“I don’t know. Maybe. But I’m guessing it has other life forms, more solid ones, inside,” Amaya ventures, frustrated by the evident uselessness of most of her instruments. “Exactly twenty-four of them, slowly changing positions. They’re four or five meters long. But the thing that’s holding or encasing them, the ship or whatever, distorts everything, so I can’t be any more precise about the details.”
“It might be a bioship fluctuating between hyperspace and normal space,” Nuria hypothesizes thoughtfully. “A supercell. And those could be its nuclei, you know?”
Amaya gives her a furious look and opens her mouth…
If I let them go on one second longer, we’ll have to sit through yet another sterile argument between the former lovers, so I intervene. “We can settle all that later, but for now, why don’t we communicate with the Servet and see if they already made Contact? Isn’t that what really matters?”
“I have a transmission coming in from them now,” Amaya notes, suddenly and thankfully busy at the controls again. “I accept and copy.”
The holographic image of Alberto Saudat, the old captain of the equally antiquated hyperjump cruiser from Nu Barsa, immediately appears over our heads.
“… to the hyperjump frigate Antoni Gaudí,” says his monotone voice, as if he’s repeated the same phrase a hundred times already. Then, realizing that he now has a connection, his tone changes to what can only be called one of terrified bewilderment. “Captain Berenguer, condomnaut Valdés! How lucky you’re the ones who got here! We need your help urgently. We’ve located the extragalactics, as you must have deduced from the proximity of their ship to ours. But there were… unexpected problems. We haven’t been able to make Contact with them, Nerys is in shock, and… ”
I’m sorry about what happened to you, my dear slippery mermaid. I think you bit off more than you could chew. Or they made you bite it off.
I don’t know whether to feel angry at you or pity you.
Did you think making Contact with creatures from the Magellanic Cloud would somehow be routine?
The hyperjump cruiser Miquel Servet was luckier than we were. They found a Qhigarian worldship just four days into the search in the sector assigned to them, Radiants 3567 and 3568. The Alien Drifters were harvesting water comets in the Oort cloud of Epsilon Piscium, and they were delighted to give them the orbital coordinates of the extragalactics they had made Contact with a few days earlier—in exchange for the secret of cold fusion, which I myself had obtained from the Continentines years ago.
Oh, well. Easy come, easy go. Good to know I wasn’t the only one who would have happily sold his own mother to drag the damn coordinates out of the Qhigarians. Seems that Nerys also took Miquel Llul’s phrase at any price completely seriously.
Good thing only two ships from Nu Barsa made Contact with the Unworthy Pupils, because the third might have had to give them the entire orbital habitat in exchange for the same data.
The Servet, already knowing what the extragalactics were after and what route they would take, only needed one more hyperspace jump to catch up to them in this system. I suppose the conglomeration of worldships was just beginning to form in the triple Gamma Hydri system at that moment, or else it would have been a lot harder for them to get here, as it was for us.
Reaching the eagerly sought visitors from beyond the Milky Way wasn’t the end of the odyssey, of course; it was just the beginning.
The crew of the Servet didn’t wait the usual three days for a First Contact, of course; the matter was too urgent. The extragalactics allowed them to approach the orbit of their ship with its wavering outline (it almost gives you a headache to look at it) until they were just a few dozen kilometers apart. The Aliens didn’t communicate, attack, flee, or show any sign of hostility, fear, or even recognition.
The Catalan crew then figured they might try to make Contact with them. But just when Nerys was nervously preparing to head out into space wearing her ultraprotect, the hypergraph detected a sudden, massive fluctuation, and the condomnaut mermaid disappeared from the airlock—leaving her suit behind.
At first Captain Alberto Saudat retreated to what he thought was a safe distance, but after three minutes went by and no sign of Nerys, he admits he got so nervous he moved the ship back until it almost touched the damned white cloud. He even fired his disintegrating weapons, to see if there would be any response. Not the most powerful ones on board, of course, and he didn’t aim them directly at the extragalactics. Just in case.
In any event, my mermaid rematerialized exactly where she had disappeared, six minutes after the event. And in a state of total shock.
“She hasn’t recovered,” the stunned captain tells us in barely a whisper. “She breathes, she moves, the automedic says she has no neural damage or other internal injuries, but she hasn’t regained consciousness. Looks like a regular psychic trauma. Fernando, my life support tech, studied psychology and he’s afraid she must have gotten such a huge shock from seeing the creatures, she simply refuses to return to a reality where abominations like them exist.”
Wow, great theory for making every other Contact Specialist avoid coming within a parsec of the migraine-inducing cloud ship.
“We tried returning to Nu Barsa to ask for help, but we believe that the hyperengine stops working in the vicinity of these creatures,” Saudat continues to whine.
Of course, assuming they did try, it could just be that all the Qhigarians anywhere near here were already gathering over at Lambda Trianguli and not helping out with the hyperjumps; their minds were literally elsewhere. But this isn’t the time to tell him that the Galactic Community is about to be deprived of any means of faster-than-light travel—at least until something new turns up.
“And the worst part is, none of the holocameras and other systems on her suit recorded anything. Lucía, my sensor tech, says that was probably because of the same burst of energy that caused the sudden fluctuation we saw in the hypergraph. So we still don’t have the slightest idea what sort of creatures we’re dealing with,” the old astronaut concludes, staring at us.
Or rather, staring specifically at me.
Within seconds, the entire crew of the Gaudí is staring, too.
All of them except Jordi, the absent third official, that is.
Okay, I get it. I’m the only condomnaut in the neighborhood. Plus, Nerys is my girlfriend.
Succeeding where she failed is now almost a matter of honor for me. That’s what they think, anyway.
Captain Berenguer clears his throat and says, nice and slow, “Josué, do you think, maybe… ”
“Sure.” I sigh and shrug, as if to play it down. Though I’m already feeling the first pre-Contact jitters and cold sweats. I still think I make myself sound pretty convincing when I say, “Nerys can be too impressionable sometimes. I should know! I’m going to go put on my suit. In five minutes I can be making Contact with… ”
“Hyperjump, incoming!” Amaya exclaims at that very instant, ruining the dramatic climax of my speech. Then, voice trembling, she adds, “Human ship, approaching full throttle. I’m checking the radio beacon signal… ” She gulps and looks up at me, her face serious. “Josué, I don’t think you have five minutes to get your suit on. It’s ours, too. The Salvador Dalí, no less.”
Shit. One damn thing after another. I thought the racing-against-time stage of this ordeal was over, but now I’m up against the nanoborg and his vengeful sidekick.