Saturn Run (30 page)

“In other words, we don’t have one alien object, we got a whole bunch of them,” Fang-Castro said.

“Even more than we’ve been talking about,” Kapule said. A new view came up, one that seemed sprinkled with salt. A group of thin red rings popped up, surrounding each white grain. “We’re seeing hundreds, and maybe thousands, of pixel-sized glitters of light that move between the primary and its moonlets and out into the rings and back again. Whatever they are, they’re always moving, like a swarm of bees around a hive . . . not to suggest anything invidious here.”

“What are the patterns?” Fang-Castro asked. “Is that a defense system?”

“Yes, we have an analysis,” said Don Larson, the mathematician and former founder of the orgy club. “To go back to the bee metaphor, it’s more like they’re gathering honey and bringing it back to the nest, rather than performing any kind of defensive maneuvers. They’re not particularly fast . . . fast enough, but not way fast . . . and their actions are deliberate, rather than random. Even if not designed for defense, they could certainly be used that way. To see them at this distance must mean that
they are some meters in diameter. If they are metallic, and if enough of them hit the
Nixon
as quickly as they are moving now, they could tear us apart. It’d be like being hit by cars driving at highway speeds. In other words, they seem to be gathering honey, whatever that is, but like honeybees, they could bring out the stingers.”

Fang-Castro shook her head. She wanted none of that. The
Nixon
was not an armored warship.

Over the next several days, the steady minuscule thrust of the
Nixon
’s engines gradually warped its orbit, changing its inclination until the
Nixon
was orbiting within the Maxwell Gap in the plane of the rings. Simultaneously, they crept up on the alien constellation. Navigation and the surveillance people fed a steady stream of vid to the computers, where image analysis software tracked the motion of each of the bees. Sophisticated statistical modeling looked for any changes in the pattern of their collective motions, any indication that they were responding in any fashion to the approaching spaceship.

From Earth, they got a steady stream of essentially useless speculation about the nature of the constellation: the scientists on the
Nixon
saw everything hours before the earthbound analysts, and by the time their speculations got back to the ship, it had all been thought of.

Fang-Castro said to Crow, quietly, “David, the politicians and the military seem strangely quiet.”

“By design, I think,” Crow said. “Almost anything they say, the Chinese would pick up, one way or another. Not the encrypted stuff, but just chatter in the hallways. Which tends to be fairly accurate, if you’re in the right hallway.”

None of the analysis picked up changes in the behavior of the alien artifacts. The bees appeared to be as oblivious to the presence of humanity in the solar system as the starship had been two years earlier. Still, the
Nixon
held back, stabilizing its position at three hundred kilometers from the constellation. This was plenty close for the
Nixon
’s best telescopes—they could see ten-centimeter details on the alien facilities and the bees.

And they launched two recon shells, basically small, slow rockets
equipped with cameras and designed to be extremely visible to radar and even visual detection, the better to signal peaceful intentions. The recon shells did a complete loop around the station, broadcasting a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of it.

They watched for a day. The nature of most of the bees became apparent, although the ultimate purpose of their activities was still mysterious. Most were ice-catchers. They hunted for ring debris. Some of them looked for chunks of ice comparable to their own size, latched onto them with grapples, and hauled them back to one of several moonlets. Others had large scoops and swept up ice gravel and sand, the way a whale scooped up plankton. This was also ferried to the moonlets. Another much smaller group of bees shuttled containers of some kind between the moonlets.

None of the bees seemed to be equipped with armaments, not even so much as a cutting laser. The same seemed to be true of the moonlets and the five-kilometer primary. The surfaces were mostly natural rock, porous regolith dotted with various alien assemblages that were mostly unrecognizable. A few were clearly antennae of some kind or another; none looked anything like a beamed energy or projectile weapon. The constellation seemed to be entirely unarmed.

The primary rotated slowly with a period of four hours, further evidence of its artificial nature. A natural moon this close to Saturn would’ve been tidally locked, just as Earth’s moon was to its parent planet.

At Fang-Castro’s command, the
Nixon
moved closer, then paused again. During the primary’s second rotation, after the move, the
Nixon
’s computers spat out an anomalous delta.

A previously jet-black spot on the surface of the primary had turned light gray. During the third rotation things began to get genuinely weird. The black spot was now bright white and surrounded by concentric rings in rainbow colors. When the polychrome target came over the horizon on the fourth cycle, it was glowing dimly.

As the primary’s rotation brought it around toward the
Nixon
, the glow brightened and coruscated until it could be seen with the naked
eye through the windows of the
Nixon
, sparkling in the distance like a glass crystal spinning on a string and catching the sun.

