119: SIGHT

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Pale orange steam blasts the right side of my face, burning the skin immediately. I press my mask down over my nose and mouth with one hand, trying to avoid breathing whatever it is, and stumble back, but I can’t see. I back into the opposite wall of the tunnel and pause, disoriented. A hand grabs my shoulder and pulls me back.

As soon as we seem to be out of the immediate cloud of mysterious orange gas, the captain and I stop to check the integrity of our air tanks. Not only do we not want to be breathing the air in here, but this is just about the worst place to experience some sort of tank leak or problem; it seems to be doing fine with the 1atm air pressure around us, but a high pressure oxygen mix plus unknown gas is an excellent way to die in a fiery explosion. We’re both injured; part of my face feels burned, as is the back of my right hand, and I can’t see out of my right eye. The side of Captain Klees’ mask is cracked, and the jaw below looks very swollen. I think the pipe hit him.

He doesn’t look capable of talking very easily, so I grab my radio as we make our way down the Tube. “Aspen to Denish. We’ve got a disconnected pipe here spraying some kind of orange gas. Don’t know what it is. Captain and I are both a little injured, I don’t think it’s serious; heading to medbay. Over.”

“I will look into it. Over.”

“Friend to Aspen. Medbay’s standing by to receive you both. Over.”

“I’ve got it,” Tal says, and behind us, the gas shuts off. We find the exit and climb down, getting steadier as we get closer to normal gravity, and Lina and Denish are there, both pacing fretfully, to take us to the medbay where the Friend awaits. Tal, stationed at the medbay terminal, doesn’t look up as we enter.

Taking the mask off is agony. It’s not until it’s free of my face that I see the remnants of burned skin stuck to it.

“Are we poisoned?” I ask the Friend as it squirts a numbing agent over my face. I close my left eye to protect it and think I close my right as well. It’s hard to be sure.

“No. A disinfectant pipe disconnected. That gas is used by the ship to clean the rings and ventilation systems; it’s harmless in low doses. Very caustic, in the high dose you were hit with, but not toxic enough to worry about.”

“Can I see?”

“You don’t want to.”

I hold my hand out for a mirror. The Friend hesitates, then fetches one.

It was right. I didn’t want to see.

Most of my face is intact. The mask protected the lower half, and the blast only got the right side, but the quarter that got hit is not in good shape. Cooked skin blisters and peels away to reveal weeping flesh beneath. I think I can see bone around the eye socket, but realistically, it’s probably fat or something; I don’t look hard enough to make sure. As for the right eye… yeah. That’s not going to be seeing anything again.

I hand the mirror back, feeling sick.

“We will need to replace a lot of skin,” the Friend tells me. “Technically, it’s an operation that doesn’t require sedation, but…”

“I don’t want to be awake for it, if that’s an option.”

The Friend nods and heads off to fetch a sedative. In the bed next to mine, Lina is inspecting the captain’s jaw. Even I can tell that it’s broken, at the very least.

The Friend hands me some pills. I take them. And I wake up feeling groggy, but otherwise better.

The skin on my face is still numb, but feels whole under my fingers, soft and raw. I still, I notice, can’t see out of the eye.

Captain Klees is in the bed next to mine. His jaw looks to be wired shut, so either the bone cement needs time to work or it’s a complicated break. I hope he didn’t lose any teeth.

The rest of the crew are, of course, all gathered in the medbay, looking concerned.

“Everything go well?” I ask.

Lina nods. “You’ve got some minor damage under the skin, but it should heal fairly quickly. The skin took most of the damage. And the eye, of course.”

“Lucky it’s not preneek times,” Tal adds. “Did you know that losing big patches of skin used to be a really huge deal? Like, they would have to take skin off other parts of your body and just sew it on. Gross.”

I ignore this. “Can we do anything about the eye?”

The doctors exchange a glance.

“Yes, technically,” the Friend says. “We have cybernetics in storage that we can hook up and tide you over until another poor colonists fails revival and gifts us a replacement eye. It’s doable.”

“But…?”

“But we’re not surgeons,” Lina says. “We did Celi’s surgery because avoiding it could’ve been fatal, and that was a simple liver transplant. Eye replacement can’t be a keyhole job because the eye’s exposed, and the nerve hookup is more complicated. And given the current condition of this ship…”

“We’ll do the implant if you think you need it,” the Friend says. “But our recommendation is to wait. We’re not that far from Hylara, and once a base is established there, there’ll be proper surgeons in a properly equipped lab, with surgical robots to do the operation.”

