Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind
By Commander in Chief
Author's note: The following text contains graphic descriptions of nudity and sexual acts between adult males. If it is illegal to read such material where you live or at your age, please refrain from continuing.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased is purely coincidental.
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Part 1
"So, like I said over the crypto, you have to promise to keep this secret. The only reason I'm talking to you is that I gotta get this off my chest, and you have a reputation for integrity. I don't trust the head-shrinkers at GSC - those guys care more about furthering their own careers than client confidentiality. The word on the ring is you don't have an ego that needs boosting. Is that right? Are you as tight as what they say? OK then, where do you want me to start? Wherever? OK then. . ."
"Commanding a spaceship is hard. Damn hard. Don't get me wrong. I love my job, and I'm good at it. But it's no zero-G walk in orbit. The flying part - shit, that's easy, even if you don't use a quant. Nah, it's all the other stuff that's the reason only two percent of applicants make it through the Corps Command school. There's the in-system navigation, which is tricky but I love it, and of course the day to day running of the ship, although I mainly leave that to my XO. Then there's all the touchy-feely shit that you need to keep your crew happy and working as a team. But the heaviest burden is the loneliness of command. Yeah, sure, quants are good at what they do, but no-one's ever programmed one that can compute the best outcome when more than one mind is involved. So that means that every decision that affects my crew and my ship ultimately comes down to me. And I guess, in a way, that means that everything that happened is my fault."
"Oh, don't give that bullshit. I've heard it all before. I'm just sayin' that a different man might have made a different decision, and none of this shit might have happened. Or maybe it was gonna happen regardless, just to someone else, or at another time. Who knows? It's done. It happened, and it happened to us. No doubt you saw the news reports, but the networks only got told the "official" story. The vloggers? Hah! They only got fed a few carefully crafted scraps here and there, just to make it look like they had stumbled on the "real" story. First rule of PR - you gotta have an alternate truth for the nut jobs and conspiracy theorists to chew on. Did you say you read the official Global Space Corp de-briefing report? Huh, let me tell you, they left a whole lotta shit out - yeah, even out of that. Nah, the real story is something way freakier. If it ever leaked, there'd be chaos - most of the top brass would go. Might even bring down Admiral Chong herself. Maybe even the Big Kahuna - I dunno. That's why you gotta keep this secret, OK?"
"So, the mission. I've said it before: every mission is different, but every mission starts the same: you assemble a crew, you provision your ship, you light the fires, and you hang on!. OK, so it's a bit more involved than that, but you get my drift. I had a good crew, maybe the best crew I've ever assembled. You might think it's easy to get five people that are mutually compatible - well, six including me - but throw them together into a glorified tin can for a few years with no chance of backing out, and you'll soon see how disagreements can quickly escalate into full-on factional warfare. That's part of being a good commander. You gotta be able to keep things running smoothly, intervene BEFORE the little niggles go nuclear. But you also gotta let some things play out - you can't be too controlling, too "hands-on". A good crew won't be nannied. Why six? I guess the shrinks at GSC figured it's the ideal number for these kinda missions. You got capacity so that everyone gets enough sleep, and yeah, there's always someone with enough experience and training to fill in if anyone's out of commission for a bit. More than that though, and boom: the costs just go through the roof, y'know?"
"Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the mission. Like I said, the crew I had picked was top-notch. Of course, I'd worked with all of them before. You can't rely on official performance reviews when you're assembling a crew. Well, for a milk run maybe you could, but not for a multi-year voyage. Everyone knows that commanders will boost the assessments of the guys they want to get rid of. Outstanding' and Excellent' are just bullshit words in the file. Nah, you gotta work with a guy to really know them. And Tubs and I went to the same school, did you know that? Not rocket school - I'm mean at high school. We weren't in the same class - I was a year ahead of him - but he kinda looked up to me, and well, because we were both in the astronomy club, we became. . . friends. Why 'Tubs'? Well, he was a bit on the tubby side as a kid, and you know how these nicknames sometimes stick. Once he started growing and playing some sport, the puppy fat melted away and he became more like the guy whose photos was plastered all over the vids afterwards . . . but yeah, Tubs and I go way back."
I reached down and unobtrusively adjusted my cock, which had become uncomfortable within the confines of my underwear.