The glow began to fade again after the target passed the median line until it was almost extinguished by the time the target had rotated past the horizon.

The fifth rotation repeated the light show of the fourth. The message was clear: “We know you’re here.”

Who or whatever “we” meant.

—

Naomi Fang-Castro took slow, shallow breaths and sipped her tea as her most senior crew members took their seats for the morning briefing, chatting with each other, making last-minute slate checks. Her face was calm, peaceful in its thoughtfulness.

That was entirely for show.

Aliens were no longer a distant, hypothetical consideration, not with
Nixon
parked next door to the primary. When everybody was settled, she put down her cup, and the chatter ended; the crew had learned early on that this was the signal that the meeting was about to begin.

“We’re skipping the usual status reports,” Fang-Castro said. “Have them recorded before dinnertime. I assume everything is nominal. Our sole business this morning is to decide on our next move. John, what’s your take on what we know?”

Clover put down his triple-strength espresso, put his fingertips together, and said, “They’re inviting us over for coffee and Danish.”

“This is being recorded, John, so . . .”

“I’m somewhat serious. Look at their behavior . . . and lack of it. They take no apparent notice of us until we settle into our position. They keep doing business as usual. There’s no evidence of weaponry or hostility. The colored lights are not in any apparent way a warning. We don’t know what those colors mean in their culture, obviously—white is for mourning in Korea, black is for mourning in the West—but it seems likely that given the colors they’ve chosen, which they probably know are attractive to us, they’re inviting us in, rather than warning us away.”

“Where does that conclusion come from?” asked Martinez. “That those colors are attractive?”

“Our astronomers have done an analysis of the colors, and they are quite pure, they are very specific wavelengths—there’s nothing in the UV or IR ranges, as though they were spattering us with everything. That suggests that they know what wavelengths we see, and that . . . give me a little rope here . . . suggests that they may very well know which ones we like,” Clover said. “So we show up, but we do nothing. Eventually, they take the initiative. They set up a pretty little light show, designed to catch our eye, and just in case we’re really thick, it shines brightest when it’s pointed directly at us. Then they sit back and wait. How could that not be taken as an invitation?”

Imani Stuyvesant, the exobiologist, waved a stylus. Fang-Castro nodded at her. “Are you sure? Maybe that is the wavelengths they see best. Or maybe they don’t even see the patterns the same way we do. Honeybees and birds see flowers a lot differently than we do.”

Clover smiled and tapped his fingertips together. “If you were talking about human equivalents, Imani, you could be right. But aliens, I’d say it’s pretty much guaranteed that they won’t see exactly the way we do. There are all kinds of animals on Earth that don’t see exactly the way we do. What would be the odds that the alien sensory apparatus, their eyes, would respond anything like ours? The astronomers and physicists started taking measurements like mad when it began”—Clover nodded companionably toward Bob Hannegan—“and all they saw was visible light. No other kinds of radiation. It was tailor-made for our eyes. The light show was purely for our benefit.

“So I just gotta figure, if they know that much about our physiology, they have some idea of how we respond to stimulus. The word that came to mind when I saw that display? Pretty. It was a sparkly, colorful, enticing bit of eye candy. It was presented to us the way we’d hang a shiny bauble on a string and hold it up before a baby, just to get the kid to reach out for it. You really think that was coincidence? Or miscommunication?”

Clover continued: “Remember, they could have been looking at our TV shows for a century. Beings who could build these artifacts and
travel between stars almost certainly have some sense of curiosity, or self-preservation. If they could see our TV signals, they surely would have at least looked at them. Any analysis of our TV signals would tell them a lot about us: not just the culture, but our level of tech and everything else. Everything we do winds up on TV.”

Martinez raised a stylus: “What if it’s a deliberate trap?”

Clover shrugged. “Could be, but why go to the trouble? They can build starships that use antimatter for fuel. If they wanted to smack us upside the head, it’s not like there’s much preventing them from doing so. Why play games? It’s like the question of why they didn’t accelerate an asteroid into the earth, to wipe us off the face of the planet. They could, but they haven’t. That suggests they don’t want to.”

