Nothing went wrong. When it was over, Ebbie was sideways to the docking tube, anchored thirty meters off the end, hooked to it by three cables. Docking at a shipwreck station with a tow buckled on is not Standard Operating Procedure.
Angie and I would have to work our way down—and then back up—those cables unless we chose to stay aboard Ebbie and not return to the station habitat. I gave Angie the choice.
“Let’s go down,” she said. “If we’re going to stick around long enough to see what’s coming, that’s the place to do it.”
“Just remember, we may have to shinny back up the cables in a hurry when that ship gets here.”
We took our pressure suits off and used station stores to charge the maneuvering-gas tanks in them, although we had charged the air tanks from Ebbie. About ten minutes after we had settled in near the habitat’s instrument console, Clay came back in.
“I have finished my repairs,” he announced.
Bully for you, I thought. What I said was, “Are you going to leave now or wait to see what’s coming?”
“I will stay for now,” he said. “At least until we have a clearer idea of what the anomaly is.”
“Yeah, us too,” I said. By the partly written rules that we govern ourselves by, we should have left the shipwreck station immediately after completing repairs and getting Barta docked to Ebbie. At the very least, we should have quit drawing on station supplies, leaving as much as possible in case someone else needed the facilities. But I suspected that we would have drawn more complaints had we not stayed around this time. If we left before finding out what was coming, no one would have ever let us hear the last of it. Besides, with 117+9’s orbit decaying, it would require major attention soon anyway.
“The object has started slowing down,” Angie announced. “It is definitely coming here, not just passing by.”
“How long?” I asked.
“If it maintains its current rate of deceleration, just under two hours.”
Two eternal hours. The ranging gear gave us improved definition on the object. The scanners refined the spectrum of its emissions. The object was definitely a ship, but absolutely not of any known human manufacture. And the crew, if there was one, was not answering radio calls.
At first, Clay had taken off only his helmet. But keeping the rest of his pressure suit on apparently became too much of a burden because he took it off eventually, then put it on again no more than twenty minutes later, forty-five minutes before the mystery ship would arrive. Ten minutes after that, Angie and I got back into our suits as well.
“A prudent step,” Angie said when I made the suggestion.
“In case we have to run for it, or decide to leave early,” I said, trying to whisper softly enough that Clay wouldn’t hear.
We had a visual on the ship by then, not that it was very revealing. Even at extreme magnification the image wasn’t very clear. The ship had come in hotter than any of us had, which meant that it had to decelerate more rapidly to match speeds with the shipwreck station for rendezvous.
I fought the urge to go outside and watch. Even if the ship had been a candle with a pilot we knew (and trusted), that would have been poor judgment. In case of mishap, we would be safer inside the habitat, especially sealed in pressure suits. Of course, we would have been safer yet in our candles, backed away from the berg and ready to light the wick… and safest of all several hours out, burning for home. But we had already made the decision not to go, and no one suggested a change of plan.
Clay started to fidget and pace. With as little room as there was in the habitat with three people dressed in pressure suits, that was annoying. It appeared as if he might be having difficulty fighting the urge to move to his candle.
“That ship is definitely not of human manufacture,” Ebbie informed me eight minutes before its ETA. “It appears to be totally alien in design.”
“Could it be only partly alien?” I asked without thinking.
Ebbie did not respond.
Six minutes out, the ship increased its rate of deceleration. Then the hot drive was turned off and the vehicle edged its way in to final rendezvous with cold gas, reversing attitude so that the exhausts would remain away from the berg. The ship might be alien, but there are certain necessities that remain the same as long as the propulsion systems aren’t totally beyond our ken. The same basic mechanical needs. The laws of physics had to be the same for them as they were for us. That had to limit the alienness of the ship. It was a third larger than Ebbie.
“A little shaky coming in,” Angie commented softly.
“That ship looks as if it’s been beat up worse than Barta was,” I replied. “Maybe the pilot was injured, or just hasn’t gotten his nerves back.”
“He’s going to park awfully close to Barta and Ebbie. Maybe we should have waited aboard,” Angie said.
“I just thought of something.”
“What?” Angie turned from the monitor to look at me.
“What the hell do we say?” I said. Even Clay turned to look at me. “Some alien creature finds his way through the airlock and comes in the door.” I pointed at it. “What the hell do we say? Are we going to be able to communicate at all?”
I hadn’t given those questions any thought in the hours of waiting. It was too… preposterous a notion that after all of these decades, we were actually going to meet an alien. Face to face. Assuming that the alien had a face.
“There’s no way to know,” Clay said. “Perhaps we would have been wiser not to put ourselves in the position where we might have to make the attempt… or suffer the consequences.”
“There must be a pilot, maybe more than one,” Angie said. “No matter what he or they look like or come from, they can’t be that much different from us. From the looks of that ship, they might be in the same business we are, mining the cloud. If he, she, or they need help, we have to try.”
I guess it did come down to that, we would help if we could. I doubt that I would have put it in words the way Angie had though. I would have been afraid of sounding stuffy or trite.
Time for reflection was running out. On balance, that might have been a definite asset.
The alien ship was not equipped with standard docking gear (standard for us, that is), so it couldn’t link to the shipwreck station the way that the three of us had originally. Instead, the alien ship deployed three grapples, the way Ebbie had after docking Barta, and then extended a long bar, a probe of some sort, to secure its anchorage, about the same distance above the berg as Ebbie, one hundred meters from Ebbie and Barta.
We had excellent views of the ship now, up close and personal, both from the habitat and from Ebbie’s cameras. The alien vessel was thicker and longer than our candles, and the general layout appeared to be a separation into three clear segments, with the rearmost—propulsion—the largest by far. The forward section was the smallest.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about the skin of the alien ship; undecorated metal, much the worse for wear. There were several small patches of some sort of characters on the hull. They looked faded in visible light, though Ebbie said that they were much brighter in ultraviolet.
“If someone walks in and says, ‘Take me to your leader,’ I’ll die laughing,” Angie whispered.
“I think I’m going to be afraid to do much of anything,” I said, not looking at her. “I’ll be too scared to even faint. I mean, what would they think polite, or a deadly insult? We’ve got no rule book for this.”