Arrival: Chapter 15

  Neil stepped out of the FDM and stretched his arms above his head with his hands clasped and his back arched.  He stretched as profoundly and as satisfyingly as he ever had in either of his incarnations.  It was a beautiful and perfect morning, the kind of morning which made one happy to be alive and led one to appreciate the singular precious moment in time that was this morning.  The planet Haven greeted him in kind with the pristine and undisturbed beauty of the planet’s alien wildness.  

  The sky was brilliant blue with hardly any clouds in the sky at all.  He could hear what sounded like alien bird calls; he imagined that they served a similar communicative purpose to birds he was familiar with on his home planet, but the actual sound was hauntingly different.   It was reminiscent of what one might expect if some sort of reptile were to attempt to imitate a bird call.  The sounds were quick and rapid, but had a very deep and resonant sound.  While standing outside the FDM and absorbing the scene, Neil saw a few creatures fly over top of the runway they’d built.  They were too far away to see in any great detail, but they certainly seemed to move the way he’d come to expect birds to move as they flew, darting and swooping and seeming to play with each other.

  He was startled but delighted when one of the birds came by out of nowhere and perched itself on top of the FDM.  It appeared to be scrutinizing him as it turned its head to various angles to get different views of him with its side mounted eyes.  It was an odd creature, and definitely unlike anything he’d ever seen before.  It appeared reptilian but had the basic body design of a bat.  Its main body and head were scaled but its wings were smooth skin through which finger bones and arteries could be seen.  All in all it looked to him like some kind of miniature dragon.  When the creature landed Neil estimated its wingspan to be about two thirds of a meter and now that it was perched its body and jagged horny head only appeared to be about a quarter meter long, with a long skinny tail which was almost as long again.  It didn’t have a beak which gave Neil pause.  He wondered if the iguana like mouth indicated that it was an insect eater, and if maybe it ate those flying red insects they’d seen in the jungle the day before.

  The creature engaged in screeching squawks back and forth with several dozen others which flew overhead, at which point it took off to join them.  Neil found himself wondering with a shudder if there were other creatures stalking the sky which preyed on the animals he’d just seen.   It seemed unimaginable to him that they should have exclusive free reign of the sky, and that no other creatures would ever have evolved to prey on them.  He noted that if they were insect hunters it would have helped for them to have forward facing eyes, which he figured made their side mounted configuration an indication that they had to watch out for predators.  Also, if they didn’t’ have any predators he imagined that they would be so numerous that they would blot out the sky.  On the other hand, if they had trouble keeping their eggs safe on the ground (assuming they did in fact lay eggs), that alone could keep their numbers in check…

  Neil shook his head with a smile.  ‘There’ll be plenty of time to find out…’ he told himself.  He went on to make his way over to the shuttle which had brought them down to the planet’s surface, and which would ascend them back into orbit again later today.  It was only a couple dozen meters at most from the FDM itself, and he gratefully patted the faithful vehicle on its hull as he had a twinge of sympathy for it over the inflated fuel tanks now hanging from under the wings.  They almost appeared to be bulging with the liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel it had separated out of the planet’s atmosphere.   The sacs were made out of an unimaginably strong material and contained the fuel which would get them aloft and overtop of most of the planet’s atmosphere.  The regular fuel tanks which occupied almost all of the interior of the shuttle which was not the flight deck, housed the bulk of the fuel which would accelerate them sideways into orbit after the hanging auxiliary tanks were sucked back into the wings from the vacuum pressure of being used to depletion.

  His first move was supposed to be to prepare some coffee for him and his friends, but when he looked at the electric heating element he was to use, he found himself looking past it towards the jungle just beyond the runway and he grinned.   Instead he wandered over to the boundary of the jungle, and venturing just a few meters inward he found and collected some sticks and branches appropriate for building a campfire.  “A campfire a hundred and sixty years in the making…” he joked to himself as he gathered sufficient wood for an impressively sized campfire.  Once back at the nearby campsite, he arranged the wood into the shape of a fire with the smallest pieces he could find on the bottom for kindling, and the larger pieces on top for once the fire really got going.  

  The simple act of gathering wood for a fire conjured up a vague sense of memory for him.   There was something familiar about the exercise yet no specific memories came to mind, just a sense he supposed that this was something he’d done before.  He found himself wondering if this was a feature or a bug of his programming.   Was he meant to have these kinds of vague senses of familiarity?  Or was there in fact a specific memory which his programming had been cued to recall and then failed to.  He of course hoped that the experience was a sign of his programming working exactly as it was intended to, but it was hard to say.  He ultimately shrugged it off as an altogether human experience either way.   Human memory was certainly imperfect even at the best of times, and for whatever reason his appeared to be as well.

