The Tempest (First Contact), page 12
“This way,” Miranda says, urging them to hurry along the narrow path.
It’s dark. Emma trips on a rock. She falls forward. In the low gravity, her motion is slower than it would be on Earth. She holds out her gloved hands. On Altair IV, she’s able to perform what equates to a pushup and bounce back off the ground. Marc grabs her pack to steady her. White vapor leaks from a tear on her backpack.
“You’re venting oxygen,” he says.
“How much further?” Emma asks as Miranda grabs her gloved hand, urging her on.
“Just up there.”
In rapid succession, two lightning strikes pound the ground beside them, hitting just beyond the flickering forcefield. The flashes are blinding, destroying not only their night vision but their ability to resolve any shapes for a few seconds. All Miranda can see is the glowing remnants of the lightning bolts impressed on her retina.
The crack of thunder is deafening, rattling her bones. All three of them cower. It’s clear the bolts were intended for them and, were it not for Ariel, they would have found their mark. The smell of ionized air lashes Miranda’s nostrils. It’s hot and heavy in stark contrast to the cold.
Miranda yells at the storm, “Caliban, stop this madness!”
Ahead, her father beckons from a doorway carved into the granite. Above him, a dome stretches over four floors of a home built into the mountainside.
“Quick,” she says, pushing them ahead of her into the entrance tunnel beneath the dome.
Alien Biosphere
The two astronauts stumble down the tunnel away from the storm.
“Are you okay?” Marc asks Emma.
“Yeah, fine. I think.”
Hundreds of tiny bits of glass have embedded themselves in his suit. The inner layer has held, but the thick outer material on his left side looks as though it’s been dragged down the road behind a truck. There are scuff marks and bits of insulation torn from his arm, but his suit pressure holds.
“What about you?” Marc asks Miranda.
“I’m okay,” Miranda replies. She dusts some snow from her shoulders and shakes her arms, but her clothing is intact. Marc looks at the damage to his gloves. Her bare hands should be bloody and torn but they’re not.
Emma also notices. Both of them are surprised to see the teenage girl is unscathed given the pounding their suits took.
“If it wasn’t for that forcefield…” Emma says.
“You can remove your spacesuits,” an elderly man says, cutting her off.
They’re standing in a dimly lit entrance carved into the mountain. Rocks litter the ground. In the middle of the walkway, the rocks have been crushed as fine as gemstones and rolled flat. A gentle slope leads up into a subterranean basement, but the door is partially closed. There are stairs, leading up to the dome. Lights have been drilled into the rock wall, giving the illusion of warmth. A waft of vapor rises as the man speaks, betraying the cold inside the mountain.
“You’re quite safe in here, I assure you,” he says.
Marc looks at Emma. There’s no way in hell he’s removing his helmet. Emma, though, powers down her suit, tapping at the controls on her wristpad.
“What are you doing?” he asks, taking her by the shoulders. “We don’t know what kind of microbial contaminants are present on this moon.”
“But we do know, don’t we,” Emma says, looking across at the man and his daughter.
The man nods.
Miranda says, “There is nothing here that will hurt you.”
“Other than that?” Emma says, pulling away from Marc. She points at the entrance to the tunnel. Hail lashes the opening. The wind rushes past, whipping by at hurricane speeds. Lightning continues to strike the plateau. In the distance, the dark silhouette of their spacecraft looks menacing. Emma reaches up and releases the locking ring on her collar.
“No,” Marc says, seeing her hands set on either side of her visor, ready to twist and remove her helmet.
“I have no choice,” she says. “I’m losing internal pressure.”
To make her point more vivid, she swats at the side of her backpack with a gloved hand. Emma’s unable to reach the loose flap of material waving around as her suit vents a fine mist into the air. Beneath the layers of insulation, a tiny hole reaches through the fiberglass casing on the backpack.
Marc says, “I might be able to—”
“It’s okay,” Emma says with a sense of confidence Marc cannot muster.
