“Destiny, Houston for Tea. We need you to take a look at Panel Delta.”
Tea reacted without thinking, closing up the flight data file and dropping it in the next seat. Panel Delta was where data on Destiny’s environmental systems was displayed.
It was only an hour after she and her colleagues—survivors of the human race’s less-than-nominal First Contact mission—had sealed themselves inside Destiny. Taj and Natalia were now awkwardly camped out on the sloping “floor” next to four rigid and empty pressure suits; Lucas was wedged atop the two stowed couches.
And Tea was in T-shirt and shorts, perched above them at the command operator’s position.
The moment she had been able to close the door and restore pressure, Tea had not only removed her worn-out EVA suit, but had also stripped off her fantastically nasty undergarment. She then cleaned herself with a wad of wet wipes and shrugged into a flight suit, telling the others, “Be my guest.”
Taj had objected. “What if there’s a loss of pressure?”
“Then I’ll die comfortable,” she said. “Besides . . . your suits have different hose fittings. You can’t recharge from these tanks. You might as well clean up and change clothes, too.”
To spare the others the awkwardness of donning coveralls last worn by dead comrades, Tea had opened a cabinet and pulled out spare garments intended to be worn the last day of the mission. She hoped this was the last day of the mission.
Pogo’s size XL hung loosely on Lucas, and Tea’s spare didn’t fit tiny Natalia much better. Zack’s fit Taj as though tailored . . . which caused Tea to think about her absent friend and commander. As the others laid waste to the stored food and water, Tea radioed a quiet query to Houston about word from Zack and was only told, “Last contact was two hours ago. Nothing since then. Nothing expected.”
Now Houston had her checking environmental systems. She quickly learned why. “Houston, I’m seeing a pressure drop . . . barely over seven hundred millibars, and I think it’s gone down a point since I’ve looked.” She was too tired to do the math, or to wait for Trieu to confirm those figures. “How long before we’re sucking vac?”
“It’s still on the order of hours, possibly a day or two,” Trieu told her. “But it means we have to get you off the surface ASAP.”
Taj had heard this, and so had Lucas and Natalia. The vyomanaut was already climbing into the seat next to Tea. “How much time?”
Houston answered for Tea. “You will be going LOS in the next ninety minutes. We want you off the ground before then.”
“No more than we do,” she had told them.
Just then, strangely, the spacecraft rolled. It was worse than one simple motion . . . it actually seemed to yaw a bit, too, causing Tea’s already-sensitive stomach to protest. “Okay, anyone, what the hell was that?”
Natalia said, “I thought this was solid ground!”
The nearest window to Tea showed nothing but black sky overhead. “Taj, take a look—”
The vyomanaut already had his nose up to the square window in the hatch. “There’s a lot of vapor outside!”
Lucas pulled himself up to the couch next to Tea. “Are we venting?”
Tea didn’t think so—at least, no more than before the movement—and a quick glance at all the panels confirmed it. “No indicators. Haven’t heard anything.”
Taj was getting agitated. “I think Vesuvius is active again—”
That was all Tea needed to hear. She clicked her radio. “Houston, Destiny . . . Let’s get to that departure checklist!”
Big Smart Alien
TERM COINED BY NASA ASTRONAUT ZACHARY STEWART, AUGUST 2019
To Zack, it seemed as though the Architect considered his request to release Megan.
Then it moved again, its portside appendages swiftly lashing out, touching the interior walls to Zack’s right. A third of the way up, just above the height of Zack’s head, a panel opened up—
And a body slid out.
Zack moved reflexively . . . and a good thing, too: it was a writhing, scratching, loudly protesting human female.
Megan.
They both collapsed. Fortunately, Keanu’s gravity ensured that they wouldn’t be hurt.
It took a moment before Megan realized who had caught her. “Oh my God,” was all she said.
Zack had never heard anyone so relieved. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
They regarded each other. “I keep hoping I’m eventually going to figure this out,” Zack said.
“Me, too.”
Zack turned to the Architect, who, after releasing Megan from a hole in the wall, had resumed exploration of other cabinets higher up in the chamber, using two or three of its appendages at the same time. “Any ideas?” Zack shouted.
“I think he can hear you.”
“And you would know.”
“Yes.” She seemed to be regaining strength. “Both of us know.”
“Listen, darling . . . I’m just about out of time and energy. I haven’t slept in three days, I have barely eaten . . . I’ve seen stuff I wouldn’t have thought possible. And I’ve given up my ride home. So there’s a clock on me. I don’t know whether it will be days or hours, but if you and the Architect have anything to share, please do it now.”
Megan knelt and slipped her arms around him, cradling his head the way she’d held Rachel as a child. “Ssshh,” she said, almost cooing. “I know. I do know. You were . . . incredibly brave to come here.”
“You’re the brave one—”
“Hardly. I was in an accident, then these guys brought me back. I didn’t choose any of it. But I would have, to see all this.”
“Yeah. I wish I felt luckier.”
She hushed him, just like Megan of old. “How many people ever get the chance to . . . change the history of the world? Or a couple of hundred worlds?”
“Yeah, well, my team hasn’t done a very good job so far.” He glanced up at the busy Architect. “I’d like to tell our . . . host here that that bomb was a major mistake.”
Megan leaned her head close to his again. “I think you just did.”
“You think, or you know?”
Megan looked at the Architect herself. The giant being looked back. “I know. I mean, I figured my new body had some improvements.”
“You know things you shouldn’t.”
“Even more as time goes by. It’s like I’m being prompted. I can’t just offer things up. But hear the right question—bam! Here’s an answer.”
Zack turned her face back toward him. He put his hand on her cheek . . . their first truly intimate touch, so familiar. “Who are they? What do they want? Just building or outfitting a ship like this would take the resources of an entire civilization!”
She took a breath, then closed her eyes and said: “Okay, trying my best: life is hard to find in the universe. Intelligent life is . . . incredibly rare. We’ve found more dead civilizations than living ones, and we haven’t found many of those.”
“You said we.”
“Yes, we. I’m Megan. But I’m beginning to share some of their consciousness, too. This vessel . . . he’s really old, on the order of ten thousand years. And our solar system isn’t its first stop. There have been a dozen others.”
“Does it really have the ability to reengineer its environment to suit whatever creatures it encounters?”
A pause. “Yes.”
“For some of these other races, like the Sentries?”
“Other candidates, we call them.” She blinked, as if listening.
Zack was about to seize on the term candidates—for what? But he had a more vital question. “And this vessel can magically access specific ‘souls’ of the dead of . . . any race?”
“Yes. Don’t think of it as magic. It’s technology humans don’t possess. We know how consciousness and personality connect to bodies.”
“But you found a handful of souls out of millions!”
“It was accessing data stored in . . . the closest I can come is morphogenetic fields. The universe is filled with it . . . with bioelectric data, all kinds of data. Information.”