Fang-Castro pulled the argument back in. “If the aliens are intentionally deceiving us, I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. That’s the bottom line. So we can sit out here and dither, or we can go in. We keep watching and analyzing, of course, but we’re not going to turn around and head home.” She allowed herself to show a bit of a smile. “So, I agree with John that we’ve received an invitation to reach out. We are going to reach. I won’t risk ship-critical personnel in the first team we send to the primary. Unless anyone has a relevant objection, I will assign Captain Barnes to command the first contact team. He has combat command experience and is also heavily trained in combat trauma medicine. His second will be Lieutenant Emwiller, for the same reasons. Bob Hannegan and Imani Stuyvesant will cover physics and exobiology, John Clover will see to the cultural issues, Sandy Darlington to make the record. Ms. Fiorella will probably try to assassinate me for not including her in the trip, but I’m afraid she’ll have to wait. Sandy, your first duty will be documentary, but if you should have a moment to make some vid that Ms. Fiorella can use, I’m sure she will appreciate it.”

“I will keep those priorities in mind,” Sandy said.

“Good. Do that.” Fang-Castro turned to Martinez and said, “Joe, I’m sorry, but you’re not on this run.” His face fell. “Next to Dr. Greenberg, you are the single most vital person to keeping this ship running. If things work out as we hope, you’ll have plenty of future opportunities,
but for this expedition I want you to pick one of your assistants, whoever has the most experience flying a bus.”

“Elroy would be good for it. He’s good in space and has a lot of on-the-spot creativity, and I know he’s anxious to get out there.”

“Done, then. Tell Mr. Gorey.” She looked around the room, which included several members of the contact team. “I want you all to be ready to go in six hours. Do what you need to get ready. I would suggest naps. And, Mr. Crow?”

“Yes?”

“I believe you’ll find Ms. Fiorella out in the hall. Disarm her, and send her in.”

Rested and equipped, but not fed—they were uncertain about the availability of alien restrooms and although some facilities were built into the EVA suits, nobody enjoyed using them—the exploratory team assembled in the air lock of the storage and shuttle bay. The bay could be pressurized for shuttle maintenance and other on-site activities, but normally it was left open to space.

The seven-person party, led by George Barnes, a marine captain, suited up. The short-range shuttles, designed to carry up to twelve people and convey a substantial amount of cargo, were boxy skeletal affairs, similar in size and shape to double-decker omnibuses, so, naturally, that’s what they got called.

Barnes was soft-spoken and meticulous. Sandy had always been a bit suspicious of marines during the Tri-Border fight, as they seemed willing to trade casualties for easy movement. That is, they used lighter weapons than Sandy thought reasonable. Faced with a Guapo hardpoint, they’d tend to do recon with a live patrol, then attack with backpacked munitions. The army would check it with drones of various kinds, both fliers and crawlers, and once the extent of the hardpoint was determined, the army had no qualms about calling in the air force with thousand-kilo bunker-busters, or toasting the place with a fuel-air heater.

On the other hand, good marine officers were just plain good officers, and Barnes was affable enough. Along with Sandy, Barnes taught a couple of popular physical-fitness courses.

As Barnes hand-checked the readouts on all seven suits, he took a call from Fang-Castro. “Captain Barnes, your party will be enhanced by one extra member. She’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am. Who is it?”

“One guess.”

Fiorella showed up two minutes later, still pissed. “I imagine you set Fang-Castro straight,” Sandy joked on a private channel.

Fiorella bared her teeth.

Sandy said, “Seriously, did you pee before you left? You have a bladder the size of a thimble.”

“Yes. I peed. Now shut the fuck up.”

“Keep your teeth off your lip—you won’t be able—”

“Shut up.”

“I gotta tell you one more thing, before you tell me to shut up again.”

“Tell me.”

“I brought the mini-Red with a Post-it pad. You can stick it to the bus rail and focus it on your face as we go out, and talk to it on a side channel. When we get back, we can intercut your commentary with the documentary photos.”

“Sandy . . . but wait. You knew I was coming?”

“No, but I’ve been exposed to your powers of persuasion,” Sandy said. “I suspected I might be seeing you.”

“Sometimes I think you’re brighter than I give you credit for,” Fiorella said. Pregnant pause. “But only sometimes.”

—

The
Nixon
’s buses weren’t pressurized. The upper deck was equipped with seats and harnesses and umbilical connectors for space suits that provided life support, power, and communications. The suits were comfortable; they’d been designed to be lived in for up to thirty-six hours. They’d support a human being for longer than that, but things would start to get ripe. Food, water, waste elimination, air recirculation, were provided for. A built-in sponge bath, not so much.

The suits even offered entertainment: the heads-up virtual screen could show movies, vids, reading material, even games, whatever the wearer had uploaded into the suit databanks, or had transmitted to it. None of the team had bothered uploading data for this trip; boredom seemed unlikely to come up inside Saturn’s rings, with the vast
delicately colored expanse of Saturn itself hanging to one side and aliens awaiting them.

