The Tempest (First Contact), page 27
“The science officer,” Marc says. “Dr. James Carter. You remember him, right?”
“He…”
“He survived the crash. We found him in a cave using the fusion core for warmth.”
The professor shakes his head. His eyes dart around, refusing to settle on anything as he speaks. “He couldn’t have. Not after all these years.”
Marc is brutal with the truth. “Carter searched for survivors after the crash. Those bodies he found he ate. The core melted the ice to give him water. Eventually, he began eating fish, but the nutritional value wasn’t there. He lost muscle mass and most of his teeth.”
“And?” the professor asks even though Marc’s already told him how this ends.
“And we found him. And Ariel killed him. What the hell is going on, professor?”
“Ariel. Caliban,” the professor says. “They’re…”
“They’re what?” a voice asks from the head of the grave, challenging him. Miranda stands behind the headstone, resting her hands on the polished granite. She’s ignored Marc’s plea for her to stay with the scout.
“The machine,” the professor says. His voice trembles. “You have to understand. I didn’t mean for any of this. I didn’t. It’s the Krell machine. It’s alive. It has a life of its own.”
“What are you talking about?” Marc asks, confused by the professor’s comments.
“It’s hidden, buried beneath the surface. It wraps around the entire moon. The power is unimaginable. It’s… It’s…”
“It’s what?” Marc asks, but deep down, he already knows.
“It’s everything our hearts could desire—for good or ill,” the professor says. “It’s Pandora—their Pandora. Only Pandora. Her name. It doesn’t mean doom. In Greek, it means gift of the gods. She was supposed to save us.”
“But once the box was opened, it could not be closed,” Marc says. He’s stunned by what he’s hearing. He feels dizzy. Whether that’s the thin atmosphere or the events of the last few days catching up to him, he’s not sure.
He looks around. Fireflies buzz past. Their lights glimmer like stars coming in and out of existence—billions of years pass in fractions of a second. His mind is lost. It’s as though he’s adrift in space. He’s being drawn in toward the black hole. He’s in orbit around the dark ice giant. He’s helping Emma prep the scouts. He’s walking up to this grave for the first time and marveling at the way bioluminescent microbes light up in the dirt. It’s then he realizes he’s been looking for answers he already has. He speaks softly, recalling something James told him in the cave. “We are gods.”
“Yes, yes,” the professor says, looking at him through bloodshot eyes. “That machine made me a god. Only I’m not. I could never be.”
Marc feels the weight of the moment pulling him down. It’s as though gravity has doubled in an instant, but now he understands. The professor was crying before they landed. It wasn’t Miranda that brought him to tears—it was Emma. If he didn’t see Emma die, he at least saw her body. He knew what Ariel had done before they landed.
“We’re human,” the professor says, struggling to explain himself. “But for all our faults, we’re balanced. Love and hate. Kindness and anger. Logic and emotion. Fear and trust. We’re capable of all this and more, but we’re yin and yang. We’re both the darkness and the light.”
“Ariel and Caliban,” Marc says as a growing awareness strikes at his heart.
“Yes,” the professor replies as two figures materialize behind him in the gloomy half-light. Ariel and Caliban approach to within ten feet. In the darkness, their features are sullen. Their shoulders are stooped. It’s as though they’re responding to being scolded. They’ve reacted to words the professor is yet to speak. With bitterness on his lips, he says, “What a fool was I to trust them. They are drunken monsters, not gods.”
“And all of this,” Marc says, stunned by the realization of what’s transpired on Altair IV. “It’s the war raging in your soul.”
The professor looks down at the grave, saying, “And they killed her.”
Marc appreciates the deeper meaning in those few, simple words. With four words, the professor has described the death of his wife, the destruction of the starship Copernicus and the murder of Emma. His use of the plural pronoun is telling: they! Both Ariel and Caliban have wreaked havoc trying to satisfy their primal urges. They’re separate beings. There’s no balance within, only from without. It seems the professor tried to reign in the madness, but he couldn’t. He’s not researching ancient Krell technology. He’s trying to undo whatever spawned these monstrosities that plague him on this moon.
