Emily Malex sat at the bar and examined the bottle of green liquor in front of her. The bottle was tall, skinny and transparent. The liquid was a little cloudy, but she could still mostly see through it.
“So you don’t want to actually taste it?” said Conrad.
“Absolutely not. The taste of alcohol is disgusting,” Malex said, “But it remains a fascinating topic. So this is absinthe?”
“I’m not sure it would quite qualify as that,” said Conrad. “But that is what I was going for. I started with a mash of fungal carbs, and fermented that, then distilled it.”
“I am familiar with the production of frixel, now,” said Malex.
“Yeah, but that’s the first step, and I have to go through some more complicated filtering because the fungus leaves some really bad off flavors. With enough effort I get something akin to a neutral spirit, about seventy-five percent alcohol by volume. Then you infuse the aromatics.”
Conrad popped open the top of the bottle and poured himself a small sip.
“Space is at too much of a premium in hydroponics, unfortunately, so I can’t get ‘em to grow wormwood for this, so I have to approximate the flavor as best I can. That’s a proprietary mix, I’m afraid. Like, almost all of my personal luggage for the voyage is dried spices.”
“Fascinating,” said Malex.
“Just one of my experiments,” said Conrad.
The bar was mostly empty now, a little over an hour since the last shift change. Conrad and one other bartender were the only people working. Malex was alone at the bar, while two engineers sat in a corner playing five dimensional chess and two comrades sat uncontrollably close in a distant corner of the ship’s bar.
The door swung open and Lucy hobbled in. Malex stiffened up upon seeing her roommate. Lucy trotted up to the bar and patted Malex on the back.
“Excellent,” she said, “I was starting to worry I wasn’t a bad enough influence on you. What the hell are you drinking?”
Beads of sweat were forming on Lucy’s forehead.
“I am not drinking it. However, it is frixel, with added aromatic compounds suspended in the alcohol. Drummond, you appear to be having a medical issue,” said Malex.
“No, well, yeah, kinda. I may have gotten a little radiation poisoned on my little away mission,” she said, “Doc gave me antirad, it’ll flush my system right out. And I want something else to flush my system out.”
“Lucy, just the person I wanted to see,” said Conrad. “Do you want to do a little a/b testing?”
“You don’t need to give me an excuse to have a couple drinks,” said Lucy.
Conrad produced two small glasses and placed them in front of Lucy. He poured tiny portions of simple syrup into them, then followed it up with an ounce or so of the liquor from each bottle. He stirred them simultaneously with two steel stir sticks. Conrad finished up by pulling a chilled glass from under the bar and filling it with water.
“How similar do these two taste?” he said.
Lucy smelled the spiced frixel, then took a sip. “Tastes like gin mixed with sambuca,” she said. She cleaned out her mouth with the water and took a sip from the other one. “This one also tastes like gin mixed with sambuca.”
Conrad said, “The spices, the aromatics, how similar are they?”
“I dunno,” said Lucy. She sipped them both back to back. “They taste basically the same to me, the one from behind the bar maybe tastes a little bit more stale. I dunno why you’d grab me for this, I’m a philistine. I just want nice sugar water that makes me stupid.”
Malex rolled her eyes, then took a sip from each cup.
“The spiced frixel has a strong anise flavor with mild after tastes of aromatics. While I am not familiar with the particularities of wormwood, the absinthe has more complex flavor notes. The taste of alcohol in both of them is absolutely vile.”
At the astrometrics console Aldo Manuel noticed a strange anomaly.
Gagarin departed the planet about thirty hours earlier. They had already made their way a little more than a third of the way to their next destination, the yellow dwarf indicated by the flash data.
Comrade Manuel waved his hand at Rexus Reed and beckoned her to come closer. She was the ranking Operations team comrade this shift, tall and well built, with pale skin and long, knotted dark hair. She stepped over and examined the console.
There was an object moving at about a third light speed traveling in the same general direction as Gagarin.
“Disengage Alcubierre geometry,” said Reed, and Molina followed her order. The ship shifted subtly as the ship dropped out to sub-light velocity.
Two seconds later the door to the chairman’s office opened. Kafando, looking a little dazed, hobbled out into the command center.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“I’ve found an anomaly, sir,” said Manuel.
“None of that sir shit, please,” said Kafando, “What is it?”
