“Ah. Flight, repeat your last, please,” Jian said anxiously.
“Atlantis, your mission objectives have changed. You are to touch down and aid the harvester techs in conducting an initial survey of the anomaly before reporting back.”
“Flight, we’re not really trained for that kind of assignment,” Jian said.
“The order comes from Ark Actual directly.”
“Well then put Ark Actual on the line,” Jian said, hoping his annoyance masked his apprehension.
The line clicked over a moment later. “This is Ark Actual, go ahead Atlantis.”
“Ark Actual,” Jian said, sticking to radio titles and protocol. “I’d like clarification on the new mission parameters.”
“What do you need clarified? We need you to survey the anomaly.”
“But we don’t have any trained surveyors aboard. And we certainly don’t have the equipment.”
“You’ve got cameras, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah…”
“It’s not that complicated, Jian. This is just a preliminary survey. You’re the only ones there right now. We’re prepping another mission with the proper specialists and equipment, but it will be really helpful if they have some idea what they’re walking into. Just step outside, poke your head around, and take some pictures.”
“Actual,” Jian said. “Dad, I’m not qualified to survey some weird, probably alien artifact buried on a moon. I don’t have any experience with this.”
“Who the hell does?”
Kirkland snorted from the copilot’s seat. “He’s got a point, you know.”
“Not helping.” Jian keyed the com again. “Copy that, Actual. Starting our deorbital burn in five. Atlantis out.”
The shuttle had been orbiting Varr for the better part of a day now, first from its initial fifteen-kilometer orbit, then dropping down to less than five klicks to try and get higher resolution images of whatever was lying inside the cave underneath the crippled helium harvester. They had to wait several hours and many orbits until the system’s primary was directly overhead and poured light into the hole the harvester had punched through the cave’s ceiling.
It didn’t help much. Even bathed in light, the anomaly, as they’d taken to calling it, was covered with too much debris from the cave-in to reveal much information beyond its outline. Which was why they’d been ordered to land. That had been the plan all along, of course. The harvester techs needed a ride down to the surface to fix their broken Hoover. But the stakes had since been drastically raised.
Jian warmed up the mains for a fourth time, worrying about the additional stress he was putting on the five that were still working, but unable to do anything about it. It would be a quick, hard burn. They already orbited so close to the surface that they needed to bleed off almost all of their velocity in less than two minutes to hit their insertion window.
Complicating matters further, Varr was completely airless, so the shuttle’s airfoils and control surfaces were just dead weight. They’d be landing ass-first on a column of rocket exhaust, using only their thruster packs for terminal maneuvers.
It was like trying to balance an angry cat on top of a broom handle; a feat far beyond the capabilities of even the most experienced pilot, much less one commanding his first mission. Fortunately, that duty had been turned over to software centuries ago. All Jian had to do was punch in the coordinates of the landing site and a couple of other variables into the computer, take his hands off the stick, and relax.
He absolutely hated it.
“OK, kids, this one is going to be fast and rough. Deorbit burn in. Five. Four. Three. Two–” With the suddenness of a car accident, Jian was slammed back into his seat under seven gees, damned near the limit of the five engines they had left.
“One?” Kirkland asked through clenched teeth.
Jian tried to lift his head to see the readout, but his skull remained glued to the headrest. Not that it would’ve mattered as his vision was blurring on account of the high gee pressing his eyeballs into the backs of their sockets hard enough to deform their shape. Instead, he routed the flight computer data into his plant’s augmented reality display, which was unaffected. He spotted the problem immediately. <The damned computer moved our LZ thirteen hundred meters west, away from the Hoover,> he sent to Kirkland.
<I thought we overrode that?>
<It overrode our override. Looks like we’re in for a stroll.>
<You mean a skip?>
<True.>
Jian grumbled. The LZ might be marginally safer for the shuttle, but the longer walk would leave his team exposed to the shooting gallery that was Varr’s surface. The Tau Ceti system was a notoriously dirty place to begin with, and without an atmosphere or the Ark’s nav lasers to burn them up, micrometeorites were an ever-present risk.
As suddenly as they had come on, the gees disappeared as the mains cut out. Jian felt a moment’s sensation of pure freefall before the shuttle’s flight computer fired the forward thrusters to reorient itself for a vertical landing.
