Dilation Chapter 6: First Contact
Three figures stood in front of the hatch on the far side of the spacecraft, no more than a hundred meters away. One of the creatures squatted down.
“The speakers,” Ditka whispered. “Jeremy, can you hand me the posters?”
“I dropped them…” Dobbs said in a trance.
Walker was locked onto the aliens, trying to spot details the moment they came into view. They were bipedal, like humans, standing upright a little over a meter tall — just under four feet. Their legs moved fluidly, either from a lack of rigid bone joints or a plethora of them, extending down from narrow, cylindrical bodies. Each foot split into a long X with rounded toes — like the indentation of the landing gear.
From the upper half of their tube-like midsection sprouted four arms, forming their own X around the body with two in front and two in back. Like their legs, their arms seemed to move without major joint locations, flexing in different areas, sometimes uniformly. Three thick fingers branched at the end of the arms, with one opposing the other two.
The aliens came to a stop fifteen meters in front of them. They didn’t have much of a neck area; the cylinder got slightly wider and came to a curved top like a microphone. They were wearing thin navy protective suits with a transparent window starting above their arms and ending below the top of their heads, around where the neck would be on a human. Towards the top of their faces was a single, visor-like lens that ran the entire circumference of their heads.
As they came to a stop, the first one turned towards the ship, its back facing the contact team. It didn’t look any different from the second one, which turned towards them instead. The third stood perpendicular to the group, facing the other two. Walker suspected all three could see them just fine. It was both fascinating and creepy.
It was so…alien.
A surge of ideas flooded into Walker’s head. An entire civilization of technology conceptualized with no front or back — like the ship they’d emerged from. There was no mouth visible in the clear portion of their suits — perhaps it was near their arms like a cephalopod, though she might only be thinking of squids because of her summer course. The prehensile limbs could just as easily be structured like a monkey tail, an elephant trunk, a snake body…
She was definitely missing her classes tomorrow.
Below the black, visor-like lens, the perpendicular creature had pale, purple skin, the other two more of a brownish-orange. On those, Walker could faintly see two small, vertical slits on the sides of their faces corresponding to their legs — perhaps noses or ears.
Suddenly, the visible skin of the middle alien changed. A vibrant line of royal blue appeared within the brownish-orange, running around the circumference of its face. As quickly as it had come, it was replaced by a vivid shade of green across the entire area.
Their skin — at least, the skin on their faces — was made up of chromatophores. Again, like a cephalopod. Each cell contained an elastic pigment sack, surrounded by muscles that could stretch it over a larger area. Different colored chromatophores sat side by side, and animals would stretch one while contracting the others to change their skin color. The cells could only be a few colors, though. These alien cells were much more advanced. For a species that could see in every direction, a complex, visual communication system would only be natural.
The creature’s face returned to its original color as a strange sound emitted from one of them. A low, guttural clicking, like a slow croak. None of the humans had reacted to visual communication, so they were using sound.
Low sound would travel far underwater, though it didn’t look like there was water in their suits, and no water had rushed out of the open hatch. Perhaps they more recently evolved out of the ocean. Maybe their planet had an extremely thick, swampy atmosphere.
Another one joined the first, the sound echoing through the trees.
“Jesus…” someone finally said. It sounded like Pierson.
“What should we do?” Sconi asked.
“Nothing,” replied Lauer. “Everyone keep still.”
“Dr. Plum,” Xi said from the tent. “Video, please.”
“Right…” Plum slowly, carefully raised a video camera.
Faint crimson rapidly spread across the face of the leftmost alien in a wave. With one of its farther arms, the creature quickly pulled out a device, curling the prehensile appendage around its body to point it towards the NASA engineer. A narrow, pink beam emitted from the end, causing half of them to jump as a loud bang — like a gunshot — echoed off the hull.
Fowler’s heart was racing, and the Predator-like clicking wasn’t making it any better. He was backing Lauer’s call completely — let these things do whatever they need to do, don’t startle them. Like his mother told him when he was six and found a raccoon in the garbage, “It’s more afraid of you than you are of it.”
He watched in astonishment as their skin changed to a full spectrum of colors in various patterns. Some appeared rapidly, others held for a while. Like a chameleon, but instantly.
Fowler’s vision started to fog when Plum lifted the camera. It felt dangerous. None of them had any clue what the aliens would do. One of the creatures pulled an object out from behind them…or in front of them. The jury was still out on that one. Fowler’s hand tensed towards the rifle stock at his side. Light gasps came from the team as a flat, pink light came from the end of the device. According to every TV show Fowler had ever seen, it was doing a scan of some kind.
Then the slow, quiet scene was broken by a gunshot.
Oh no.