"I guess you've read the bios on the rest of the crew, so I don't need to tell you their life stories. Red was my Executive Officer - yeah, right, XO. It was his first mission as XO, but after four trips - two of which were deep runs - I figured he could handle it. Pauli was our Engineer. Named after the physicist, if the rumours are to be believed. Something that won't be in his file - that guy is a fuckin' genius with a laser cutter and a torque wrench. Can fix just about anything. Let's see now . . . Dan. I brought Dan on board as our robot wrangler. It's hard to believe, but for a big man that guy has the gentlest hands. You really need someone with patience and skill and, ah, what's that word, finesse? Yeah you need finesse to operate a remote vehicle, and Dan's your man. Plus, he cooks a mean soylent chilli! Jorge was my first officer, he. . . sorry, what exactly does a first officer do? He's my backup. He's qualified to do everything I do: fly the ship, navigate in-system, program the quant, yada yada yada. All the fun without any of the responsibility! And last, but definitely not least, Tubs, xenobiologist and ship's medical officer. And me, Mark, ship's captain."
"Yeah, you noticed, all guys huh. It's just a coincidence, not a conspiracy. My first choice XO was pregnant at the time, so for obvious reasons, she couldn't come. Not that she would have minded, but the rules about no kids on deep space missions are there for a reason. No, I won't name her because she's still in active service. Maybe when she retires . . . and only if she says OK - she'll bust my balls otherwise. Don't laugh, I'm serious, she is one feisty lady! But the other thing that you probably won't pick up from just reading the bios is that we've all got what they call "good genes". That's no accident. For deep space missions, the sustained low-G environment and the cosmic radiation combine to really fuck with your body. Even with exercise and myo-stim and all the shielding, even with this new telomere therapy, it's hard on your body. So I work on the principal that you start with the best physiques, since they have the deepest reserves. No gym bunnies though, I'm talking prime natural specimens, you get my drift?"
"There's not much to say about the launch. It was pretty much your standard Luna maglev launch. That stuff about lighting the fires? Nah, that's just some shit we talk from the good ol' days of chemical fuelled rockets. Yeah, chemicals! Crazy huh? And no-one launches from Earth anymore. Gravity well's too deep. Anyway, everything was just, well, normal, I guess. I programmed the quant with our destination system, got Jorge to check the coordinates, and we made the jump at the L2 portal, just as planned. Have you ever made the jump? Well, how can I describe it? It's like falling and being squashed at the same time. It seems to last forever but it only takes a heartbeat. And when you arrive at the other side, it's like your insides want to be on the outside. Some people puke the first time. Hell, I did. Some people puke every time, but I'm not one to judge a person by their inner ear."
"First thing you do when you arrive in-system is to raise the EM shields and to listen. No-one wants to announce themselves to a potentially hostile ETI with a blast of active search radar. Fastest way to get fried, yeah? So standard GSC protocol is to stooge around for a while, and listen for any artificial electromagnetic emissions. We know how all the main sequence stars radiate, ditto for your typical gas giant. So we're listening for anything else. Since this star had a decent Oort cloud, we programmed the ship to make us look like a dirty snowball and inserted ourselves into a highly elliptical orbit around the star, which was somewhat smaller and hotter than Sol. Why elliptical? You get a good range of scan angles on the planets. Makes for a shorter mission too. So we sat in orbit for a week or so, just listening. Nix. Nada. Nothing. Now, many systems really are lifeless, but you can't tell just by listening. You have to search. So after a week or so, we launched a bunch of probes. They won't fool a really advanced intelligence, but to any ETI at level 4 or below, they look just like your average Kuiper belt object. . . uh, yeah, an asteroid, a rock. Inside they contain a whole raft of sensors and shit, as well as some active EM. If ET gets angry, he'll just zap a few probes instead of us - well that's the theory anyway. So as I was saying, we dropped some probes. And I guess that's when things started to get interesting."
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"Hey Mark. . . " My ship, my rules, and that means that once we've made the jump, we call each other by name, not rank or title.
"Yes, Dan, what is it?"
"I'm getting something weird on one of the probes."
"Weird how?"
"Weird like I'm never seen anything like it before. Abnormal concentrations of molecular carbon."
"OK, run the self-check diagnostics and reset the probe."
"Already done that." That's another reason I like Dan - he's not an idiot. "Diagnostics report is all clear. Probe has been reset and is still reporting unusually high concentrations of almost pure carbon."
"OK, what are we reading? Could it be contaminants from Luna?"
"No way. Isotopic ratios are way off for it to be contaminants from either Luna or Earth. And the carbon is really pure. I mean 99.999% pure."
"Talk to me Dan. What else are we reading? Anything else apart from carbon"
"There's the usual low-weight elements: hydrogen, helium, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, etcetera. Nothing out of the ordinary. Not much metal though. Very little sodium, potassium or calcium. Some nickel. No iron to speak of."