With all its forward momentum bled away, the shuttle started falling straight and true towards Varr’s surface. The only indication of movement Jian could see as he looked out the cockpit windows was their altimeter readout dropping, glacially at first as the moon’s paltry three and a half percent standard gravity clawed meekly at the craft. But without any atmosphere to drag against the hull, their velocity built up until at a hundred meters the engines fired again, although less exuberantly. At only five meters above the regolith, the flight computer pitched the shuttle over again until it was level with the ground, then settled down into the billowing dust on thrusters alone.
The shuttle nestled into the ground on its belly. They didn’t dare open the landing gear doors; the statically-charged dust played merry hell on any moving parts it clung to and shorted out electronics like a bucket of salt water. Everyone unbelted and silently, solemnly started prepping their vacuum suits. Jian picked up on their dour moods.
“Hey, everyone.” He clapped to get their attention. “What’s with the faces? Is this a funeral?”
“Potentially,” technician Madeja muttered.
“Look.” Feng ignored her. “I know this isn’t what any of us were expecting to find out here. I certainly wasn’t. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t scaring the living fertilizer out of me…” A round of polite, if awkward laughter passed around the cabin. “But whatever it is has been buried here for God only knows how long. If it was going to hurt anybody, it probably would’ve done it a long time ago.
“So, instead of a boring maintenance assignment, we’re out here right on the knife’s edge of exploration and discovery. C’mon, that’s exciting, right? Let’s get buttoned up and get started. Last one into the hole is a reclamation chute.”
Kirkland hopped over and whispered in his ear. “Great speech, commander. Are you going to call them doody-heads next?”
“If it gets the job done,” Jian said. “Speaking of jobs, don’t bother getting dressed.”
Kirkland cocked her head. “Why not?”
“Because if I’m wrong and things do go sour down there, we’ll need a fast evac. So you’re going to stay here and keep Atlantis’s engines warm and ready to dust off on a tripwire.”
“And if things go really wrong down there?”
“Then you may have to bug out and make the return trip alone.” Jian noticed Kirkland wasn’t exactly broken up by the prospect. “Which would be terrible. Right?”
“Hmm? Oh, yeah, just awful. Me, alone, commanding my own shuttle? A real tragedy. C’mon, let me help you get in your suit.”
“Only if someone else checks my seals.”
“So suspicious,” she said teasingly. “We’re a team, remember? Our trust is our foundation.”
“I’m doomed.”
Kirkland laughed. “Get in those jammies, commander. You’ve got work to do.”
Twenty minutes later, six of them walked across the dirt. Actually, “walked” was entirely the wrong verb. With the incredibly low gravity, they hopped across the surface in great, bounding leaps, like the ancient footage of the original Apollo astronauts bouncing across Luna’s terrain, only exaggerated.
But unlike Luna’s rocky, bone-dry surface, Varr was a dirty snowball. Layers of rock and water ice laid buried under meters of cosmic dust that had fallen over eons. Outcrops of ice protruded from the surface here and there, while deep fissures crisscrossed the surface, pulled and stretched by the tidal forces Gaia exerted on the moon with each orbit.
Instead of Luna, Varr was more like Ceres, or even Pluto from back in the Sol system. Between the wildly elliptical orbit and the moon’s composition, the consensus among the Ark’s astronomy department was that it had been captured by Gaia several billion years earlier as it plunged towards the system primary, likely disturbed from its orbit by the outward migration of the ice giant Tau Ceti F, before it too found a stable orbit to call home.
With each hop, Jian sailed effortlessly several meters above the surface. Indeed, it was almost impossible not to. In such a shallow gravity well, he weighed scarcely four kilos, vac suit included. Each footfall sent out a little plume of dust, pulverized into a fine powder from billions of years of micro, and not so micro, meteorite impacts. But he didn’t take long to adapt to it. Considering the amount of time he’d spent in zero gee aboard the Ark over his lifetime, it felt almost natural.
<Ravine ahead,> Madeja said into the plant link. <Looks like about ten meters across. It’s really deep.>
The rest of the expedition stopped at the edge of the cliff and leaned over to inspect it. Jian rolled his eyes. Instead of slowing down to stop, he took two long hops to build up momentum, then hurdled over the crevasse. He arced through the sky in a perfect parabola, easily clearing the icy canyon and landing on the far side with meters to spare.
<It doesn’t matter how deep it is, guys. Just jump over it, we’re burning O2.>
Tentatively, the first of them backed up and charged at the divide, jumped, and landed with room in reserve. Three more made the leap without incident. Then, it was Madeja’s turn.
She stood at the edge, wringing her hands nervously. <I’m not sure I can do this,> she said into the group link.
