Francis’s thoughts. “The real problem comes from items that somehow got loose from the ISS or other stations and remained in the same orbit. NASA keeps talking about rigging up some orbital sweep, but so far nothing has actually passed beyond the research stage.”
He scowled. “One Chinese proposal was to have a station of their own that they could blow up if there was a war,” he added. “If that worked, they would seal off space for at least a decade, or so they thought. There was even a terrorist plot to get a bomb onboard the ISS, but everything loaded onboard the shuttles or the supply capsules from Russia gets checked carefully, just in case.”
“I don’t think I wished to know that,” Francis said softly. He looked out at the ISS. “How long will it be until we dock?”
“Forty minutes,” Kane said. “It won’t seem that long, believe me, but we have to be very careful. If we collided with the station instead…”
He tapped a key on his console. A moment later, Francis recognised the use of the opening from Richard Strauss's
“Welcome to the International Space Station,” Kane said, after the docking formalities had been completed. “Please remember to tip your pilots after the docking and that the flight back to Earth will be, God willing, in two weeks…and if you miss that, you’re stuck on the ISS for two months.”
He grinned up at Francis as he finished the announcement. “Back when I was a kid, I read a story about someone rigging the IS escape pod so that they all got to go home early, apart from the commander,” he added. “They had to send a shuttle up to recover the poor bastard on his own.”
Francis winced. They’d been briefed, endlessly, about ISS safety procedures, but they looked a little flimsy to him. If the crew couldn’t reach the escape pod, or were trapped without a spacesuit, they were dead. End of story. He’d thought himself resigned to that, but now he was on the station – well, technically attached to the station – it felt as if he’d made a huge mistake. He should have let some hotshot young State Department punk fly into space and meet the aliens…and then steal the limelight when the aliens moved their activities down to Earth. He should have…
Kane read his thoughts again. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There are hundreds of would-be astronauts who would be furious with you if you got up and then panicked when the aliens arrived. They were all more than a little…miffed that the shuttle wasn't crammed with scientific people and even duplicate pilots, instead of…”
“A bunch of fat ambassadors,” Francis guessed. He had always thought himself in good shape until he’d gone through the pre-mission physical. “Just now, I wish I’d let them come up instead.”
“And if you’d been on the bottom of the gravity well, watching as history is made up here, would you share those feelings?” Kane asked. “Think about it; you’re going to make history up here and people will remember your name a long time after Kennedy, Carter and all those other idiots who sabotaged the space program are forgotten.”
“I suppose,” Francis said, with a sudden smile. “So, what do you think the aliens will look like?”
Somewhat to Gary’s surprise, the first three days on the ISS passed almost without incident. The Ambassadors were shown around the station, once they had gotten over the shock of finding themselves in zero-gravity, and enjoyed themselves. Gary didn’t hesitate to show them everything, apart from a handful of classified instruments; he couldn’t allow the opportunity of impressing such important people with the importance of the space program to slip past. The Ambassadors were all trusted friends and allies of their Heads of State and if they could be convinced to support the space program, it would be worthwhile. The aliens alone might not be enough to convince humanity to advance into space, although Gary hoped that the mere presence of alien life would serve as an incentive, but if there was actually some strong political support for the program, it might push the human race forward.
And space was insulated from most of the tensions on Earth. The rioting and panic in America was calming down slowly, although millions of citizens were still intending to move away from the cities, at least until they knew that the aliens were friendly. China and Russia had a major dispute over testing boosters for their space program, but the representatives from both powers on the ISS ignored it and played endless games of chess with one another. Gary had half-expected them to be studying their instructions and trying to sort out what they would say to the aliens, but there was little point in further revision. Like children awaiting an exam, there was a point where further revision would be almost useless…and they’d reached it long ago. The sheer absence of data on the alien starship, let alone what they actually wanted, made it impossible to draw up any real plans for the future or even key non-negotiable points. They all hoped for an outcome that would be, at best, beneficial to their countries and, at worst, neutral towards their countries, but in the absence of further data, there was little point in speculation.
That didn’t, of course, stop them from speculating like mad. “So,” Sonja Greenhorn said, one evening, “what do you think the aliens will look like?”
It was Philippe Laroche who answered first. “I think they’ll look exactly like us,” he said, and grinned at their faces. “They’re an evolved race, just like us, and so they will fit their environment. The humanoid form is so useful that the aliens are quite likely to have evolved along similar lines to us. If they were, say, massive octopus-like creatures, could they have evolved a space-based technology?”
“Octopuses are actually quite smart,” Sophia Friedrich said. The UN’s representative, a German-born girl who spoke English with a slight accent, smiled from her perch. “You could get one of them to actually do almost anything, as long as it was underwater.”
Kane laughed. “So, you don’t believe the abduction claims, then?”
“No,” Francis said. “I think they’re just attention seekers.”
Gary nodded. The number of reported alien abductions had skyrocketed in the days since the announcement of an actual alien starship. The reports had featured the stereotypical little grey aliens, but also hundreds of other kinds of aliens, from humanoids with pointy ears to perfectly indistinguishable human-aliens that had been attempting to pick up breeding stock. So far, no one had actually managed to provide proof that any of the abductions – let alone the UFO sightings, government men in black covering up alien contacts or even the super- secret FTL starships flown by the American government – actually existed.
“Its obvious,” Bai Li said, with one of his rare smiles. “They’re going to be Chinese.”
“Chinese? Asians? Space Asians?” Kane asked. “How did you figure that?”
“Well,” Bai Li said, mischievously, “it’s been proven by the latest revisionist history book, in the sprit of
Kane stared at him, realised that he was being wound up, and laughed. “I don’t think that that’s quite the answer,” he said. “Maybe they look like spiders, or other insects.”
“Won’t happen,” Sonja said. “There are limits to how large a spider, or a crab, could become before it collapsed under its own weight. It’s rather more likely that they’re dinosaur-like creatures.”
“Or little baby elephants,” Francis said, grinning. The barriers were breaking down, one by one. “Hell, they could look like anything, even the Manhunter from Mars.”
“That would be funny,” Philippe said, dryly. “Do you think that there would be a case for a lawsuit if the aliens actually looked like some alien we invented on Earth?”
“It would be hard to imagine an alien who didn’t look like something we invented on Earth,” Stanislav Genya said. The Russian smiled into the silence. “Come on; between Hollywood and the rest of the world, we have hundreds of thousands of aliens that might reassemble the real aliens. They could look like something from
Gary spoke into the silence. “Does anyone have any phobias they wish to confess to, now they’re up here and beyond recall back to Earth?”
There was a long pause. “Perhaps the aliens are machines,” Kane suggested. “That entire starship could be a machine, or two machines, and there won’t be any humanoid life at all.”