Marc breathes deeply. As much as he wants to believe the professor, something bugs him about the old man’s choice of words. And they killed her. He’s absolved himself of all responsibility. Is he rationalizing his culpability? Is he lying even now?
Marc says, “It’s all because of you, isn’t it? You’re conflicted. You want to leave but you know you shouldn’t and that manifests in them. You know what will happen if you go back out there. And so you stop yourself time and time again.”
The professor drops to his knees in the snow and ice and leans forward sobbing over the cold rocks that form the grave.
“It was too much. The machine. It was too powerful. It took from me what it wanted. What it needed to create them.”
Marc looks at Miranda, saying, “I’m taking her with me.”
“What? No,” the professor says, looking up at his daughter standing at the head of the grave. “You can’t. She can never leave here.”
“Why?” Miranda asks, but her father doesn’t answer. From the look on his face, it’s not that he can’t but that he won’t.
Two thundering booms reverberate through the air. They’re high and distant, breaking in the clear sky barely a second apart. They all look up. Two meteors cut through the dark of the eternal night. Yellow streaks light up in the stratosphere, blazing as they tear into the atmosphere. They travel in a smooth curve, looping slowly around the sky as they descend.
“Emma,” Marc whispers, realizing what’s happening.
While the others are looking up, he checks the control panel on his suit arm. The mission-elapsed time has just passed 36 hours. This is what Emma meant when she said they had an advantage over Ariel and Caliban. He asked her what it was, but she wouldn’t tell him. He still remembers the glee with which she answered, “Me!” This is what she meant. While he was prepping the scout for departure on the Sycorax, she was setting up the other two scouts as a contingency. She knew they should have been back within 24 hours so she programmed them to fly on autopilot as a backup to rescue them if things went sour down on Altair IV. They’re probably homing in on the beacon built into the scout. Emma might be dead, but she’s given him an ace-in-the-hole.
“There are more of you?” the professor asks, confused. He must think Marc and Emma have lied to him about the state of the Sycorax and its crew. They haven’t, but he’s assuming the incoming scouts are crewed. Ariel and Caliban both step further back into the shadows. They’re trying to assess the threat cutting through the sky above them.
Marc sees an opportunity. Up until this point, he hasn’t lied, but now he sees an opening to gain an advantage over the demigods. It doesn’t matter that the scouts are on autopilot. As long as they think there are two crews inbound, it’ll distract them and provide him with cover. And that will buy him some time.
“It’s over,” he says to the professor. “You need to come clean with me—with both of us. Tell me. What happened here?”
“You don’t understand. I—I can’t,” the professor says, kneeling beside the grave. He reaches out and touches the stones. There’s tenderness beneath his fingers.
“Who’s in the grave, professor? Who died here?”
“The light of my life,” the professor says with trembling lips. “But I suspect you’ve always known that.”
Marc drops to his knees. The ice crystals around him glow in response to his motion as alien bacteria react to his movement. He grabs at the rocks and stones and begins casting them aside. In the low gravity, it’s easy to clear away bigger rocks.
“No, no. No! You can’t. You mustn’t,” the professor yells, batting at Marc’s hands from the other side of the grave.
Marc will not be deterred. Ice has fused some of the rocks to the ground, but he wrenches them away. The smaller rocks scatter like blocks of polystyrene.
“Please, no,” the professor says, trying to lie on the grave to prevent Marc from disrupting it. “If they knew…”
“Father,” Miranda says, kneeling beside the old man and wrapping her arm over his shoulder. She’s gentle, speaking softly. “This has to end. No one else need die to hide your secrets.”
The professor looks deep into her eyes. Tears stream down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, Miranda. I am so sorry. You must believe me. I never meant for any of this. I just—I just wanted to protect you.”
