First Encounter Page 5

  And then the sound came again. Thunk... Thunk thunk... Thunk...

  Ambassador Morgan walked past them as if in a daze and placed his naked ear to the outer airlock door.

  The sound came again. Thunk... Thunk thunk... Thunk...

  “They’re knocking on the door!” Morgan cried.

  Chapter 8

  Silence hung frozen in the air as they all considered what to do next. Clayton was torn. They had to look for Dr. Grouse, but they couldn’t leave with a horde of angry aliens outside waiting for them. Tactically, it was suicide.

  “What if we misinterpreted their behavior?” Dr. Reed asked, the first to break the silence. “They’re not all banging on the sides of the shuttle like some angry mob. They’re knocking like a civilized species.”

  “Could be a trick,” Delta pointed out.

  “That level of cunning requires high intelligence,” Ambassador Morgan added, stepping into the airlock and drawing himself up. “That means this is officially first contact with an intelligent species.”

  Clayton arched an eyebrow at him. “We don’t know that yet. Even a monkey can knock on a door. Besides, even if it is first contact, that doesn’t change the rules of engagement. They can be hostile and intelligent at the same time. Rising to the bait would simply initiate the hostilities. They might be calling us out to answer for what we did to their friends—or family—stunning them. As far as they’re concerned, we attacked first. Now it’s their turn.”

  “I disagree,” Morgan replied. “As Lori—” He caught himself. “As Dr. Reed pointed out, they would be banging on the sides of the shuttle like actual monkeys if their intentions were purely hostile.”

  Clayton shared a dubious look with Commander Taylor. She rolled her eyes. Clayton nodded to the ambassador. “They’re aliens. We can’t pretend to know how they would act in any given situation. As much as I want to get out and rescue Dr. Grouse, we can’t risk more personnel. We’ll have to wait for the HEROs to get here. It’s the only way to deescalate at this point.”

  “Because landing an army here won’t be escalating conflict,” Dr. Reed muttered.

  “They can attack the HEROs all they want. Without high-powered weapons, they won’t even make a dent in the armor.”

  “I’m sorry, Clayton,” Ambassador Morgan said, shaking his head. “But I’m pulling rank here. We don’t have that kind of time to waste. They could kill Dr. Grouse while we’re waiting. This might be our only chance to save him.”

  “And how do you propose we do that? We can’t exactly tell them it was an accident.”

  “We can,” Dr. Reed replied. “We’ll use the Visualizers to explain ourselves. Then maybe we can get them to wear one and calibrate it so we can have a conversation.”

  “Too risky,” Clayton said again.

  “This whole venture is risky,” Dr. Reed replied. “We all knew what we were getting into when we signed up.”

  Delta caught Clayton’s eye and gave his head a slight shake. Clayton frowned.

  “Fine, but I’m going out, too.”

  “No you’re not,” Morgan replied.

  “Excuse me?” Clayton could feel his blood pressure rise, his face growing hot with it.

  “You were the one who opened fire. In fact, all of you shot at them,” Morgan said, his eyes skipping from Clayton to Delta to Taylor and back again. “None of you can come out with us.”

  Clayton blew out a stale breath. “This is a bad idea.”

  “Your objections have been noted,” Morgan said. “Ready, Dr. Reed?”

  She nodded. “Whenever you are.”

  “Everyone else out of the airlock,” Clayton said.

  “Sir, you can’t be serious!” Delta began. “This is—”

  “The ambassador has left us no choice. The chain of command is clear. Civilians are in charge when it comes to first contact.”

  Morgan smiled patiently as they withdrew from the airlock. “Thank you, Captain. We’ll be in touch soon.”

  Clayton smiled coldly back. “Not if you’re dead.”

