We woke up about six hours later. The cabin was dim, and quiet. I got out of the bunk, and gave Laura a nudge.
“Huh?” Was all she said.
“Wake up, time to go explore. How about it, you ready?”
“Yea.” The color was coming back to her cheeks and face. “Sure, give me a few minutes and I'll be ready.” She sat up, as much as she could in the confined space, and rubbed her eyes. I went to the galley and got some coffee, and went back to the commanders chair.
I pulled up our location on the screen, and did an overlay of the local geography, with the silicum crystal deposits highlighted. That was the place to look for UUP. We both loaded the maps into our computer tablets, and strapped them on our arms. It didn’t take us long to get ready, and we climbed into the little airlock. No reason to decompress the whole cabin, and then restart.
The green light came on, and I opened the outer door to the outside. It slid back silently. No noises in space. You can see the compressed air move the door, see the gas, can't hear a thing. We stepped outside.
The harsh glare of the unfiltered sunlight greeted our eyes. It took a minute to adjust. The landscape was rocky, and barren. Dark dark gray, almost black. I looked a the map and told her, thru the radio, to follow me. We headed away from the ship, to the small ridge just 100 meters in front of us. The suits were comfortable, but still a bit restricting. We carefully made our way across the rock strewn landscape. I led and she followed close behind. Our ship was well sheltered, behind a little rise. I like being unobtrusive. Usually a very good idea in isolated parts.
We made our way to the rocky ridge line in front of us. It was about ten meters high. Not really big, but good enough to provide us with some shelter from the valley outside. And some visual protection.
I reached the ridge first. Laura right behind. We climbed up the ridge carefully.
It was steep. About a 30% slope. One had to be very careful on such things, a fall could damage the suit.
It didn't take long to find our UUP. Orange veins ran everywhere at the top of the ridge. It was going to be a profitable trip. We started collecting some of the loose stuff. I had wanted to scout around a bit before we brought the buggy out. In about half an hour we had loaded up pretty well, maybe fifty kgs each. Due to the low gravity we would be able to carry it all back to the ship. We made our way back.
Back in the airlock, we waited for the atmosphere to charge. About two minutes later, the green light came on, and we took off our helmets.
“Good load?” She asked.
“Good enough. Two or three days of this and we will be ready to leave. If it's as easy as today, maybe two days. We need to get the buggy out.” I took the bags, one at a time, to the hold. You can access the hold from both inside and outside the ship.
“I'm hungry.” She said, “How about you?”
“Yea good idea, food would be good, then we can decide what to do next.”
Laura made some sandwiches, and we sat down to eat. We decided to take the buggy out afterwords, and load it up full, and bring it back. I figured about eight buggy runs and we would have a really good load. four would be highly profitable, eight would be a small fortune. The buggy could carry about 500 kilos of material. After lunch we cleaned up quickly and got back into the suits, and headed outside. It took about ten minutes to get the buggy out. That meant we could drive it up to the ridge and load everything onto the buggy and haul it back. Big time saver. The afternoon progressed much as the morning, we loaded up with a good solid load of UUP and headed back to the ship. twenty minutes later we were unloading the bags into the hold. This time from the out side. It was getting late, the day here was only sixteen hours long and at night it would be bitter cold out even with the suits on. Much better to be inside. We finished loading up the hold and reentered the airlock.
Once the atmosphere charged and we opened the door and took our helmets off, we sat at the table silently for a few minutes.
“Wow I'm more tired than I expected.” She said.
“Yea, working in those suits takes it out of you. Even with the gravity being less, the whole situation makes it harder than doing it on an earth-like planet. It's also more stressful overall being this far out. That has an effect on the whole thing.”
“Sure, I can see what you mean. Man, I'm beat, I'm going to lay down.”
“Good idea.” I crawled into the lower bunk, she into the upper. We put the lights out and fell asleep immediately.
The next day we got up about half an hour before sunrise. Time enough for coffee and breakfast. As before we headed out to the ridge. The morning went without anything remarkable happening, and by noon local time we had made two runs back to the ship. We ate a quick lunch, not taking our suits off, and headed back out, and managed two more loads by sunset, tho we just made it in side with minutes to spare. The temperature at night drops to about 1 degree about absolute zero in the inky blackness, and one does not want to caught out side in that, suit or no suit. We collapsed into bed again, as the night before.
The next day we got up again and proceeded out side. We took the buggy. On the short ride there, we passed a cleft in the ridge. Laura was looking in that direction, and suddenly said:
“We're not alone. There was a ship over there.”