“I don’t think we could kill you doing it on the ship, unless we screw up incredibly badly,” Lina adds, “but we might cut or damage or scar something that causes permanent problems for you.”

I nod. “I’ll wait. Given our luck on this ship so far, I just know that we’d be halfway through a serious surgery and something critical would break and make it massively more dangerous. Given, well, everything.”

The doctors both relax a little.

“It’s not luck,” the captain mumbles through an unmoving jaw. “That pipe just happened to disconnect at the specific moment we were up there? No way.”

“That was my fault,” Tal says. “I should’ve expected it and caught it before you guys went up. Sorry.”

“What happened?”

“You guys remember how you found Reimann? How he disabled Amy’s control over the ventilation, froze the vents, and she used a rewritten emergency protocol to lock him in til he died?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you guys ever wonder why the air was weird in there? Like how exposed tissues wouldn’t rot properly?”

We all look at each other.

“Not really,” I shrug. “I mean, I figured it was something to do with the chronostasis fluid evaporating, or something.”

“Me too,” Tal says. “But what I didn’t pay attention to, because I’m an idiot, is that the sterilisation cycles aren’t on the same system as the usual ventilation control. I reckon Amy recoded those to protect herself from him. He’d already been physically messing around inside her ventilation systems once, and he had an axe. She probably filled the ring with disinfectant in an attempt to poison him, and had procedures all rigged up to be dangerous if he tried to physically interfere again. When you were up there, you connected an old system that triggered a pipe disconnect in the sterilisation system.”

“Booby trap,” Captain Klees says. “For Reimann.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I should’ve caught it. It’s obvious, when you think about it. I used to be good at this stuff!”

“You are,” I point out. “No one expects perfection.”

“You should! I used to have it! Until I clearly fucked up badly enough to get caught, somehow, and now I just fuck up all the time. I don’t know when that started.”

“Probably about the time you were thrown into a wildly unfamiliar situation full of curveballs that no one could anticipate?”

“Lame. I’m losing my edge.”

“I suppose we need to postpone the radio message,” Sam says.

Captain Klees shakes his head. “Someone else can read it.”

“That’s not… I mean, the captain really should do it. That’s kind of the point.”

He shakes his head again. “Kids in two generations reading history books aren’t going to care one way or another whose name is attached to the speech. I don’t know about you, but I want it done and over with.”

He’s not wrong. The feeling in the room is tense, and not just because two crew members have minor injuries. We all want to send the message, get no response, and move on.

“I hope we get a response,” Tal says. “It’d rule.”

“You ready to do the message tomorrow, Aspen?” Tinera asks.

“What? Me? Why me?!”

“Why the sociologist with extensive public speaking experience whose also one of the few members of this crew who isn’t a convict under Earth law?”

“She’s right,” Lina says.

Captain Klees nods. “You’re the obvious choice.”

“I’m injured, too,” I grumble.

“A lack of an eye doesn’t stop you from talking,” Tinera says. “Captain, should we go set everything up for Aspen’s speech tomorrow?”

He nods again.

“Do I get a say in this?” I ask, but everyone’s already moving.

Which is how, the next morning, I end up facing a little microphone in Engine Ring 1, speech in hand, surrounded by the crew.

“Amplitude modulation is probably the easiest for anyone down there to decode, if they’re anything like humans,” Tal says, tapping at a keyboard, “but tends to get scrambled a bit by magnetic fields. So what I’m thinking is, we broadcast in AM and then the same message in FM, make sure it gets through. Using any kind of binary encoding is useless, of course; just a raw audio to radio wave transmission is easiest to decode. And both systems maximises our chances of not only getting them to figure it out, but gives ‘em a Rosetta stone between the two systems.”

“Yes, fine,” Captain Klees mumbles. “You ready, Aspen?”

“Absolutely,” I lie.

“Great. Start when you like. Tal will record and transmit when you’re done.”

I take a breath and start reading.

“People of Hylara. We are the ship Courageous, from the planet Earth. My name is Aspen Greaves. We are moving towards your planet, and look forward to meeting you. We hope to learn from each other and work together to help both our peoples.”

“Got it,” Tal says. “Sending.”

“Transmission time?” Captain Klees asks.

“One hour, thirty five minutes, thirty nine seconds,” Sam says.

So. That’s done then. I go to pick some apples, and somehow manage to scratch up my hands doing it because it turns out that depth perception and being able to see what’s on both sides of you is more important than one might think. Tinera sneaks treats to the chickens when she thinks I’m not looking. The job’s done, and we can all do other stuff.

