“What are you?” she said.

  The voices replied. It sounded like “Korrando Kaichtiene Krecksenge.”

  “You’re alive here. What is the power source for this place? What do you need us for?”

  “You walk.”

  “Walk?”

  The wall faded, back through translucency, until it was opaque once more.

  “Walk?”

  “You walk.”

  “Where?”

  “You walk.”

  The robot strode away, legs seeming to lengthen with each step.

  Lila hurried after.

  “You speak.”

  “What should I say?”

  “You speak.”

  Lila sighed. “I’ve already told you plenty. About our ship and our journey. About the crew. Why don’t you speak? Why don’t you tell me how you brought us here?”

  “You help.”

  “Oh. Us?”

  “You help.”

  “Help. Help you? How can we help you?”

  “You look.”

  The robot reached to the wall and pushed. A section of it seemed to crumble, breaking into small pieces. They floated off, as if gravity was random, falling away into hollows at the sides.

  It left a big opening into a hallway. A dark room. The robot strode on. Lila’s suit lights shone around.

  There were more of the walls like the augered room, big horizontal ripples. White, lumpy surfaces. The space stretched out into the distance, maybe forty, fifty meters, uneven and winding. The reach of her suit lights was diminished beyond that. Perhaps it went on for kilometers.

  “I need to get back to my crew,” Lila said. “I can’t help you here.”

  “You look.”

  The robot reached and touched the surface again. It became transparent. Lit from within. Another organic shape in there, yellows and purples, more drifts of skin.

  Lila looked up and along the space again.

  “Lots of them,” she said. “Lots of you.”

  “You understand.”

  Not an instruction this time. An acknowledgement of fact.

  “You need help? You need our help?”

  “You understand.”

  “How?”

  “You understand.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Another blaze of light filled Lila’s vision. Searing, even through her lids. She felt nauseous, tasted bile in the back of her mouth.

  Held it in.

  Very important, spacesuit lesson number one; how to avoid throwing up.

  The light faded. Lila opened her eyes. She was looking at stars. Billions of them, all shining right at her. The thick band of the Milky Way growing more distinct as her eyes adjusted to the diminished light.

  “Lila!” Was that Cassidy? “Lila.”

  Other voices then. Almost like the multiplied disembodied voice that had spoken to her below. All saying her name at once.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  She was lying on her back, staring up. The visor’s display flickered to life, a warning flashing that she was no longer upright.

  Another suit visor appeared, looking down at her.

  “Jacques?” she said.

  “Are you all right?” It was Garrison.

  “I’m...” What was she? Disoriented, for sure.

  “She already said she’s all right,” Malé said.

  “But she’s lying here on her back. That thing spat her out. How can she be all right?”

  “I am,” Lila said. “Something happened.”

  “Yeah, we noticed,” Cassidy said.

  “You were gone long time,” Denella said. “Captain was frantic. We were getting tools from lander.”

  “Tools?” Lila sat up. Her stomach cramped for a moment.

  “What?” Garrison said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You jerked.”

  “Sore. Don’t know why. I need to get up.”

  “Take my hand.” Garrison’s gloved hand was right there.

  Lila put her hand out and he helped her to her feet. Everything looked as it had. Blank and black. The stems, the bubble.

  That said, everything looked different. This wasn’t a dead world.

  “They need our help,” she said.

  “They?” Denella said at the same moment as Jacques said, “Who?”

  The others were clamoring too. Questions, concerns.

  “Hold up,” Lila said.

  It fell quiet. She looked at the mountains, at the sky.

  “I’m still working it out. Let’s make our way back to the lander. I can tell you what happened on the way.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The lander’s interior felt safe and warm. It smelled of sweet cinnamon, though that had to be impossible. It was such a relief to be off the surface, back somewhere familiar.

  Lila sucked in deep breaths of the air. Was she still disoriented? Maybe just not used to suits.

  Denella knew exactly what to do to get data from Lila’s suit.

  With what seemed like well-practiced hands, Denella plugged the helmet into a console at the back of the lander’s cabin. Screeds of text rolled up the main display on the front bulkhead.

  “This is gold,” Cassidy said. “Pure. What do they call it? One hundred carat?”

  “That’s diamonds,” Garrison said. “But I get your point. Except for when I look at that text. Looks just like any other unintelligible nonsense to me.”

  “No,” Lila said. “The point is that the suit has recorded it all. I thought I’d lost all my sensors. There was nothing on the HUD.”

  “Heads-up display,” Denella said to Garrison. “It makes—”

  “I’m not a complete bozo,” he said, but with a smile. “I had one in my suit.”

  “You are right. My apologies.”

  “Is there imagery?” Lila said. “I need to show you.”

  “Yep,” Denella said. “Just working on that.”

  Malé pressed something cold into Lila’s hand. A water bottle, looking clear, but there were floaters in it. Pulp, from something. Looked almost like that floating skin—or whatever—had been in with the... aliens.

  “They’re not frozen,” Lila said. “But it’s like suspended animation.”