  Morgan looked away, and Dr. Reed shouldered her pack with the Visualizer in it. Clayton keyed the inner doors shut from his side and watched through the small windows in the top of those doors as they went through decon once more. This time those sprays and radiation pulses were to protect the alien environment from their microorganisms. The last thing they needed was to come in peace and wind up killing all the aliens with the equivalent of small pox. The old world meets the new all over again. Clayton opened a sealed compartment in his suit and retrieved his ear piece. He at least needed to stay in comms contact with Dr. Reed and Ambassador Morgan while they were out there.

  The flashing lights and misting sprays stopped. A light burned green above the outer airlock doors, and then they swept open to reveal a horde of those monkey creatures. One of them was standing right outside the doors, on four legs. Its other six limbs were folded in against its torso like arms. The alien cocked its brown head and blinked big black eyes at them. It backed up a few steps, making room for Morgan and Dr. Reed to get outside. Dr. Reed slowly unslung her pack, and the creature at the top of the ramp grew agitated. Its neck collar flared out, glowing brightly and rattling in warning. All six of its arms spread out from its body, and it reared up to an impressive height.

  Morgan stepped between them, with his hands raised in surrender.

  He probably thought that was a good idea, but he was unintentionally mimicking the creature’s aggressive stance. “Morgan! Put down your hands!” Clayton screamed over the comms.

  Chapter 9

  Lori watched Richard step in front of her and raise his hands. The alien’s neck collar began rattling louder and more ominously. Lori almost screamed for him to put his hands back down, but screaming would be an equally bad idea right now.

  Captain Cross did it for her, his voice booming to their ears over the tinny speakers of their in-helmet comms. “Morgan, you idiot! Put down your hands!”

  Richard dropped his hands in a hurry, and the alien standing on the ramp with them slowly lowered its hands, too. All six of them.

  Lori slowly removed the Visualizer from her pack. There was just one problem that none of them had properly considered. You can’t wear a suit helmet and a Visualizer helmet at the same time. Lori glanced at the readings on her HUD. The air out here was breathable. She’d get light headed from low oxygen in the thinner air, but she could take it for a while at least.

  Lori unsnapped the seals at her neck. Captain Cross’s voice crackled to life almost instantly. “Don’t you dare, Lori!”

  They hadn’t thought this through. She should have had an O2 mask with her at the very least. Lori pulled off her helmet with a hiss of escaping air from the higher pressure in her suit. Her ears popped and she sucked in an unfiltered breath of the alien air. It was cold and thin and smelled like cinnamon. A gentle breeze gusted in, and she caught a whiff of something else. The alien standing in front of her gave off a gamy scent. Lori’s head was already swimming from the lack of oxygen. She hurriedly put on the Visualizer helmet, and set the holo projector in front of her.

  She raised the screen of her helmet so she could still see, then blanked her mind and focused on transmitting an image of Dr. Grouse.

  Dr. Grouse’s face appeared, projected above the device in a translucent image. The alien reacted with a sudden hiss and took a quick step back.

  Lori tried again. This time, she pictured him wandering around the dark forest, stumbling, searching for something.

  The alien cocked its head at her, big eyes blinking, black beak opening and closing restlessly. At least it hadn’t tried to attack them yet.

  So far so good, Lori thought. She tried another image. She showed them their planet from orbit. A cloud-swept blue and green marble striated with rivers and pocked with lakes. The mountain ridges that were the scars of old asteroid impacts formed bald black rings around the vegetation.

  The creature in front of Lori reacted by r
etracting its glowing neck ring and sinking down to all ten of its limbs. It bowed its head and let out a low growl. The creatures behind it mimicked that posture and the growl—all fifty of them.

  Lori frowned at that. They’d gone from hostile to obeisant. What had triggered that reaction? She stared at their planet hovering above the projector. If they had recognized that image, then that meant they’d been up into space before, but they weren’t even wearing clothes, or armor, or weapons. No accessories or technology of any kind. This species, however intelligent they might be, wasn’t space-faring. So who had taken them up to space? And why?

  An uneasy chill coursed through her. Black spots danced before her eyes, and a foggy haze filled her head from the thin air. She blinked, and suddenly she was lying flat on the boarding ramp, staring up at Richard’s helmet, his expression pinched with worry behind his visor.