“No, it’s not.”
Marc may have been disinterested during his flight training, but his astrobiology background has prepared him for this moment. He understands this is more dangerous than juggling sticks of dynamite.
Life is aggressive. It’s like a point guard in the NBA Playoffs, constantly hassling for an advantage. Species have to be aggressive to survive. It’s a case of, “Go compete or go extinct.” Ever since the first cell divided on Earth in some primordial soup four billion years ago, the race has been on. At a microbial level, cannibalizing anything that gets in your way is a fair strategy. Throw exotic alien biomes into the mix and the competition for microbial dominance is unavoidable. Why would life on this moon be the exception? It wouldn’t. The only way life could adapt to such a harsh, cold, dark, energy-poor environment is through aggressive competition. Survival of the fittest means life for those species that can exploit a niche.
Their eyes meet. The look of desperation in Emma’s dark pupils tells him more than words ever could. Like him, her mind has raced through the possibilities and arrived at this as the only viable conclusion.
Marc wants to stop her, but he can’t. Oh, he could try to overpower her, but what would that accomplish? He could insist they buddy-breathe, but that would only exhaust both of their supplies. A suit patch won’t work. It’s her backpack that’s leaking, not the inflated suit bladder supporting her body. Although it was the flying glass that bothered him most in the storm, he felt the sting of tiny stones being flung up and hitting his suit trousers. Emma must have been struck by a sharp fragment hurled around in the storm like a bullet. Without dismantling her backpack, it’s impossible to know whether it struck a pipe, a valve, the tank regulator or the filtration unit. Regardless, a cloth patch is useless on anything other than their cloth suits.
With nothing more to say, Emma removes her helmet. She exhales slowly and sniffs at the air.
“What can you smell?” Marc asks from behind the safety of his visor.
“Well, my nose isn’t as good as yours, but I’m guessing ozone from all that lightning. The air is thin. I feel as though I need to hyperventilate just to breathe… Ah, there’s ammonia. And rotten eggs. What smells like rotten eggs?”
“Hydrogen sulfide,” he says, although he’s looking at the readout on his wristpad computer rather than guessing in response. It’s analyzing the atmosphere based on local sampling. “I’m seeing trace amounts of methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide. Stuff like that. But this filter won’t detect viral particles or airborne microbes.”
Emma hoists her helmet on her hip. She rests her left arm over the top of it and offers her right hand to the old man in a gesture of friendship.
“Lieutenant Emma Madi of the Sycorax colony transport out of Westminster Star Base.”
“Professor Antonio Spiro,” the old man says, shaking her hand and smiling. “And you’ve already met my daughter, Miranda.”
“I don’t like this,” Marc says. He looks around, but not at anything specific. He’s trying to take in the enormity of all that has transpired. “We’re in the middle of an active alien biosphere.”
“I’ve been here for almost twenty years,” the professor says with warmth, charm and a smile. “Our two biospheres coexist without competition.”
“I don’t buy it,” Marc says. “Evolution allows species to adapt in an astonishing variety of ways. This biome has evolved over billions of years. You’ve been here for twenty. That’s hardly comparable. This place might need thirty years to cannibalize your cells. For that matter, it may have only needed ten and you haven’t noticed yet.”
The professor says, “You’re quite the alarmist.”
“Quite the rationalist,” Marc replies. He turns to Emma, saying, “We need to get you back to the scout.”
“You want to go back out there?” Miranda asks, pointing at the storm.
As if in response to her question, the gale increases in its intensity. Rocks fall over the mouth of the cave. It’s not a landslide. The entrance is still open, but if any of those rocks had struck Marc, they would have crushed his helmet.
The professor asks a bitter question. “How long will your oxygen last?”
Emma is subdued.
Marc looks at his wristpad computer, saying, “Another four hours.”
“You won’t make it forty feet out there,” the professor says. “Storms like this can rage for days.”