Beneath the seats, the life-support system sat on top of an open framework equipped with grapples, maneuvering actuators, and tie-downs. The front of the bus was equipped with manipulator arms, like the claws on a lobster. At the rear end of the bus were the rockets. The bus “cruised” at a maximum ten kilometers a minute, a snail’s pace by the standards of space travel, but entirely sufficient for the bus’s normal operating range of a thousand kilometers.

The first trip to the alien constellation’s primary would be an easy half-hour run, and over that distance, fancy orbital mechanics didn’t come into play: Gorey could fly it by the seat of his pants.

The five-kilometer primary was impossible to miss if you knew where to look; it was dim and dark, but it was twice the size of the full moon. When they were loaded, strapped in, checked one last time by Barnes, Fang-Castro gave them the go-ahead.

Barnes said, “Mr. Gorey. You’ve got the wheel.”

The bus unlatched from the ship, Gorey gave it a tiny boost to the left, pointed it slightly inboard of their alien objective, and opened the engines. The bus’s quarter-gee acceleration brought them to their cruising velocity in barely over a minute; it felt oppressively heavy to people who’d been living in a tenth of a gee for half a year.

Hannegan, the physicist, said, “My God, when we get home, it’s gonna hurt, the gravity is.”

“That’s why you’ve got to keep coming to the PE classes,” Barnes said. “If you don’t, going home won’t just hurt, it’ll kill you.”

Sandy kept his high-resolution cameras running all the way in, with the recordings retransmitted to the
Nixon
as they were made. Gorey stopped the bus ten kilometers out. Fang-Castro asked, “Anything?”

“Not that I see,” Barnes answered.

They’d agreed that purely passive reconnaissance was the safest course. No laser altimeters or radar-mapping, nothing beamed at the alien structure, nothing that could be interpreted as hostile or
invasive. They thought they’d been invited . . . but what if they were wrong?

The bus trip had been timed so that they’d arrive shortly before the primary’s rotation brought the rainbow target in line with the
Nixon
. The scientists had wanted the bus to loop around the primary, so that they’d have a minutely detailed record of its entire surface, but Fang-Castro had vetoed the idea. The bus would never be out of sight of the
Nixon
, not on the first trip.

Barnes: “Here comes the target.”

As the alien sphere turned, the rainbow target slowly appeared, brightening and sparkling but now something new happened. A hundred meters off to one side of the rainbow, a new, smaller bull’s-eye target began to glow, in repeating concentric rings of yellow, green, and blue that shrank toward the center and disappeared.

Barnes: “John, is that a landing port?”

Clover said, “Can’t see what else it could be.”

Barnes said, “Admiral, unless you object, I’m going to have Elroy take us in. Otherwise, we’ll be waiting another four hours before you’re line-of-sight with us.”

“I concur,” Fang-Castro said.

“Elroy . . .”

Gorey took them in. As they closed, a port began to open in the middle of the smaller rainbow target, and a massive shelf pushed out.

“One damn fine mousetrap,” Clover laughed.

“Not helping, John,” Barnes snapped.

Sandy glanced at Fiorella, who was smiling into the mini-Red she’d stuck to the rail of the bus, talking a kilometer a minute.

Barnes: “That shelf could take the bus. Do we land it? Or do we leave the bus hanging? If we land it, it’ll rotate out of sight.”

There was a long silence, then Fang-Castro said, “We now agree here that you should land the bus. Then, if you’re asked to leave, or pushed out, you’ll have something to leave with—you won’t be hanging on the wrong side of the primary without a ride.”

Barnes: “Take it in, Elroy.”

The bus landed on the primary without incident and extruded the Post-its to hold it to the surface. As soon as the bus was secure, the crew began unplugging from the bus and to go on full internal suit support.

Barnes worked through the agreed-upon procedure: “Everyone stay together. Check your tethers. I don’t want anyone flying free. Nobody touch anything without my approval. Nobody armed except Emwiller, and make sure your weapon is safed, Sally. No other external equipment except for Sandy’s camera gear. Ready?”

They were ready.

“Then let’s go.”

—

They floated just above the regolith of the primary. As soon as they moved away from the bus, maneuvering with their suit thrusters, a line of glowing dots appeared on the regolith leading toward the rainbow target. The dots flowed toward the open port.

“Interesting,” said Hannegan, the physicist. “The surface doesn’t change, it’s like the light is moving through it. I’m guessing some kind of cellular automata or nanobots, they’re what’s making the lights. Nice. The ultimate programmable signage. You getting this, Sandy?”