  “You know that there were going to be starships running like that? Back in the early pre-warp days. Twenty or thirty year flight just to Proxima. They made some good headway with revival at the end, after freezing. Lots of mice met their doom in those tests.”

  “Oh!” Cassidy said. She looked aghast.

  “I know, terrible. I think someone got wind and quickly put a stop to it. Much easier to use artificial cells anyway. In the end, it didn’t matter. Wilkes figured out the warp principle and here we are.”

  “There is still work,” Denella said. “Fast as ships are now, how to get to Andromeda? Combine long sleep with warp and fly between galaxies.”

  Garrison nodded.

  “You know of this?” Denella said, eyes narrowing.

  “Yes,” he said with a smile. “That’s my line of work, really.”

  Denella nodded enthusiastically. “That is good.”

  “All right,” Jacques said. “I’m more interested in the here and now. Our stalled ship. An underground complex where Lila was whisked away. Aliens.”

  “That’s what I want to see,” Malé said. “So far we’ve got nothing right? Plenty of living ecosystems, right Lila, but no civilizations? No intelligent aliens. In all the worlds that have been explored and colonized.”

  “Plenty of the moss,” Denella said. “Amoebas and bugs and plankton.”

  “Frankly,” Cassidy said, “I’m hanging out for dinosaurs. That would be interesting.”

  “Will be found some day. They are very robust organisms. Except for asteroid, we would all be dinosaur.”

  “That would be something,” Malé said.

  The first image came up on the display. The room with the slowly writhing lattice.

  “Whoa!” Cassidy said. “That’s... that’s alien! That’s what you saw? Where you went?”

  “Yes,” Lila said. Looking at the image now made her slightly uncomfortable.

  “This is why we needed to come down here,” Malé said. “Alien contact.”

  “We saw structure on surface too,” Denella said. “What is so surprise about this? Is to be expected.”

  “The transport, though,” Cassidy said. “How did she get down there?”

  “Through the bubble,” Lila said. “The light was... I didn’t see anything.”

  “Persistence of vision,” Malé said. “It affected all of us.”

  “Did the light transport me?” Lila said. “What about energy consumption? An installation out here for hundreds of thousands of years, well, how is it powered? That light must have taken some reserves. How long to replenish that?”

  “Thinking in human terms,” Jacques said. “Incident sunlight to power everything. Maybe some radioactive decay. Wilkes stripping. Batteries.”

  “They would have had warning,” Lila said. She sipped from the water, it was good and cooling. The pulp was grape, adding just a tinge to the flavor. Very nice. “Known what was coming?”

  “Thousands of years,” Cassidy said.

  “Even tens of thousands. Hundreds of generations, though, again, that’s human thinking.”

  “Transportation by light,” Garrison said. “Very clever. Installation that keeps life suspended for eons. Very clever.”

  “Why didn’t they leave, though?” Cassidy said. “Build themselves some nice giant starships and fly off. Plenty of habitable worlds to go find.”

  “Wilkes,” Jacques said.

  “Right,” Garrison said. “That was a breakthrough. Maybe they just never got there. As we never got there with suspended animation.”

  “Sounds like we do scientific exchange now,” Denella said. “They know this suspended animation. We know warp. Do swap.”

  From the display came Lila’s voice.

  “Hello,” then a moment later, “Who’s there.”

  “They communicated with me. It should be on the recording.”

  “There is just your voice,” Denella said.

  “My name is Lila Sansom. I am forty-seven years old. I grew up in Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia.”

  “They were talking with me. Telling me to relax. To walk.”

  The image moved. Video. Lila’s viewpoint. Walking up to the wall. Her hand reaching out to touch it.

  The view turned as she had. The plinth was there. The hole in the wall.

  “You were underground?” Cassidy said.

  “I assume so. Maybe there’s telemetry on my location from the suit too?” Where was the collection of twangy voices? You relax. You walk.

  “Stands to reason,” Jacques said. “There’s the installation. As Garrison suggested, an access point.”

  “I will run telemetry too,” Denella said.

  “Good,” Jacques said. “Now, you said they need help?”

  On the display, the view of the curved stairway showed. Lila’s steps seemed more hesitant than she’d remembered. Big steps.

  “Simple sentences. Instructions. ‘You look’, things like that. Once I asked what they were and they said something like Kuranda Kitcheny Krecksege. Strange words.”

  “There are other sounds on the footage,” Denella said. “Your movements your breathing. You are the only one who speaks.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  While Malé and Denella worked on the data, Lila drank the rest of the grape-tinged water.

  “You were underground,” Garrison said.

  “So it seemed.”

  “We should rest,” Jacques said. “We’ve been out a while. We had the drama of Lila’s disappearance.”

  “She came back,” Malé said.

  “We should leave,” Cassidy said. “It’s unsafe here. They transported her by some technology we don’t understand. Who knows what else they can do?”

  “They took us out of warp,” Garrison said. “That’s one thing.”

  “Which suggests to me that we need to get as far away as we can.”

  “What’s the Elegia Fortune’s status?” Jacques said.

