The Rescue Read online

  “How do you expect to communicate with them?” Raedawn asked.

  “Good question,” David said. “In all the old movies we blink prime numbers at them, and they let us know when they understand by sending the next one in the series.”

  “Got a flashlight?” Raedawn asked.

  “There’s emergency lights in the airlock.”

  “I get one,” said Boris. He pushed himself backward through the cargo bay, flipped end for end, and caught himself against the open pressure door. A moment later he was back with a white plastic emergency light in his hand.

  David took it from him, aimed it out the window, and flicked it on and off. He paused, then flicked it on and off twice more. Pause, then three, then five, then seven.

  They waited to see what would happen. Nothing. David again flicked the lights on and off in exactly the same pattern. They waited, several minutes seeming to stretch out in time as they ticked by. Then they saw it, a bright green light that blinked back eleven times from the alien ship’s cabin.

  Communication had begun.

  9

  Six hours later, the aliens had a better command of English than Boris. They had switched to radio within minutes of exhausting the prime numbers below 100 (for which David was grateful after mistakenly sending them 69), and with telescopes trained on one another they pantomimed motions and exchanged the words for them.

  The alien language was nearly impossible to fathom, since it seemed to involve subtle facial gestures as well as spoken words, but the aliens—who called themselves “Kalirae”—seemed to grasp English without any problem. In fact, David suspected there was some sort of telepathy involved, since the Kalirae would occasionally guess at a word that he was sure he had not yet given them. Maybe they had a computer that could extrapolate from root words, but whatever gave them their capability, it was almost spooky.

  Their voices were spooky, too. Their vocal apparatus was different from humans’. They had lips and a tongue and vocal cords, but those vocal cords didn’t produce the same range. There were overtones that sent shivers up David’s spine, like the subliminal sound track to a horror movie. He slowly grew used to it, but the awareness never went away completely.

  The humans had donned their clothing again after they were sure it would be safe. Boris had restacked the cargo in back and fixed some food while David and Raedawn played tutor. Now they held up their rations for the Kalirae to see, naming all the parts: eggs, soy cake, cereal, reconstituted milk-like food product. The taller blue one named Gavwin made a repeated smacking noise with its oversized lips when it heard Raedawn call it that.

  “We have a similar food,” it said. “Tastes very bad.”

  “You got that right.” Raedawn swallowed some and grimaced, then said, “Speaking of bad, why did you shoot at us?”

  Neither humans nor Kalirae had broached that subject yet. David winced, expecting the conversation to turn ugly now, but the greenish-gray one named Harxae answered simply, “That is the way of the Maelstrom. Shoot first or die first. After you have been here as long as we, you will understand.”

  “That’s all you have to say?” Raedawn asked.

  “No. You won the battle; that should be enough.”

  “Well, at least you’re honest.”

  “When it is in our interest.”

  “Right,” David said. That, at least, had to be true. “How long have you been here?”

  “We must define time units. How much time is this?” Harxae made a soft whistle for a few seconds.

  “Do that again,” David said, setting his watch into stopwatch mode. When Harxae whistled again, he timed it and said, “That’s two point four seconds. We have sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour, twenty-four hours per day, and three hundred sixty-five days per year.”

  Harxae and Gavwin stared at each other for a moment, silently communicating, then Gavwin said, “We have been here for two hundred and seventy-three of your years.”

  “Holy shit,” David murmured. “That long?”

  “Yes. Even so, we are relative newcomers. The Shard have been here for thousands.”

  “Have you—I mean, can you—”

  “There is no escape,” Harxae said.

  David leaned forward and looked out the window to the left, where the white cloud surrounding his probe still swirled softly. It had withdrawn the long arm that the Kalirae missile had stretched out of it, apparently drawing the missile back with it, and it had shrunk considerably, but it was still there.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “I’m pretty certain that glow is coming from our sun shining on the part of the cloud that sticks out into normal space.”

  “You are correct,” said Harxae. “But the cloud was dark on that side, was it not? No light from here emerges there. It is a one-way opening.”

  “It can’t be. Look at that cable. The other end is on the other side. If I followed it a centimeter at a time, wouldn’t I wind up back home?”

  Both aliens were silent for a few seconds before Harxae said, “We don’t know. Nobody has ever managed to leave a lifeline before.”

  “Then let’s try it and see before the hole closes,” said Raedawn.

  Once more the Kalirae silently consulted with each other, then Gavwin said, “She is right. This is a unique opportunity, well worth the risk. I will attempt it.”

  Raedawn looked like she might protest, but after a few seconds she merely said, “Go for it.”

  David reached out and turned off the radio for a second. “Do we want a potentially hostile alien poking his head into our solar system?”

  “Do you want to climb up that rope first?”

  “No.”

  “Me either, not if somebody else will do it. But if he makes it, I’ll be right on his tail. Armed for bear. No offense, Boris.”

  Boris laughed. “None taken.”

  David bit his lip, then said, “I guess that makes sense.” He switched on the radio again.

  “—will trail another line so you can pull me out if necessary,” Gavwin was saying.

  “Right. Don’t actually pull on the cable that goes through the hole; it’s not attached to much on the other side.”

