It throws me off – the angle of those curved limbs mean I end up flying ten feet in the air, but I come down with my feet braced against the slope of a wall like a goddamned interstellar ninja and jump right back at it. For a moment I have my hands about the rim of its helmet, and I’m going to open the fucker up and see if it’s a monkey or a bug monster or twelve penguins all crammed in together. Then it slaps me down with a big metal fist, and I see something light up and spin within the cylinder attached thereto. That’s just enough warning for me to get the hell out of the way before its energy cannon or whatever-the-hell carves up the air where I was crouching, leaving a great molten furrow in the stone of the Crypts itself.
I’m not daunted; in fact I’m even angrier, every knock feeding that insane wrath within me. I get hold of the alien and lift it bodily in the air, slamming it against the wall in the hope I’ll break open its armour like an eggshell. Still in one piece, it kicks me in the jaw, catapulting me backwards, and lands on all fours. I see it snatch up its light-crook and the packs, which cling to the alien’s armour with their little legs, and lurch to my feet, bellowing hoarsely. It scuttles away, flashing away with its energy gun and drawing new, meaningless sigils in the stone.
Even fighting mad, I steer well clear of that, and I see the thing shimmy up a sheer wall and vanish into a passageway. I make several attempts to follow, still hollering and yowling, words of English and Danish peppering my incoherent ravings. I cannot manage the slope, though, nor jump quite high enough. I am left only with the thing’s fire bowl, which I kick over, trampling the coals until the air smells only of my own burnt flesh.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DOCTOR NAISH GOT us all together in one room; the entire crew, even those whose turn it was to sleep. She and the Mission Team had studied Mara’s records and the data from our diminishing fleet of drones, and they had received the delayed thoughts of the various scientists back on Earth. She had looked at the facts and prepared a theory that fit them, which the Expedition Team would get to test.
Of all the people who should have been sleeping right then, Doctor Naish looked as though she was top of the list, a world away from the cheerful, telegenic science communicator who’d been on everyone’s TV screens. From the look on her face, I half expected her to just shout “Fuck knows!” at the top of her voice in her broad Scottish accent and throw her tablet across the room.
We floated there in front of her, holding on to various straps and handles. Those of us scheduled to actually go on the expedition wore expressions indicating various stages of constipation, because we’d been given all manner of bone tablets and muscle stimulants to prepare us for being in gravity again, and our bodies weren’t appreciating the tune-up. Everyone else just looked tired and ill-tempered, because space is full of panic and boredom in random allotments, and it gets people’s backs up eventually.
“The Artefact,” said Doctor Naish, rubbing at her eyes. She still refused to call it the Frog God. “What we see out there isn’t the Artefact, not really. It’s just… the tip of the iceberg, is the phrase I’ll be using for the press back home. And the rest of the iceberg is… not in the universe as we know it. We know it’s very large, but it’s folded almost entirely outside normal space. All we have are its doorways. Plural; the Mara’s images are unequivocal, and one of our drones also recorded some similar footage. Similar but not the same, because there was a different starfield and no planet.”
She gave us a blank stare as though unsure for a moment who we were or why we were there. She’d been pushing herself far too hard, and now the only answer she had was scientific nonsense. Only the actual fact of the Frog God floating out there stopped everyone laughing at her.
“We don’t know how it interacts with normal space. We’ve all seen how you only ever see the same facing, no matter the angle. It seems likely that the Artefact has several such exits, maybe hundreds, thousands. We have images of two and one of those plainly includes a planet with a spacefaring civilisation in advance of ours. It may therefore be that the Artefact’s gates only become active in planetary systems where such activity is detected; and it’s proposed that an inactive gateway wouldn’t be visible or detectable by any means, folded away out of sight. Or they may just be everywhere and we got lucky that there’s a gate near us. Or perhaps the Drake Equation comes up with four aces every time and there’s space aliens everywhere.” She kneaded the bridge of her nose. “Or they bring out the spacefarer in us, like 2001. I mean we just don’t know, do we? All I can say for certain is there was definitely some unexplained interaction between the Artefact, Kaveney and Mara. It activated them. It drew our attention to itself.”
“Hvad vil det have?” Eva Ostrom asked. So what does it want?
Naish just shrugged. “Jeg ved det ikke.” Confessing her ignorance. “Does it want anything?” she went on in lilted English. “Questions we’ll probably never answer. What does it do, though? It has a hundred entrances, scaled to different sizes. Several, including the one best suited to us, have a breathable atmosphere and conveniently survivable temperatures and pressures inside – though nobody is going to be taking their helmets off to smell the roses, right?”
No disagreement on that one.
“So what it does is this: it links distant parts of the galaxy. Or perhaps galaxies. Mara got to another star system and back in a matter of months. It’s a pedestrian underpass. We can go in, things could come out. And have done, in the past; the Red Rocket proves that. Whatever built the Artefact must have had a burning need to connect Here to There on a cosmic scale, and not just for their own purposes. We know there are different environments in there. We think there might even be… ‘roads’ of particular atmospheres linking similar planets. Or there may be no logic to it at all. Whoever built the Artefact, they don’t appear to be using it now. It’s just… there. There’s no suggestion of internal power or mechanism integral to the structure. The structure itself appears stable, and perhaps, once twisted into whatever space it occupies, its very shape holds it in place. We know so little about how such a thing might be done, it’s pointless to speculate.”
She had very plainly worn herself to the bone with just such speculation.
“The Expedition Team is on sleep shift as of the end of the briefing,” she told us all. “When your alarm goes, you’ll be going in. You’ll take every possible precaution. You’ll have the buggy to carry supplies, tents and tools. You’ll have one of the remotes, and we’ll watch you for as long as we can. Electromagnetic signals don’t carry far inside, but you’ll be setting down boosters to get it out to us. Your mission objective is first just to reach the lit area that we’ve already identified, and establish a camp there. Nothing more than that, for now. We’re going to take this very slow and very steady. No grandstanding, is that clear?”
And it was clear. We were going to be so careful. We were no fools.
And she went over every detail of the mission procedure, and every individual confirmed their understanding of it, as belt-and-braces as you like. Then, right as everyone was ready to drift off, Naish’s face kind of spasmed with sheer annoyance and she said, “You’d think, if they could build something like this, they’d have just made something big that spaceships could go through. I mean why?” And if the ancient Frog-makers had reared their hoary heads at that moment, they’d have had it from both barrels from an extremely irate Scotswoman. Wisely, they remained unknowable and absent.