lights of the equipment panels flashed a barrage of colors at them.
“Wow, looks like we've got some messages.” Inst unnecessarily pointed out.
Each station flashed with communication indicators; messages and orders from home. The group removed their suits and vigorously fluttered their wings, reveling in the fact that they could again use them to swim through the thick gasses mimicking their home world's atmosphere.
As they made their way to their respective seats, Dorn manned his own station and opened the communications to Nia-2. Non's voice streamed into the cabin. “Dorn, you're not going to believe this. They're telling us to leave. They put a blackout on the mission, and they've ordered us home.”
A series of confused and worried looks passed between the crew, then all rushed to retrieve their communications from Onn Control. Gasps echoed through their heads, and Dorn began relaying his own orders to the group, “Mission is blackout status. No part of what the crew has seen or documented can be conveyed in any way to the public or anyone outside of Onn Control.”
Dorn looked up to see that the others were now watching him intently. Disappointment and confusion flowed out with his mental voice as he told them, “Immediate return.”
“What?” Orin, Nia-2's engineer, called out, “What about the telescope? That's half the reason we came here!”
“If we leave now, without a sample and without deploying the telescope, then the entire mission is a failure. Why would they do that?” Kil queried, but no answers came.
Dorn was thoroughly confused and opted to postpone viewing anymore messages from Onn. Instead, he joined the others in staring at the repeating image on the cabin display of the alien craft and its offspring.
The gentle voice of Ost, the navigator aboard Nia-2, slid across the mental ear of the others, “The coordinates and the timetable are in. We have two rotations to prepare for departure.” A few, painfully long seconds elapsed, and she added, “I guess this is for real.”
Dorn and his crew stopped watching the display and once again stared at each other. The confusion among them was as thick as the swirling gasses circulating throughout the cabin.
“What are we going to do?” Inst wanted to know.
Dorn was quick to respond, “We follow orders.”
“So we leave, just like that?” Kil's anger was replacing her confusion, “We came, in part at least, to search for life outside of our planet. I'm pretty sure that thing out there constitutes not just life, but intelligent life. Why run away as soon as we find it?”
“I have an idea,” Nio, the team astronomer chimed in from Nia-2, “We can't disobey orders, but that doesn't mean we can't investigate.”
“Investigate the lander?” Dorn inquired.
“No, we use the telescope.”
“How? The orders were pretty clear, and there's no way we can deploy and activate it in just two rotations. There's not enough time.” Dorn countered.
“Not deploy, just activate. We leave it attached to the ship and simply turn it on. I'm working on tracing possible paths right now. By the time the results are in, Orin and I could have the telescope up and running,” the astronomer confirmed, “That is, if we get started now.”
Non's voice came to the forefront, “Dorn, I think we should do it.”
Dorn aimed his eye lights at the floor of the cabin and contemplated. The dark red bands of light tracing the length of his limbs and joints took on a muted, crimson glow. “Alright, we'll turn it on, but we're handing everything over to Onn Control. I won't allow anything that directly violates orders.”
“We're on it,” Non's voice fired back almost immediately, “Keep the channel open, and we'll connect you as soon as we have images.”
Dorn looked up at his crew and was met with a trio of dull eyelines. He turned away from the others and resumed watching the looped video. The crew assembled near one of the vents pumping the life giving gasses into the ship and began huddling together, preparing to rest until their pre-flight duties called.
For Dorn, the reality of the cabin quickly slipped away, there was only his respiration and the sight of the alien craft dropping its surprise, over and over again on the cabin display. The efforts of moving in the suit was taking its toll him as well, and the images began to blur as his eye lights dimmed. After fighting valiantly for some time, Dorn reluctantly joined his crew and succumbed to sleep.
A flickering light teased his senses, and as Dorn tried to stay in the warm embrace of slumber, reality and dream merged. His mental view showed the strange landing craft splitting open along a linear seam. The light coming out of it flashed and strobed, causing his own eye-lights to ebb and flow with luminescence. Shapes began to move from inside the craft, cutting through the light with black bars of shadow. Just as the shadows started to morph into discernible forms, the image blurred, and a familiar voice softly weaved its way into the dream.