  “Lori! Lori!” Richard said over the comms. He was slapping her gently.

  “I’m here.” She rose to a sitting position and shook her head to clear it. The aliens were still bowing to them, as if waiting for a command from her.

  “Why are they acting like that?” she asked aloud. “They were angry a moment ago.”

  “Does it matter?” Richard replied. “Try to get one of them to wear a helmet. We need to see inside their heads and make this a two-way conversation.”

  Lori nodded quickly and withdrew a malleable electrode helmet from her bag. She passed it to Richard, not trusting herself to get up and carry it to the creature in front of them. Besides, she’d compromised her suit’s integrity. The less contact she had the better. She didn’t want to make these aliens sick, or vice versa.

  Richard took the helmet to the one on the landing ramp and said, “Greetings. I am Richard Morgan of the United Nations of Earth.”

  The creature glanced up and saw him standing there, but quickly dropped its head again.

  Richard stepped into reach and tried lowering the helmet over its head, expanding the malleable frame to fit.

  “Ambassador, I hope you know what you’re doing,” Captain Cross said.

  “So do I,” he whispered back.

  The creature reacted with a growl, but did not resist as Richard lowered the helmet over its triangular head. He adjusted it to fit, but didn’t lower the screen over its eyes. It wouldn’t have fit over the creature’s beak anyway.

  He hurried back to Lori’s side, and she busied herself by mentally issuing commands to the holo-projector, linking it to both helmets and dividing the projection into two sides, divided by a line in the middle. The left side was for the alien’s messages, right for hers.

  The left was hazy with flickering, indistinct images. The helmet still had to be calibrated. Lori took a deep breath, feeling faint again. Under ideal circumstances she would have had hours to calibrate the device. Right now she had seconds. Using her side of the holo projector to pull up a calibration interface, she began hunting for visual signals in the mess of activity going on inside the alien’s head.

  Every time she picked out a halfway discernible image on the alien’s side of the projector, she tagged those signals and prioritized those neural pathways over the rest, and each time she did that the images got clearer.

  Gradually an image snapped into blurry focus. It was an image of Alpha Team walking through the forest, seen from above, the beams of their helmet lights sweeping back and forth.

  The alien looked up, saw the imagery, and its eyes flared wide. A hiss escaped its beak and its collar flared out briefly before flattening once more.

  Lori tried repeating her message from before, showing the image of their world from orbit. This time she added an image of the Forerunner, as seen from their shuttle as they left and began flying down to Trappist-1E.

  A reciprocal image flickered to life on the alien’s side. It was peering down on its own world from orbit, standing in front of a broad window on a silvery surface. But something was different. The planet had all the right colors—blue-green with white streaks of cloud, but it lacked the black rings of mountains. The impact craters were missing.

  Maybe this was another planet. Lori’s heart fluttered in her chest. She was right. They had been up to space. But were they space-faring? Had she been wrong about that? She tried picturing one of these ten-legged aliens in a spacesuit that looked vaguely like a Space Force uniform.

  The alien’s side of the Visualizer blanked, then returned. It showed the same scene from orbit, but this time bright, glowing orange balls were flashing down and vanishing against the planet below. Moments later they bloomed into dazzling flashes of light and angry black mushroom clouds that rolled out across the surface of the world.

  The craters. Was this the meteor storm that had scarred their world?

  Then the scene shifted and small gray wedges flashed into view. Bright blue thrusters glowed behind them, and more glowing orange balls were raining down from them.

  The scene clicked in Lori’s brain. Spaceships. Weapons. This was an orbital attack.

  She gasped.

  “Holy shit...” Commander Taylor muttered over the comms. Lori glanced back to see her and Captain Cross pressing their faces to the windows in the outer doors of the shuttle’s airlock. They had their helmets on, ready to come out guns blazing at a moment’s notice. Lori waved them away and tried summoning another mental image.