Marc clears a section of the grave near the headstone. Ariel and Caliban watch impassionately. Now that he’s below ground level, the gravel used to fill the grave is as fine as sand. Marc has no idea how deep the grave is, but given the ground around him is frozen solid and yet within the grave it’s loose, he suspects the trench is shallow. What need is there for a six-foot-deep grave on a moon with no scavengers?
Miranda helps him. She cups her fingers together, swirling them around and pulling loose gravel out of the grave. With each motion of her hands, tens of thousands of microbes light up in iridescent blue, sparkling like stars beneath her fingers.
Less than a foot down, they come across a scrap of cloth. Miranda sits back, watching as Marc continues. Out of respect, Marc slows his motion. Even though Miranda never knew her mother in life, seeing her like this in death must be harrowing. He sweeps his hand back and forth, gently clearing away the fine gravel. Ribs are visible beneath the fabric.
The professor’s hands are shaking. He takes hold of Miranda’s hand, wanting to comfort her and perhaps to hide his trembling fingers from sight.
Marc clears the gravel, exposing a shoulder bone. As the soil shifts with his motion, a jaw is exposed along with a few teeth. The rest of the skeleton is still buried.
“I’m sorry,” Marc says, feeling terrible for doubting the professor’s integrity.
He rests his hand on the pile of gravel beside him, ready to push it back into the grave and cover the remains, but something bothers him. It’s the size of the bones. Women are smaller than men—that’s to be expected—but the shoulders are narrow. The jaw is slight. And the teeth. They’re long but thin. The length isn’t that much of an issue as ordinarily only a fraction of each tooth would be visible above the gum line, but these teeth are tiny. Without saying anything, he rests his hand on the jawbone, comparing the size of the teeth with the nail on his little finger. Three, almost four teeth would fit within his nail.
He sits up, looking at the professor. “This is a child.”
Reluctantly, the professor nods.
Miranda looks confused. Her brow furrows. “I—I don’t understand. How is this possible? I thought this was my mother.”
Marc reaches down and brushes the gravel away, exposing the cheekbones, eye sockets and forehead of the skeleton. Although he’s leaning into an adult-size grave, the body within is of a child no more than five or six years old. Strands of blonde hair are visible beneath the dirt.
“No,” Miranda says, getting to her feet and staggering backward. “No, no, no. It can’t be.”
Her arms are shaking violently, but not from the cold. She looks around in a state of shock, turning toward Ariel and Caliban, and then the scout, and then back at the grave as she says, “No, it’s not. It’s not me! It couldn’t be me. I’m here! I’m right here.”
“I’m sorry,” Marc says, getting to his feet. Fine dust falls from his knees and legs, lighting up like glitter as it settles on the frozen ground.
Miranda pleads, “Father. My father. Please tell me this isn’t so.”
The professor opens his mouth but no words come out. He reaches out, using the headstone to help him stand.
Marc’s wristpad computer beeps, distracting him. The two scouts are on final approach. He can see the glow of their engines coming in over the distant mountains. Emma’s set them up to use a Stranded Crew protocol, meaning now they’re in range, they’re operating in tandem to effect a rescue. Their flight paths can be altered by remote control.
Marc’s got several options available on his screen. His computer informs him about the preprogrammed rescue scenarios available to him. The first is to divert the landing to his present location. This is intended for situations where the primary craft has crashed in a dangerous position or the wreckage impedes landing. It allows the surviving crew to move to nearby safe ground and call in the rescue craft. Then there’s an option for hovering and lowering a harness, and one for aborting the landing and going around again.
Marc could take direct control of one or both of the scouts, but even Emma wouldn’t attempt that. Remote control flight is enhanced with AI, but next to impossible without hooking up to a larger display. Given his lack of flight experience, he’d have a 100% chance of crashing and he knows it. As it is, he leaves the options alone, keeping his fingers well clear of the buttons on the display. A quick glance tells him that the rescue craft will be fine setting down behind the first scout. As they’re under AI control at the moment, they’ll flank each other, forming a triangle with the craft on the ground at the apex. As soon as they land, though, and no one walks out, Ariel, Caliban and the professor will know it’s a bluff. Marc swipes the screen away.
