‘Sensors, let’s get the dish out there,’ Oscar said. ‘Check for emissions.’
Another electromuscle arm snaked out from its ceiling recess, carrying a furled dish. It went through the gateway beside the planetary survey scope, and extended its metal mesh.
‘No radio signals detected,’ sensors reported.
‘All right; bring both the arms back in,’ Oscar said. ‘Astro-gration, move the wormhole exit to geosynchronous height above the third planet’s daylight terminator.’
When the arms were back in their recesses, the starfield winked out. A moment later, the gateway opened again, revealing the crescent of a planet directly ahead. Its radiance washed across the confinement chamber and in through the windows. Oscar smiled in welcome as the soft light fell across his console. The cloud cover was above average, cloaking a good seventy per cent of the hemisphere. But he could see the blue of oceans, and the grubby red-brown of land, even the crisp white of polar caps was visible in that first glimpse.
‘All right people, let’s concentrate on the job,’ Oscar said as excited conversation buzzed through the loop. ‘We’ve all seen this before. Sensors, I want a full electromagnetic sweep. Launch seven geophysics satellites, get me some global coverage. Planetary science, you’re on; preliminary survey results in three hours, please. Alien encounter office, start hunting. Emergency defence, you’re on stand-by alert, and now have full wormhole shutdown authority; acknowledge that, please.’
‘Acknowledged, sir.’
The launch rail telescoped out from its storage bay below the control centre windows, extending a good ten metres through the wormhole exit. Satellites accelerated down the rail, riding the magnetic pulses before whirling away along different trajectories. Once they’d fallen a kilometre from the gateway, their ion drives came on, pushing them into high-inclination orbits which would provide coverage of the planet’s whole surface. As they went they each released a swarm of sub-satellites like golden butterflies, expanding their observation baseline. Tracking dishes were deployed to keep in contact. The big dish came out again, scouring the continents for any electromagnetic activity. A two-metre telescope peered down inquisitively.
Oscar sat back and had his first in situ break of the day. A trolleybot slid along the console rows, distributing drinks and snacks. He claimed a cheese and smoked bacon sandwich and a couple of bottles of natural mineral water. As he ate, the screens above the windows came alive with images from the satellites. Details were gradually sketched in by the data tables and graphics in the console portals.
The planet had five major continents, accounting for thirty-two per cent of the surface. Temperature was lower than strictly favourable, resulting in huge ice caps which between them covered a third of the planet. One and a half continents were completely buried beneath ice. That left a lot less usable land than average. The magnetic field was stronger than Earth’s, which gave it a very large Van Allen radiation belt.
‘There is no evidence of sentient life at this time,’ alien encounter said. ‘No large-scale structures, no electromagnetic activity, no visible cultivation, and no artificial thermal sources.’
‘Thank you,’ Oscar said. The last factor was the clincher for him. The ability to start and use fire was deemed the litmus test of sentience. If anything on the planet was capable of sentient thought, it was currently below Neanderthal-equivalent. ‘Sen-sors, you can switch to active scanning now.’
Radar sweeps started to penetrate the pervasive cloud. The images on the big screens began to develop a lot quicker, with detailed layers building on the provisional outlines. Lasers swept through the atmosphere, plotting its composition. The RI manipulated the energy flow through the gateway mechanism, manufacturing tiny gravity wave distortions at the worm-hole exit. They rippled through the planet’s crust, allowing the satellites to determine its internal layout.
At fifteen hundred hours, Oscar called an intraloop conference with his station heads. So far, they agreed, the planet appeared to be hospitable. There was definitely no sign of an indigenous sentience. No animals above two metres in length had been spotted by the infrared sensors. Its geology was standard. Its biochemistry, as far as could be deduced from spectography, was an ordinary carbon-based multicelluar form.
