The last member of the team joined us. She looked over at me and nodded. Silvered electronic eyes glinted in the flash of the airlock warning lights. She flexed the jet black fingers of her artificial right hand absentmindedly as she waited for the doors to open. She ran the fingers of a real hand over her shaved head, then put them back in her utility jacket, covered with what seemed like hundreds of pockets and zippers.
“That’s Kepler,” Cruzie said.
The airlock doors opened. A thin, naked man stumbled out, dripping goopy blue acceleration gel with each step.
For a moment his eyes flicked around, blinking.
Then he started screaming.
Oslo, Kepler, and Cruzie jumped back half a step from the naked man’s arms. I stepped forward. “It’s not fear, it’s relief.”
The man grabbed me in a desperate hug, clinging to me, his hands patting my face, shoulders, as if reassuring himself someone was really standing in front of him. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “You’ve been in there by yourself for days, with no contact of any sort. I understand.”
He was shivering in my grip, but I kept patting his back. I urged him to feel the press of contact between us. And reassurance. Calm.
Eventually he calmed down, and then slowly let go of me.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Beck.”
“Welcome aboard, Beck,” I said, looking over his shoulder at the scientists who looked visibly relieved.
First things first.
Beck got to the communications room. Back and forth verification on an uplink, and he leaned back against the chair in relief.
“There’s an uplink to the Hive,” he said. “An hour of lag time to get as far back as the home system, but I’m patched in.”
He tapped metal inserts on the back of his neck. His mind plugged in to the communications network, talking all the way back to the asteroid belt in the mother system, where the Compact’s Hive thrived. Back there, Beck would always be in contact with it without a delay. In instant symbiosis with a universe of information that the Compact offered.
A hive-mind of people, your core self subjugated to the greater whole.
I shivered.
Beck never moved more than half a foot away from me. Always close enough to touch. He kept reaching out to make sure I was there, even though he could see me.
After walking around the research station for half an hour, we returned to our shared room.
He sat on his bed, suddenly apprehensive. “You’re the Friend, correct?”
“Yes.”
“I’m lonely over here. Can you sleep by me?”
I walked over and sat next to him. “I won’t have sex with you. That’s not why I’m here.”
“I’m chemically neutered,” Beck said as we curled up on the bed. “I’m a drone.”
As we lay there, I imagined thousands of Becks sleeping in rows in Hive dorms, body heat keeping the rooms warm.
Half an hour later he suddenly sighed, like a drug addict getting a hit. “They hear me,” he whispered. “I’m not alone.”
The Compact had replied to him.
He relaxed.
The room filled with a pleasant lavender scent. Was it something he’d splashed on earlier? Or something a Compact drone released to indicate comfort?
“That,” Kepler said, leaning back in a couch before a series of displays, “is one of our remote-operated vehicles. We call them urchins.”
In the upper right hand screen before her, a small sphere with hundreds of wriggling legs rotated around. Then it scrabbled off down what looked like a dirt path.
Cruzie swung into a similar couch. “We sterilize them in orbit, then drop them down encased in a heatshield. It burns away, then they drop down out of the sky with a little burst of a rocket to slow down enough.”
I frowned at one of the screens. Everything was shades of green and gray and black. “Is that night vision?”
Oslo laughed. “It’s Ve. The atmosphere is chlorinated. Green mists. Grey shadows. And black plants.”
The trees had giant, black leaves hanging low to the ground. Tubular trunks sprouted globes that spouted mist randomly as the urchin brushed past.
“Ve’s a small planet,” Kepler said. “Low gravity, but with air similar to what you would have seen on the mother world.”
“Earth,” Oslo corrected.
“But unlike the mother world,” Kepler continued, “Ve has high levels of chlorine. Somewhere in its history, a battle launched among the plants. Instead of specializing in oxygen to kill off the competition, and adapting to it over time, plant life here turned to chlorine as a weapon. It created plastics out of the organic compounds available to it, which is doable in a chlorine-heavy base atmosphere, though remarkable. And the organic plastics also handle photosynthesis. A handy trick. If we can patent it.”
On the screen the urchin rolled to a slow stop. Cruzie leaned forward. “Now if we can just figure out if those bastards are really building a civilization, or just random dirt mounds…”
Paused at the top of a ridge, the urchin looked at a clearing in the black-leafed forest. Five pyramids thrust above the foliage around the clearing.
“Can you get closer?” Beck asked, and I jumped slightly. He’d been so silent, watching all this by my side.
“Not from here,” Kepler said. “There’s a big dip in altitude between here and the clearing.”
“And?” Beck stared at the pyramids on the screen.
“Our first couple weeks here we kept driving the urchins into low lying areas, valleys, that sort of thing. They kept dying on us. We figure the chlorine and acids sink low into the valleys. Our equipment can’t handle it.”
Beck sat down on the nearest couch to Kepler, and looked over the interface. “Take the long way around then, I’ll look at your archives while you do so. Wait!”
I saw it too. A movement through the black, spiky bushes. I saw my first alien creature scuttle around, antennae twisting as it moved along what looked like a path.
“They look like ants,” I blurted out.
“We call them Vesians. But yes, ants the size of a small dog,” Oslo said. “And not really ants at all. Just exoskeletons, black plastic, in a similar structure. The handiwork of parallel evolution.”
More Vesians appeared carrying leaves and sticks on their backs.
And gourds.
“Now that’s interesting,” Beck said.
“It doesn’t mean they’re intelligent,” Beck said later, lying in the bunk with me next to him. We both stared up at the ceiling. He rolled over and looked at me. “The gourds grow on trees. They use them to store liquids. Inside those pyramids.”
We were face to face, breathing each other’s air. Beck had no personal space, and I had to fight my impulse to pull back away from him.
My job was now to facilitate. Make Beck feel at home.
Insect hives had drones that could exist away from the hive. A hive needed foragers, and defenders. But the human Compact only existed in the asteroid belt of the mother system.
Beck was a long way from home.
With the lag, he would be feeling cut off and distant. And for a mind that had always been in the embrace of the hive, this had to be hard for him.
But Beck offered the freelance scientists a link into the massive computational capacity of the entire Compact. They’d contracted it to handle the issue they couldn’t figure out quickly: were the aliens intelligent or not?
Beck was pumping information back all the way to the mother system, so that the Compact could devote some fraction of a fraction of its massed computing ability to the issue. The minds of all its connected citizenry. Its supercomputers. Maybe even, it was rumored, artificial intelligences.