<Oh for God’s sake, Madeja,> Jian said. <Rakunas made it, and he’s got a shitty knee.>
<Hey!> Rakunas objected.
<Your left knee is crap, Adam. I’ve played enough handball with you to notice.>
<Easy for the twenty-six year-old to say,> Rakunas answered. <Let’s see how your joints hold up in twenty years.>
<Whatever, old man.> Jian returned his attention to Madeja. <C’mon, you can do it. We’ll catch you.>
<I’m scared.>
<It’s either jump or go back and wait on the Atlantis,> Jian said, losing patience. <Make your choice, technician, because the rest of us have to keep moving.>
<OK, OK,> Madeja said. She took quite a few long hops back, then paused.
<While we’ve still got air!> someone said into the comlink.
Madeja winced, then started to run, building up speed and height with each bounding leap. But she misjudged her final jump, landing and pushing off almost five meters from the edge of the cliff. At first, it looked like her parabola would be high enough to clear the icy schism, but as she reached her apex and started to drift down, the augmented reality display projecting her trajectory into his vision said she was going to come up almost a meter short.
“Shit,” he said aloud inside his helmet. Jian took three small hops and got right up to the edge, then kicked his legs out from under him and floated down into the dust flat on his stomach.
<Oh my God, I’m going to fall!> Madeja shouted through the plant.
<No you’re not.> Jian stretched out his left arm as far as the range of motion in his suit’s shoulder joint would let him and scrambled for grip with his free hand.
<Grab my arm.>
With barely a meter left to fall, Madeja reached out in a panic. But in freefall, the wild flailing of her arms caused her entire body to rotate around her center of mass, quickly spinning her outstretched hand out of his reach. With her back now facing him, Jian made one last, desperate lunge for the grab handle on the top of her suit’s life support backpack before she slipped into the inky black of the yawning chasm.
Jian managed only to get two fingers on it, but in the weak gravity two was more than enough.
<Gotcha,> Jian said. <Now stop struggling so I can pull you up.>
Madeja went obediently limp as Jian firmed up his grip on her backpack handle. With almost no effort, he flexed his arm and tossed her entire body up and out of the ravine.
For just a moment, he felt like a superhero.
He was not a strong man by any measure of the word, but with Madeja effectively weighing in at less than four kilos, it was easier than throwing a baby. Not that Jian would ever throw a baby. But his ego, not caring about the details, swelled up a notch anyway.
<Did you see that!?> Rakunas shouted into the com as the rest of the team bounced up to help both Jian and Madeja to their feet. <That was amazing, commander.>
<It was nothing,> Jian lied and turned to Madeja. <Technician, are you all right?>
Madeja took a moment to regain her composure before answering. <Yes, I think so.>
<How’s your suit integrity?>
<Pressure’s green. No leaks detected. Pack isn’t throwing any error codes.>
Jian nodded. <Good, but keep an eye on it. Any trouble, anything at all, tell me immediately.>
<Yes, sir.>
<OK, let’s get moving.>
The rest of the jaunt to the stricken harvester was, mercifully, uneventful. The machine itself was enormous, nearly the length of the shuttle from which they’d arrived. Each one had taken a dozen shuttle flights to deliver the components to Varr’s surface for reassembly. With six wheels and an articulated body, it looked like a strange, gargantuan insect. Its “head” rested on two of its wheels and mounted a broad, shallow scoop to shovel up the first several centimeters of regolith for processing further back in the beast’s body. Only a thin layer of dust needed to be collected, because the lion’s share of the fusible Helium-3 that rained down from the system primary in the form of solar wind was trapped there.
Once inside, a series of sifters and vaporizers separated the individual helium atoms for capture, along with a handful of other useful elements and compounds, and were routed into storage containers for later collection. The remaining dust was then spread out the back of the harvester and combed to cover any trace of the machine’s passing.
That feature had been retrofitted to the harvesters out of respect to the Atlantians, who had insisted that any disturbances to Varr’s surface be mended before they would grant permission for the endeavor. It was the face of one of their Gods, after all. Such considerations had not been important when the harvesters had been built to stripmine Earth’s moon, which was just as doomed by Nibiru as mankind’s homeworld had been.
The resurfacer wasn’t the only field modification the harvesters had gone through. Despite their size, their weight was a problem, or more accurately, their lack of it. They’d been designed to operate in one-sixth standard gravity, and while that didn’t seem like much, it was still nearly five times greater than Varr’s environment. Huge concrete slabs made of thermally fused regolith had been strapped to their backs to give their wheels enough purchase to push through the dust. Likewise, metal paddles had been fixed to the wheels themselves for extra grip on the silty surface.