  “I understand.”

  The blue Kalira disappeared from view into the back of their ship, and a few minutes later an airlock door slid aside and he emerged in a spacesuit. It was skintight, like a plastic bag just half a size bigger than his body. He was half again as tall as David, but no heavier, which gave him a thin, stretched appearance even in his suit. He held a long, coiled tether in one hand, which he threw out into space. In his other hand he held a reaction pistol. He jumped toward the white cloud, corrected his course with the reaction pistol, and drifted into the billowing surface.

  “Growing dark,” he said. “Cannot . . . cable. I will . . . ” The magnetic effects were breaking up his signal.

  They waited for him to say anything more, but minutes ticked by with no word. His lifeline jerked once, then stopped. He wasn’t making progress. Was he still trying to find the cable, or had he reached it but was just having trouble following it?

  Then an eye-searing bright light flared within the white cloud, blasting it into shreds of fog. For just an instant they could see a normal star field where it had been, then the gray veil of the maelstrom’s edge rushed in to seal the breach.

  “Chort!” Boris exclaimed. “He hit missile.”

  “Arrrrrada!” Harxae howled in anguish.

  David had no idea what the word meant, but the sentiment was clear. He wished he had words of consolation for the alien, but he couldn’t spare the time to think of it. His hands flew over the controls, examining the magnetic field, optical and radio wavelengths, radiation count, and tracking the debris that flew away from the explosion. If he could get the specs on that missile from Harxae, he could use the ejecta’s trajectory to calculate how much energy from the blast had been absorbed. That would give him an idea how much had gone into opening the hole.
/>   Already his mind was awash with questions. Was it the shock wave that had done it, or the intense light, or something else entirely? What if they launched another missile at the spot where the hole had been? What if they hit it with a flare? How about a laser? There were a million things to try.

  He glanced upward along the ring of planets. Off in the distance glowed the even bigger anomaly that had delivered Earth into this unlucky place. If it persisted long enough, there might actually be a chance to send the planet home.

  Then another thought hit him. “Is there any chance Gavwin could have survived that?”

  “You’re kidding,” Raedawn said.

  “He’s alien. Harxae? How about it? How tough are you guys?”

  “Very tough,” the Kalira answered, “but not strong enough to withstand that. Gavwin has ceased.”

  So the aliens could be killed. Much as it disturbed him to think like Colonel Kuranda, it looked like a military attitude might be even more of a survival skill here than it had been back home.

  All the same, a little compassion never hurt, either. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to try an untested theory. We need more information before we make another attempt to leave this place.”

  “That would be wise,” said Harxae.

  David heard the pain in the alien’s voice.

  “Did he have family? Should we notify his next of kin?”

  “All who care already know of his passing.”

  David wondered if that was because of some telepathic link within their species, but this didn’t seem like the time to pepper Harxae with questions. If anything, it was time to make what amends they could and hope for better relations with the Kalirae than what they’d started out with.

  “Your ship is crippled,” he said, “and we’re way out of our element here. Why don’t you come with us to Earth? With your knowledge of this place you might be able to help us save some lives there, and maybe together we could figure out a way home for all of us.”

  “That is unlikely,” said Harxae. He looked out the window of his damaged ship at the humans, his expression unreadable even in the telescope view. At last he said, “But new races bring the only hope we have in this place. Eventually someone must come up with a theory that will let us understand it. Perhaps it will be you.”

  “I’ve got a few ideas,” David admitted.

  “Then by all means, let us explore them.”

  Raedawn didn’t bother to switch off the radio. She just said straight out, “Wait a minute. This guy tried to kill us just a few hours ago. I don’t mind talking to him now that we’ve disarmed him, but do we really want him on board our ship? Or on Earth?”

  “Gavwin died for you,” Harxae said.

  “Bullshit. Gavwin died for you, and for the rest of the Kalirae.”

  “You were quite happy to see him take a risk that might benefit you.”

  “Of course I was. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he did it for his own self-interest.”

  Harxae said, “As I told you before, that is the way of the Maelstrom. If you intend to survive, there are two rules you need to remember at all times: everyone is out for themselves, and the weak die first.”

  “That just reinforces my case,” said Raedawn. “We’d be stupid to bring you on board.”

  “It would be a risk,” Harxae acknowledged, “but David is right when he says that I could help save many lives on your home planet. For instance, I know some of the races you will soon encounter. I know their strengths and weaknesses and how to make them allies or enemies. You must decide if that is worth the risk of bringing me on board.”

  Raedawn snorted. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Raedawn!” David said.

  “Hey, I’m just following Harxae’s rules. If everybody’s supposed to be out for themselves, what’s my own personal advantage in bringing a potentially hostile alien on board my spaceship?”

  David looked at Boris, who spread his hands out in a “who me?” gesture.

  If Harxae was offended, he hid it well. “You learn quickly. Good. Very well, I will teach you to kill.”

  “Kill what?” asked Raedawn.

  “Everything but me.”

  10

  David and Boris both held pistols on the Kalira as it came through the airlock. David hoped the threat would be enough to ensure good behavior, because he wondered if he could shoot an alien point-blank even if the creature seemed dangerous.

