Cold Eyes (First Contact), page 27
Dozens of large square pillows have been placed within the sphere. Dali sits, bunching a few of them up behind him. The soft fabric presses against the curved glass.
“Thank you,” he says, lounging on the pillows and getting comfortable.
Rose raises her hand. As she lowers it, the glass darkens, mimicking the fall of night, something that never happens on this planet. Dali’s tempted to pull off his Snoopy cap. His hair is oily and his scalp is itchy, but the tiny speakers in that cap are his only connection with this crazy world. He leaves his cap powered on but tucks the microphone down below his jaw so he’s not leaning on it as he lies on the pillow. Within a few minutes, he’s asleep.
Wreckage
Dali blinks in the morning light. The sunrise is beautiful, heralding the dawn of a new day. Clouds drift above the sea. Birds float on the breeze.
“I had the craziest dream,” he says, turning toward Sandy, only it’s not Sandy beside him—it’s his scratched, dented helmet. He sits up, muttering, “Not a dream… Not even morning.”
From where he is, Dali can see the alien ocean out through the pillars of the temple, across an ornate garden on the edge of the cliff. Further along the coast, rain soaks the land, coming in from the ocean in squalls. Dark clouds obscure the mountains. A flock of birds hunts a school of fish. They sail high above the sea. Occasionally, one of them deflates its flotation bladder and dives toward the waves, pulling up and skimming along just above the surface.
“How did you sleep?” Rose asks. “That’s the term, correct?”
Although her voice is kind, the sight of an alien drifter is alarming. To him, she’s semi-transparent. He can see the beating of her heart. Blue blood pumps through the arteries and veins sprawling over the tight bladder keeping her aloft. He wonders about what she and her kind can see. Which part of the electromagnetic spectrum is visible to them? Perhaps to them, their skin is a barrier. Infrared tends to augment heat rather than what humans think of as color. When Rose looks at other drifters, she probably doesn’t see the folds of their brains or the curl of their digestive tract, just the warm glow of their skin.
“Ah, good,” he says, trying to stay focused. He’s being polite.
On Earth, only a handful of creatures are transparent. When it comes to terrestrial animals, skin provides protection not only from microbes but from the harsh ultra-violet light of the sun. Even white light can damage DNA within a cell. On Bee, though, such biological shielding isn’t a factor. The infrared coming from Luyten’s Star is mild by comparison.
For some sea creatures, like tiny fish or jellyfish, being translucent allows them to avoid predators. Deep within the ocean, though, where the light seldom reaches, almost everything is transparent. On this planet, the vegetation is burgundy bordering on black, absorbing every last photon of energy to produce photosynthesis, but the sky-whales were a variety of grays. Bob was light blue, a color that doesn’t naturally appear in the foliage. His skin tone, though, is roughly the same as the orange haze in the sky. Perhaps, if they’re color-blind, prowler skin is easily mistaken for the background. They seem to be able to distinguish shades and patterns. Rose has clear, translucent skin. She seems to sense him staring. Her tunic changes color, hiding her organs behind a veil of soft pink.
Dali leans back on one of the large pillows.
“We’ve finished recovering your spacecraft,” Rose says.
“You’ve what?”
Dali leans out, pushing his hands against the smooth glass and looking down at the marble floor. The drifters have arranged the Ranger like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Bits and pieces lie scattered over an area three to four times the size of the actual craft. It’s as though the vessel has been dissected. Various sections have been grouped together, lying next to each other in a methodical manner. The shattered windshield has been placed next to twisted metal from the fuselage. Heat-shield tiles have been stacked to one side. The metal trusses and crossbeams that provided the craft with its delta shape have been carefully positioned. The control panel and cockpit seats are stacked on a flat section of the flight deck that survived the explosion. The tail fin is largely intact. It stands alone, rising up from the marble floor at the rear of the dismembered spacecraft. The paint has been singed, but the UN logo is still visible.