Miranda addresses Marc. She’s angry. “Why? Why did you do this?”
“I had to know,” Marc says, still distracted by the incoming scouts visible to one side of her. The scouts have activated their landing lights, meaning they’re fifteen kilometers out. The lights are designed to illuminate a landing strip for hundreds of meters so they light up the mist in the air.
Clouds roll in. The weather is moving unnaturally fast. The wind picks up. Marc’s eyes dart around. He’s trying to gauge what Caliban is doing and the growing threat around him. Without raising his hand, he points at the scout with one finger, trying to get Miranda’s attention. She doesn’t notice. Tears roll down her cheeks.
Ariel and Caliban walk over and stand at the foot of the grave, looking down at the remains. Lightning crackles in the distance. Thunder rolls across the plain. The professor notices the growing tempest. He looks at Miranda and then Marc. Their eyes meet, exchanging what words cannot convey. The professor is worried about what will happen next. It seems he fears not only for his life but theirs.
Marc understands. As long as Ariel and Caliban thought Miranda was his daughter, she was untouchable. These Krell sentinels may have split off from the professor at some distant point several decades ago, being torn from the primal parts of his mind, but they never lost their respect for him. Now, though, they must see Miranda as a threat. The professor has been protecting her from them—and not without reason. For them, though, the dynamic has changed. He betrayed them. He misled them. There’s no telling how they’ll react to this other than that they’ll act in their own self-interest. They might be the product of the alien Krell machine, but they’ve inherited the professor’s human traits and even his mannerisms. Marc sees the way Caliban looks sideways at Ariel. Whereas once he fought to prevent her from fleeing, now he’s aligned with her. Now, they have a common cause.
Staring at them, Marc can’t help but wonder how long this alliance has been in play. Could it be that as soon as he and Emma decided to talk to them separately that they conspired together? The storm that battered the scout seemed determined but not violent, which makes Marc wonder if they’ve been working together for a while now, deceiving what they perceive as ‘dumb humans.’
Ariel doesn’t notice Caliban’s interest in her. She’s distracted. She kicks at the loose rocks at the base of the grave, asking, “How is this possible?”
“You,” the professor says, pointing to the caves at the base of the cliff behind them. Marc can see the old man is stalling. He’s trying to buy them some time. Marc edges closer to Miranda as the professor continues. “You were supposed to protect my family. You were supposed to be there for us, but you conspired with Carter. Together, you were going to leave for the stars. You abandoned us.”
“But I didn’t kill her,” Ariel says.
“You might as well have,” the professor replies. “You left us. You were supposed to protect us. You said you’d stay. If you’d stayed. If you’d been here none of this would have happened. You knew the passage was unstable after the Krell machine came to life.”
“What happened?” Caliban asks.
“She fell. There was a quake. They both fell from the narrow ledge that leads to our home. Lisa and Miranda, but I could only reach one of them. My—My wife—Lisa. She slipped beneath the waves. M—Miranda was still breathing, but her body was broken. I tried. I did all I could but she was dead before I could get her home.”
“And us?” Ariel asks.
“And you. You were gone. You and Caliban were fighting over the wreckage of the Copernicus for months! You could have saved her, but you didn’t. When I needed you most, you abandoned me. If you’d been here, they’d both still be alive.”
Marc comes around beside Miranda. He takes her by the elbow, gently edging her away from the grave and toward the scout, but she resists, pulling away from him. She looks at him with disdain. He wants to say something but he doesn’t want to provoke Ariel or Caliban. At this point, it’s impossible to know what they’re going to do. This has come as a shock to them, but that’s playing to his advantage. Either of them could strike him down, but they’re still coming to grips with what’s been said. Ariel’s grand scheme to somehow leave this moon has unwound. From the way she looks at the professor, it’s clear she loves him in her own twisted, distorted way. That’s why she came back for him. Now, she’s struggling with the realization he never trusted her.