We drove up to the ridge, and got out. “OK, stay low. We are going to creep up there and see whats happening over the ridge. If I say run you head for the ship, in the buggy. I can run in my suit if need be. Do NOT lock me out. I got a fail safe mechanism for that. We are going to take a very careful look and then head back to the ship.”
We crept up on the overhang. Laura was right. Something was out there. Something neither of us had ever seen before. We huddled behind a boulder and studied the ship. It was unlike anything either of us had seen in the human universe. About 40 meters long. It had a really weird, smooth surface. Unlike any kind of space going vessel I had seen before. This was not any known earth vessel. This was something totally different. We ducked back behind the ridge.
“You see anything moving outside the ship?” I asked.
“No, did you?” She replied.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. And that thing doesn’t appear to have any doors, windows, engines nothing. I dunno, but I've never seen anything like it before.”
“Neither have I. Well, never heard of anything like it even.”
I looked thru the cleft between two rocks. It was just sitting there. It didn’t look alive or dead. It didn’t look... Real. It was oblong shaped, dead smooth on the outside, and without any features. Everything was beautifully curved. It was a greenish blue color, but it sort of shimmered in the sunlight, and shifted colors as you looked at it.
“Well, I don’t know what it is. But we are going to get back to the ship and get in side. Then we are going to power up the lower power features, like the computer and run a scan on the tape in my helmet and see if we can get any matches. Then we are going to do nothing except lay low, and see what happens.”
“Sounds OK to me. Let's get out of here.”
We backtracked down the ridge, and got in the buggy, and drove, the longer way back so as not to expose us to the ship out there. I parked the buggy under the ship, and we had it stowed in ten minutes. We climbed back in the ship, thru the airlock and then into the cabin. I powered up the low power computer system, and the passive radio receiver, and radiation scanners. Nothing showed anywhere on the screens. I scanned back thru the data from last night and notice a small increase in radiation about the middle of the night local time. “That would probably be their engine signature.” I pointed to the screen for Laura to see. “So, that means at least we can tell something about what is happening, if their engines are on.”
“So what do we do now?” She asked.
I was silent a minute. “Very good question. I think, we stay put for the moment. At the very least we do not want to blast out of here in daylight. That would just make things easier for them. So for now we sit tight. We leave all
the passive sensors on, so that if anything develops we can hear or see it. Cameras on, radio receiver on, multi frequency scanning mode, radiation sensors, heat scanner, all of that stuff. That should give us some kind of warning if someone approaches the ship. If it's not one of ours, and I don’t think it is, then that means it comes from an alien culture. And we have no idea what technology they have, what kinds of scanning systems, weapons, intentions etc. so laying low would be a good idea at this point. If we are lucky, they might just take off and leave. That would give us a chance to get out of here, and head for someplace nearer to home. That would be my plan at this point. I have an emergency start up program loaded up, we can get the ship off the ground in less than a minute and into the air, and blast right into hyperspace as soon as we get outside the gravity of this thing, that means about two minutes flight time. But I don’t want to try that if I don’t have to. Something tells me they could do a lot of damage to us in two minutes.”
“So, you really think they are some kind of aliens?”
“Unless you got a better theory, yea, I do. Its the only thing that fits the facts. I’m running a scan on the images from my helmet now, look.” We looked at the computer screen. Endless images were being compared with no matches. Finally the computer came back, no match found. “Well, what ever it is, it isn’t in the database. So what ever it is, alien human or otherwise, we have no idea what that thing can do. Who knows, maybe they can read our minds right now as we speak. It's really hard to say. We don’t know what other species are like in the universe.” I went silent. What more was there to say.
“Hmm. Well, how about some coffee. And I guess we sit here in the cockpit and wait, don’t we?”
“Indeed, that sounds like a plan.”
She went to the galley and made some coffee and brought it back. I trained the cameras on the area around the break in the ridge, but nothing was happening there. It was completely quiet. I trained another camera on the cleft in the rocks and you could just barely make out a tiny bit of color that was the ship out there. It was at least 500 meters away, from the ridge, which put it about 600 meters from our ship.
I pulled the zoom all the way out and focused on the alien ship. It just sat there, with the skin shimmering between a dark hunters green and a ultramarine blue. Laura put the coffee down and sat in the co pilots chair.
“So now we sit and wait?”
“Yup, we sit... And we wait.”
And we did. We sat there the rest of the day. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Finally the sun went down. Again, no developments. We were dozing off in the chairs, about midnight local time, when the radio locked on to something. A strange array of static. It was clearly coming from the alien ship. We were both instantly alert.
“Is that..?” Laura said.
“Yes, it's what you think it is, its some kind of broadcast from the ship. It is on some really low band, but not subspace. Like long range interplanetary communication... Or maybe with another ship...”