“Oh, this is wonderful,” Dali says, getting up off his knees and to his feet. He picks up his gloves. He’s weak. His movements are slow and cumbersome. The intense gravity on Bee has caused him to burn through the meager fat stores on his body.
“Are you sick?” Rose asks.
“Hungry,” he replies, connecting life-support hoses to his suit. He struggles to get the pack on his back.
“Your metabolism? What powers your body?”
“Food,” Dali says, suiting up. “But you’re not going to find a cheeseburger and fries within a dozen light-years.”
“We can synthesize many things. It may be that we can synthesize what you need.”
What does Dali need? At a chemical level, he has no idea. Food is a convenient catch-all, but the actual details of what it entails escape him. Wasn’t it British sailors who suffered from scurvy because they lacked vitamin C? What are vitamins? How is he going to get Rose to synthesize something he can’t even describe, let alone define? Sugars, proteins, carbohydrates, fats? He’s pretty sure they’re simple enough but he has no idea about their chemical composition.
Dali seats his helmet, feeling hopeful as he says, “I had protein bars on board the Ranger. Some of them may have survived.”
He steadies himself, leaning his gloved hand against the transparent frame. The door to the middle module opens. Dali steps inside. The glass slides closed behind him. It can’t be glass as such, though. Glass wouldn’t be strong enough, but his three-compartment home doesn’t look as though it’s built from plastic. Each glassy wall is easily three inches thick, distorting the light that reaches him. The pressure builds, causing his suit to crinkle. The next clear glass door slides open and he steps into the outer hatch. The final door is already open, allowing him to walk down the steel grates to the floor. He keeps a steady hand on the rails. For creatures that float, Rose and her team of scientists have an acute awareness of what’s needed for a biped like him.
Rose descends beside Dali.
He crouches, examining a piece of burnt plastic. The black coating has melted into the foam, crushing it, but he recognizes it as part of an armrest. Nearby, the smooth curve of the nose cone sits on the marble floor.
The front landing gear is set beside the nose cone. Although NASA never imagined airports on an alien world, they thought the crew could target dry lake beds or rocky deserts as landing zones. Within the housing, there are layers of lightweight material, bits of torn gold foil, matted thermal insulation, wires and hydraulics. The suspension is ridiculously oversized compared to the wheel. It’s no wonder this survived the breakup. It’s designed to careen across rough ground.
Rose says, “We’ve never had to engineer a craft for spaceflight. It’s interesting to see your approach. The insulation layers and the way you’ve catered for radiation and micro-meteor impacts in the hull have been of special interest.”
Dali walks around the wreckage. His mind is overcome by a sense of nostalgia. This was his whole world—one, solitary spacecraft. Now it lies broken on the floor. It’s difficult not to feel disheartened.
A set of cabinets has been abandoned on the marble. They’re lying on their side. The shiny aluminum doors that once faced forward are now scorched and burnt, having been turned upward, facing the roof of the old temple.
“This,” Dali says. “I think this is the storage lockers from beside the airlock.”
Rose follows his lead, coming over beside him. Behind her, several other drifters float higher up, carefully watching his motion. They’re holding what appear to be tablet computers, only like the microchips he saw in the village, they’re circular rather than rectangular in shape.
Dali tries to open one of the cabinets. His gloved fingers can’t pry the panel loose. Another drifter flies in, racing down with what looks like a cutting torch. Dali steps back. The drifter fires up his torch and burns through the thin sheet metal. After prying it open, he retreats, leaving Dali to explore.
“Okay. These are the HALO packs. This is what I used when I bailed out. It contains a parachute, life jacket, life raft, things like that.”
“I’m not familiar with those terms,” Rose says.
“A parachute is a carefully designed canopy catching the air. It slowed my fall. It’s a lot like the webbing the prowlers use when they fall, only much larger.”
“Interesting.”
“These are low-tech devices. They’re simple mechanical items. They saved my life.”
The drifter with the cutting torch sees Dali turn his attention to the next cabinet. He flies in and clears away the twisted wreckage, allowing Dali to open it.