The legs of the creature went limp as it collapsed to the ground. Four arms lied at every odd angle. The helmet made it difficult for Fowler tell exactly where the shot came from, but it was somewhere to his right.
God damnit, Pierson.
Fowler’s skin grew cold. Secretary Lauer screamed again for everyone to hold fire, his voice cracking. What would the creatures do? Flee? Retaliate? Could this be salvaged if they all stayed still? Fowler didn’t know what else to do, immediately disregarding his earlier conversation with Sconi. He didn’t want to make any decisions for this.
Rapid patterns of different colors flashed across the remaining creatures’ faces as they moved with frightening speed. The alien facing towards them dropped down to all fours, planting its two closest arms on the ground and leaving the other two free above its body. The top of the creature’s head was angled towards Pierson like it was about to charge.
It didn’t charge. During its drop to the ground, the alien had similarly retrieved a device with one of its free arms, now angled directly at Pierson. A high-pitched sound — a reversed zap that rapidly raised in pitch before silencing — was followed by a crack and a wet popping sound. The visor of Pierson’s suit shattered as a crimson, liquid mist shot out of the hole. A thick trail of red slush covered the ground beside a flattened hazmat suit as Pierson was instantly pureed.
Fowler couldn’t even say the reaction was excessive, but he also couldn’t wait to see if the creatures continued down the line of people before drawing. He grabbed the jagged edge of the M4’s collapsible stock, pulling it up to his shoulder in a motion he’d performed thousands of times. His right hand instantly found the grip of the carbine, pulling it tight to his body. He had a clear view of whatever you’d consider to be the animal’s face, even as it rotated its body and arm towards Lauer.
By the time the secretary of defense started to give the order to fire, Fowler was already squeezing the trigger. The full motion had taken him no more than half a second, but it was still too slow.
“Fi — ” was all Lauer managed to scream. With the same zap, crack, and pop, his partially-levigated body splashed through his helmet. The engine lights lit the splatter up in the brightest red Fowler had ever seen. As the remains of Lauer splashed across the ground, Fowler fired a burst of four rounds into the top of the creature’s head, tearing through its suit and clanking against some sort of hard shell.
“Oh my god!” Ditka screamed as Jeremy Dobbs came bursting out of his helmet next to her. Before the hard-headed being had a chance to turn towards Fowler, he put half a dozen rounds through its face, splashing blueish-purple blood on the inside of the clear plastic mask.
The third alien had sprung away from the other two with impressive agility, landing in the same lowered position as the second had. Fowler swung his rifle towards it, waiting to see if it reached for a similar gizmo. As quickly as he turned his aim, the alien dove towards the dropped weapon. A trail of bullets kicked dirt into the air as Fowler swept the rifle behind it. With three thick fingers, the creature grabbed the futuristic pistol of its fallen comrade, rolling across the ground into yet again the same combat position.
Pattering rounds from the M4 caught up to the creature, hitting the top of its head. As before, they tore through the navy material of the suit, rattling against the hard shell underneath. Additional holes appeared in the synthetic fabric from Sconi’s gun to the same effect.
A jointless, drunken arm angled the weapon towards Fowler and he dropped hard to his knee, pain shooting through his leg. A high-pitched zapping sound pierced through the night, followed by the crunch of a tree at the edge of the clearing behind him. The sudden burst of heat knocked Plum to the ground as fiery splinters showered the area. Small pieces of charred bark cascaded around Fowler, slapping against his back. He was only getting one more salvo before becoming strawberry jam.
The alien’s face was just barely visible below the hardened dome. Pushing the barrel down slightly, Fowler let the last burst of rounds erupt from the assault rifle. The first one hit the ground behind the alien, the recoil dragging the barrel up. A line of bullets walked up the alien’s neck, with the last puncturing downward through the circular lens of its eye.
He stopped firing, keeping his gun trained for a moment. None of the bodies moved. The light crackle of fire from the fragments of burning trees danced around him.
Walker was crouched down next to Sconi, who had a large piece of timber lodged clean through his thigh. Plum was still face-down on the ground, his chest slowly rising and falling. Ditka was either sobbing quietly or hyperventilating in the center of the three chunky red streaks, more than a little of which covered her once-orange hazmat suit. Had Fowler been thinking straight, he would have moved to cover them from the ship in case more of these things came out. He would have tried to put out the fires before they took down the forest, gotten Sconi away from the scene now that his suit was torn.
But he wasn’t thinking straight. His mind was in a loop. All Isaac Fowler could think was that he had just killed the first aliens ever to set foot on Earth…within a minute of their disembarkment.
Another glimpse of the liquified bodies turned his stomach. He doubled over, taking deep, slow breaths to avoid throwing up in the helmet of his air-tight suit.
“Agent Fowler…” Xi’s voice came weakly through the earpiece. “What just happened?”
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