It was probably a combination of the extra weight and the sharp wheels that had caused the roof of the hidden cave to collapse as the harvester rolled over it. Jian came near the edge and prodded at the ground with his foot to make sure it wasn’t about to give way. It held. Still, to be safe, he hooked a line to the harvester’s hull with a carabiner and instructed the rest of his team to do the same.
Their lidar scans from orbit had pegged the cavern’s depth at around thirty meters. Peering in through the hole, it looked more like sixty.
Well, nothing for it, Jian thought as he let his line play out all the way to the bottom. The distance was safe to jump in only three percent gravity, but he clipped a repelling arrestor to the line anyway. No such thing as too careful. With a flourish befitting his new superhero status, Jian stepped off the ledge, rotated to face his teammates, and saluted as he plunged out of sight.
Slowly.
Very, slowly.
He didn’t so much plunge as… sink. By the time he was halfway down the shaft, Jian was already bored. He hoped for some vivid hallucinations a la Alice’s visions as she tumbled down the rabbit hole, but none were forthcoming. He finally touched down many seconds after stepping off, his boots sending out little clouds of dust which flew off in perfect little parabolas before settling down again. His helmet’s floodlights bounced around the chamber, illuminating it with a dim glow and giving him a sense of its proportions. It wasn’t much bigger across than it was deep, but if it had a back wall his suit’s lights couldn’t find it. Debris from the roof collapse littered the floor like discarded building blocks.
Then, he looked right, and his heartrate jumped twenty BPM.
<Commander,> Kirkland’s voice broke through from the shuttle. <Your vitals just spiked. Is everything all right?>
<Standby, Atlantis,> Jian said. As he spoke, his eyes swept over the anomaly. Until that very moment, Jian had been holding out hope that it had been some strangely improbable arrangement of ice slabs, or a trick of light and shadow, like the face on Mars that had captivated so many fools back on Earth centuries before.
But staring at it, he knew it was neither. Covered in rocks and ice, it was unmistakably manufactured. And unmistakably alien.
Jian pulled a light beacon from one of the pockets of his pants, switched the little globe on, and let it tumble to the ground. <I guess the rest of you had better get down here. We have work to do after all.>
It took almost an hour to clear away most of the debris from the top and front of the anomaly, which was surprisingly light work in the low gravity. Still, even with their relative super-strength, some pieces were too large or too wedged in to move by hand.
They were going to need some help.
<Hey, commander,> Rakunas said as he surveyed one of the largest slabs pressing against the side of the anomaly. <Check this out.>
Jian maneuvered over the block and crawled up its surface to take position beside Rakunas. <What do we have here?>
Rakunas wiped away a handful of dust from one corner of a small ledge built into the anomaly’s face. Below it was a circular depression, maybe three meters across. Jian’s helmet banged off the wall, so he used one of his wrist lights to get a better look. Running diagonally across the circle was a line separating it in two.
<Shit,> he said a moment later. <Looks an awful lot like an airlock, don’t it?>
<That’s what I thought too, commander.>
<Can we get around this damned thing?> Jian pointed at the slab.
<I’ve walked all the way around it. There are some small cracks here and there, and a little bit of shimmy space underneath, but I certainly wouldn’t fit. I don’t think anyone else here would either.>
<Right. We have a doorway here, people,> Jian announced to the rest of the team. <How do we get this honking block of rock and ice out of the way? Suggestions?>
<What about electric winches?> Rakunas asked. <I thought I saw one on the front of the harvester.>
<Could work,> Jian said. <Although I don’t know if they’ve got enough cable to reach all the way down here and wrap up these blocks.>
<Are you crazy?> Madeja said. They both turned to face her.
<You have something to add?> Jian said testily.
<Yeah, what do you think is anchoring the winch? If you try to pull those blocks out with it, you could bring the rest of the roof down on top of us, and the harvester with it.>
<OK, that’s a fair point,> Jian said. <What are our alternatives?>
<Go home?>
<Useful alternatives.>
Madeja took a deep breath obvious even through her vac suit. <Well, there’s one possibility.>
<Let’s have it, then.>
<We brought a couple of inflatables with us, in case we needed to lift the harvester to make repairs. They’re just giant air bags made out of Kevlar and synthetic spider silk. You wedge them under something heavy, or in this case, stuck, turn the valve, and let the magic of air pressure and surface area do the rest.>
<And you think they’re strong enough to pop this monster loose?> Jian wrapped his gloved knuckles on the slab.