“I—I can’t,” Marc says, addressing Emma. “I can’t take this off. It goes against everything I’ve been taught.”
“You don’t have a choice,” she says.
The professor says, “Our two biomes compete for similar primary resources, but tend to ignore each other. I’ve detected trace bacterial loads beyond our home, but never in large microbial colonies. And I’ve never encountered intrusions into our residence.”
Marc asks him, “And you’ve tested for contamination within human subjects? You’ve looked for analogs of deep-tissue viral reservoirs? You’ve checked your spinal fluid? You’ve examined either side of the blood-brain barrier?”
“I have,” the professor replies, triumphant.
Marc’s not sure how much he believes the professor. The old man rattled off a simplistic answer to complex questions with a little too much glee, but he’s right about one thing. Marc won’t last long in his suit. Reluctantly, Marc concedes. If he makes a run for the scout, he’ll be blown off the edge of the cliff or struck by lightning—and that’s if his suit isn’t torn to shreds first. As much as he wants to hold out until the last breath of air leaves his oxygen tank, all he’s doing is delaying the inevitable. Against his better judgment, he taps at his controls.
“There’s no cellular compatibility,” the professor says. “Life here uses entirely different chemical pathways.”
Emma says, “But you told us this moon was under quarantine?”
“From Caliban.”
“Who or what is Caliban?”
As the two of them talk, Marc powers down his life support system. He equalizes the pressure and removes his helmet.
The professor says, “Caliban is a planetary defense structure put in place by the Krell.”
“Woah, there,” Marc says, holding his helmet by his side. “You’re talking about extraterrestrial intelligence?”
The professor nods.
Emma says, “Hang on. In over five thousand surveyed worlds, and after detecting microbial life on, what? Less than one percent of terrestrial analogs? We’ve never found anything more complex than a cockroach, let alone sapien-level intelligence.”
“Until we found Altair,” the professor says.
Emma points at the storm swirling before them in the darkness beyond the entrance to the tunnel. “Wait. You mean the ice giant, right? Not here. Not on this moon.”
“That’s correct, lieutenant.”
Emma spins around. She turns her back on the professor. With her one free arm, she raises her gloved hand and presses it against the side of her forehead as though she were trying to clear a migraine. She speaks softly with Marc.
“This is wrong. Something here is horribly wrong.”
“Oh, I know,” Marc says. He addresses the professor, speaking slowly and measuring his words with care. “This is First Contact. If you’ve discovered an intelligent extraterrestrial species, why is this the first we’ve heard about it? Why isn’t this all over the news back at star base?”
“You shouldn’t have come down here,” the professor says, refusing to answer his question.
Marc turns to Miranda. “What’s going on here?”
“I… My father…”
“Miranda was born here,” the professor says. “This is the only life she’s ever known.”
“Why haven’t you told anyone about your discovery?” Emma asks.
Marc focuses intently on the professor, looking for any hesitation in his response or eye movements that might reveal a lie.
“The Krell are millions of years more advanced than us,” the professor says as though that plain statement of fact were an explanation in its own right. He seems relaxed. He’s not bothered by the discussion.
“So?” Emma says.
The professor laughs, responding with, “To them, we’re chimps. We’ve barely made it out of the trees.”
Emma does not look impressed.
“Come,” he says. “Let me show you my laboratory and we’ll talk about the Krell.”
He gestures for them to follow him.
“A million years isn’t a reason,” Marc says, walking up beside him.
“Oh, but it is,” the professor replies, chuckling. “You have no idea what you’ve done by coming here.”
“But you’re here,” Emma says, walking on the other side of him. “Where’s your ship? Where’s the rest of your crew?”
“They’re dead,” the professor says with cold, clinical precision. “The Copernicus crashed. Caliban brought it down roughly two hundred kilometers northwest of here as it attempted to leave the moon.”