“I am now.” Sandy was pointing his camera at the surface, cranked up to maximum magnification. In his viewfinder, he could see the surface was packed with speckles that brightened and darkened in a coordinated way. They reminded him of the chromatophores he’d seen on the skins of squids and octopi.

The crew floated through the open port into a white, cube-shaped chamber, large enough for a small orchestra. The door that was open to space was behind them, but there was a closed door in front of them. A green pad the size of a dinner plate was next to the closed door.

Barnes looked at Clover. “What do you think?”

“What does green mean, on traffic signals almost everywhere on Earth?”

Barnes shrugged, reached forward, and punched the button.

The door behind them closed and a light winked on Sandy’s camera: “George, I just lost the link back to the
Nixon
.”

Barnes tried calling the
Nixon
. There was no response. “The interior must be EM-blocked. Why am I not surprised? Okay, people, we are really on our own now. You follow my orders. You do what I tell you, when I tell you to do it. You do not take the initiative, not if you ever want to come back here again. We take everything slowly.”

Gas began venting into the chamber. When it hit one atmosphere, according to their suit gauges, the inner door opened. They moved forward, and somebody muttered, “Standard air lock . . .”

When they’d all entered the second chamber, the door behind them closed. The room was larger than the first, but not much, possibly ten meters long and eight wide, also a featureless white with diffuse lighting. The only item in the room was a stand-alone console toward the back of the room. A meter and a half high, it would’ve been impossible to miss even if the room had been as cluttered as a secondhand junk store: it glowed with flickering bands of rainbow colors and looked disturbingly similar to an antique jukebox.

Words appeared in the air above the console that read: “You can remove your helmets. The air is sterile and breathable to Earth standards and is maintained at 21 degrees Celsius.” In a few seconds, the words changed to Chinese ideograms, followed by Arabic and Russian, then a half-dozen other languages, before it cycled back to English. Barnes looked over at Emwiller and said, “Sal, I’m cracking my helmet. If I collapse, get everyone out of here, pronto. Shoot out the air lock if you have to.”

“Wait, wait, wait . . .” said Stuyvesant. “What if there are biologics in here?”

“That’d be another unnecessary mousetrap,” Clover said.

“They could be unintentional—”

“We haven’t seen anything unintentional so far. . . . I believe the air will be safe.”

“I’m going to unseal,” Barnes said. “Sally, stand by.”

They all watched as he unclipped the faceplate on his helmet and took a deep breath. And held it. And let it out and took another. He took a few more breaths and licked his lips, tasting the air, and finally nodded. He pushed the faceplate closed again, resealed it, and said, “The air seems to be okay, but I want everybody to stay sealed. When we get back, I’ll go into isolation to check for biologics. Let’s go to Post-its.”

They all reached down and threw switches on the legs of their EVA suits. When upward pressure was placed on a boot, a pressure switch would cut the electrical charge and the boot would peel away from the floor with about the same resistance as Earth gravity.

As they all stuck to the floor, or deck, or whatever it was, new words appeared over the polychrome console. “Please say something to me.”

“Speakers and mikes, now,” Barnes said, and they all went to external speakers and microphones.

The phrase repeated in the same other dozen languages they’d seen in the first message.

Barnes said, “Hello. We’re from Earth. Uh, the third planet in this system.”

Colors shifted across the sides of the alien console making it look even more like a jukebox, and then it spoke: “American English. I can speak in American English. Now, what questions do you have?”

Barnes asked, “Who are you?”

The jukebox said, “I am not a ‘who’ but a ‘what.’ I am a low-grade artificial intelligence tasked with answering questions. I am programmed to understand thirteen human languages, five of them based on the probability of being the first-contact languages. In order, the probability for first contact was American English, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Portuguese. I am not a fully intelligent AI. I chain rhetorical logic via a statistical grammar. Though it may sound as though I’m being conversational, in fact I am always responding directly or indirectly to questions. My data storage has the answers to 71,236,340 explicit or implicit questions. I can synthesize new answers from those I am preprogrammed with, but at times you will ask questions for which I have no answer, to which I will reply, ‘I don’t know.’”

Barnes asked, “Can we set up camera equipment to record this conversation?”

“Yes. I will wait.”

Barnes nodded at Sandy, who’d had the mini-Red under his arm, recording first contact as clandestinely as he could. Now he broke three more cameras out of his carrying case and began setting them up in the bare room.

Clover asked the jukebox, “Are there any other species here now?”

The AI said, “No, you are the only species here at this time.”

Clover: “When are you expecting others to arrive?”

“I don’t know. That is not an omission from my database. There is no predefined schedule for arrival. Previous intervals between arrivals have ranged from two years to three hundred and ninety-six years.”