  She showed the planet without the black rings of the mountain ranges, just as this alien had shown her. Then she showed the same scene that it had, with those fiery orange missiles raining down. Followed by the orbital view of the world as it was now: with the craggy black rings of mountains dividing up the jungles.

  The alien replied by showing her the same before and after images of the planet. This time the imagery was accompanied by a soft whistling sound. Pain? Sadness?

  It was confirmation enough for her.

  “What does it mean?” Richard asked.

  Lori was too light-headed to reply. The black spots dancing before her eyes converged into a solid sheet of black, and time dragged into an endless moment.

  She woke up lying on her back inside the airlock with an oxygen mask on and Doctor Stevens crouching over her with an empty syringe. He was still wearing his helmet. She was now a potential source of contamination. Quarantine measures were in effect.

  “What...” Lori rocked her head from side to side. “What happened?” she asked, her voice muffled by the oxygen mask. She pushed up onto elbows and twisted to look at the outer doors. Doctor Stevens was the only one in the airlock with her. The inner doors were also shut.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “They left,” Stevens replied. “To go look for Dr. Grouse.”

  “I need to join them! They’ll need my help to communicate with—”

  Stevens pushed her back down gently and shook his head. “You need to rest. Let the Captain handle it.”

  “But what if they start shooting again?”

  “The aliens surrendered. You seem to have earned their respect.”

  Lori thought back over the exchange. They’d ‘talked’ about a cataclysmic attack on this planet, but it must have happened a long time ago, since the jungles had all re-grown now to fill in the blast craters, but...

  That alien had told her about the last first contact event in their history. This was the second such event. And to them, both meetings were somehow linked. That realization struck her like a lightning bolt. “I didn’t earn their respect. They’re afraid of us! They think we are the ones who attacked them all those years ago.”

  Doctor Stevens frowned behind his helmet, and the lines of his craggy face multiplied. “Even if that’s true, a healthy dose of fear will do to keep us safe. It might not be a bad thing.”

  Lori rocked her head again. “You think that’s okay? Claiming responsibility for attempted genocide against their people?”

  “Maybe you’re wrong,” Stevens said. “Maybe you misunderstood. Visualizers are hardly a precise form of commun
ications.”

  “Maybe,” Lori admitted. “Or maybe I’m right. Regardless, you realize what this means, don’t you?”

  Doctor Stevens’ expression grew grave behind his helmet. “It means there may be two intelligent species on this planet besides ourselves.”

  Lori nodded. “We’ve met the natives, but we have yet to meet the genocidal invaders.”

  “Let’s hope that we never do,” Stevens said.

  Chapter 10

  “Commander, activate Dr. Grouse’s emergency locator beacon and share the results with us please,” Clayton said as soon as they left the airlock. The aliens were still there, crouching in the blue-green grass with their heads bowed.

  There weren’t as many of them as before, and they parted quickly to make way for Clayton and his crew as they descended the boarding ramp. Delta and Commander Taylor kept a wary aim on them with their coil guns. Clayton had a firm grip on his own weapon, just in case.

  “I’ve got a signal. It’s weak... flickering. Roughly three klicks from here.”

  “Three klicks,” Clayton muttered, staring at the red dot of Dr. Grouse’s locator beacon on the miniature map in the top left of his HUD. Three kilometers over rough terrain. Average walking speed was around five klicks an hour. He checked his air. One hour and five minutes. They’d have to move fast to get there and back.

  “Air supply check,” Clayton ordered as he strode toward the forest.

  Everyone reported in one after another saying they had just over an hour of air left. It was enough, but barely.

  “He’s just sitting there,” Ambassador Morgan said. “Why isn’t he moving?”

  “Could be wounded,” Delta said.

  “Should we go back for Doc?” Commander Taylor asked.

  “No,” Clayton replied. “He needs to watch Dr. Reed for any adverse reactions after breathing the air down here. Besides, we all have first aid training. We’ll stabilize him as best we can and get him back to the shuttle ASAP.”