . or when Gomez has some usable imagery for us."
"Aye aye, sir." (Funny, the way naval usages were surfacing in a service descended from the Air Force. The ex-squids in the Space Force had to be threatened with bodily harm lest they call the control room the "bridge.") Farrell looked up, and for an instant he seemed even younger than he was. When he spoke, his tone was almost beseeching. "Colonel, what is that thing?"
"I think we're going to find out, Lieutenant. Like it or not."
DiFalco's cabin was too small for pacing, and he soon found himself turning the news update back on. It was a link with familiar things, with home . . . and he needed that, however much he hated what home was turning into. He was up to the latest synagogue burning in New York (the state's Social Justice governor hadn't quite winked at the cameras as he had condemned the act "despite centuries of terrible provocation") when Jeff Levinson arrived. He switched it off hurriedly.
"Oh, that,"
Andy J.
's executive officer indicated the reader. He smiled wryly at DiFalco's palpable embarrassment, creasing his dark features—his mouth, like his nose, belonged on a larger face. "Why do you think there are so many of us in space? Out here, you can get away from some things. Not all, of course." He took out the plastic Ethnic Entitlements Card that every American citizen was required to carry at all times—white, with a large yellow Star of David, in Levinson's case. DiFalco's was brown; his mother was one-quarter Cherokee, which, despite all her Swedish, Scots and English genes, and the Italian, Irish and additional English ones on his father's side, made him a "Third World person" and helped account for his rank. (Levinson had risen as high as he probably ever would, especially if the quota structure was further stacked against him as seemed likely after the next general election.) DiFalco was old enough to recall when the cards had been introduced . . . strictly as a temporary measure, of course, to "enable the proper authorities to readily identify the victims of past discrimination until its effects have been compensated for." Ex-officials of the former South African government had been hired for their experience in administering a similar system; those who had commented on the irony had been prosecuted for the misdemeanor of "inappropriately directed laughter."
"But," Levinson continued, "you didn't call me in to discuss the political situation. What's up, that couldn't wait 'til after Fraser and I were done with the fuel feed?"
"Well," DiFalco drawled, "how about little green men? Terry seems to have spotted some, doing their damnedest to intercept us."
"
Oy vey!
" Levinson sagged down onto DiFalco's bunk. "What does the kid think he's seen now?"
"It's no bullshit, Jeff," DiFalco assured him, turning serious. He accessed the data on his perscomp and handed it to Levinson. The XO studied it with frowning concentration, then looked up.
"Eric, just what the hell is going on here?
Nobody
has anything like this, and extraterrestrials . . ."
" . . . don't exist," DiFalco finished for him. "Everybody knows that. I'll tell you what I told Terry: we'll find out the answer soon enough, so all we can do now is assess our own capabilities—which, I know, don't include either attempting or avoiding a rendezvous. Our weapons"—the missiles, the antimissile lasers, and the big spinal-mounted particle accelerator—"are in working order." Levinson nodded emphatically. "But I don't intend to use them except in self-defense. For now, we'll continue to try and communicate with them. We simply don't know what we're dealing with here . . . ."
The intercom beeped, and DiFalco acknowledged. "Colonel, Gomez is ready for you," Farrell reported.
"Good. Tell her the XO and I will be in the lab ASAP."
Afterwards, neither DiFalco nor Levinson was ever sure how long a period of utter silence they had spent staring at the blowup. No fine details could be made out, of course, even with deep-space photography using mid-twenty-first-century equipment. But two things were very clear about the spacecraft. The first was that it
was
a spacecraft, an inarguably artificial construct. And the second was that it was a product of no known design philosophy, nor even any known concept of a viable spacecraft; there was no room for doubt that it had originated elsewhere than Earth.
Finally, Levinson looked up, his engagingly ugly face wearing a lost expression DiFalco had never seen there.
"Colonel, what are we going to do?"
"We are going to wait," DiFalco stated firmly.
The Unknown lay a few kilometers off, a clearly visible affront to DiFalco's sense of reality.
It had matched vectors with
Andy J.
so smoothly that DiFalco was somehow sure that it wasn't showing off, merely executing a routine maneuver. It certainly had the thrust to do it . . . he had tried to calculate the power required for that kind of sustained maneuvering by a ship massing what that one must, and given up. And it produced all that thrust with no great display of flaming exhaust; its drive was evidently too efficient to waste much energy on such things.
"Well," Levinson broke the silence in the control room, "we know one thing about them."
"You mean besides the fact that they're very goddamned advanced?" DiFalco, like the XO, spoke in a hushed voice, for no reason that stood up to logical analysis.
Levinson nodded. "They don't need weight."
DiFalco nodded in reply. He had already thought of it himself. That gleaming bluish-gray shape—rather like a cigar with the small end forward, with four elongated blisters spaced evenly around the hull near the stern, alternating with what was obviously tankage—was a seamless unity without any segment which could plausibly be a spin habitat like
Andy J.
's. If its occupants had wanted to use angular acceleration to counterfeit gravity while in free fall, they would have to spin the entire ship, which was patently impractical. Humans were unsuited to prolonged periods of weightlessness. Drugs coupled with regular exercise now enabled them to live indefinitely in low-G environments like Luna, but some weight was still required to prevent fluid imbalances and atrophy of the bone tissues and muscles, and all interplanetary spacecraft designs reflected this. It was the final piece of evidence that the UFO's crew were not human. Were they even organic?
