Cold Eyes (First Contact), page 19
Dali twists the dial yet again. Although the LED display is illuminated, the sheet of nylon wrapped around his helmet makes it impossible to read. Is it the lifejacket next or the raft? If it’s the raft and the damn thing rushes away from him, he’s fucked.
Dali pumps the lever. Thick balloons rise out of the vest and inflate. They’re offset, deploying to either side of the front-pack to avoid obstructing his view. At the moment, all he can see is the reserve canopy wallowing in the darkness. Slowly, the inflated vest drags him back to the surface. Dali struggles with the reserve canopy, trying to work his way out from beneath it. Luyten’s Star grows brighter. Eventually, he breaks the surface, still trying to clear the nylon from his helmet. It takes several minutes of exhausting struggle before the reserve parachute drifts away from him.
Only a fraction of his helmet is above the waterline. Even with the lifejacket inflated, he’s submerged. The water is murky. He’s not sure if it’s sediment or microbes, but it appears dirty. He was expecting clean, clear water—perhaps something like the crystal blue waters of the Bahamas. This alien ocean seems almost muddy, like a creek or an estuary.
Dali twists the cog on his vest once more. He pins his chin, pushing it down toward his chest so he can read the LED display.
7. Inflatable Raft
“Come on,” he says, pulling on the lever. Most of the pouches on his front pack are now empty, all except for the thick bundle immediately above his groin. Gas canisters inflate an emergency raft, pushing it up and out of his vest. It unfurls slowly. Thick sides inflate. A thin cord connects him to the life raft, preventing it from floating away.
Dali is exhausted. He swings an arm up over the sidewall of the raft, but he can’t pull himself in. He’s too goddamn heavy. Murky water laps before his eyes. It’s a stark contrast to the day-glow orange of his raft. He kicks with his legs, but to no avail. The lifejacket doesn’t help. The inflated pouches rising from the sides of the survival pack get in the way of his arms.
Dali pulls down on the sidewall, hauling himself up. He flails around like a fish flapping at the bottom of a boat. His arms swing. He rolls and kicks with his legs, splashing in the sea, slowly inching himself higher. Water seeps in with him. He rocks his body, using his stomach muscles to move like a seal, worming his way onto the raft. Dali’s desperate. Anything. He’ll do anything to get out of the ocean. There are handles on the side of the life raft. He grabs one and hauls himself up further, eventually getting his legs inside.
For a moment, he lies there on his back. Water laps around him. The raft is partially submerged with all the water he let in while clambering aboard. Didn’t Helios say something about keeping his backpack dry? Something about the carbon dioxide canisters? Dali wants to care, but he can’t. He’s exhausted.
To one side of the raft, there’s a small paddle on a string. It’s probably intended for basic rowing and could be used to bail out the raft, but for now, he just lies there staring at it. He’s alive. That’s all that matters. He’s down. He made it. He breathes deeply. His muscles sag with exhaustion.
There’s no night on Bee. Technically, the far side of the planet is locked in perpetual darkness, but where Dali is, it’s always daytime. The alien sun never rises or sets. Hours, even days, are meaningless on a world where the sun never moves. Weeks, months, and years are impossible to measure.
Dali loses all sense of time. Although it’s a red dwarf, Luyten’s Star is pretty damn close and pretty damn bright. He can’t stare directly at it. The sky is orange, except for close to the star where it takes on a deep red hue.
Lying there in the alien seawater, Dali pulls the glare visor over his eyes. Someone else might start looking for help or figuring out what the next steps are, but Dali is spent. Sweat drips from his brow. His muscles tremble. The surge of adrenaline he felt when sinking in the ocean has faded. His body aches. He can barely move his fingers, let alone his arms. He needs to rest.
Dali closes his eyes and dreams of a world he’ll never see—Earth.
Nitrogen
It’s night, or at least twilight. The unrelenting sun has finally given way to shade, which is a relief. Dali’s got his eyes shut and his glare visor down. As the outer visor was designed to allow astronauts to work in the harsh light of space, the glare is lessened rather than darkened. Now, though, the red glow beyond his eyelids has gone.