“Protein bars,” he says, feeling his heart leap in his throat. “This is what I eat!”
Rose and the others gather around. Dali grabs several of them, shoving them in his pockets.
“We need to clean them,” she says. “We need samples.”
Reluctantly, Dali surrenders his stash. She’s right. The wrapping on the bars is burnt and torn, exposing the protein-packed food to the microbes on Bee.
“Damn.”
“Do not worry,” Rose says. “We will isolate the key components and replicate them.”
“To hell with thirty-two days,” Dali says, suddenly realizing he’s vocalizing his thoughts in response to Kari’s gloomy prediction. With food, water and a habitat, he can wait for months if not years for rescue. Deep down, though, he knows food buys him time, but the physics haven’t changed.
Rose is confused. “Hell?”
“Forget it. Long story,” Dali replies, walking on to examine more of the wreckage.
Although Rose never leaves his side, the other drifters around her race back and forth like bees dancing between a field of flowers and a hive.
“I sat here,” Dali says, standing behind the burned-out frame of a chair. Melted plastic has dripped from the support struts and springs, solidifying into a grotesque, surreal work of art. Salvador Dali would be impressed. Dali himself feels depressed at the sight of his spacecraft lying there in ruins. The thick webbing of his five-point harness has survived along with the chrome locking plates. The rest of the seat looks like it was made of wax and melted in a fire. He picks up the buckle, watching as it falls from his gloved fingers. In his mind, he’s expecting it to tumble as it did so often in space. Instead, it rushes from his hand, slamming back into the marble floor.
Everything’s wrong. Dali’s known this for some time. It’s not just that he’s stranded on an alien world. Nothing makes sense. Not Bob. Not Rose. Not the cave paintings. Not the exalted ruler. Not even the ruins of the Ranger. He feels as though he’s acting out a part on a stage, waiting for the final curtain to fall. This is a nightmare, but one from which he can never wake.
He wanders among the wreckage, distracted, feeling lost, abandoned.
The crushed remains of the external antenna are still attached to the torn wreckage of the fuselage. The dish is bent.
“I need to talk to the Magellan,” he says. “Please.”
Rose raises her three-fingered hand, wanting him to wait. She’s distracted. From what he can tell, she’s in discussion with someone, but not anyone near her. Dali can see stripes and shapes rolling over her skin, but his translation device doesn’t pick up her words and none of the other drifters respond. She must be on whatever equates to a conference call. It’s only then he realizes she’s at the forefront of the Beebs efforts to understand these strange beings from another star system. There’s no doubt the technology on Bee eclipses anything on the Magellan, and yet physics is cruel. It’s Earthlings that are in orbit, not the inhabitants of Bee.
He walks around the back of the carefully placed wreckage. The rocket engine bells are dented but recognizable. The spaghetti-like mess that is the turbo-pump fuel lines has been twisted and distorted.
Dali’s troubled, but not by the wreckage of the Ranger. Why aren’t the inhabitants of Bee in touch with the Magellan? They can talk to him. Why aren’t they talking to Sandy, Helios and Kari? Why should he even need to ask to talk to his ship?
One of the oxygen cylinders from the rear of the craft is intact. Rather than being used for air, it was used to oxidize fuel and propel the craft in space. Dali’s mind casts back to when he was in orbit, slowly spiraling in toward Bee. Helios said he was venting gas. Like a thruster firing slowly, that changed his orbit. Looking at the oxygen tank, Dali can see a long, smooth, curved dent running along one side of the cylinder. It looks like someone’s pushed a steel pipe into the metal, leaving a distinct impression easily four feet in length. The insulation has been stripped away.
There’s a crack in the cylinder near the outlet valve. Dali’s confused. This didn’t happen when the Ranger broke up. This isn’t the result of the spacecraft exploding as it hit the thick, lower atmosphere. Something punched through the hull, denting the tank as it passed through the Ranger. Whatever it was, the stress caused the weld near the valve to crack. That has to be the vent Helios was talking about.
