Short Fiction
RE-ENTRY
Prelude to Tulpa
The two government agents had just arrived at the eastern crest of the valley. The sun was setting against the valley’s other side, dipping below the comparatively low peaks of the Front Range. The split pinkish light filtered between the peaks of the Rockies and into the valley, giving the two agents a spectacular view of the climb they had just completed.
For two and a half hours they had stalked upward, the valley to their backs, in order to get a better view of the valley. Jacqui, the female agent, reached the top first and bent low with her hands on her knees. Her partner Rick met her two minutes later, in a similar condition. They were both technically field agents, but they felt that today had taken that definition a little too far. They hadn’t has such a long walk at any time in recent memory; the last few years had been nothing but desks and filing cabinets for both of them. Unfortunately, this time they’d both drawn the short straw and had been sent on this particular errand.
‘At least the scenery’s nice,’ Rick said after he’d caught his breath.
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘You’re just unfit.’
‘I’m fitter than you are.’
Together they looked into the bowl of the valley, which was shaped vaguely like a cat’s eye. The glow of the sunset made the shadows long, so that the whole vista was striped by the shadows of hardy clusters of pine-trees, and huge boulders larger than jeeps. A few animals too far away to distinguished grazed on the southern end, towards the foot of what Jacqui recognised as Pikes Peak. A blue lake, the name of which escaped her, took up about a tenth of the central area, with more evergreens gathered around its westerly edge. It was there, near the edge of the woodland, that they saw what they had been sent to find.
‘I see it,’ Jacqui said.
‘Jesus. How did you make that out? It looks just like a rock.’
‘The smoke was a clue.’
The object had a thick pillar of grey smoke rising from it, but the air was cold there and it didn’t rise above the tree line. It was no wonder they hadn’t seen it from the bottom of the valley, where the ground was so uneven and the flora got in the way. It was a spacecraft, of American design, that had crash-landed following a black-out of radio communication during re-entry. It had scudded through the atmosphere too shallowly, and as such caused too much interference for the GSP Mission Control Centre – located just ten miles further back along the Rockies. The craft had operated without radio guidance or the help of AIs for three minutes, and so the flight path had remained uncorrected.
The craft hit the ground not seven kilometres from where the two GSP agents stood, carving a red-brown trench across the valley, and coming to rest amongst the pines.
Rick began to rub the grit off his cotton trousers. ‘Looks like a write-off to me.’
‘Don’t bother dusting down,’ Jacqui said, ‘we’ve got a few more miles to go yet.’
She set off immediately, back down the steady slope of the valley’s crest, this time in the direction of the downed craft. Rick sighed theatrically and then, when Jacqui chose not to react, followed his partner back into the shadow of the mountain.
*
It took almost as long to reach the spacecraft as it had to climb the valley. It was dark when they arrived, and through the darkness they could see the flickering flames that danced amidst the wreckage. The trench ran behind it like a tail. Within it was a turgid stream of liquid clay, pooled around chunks of ceramic plating and twisted pieces of burnt metal.
The air became acrid. Rick was the first to touch the outer hull of the shuttle, which was two storeys high. It no longer looked like a big rock. It looked scorched and broken, a once-fabulous piece of high technology turned into nothing more than a foul-smelling death trap. It would be a mausoleum. He didn’t expect to find anybody alive inside.
‘We have to check,’ Jacqui pointed out.
‘I suppose we should you energy shields,’ he replied sullenly, and pressed a few tiny buttons on the box clipped to his belt. A series of very thin, invisible barriers of magnetic fields and scorching plasma covered his body, protecting him from risks like harmful gas, tongues of flame, and even vacuum. They couldn’t stop a bullet, but then agents of the Global Space Program didn’t expect to be shot it. If they messed up, it generally involved a disaster on the scale of the wrecked ship in front of them.
Jacqui activated her shield as well, and approached the door. It was still sealed, but she had a decoder that had been pre-set for that one purpose, and the shuttle hatch hissed open with a release of pressurised gas.
‘We’re in.’
‘Don’t touch anything that looks dangerous,’ said Rick.
‘If it looks dangerous,’ she said, ‘why would I touch it?’
‘I’m only saying.’
They entered. They didn’t expect to find anybody in the crews’ quarters. It was empty anyway. They moved on to the cockpit.
