Wednesday, July 11

79. (Thomas Viancetti: The Gate at Raimos)

The small, black spacecraft lands on the platform outside Viancetti's estate at three hours past mid-day, as the local sun is just passing its pinnacle in the sky. It's a sleek craft, solid in color both on its frame and in its views-shields, all of which have been darkened for the anonymity of the pilot. It lands gracefully, but with a quickness that seems to indicate that the pilot is in something of a hurry.

A hatch on the side opens and a man steps out; he's wearing a long brown jacket and Earth-style horn-rimmed glasses. His hair is short and brown, cut in a vaguely military style. "Is this the estate of Professor Thomas Viancetti?" he calls out as he approaches.

Viancetti stands up from his deck chair, painfully aware of the creaking in his joints. The man approaching him is certainly not young, but to even be his age again would be a blessing. The professor's hair is grey, the hairline receding, and his eyes are a pale blue; he's thin, almost worrisomely so, and leans on a cane as he rises. "I'm Thomas Viancetti, yes, and this is my home. Might I ask you what your business is here?"

The ship's pilot flashes a badge of some kind, federal identification. Viancetti don't get a chance to read it. "I'm Agent Sam Burns, with the Expansionist Regime. Professor, there's a situation up at the gate. I've been ordered to take you up to examine it."

The professor laughs and sits back down. "You're kidding, right? I haven't been to the gate--much less in space--in thirty years. I'm retired, son. Find one of the younger researchers to deal with it--"

"That's not an option, professor. Travel registries tell us that you're the only gate expert on Raimos. The rest have been gathering over the last few days at Mars, dealing with the discoveries there."

"Discoveries?" Burns just nods in response and does not elaborate. "So if they're already on Mars, just have them come through the gate--I don't seen the problem."

The agent clears his throat. "That is the problem, professor. The gate is not operating."

Viancetti stands up again, slowly. "Not operating?" Is that even possible? he thinks. We've been flying our ships through it for over a century, with no negative effects or accidents--our record is perfect, the gate is perfect. The gate is always open. We wouldn't know how to shut it off if we wanted to. "Do you know why?"

"We suspect that possibly a ship passing through it clipped against one of the edges, or a piece of debris from some vessel or other smashed into it. With the hubbub on Mars security on this end has been a little... lax. We need someone who knows the gate's surface intimately, and you are, as far as we know, the only person on this side who's seen it up close."

Behind him--inside the house--Viancetti can hear the warbling of his vidlink trying to get his attention. It's probably just a videomarketer, he assumes. "Very well."

Minutes later he's sitting in the co-pilot's seat of the sleek black ship, breaking atmosphere. The gate, from this distance, is little more than a speck. It grows into an octagonal ring as they quickly approach it; a hundred yards in diameter, made up of a three-sided framework with glyphs carved into all three faces of each eight sides. Each side of the octagon officially denoted with a letter of the English alphabet--A, B, C, and so on--and each face of each side is given a Roman numeral--AI, AII, BI, HII, and so forth.

The ship floats in silence for several minutes while the pair inside visually regard it. "Do you see anything that stands out, Professor?" Agent Burn asks.

"Nothing... large. I expect I'll have to space-walk along the whole thing and examine it. This kind of operation is why I retired."

"Trust me, professor, if there was another way we would be more than happy to oblige."

Viancetti climbs into an excessively thick space-suit--a single-man transport frame, as it's referred to in official channels. His hands and feet strap in to levers that control the hands and feet of the suit, keeping his extremities safe and warm under several inches of heated insulation. His head and face, however, are not as well protected; for the sake of visibility, only a layer of tinted glass protects his face, held in place by metal and plastic shielding the rest of his head. Strapped to the back is a self-propulsion system, a small cluster of propulsion engines pointed in different directions.

He uses this propulsion system to leave the ship and float out to the edge of the gate. It is a long and painstaking process of surface examination, looking for new scratches or blemishes on the grey surface.

"Have you found anything yet, Professor?" Burns' voice hisses electronically in Viancetti's ear, two hours later.

"Nothing so far." Off in the distance he can see a cluster of personal craft of various sizes--travellers, expecting to make their way to Mars and, likely after, Earth. Black ships matching the one he rode up in fly circles around them, no doubt keeping them detained. "Do you hear that, Burns? There's some kind of... radio interference now."

"I'm picking it up on the sensors, yes. No idea what it is. I thought it was coming from the other ER ships, but it's not a frequency we usually use."

"Do you have a bad feeling about it?" Viancetti asks. Burns answers but the professor is no longer listening--he's not even breathing, for a moment. And then he's breathing very fast. "Burns, are you seeing this? Look at the glyph on EIII--facing you, you can't miss it." Of course he can't miss it. It's glowing a light green color. Over a century of gate use and each glyph has only ever remained dark.

"Professor, come back to the ship."

"I'm going to have a closer look." Viancetti uses the propulsion system to make his way across the full diameter of the gate, to the glowing glyph.

"Viancetti, I really think this is a bad idea." The agent is starting to sound panicked.

"There's no lighting mechanism, Burns. It's just glowing, with some kind of... radiation, maybe. This suit is insulated for radiation, isn't it? Good, I'm going to--wait. Wait. More of them are lighting up now--AII, BIII, FI--now all of them. All twenty-four."

"Professor!"

"Quiet, Burns. You brought me here to do a job." He uses the propulsion system to float out and away from the gate, trying to get a better look at it from a distance. His scientific curiosity has gotten the best of him--deep down, he wants to know why this sudden and new glow is happening.

"Professor, something is happening. Something else. I really think you should come back to the ship."