Of course three hours and ten minutes later, we’re all back in Engine Ring 1.

“There’s no one to reply,” Lina says. “We haven’t detected any radio from the planet.”

“Of course,” I say. “It’s just for, you know. The history books.”

“But hypothetically,” Denish says, “if there were somebody, how long…”

“A few seconds… there,” Sam says, watching a clock on the monitor in front of them and Tal. “If someone received a message and responded right away, we’d be getting it now.”

We all stand about the room in silence. Seconds tick by.

“Any…?” Captain Klees asks.

“No response,” Tal says, eyes glued on the monitor.

“Right. Of course there isn’t.”

We all just stand around and try not to look disappointed.

“Of course,” Captain Klees says, “hypothetically, if an alien transmission came in from space, you wouldn’t respond right away. It could take days to decode.”

“We didn’t detect any radio activity on the planet,” Lina reminds him.

“I know. I’m just saying, hypothetically.”

We stand in silence for a bit longer, until it really sinks in that, yep, we’ve sent the message to an empty planet, go us, time to move on. I turn for the airlock.

The radio signal alarm goes off.

We all immediately pile up behind Tal’s chair to see the screen. This is pointless, because all that’s on there is some text telling us that a radio signal is being received, but we do it anyway.

“Can you play it?” Lina asks.

“Oh, sure, I’ll just open up a mysterious transmission from an unknown sender right on the spaceship’s main computer, that’s safe.” Ke taps some keys.

“… are you suggesting that previously uncontacted aliens might be both capable and willing to randomly send us malware?”

“No, I’m suggesting that the probe on or around that planet that might have previously tried to kill us might also have contingencies for if we try to talk to it. I can’t guarantee that… uh. No.” Ke pulls up what looks like a visual representation of a radio wave. “Yeah that’s just a raw radio wave, I can play that directly. Just eyeballing it, I think they did what we did – might be the same message in AM then FM.”

“Might be sent from the probe?”

“Nah. It already knows how to talk to our computer. The only reason to do it this way would be if somebody’s copying the way we sent them a message, which would be a weird thing to program the probe to do.”

“It’s not our signal reflected back, is it?” Sam asks.

Ke pulls up another radio wave image. “Nope. Different.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Captain Klees grumbles. “Play the mysterious space message already!”

“Brace yourselves, everyone,” Tal says. “we have no idea if these guys have voices that are pleasant to human ears. They might even speak in like, light pulses or scent clouds or something, and decoding it as audio is going to be a mess. Chances are, whatever we’re about to hear will sound horrible.” Ke dramatically taps a single key and sits back.

The sound that comes through does not sound horrible. It sounds, in fact, like somewhat accented but perfectly legible Interlingua.

“Storgalthan’s unusually luminous left testicle! You’re who?”

The engine ring is dead silent for several seconds.

“Whelp,” Tinera says. “Probably should’ve seen that coming.”

“It might still be aliens,” Tal says hopefully.

I shake my head. “Sixty five years transmission time either way. Even with us being late, that’s one message per way at most, if Earth started talking to aliens on Hylara the day we left. Not enough to learn the Interlingua fluently. That’s a colonist, probably on a second ship sent to bolster our colony, except we had engine trouble and they accidentally overtook us.”

“And settled on a planet with life on it,” Captain Klees says. “You said previously that there’s simply no way to introduce life to a planet and have it oxygenate an entire atmosphere that much in that short a time frame.”

“Yep,” I sigh. “Which saves us having to deal with a difficult moral question, I guess. Whether to contaminate a living planet by terraforming it. Their ship took it out of our hands.”

“If they’ve already established a base, that at least makes our job a lot easier,” Captain Klees says. “Of course, it might make the politics of the situation even more complicated. We’re going to have to explain all this mess not only to our own colonists, but to them.”

“I wonder what sort of government system they have,” Sam muses. “Anyone familiar with that curse? About the luminous left testicle?”

We all shake our heads.

The radio cut in again. “Sorry, that was unprofessional. I meant, um.” They clear their throat. “This is Hive, I mean, um, Materials Port Supervisor Cattail. We were expecting you much earlier, Courageous. To be honest, we all thought you were dead. This is… this is somewhat outside of my purview. I’m going to get my superior. Um. Supervisor Cattail out.”

“Cattail,” the Friend says. “A type of river reed.”

I know what it’s getting at. I shake my head. “Doesn’t sound Arborean.”

“True. Plenty of other societies also have some plant names.”

The radio cuts in again.

“Sorry,” Supervisor Cattail says, “I just have to ask. Are you the Aspen Greaves?”

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