‘So is it aggressive or passive?’ Oscar asked. The problem was common enough. On a colder world such as this, most life would be slow-growing; a trait which inclined towards a more passive animal nature. But there were cases where the opposite was true, and evolution had produced some very tough life forms geared for survival at all costs. ‘Best guesses please.’
‘The geology is stable,’ planetary science said. ‘The current bio-epoch is probably about eighty million years old if we’re reading the stellar cycle right. We can’t detect any previous ice ages, so there’s been no sudden climate change to throw their evolution off kilter. Everything growing down there is stable and adjusted. I’d say passive.’
‘I have to agree,’ xenobiology said. ‘We’re seeing small movable thermal spots indicative of animals, but nothing larger than a dog. Certainly nothing we normally associate with carnivorous predators. Botany is also reasonably standard, though there are few large plants, and what pass for trees are solitary, they don’t congregate in forests, which is unusual.’
‘Very well.’ Oscar swivelled his seat until he could see McClain Gilbert, the forward crew chief, sitting at the front of the observation gallery. ‘Mac, I’m giving you an initial encounter authorization. Get your first contact team suited up.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ McClain Gilbert gave him a thumbs up from behind the glass.
Oscar switched back to the full loop. ‘We’re going for a ground encounter. Sensors, put the geophysics satellites to automatic, and withdraw all the arms. Astrogration, I want the exit moved to a five hundred kilometre equatorial altitude, then give it an orbital velocity. When we’re established, launch the low orbit surveillance satellite fleet; I’ll need constant coverage of the ground contact site. We’re aiming for ground opening in one hour, people, get ready for that. Planetary sciences, find me a suitable dawn site at that time.’
With the exit positioned five hundred kilometres above the ground, the clouds below seemed a lot brighter. The small squadron of low orbit satellites shot off the launch rail, curving down to an even lower altitude and spreading out to form a chain around the planet’s equator. Images from their high-rez cameras appeared on the screens, revealing a wealth of details. Stones a mere five centimetres across were visible amid the carpet of vermilion grass-equivalent. Squirrel-like rodents, with grey scales rather than fur, bounded about, scuttling into burrows and swimming along streams. All the small independent trees had peculiar zigzag branches.
‘Confirming low orbit satellite fleet in position,’ sensors reported. ‘We have full coverage.’
‘Coming up to dawn on the landing site,’ planetary science said.
‘Withdraw sensor arms,’ Oscar said. ‘Chamber management, establish a force field across the gateway. Astrogration, reposition the exit one kilometre above designated contact site, horizontal axis.’
The wormhole blinked, and they were looking down on a gently crumpled landscape of thin burgundy grass and twisted carmine bushes. A low dawn light was casting long gloomy shadows across the ground. Pools of dense mist clung to hollows and depressions with oily tenacity.
‘Chamber management, equalize pressure. Sensors, deploy the atmospheric probe and exposure samples.’
The force field reconfigured itself to allow the sampler arm through. It didn’t find any immediately lethal particles missed by the scans from orbit.
Oscar waited the designated hour for the exposure and micro-analysis processes to run. ‘Xenobiology?’ he asked eventually.
‘Some spores – probably plant life. Small bacterial count in the water vapour. Nothing abnormal, and no adverse reactions to our sample materials.’
‘Thank you.’ It would take months of laboratory tes
ting to discover if any of the microbial life was dangerous to humans. Until they were given the all clear, the forward crews would all be in suits anyway. It was the other biological reactions which worried Oscar; a century ago CST had opened a wormhole to a planet where the local fungus ate polymers. Quite how that evolved was still a puzzle for the xenobiologists. Now a whole spectrum of materials were exposed to the planet first. ‘Astro-gration, please take us down to the surface.’
The exit began to move, drifting downwards with the same sedate lack of urgency as any hot air balloon. Oscar could even guess the point that astrogration had chosen for contact. A flat patch of ground clear of any trees, with a stream three hundred metres away. Ground search radar confirmed the area was solid. At a hundred metres up, the oval exit began to rotate around its long axis, tilting to the vertical. A light blue sky slid into view, with wispy clouds high above the horizon, glowing pink in the rising sunlight. Astrogration halted the descent when the bottom rim was a couple of centimetres above the fluffy leaves of the cochineal-tinted grass-equivalent.