"OK then, tell me more about the carbon."
"Getting a rough idea of the mix of allotropes now. Looks like mainly nanotubes. Long, long nanotubes. Some low weight buckyballs, traces of diamond and graphite. Hmmm, that's interesting, almost no amorphous carbon."
Yeah, that WAS interesting. Amorphous carbon is natural. Some low weight buckyballs are too. But nanotubes are artificial - you don't find them just floating around the galaxy. They have to be made. And something that is made implies a maker. I blinked at the ship's navcon to activate the PA system.
"All stations. This is the captain speaking." That rule about not using rank or title? It doesn't apply in some situations.
"All stations. Go to alert level 2. Repeat. All stations go to alert level 2. Jorge, Tubs, repot to the bridge immediately. Pauli, have all systems on standby. Acknowledge."
"Aye skipper" Pauli was first to reply. "Main engines on standby. Auxiliary on standby. Primary shields on standby. Secondary on standby. All systems nominal." Pauli loves his machines like a child loves a pet - with all his heart. He keeps them purring like a kitten.
"On my way Mark."
"Be there in a tick, Cap." That was Tubs. He calls me `Cap' when he wants to yank my chain.
Jorge was first to arrive. Tubs was a minute or so behind, blond hair still damp from the shower, a small blob of shaving foam below his left ear. I absent-mindedly reached out and wiped it off.
"OK, this is the situation. We have a probe reporting abnormally high concentrations of molecular carbon. We have not detected any EM radiation thus far. Assessments please gentlemen."
Tubs was first to respond.
"What sort of carbon? What concentration? Isotopic ratio? Mass?" Good little scientist, always hungry for data. Jorge looked at me and then at Dan. I knew what he was going to ask. Part of his job description is to ask the obvious questions.
"Is it a faulty probe?"
I looked over to Dan.
"Negative. Probe is fine. I've got another one on the way. Should be in the general vicinity in six hours." Good man, Dan. One step ahead. He relayed to Tubs the figures he'd mentioned to me, along with some more detailed stuff about isotopes and molecular weights. And then I heard something that really got my attention.
"Did you say `kilotons'?"
"Yes Mark. Kilotons. As in thousands of tons. Mostly long tubes of graphene, buckyballs of different sizes, and maybe one hundredth of one percent crystalline carbon, otherwise known as diamond."
"How much exactly?"
"It's too early to be certain, but the probe estimates the total mass of carbon is somewhere in the order of 10^7 - 10^8 kg."
HO-LY SHIT. Between ten thousand and a hundred thousand metric tons of it! And not soot, but useful stuff like buckytubes, and graphene. And if we could extract it, a few tons of diamond! The weenies at GSC HQ would go ape-shit at this stuff. Come back from a deep space mission with this sort of treasure, and we'd be heroes. Careers have been made on smaller discoveries. Hell, this was life changing.
"OK, Dan. Let me know when the second probe is on station. Tubs, go finish your shower. Jorge, let's go chat with Red."
Red would be grumpy - who isn't when their sleep shift is interrupted? - but this was too important to wait. After me, Red was the most experienced man on board, and I needed his opinion. Red was snoring gently when we arrived at his compartment. A rather obvious bulge tented his sleep sack.
"Hey Red. Wake up!" I put a hand on his beefy shoulder and shook him gently at first, then more vigorously.
"Who's the lucky lady that's getting you all het up?" Jorge, with the not-so-subtle question.
The sleeping man opened one eye, and glared at Jorge.
"None of your fuckin' business, pal." Then he noticed me in the cabin. The colour rose in his face. "Sorry about the language, Mark. You know he's always teasing me about my luck with the girls back on Luna."
"Yeah, well let's forget about the lovely ladies of Luna for a minute. We have a developing situation. I need your analysis, right now." That got his attention.
As I briefed him on what Dan's probe had found, Red rolled out of his bunk, stood up, stretched, and started getting dressed. Red must be one part yeti, one part human. He has a thick pelt of reddish-brown hair on his chest, back, ass and legs, and a curly beard that is just starting to develop silvery-grey streaks. I've seen him naked before of course. We've all seen each other naked. But in the shower he was soft, cock almost hidden in a dense thatch of wiry red pubes. As he pulled on a tatty blue GSC jock, I caught a glimpse of it now, still half hard, projecting from between his legs. Jorge seemed to notice it too. The pouch of the jock was straining as he stuffed his balls and dick into it. Idly I wondered whether the low G environment made it more of less likely that the elastic would give way. Less, I decided. Red finished dressing, and the three of us made our way to the galley.
"So, what do you think?"