“An alien spaceship, I believe. It’s traveling at a third light speed, and it’s warmer than the surrounding space, although only just.”
“Molina,” said Reed, “Bring us closer to the object, maybe five hundred meters, then match its velocity and trajectory.”
“It’s emitting radio frequencies,” said Manuel. “That means there’s electronics on board. The temperature is very cold though, I don’t know how a humanoid could survive.”
“Maybe it’s a probe,” said Kafando, a little deflated, “Reed, field an away team. I’ll stay on duty here for the rest of the shift.”
Reed nervously nodded.
Every shift the Operations team maintained a list of comrades who were on-call to join away teams. This time around it was Julu Serpen from Safety, Kibet Auma and Hoang Hui Sang from Science, Doctor Gomez from Medical, Morozof was the pilot, and, of course, the lead for the away team was Rexus Reed.
The shuttlecraft Marcos lurched out of the back of Gagarin. It turned in the direction of the unknown object and gently pushed toward it.
The unknown object was made primarily from square plates of metal. It was long and cylindrical. Huge rocket engines were mounted at the back, with an array of smaller engines behind the neck, and that implied chemical rocket fuel of some sort. None of them were active, now, and it was just coasting on momentum. At the very front, just past the maneuvering thrusters, was a circular module. It had what appeared to be two docking mechanisms on either side of it, doors with a folded up hallway surrounding them. They were sized to fit one human sized entity.
The Marcos pulled into position next to one of the docking doors, then inched up close to it. Finally, when it was close enough, the Marcos released its docking ring, which shot off and magnetically locked onto the docking door. The docking ring on the Marcos was a little larger than the one on the unknown craft, but it wasn’t completely incompatible.
The crew, other than Morozof, unclasped their seats and pushed themselves toward the airlock, with Serpen in front. Serpen grabbed a hold on the bar by the door and hit the air release. With a loud whipping sound the air vanished from the airlock, and the door slid open. Hoang produced a device from his equipment vest and handed it to Serpen. Serpen slapped it onto the surface of the unknown ship, next to the door. Hoang fumbled with a small control for a moment, then an amber light shone from the door and it slid open. The atmosphere equalized with a woosh.
Serpen pulled herself inside the unknown craft. It had an atmosphere; nitrogen oxygen; but the temperature was well below human survivable limits. This was undoubtedly the product of an alien intelligence. This ship didn’t utilize Higgs Attenuators for faster-than-light travel, but it was obviously capable of interstellar travel.
All kinds of instruments and panels and consoles were mounted on the walls. That probably meant they didn’t have simulated gravity at all. The chamber was illuminated with low amber lights that only lit the chamber enough to see the rough shapes of everything, punctuated by the next amber light. Serpen clicked on her head lamp.
Everyone made their way inside the alien vessel. Serpen in front, the engineers behind her, the doctor behind them and Reed at the back. Auma pulled out a sensor and ran it around in a sphere.
“All right,” he said, “The electronics onboard appear to be working within normal parameters, it looks like some kind of low power mode. There are significant electromagnetic signals happening deeper in the shaft, I’m not sure what that means.”
Serpen nodded. She crawled around the chamber until she found the door to the shaft section. She grabbed a handle and tried to pull. It didn’t move. She fumbled with her equipment vest and pulled out her hammer. The back end of it was a sharpened metal pick, she squeezed it into the lip in the door and pried. A mechanical noise grinded, then it slid open a little bit. She slid the rest of the hammer in and used it as a pry bar. This snapped the door open enough to release it. She slid into the shaft section.
Large cylindrical machines were mounted on the walls of the shaft section. Each was about three meters long by a meter and a quarter. They had windows that peered inside to cushions, as well as hookups for electronic devices. Otherwise, they were empty. There were dozens of these cylinders, stretching off down the shaft. At the far end there were a few illuminated by low amber lights.
Serpen swam through the shaft, throwing herself from machine to machine to climb to the end. The others followed her. Soon, she reached the machines with the amber lights.
She looked through the windows in the machines. They contained humanoid creatures.
“What in the furnace of Vulcan?” she said.
They looked almost exactly human, their forehead looked a little wrong, they had cranial ridges that humans didn’t have. Otherwise, they appeared human. Torso and limb proportions seemed almost exactly human. Three of them were loaded into the machines at the far back of the shaft chamber.
Doctor Gomez pulled out his scanner. He ran it over the machine where the bodies were.