  He touched one of the smaller pieces of wood to the top of the heating element he was meant to use, and turned it on to full power until the first licks of flame arose from the piece of wood, at which point he carefully place it into the base of the potential for a larger fire which he’d created.  Slowly it caught fire and the flames began to proliferate throughout the whole wooden structure.  

  Once he had a good fire going, he walked the short distance back to the FDM for some water with which to make his coffee.  The module had a more compact version of the atmospheric separators the shuttle employed and overnight it had filled up its twenty litre water tank.   Once Neil had extracted the couple litres he required for the moment, the apparatus happily went to work replacing the fluid and topping up the reservoir.  He carefully placed the water kettle on an appropriate part of the fire, and prepared three travel coffee mugs with a packet each of dehydrated coffee, and a fourth with tea leaves for In-Su who didn’t care for coffee.

    It was at this point that Sadhika emerged from the FDM and took what appeared to Neil to be an almost equally satisfying stretch.   “It seems like such a waste to sleep… she groggily remarked, “especially since we don’t actually need to… seems like such a terrible waste of time.”

  “As it often seems to humans as well, my dear Sadhika,” In-Su remarked as he followed her out of the FDM.  “Is that not the point?  Likewise…” he added as he rubbed his eyes, “nor do we need to drink or eat, yet nothing in the world at this moment appeals to me quite as much as the tea Neil seems to be so graciously preparing for me.”

  It was at this point that Sadhika fully clued in to the fact that Neil had constructed a fire.  “Oh what a wonderful idea!” she exclaimed as she went over to give him a warm and lingering hug.  Neil and Sadhika were very fond of each other.  In fact, while Neil had for some time considered In-Su his best and closest male friend, he’d long ago come to think of his friendship with Sadhika as comparable.  

  Neil got on quite well with Wiremu, but they’d never had as much of a chance to get very close, and they ultimately didn’t have much in common besides their mutual passion for the mission.  The other three had an intellectual streak which Wiremu did not.  Wiremu was the one with a strong and pronounced adventurous streak which was far less pronounced in the other three.  None would have founded the mission if a sense of adventure was altogether absent from them though, and likewise an intellectual streak was not altogether missing from Wiremu either.  They were a good complimentary team, each with their own strengths and deficits.

  “What world specifically were you speaking of In-Su?” Neil asked as Sadhika pulled away from him.  “Nothing appeals to you as much as anything in this world, or the last?”

  “Either,” the man replied with a smile.

  “Well, then here you go.”  Picking up the pitcher by its cool ceramic handle, Neil poured the now boiling water into the four mugs, first handing a coffee to Sadhika, and then the lonely tea to In-Su.

  At this point Wiremu finally emerged from the First Descent Module, and Neil happily came over to offer him his morning coffee.  Wiremu only grunted in acknowledgement of the kindness at first, but after a few tentative initial sips of the hot liquid and several moments to compose himself, he finally uttered a recognizable “thank you.”

  They all said the remainder of their hellos and good mornings, and then they all enjoyed their incredibly satisfying drinks in silence for a while as they soaked in the moment and the sounds of morning on this strange new world.  It was the first sip of their respective favourite morning rituals which any of them had had in over a hundred and sixty years.   Either that or it was their first sips ever; either way the experience was for all four of them delicious, and unbelievably satisfying.

  “Will this even work?” Wiremu asked.  “I mean… will our physiology respond to caffeine the way a human body would?”

  “No… but yes,” Sadhika cryptically answered.  “I mean not directly… nothing biochemical can affect us directly in a normal biological way since we don’t have a… well any kind of biochemical structure at all, so no drugs can directly affect us in the way you mean, no.   However, we were built to be perfect simulations of human beings, and that includes a subjective experience of the effects of something like caffeine, or any other drug our bodies have been programmed to detect and recognize.   Our systems detect the substance, and then our bodies and brains simulate the effect of the detected drug as though we were affected naturally.”

  “So…” Wiremu asked as he took another sip with an expectant wince.

  Sadhika laughed.  He understood well enough, he was just ribbing her complete inability to provide a simple straightforward answer to any kind of scientific question.  “So, yes, it will work.” she answered him plainly.   “Sorry.”

  “Good,” he said as he took another sip.  “We need like… bacon and eggs or something… and toast.”

  “Well you should have thought about that before we left Earth,” Neil scolded him in jest.  

  Wiremu nodded in acknowledgement.  “Indeed”

  “We could cook up the specimen we picked up yesterday…” In-Su suggested.  The other three looked at him in surprised confusion for a moment before they started to laugh when they realized he was joking.   He was finicky about eating any kind of meat at the best of times, let alone their alien planet mystery meat.