“Dorn. Nia-1, can you see this?”
The words were coming from far away. Dorn illuminated his eye lines to reveal the rest of the crew still asleep. The lights on their chests and bodies pulsated rhythmically in time with their respiration, out of sync with one another, yet rhythmic and somehow cohesive. The lights of their eyes emanated a soft, almost imperceptible glow.
“Dorn, are you there?” Non's voice was much louder and more clear.
Dorn forced more light through his eye lines, and the fog distorting his vision melted away. The image streaming into him quivered and fell into focus, and his eye lights grew bright.
“Is that..?” slipped out of his mind.
“The third planet,” Non affirmed.
Dorn ignored the stirrings behind him and stared at the hemisphere of cobalt blue sporting wispy, white clouds bands and swirls. Brown stains broke up the seemingly endless expanse of blue, eventually giving way to solid white at the pole. Faint glints tickled his eye lights and stirred his wonder. “Are those,” a prolonged pause, “Are they probes?”
“No, they're satellites. Artificial satellites,” Nio confirmed, “What we saw, and what it dropped here, those are probes.” He gave them ample time to process the information over a prolonged silence, then added, “And that's not all.”
As he marveled at the image of the blue marble, Non unveiled something even more amazing, “Dorn, we've found them circling nearly every body in the inner system, and I suspect that if we train our lens on the outer ones, we'll find even more. Just like the one orbiting Nia, and us, right now.”
Dorn was lost in a churning sea of thought, and though he wanted to speak, to unleash the barrage of questions swarming through his mind, he couldn't convert his thoughts into words.
Inst broke the silence from behind him, “It's the same thing we are trying to do, but instead of placing equipment on terrestrial satellites, their equipment are the satellites.”
Uul stood behind her and offered his own input, “That means that they are much more advanced, at least technologically. We're taking the first step off our planet, while they've already reached out this far, and who knows, maybe farther.”
Nio continued with her findings, “Light analysis suggests an atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen at a small fraction of our own pressure and depth. It's just a thin bubble really, only slightly more dense than the atmosphere of this place and toxic as can be.”
“Living things are breathing that?” Kil asked in disbelief.
“Oh, there's more,” the young astronomer announced, “To exist as a gas at those pressures, the surface of the planet would have to be very hot. I mean really hot. As in, vaporizing the very materials our ships are sitting on and evaporating us, hot.
Nio fell silent and let the others absorb the information. Dorn settled in to his seat and pulled up the feed for one of the external cameras. He sat in silence, staring at the jagged spires and icy terrain, trying to envision an intelligent organism that could live and thrive in a poisonous environment hot enough to vaporize him.
Nio concluded, “If you
think about it, neither of our kinds could ever exist in the same place at the same time. Sure, suits and enclosures and such, but we could never really interact with each other. Our pressures and temperatures would crush and freeze them, while theirs would boil our fluids and incinerate us. The only real positive aspect I see is that they must be really tiny.”
“But what if they make up for it with numbers? What if their hostile?” Ost inquired, and she sounded disturbed, “I think we should turn the telescope off and get ready for launch. Control is right, we need to go back, and we need to take everything with us.”
Dorn was surprised by the obvious fear in her tone, and though he had already made up his mind, he took the opportunity to reassure her and avert any panic spreading among the crews, “She's right, and that's exactly what we are going to do. The higher-ups back home will decide what happens next, our job is to follow orders. Store the data, shut it down and let's get to work.”
The moods of those in both vehicles was sullen as they went about the routine of preparing themselves and their ships for departure. The lights on their chests displayed the muted tones of uncertainty and confusion.
“I don't understand why we're running away. It doesn't make any sense.” Kil announced.
Dorn was quick to reply, “We may not understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but we still have the obligation to carry them out.”
“You know what is going to