Wait?
There is no night on the ocean side of the planet.
His eyelids flicker open. He slides his glare visor up.
Dali’s in the shadow of a massive creature floating through the air. Several elephant-like trunks loom over him, probing his legs. They’re pink and fat, nudging his knees and boots. There are four of them, moving in tandem, poking at both him and the raft.
“What the hell?”
Dali shimmies backward on his life support pack, shuffling to the far side of the raft. He pushes himself against the inflated wall. Water sloshes around his boots.
Thick, fleshy, muscular trunks bend and flex, searching for his legs. Above them, a mouth opens. There are no teeth, but the gaping maw is large enough to swallow an SUV. Saliva hangs from broad lips. Beyond, a dark throat beckons.
“Git!” he yells within his helmet, swatting one of the trunks with his gloved hand. “Git the hell out of here, damn it!”
Dali waves with his arms, trying to make himself look big and threatening to an alien creature well over a hundred times his size. Rolling folds of flesh float just a few feet above his raft. The hair on his arms stands on end, not that the alien can see that vestigial relic kicking in as fear seizes his mind.
Dali thrashes with his boots, churning the water around him, trying to make as much commotion as he can in the hope of scaring the animal away.
A foghorn sounds—long and low. Wind rushes at him from above. No, it’s a deep breath being exhaled. The sky-whale rises, lifting high into the air. Four flippers twist and turn. The front pair move one way, while the back two take an opposing position, allowing the animal to steer as it climbs into the sky.
“That’s it,” he yells, continuing his pathetic display of aggression. “You better stay away from me! I’m not your lunch. I’m a big bad alien, you hear?”
It takes almost a minute for the shadow of the sky-whale to pass over him.
The animal rises higher, joining a pod of creatures roughly a hundred feet above the surface of the ocean. They’re beautiful. Majestic. Dali maintains his bravado and bluster.
“That’s it, you—you sky-demons! Or whatever the hell you are. You just keep going that way!”
Kari would be in awe of such a sight. Sandy would watch in silence. Even Helios would smile. But for Dali, seeing those creatures is heartbreaking. They’re a reminder of what he’s lost. He’s going to die down here on Bee.
Dali slumps against the sidewall of his raft. Sitting waist-deep in seawater, he watches as a pod of five sky-whales drift on the breeze. They’re reminiscent of blimps. Most of their bodies lie slung beneath an elongated semi-transparent bladder. Sunlight catches the taut skin of the bladder, reflecting hues like those on a soap bubble. Ruddy pinks and yellows appear like oil on water. Veins reach up from the body of the creature, stretching out over the flotation bladder like the roots of a plant.
As grumpy as he is at being shocked awake, Dali can’t stay scared. The sky-whale wasn’t trying to eat him. It was curious. Curiosity is a hallmark of intelligence. Drifting over a vast, featureless ocean, an alien mind spotted a human floating in a bright orange life raft. It came down to investigate, not to feed. It sought to understand this intruder into its realm, not to devour him. But like all good humans, Dali was predictable. Fight or flight. With nowhere to run to in his tiny raft, all he had was a surge of adrenalin when he should have been curious too. He raises a gloved hand, waving in acknowledgment at a missed opportunity.
The day wears on.
It never ends.
Dali drifts on the open ocean.
The angle of the star gives him some idea of his location. Luyten’s Star isn’t directly above him, which is a relief. That means he’s not in the middle of the heat dome with its calm waters and lack of breeze. As the star’s sitting roughly at 45 degrees, he must be off to one side of the ocean. How far is it to land? A hundred miles? A thousand? Where will the prevailing currents take him? Is he destined to be washed ashore, or is he caught in a gyre, circling around and around the same patch of ocean?