<They can individually lift a couple metric tons in standard gravity. Here? They could lift dozens.>
<But that’s just weight. What if it’s wedged in too tight?>
<Then nothing else we have with us will be strong enough either. Unless you want to blow it up with seismic survey charges.>
<That’s not high on my list, no. What about torches?>
<Cut it up?> Madeja considered the question. <They would certainly be hot enough, but I think they’d run out of fuel before making enough of a dent to matter.>
Jian nodded. <Airbags it is. You’ll be in charge of placing them and monitoring their inflation, Madeja.>
<Me? But, I’ve never done anything like this before.>
<Who the hell has?> Jian winced as his father’s words tumbled so easily out of his own mouth. <What I mean is, you’ll be fine. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, we’ll just have to think of something else, OK?>
Madeja nodded and signaled for LaSalle to come over with his pack. Together, they fished out the inflatables and argued over their optimum placement. After a gentle reminder of how much O2 their deliberations were burning up, consensus was quickly reached. Madeja popped the valves and backed away almost to the far wall. With no atmospheric pressure opposing them, the airbags expanded and quickly filled nearly all of the void-space between the floor, slab, and the front face of the anomaly, unfolding in total silence in the airless chamber.
The expansion stopped abruptly as the airbags met real resistance. At first, nothing happened. Jian was preparing to call it a day as the sides of the bags bulged helplessly against the stubborn monolith. But then, he felt a rumble of something shift through the soles of his feet.
<Everybody get back against the walls,> Jian warned.
As the team took cover, the slab cracked in half with a shudder. The airbags, already pressurized to their full capacity, launched the two pieces with tremendous force, one towards the opposite wall, and the other up towards the–
<Oh, shit,> Madeja said as they all stood by and helplessly watched the chunk of rocky ice pinwheel through the cavern, drawing slowly but inexorably closer to the harvester wheel dangling over the open ceiling, backlit by the stars.
<Everybody to the far side!> Jian shouted.
With the sort of bad luck usually reserved for compulsive gamblers, the spinning block struck the wheel dead on before rebounding back towards the floor.
<It’s coming back down,> Rakunas yelled as the chunk returned to the floor, bounced off one of the other blocks at an angle, then came to rest with a thunk everyone could feel through their boots.
But no one was paying it any attention. Instead, all eyes remained fixed on the wheel of the harvester as it shifted and ground its way further over the hole. Little flakes and pebbles of debris floated down through the cavern like gray snow. Jian sucked air through his teeth. Sphincters clenched down on colostomy tubes as everyone watched in horror, expecting the rest of the roof to collapse and send the harvester tumbling down, dragging their anchored lines along with it.
Another section of ceiling ice almost a meter across broke free where the wheel’s axle had sat and followed the dust down to the floor in a fresh pile. But then, movement stopped. The harvester settled into its new position and rested.
The sighs of relief were audible even through the plant comlinks.
<Maybe we should move the harvester before we continue the survey,> Jian said.
<You think?!> Madeja shouted.
<At least he didn’t hit it with a rock,> Rakunas said.
<Says the man who wanted to tie it to the rock with a damned winch.>
<That’s enough, you two. We’re still on the clock.> Jian bounded over to the anchor lines hanging from the harvester far above. With more than a little trepidation, he gave one line a cursory tug. It held, and nothing came crashing down on his head. He gave the line a harder jerk. It felt solid enough, so he grabbed it with both hands and put his full weight on it. No change.
<OK, the lines are intact. Madeja, can you and LaSalle go back up to the surface and recall one of the other harvesters for a tow?>
<Should work. The winch may not be powerful enough, but the cable will be plenty strong for the other harvester to go in reverse and pull it out.>
<How long?>
<Hour, tops.>
Jian checked his suit’s air supply. The CO2 scrubbers were still at sixty-seven percent and they had another four hours of battery charge on this trip. Hour to secure the harvester, hour to walk back to the Atlantis, hour for safety margin, still gave them an hour to play with. It was worth it.
<OK, shimmy on up and get that thing out of the way.>
Madeja nodded and started working her way up the line back to the surface with LaSalle close behind on another rope.
<What are we going to do?> Rakunas asked.
Jian looked at the anomaly and its freshly revealed airlock.
<Knock.>