One thing they definitely were: damned uncommunicative. He had stopped paying attention to Farrell's endlessly repeated hails and requests for acknowledgment up and down the frequencies—they had become a meaningless ritual of some forgotten religion.
So, like everyone else in the control room, he jumped when the hush was shattered by a screech of static, dying down to a faint roar overlaid by a voice speaking in careful, faintly accented English.
"Calling United States Space Force Ship
Andrew Jackson
. We urgently request that your commanding officer come aboard our ship for consultation on matters of the highest importance."
In the stunned silence, DiFalco was the first to find his tongue.
"This is Lieutenant Colonel Eric DiFalco, commanding," he rapped out, pleasantly surprised that his voice didn't crack. "Who am I addressing? Can we have a visual signal?"
"I am afraid not," the voice resumed. "All your questions will be answered here. You will, of course, find our shipboard environment quite safe. Please enter through the airlock we have illuminated." Levinson touched his arm and pointed at the magnified image of the UFO. A blinking exterior light had awakened on that unbroken surface. He was gazing at it when Farrell looked up.
"The signal has been broken off, Colonel. They're not accepting any further transmission."
"Damn!" DiFalco turned to the XO. "Jeff, could that voice have been artificially generated?"
"In theory, yes," Levinson replied judiciously. All state-of-the-art computers could accept vocal input, and the more sophisticated ones could provide simple "spoken" output. But you knew damned well it was a machine talking, and there was no question of carrying on a conversation. Chatty computers still belonged to the realm of science fiction. For that matter, so did UFOs.
DiFalco gazed a moment longer at the image in the screen, with its somehow impudent winking light. Then he unstrapped and shoved himself up from the acceleration couch.
"XO, have GP shuttle number two readied. And have Sergeant Thompson meet me at the docking bay."
"Holy shit, Eric!" This was pushing the limits of informality even for the Space Force, but Levinson looked like he was past caring. "You're not actually going over there, are you? I mean, we don't know . . ." He sputtered into speechlessness.
"That's right," DiFalco said quietly. "We don't know
anything
. And we're not going to find out, sitting here staring at them and hoping they'll resume radio communications. And I want very badly to find out, Jeff. Call it curiosity or anything else you like, but there's no way I could
not
accept this invitation. Anyway," he continued with a slight smile, "if they wanted to zap us, I have this strange feeling that we'd all be dead by now." He moved toward the hatch. "You have the con, XO."
Levinson made one last try. "Colonel, we only have the word of some robot or some bug-eyed monster that it's safe in that ship! How can they even know what's safe for us?"
DiFalco turned toward him with an odd expression. "You know, Jeff, that's one of the things that makes me so curious about all of this. Remember when he told us that?" Levinson nodded. "Well . . . why should the suitability of their environment for us be an 'of course'?"
Andy J.
was still visible as an elongated dumbbell (DiFalco had vetoed Levinson's suggestion that the ship be realigned so as to aim the particle accelerator at the alien) when the lighted airlock became visible as a faint outline on that curving wall of unidentifiable alloy.
Piloting the little interorbital shuttle toward it, DiFalco stole a glance at his companion's black face, frowning with concentration as he checked out, not for the first time, his recoilless launch pistol. Not that the little rocket gun would be likely to do much good, even if the colonel let him use it. Since he had no real intention of doing so, he wondered why he had even brought the sergeant. Purely as a ceremonial bodyguard, he supposed—the Marines performed shipboard duties for the Space Force similar to those they always had for the Navy, although their EVA role was a new wrinkle for them. Anyway, having him along made DiFalco feel better.
Gunnery Sergeant Joel Thompson, USMC, was not a particularly huge man. In fact, he was only slightly bigger than the six feet and one hundred eighty pounds maintained by DiFalco, who worked at keeping in shape—largely, as he admitted to himself, because he was reaching the age at which a flat stomach was an emblem of self-discipline. But vanity had nothing to do with the sergeant's unrelieved musculature, without an ounce of efficiency-impairing fat. He was not an easy man to know, but he was as formidable and dependable as he looked. And his stubbornness was a force of nature.
A faint boom sounded through the shuttle as it made airlock-to-airlock contact with the UFO's hull and instruments confirmed magnetic seal attachment. For a moment, the two of them sat in silence as if awaiting something, then exchanged quick, sheepish smiles and proceeded to don their vac suit helmets. DiFalco's mounted a videocam whose continuous transmission to
Andy J.
would, he guessed, be of some interest to Levinson and everyone else who could contrive an excuse for being near a screen. Like their helmet communicators, it would be relayed by the shuttle's more powerful comm equipment; they shouldn't be out of contact with the big ship, barring intentional jamming by the . . . aliens, he supposed he had to call them. Concentrating grimly on the the concrete and the routine, he led the way to the airlock.
Decompression completed, their outer door slid open to reveal, as he had more than half expected, the UFO's airlock similarly open to vacuum. They floated from one chamber into the other, and the strange door sealed behind them. There. That was it.
Shouldn't I have said something historical before stepping across?