Dali discards the HALO front pack with its spent pouches. It feels good to remove the harness from his shoulders and legs. The life jacket is part of the pack, so he keeps it within reach in case there’s a leak in the raft, but it feels good to be free of the extra strapping. There’s a flare gun tucked into the side of the pack. He keeps that as it might come in handy for creatures that aren’t as friendly as the sky-whale. Although, in the thick atmosphere on Bee, the flare will probably drop out of the end of the barrel rather than shoot into the distance. At least the glow of burning phosphorus and clouds of smoke will provide a distraction. He shoves it in the pocket on his lower leg.
Tiny fish dart around the outside of his raft. It seems a school of alien minnows or something has taken to his raft for shade. As he hasn’t seen any equivalent to seabirds hunting fish, it’s probably to hide from predators lurking beneath the surface. The thought of an alien shark launching itself out of the water to grab him should be terrifying, but it’s not. Too much time has elapsed under a harsh alien sun. Fear is for energetic minds. His thinking is far too dazed and exhausted for such a luxury. If the sky-whales were to approach again, he’d welcome them as long-lost friends.
A light blinks at the top right of his heads-up display. It’s an alert that’s been flashing away on the edge of the visor since before he bailed out of the Ranger. With everything he’s been dealing with, it was too much, so he ignored it. After a while, it became more background chaos. Now, though, he uses his wrist pad computer to access the alert.
Inbox: You have three unopened messages
Dali laughs, shaking his head in disbelief.
“If this is spam,” he jokes with himself. There would be nothing more utterly human than being stranded on an alien world and yet still not being out of reach from getViagraCheap999817@hotmail.com.
Dali has to lower the glare visor to see the image on his heads-up display properly. There are three messages—one from each of the crew.
“I’m so, so, so, sorry,” Sandy says with tears streaming down her cheeks in a prerecorded message. “Be strong. Be brave. Be the Dali I know you are. We won’t give up on you. I promise. We’ll figure something out. We will. Physics be damned.”
She kisses her fingers and reaches out, touching the camera. With that, the broadcast is over. Dali would have liked to hear more from Sandy, but she was probably pressed for time. Either that, or those few words were all she could muster.
As much as Dali appreciates her passion, he knows it’s a lost cause. Even if they could send a rescue craft, they probably couldn’t find him. Day-glow orange might make sense on Earth because it stands out. On Bee, it blends in. Finding a needle in a haystack is child’s play compared to finding him in an ocean almost three times the size of the Pacific.
“I love you too,” he says to a distant Sandy.
He opens the message from Kari.
“Dali. Not much time. I’ve zipped a machine-learning algorithm that compares HUD imagery with terrestrial biology. You’ll have to compile it locally. Hopefully, it will be useful. It should at least give you some idea what you’re dealing with down there. It’ll automatically activate the recorder on your HUD with each interaction. You’ll see a little red dot blinking on the lower right when it’s running. If we get close enough to pick up a signal, the algo is programmed to compress and transmit results, and we’ll get to see what you’ve seen. I’ll pass your interactions on to the folks back on Earth. Oh and hey—”
She pauses, searching for her next words. “Above all, remember, keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times. Later, dude!”
Oh, pragmatic Kari. She’s ever the scientist. It’s not difficult to see why she was selected for the mission. Dali opens the attachment. It decompresses and compiles with a few obligatory ‘Are you sure you want to continue?’ messages. Dali loves the way programmers assume users are sure about anything when it comes to the seemingly magical, inner workings of a computer.
Dali activates the program. It quickly picks up on the fish darting past in the water.
The streamlined body shapes of aquatic animals are consistent with convergent (genetically unrelated, but functionally similar) evolution… the group motion of multiple organisms moving in unison is suggestive of schooling for protection from predators… The alien organism may parallel baitfish. On Earth, predator/prey relationships for similar species range from barracuda to whales.
“Huh?” Dali says, wondering if the elephant-like trunks he saw on the sky-whales were used to catch these fish. Or perhaps that massive mouth hoovers up fish like a baleen whale carving through a bait ball of krill.
A few of the tiny, streamlined fish have made it inside the raft. Dali hadn’t noticed them before as their bodies are almost entirely transparent. They dart around on the far side of the raft, staying in the shade of the sidewall, near his boots. It seems they want to remain in the shallows but fear the light.