  “Maybe once we’ve examined it back on the ship In-Su,” Wiremu laughed as he clapped the smaller man on the back a little harder than he was comfortable with, “maybe once we’ve examined it…”

   

  Half an hour later, the four were sitting in the flight deck of the shuttle in the same seats they’d descended in.  Wiremu and Sadhika were seated in the front swiveling pilot seats going through all of the pre-ascent checklists in conjunction with the New Horizon flight operations team.  Aset had had to take over serving as the mothership’s liaisons with the shuttle and was overseeing the ascent operation herself since Ishtar, the former head of flight operations, had defected along with her husband Halley.

  “We’re all ready for you up here,” Aset reported.  She sounded incredibly depressed, and she didn’t seem to be putting much effort into concealing it.  The four simulants were understanding, but they were also understandably concerned.  “Have you been monitoring Halley?” the woman on the ship asked.

  “Yes,” Wiremu answered.  “Satellite imaging shows that they just spent last night sleeping in their shuttle.  So far this morning they don’t appear to have left their landing strip to do any exploring or anything.”

  “I’m watching them on one of my screens now,” Aset informed them.  “It looks like they’re moving on to exploring the jungle near their landing site.”

  “They haven’t made any attempts to procure any other modules, have they?” he asked.

  “Not that we’ve noticed, but we’ve locked all of their Brainchip access codes out of all of our systems so at this point there’s not much they could get from us or do to us even if they wanted to.”

  “Unless they left a mole on the ship to do it for them…”  Wiremu immediately regretted saying it and needlessly putting the idea in her head.  He realized by her reaction that they hadn’t considered such a possibility before he’d mentioned it. 

  “We hadn’t thought of that…” Aset said as she looked off screen, presumably over at Asari.

  “I suspect,” In-Su interjected, “that if they had any intentions of taking any further actions they would have done so already, they’d have done everything that they intended to do all at once to avoid giving you any chance to respond.   I believe they are consciously and deliberately avoiding antagonizing the rest of us as much as possible.”

  “You may be right.” Aset said, but she sounded decidedly unconvinced.  “Are you four good to go?”

  “Good to go,” Wiremu called back.

  “Very well… Shuttle One you are cleared for launch.  You have the ball.”

  “Thank you New Horizon, we have the ball.”

   

  Very slowly, very small electromagnetic motors turned the shuttle’s wheels and drove the ship the few dozen meters it had to go to the very end of the runway, right beside the First Descent Module.  It carefully positioned and pointed itself off to the side of the FDM to avoid incinerating it with rocket exhaust when it took off.  The shuttle then deployed its auxiliary ascent wings.  

  The thick stubby wings it began with were in fact three layers of wings folded on top of themselves.  During atmospheric entry it was important to have a modest attack profile, but to take off from the ground loaded with as much fuel as it was, and to achieve the high altitudes from which it was meant to rocket hard into orbit, longer more lift generating wings were required.  To this end, the outer edge of the descent configuration wing contained a hinge which allowed the auxiliary wing to fold up, over, and out to double the length of the wing and then to unfold up and over yet again, resulting in a total wingspan three times that of the shuttle’s original descent configuration.    

  Once the shuttle had turned around and fully deployed its ascent wings, the three conical main thrusters at the back of the shuttle lit and the shuttle immediately and dramatically began accelerating.  Great thrust was required to get it off of the ground, but once the shuttle lifted off of Haven’s surface near the end of the runway the throttle was dramatically reduced while the shuttle ascended through the atmosphere as a standard aircraft would.

  They spent the first half hour of the flight lazily climbing their way up to about thirty kilometers above the surface, where there became a balancing point between the thinning of the air and the maximum lift profile of the shuttles wings in flight.  At this point the thrusters engaged fully and the aircraft became a spaceship as it took off with an incredible acceleration.  It wasn’t just a question of getting up to orbital height, that was in fact the easy part and they were already nearly there.  The really hard part about achieving orbit from a planet’s surface, is the energy required to go sideways at a sufficient speed; to fly so fast around the planet that you are perpetually falling over the side and around the planet instead of falling down to the surface.  One has to fall sideways so fast that they perpetually miss the ground.

  Now in black skies, after twenty minutes or so, the engines abruptly cut out after guzzling a full ninety-seven percent of their remaining fuel.  Although they were both travelling incredibly fast, the New Horizon and the shuttle were moving very slowly relative to each other.  The shuttle’s mothership reduced its speed by just a tiny bit as the shuttle increased its speed by an equivalent amount.   The two vessels moved slowly but continually towards each other until they were close enough, at which point the shuttle slowed down just enough for the two crafts to match their speeds exactly.

  After retracting its auxiliary ascent wings, the shuttle ever so slowly and carefully approached its mother ship and slid along the New Horizon’s long engineering section.  It nuzzled up to its docking port and held itself just off of it so that the magnetic seal system could pull the shuttle firmly and decidedly into its properly sealed docking position and lock it down.  

  Shuttle One was home.

   

  “Docking complete.  Shuttle One safely home.”