They walk past the stairs and past the partially open door leading to a brightly-lit basement. Marc and Emma both peer through the gap as they walk on. Inside, large semi-transparent crystals rise from the floor. Machines surround them, monitoring them.
“Ah,” Marc says, pointing at the door and wanting to see more, but the professor ignores him. He leads them to an elevator. To Marc, the whole place is like something out of an old James Bond film. What little he saw of the basement was reminiscent of a supervillain’s secret lair.
“What’s in there?” Emma asks, turning back toward the basement as they step into the elevator.
“Krell technology,” the professor says, offhandedly.
The elevator rises. Roughhewn rock slides past just beyond the smooth, curved glass as they pass from inside the mountain to the home outside. The elevator clears the rock wall. They emerge within a dome stretching over the mountainside, providing them with a rain-soaked view across the darkened valley. Several floors pass quickly beneath them. The lighting is dim and tinged with red. The furniture is sparse. Polished concrete floors form a semicircle ending with a sweeping balcony on each level. As the vast building is set on the slope of the mountain, each balcony is set back slightly from the previous one, allowing an atrium to form within the dome. The effect is such that it’s possible to stand on any balcony and see the whole structure.
The storm rages beyond the dome. Rain lashes the smooth, glassy surface, fighting to get in. Lightning ripples through the clouds.
Marc tries to ignore the distractions around him and focus on the central issue. He says, “Even if these guys are a million years more advanced, why does that matter?”
Emma reinforces his point, saying, “A million isn’t going to cut it as an explanation. You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“A million years is beyond human comprehension,” the professor says, stepping out on the top floor of his home. “You might think you know what it means, but you don’t.”
“Try me,” Emma says, walking into the professor’s laboratory. Marc’s known her long enough to know when she’s barely able to contain her rage. It’s not unbridled anger she’s bottling up. Emma’s not like that. She’s not someone that flies into a fit of swear words. No, she’s focused.
Krell Science
Emma paces to the far side of the lab. He knows what she’s doing. This place is familiar to the professor and his daughter but not to them. She wants to get comfortable with the setting. They’ve both had enough surprises for one day.
Marc adopts a more passive approach. Physically, he’s exhausted, so it’s easy enough to come across as relaxed. If Emma’s the lioness prowling back and forth through the long grass, he’ll be the male lazing in the sun. Neither, though, should be underestimated.
Marc rests his helmet on one of the benches and looks at the equipment. None of it is familiar—not from his time. He’s seen lab equipment like this before but only in historical displays.
Like the rest of the dome, the lab is lit with a soft red light, allowing their eyes to remain adjusted to the darkness beyond the glass. The light, though, is everywhere. It’s not a point-light casting shadows around them, but rather one that saturates the lab, blotting out the distinction of colors, making it easy to see the shapes and items around them. Marc’s only ever seen this lighting scheme in mountain-top observatories back on Earth.
Rows of test tubes sit neatly in racks at the back of the circular lab. Cork bungs prevent evaporation. As he moves closer a white light comes on overhead. Step back and it fades to red. In this way, the various workbenches have their own light profiles within the overall night lighting scheme. Marc passes his hand in front of him, activating the light again, wanting to see what’s in the test tubes. The various liquids have been arranged in shades of color stretching from red to pink, yellow, green, violet and blue, which makes no sense as these shades would be the result of entirely different chemical processes. At a molecular level, there’s probably no correlation between them beyond aesthetics. He walks on and the bright light fades.
A polished copper still sits on a tripod. It’s been mounted on another table. A naked flame burns beneath the still, which is both horribly inefficient and imprecise—and dangerous! Did the professor really leave a naked flame burning in an empty lab? Back at college, his chem lecturer would have flunked him if he did something this stupid. Brass tubes wind in tight coils, allowing condensation to form at various points along their path. They twist in exotic shapes. A murky fluid drips into a distillation flask with a conical base. It’s seated on a flat metal slab that rocks back and forward, constantly mixing the fluid. This is old-school organic chemistry.
