double-checked, they entered the airlock. The heavy door closed behind them and the lights switched from green to red: depressurization was under way. At the same time, a digital gauge on the wall began to tick down from 101 kilopascals. The process was never speedy, but with history awaiting them on the other side, it was glacially slow.
When the gauge read zero, the round outer door popped inward, rolled to the side and revealed the vast iridescent wall of Zebra-One, so large that Marcus was struck by vertigo as if he were hanging fifty meters above the ground.
His discomfort must have been apparent because he felt a hand on his shoulder, and heard Faulkland’s voice in his ear. “Everything alright, Doctor Donovan?”
“Fine,” he said as he regained his composure. “Just haven’t gone EVA in a while.” That wasn’t true. “Donovan to Base, we’re exiting the bay now.”
“Roger that, Donovan. Good luck.”
The pressure suit read his body-language and engaged its cold-jets, thrusting him out away from the Shackleton. The other astronauts followed and together they slowly drifted out of the chamber and into the void, while one of the ship’s life-rafts automatically detached and moved to intercept them. Once they were all hooked up to the raft, its own engines lit up and carried them over the last leg of the journey.
As he approached, Marcus formed different theories about the ship’s surface. He’d long believed it to be some sort of metal, but at fifty meters, he started to entertain the idea of a metamorphic silicate shell. Ten meters after that, the translucency became more pronounced like quartz. Yet another ten meters on, he began to notice patterns swirling within the surface, like viscous fluid in a clear casing. In the final stretch, he finally admitted that he had no damn idea what it was.
The life-raft came to a halt just a short distance from Zebra-One’s hull, and Marcus couldn’t unhook himself fast enough. While the rest of the team were still detaching their umbilical cables, he was free and floating towards her. Finally, after all those long years, he was there beside her. He knew it was reckless, but it didn’t matter. He had to touch her.
The color of the wall shifted as he approached, so slightly he thought it was just his imagination. The surface was flawless, without seams, panels, scratches or any other imperfection. During the survey, his team had detected geometric surface patterns—grooves and protrusions both—but on a large scale separated by hundreds of meters. They assumed they’d find similar patterns on the small scale, but there were no such details, no signs of anything mechanical nor any hint of the artifact’s manufacture. For as far as Marcus could see, it was simply a wall of clear glass with subtly swirling colors trapped beneath.
His thrusters brought him to a graceful stop mere inches away from her, and he reached out. Without any jitter or hesitation, his hand rose up with his fingers spread, and he touched the unimaginably large creature in front of him, the way a diver might dare to touch a passing whale.
Nothing happened.
He wasn’t sure what he expected. He didn’t know if his hand would sink in or be repelled, or if she might crumble at his touch like a mummy rashly exposed to fresh air. He half expected to wake up back home in bed, covered in sweat, with only a vague recollection of his strange adventure. Instead, there was no response other than the feeling of his gloved hand against something solid. And with that, he was satisfied.
“How’s she feel, Marc?” Rao’s voice crackled over the radio.
“Real,” he said. He looked at the wall directly in front of his face, and now he was sure it had changed. On their approach, Zebra-One had been the same dull yellow-green she’d been throughout the previous day’s survey. Now, the wall in front of him had become a vibrant, living green. It was the green of fertile hills after spring’s first rain. And there was something else.
“The color of the wall is changing, Doctor,” Faulkland said.
“Yeah, think you’re right,” Marcus replied, while something even stranger had caught his attention. Around his hand, there was a flickering pattern that branched out from his finger tips. He waved the hand back and forth, and the pattern followed, pulsing and waving, slowly growing in strength. It reminded him of the chintzy plasma globe he used to keep on his desk. “Now that’s interesting.”
“What?” Rao asked.
“I’m not sure. Galvanic skin response maybe. One way or another, she’s reacting to me.”
The rest of the crew were finally unhooked from the life-raft, and Rao came up beside him. As he approached, the rich green colored area expanded to surround him as well. He reached out his hand toward the wall and lightning-like patterns appeared around his fingers, their ends disappearing into the mysterious depths of the alien material.
“Surface temperature is rising,” Juliette St. Martin said with a little worry in her voice. Marcus turned to look over his shoulder, and found her behind him with a multifunction probe in her hand. The pen-like piece of metal was attached to her wrist by a thin cable, through which it transmitted information to her heads-up-display.
“Rising? How quickly?” Marcus asked.
“You’re not going to be barbecued anytime soon, if that’s what you’re wondering. In fact, it’s leveling off now at… thirty-six degrees centigrade.”
“Human body temperature,” Marcus said.
He thrust backwards and watched the color of the artifact fade to dull green-grey again, while the vibrant circle around Rao persisted. He stopped only a few meters away. “Ideas?”
His question was met with silence. “Alright then. Donovan to Base, still reading us?”
“Crystal clear, Doctor. We’re receiving mission data from all units.”
“Good. We’re proceeding to the iris.”
“Roger. We’ll be watching.”
The structure dubbed Iris Charlie was one of the smaller irises; all of them were identical in shape, but differed in scale. They were elliptical, and this one measured twelve meters by a little over seven. Its dome protruded out from the smooth surface by four and a half meters. These features, just as every part of Zebra-One measured so far, related to each other by the golden ratio.
As they moved toward the iris, the finer details became apparent. There was a convex ring surrounding it which was broken into five equal sections, each covered in a tiled pattern of overlapping scales. Marcus couldn’t decide if the pattern was biological or mechanical, of if such a distinction would even make sense to the race that manufactured it. The iris itself was the same color as the wall and was just as smooth. It was so smooth, in fact, that it might as well have been a bubbling liquid frozen in place.
The team came to a stop in front of the iris and waited. Marcus was studying the bubble, looking for any clue to its purpose, and it occurred to him after a moment that everyone else was waiting for his move.
Rao broke the silence. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “Should I say open sesame?”
He was hugely glad the door remained closed. He’d already had plenty of “strange”, “alien” and “amazing”; he wasn’t in any mood for “ridiculous” to join the party. Options started running through his head, and before he noticed, he was brainstorming out loud. “If it’s a door, there’d be some way to open it. A handle, a button, maybe a remote control we don’t have. If it’s an eye, it’s watching us right now. Not much of a show, I’m afraid. I guess it could accommodate some internal equipment that needed the extra space, but when the damned ship is already most of a kilometer wide, I can’t imagine another four meters making much of a difference.”
“Maybe,” Hector Pacheco said, breaking Marcus’ rambling stream of consciousness, “you should try knocking.” As usual, the grizzled crew chief had managed to be serious and joking at the same time. It was a fine talent, and one of many that Marcus envied.
Fighting against the stiff shoulders of his pressure suit, Marcus Donovan shrugged, then maneuvered toward the iris. He raised his hand and curled his fingers, then reached out to rap on the surface.
Just as his knuckle was about to collide with the iris, the glossy material shrank away from his hand and raced toward the edges, like hot wax poured over glass or a soap bubble popping in slow motion. Inky darkness waited inside.
Marcus was glad no one could see the look on his face. “Or maybe it’s automatic, like bloody near every door on our entire planet. Should we go in?” he asked.
Before anyone could answer, the decision was made for them. The doctor and his fifteen companions were all drawn into the cavity at once, and the force that attracted them was accompanied by an oddly familiar feeling. It
