was like a spider web’s nightmare, the struts and spars that held it together as gnarled and lumpy as wood, unsettlingly organic in their texture.
The word came to mind, unwelcome but undeniable. The ship in front of them shrieked it in the sheer incomprehensibility of its design.
In all the centuries since Earth, on all the planets and moons intrepid explorers found and conquered, mankind had never met its equal. Or even the equal of an ant colony. Life was common enough: simple bacteria, plants, the occasional mollusk. But nothing organized. Nothing
Man stood alone as a sentient race, looking into the mirror of the universe and seeing only his own reflection. A miracle without explanation, a blessing of no competition or a curse of loneliness, depending on your point of view. Was it improbable that no other planet had been climatically stable enough long enough to make society, or was the improbability that Earth had? Philosophers argued, scientists washed their hands of the insolvable, and ordinary people relaxed in the knowledge that the closet was empty: there was no bogeyman hiding in the dark.
But here the broken eye of alien intelligence stared back at him. And it was hostile. First Contact had come in the form of a lethal attack.
Jorgun shouted above the wind, childish wonder in his voice. “Who made that?”
A fine question, even if the answer was obvious:
Who had given the League that anonymous tip? The one that had sent him out here, on a twelve-day trip, just in time to discover an attack seven days old.
The tip had been given before the attack had taken place.
Someone human knew this attack was going to happen. Someone human had sent him out here to discover the aftermath. Someone human knew the answer to Jorgun’s question. And they weren’t sharing.
Prudence had come up behind him, and was staring down at the wreck. He studied her face carefully. But the operative was gone, replaced by a frightened young woman. She glared back at him accusingly, demanding that his badge and his authority make sense of the tragedy that lay in front of them. The same look so many victims had given him over the years. No actress could fake that heartbroken glare, that shattered innocence, that instinctive need for someone to explain how ordinary life had suddenly become nightmare. He’d nailed a dozen murderers simply because they had failed this test. When confronted with the body, they could fake the loss, the grief, the sorrow, but they couldn’t fake the outrage that their predictable world no longer made sense. They could pretend to lament the deceased, but not the death of meaning.
She didn’t know the answer.
“Fucking aliens.” Melvin screamed over the blizzard. “Aliens! Pru, what the hell are we gonna do?”
“Is it the Dog-Men of Ophiuchi Seven? Because I thought their ships were shaped like giant wolves.” Jorgun was talking about some space-opera comic show that ran on the low-grade entertainment channels. From a normal man, Kyle would have suspected irrationality born of fear; from a clever mind, satire from much the same source. But Jorgun’s voice was smooth and even. Of all the people here, he was the only one who did not shudder. Protected by his Zen-like innocence, while the rest of them teetered on the brink of the unthinkable.
“This isn’t a fucking vid show, you idiot!” Melvin’s outrage didn’t sting. It wasn’t directed at Jorgun, but at the alien ship, the war-shattered colony, the entire universe itself. Even the simpleminded giant could tell that. He didn’t flinch, but just asked his next question, obviousness having been transformed into insight by the impossibility of the scene.
“Are you sure? It feels like a vid show.”
Yes, Kyle thought, it did. It felt like one of those prank shows, where people were put in ridiculous situations and secretly filmed for their comedic reactions.
Except a lot of people had died to set up this gag.
Prudence’s voice was carefully neutral. “What
The men who ran the League would mark her out for that, put her name on the list of Undesirables. The list of people to silence, while they took control. The people to make disappear, once they had it.
That list that was already too short, depopulated not by threats and subterfuge, but by bribery and innate laziness. Sometimes he wondered if anyone would notice when the League finally won and seized absolute power. If the price of a vid and a beer didn’t go up, would they even care?
Prudence was an attitude he had stopped expecting to find. Complacency was easy on a rich world like Altair. Looking the other way when the price of looking deeper got too high. Letting someone else take care of things because they’d always done such a good job of it before.
In the presence of her piercing eyes, entranced by the shapely lips that almost smiled but not quite, trembling as if they could burst into laughter or disdain at any instant, he could not stop his mask from slipping. He spoke honestly, from the heart, without calculation.
“We’re going to go down there and take a closer look.”
Like he could trust her; like she was on his side. Always it was “I” or “the Department” or “the League.” Never “we.” Never himself and another, partners and equals, peer to peer.
A subtle slip, but his life had become a pirouette on the razor’s edge, and subtlety had become the only flavor left.
Trudging down the crater’s edge to the alien ship, he resolved not to make any more mistakes.
Melvin screamed something, but the wind took it.
Kyle turned his helmet mike on. “No point in radio silence now, people. But consider this a crime scene. Don’t touch anything. Do I make myself clear?”
Melvin’s voice rattled in his ear. “We’re not bio-sealed! How do you know it’s safe?”
Prudence answered, the voice of spacer wisdom. “Melvin, we can’t get sick from aliens. For crying out loud, we can’t even eat native plants.”
Everything the human race had, they’d brought with them from Earth, or made since then. Life was a complex orchestra, and one wrong note made it incompatible. It wasn’t just the molecular composition of proteins: it was the shape they folded into. Sometimes the local flora was poisonous, but usually it was just inert, like eating cardboard. The dreaded space-plague was a feature of science fiction, not reality.
Kyle added his own reasoning, trying to reassert control from that one foolish moment he’d let it slip. “If they had a biological attack vector, they would have already used it. None of the colonists were dying from disease.”
Even while he spoke, a thousand warnings rattled through his mind. There were so many ways this could end in death: automated defense systems, a wounded but still living pilot, a booby trap, or just industrial hazard. What if the fuel source was toxic? What if the ship was on fire, internally, and about to explode? What about radiation?
He worried about these things, but he didn’t stop walking. Curiosity and the proverbial cat. Thinking about cats made him think about Prudence, so delicate and reserved in repose, but feral in movement.
He turned to look at her, coming down the slope after him with Jorgun in tow.
“The locator doesn’t read any signal other than the distress beacon,” she said over the radio. “There’s no distortion in our communications. And the snow hasn’t melted. This wreck is cold.”
She had done more than just think about the dangers. She had looked for them.
“Good,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Quite brave of you to assume it was safe.” She was mocking him again.
“No, it was stupid. I’m tired. Don’t let me make any more stupid mistakes.”
Melvin was still standing at the top of the crater, holding a rifle. She wasn’t making mistakes.
“This whole expedition is stupid,” she told him. Floundering in the snow, she leaned on the big Jorgun for support, let him help her through the drifts. Kyle was seized with a completely unreasonable pang of jealousy.
“Then why are you down here?” he asked.
The two of them had caught up to him, close enough that he could see her face.