“What do we do?”
“We wait some more, and see what develops.” Presently the transmission ended. About two minutes later, a similar, but fainter transmissions returned. It was about equally as long, two minutes, like the first one. But clearly a different pattern. Then all was silent again.
“So any thoughts?” She asked.
“No good ones. Could be twenty different things, maybe a hundred. Who knows. No way to tell. Running the signal thru the computer now, but I don’t expect to find any matches.” The computer simply ran thru the data base, looking for matches. Nothing was even close.
“Wait and see. Maybe they will take off. That would be my guess. I don’t think they know we are here. No one has come to investigate and that signal wasn’t aimed at us, it was aimed into space, into the closed zone. So I don’t expect any reason for them to come out here at this point. Maybe they had a mechanical failure and needed to set down for repairs. Maybe they are a scout ship of some sort. Who knows. It's impossible to say at this point. But I don’t think now is the time for us to go down in history as being the first people to make face to face contact with aliens.”
“Agreed. Bad idea under the circumstances.” She was crystal clear on that.
We went back to listening, but nothing happened. Then after about three hours, an hour before dawn, the radiation detector came on. I cut over to the camera on the cleft, and the ship now was glowing a reddish orange color. Suddenly it lifted off, at an amazing rate of speed. It was gone before I could get the camera on it.
“Wow. I guess you were right,they took off.”
“Yea. Well now we are going to wait some more. I want to give them a good head start before we try to get out of here. We will wait a while and then take off. Maybe we wait til the planet is 180 degrees from the direction they took off in and blast out of here. At least they headed out into the closed zone, so we are going to be traveling in the opposite direction. That is a good thing.”
“Yea, I think so too. What are we going to do from here?”
I pondered a moment. “Good question. We have four and a half weeks to talk about that back to earth, or maybe ten days to an outpost. We can decide on that in a bit, there is an outpost on Ross 248 we could head for that is on the way to earth. The question is what do we say, and who do we say it to. Right now I think we keep this to ourselves. We also are going to have to think about the political fallout from this... This would really blow the balance of power up in the parliament, and who knows what kind of enemies we might make. Let's stop and ponder this for a while. I know someone who might be able to help us. Real scientific guy, also connected politically a bit, and smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut. I went to school with him, he grew up on a freighter too, but ended up becoming a scientist. I think we could go see him and get some ideas. Right now I'm really unsure about what to do. The ramifications of finding intelligent life out here are enormous. But I do know this, we need to get out of here, at the right time, and in a low key manor. The other thought I have is, we ought to go back out and load up a few more loads, we might need the fuel and or the money it brings.”
“Think we can do four before they can see us leaving?”
“Dunno, three definitely. four would be a pretty full ship, that would be 3000 kilos. Given the fact I want to blast out of the atmosphere pretty fast, that would probably be a good amount to shoot for. That would be two years worth of credits for living pretty damn well. For a nine week trip its a small fortune. Yea, let's get out there and load up.”
We did as before, got dressed and headed out. In the end we put together five runs of almost 500 kg each, which meant this was going to be a profitable trip, whatever happened. We packed the buggy away, got in, got the suits off, and settled into the command chairs. I pulled up the start up program and started plotting. “We should get out of here in the next fifteen minutes if we want them to be on the other side of the planet. I can program a course out of here that takes us about a light year from the planet before we turn homeward. My friend Jochim is on the station at Ross 248 That's about ten day trip. We are going to head there and then contact him. Also we will get a good good price for our UUP there. You get 30% remember, so that's a nice hefty sum for you.
She smiled. “Cool, I like doing this and I like working with you. I feel comfortable here.”
“Yea I'm surprised too, but I like having your company. I didn’t know you were so curious about things, or that you had read so much. You don’t exactly strike one as that type when someone first meets you” and I smiled.
“Ha, yea. I know people don’t think that of me. Well that’s all to my advantage sometimes. But I'm ok with this. And I don’t really have anything else to do right now, so if its ok... I think I'm going to stick around for a while. I want to meet this friend of yours, and I want to know what it was we saw out there.”
“That can be arranged” I locked in the program, and looked at her. “So, you ready to get out of here???
?
“Yes, totally.”
“OK hang on, this is going to be a bumpy ride.”
I hit the start key, and the ship roared to life. In one minute the engines kicked in and we followed the pre-programed course off the planet, and out of the system, that kept the planet between us and the last known direction of the alien ship. After about fifteen minutes we both visibly relaxed.
“So Alex, what about dinner?” And she went to the galley without waiting for an answer.
The Flight to Ross 248.