‘I see someone,’ said Rick. He pointed to a burnt arm.
‘How many people should here be again?’
‘Four,’ he replied. ‘The Director from Karlson Enterprises; an older male; and two siblings, brother and sister, about my age.’
‘Small team.’
‘It was supposed to have been a short trip.’
The shuttle had just arrived from the moon. It was hard for Rick to believe, that the narrow burnt-out area he was standing in had not only seen outer space, but had gone as far as the Earth’s moon and stayed in orbit. The crew itself had been a team deployed by GSP to complete the Lunar Farside Radio Laboratory, a lab and its accompanying radio dish that was intended to monitor the movement of faraway stars and planets, pick up details that might apply to weather studies back on Earth to predict destructive weather patterns, and perhaps even intercept radio transmissions from other species that might exist elsewhere in the universe. Rick didn’t know if the dish had ever been finished, or if the lab had been fully operational by the time the shuttle had made its unscheduled return to Earth. All he knew is that there were a few “Eyes Only” and “Top Secret” labels attached to most of the files, and that he was just a lowly agent who did everything from criminal investigations related to GSP projects to dumb assignments like finding a downed spacecraft.
Jacqui position herself at the nose of the cockpit, and looked back towards Rick. She could see all of the seats – eight in all – but what she saw she couldn’t explain.
‘Two bodies,’ she said.
Rick moved to stand next to her, to see what Jacqui was seeing.
‘Well, that one there is the young male, the brother.’ He accessed his the information database that his resident nanomachines carried with them. ‘James Aylesworth. He was a technician. His sister Maria Aylesworth was the pilot.’
‘The pilot’s seat is empty,’ Jacqui said.
Rick cleared this throat. ‘No wonder they crashed.’
‘Is this the sort of thing you laugh at? Get serious, will you? What about the others?’
‘Well, I would guess that our answers lie with this…’
Rick knelt into the empty pilot’s seat, and leant over its headrest.
Position in the seat behind was an object that he couldn’t even begin to explain. It looked like a huge rock: a rock as big as a man, and just the same shape as a person would be, sitting in the chair. It was all one block, as black as coal. Tiny facets glinted in the pencil-thin beams of light that filtered through the scorched windshield.
‘I don’t think anybody would bring a statue home from the moon … do you?’
Jacqui shook her head. ‘No. I defiantly don’t think they would.’
*
With the shuttle located, the two agents sent their message back to the Mission Control Centre, which was housed beneath one of the larger mountains of the range, approximately twenty stories underground. The base retrieved the signal, and told the agents to stay where they were; a chopper would come and pick them up in just a few minutes.
The chopper arrived. Rick and Jacqui were bundled into it, and it took off almost immediately without even giving them enough time to get their headgear in place.
‘Hey!’ Jacqui shouted down at the agent leading the recovery squad. ‘You’ll keep us informed, right?’
The agent spoke into his mic as he pulled his jacket tighter around his chest. He was only half-listening, more concerned with the task at hand. His team was conducing a more thorough search of the craft, primary for the other two bodies, as well as the removal of the corpse and the strange stone artefact. They were also instructed to conduct brief assessments of the material the craft was made of, so that a list could be compiled of the areas that might be salvaged and reused, or at least sold. The Global Space Program swallowed funds like a tornado swallows trailers.
‘Of course we will, agent,’ he lied. ‘We’ll keep you updated every step of the way.’
He turned to the officer that he was treating as his second-in-command. ‘Keep searching. Make sure you cover every square inch. We don’t have a lot of time.’
*
The stone statue began to soften almost as soon as they began hauling it from the shuttle. It weighed a ton and took three men to get it out of the auto-ergonomic chair. They carried it awkwardly out of the cockpit and outside. The black stone soon softened to the consistency of clay, and was already beginning to fall away by the time the statue was loaded into the helicopter. They strapped it down anyway. During take-off, a segment fell away from the area they took to be a shoulder.
There was cloth underneath; clean, navy-blue cotton. It was the padded shoulder of a suit.
*
*
Previous stories in the Gas Giant sequence were printed in Pantechnicon magazine. The final piece, "Tulpa", will be printed in Pantechnicon #9 in April this year. You can discuss this story and others at the Forum.