Oscar let out a breath as he watched the landscape for any sign of movement. If there were any Silfen on this world, now was the moment they appeared. Stupid lanky humanoids ambling up to the opening and waving gamely at all the ground crew behind their consoles. ‘Welcome,’ they sang in their own language. ‘Welcome to a new world.’ He’d seen it once himself, twelve years ago when he was chamber management station head on Augusta. There had been so much amusement in their smooth voices, laughter for the serious humans and their clunky machinery. He’d wanted to pick up a rock and throw it at the smug mystics.
But this time the chilly red and blue terrain was so still it could have been a painting. There were no Silfen here.
He wasn’t the only one waiting, anticipating. A number of sighs were let out around the control centre.
Oscar went round the loop again, confirming every station was stable. ‘Forward crew, initiate contact,’ he said.
The floor of the confinement chamber rose up into a ramp. Airlock two irised open. McClain Gilbert and the four members of his first contact team were standing just inside. They wore their magenta insulation suits, a close-fitting onepiece with a flexible hood that clung to the skull; a broad transparent visor dominated the front. The backpack was slim, containing a lightweight air-recycling unit and the superconductor batteries for the force field armour they wore unseen underneath the fabric. It was a precaution against any newfound native animal who was hostile enough to try and find out what the invaders tasted like.
Cameras mounted on the side of their hoods relayed images to the big screens above the windows. A quick check showed Oscar that several hundred million people were accessing this moment through the unisphere. They would be exploration addicts, the stay-at-homes who couldn’t get enough of alien worlds and the expanding human frontier.
‘Out you go, Mac,’ Oscar told the heroic-looking figures as they stood at the bottom of the ramp.
McClain Gilbert nodded briefly, and strode forward. The force field over the gateway exit slipped round him as he stepped through. His booted foot came down on the feathery leaves of the ground cover plant.
‘I name this planet Chelva,’ McClain Gilbert intoned solemnly, reading from CST’s approved list. ‘May those who come here find the life they search for.’
‘Amen,’ Oscar muttered quietly. ‘Right, people, to work, please.’
Procedure meant they acquired immediate soil and plant samples which were quickly taken back through the gateway. Once that was done, the team began a more elaborate investigation of the area around the wormhole exit.
‘The grass-equivalent is spongy,’ McClain Gilbert said. ‘Similar to moss but with much longer leaves, and they’re kind of glossy, like a wax coating. From what I can see the ground next to the stream has a high shingle content. Looks like flint, same grey-brown colouration. Possibly good for fossils.’
The forward crew was heading towards the water. Streams, lakes, even seas, always provided a rich variety of native life.
‘Okay, we have company,’ McClain Gilbert announced.
Oscar glanced up from the console portals. The forward crew were about a hundred metres from the exit, he could only see three of them directly now, and two of them were pointing at something. His eyes flicked up to the screens. The small squirrel-rodent creatures had appeared; helmet-mounted cameras were following them as they hopped around on the flat rocks beside the stream. Now he could see them properly, his first equivalence naming was becoming more and more inaccurate. They were nothing like squirrels. A rounded conical body, thirty centimetres long, was covered in lead-grey scales, with a texture astonishingly similar to stone. There were three powerful limbs at the rear, one directly underneath the body, and two, slightly longer, on either side. Where they connected to the main body they were shaped like chicken thighs, except there was no mid-joint, the lower half was a simple pole. It was as if they walked on miniature stilts, which made their motions fast and jerky. The head was a giant snout, with segmented ring scales allowing it to bend in every direction. Its tip was a triple-pincer claw arranged around a mouth-inlet. Two thirds of the way along the snout, three black eyes were set deep into folds which creased the scales.