The algorithm is still churning through environmental data.
The ocean surface temperature is 11C/50F. Sonar indicates the approximate depth as 200m/650ft… Detecting a distinct temperature gradient that drops steeply near the surface. Ocean temperature stabilizes at 5C/40F within a depth of 3m/10ft.
Dali mumbles, “So these tiny things are trapped between the cold below and the sky above.”
He rocks forward, cupping his hands in the water. With no humans to fear and no trunks reaching down from the sky, a couple of the fish circle within his palm. They dart in and out, pecking softly at the fabric on his gloves.
“Hey, Kari. Remember those samples you wanted?”
Dali looks up at the orange sky, hoping against reason for a reply.
Nothing.
Dali’s hungry. For the first day or so, he barely noticed the lack of food. He’d sip water from the straw protruding from the inside of his helmet and forget about his hunger pangs. Now, though, a knot in his stomach demands more. It’s frustrating. His body doesn’t seem to understand the inability of his mind to procure food. His stomach continues to pain him, demanding attention he can’t give.
Dali opens the message from Helios. He opened this one last for a reason. He may not remember the big guy from training, but he’s had enough interactions to realize that, like Kari, he’s no dreamer. Whatever Helios has to say, it’s going to be blunt. As it is, his message seems to start mid-stride.
“Sandy thinks she can get you off that rock. I don’t. I can’t lie to you. I can’t give you false hope.”
“It’s nice to see you too,” Dali says to the image projected onto the visor a few inches from his nose.
“At some point, you’re going to die down there. Let’s not pretend otherwise.”
Ah, Helios. If Kari’s pragmatic, Helios is a stoic Greek philosopher.
“You need to know how to end your life on your own terms,” Helios says. “As your flight physician, I’m obliged to provide you with an effective means of termination.”
Ouch. When Helios talks like this, it’s utterly sterile. Suicide is an ugly term. Dali understands why he’s avoiding it, but isn’t that the whole point—down here on Bee, it’s unavoidable. Perhaps Helios isn’t using that term because suicide is tragic but preventable. Suicide is the heartbreak of people not realizing there’s always someone who cares. Programs are terminated, not people. Damn it, Helios. Have a heart.
“If your CO2 scrubbers fail or you find yourself in unbearable pain, switch the atmospheric filter to 100% nitrogen. You’ll feel a little lightheaded, then drowsy, and then it’ll be over. Carbon dioxide triggers a panic reflex that is distressing and painful. Nitrogen doesn’t. It will simply displace the oxygen in your lungs. You won’t feel a thing. I’m sorry, but that’s the best advice I can give you.”
“Nitrogen, huh?” Dali says. For Helios, this is, ‘Having a heart.’
Helios barely blinks on the semi-transparent HUD. For him, this is a clinical decision. He speaks with passion. This is why Sandy selected him for First Contact. When it came to the hard decisions, she knew he wouldn’t be swayed by emotion or feelings. Dali hangs his head as Helios continues.
“Sandy thinks we’re going to make meaningful contact with the inhabitants. She thinks they’ll help you. I don’t. From their perspective, you’re a specimen from another world. Ask yourself, what we would do if you fell to Earth? I’m sorry, Dali. A hundred percent nitrogen is the only way you’re getting off that rock.”
The message ends.
Dali dismisses the HUD interface, throws the glare guard open, and leans back with his arms on the side of the raft. A single word falls from his lips.
“Fuck!”
Land
Sleeping with the sun always up isn’t easy. Even if Dali positions himself so Luyten’s Star is at his back, over time, his raft turns and the alien sun once again brightens his eyelids. His sunshade is designed to get rid of glare, not light. It is intended to allow astronauts to work in space so it dims the light but doesn’t darken his helmet. Eventually, Dali slips off to sleep again.
Hours later, his raft gets stuck. After bobbing in the ocean for what felt like days, it’s a strange sensation to be stationary, resting on a submerged ledge. Dali opens his eyes, raises his glare visor and looks around.
