THE ENCOUNTER
At last it’s time and you file in to watch the contact video. You’ve seen it before; everyone has. When you enter, you recognize the bulkheads, the fat tube lighting they used everywhere back then, even the black rubber coffee mug that sits atop a panel near the breach chamber’s exterior door. But it’s different. They said you had to see it for yourself to appreciate it, and they were right. When you turn your head, the picture is all around you. You can walk right into it. You could just about pick up that coffee mug and drink from it. This isn’t like what you’ve seen before. It’s like being there.
Up front are four white-suited figures. Since this is the contact video, you recognize them: Maladanto, White, Esperanza, and Bock. Just standing there, large as life. Someone beside you inhales. A wild compulsion rises in your throat: You should warn them! A man to your right even takes a step and clenches his hands. You knew what you’d be watching today but you weren’t prepared for it to feel like this, like it’s wrong to be here. And wrong not only because you know what’s going to happen, and not even because there are four people who need your help and you can’t give it, but wrong like you’re intruding. They’re about to experience the worst moment of their lives, and you’ve come to watch it.
Fabric suits, plastic helmets. Esperanza is holding a thin stick that functions a little like a cattle prod, and that’s the best weapon they have. They’re scientists, remember. They went into space to study bacterial growth. Then they picked up a hint of controlled propulsion in a place it didn’t belong and there was no one else for millions of miles. They could have turned tail and run—they should have—but here they are. Side by side. With a cattle prod.
Their positioning is terrible. That’s something you didn’t appreciate from the standard video. At first glance, they’re poised and ready. But with this much detail you can see everything that’s waiting to go wrong. Esperanza is a half step back from where he should be, his weight on his right foot; he’s going to get tangled up with Maladanto, it’s as clear as day. Bock is supposed to be stationed by the interior door, but she’s come too far forward. White is a mess of nerves. His eyes roam the chamber and—aha!—alight on that coffee cup. You can see his thought: So that’s where I left it.
“Open it,” says Maladanto.
Coral Beach’s exterior breach door clacks and thumps and splits to reveal a depthless dark. Decompression ripples their suits. White’s coffee mug falls off the shelf and rolls toward the void.
“Steady,” says Maladanto. His voice is deep and rich and more intimate than you’ve heard it before. He’s ex-Service, the only one of the crew with any military background. Used to fly shuttles, back when they needed human pilots. “We’re making history today. Don’t fuck it up.”
Bock lifts a hand to wipe her brow. Actually draws the back of her hand across her faceplate. Then lowers her arm like she didn’t even notice how crazy that was.
The wind dies. The doors open as far as they go and halt with a sound you can feel through your feet. It’s hollow breathing and nothing else. For minutes, everyone holds position. The standard video skips this. You see the doors open, then contact. Because it’s four people just standing there; what’s to see? It turns out that White swallows repeatedly. He closes his eyes for ten seconds at a time. At one point, Bock says, under her breath, “Shit,” so quietly it’s barely a word. A tremor starts in her left leg, enough to wobble the suit fabric. You see these details and they matter.
Maladanto says, “Where are they?”
Up in the command station of this little plastic suitcase is de Veers, watching the monitors. He’s the youngest of the five, and when Maladanto ordered him to take the helm, he protested, because he wanted to be down here in the breach chamber with them. But only briefly, because de Veers is irrepressibly good-natured, with a grin that never goes missing for long. He’s going to die in about four minutes.
“From what I can figure, two starboard, one aft, one port, one below,” says de Veers. “Don’t think they’ve noticed that we opened the front door.”
For three days, they’ve been tracking a half-mile-wide brown rock. All they know about it is it’s full of holes and moving like it has some control over where it’s going. Ten hours ago, it began to angle toward Coral Beach, as if noticing them for the first time. Sixty minutes ago, it exuded five small, dark blobs, which sailed across the darkness and stuck to Coral Beach’s hull. Since then, the crew has been tracking them mostly from the sound, which is a clunk, clunk, clunk like someone’s walking around out there.
To your left, a woman stiff-legs it toward the exit. It’s tempting to join her. But Maladanto, Esperanza, Bock, and White are there with the breach door open and you’re struck by how they didn’t have to do this. At any point, they could have decided to pull out and leave this to someone else. Even now, they could have closed the exterior door and pulled Coral Beach away, and maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference—maybe by this point, their fate was sealed—but even so, they stood together and faced it. So you’re staying, too.
“Okay,” de Veers says in your ear. “Seems like they noticed. All five unknown objects converging on the breach chamber.”
You see their hands tighten, the skin crease around their eyes. Esperanza takes a little step to the left, which gets him out from behind Maladanto, and you think, Yes! as if there’s still a chance. Then he steps right back where he was. You hear someone moan quietly. There’s an urge to blame here, to say, There, that’s what went wrong. That’s why it happened. Esperanza’s positioning. Bock drifting away from the door. There must be something, a mistake without which it would have turned out differently. Surely it didn’t have to be like this.
A vibration. Low impacts coming through the hull.
De Veers’s disembodied voice: “Ten seconds, boss.”
Maladanto says, “We don’t know what we’re going to see. Neither do they. Let’s nobody turn this into something it doesn’t have to be.”
White’s lips move fractionally. You always thought he was chewing the inside of his lip, but he’s actually mouthing words. When you make out a few, you realize he’s praying.
A rough, blocky limb appears against the darkness. It curls inside the bulkhead like a tree root. Then another limb, and more: too many limbs. An irregular shape rises into view. There’s a rough-hewn head and shoulders and a massive torso and it looks like some kind of gnarled wood. It’s actually translucent resin. You can see a hint of movement beneath its surface, threads contracting and expanding, like a bowl of worms. A second shape clambers down from above, senses the gravity, and drops to the floor, landing on six thick limbs. The tremor comes up through your shoes.
“Oh, God,” someone behind you mutters.