"It's moving," Viancetti mutters under my breath. The sides of the gate are rotating slowly, silently--and then they stop. The glow on the glyphs intensifies--and there's a flash, and for a moment the professor is blinded.

I can hear Agent Burns shouting over the radio, no longer just to me: "This is Agent Sam Burns to Expansionist Regime command! We have a code beta--repeat, a code beta!" The poor man sounds even more panicked now.

Viancetti's vision clears and he can see why Burn's is yelling. A ship--a clearly alien ship--has come through the gate. It is roughly the same size as the agent's black ship. It's green, ovular, shaped almost like an egg with small round bumps on its surface. It floats there silently, motionlessly. After a moment it rotates around to face the gate, and emits four lights, beaming them directly on four sides of the gate. The lights vanish, then reappear, shining now on the four remaining sides.

"Professor, I think you should come back to the ship now," Burns yells in my ear. "This is a really bad time to be unprotected out there."

Viancetti starts floating back towards the black craft, never taking his eyes off the new ship or the gate. The latter is breaking apart, each of the eight sides separating from its neighbors and floating outwards, triangular rods forming a larger, incomplete framework. He's halfway back to Burns' ship when the gate pieces stop floating and start projecting a bright blue light from each end. The lights curve and connect with each other, and suddenly the hundred-yard wide frame of alien stone has grown to a five-hundred yard frame of glowing light.

"Move it professor, we need to get away from--" A high pitched noise interrupts him. Before Viancetti can react a shock wave tears through space and he's sent tumbling head-over-heels away from both the black ship of Agent Burns and the green ship that came through the gate. As he rights himself and stops his tumble, his breath lodges in his throat. Floating silently in the midst of the gate is a massive alien craft. Easily a thousand yards long and four hundred yards wide, it's shaped like a huge, elongated egg with bulbous lumps covering its surface, much like the smaller craft. On these lumps Viancetti can see what looks to him like propulsion units, weapons, portholes, and hatches.

The high pitched noise ceases. The professor can hear Burns shouting more official code mumbo-jumbo into the radio, desperate now to reach his superiors.

This is it, he thinks, this is first contact. This is alien life making contact with humans for the first time. We've always known they were out there--we had just never actually met them.

The first, smaller ship floats up and into the larger ship. Several seconds pass.

"Professor, I've been ordered to get you the hell out of here, this is--Oh." An object--a missile launches from the massive ship. In hits Burns' ship dead-center, and the sleek black craft crumples, folds, and explodes. There's a burst of static in Viancetti's ear, then nothing.

A piece of debris hits the propulsion suit and again the professor is sent tumbling, this time towards the massive ship. The glass protecting his face cracks, and the crack widens. He breathes out all the air in his lungs and squeezes his eyes shut just as it shatters. Basic space-walk training conditions you to react as such, just in case there is a ship to catch you, though chances of survival are still almost nil. The last thing he sees is the massive alien ship turning its attention on the cluster of black ships rapidly approaching it, weapons blazing. They don't stand a chance, but it buys time for the civilian travellers to get away.

An instant later Viancetti slams bodily into the alien craft. It's almost soft, and gives a little with the impact. He bounces off, spinning end over end. All of this takes less than a couple seconds, and then he's hit with a blast of heat and can see light through his clenched eyelids--and then, nothing.

Friday, July 6

78. (Days and Hours and Nothing.)

September. It was unseasonably hot, and the air was thick with insects as we waded through the tall grass to our secret spot, our clubhouse without a house. We babbled on about everything and nothing and everything again. Girls. Sports. It's sorta all blurry now. I remember dropping into the couch, casually, and Sam throwing himself into the broken recliner.

Some time passed. I don't know how long. And then there was a light, just floating in the air in front of Sam, and immediately after that the light was gone, replaced with...

With what, I don't know. A floating shadow? An emptiness? It defies me to this day how to accurately describe it. Sam looked at it cross-eyed, and reached out and touched it. "It's cold," he said--and then his hand was gone. There was no blood, there was just screaming, screaming from all of us. He tried to pull away but it was like something was holding him in place--no, pulling him in. Soon his arm up to the elbow was gone, vanishing into that floating shadow, that... void. I'll never forget the look on his face, such pure, uninhibited fear, panic, pain.

I grabbed his other arm and pulled--we all pulled, but it was like he was set in stone. It had pulled him in up to his shoulder, and was pressing up against his chest. I could hear his ribs breaking, shattering, crumbling inside. Sam let out a wail of agony--and he died. We fell away, screaming, and his body vanished completely, sucked into that glimmer of nothingness.

Only it wasn't a glimmer anymore. As it had pulled him in it had grown: the size of a baseball by the time it reached his elbow, as big as a pumpkin when it killed him. It wasn't growing anymore, just... floating there.

I blacked out after that.

When I woke up I was on a stretcher in an ambulance. Our secret hiding place was gone--someone had erected a huge white tent over it. Several large men with rifles and gas-masks stood around it in a circle. Men and women in lab coats bustled around. I didn't know what was going on. As I lay there staring at the white fabric, a gust of wind blew one of the tent flaps open and I caught a glimpse inside--the nothingness was the size of a large horse.

Suddenly there was a scuffle--someone was shouting something, some kind of horrible howl was coming from inside the tent--and then the scientist types came running out, and a moment later the tent itself vanished, replaced by... nothing, even larger.

The more it took in, the more it grew. I imagine some poor schmuck tripped and brushed against it and got sucked in.

It's still growing now. We're driving South, towards Mexico. Oklahoma is gone--totally gone. It just keeps getting bigger--we can't run forever. We're not the only ones. Everyone is running--North or South or East or West, everyone running out. It's only a matter of time before there's nowhere to run to.