‘Ugly-looking critters,’ McClain Gilbert said. ‘They seem, I don’t know, primitive.’
‘We think they’re quite evolved,’ xenobiology said. ‘They obviously have a good sense of balance, and the limb arrangement provides a sophisticated locomotive ability.’
They didn’t bound about, Oscar saw, it was more like a kangaroo jump. Watching them, he worried that the forward team were scaring them, they were never still. One of them darted forward, its pincers splashing into the water. When it brought its snout out, the claws were gripping a tuft of lavender foliage. They moved with incredible speed, shovelling the dripping morsel back into its mouth-inlet.
His virtual vision brought up an amber warning over a section of McClain Gilbert’s insulation suit’s telemetry. The cautions were repeated on the other forward crew. ‘Mac, what are you standing on?’
In unison, the helmet camera images on the screens tipped down. The feathery grass was slowly curling over to embrace their boots. A thin mist was leaking out from the onion-shaped tips of every blade.
‘Hell!’ McClain Gilbert exclaimed. He quickly lifted one foot. The grass wasn’t strong enough to stop him. Blisters and bubbles were erupting on the top of the boot. The rest of the crew shouted in alarm, and began to pull their own boots clear.
‘That’s some kind of acid,’ planetary sciences said.
Oscar noticed all the creatures were hopping away from the humans at quite a speed.
‘What sort of plant has acid for sap?’ McClain Gilbert asked.
‘Not a good one,’ xenobiology said. ‘Sir, I recommend bringing them back in.’
‘I concur,’ emergency defence said. ‘If nothing else, we need to wash that acid off them before it eats through their soles.’
‘I think they’re right, Mac,’ Oscar said. ‘Get back into the environment chamber.’
‘We’re coming.’
‘Xenobiology, talk to me,’ Oscar said.
‘Interesting. The plants didn’t move until our team had been standing still for a little while, so I’m guessing they probably operate off a time/pressure trigger. I’m reminded of a Venus fly trap, except this is a lot more unpleasant, and the scale is larger. Any small animal that stops moving is likely to be trapped and dissolved.’
Oscar glanced back through the oval gateway. McClain Gilbert and his team had almost reached the rim. Behind them, there was no sign of the small not-squirrel creatures. ‘Those native animals never stood still,’ he murmured.
‘No, sir,’ xenobiology said. ‘And their leg structure would be difficult for the grass to capture. I’d love to know what their scales are made of, it looked pretty tough. Anything that evolves here must be relatively acid resistant.’
&n
bsp; ‘How widespread is this plant?’ Oscar asked. ‘And is the rest of the vegetation going to be similar?’
‘The images we’re getting from the low orbit satellites indicate a comprehensive ground plant coverage,’ sensors said. ‘If it’s not this particular grass-equivalent, it’s a close cousin.’
‘Damn it,’ Oscar hissed.
The forward crew hurried back into the alien environment confinement chamber. At the bottom of the ramp, decontamination shower cubicles had risen up out of the floor. They were designed to wash away spores or dangerous particles. But they’d be just as effective for this. The team members stood underneath the nozzles as the water jetted down.
‘All right,’ Oscar announced to everyone on the loop. ‘Our priority is to establish how widespread this grass variety is, and if the other plants are related. Sensors, get a marque 8 samplebot out there. I want to check out the nearest trees, and there are a few other kind of plants in that grass stuff. Mac, go through a complete decontamination, and de-suit, I don’t think we’ll need you again today.’
Everyone in the control centre watched anxiously as the samplebot trundled out across the red grass. It stopped several times to snip sections of leaf from clumps of other plants, then headed for the nearest tree a hundred and fifty metres away. As it got closer, they could all see the jagged pattern of the branches as they forked at acute angles. There weren’t many leaves, just a few slender beige triangles clumped round the end of each twig. Black kernels similar to walnuts dangled down from almost every joint on every branch.