“They’re alive,” he said, “In some kind of suspended animation, I’m not really sure how it works. Their metabolism is running incredibly slowly, they’re being held just above freezing temperature. Any colder and ice crystals would start shattering their cell walls.”
Auma ran his scanner around.
“Right. This ship is moving at about a third light speed, and its destination is one light year away. They don’t have room on this vessel to store everything they need to survive for that time, at least not with a full complement.”
Hoang said, “The batteries in this thing are worn down, they barely have any electricity left in them.”
“What do we do?” said Serpen, “It feels wrong to leave them here to die.”
“There’s only one thing we can do,” said Reed. “We have to contact Gagarin and then we can decide together.”
Julu Serpen felt very uncomfortable in a room with all the most important workers on Gagarin. She stood up straight and stiff.
All the department chairs sat around the conference table. Chairman Kafando, of course, and to his left Second Chair Lei, and Acting Engineering Chair Galvin, Acting Safety Chair Aoki, Medical Chair Lewis, Science Chair Grekkel and Operations Chair Varma.
“So,” said Serpen, “here is our going theory for what happened to this ship. It appears to have already been in orbit when the atomic barrage occurred. The ship doesn’t have enough resources to remain in orbit indefinitely.”
Doctor Gomez said, “They had enough fuel for what appears to be their return trip. If they didn’t swing hard they were definitely going to get struck out, so the best they could hope for is a home run.”
Safety Chair Aoki rolled his eyes.
Chairman Kafando said, “Is there any indication they were the source of the atomic weapons?”
Serpen said, “We scanned for radiometric anomalies and excess radiation. Our readings were consistent with what we would expect from a vessel traveling that velocity across four trips through interstellar space. It’s not impossible, but it’s not our leading theory. Storing fissile material would have left more atomic damage than we detect.”
Second Chair Lei said, “What will happen if we don’t do anything?”
“In about four months the batteries will run down and the stasis chambers will deactivate. From a close examination of them it appears that they require a large charge of energy to go through the metabolic awakening procedure. Without the support from the machines the people inside them will very quickly freeze to death,” said Doctor Gomez.
“And,” said Serpen, “The rockets on the vessel are computer controlled. It should have ample energy to automatically return to orbit around a planet in the star system we’re moving toward. After that it seems likely that residents of the planet will take an interest in it.”
“So let’s assume we did interfere, recharge their batteries or whatever. Their comrades on their home planet would recognize someone tampered with the ship, no?” said Lei.
“That’s not one hundred percent certain,” said Doctor Gomez, “But it seems highly likely.”
“What are our choices?” said Chairman Kafando, “We do nothing, these people die. We recharge their batteries. They get back home and wake up and investigate why they had more charge then they should have?”
Doctor Gomez said, “We could trigger the awakening cycle in the machines ourselves. I’m honestly very curious how it works and if it might be applicable to human physiology. The aliens are very curiously similar to us.”
“Then we’d have to deal with a bunch of aliens we know nothing about, culturally. That doesn’t seem like a great idea,” said Kafando. “But we have ample time to study the mechanisms of the stasis chambers. There’s no reason we have to hurry to their home planet, right?”
“I think the option of recharging their batteries has more danger than we are considering,” said Lei, “We don’t know their culture, we don’t know how they might react to something like this. Maybe they think it’s a miracle from the gods. Maybe they think a demon corrupted the ship. Maybe they worry we’ve infected their ship with an alien virus. There’s too many unknown unknowns. They likely knew the risks when they put themselves into suspended animation.”
“They had to know the risk, but they also had to know the low chance someone would help them. I struggle to imagine a scenario where they would react negatively to mysterious help. Like, maybe another ship from their world found them in transit and gave them a jump, how could they prove it’s something supernatural or unknown?” said Kafando.
Doctor Gomez said, “I have a proposal. Let’s set up a basecamp on the alien vessel and study the suspended animation device, and really, all the technology, and refill the batteries. Once that’s done, we leave them just as we found them, other than the batteries and continue on to their planet.”
The chairman said, “Do we have any other counter proposals? Does anyone else want to get on stack?” He waited a long moment, but nobody did. “Let’s bring this to a vote. All in favor, aye.”
Chairman Kafando, Galvin, Aoki, Doctor Lewis, Grekkel and Varma all voted aye.
“Opposed?”