Red didn't answer immediately. I knew him well enough not to push. He would consider his words carefully before speaking, especially given the circumstances.
"The fact that it's not natural means we gotta investigate. This is exactly why they send us meat puppets instead of just a bunch of ROVs. A robot can tell you the chemical composition of a rock down to the last atoms of silicon and oxygen, but it can't tell you shit about something it wasn't programmed for. And this sure as fuck aint anything it was programmed for."
"Jorge?" I wanted my first officer's opinion too.
"Agreed. But let's wait and see what Danny-boy's second probe turns up. No point wasting our time if it turns out some weenie back on Luna left a pencil in the wrong place, eh?"
"OK then, we wait. But in the meantime, I want each of you to draft a mission plan. Jorge: you concentrate on a possible materials recovery operation. Red: you focus on the possibility that whatever made this stuff is still around here somewhere. Any questions?"
I left the two of them to grumble about the jobs I'd just dumped on them. Truth is, GSC has a standard procedure for everything, but I wanted to keep my guys busy. The devil makes work for idle hands, an' all that.
Five and a bit hours later, Dan's second probe was on station. The main cabin was crowded with all six of us present; everyone was eager to find out what was out there. The idea of returning to Earth as heroes is intoxicating to most men, and we were no exception. The tension was palpable. Dan was hunched over a console, looking at the numbers that were coming in over the narrow-beam laser link.
"OK, I'm getting similar readings to the first probe. Mainly carbon nanotubes - long ones - traces of diamond and graphite. Isotopic ratios are off the charts. I think we can rule out contamination from Luna."
A collective release of breath. Whatever it was, it was real!
"What about organics?" Tubs wanted to know. As resident biologist, that was his speciality.
"Checking now. OK, we definitely have water. And some simple organics - hydrocarbons, some esters, aldehydes, ketones - as well as some nitrogen compounds: mainly ammonia, urea, and, yep, some amines. Definitely picking up some amino acids."
"Anything more? Any proteins?"
"Not seeing any."
Amino acids alone aren't proof of life, but proteins are, and their absence was a pretty good sign that we were the only living things within the general vicinity - a sphere roughly a million klicks or 3 light seconds in diameter. I could tell that Tubs was disappointed, although he hid it well. Scientists are always on the lookout for things to write papers about, and extra-terrestrial life would be almost a guaranteed Nobel prize.
"OK guys, no sign of ET - it looks like it's just us and a shitload of nanotubes. Jorge, what's your plan?"
Jorge outlined his scavenging mission. It wasn't too different from what was in the GSC bible, so I didn't bother changing anything. Perhaps if I had. . . well, who knows? Essentially, we would work in two teams of three: Me, Tubs, and Dan in one team; and Jorge, Red, and Pauli in the other. Each team would work an eight hour shift and then rest for eight. The robots would do all the grunt work, but we still had to have someone to help them in case they jammed or got stuck. One team member would work outside the confines of the ship, untethered, so as not to get tangled with the `bots. Another would be in the loading bay, operating the grapples. But since EVA is physically demanding, they would swap duties every few hours, and both would be be fully suited up. The third team member would stationed on the bridge, monitoring the other two and generally keeping an eye out.
I guess we'd done maybe ten, twelve shifts when it happened. I was on EVA duty and for the past hour had been wrestling with one of the `bots that had got itself into a spin. Probably a jammed thruster. I'd finally stabilised it, and radioed to Tubs that I was starting to tire and that he should get ready to change places. No answer.
"Hey, lard ass, turn your radio on!"
Still no answer. I switched over to the ship's primary channel.
"Dan, this is Mark. Tell Tubs to turn on his radio. I can't hear him."
No response from Dan either. Damn, that probably meant that my radio was out. No reason to panic. I had plenty of propellant left, and apart from the distant blue-white star we were orbiting, the ship was the brightest object in the sky and only a dozen or so klicks away. I oriented my suit with a few quick squirts on the attitude jets, and hit the main thruster. A gentle force pushed me back in the suit as I accelerated to about a tenth of a G. That would be enough to get me back to the ship in about 15 minutes. Driving a space suit is pretty easy only you get used to it. The trick is to remember that to have to spend as much effort slowing down as you did speeding up. Rookies always overshoot their target because they're used to some sort of constant resistance, be it air or gravity. I was remembering how bad I was at my first few attempts during GSC training, when I slowly became aware that I was starting to feel weightless again. I checked the main thruster control: ON. If my thruster was on, I should be feeling the reaction force, but yet I was, without any doubt now, almost weightless. Something must be wrong with the thruster. But I could still hear the hiss of the the exhaust transmitted through the metal and plastic of the suit. What then? I toggled it off. The hiss stopped. On. Hiss, but no acceleration. Impossible! What was happening? I looked over towards the ship again, but it was still just a tiny dot. There was no way they'd be able to see me unless they were looking for me, and even then, they'd need a telescope.
