A steward came into the bridge, carrying a tray of water glasses, each with a slice of lemon vertically on the rim. He walked around, letting the crew take glasses as he went. Ice clinked.

  “Very civilized,” Lila said. “I thought that kind of thing was reserved for passengers. I guess I’d imagined you all simply... suffering.”

  Jacques smiled.

  “I’ll play this on low volume,” he said, with a wave at the table. “This is the first transmission.”

  A bar tracked along the image of the squiggle as the sounds came.

  Warbles. Bloops. Sounds like an animal underwater, struggling to free itself from a dangerous entanglement.

  It continued on for couple of minutes, fading in and out, changing pitch.

  The bar reached the end. The sound vanished.

  Lila looked at Jacques.

  “I can’t help you,” she said. “I think you misunderstand my skills, perhaps.”

  She accepted a glass of water from the tray, thanking the steward. He nodded to her.

  “Perhaps you underestimate them.” All smiles, all charm.

  “Do you know something here that you’re not telling me?” The water was chilled, with just a hint of the lemon. Very nice.

  “No, not at all.” Jacques’s face fell more serious, as if he was managing to put aside the charmer and be more focused. “You’re a xenobiologist.”

  “Yes. Stress on the ‘biologist’ part. This is data interpretation. I can tell you about the cells from Europa or the mustelid ecology on Wolf six 18. But errant radio bursts, I can’t help.”

  “Is it language?” Garrison said, looking around.

  Lila shook her head. “How could we possibly know? A radio signal could be used—if it was used rather than just a random emission—in any number of different ways. You’d have to interpret and reinterpret, analyze and, mostly, make extrapolated guesses. At best.”

  “Listen again.” Jacques waved at the table and the warbles and bloops started up again.

  Lila spoke over it. “If you listen, you’ll start hearing words in there, because that’s the way the human brain works. We want to interpret. We want there to be meaning. The same way as we see faces in rocks and devices. A couple of screws become the eyes and the switch is the nose.”

  “I told you she was funny,” Garrison said.

  Denella nodded, but didn’t seem impressed.

  Lila shook her head at Garrison in exasperation. She focused back on Jacques.

  “The key is not what it’s saying, which I’m sure is nothing, but where it came from.”

  “The planet,” one of the other crewmembers said, earning a scowl from Jacques.

  “Yes, of course. But have you narrowed it down? Is it a reflection? You know, some old television show from Earth, bouncing off of it. How many light years are we out now?”

  “Close to eighty,” someone said, at the same time as someone else said, “Television?”

  “Old entertainments,” Garrison said. “And that’s probably our first port of call.”

  “Bad metaphor, given our current situation,” Denella said.

  “Fair point.”

  “Well,” Lila said. “Anyway, not television, but potentially a signal from Earth, bouncing back. We’ve overtaken it. If we stay here long enough, we’ll be able to listen in to a whole bunch of old recordings. Compile a history of broadcasts from eighty years back.”

  “Good thought,” Jacques said. “Isn’t it too strong, though?”

  “The power of a signal decays by the cube of the distance,” Denella said.

  “That’s a given,” Garrison said.

  “You didn’t have to amplify?” Lila said.

  “Not a bit. Clear as a bell.”

  “How far are we from the planet?”

  “A little over a quarter million kilometers,” Jacques said.

  “Wow!” Garrison said. “That’s like Earth to the Moon kind of factor. Lucky we didn’t drop out right inside the thing.”

  “Couldn’t happen,” Denella said. “Inertial dampening.”

  “Ahh,” Garrison said, as if that explained it.

  Lila sipped from her water again.

  “How long,” she said, “will it take us to get down there?”

  Chapter Six

  Jacques had no separate ready room or office, but a small meeting space near the bridge served the purpose. It was a plain off-white, with some semi-static displays showing bold paintings of sailing ships weathering storms, or facing cannon-fire.

  Seated around a dense faux-wood table, there was space for six of them. Lila, Garrison, Jacques, Denella and one other crew member—Cassidy Illington, a lander pilot—and another passenger—Malé Mdessen, a signals specialist who was on her way to Ursus to work on the communications network.

  “I don’t see how I can help a bit,” she said. “Frankly, I’m just about freaking out right now. There’s no indication that we will be able to get safely underway again.”

  Malé was taller than any of them, and thin to the point of bony-ness, but she had a warm smile and soft eyes. She collected button chats—those quaint comms devices that had preceded the once popular retinal-cochlear connections. Lila had shared a table in the dining room with her several times.

  “Radio signal,” Denella said. “You know more about that than I do.”

  “I know about commercial installations. Making sure everyone has a good signal and that the infrastructure is robust.”

  “There you go. More qualified than anyone else aboard.”

  “If we’re going to land,” Jacques said, “then we need to know exactly where.”

  “What?” Malé said.

  “The source of the signal.”

  “The source.”

  “You want to go to the source?” Garrison said.

  “Exactly.”

  Lila smiled. That was the captain’s plan.

  “What are you grinning about?” Garrison said.

  “May I speculate?” Lila said.

  “By all means,” Jacques said, smiling as if he’d hoped someone would figure it.

