Jack finally looked around and got his bearings, and it didn’t look good. There was no trace of the other leviathans or the tranzat, and God only knew how far he’d traveled before getting things under control. The air above was thick with those strange vehicles, now too distant to see clearly, while below there was only a thick dust cloud that stretched to the far horizon.
The barely stable leviathan dipped down into the dust cloud, and once inside, vicious winds tore at it from every direction. Jack held onto the controls tightly, and as he dropped into the darkness, he prayed that he’d seen the worst of this day.
Chapter 8:
Jonah and the Great Fish
Rumours spread through the Shackleton like a plague, and the crew were up to speed within an hour. They had found an alien vessel. What followed was overwhelming excitement and fifty-six astronauts trying against all odds to squeeze into an eight-man bridge compartment. Still, the Shackleton did nothing the first day but survey, traveling up and down the length of Zebra-One like a mosquito buzzing around a buffalo, scanning, observing and recording every strange feature of the artifact’s surface. Each new discovery elicited bursts of conjecture and heated debate.
Faulkland eventually banished the crowd from the bridge, but they wouldn’t be deterred. Instead, the lot of them crammed into the maximum-occupancy-twelve dining hall where they monitored progress by CC-TV and somehow managed not to suffocate.
It was a long day mapping Zebra-One’s surface, and at its end, Marcus didn’t sleep at all, nor did he bother trying. He knew from experience that he would have lain awake, running every possibility and contingency through his head. Commander Faulkland claimed that he could sleep at will anywhere in the universe, but he spent the whole night on the bridge with Marcus, staring in perfect silence at the sleeping giant just outside their window.
Meanwhile, Mason Shen sat off to the side and tried to solve the communication puzzle. When morning hours rolled around, he was still at his console and no closer to an answer. He was in contact with Ares Colony on Mars, but Earth remained morbidly silent for them as well.
“I’m about ready to give up,” Mason said around 0800.
Marcus was still staring at Zebra-One, now with dry and sore eyes. He asked the obvious question. “Still no luck, Mason?”
“I wouldn’t say none,” Mason replied. “I’ve been chatting with this Martian comm operator, and she sounds pretty cute. Earth, though… Boss, if I didn’t know better, I’d think everybody just packed up and moved away. There’s nothing.”
Marcus felt like that should bother him more, but he was so far away that it didn’t matter. “No worries. I’m sure there’s a simple answer.”
“Yeah,” was all Mason said, his voice lacking enthusiasm.
“Have there been any signals from Zebra-One?” Marcus asked, switching back to the important topic.
“Not a peep, sir. I’ve been cycling greetings in every language I know and some I don’t, but she’s just as quiet as the Earth. If she’s awake, she ain’t talking.”
“Just as well,” Faulkland said. “It’d be a little anti-climactic if she called us back.”
By 0915, two teams of eight were assembled, briefed and ready to get on with the show. Marcus’ team included himself, Commander Faulkland, Dr. St. Martin, and a handful of the eager miners. The second team was Rao’s, and included Crew Chief Hector Pacheco, the paleontologist Professor Caldwell, and their own team of miners. As much as Marcus pretended there was some deep strategy to the team rosters, they were actually divvied up based on personality. He knew who got on well with whom, and he preferred his teams not be at each other’s throats until after a mission started.
Like Marcus, hardly anyone slept the night before, and they were running on a mixture of high octane coffee and lipid bars. Combining stimulants and sleep deprivation never added up to a level head, and Marcus had a sneaking suspicion that most exploration had begun in a similar fashion. It would explain why so few natives survived first contact.
He was about to say a prayer for whatever natives they might encounter, when he realized his own people were completely unarmed. The tone of his prayer changed very quickly.
With the Shackleton stationed fifty meters from Iris Charlie, the exploratory teams entered the EVA module, which housed a dressing room and airlock. The pressure suits were skin tight, as close as a human could get to naked in space, and the only clothes worn beneath were thin thermals that left little to the imagination.
It took the team less than ten minutes to suit up. Then, with everyone helmeted, sealed, checked and double-checked, they entered the airlock. The heavy door closed behind them and the lights switched from green to red: depressurization was under way. At the same time, a digital gauge on the wall began to tick down from 101 kilopascals. The process was never speedy, but with history awaiting them on the other side, it was glacially slow.
When the gauge read zero, the round outer door popped inward, rolled to the side and revealed the vast iridescent wall of Zebra-One, so large that Marcus was struck by vertigo as if he were hanging fifty meters above the ground.
His discomfort must have been apparent because he felt a hand on his shoulder, and heard Faulkland’s voice in his ear. “Everything alright, Doctor Donovan?”
“Fine,” he said as he regained his composure. “Just haven’t gone EVA in a while.” That wasn’t true. “Donovan to Base, we’re exiting the bay now.”
“Roger that, Donovan. Good luck.”
The pressure suit read his body-language and engaged its cold-jets, thrusting him out away from the Shackleton. The other astronauts followed and together they slowly drifted out of the chamber and into the void, while one of the ship’s life-rafts automatically detached and moved to intercept them. Once they were all hooked up to the raft, its own engines lit up and carried them over the last leg of the journey.
As he approached, Marcus formed different theories about the ship’s surface. He’d long believed it to be some sort of metal, but at fifty meters, he started to entertain the idea of a metamorphic silicate shell. Ten meters after that, the translucency became more pronounced like quartz. Yet another ten meters on, he began to notice patterns swirling within the surface, like viscous fluid in a clear casing. In the final stretch, he finally admitted that he had no damn idea what it was.
The life-raft came to a halt just a short distance from Zebra-One’s hull, and Marcus couldn’t unhook himself fast enough. While the rest of the team were still detaching their umbilical cables, he was free and floating towards her. Finally, after all those long years, he was there beside her. He knew it was reckless, but it didn’t matter. He had to touch her.
The color of the wall shifted as he approached, so slightly he thought it was just his imagination. The surface was flawless, without seams, panels, scratches or any other imperfection. During the survey, his team had detected geometric surface patterns—grooves and protrusions both—but on a large scale separated by hundreds of meters. They assumed they’d find similar patterns on the small scale, but there were no such details, no signs of anything mechanical nor any hint of the artifact’s manufacture. For as far as Marcus could see, it was simply a wall of clear glass with subtly swirling colors trapped beneath.
His thrusters brought him to a graceful stop mere inches away from her, and he reached out. Without any jitter or hesitation, his hand rose up with his fingers spread, and he touched the unimaginably large creature in front of him, the way a diver might dare to touch a passing whale.
Nothing happened.
He wasn’t sure what he expected. He didn’t know if his hand would sink in or be repelled, or if she might crumble at his touch like a mummy rashly exposed to fresh air. He half expected to wake up back home in bed, covered in sweat, with only a vague recollection of his strange adventure. Instead, there was no response other than the feeling of his gloved hand against something solid. And with that, he was satisfied.