A new sensation. Now I wasn't just weightless, now I was falling backwards. Holy shit! Some force was not only counteracting the suit's thrusters, it was actually moving me in the opposite direction. I activated the emergency beacon, and breathed a sigh of relief as the flashes of light from the strobe illuminated the `bot that I'd been working on. The beacon would emit both a visible light flash and a radio pulse every second for the next 5 days or so, plenty long enough for the guys to track me down. I would be hungry, of course, but the suit could keep me alive for a week at least.
No sooner had that comforting thought entered my head when the dashboard in my suit went blank. The hiss of the thruster faded into silence. I tried the attitude jets, but they were dead too. I looked around for the broken `bot, but the pulse of the strobe light had also ceased. Fuck! A complete power outage. Without power to recycle and purify my air, I would quickly suffocate. I wouldn't even last an hour. Fuck, fuck, fuck! In the sudden silence, I could hear the blood pounding in my temples, and I closed my eyes and tried to bring my heart rate under control. I became aware of the sound of my own breathing - rapid, gasping breaths - and it took me several minutes before I was able to fight off the rising sense of panic. Without the beacon, my only hope now was that someone on the ship had been looking out the window at the right place at the right time. Otherwise, they wouldn't even know in which general direction to search. When I opened my eyes again, I could no longer see the bright speck that was the ship. Something had re-oriented the suit. I heard a noise, a sort of rustling, then there was a blinding white flash, the rush of escaping air, and I passed out.
When I came to, my first thought was `is this the afterlife?'. It was absolutely dark - pitch black. No stars, no light of any kind. Explosive decompression of a suit in deep space is generally fatal, yet somehow I sensed I wasn't dead. I tried shouting, but I couldn't move my jaw or tongue, nor could I consciously take a breath. I tried holding my breath, but I didn't seem to be able to do that either. I tried moving my arms and legs, but the message from my brain didn't reach my limbs. Shit! maybe I had survived, but was so badly injured that I was a vegetable. Oh god, the idea was horrifying, and I felt my throat constrict and tears well up in the corners of my eyes. It took me a few seconds to realise: dead men don't cry. My self-pity had inadvertently given me proof I was alive! I tried to count the beats of my heart, but I couldn't hear or feel any pulse. Did I even have a heart anymore? Maybe I was now a disembodied head, some gruesome brain-in-a-vat science experiment, kept alive with a glucose drip. This time I couldn't stop the tears from flowing.
Time passed. I had no way of knowing how much, except that my body was telling me that it was hungry. I sensed that I was in an enclosed space. Maybe it was the faintest of echoes, I dunno, but my gut instinct told me I wasn't floating in outer space. My brain, deprived of any visual stimulation, started hallucinating. I saw swirls of colour, cascading shapes, fractal patterns in monochrome and technicolour, sparks and fireworks, dots and lines dancing across my sight in ever-changing patterns. Unable to look away, I let my mind drift.
Time passed. I opened my eyes, blinked. Blinked again. Saw a mottled pattern of dark on less-dark in front of me. I blinked again. The pattern did not change. This was no hallucination - there was light and I could see! Oh, thank god! I concentrated on the pattern, but it was too dark to make out any details. I closed my eyes, opened them again. Perhaps there was a darker blob in the middle. It was impossible to tell for sure.
A faint tingling sensation started in my scalp, and gradually spread downwards, seeming to warm my skin as it passed. I felt the hairs on the back on my neck stand up, and I involuntarily shivered. I felt it pass through my shoulders, and down my arms. I felt all the hairs on my forearms stand up, then the ones on backs on my hands, and finally the tiny hairs on the first joints of my fingers. My fingertips pulsed with every beat of my heart. My palms too. The tingling inched its way down my torso. I felt my nipples swell and stiffen to hard little nubs. When the sensation reached my flanks, I shivered again, unable to control myself. Down it flowed, inexorable, a wave receding. I felt all the hairs on my butt cheeks gradually stand to attention. As the sensation passed through my perineum and reached my crotch, my balls felt suddenly heavy in their sack, heavy and hot. The tingling spread out from my crotch, spiralling around and down my thighs and leaving me weak at the knees. Down it passed, down through my calf muscles, the soles of my feet, and finally to my toes.
I gasped.
to be continued