Maladanto, Esperanza, Bock, and White don’t move. That’s always seemed remarkable, but now it’s flat-out amazing. They watched two alien nightmares climb on board and they didn’t fall apart and run.
The creatures move tentatively, taking stilted steps. Their heads bob. You know what they are. They have several names, nowadays, but most commonly, people call them salamanders. You know a lot about them that Maladanto and his people don’t.
The salamanders seem to notice them. There are moments of stillness: one, two, three, four. Maladanto raises a hand in greeting.
The salamanders don’t respond right away. It’s not clear whether they understand. Then the first begins to bow. It was standing on four hind legs; now it goes down onto all six. Its head dips.
Maladanto isn’t an expressive guy and even here his face is half-shadowed by his helmet, but you can see what’s blazing in his mind. He didn’t dare hope it would be life, and he didn’t dare hope it would be intelligent, and he didn’t dare hope it could communicate. He begins to lower his own head, mirroring a gesture he’s read all wrong.
The salamander’s face splits open. What you’re seeing is its protective resin breaking apart to reveal its true face for the first time. But to Maladanto, it must appear as if the creature’s head disintegrates. Its jaws crack open. It makes a movement in its throat, which has since been named for the noise it accompanies: huk.
Maladanto’s body jerks. Fluid hits the wall behind him.
You know that salamanders are capable of spitting little quark-gluon slugs, which are essentially tiny black holes. They leave behind a trail of mangled matter, because what happens when that much gravity passes an inch from your heart and five feet from your toes is that different parts of your body experience monumentally different forces. The crew of Coral Beach doesn’t know this. They only see Maladanto’s body implode.
A chunk of what’s left hits Esperanza. He’s the one with the cattle prod, which is actually an emergency ignitor for Coral Beach’s fuel collider and has never been used in practice. It’s capable of putting out a heart-stopping charge, but Esperanza falls and loses his grip on it, because he was standing too close to Maladanto.
White runs. This is the part where Bock should take two steps back and drop the door. But the cattle prod rolls toward her and she hesitates, then runs forward and scoops it up. The salamander advances and she raises the cattle prod above her head. White reaches the door and yells for Bock to come. This is how it happens: Bock won’t leave Esperanza and White won’t leave Bock.
The salamander pauses. Bock could strike at it, but doesn’t. She’s holding a cattle prod in front of an alien and no one would blame her for freezing up in fright, but that’s not what’s happening. Bock is a biologist, and there’s a line of concentration between her eyebrows, and you see her hearing Maladanto’s words: Don’t fuck it up. Before she stabs the first intelligent life ever found beyond Earth’s warm blue bubble, she’s making sure in her own mind that it’s the right thing to do. Maybe she could have killed one. Hurt it, at least. Who knows. She’s still deciding when the two salamanders huk and turn her and White inside out.
Esperanza grunts, the sound loud in your ear. He shoves away the rearranged nightmare that is Maladanto. The door is twenty feet away and he crawls toward it. The salamanders watch him. There’s nothing to read in their faces. They’re both split open now, loose strings of resin dangling obscenely, but what’s underneath—the wide, lipless mouths, the black, orblike eyes—is incapable of expression. Esperanza is a fifty-eight-year-old botanist who made his name in flowering gene strains. The salamanders let him get almost to the door before they turn him into meat.
People around you are crying. Alert lamps are cycling. Those huks passed all the way through Coral Beach, leaving ten-inch-diameter tunnels behind, so air is venting. The salamanders don’t seem bothered. Resin is already threading across their faces, forming a fresh layer. Behind them, more salamanders climb into the breach chamber. They explore slowly, thoroughly. They go through the door that nobody closed. There’s another behind that, which stymies them briefly, but when they can’t force it open, they huk at it until they can. Coral Beach isn’t large. It’s not long until they find de Veers. He’s working the engines, trying to bring the craft around on the alien ball. He has no weapons, so he’s decided to ram it.
The salamanders don’t speak. They don’t try to communicate. They just kill him. You don’t know why. There are a lot of theories. Some people say it wasn’t their fault. We wandered into their territory and they defended it. They’re mindless animals, unaware of what they’re doing. Something Maladanto did registered to them as a threat. There are a lot of opinions. All you know is that when the video finally, mercifully stops, you want to kill salamanders, as many as you can.
SEVEN YEARS AFTER CONTACT
1
[Gilly]
THE LAUNCH
Before he could go before a global audience of two billion, they wanted to fix his eyebrows. He sat before a light-ringed mirror, on a chair that went up and down at the whim of a woman with silver lips, and tried to keep still.
“The left is fine,” she said. “The right concerns me.”
He’d been in the chair for two hours. There had been a makeup person, a hairdresser, a stylist, and now this second makeup person. His face felt like a plaster model, ready to crack and fall to pieces if he smiled.
“Smile,” she said. It did not crack. “Can I get some three-base paste for Gilligan?”
“Gilly,” he said reflexively. He didn’t like Gilligan.
“I’m so nervous, I could barf,” said the person to his left. “That blueberry yogurt is definitely starting to feel like a mistake.”
Three others were in chairs alongside him; the speaker was Talia Beanfield, the Life Officer. Gilly glanced at her but she was recording herself on her phone. He was supposed to be recording clips, too. Service wanted to stitch them together into a behind-the-scenes feed of the launch ceremony.
She caught his eye and smiled. For most of the last half hour, Beanfield had been immersed in towels and clips. She looked good now, though. Her hair was artful and honey brown and glimmered as she moved. “Did you try the yogurt, Gilly?”
“No.”
“Smart,” she said to her phone. “This is why Gilly’s Intel and I’m Life.”
“I’m sorry,” said the makeup woman. “I need to get in there.” She stood between them and resumed her attack on Gilly’s face.
“Stop giving the makeup people a hard time, Gilly,” Beanfield said. “You and your unruly eyebrows.”
“Eyebrow,” said the woman. “It’s only the right.”