  “Falling out of warp so near the planet wasn’t a coincidence.”

  “Someone planned it?” Garrison said. “Back home?”

  “No. Someone planned it right here.”

  “Here?”

  “The signal’s from the planet,” Denella said. “You think that the signal interfered with our flight? No it couldn’t do. We were on the warp. Supra-light.”

  “So they used something else to affect the drive,” Jacques said.

  “Someone here on the planet?” Garrison said. “Someone here—this ‘they’—are able to sabotage a supra-light vessel passing by? How does that even make any sense?”

  “That’s what we’re going to go ask them,” Lila said.

  Chapter Seven

  The lander’s interior was cramped, but with just six of them, in a space designed to carry twenty passengers at a time, it felt almost spacious.

  Everything smelled new. The landers had been fully refurbished before departure. Eggplant colored upholstery on the soft seats, fresh carpet, new interior paneling.

  Lila sat next to Denella for the trip.

  The cadet was even younger than Lila had thought; not even twenty yet.

  “First trip,” she said to Lila. “Had not expected this.”

  “No one did.”

  The forward bulkhead had a simple display showing their approach. The planet was black, with a few sparkly edges where icy mountains caught distant starlight, turning it into visual diamonds.

  Sixteen hours—the lander had an impressive burn rate—and they would be on the ground. Back on Elegia Fortune the ship’s brain was narrowing down landing sites.

  There were probably structures that the scans had found, but correlating those with the source of the signal was difficult. It was taking a lot of the ship’s brain work to slim down the broad and smeary transmissions.

  “Either we land at a structure and get lucky,” Garrison had said, seeming to warm to the prospect of setting down, “or, better, the extrapolation has worked before we arrive and we can land at that pinpoint.”

  Lila slept. Deep and calm, but then woke, startled by some REM insight.

  “Landing?” she said, still climbing through the cobwebs of waking.

  “What about it?” Jacques said. He was seated across from her. He had a hemisphere display in his hand, with layers of data, similar to the table in the bridge. He was reading documents.

  “Nothing,” Lila said. “I was sleeping.”

  Garrison was next to Jacques, and leaned forward, staring at her.

  “There’s no atmosphere,” Lila said. “So we can’t aerobrake to a landing, that was all. But I’m sure that’s all been thought of.”

  “It has,” Jacques said. “But where safety is concerned, I’m always open to hearing it. You never know when there might have been some oversight.

  “Good,” she said. “Thank you.” She closed her eyes and drifted off again.

  Woke with Denella shaking her shoulder. Lila didn’t feel especially rested. Her mouth was dry and her skin was clammy.

  “Sleep in your clothes a lot?” Garrison said, leaning to see her again.

  “What?”

  “Sorry. It was meant to be funny.”

  “Keep working on it,” Denella said. “You’ll get there.”

  Garrison smiled. “At least that was funny.”

  “Wasn’t meant to be.” But she grinned at him, and actually winked.

  “You woke me?” Lila said.

  “Look.” Denella pointed at the window beside her. There were a dozen dinnerplate-sized windows along the lander’s walls.

  The planet was there. Black and brooding. Different to the starfields above. A few specks of light below, momentary glints of starlight finding that particular angle between frozen atmosphere and Lila’s eye.

  “I had not expected it to be so bright,” Denella said.

  “Likewise,” Lila said.

  “Landing in twenty minutes,” Jacques said. “The planet’s rotating, so we’re coming in at the equator to help shed some of our velocity.”

  The sounds in the ship changed. Deep hums and creaks echoed through the superstructure.

  “This is all automatic,” Garrison said. He’d left his seat and was leaning over her, staring through the window too. He smelled faintly of aftershave. Had he put that on just before departure?

  “I understand,” Lila said. Cassidy was piloting, alone. Most of the crew had remained on Elegia Fortune to work on repairs.

  None of them had seemed very hopeful. Jacques, however, had indicated that they were very early into the problems and there were a lot of different paths to explore. The man was relentlessly upbeat.

  Eventually Garrison returned to his seat. The ship shuddered, and their weight increased. Even the artificial gravity systems couldn’t fully displace the effects of serious deceleration.

  Then, with an extra shudder, they were on the surface. The ship fell silent. A strong tingle ran through Lila as she artificial gravity let natural gravity take over.

  “Safe,” Garrison said. “Next question is, whether we are somewhere useful or not.”

  “It’s all useful,” Lila said. “We have a responsibility here to make as many observations as we can. To gather samples. I trust that the lander, Captain, is running itself hot gathering data.”

  “It is. And please, it’s Jacques.”

  Next to him, Garrison actually rolled his eyes.

  “Down safely.” Cassidy’s voice ran through the cabin. She was in the cockpit, nestled above and forward of them. The lander was a strange shape, like some insect with stubby undercarriage for legs and a pointy nose for a head.

  “Now,” Jacques said, “the fun begins.”

  Chapter Eight

  Lila’s EVA suit was too hot and too tight in places. She never had expected that she would ever need to wear one on this trip. Ursus 319 had a breathable atmosphere. Walk around in shirtsleeves with a straw hat.