  “I’ll check,” Cassidy said. “Tell you soon.” She slipped through the floor hatch, returning to the cockpit.

  The footage from Lila’s helmet played through to the end, coming to the point of the others bending over her back on the surface.

  “We can parse it through Elegia Fortune’s systems,” Denella systems. “See if there is anomaly. See if there is recording of voice.”

  “Right,” Malé said. “It could be buried in there. Subsonic or something.”

  “Or something.”

  “They need our help,” Lila said. “They said that I would understand. As if I already understood.”

  “There’ll be nothing on the recordings,” Garrison said. “They were speaking directly to you.”

  “Then there will be something on recordings,” Denella said.

  “He means telepathy,” Malé said. “He means that they spoke into her brain. Brain to brain.”

  “Which is why there’s nothing on the recordings,” Garrison said.

  “Telepathy not possible,” Denella said. “You are talking about magic, that is all.”

  “Warp drive is magic to anyone from before Wilkes’s time,” Garrison said. “A wheel is magic to a caveman dragging along a dead antelope.”

  “Yes,” Lila said. “They have mastered suspended animation, but they haven’t mastered interstellar flight. They didn’t leave because they didn’t know how.”

  Garrison met her eyes and rubbed his chin, brow beginning to furrow.

  “Question,” Cassidy called from the cockpit, her voice sounding odd, drifting up from the access hole. “If they can’t build interstellars, how could they pull one of ours out of warp? That would be a good thing to know.”

  “We need to go ask them,” Garrison said. “We need to figure out what kinds of resources they need. We’ll want to take some high-powered processing equipment. Something that can translate. I mean, they didn’t say much.”

  “Yes-no questions,” Malé said.

  “Huh?” Denella said. “What do you mean?”

  All this time Jacques had been seated, quietly listening. Clearly absorbing the line of thinking, considering all kinds of things.

  Ship’s captain. You didn’t rise to that kind of position by being recalcitrant, but you did by being able to weigh up all kinds of information and chose the best way forward. A balancing of details. The kind of bright incision that meant being able to choose even when all the information was not there.

  Lila admired that. Far more complex than anything she might do, such as attempting to determine the functioning of alien cells, or figuring out the complexities of ecosystems. Anything she decided on had plenty of lead time. Nobody’s livelihood depended on her making quick decisions.

  “Some of us need to stay,” she said.

  Everyone stared at her. Garrison gave a half-smile. Denella’s eyes were big enough set down a teacup. Malé put her hands up on her black hair, squeezing so pieces of it seemed to push out like puffs of gas.

  Jacques’s cheek formed a bubble, as his tongue explored the inside.

  “What was that?” Cassidy said from the cockpit. “I didn’t hear.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The lander’s interior was remarkably reconfigurable. Technically, it was simply a shuttle, designed to take people from the Elegia Fortune to the surface, and back again. Not as if it was something from a research vessel, designed to become a home away from home, with private spaces and a lab, kitchen, bathroom and so on.

  Lila had used some of those. On Landrom, a world little bigger than Mars, with a good atmosphere and a vibrant ecology. She’d spent months with two other researchers in a vessel just a fraction larger than this.

  Jacques wanted to talk. He’d had Cassidy alter the lander’s layout so that the unoccupied seats folded out of the way, and the remaining ones formed an oval, around a table. Like the table in the Elegia Fortune’s bridge, this was a full-display, showing dozens of images and documents.

  Malé and Denella used the lander’s dispenser to come up with snacks and drinks. Nothing fancy, nothing anyone would consider a meal—crackers and spreads, some dried fruit—but it was still sustaining. Actually quite tasty.

  “Good,” Jacques said as Malé took the last unoccupied seat. “Thank you.”

  He’d kept them all quiet while the reconfiguring and food happened.

  People were bursting for explanations, but it was clear, he’d said, that it needed in depth, equal opportunity discussion. Not just jabbering over each other.

  “We can talk now?” Cassidy said. She was nibbling on a piece of dried apricot. Nervous.

  “Once Lila has explained what she means.”

  “Should have full crew here,” Denella said. “Officers. Not just us. Cannot make such decision without them. Should contact Earth for decision.”

  “Correct,” Lila said. “But we can’t contact Earth.” One of the things still out of reach, was a working ansible. Communications still proceeded at the speed of light. Someday, someone would figure it out. In the meantime, the best they could do was to send a ship. Faster than light, it would overtake any message, arriving long before.

  “I don’t know why we’re even having this discussion,” Cassidy said. “If Elegia Fortune is becalmed, anything we do is moot. What’s going to happen, we join them in suspended animation for fifteen million years? Hope someone else happens by?”

  “We don’t know that the ship is permanently incapacitated,” Malé said. “Why would they do that?”

  “Repairs are proceeding,” Jacques said.

  “There.”

  “But,” Cassidy said, “not assured, right?”

  “Correct,” Jacques said. “But a warp drive is a complex piece of equipment. It takes time. We need to get to the root of the problem. It’s not straightforward by any means.”

 

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