Only Lei said, “Nay.”
“Motion passes,” said Kafando, “I leave it to Operations and Engineering to implement this.”
Pilots from Gagarin ferried small teams across onto the alien vessel. One always stayed at one airlock, while a new pilot joined them and relieved the pilot on the other side. At first they ferried crew–specialists. Exolinguistics, comp sci experts, biologists, and many other Science disciplines came over to the alien ship to research. And they followed with Engineering crew.
A basecamp was established in the circle compartment at the front. The computer scientists researched the ship’s computer, while the biologists studied the stasis chambers.
Lucy Drummund kept herself clasped to a handle on the wall by the airlock with a carabiner. Her ev suit’s radio buzzed.
“Adorno in position to dock,” said the pilot.
Lucy said, “Adorno is clear to dock.”
She waited a moment, and nothing happened. Then the alien vessel gently shuddered and she heard a faint echo from the air lock. The door swung open. The crew waved to her as they pushed large luggage into the ship, then down into the shaft section.
She switched her radio channel to the other shuttle.
“Adorno has docked,” she said, “Shakur is clear to launch.”
“Over,” said the pilot.
The alien ship shuddered again. Through a window she saw the shuttle craft float carefully toward Gagarin.
The last out of Adorno was Orlando. He didn’t look so scrawny in a full EV suit, but he did basically look like a baby. It disguised his oily blonde hair. Up to now basically every time Lucy had seen him his nose was buried in a tablet. He pushed a large metal box into the circular chamber.
He said, “You’re Drummond, right? Lucy?”
“Yes, Orlando,” said Lucy.
“Uh, how are you enjoying babysitting duty?” he said.
“Bad,” said Lucy, “It’s so boring. It’s quiet as a tomb, except for the nerds doing all their science. The waiting is the worst part about working security.”
“Not the danger?” said Orlando.
Lucy said, “The danger’s really not that bad. You get it like one out of every hundred times. Keep your wits about you when it happens and you’ll be fine. If anything, that’s the good part. It’s exciting, you get the rush of adrenaline. Here and now, though, all you get is the gross nutrient paste.”
“Really,” said Orlando, “What’s the worst danger you’ve been in?”
Lucy sighed.
“The Citadel,” she said.
“Oh, crap, yeah, sorry,” said Orlando.
“But yeah, in my adult life not so much. Maybe drunk college kids after their team won a football game? But I’ve worked through all the simulations, played through the chairman’s role in the Battle of the Citadel. The Second Battle of San Antonio, the Battle of Cairo, won both sides of the Insurrection of Soweto.”
Orlando said, “I’ve played so many video games in my life. They’re really, really not the same thing as real life.”
“Maybe not,” said Lucy, “But in a dangerous situation they help your intuition. If you’ve worked through a problem in theory, if something similar happens you’re less likely to freeze up, and that’s the thing that’s really dangerous.”
“Who told you that?”
“The chairman.”
“Shakur is secure,” said Deimos, “Situation normal.”
Long stretches of nothing, punctuated by boring meetings. This is what Chairman Kafando wanted. This is what Chairman Kafando signed up for. This is what Chairman Kafando didn’t realize he actually hated.
“Situation report,” he said, the third time this shift.
“Bioreactors functioning at eighty five percent efficiency. Apparently there’s some variance in the temperature regulation subsystem. Acting Engineering Chair Galvin is looking into it,” said Albert. “Engines operating within normal parameters. Life support operating within normal parameters. Gravity subsystem operating with point oh one percent variance. Second Chair Lei is experimenting with a new heat dissipation routine for my computer core. This has decreased my processor temperature by half a degree.”
“Great,” said Kafando. Basically unchanged from an hour and a half ago when he last asked. He stood basically still and darted his eyes over the crew in the command center. They pecked at their various consoles. Nothing super interesting to report. No decisions to make. Not even any meetings to facilitate.
The astrometrics console chimed.
“What’s that?” he said.
Miyamoto replied, “Not sure. It’s a temperature anomaly about five hundred kilometers away. It’s gone. It looked like a small explosion.”
“Let’s take a closer look,” said Kafando, “That sure as hell seems like it wouldn’t be a natural phenomenon. Space is so big, there shouldn’t be anything that interesting happening so close to here.”
“Course laid in sir.”
“Poyekhali,” he said.
Gagarin lurched toward the small anomaly.