  He had the same misgivings about Boris. He had hesitated about giving the Neo-Soviet a live weapon, but he needed the backup. Raedawn had a pistol, too, but he wanted her up front to defend the controls in case things got ugly back here in the cargo hold. It was a calculated risk. Boris’s gun would only be good for an hour, but by then they would have a much better idea what they faced.

  The Kalira had to bend nearly double to fit through the door, and it couldn’t stand upright even in the cargo bay. David thought that ought to slow it down a bit in a fight, but he remained cautious just the same.

  “Welcome aboard,” he said when their guest had removed its helmet.

  “Thank you. Here is my food. It need not be kept cold.” Harxae handed over a net bag full of plasticlike containers and glittering gold foil boxes, all of which had a bizarre sheen to them. It must have massed at least a hundred kilos altogether; David shoved it into a corner against the back wall with his feet while he braced himself against the side wall with his hands, then wrapped a cargo strap around it to hold it in place.

  Up close, the Kalira looked even more stretched out than it had through the intervening space between ships. It was easily two and a half meters tall, its arms reached all the way to its ankles, and its legs were longer than a supermodel’s. David could have encircled Harxae’s waist with his fingers; Harxae could have encircled it twice and had an extra joint of overlap. Its bald head was a half meter oblong, its greenish hue giving it the look of a melon or a zucchini, but it did at least have humanoid features. Two eyes beneath a wrinkled brow, a long, aquiline nose, one mouth, and a pointed chin. Its ears were afterthoughts, but they were in the right place.

  A pendulous loincloth hung from its waist like beard moss from a tree, scrunched up now inside its clear spacesuit. That was its only clothing, but it didn’t look like it needed more; the rest of its body looked hard as polished stone. A round pendant that looked like hammered copper hung around its neck. It was etched with some sort of symbol, a web of intersecting lines.

  David found himself thinking of Harxae as “he,” but that was more from the lack of feminine features on its bare chest than from any positive masculine features. Its loincloth hid any more obvious gender marker, but David realized he couldn’t think of an intelligent being as “it,” and there was nothing about the Kalira to suggest femininity. He made a note to ask about gender when the time was right, but this moment of armed reception was not that time.

  “Have you got any weapons?” asked David.

  “None that I can remove.” As if to illustrate, Harxae peeled out of his clear spacesuit and handed it to Boris, who put it with his bag of food.

  “What do you mean, none that you can remove?”

  “As you suspect. I am telepathic. That ability can be used to project thoughts as well as receive them. I cannot take over your mind nor even speak to you directly, but I can sometimes distract an opponent with an emotion. The effect often gives me an edge in battle.”

  David wondered if that was all it would do. If he were in Harxae’s shoes, he wouldn’t give away all his secrets.

  Harxae picked up on his thought. “If I had intended to harm you, you would already be dead. Trust me or kill me.”

  David’s instincts told him the Kalira was friendly, but could he trust his instincts around a telepath?

  “I’ll trust you for now. But don’t try anything, and pray that I don’t have any sudden mood swings.”

  “Understood.” Harxae stretched out diagonally in
the cargo hold. It looked a little like a crane reaching out from a space station to grasp a ship for docking, but Harxae merely floated there, feet oriented toward the back wall. “I am ready to go anytime you are.”

  “Right.” David backed up and rapped on the closed door to the control cabin. “All set back here.”

  “All right,” came Raedawn’s muffled voice. “One gee in ten seconds.”

  David and Boris took up positions in the corners as far from Harxae as they could in case the alien tried anything while they were under thrust. David counted down the seconds in his head, inevitably counting too fast, and was just opening his mouth to say, “What’s wrong?” when the engines lit.

  Sudden weight shoved them to the deck. Both men, used to Mars’s lighter gravity, grunted with the effort to remain standing, but Harxae took it as if nothing had happened. The thrust went on for long minutes as Raedawn built up speed, then she slid the door open a crack and said, “Free fall in ten.”

  “Roger,” said David. When the thrust ceased, he let the tension in his legs send him forward to the control cabin door. Raedawn had let it slide a hand’s-width into the bulkhead; he grasped its edge to stop himself and asked, “How long do we coast?”

  “Three hours.”

  “Don’t count on that,” Harxae said. He hadn’t moved any nearer, but his height already put his head close to the door.

  “What?” Raedawn asked.

  “Things are not always as they seem here. Space itself is different. There are currents and eddies everywhere, but especially near planets that have recently arrived.”

  “You’re saying there might be some kind of shortcut between here and there? In clear space?”

  “Yes. Or a long cut. That is equally likely.”

  “Is there any way to detect them?”

  “None that we have discovered.”

  “Great.”

  David didn’t know whether or not to believe him. There was no good theory to account for the phenomenon he described. Wormholes, maybe, but this didn’t sound like wormholes. It sounded like two different kinds of space, like ether and phlogiston mixing together in some nineteenth-century scientist’s lab. Or not mixing, by the sounds of it. If the effect was strongest around new arrivals into this place, then it could be the result of ordinary space not blending with whatever dimension this was.