With his boot, he shifts a battery cell on the marble. Something has grazed the electronic control board on the side of the housing, tearing computer chips from their soldered sockets. Like the cylinder, the damage runs in a perfectly straight line. It’s too orderly to be the result of the Ranger breaking up. He was hit by something small moving very fast.
Dali remembers the craft rocking just before he lost power. Standing there, looking out over the wreckage, he tries to picture where he was and where it felt as though the impact occurred. He turns, judging the distance and his memory of that sensation—if it wasn’t at this point, it was damn close.
He takes a closer look at the cylinder. His gloved fingers linger, touching the scraped paint. Rose is distracted. She’s conversing with someone, probably over a radio as she’s not facing any of the drifters. She’s animated, angry, pressing her point home, that much is clear from her motion and the flicker of shades running across her body. Rose drifts high above the wreckage, but she moves in swift bursts. This must be the alien equivalent of pacing the floor or perhaps hand gestures accompanying a passionate argument.
The other drifters, though, notice the movement of his fingers. Two of them descend. They’re curious about what he’s seen. Dali steps past the oxygen tank, dragging his gloved fingers along a nearby section of the hull. He steps over the hatch on the airlock, still running his fingers over metal parts, making as though he’s lost in thought. Dali is anything but lost. He crouches, looking at the broken remains of the microwave oven built into the back section of the cockpit. Dali doesn’t give a damn about the microwave, but he runs his fingers over the fractured safety glass. The plastic laminate has held the glass together, forming a spiderweb of splinters. He dusts the buttons, but it’s a feint. His mind is still focused on the oxygen tank.
The red flashing light on his HUD has barely stopped over the past few days. Everything’s being recorded, but will it be understood back on the Magellan? He wants to say something, but he doesn’t want to be overheard.
To his surprise, the tiny red dot changes color. It’s still blinking, but it’s green? Goddamn it, Kari. Some instructions would have helped. What does that mean? Green’s good, right? Or is he running out of storage?
Rose descends. Dali catches her motion out of the corner of his eye. Still playing dumb for the others, he picks up the melted remnants of the joystick used to control the attitude thrusters on the Ranger and shows it to her.
“Most of our maneuvers were preprogrammed,” he says, bluffing, trying to divert the attention of the other drifters from the oxygen cylinder. He’s hoping if he plays it cool, they won’t realize he’s noticed the impact that brought him down. He says, “If manual adjustments were needed, this is how we flew the Ranger.”
He holds up the joystick. A bundle of wires and plugs hang from the severed control.
“You have it.”
“Yes,” he says. Dali turns the joystick over in his hand. “This is it. We called it fly-by-wire, meaning a slight movement here will translate to the equivalent motion of the spacecraft as a whole. There were several settings, depending on whether you—”
“No,” Rose says. “You’ve got it.”
From the way she’s speaking, it seems she’s trying to hold a conversation on two levels. Although she’s talking to him, it’s clear she’s participating in some broader virtual meeting. She’s conversing with him at the same time. It seems even aliens struggle with multitasking.
“It?” he asks, trying to make his question as simple as possible, hoping for a clear answer.
She points at the ceiling. “The Magellan.”
“What?” Dali fumbles with his wrist pad computer, switching to the open broadcast channel. Back when the Ranger was falling from the sky, he relayed his comms through his abandoned flight suit. Even though that was the best part of a week ago, his exploration suit is still set to sync with a nearby booster even though that’s dead and gone. Now, with the flick of his fingers, it’s set to transmit directly. “Hello? Sandy?”
The reply he hears breaks up, coming in rough, punchy staccato, but he understands what’s being said.
“This—This—This is the United Na—United Nations starship Magellan. Identify yourself.”
“It’s me… Dali.” He looks down at the green light flashing on his HUD. “Is that you, Kari?”
“Wha—What?” There’s yelling in the background. Kari must have her hand over the microphone beside her lips but she’s still transmitting. “Sandy! SANDY! Get up here. I’ve got Dali on comms.”