  She stood in the lock, waiting. The lander’s lock was good for five at a time, so they were going in threes. Two groups.

  “All right, Lila?” Garrison said from back in the vessel. Going in the second group with Cassidy and Denella. His voice was oddly thin through the helmet’s speaker.

  Jacques and Malé were in the spherical lock with Lila.

  “Good,” Lila said. “I’m good to go.”

  Stepping out onto an uncharted, airless planet, light years from the nearest star, looking for an alien structure, which was probably the source of them getting knocked out of warp.

  What could be not right?

  The lock cycled.

  “Lila, you go first,” Jacques said.

  “Me?” she said. Jacques looked strange in his suit, as they all did. Bulky with hoses and services all over the outside. The CO2 converter on the back of his ball of a helmet, her own suit reflected in the visor, his face just visible behind.

  The lock’s hatch folded right up out of the way and Lila leaned forward, looking out into the bleak, black landscape.

  “It should be you,” she said. “Captain.”

  “Me?” he said. Same tone as she’d used.

  “You’re the vessel’s captain. Surely it goes to you to be the first to set foot on the alien world you’ve discovered.”

  Malé laughed, strong and full. “He’s done that already,” she said.

  She looked even stranger in her suit. She was so thin and tall, but now she looked like Jacques. Still with the height, but the swollen volume of the suit filled her out.

  “You’ve done that?” Lila said. “You never mentioned.”

  “It’s not the kind of thing one brings up in polite company.”

  “Yes,” Malé said. “You have to ask him. You have to draw out the words as if you’re pulling up an anchor chain.”

  “It was an asteroid,” Jacques said. “The largest in that particular system, granted, but I hardly discovered it.”

  “He used a series of readings from some student researchers,” Denella said. “So technically, they had discovered it, but he did the real extrapolation work.”

  “And was the first to step out onto the surface.”

  “Not so very different from here,” Jacques said, staring out over the blasted plain. “Well, there was a nearby star, so we had to watch for staying out in sunlight for too long.”

  “What’s its name?” Lila said.

  “Ledger,” Denella said with a laugh. “He name asteroid for himself. Funny, yes?”

  “Pretty funny, yes,” Lila said.

  “Hey,” Garrison said. “Maybe it’s nerves or something, but is anyone actually going to ever set foot on this thing? Y’all just standing around in the airlock gabbing.”

  “Yes,” Malé said. “Lila, go ahead.”

  So Lila moved out onto the lander’s steps.

  Chapter Nine

  The planet’s surface was smooth, but undulating on a larger scale. The frozen atmosphere, shrunken to something like zero point zero one percent of its original volume, was still many meters thick.

  Ice. Oxygen, nitrogen, argon. Whatever else there had been floating around. Helium and hydrogen on top.

  Whatever hadn’t been blasted away by the cataclysm that had befallen this hapless world.

  Across the interior face of Lila’s visor, imagery and legends appeared. The direction back to the lander, the horizon, the names of a couple of stars she could see.

  It let her know that the suit’s heating system was working.

  “Zero Kelvin,” Malé said, coming up beside her. “More or less.”

  “Can’t be less,” Lila said.

  Malé gave a hearty laugh. “Come on, let’s go investigate this structure.”

  “Give me a moment,” Lila said. “I’d like to just look at all this for a moment.”

  “It sure is something, isn’t it?”

  Lila said nothing, but Malé was right. The plain stretched out in front of them to a horizon maybe four or five kilometers away. A flat blank edge, cutting through the starfield.

  An Earth-sized world.

  To her right, the east, there was a range of mountains, visible really simply because of the way the it was jagged—that blank edge serrated up into the stars. Impossible to tell how far off they were. A half a kilometer, or standing tall somewhere far beyond the horizon.

  So many stars. The view was alive and vibrant. The kind of thing that the travel companies used in their promotions of how gorgeously lit were the starfields out in the deep.

  Jacques joined them.

  “Sure is something,” he said. He stood right by her. “But, there’s work to do.”

  “Sure.” Lila turned and saw Malé already striding away, clearly confident in the environment, and in the suit.

  “All right?” Jacques said, moving around in front of Lila. “I know you’ve done the training, but this is your first time in a suit, is it not?”

  “First time in a suit other than in a training gymnasium or a pool.”

  “You seem very relaxed.”

  “Well, as someone indicated earlier, what’s not to be relaxed about? Broken ship, signals from an interstellar planet and so on. Come on, let’s follow Malé.”

  Lila stepped around and began walking. They went past the side of the lander. It had big lights operating now, shining down at the surface. In places it was black, but from many spots, it sparkled.

  The other three had cycled through the lock and joined them.

  “Breath-taking,” Garrison said. “We could open-cast this place in no time. Haul up so much metal we’d supply everyone for centuries. So lucky to find it. I hope, captain, that its position and trajectory has been recorded.”

  “Fully logged,” Jacques said. “When they receive our message in eighty years, they’ll know where to look.”

  “I have every confidence that your team will restore power to the warp drive and we’ll be on our way soon. I will be lodging a claim immediately.”

 

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