3zekiel (First Contact)
Author: Cawdron, Peter
Date: 2019-08-23

3ZEKIEL

Copyright © 2019

All rights reserved. The right of Peter Cawdron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and with the exception of Pretzel, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Cover art: NASA Commons. Progress M-21M Undocking from the International Space Station's Zvezda Service Module aft port on June 9, 2014 (image SS040-E-008471 posted on Flickr using id 35066308691)

For my friend, Rhys

Stage I: Descent

Ezekiel

“...in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

In unison, we all reply, “Amen,” even the servants.

Sweat beads on my forehead. Flies buzz through the air. The humidity is stifling even though the sun has set. Flashes of lightning to the north signal a storm that’s destined to pass by without offering relief.

Boiled potatoes, diced chicken, maize and carrots are dished up and placed in front of me. Etiquette demands I wait for my father to start. He tastes his food and only then seasons it with a little ground pepper and a pinch of salt from a wooden bowl set in the middle of the table. To season first is to insult the chef, so I follow his lead. Respect is important. Respect is all that separates us from the savages.

“Brother Jacob,” the itinerant missionary sitting opposite me says, sprinkling salt on his food as he addresses my father. He’s forgotten his etiquette and is seasoning his food before tasting. Forgotten or deliberately ignoring? “What do you make of the star?”

I can see my father fuming inside. His jaw clenches. His nostrils flare—only slightly, but I notice. His eyes narrow.

Brother Mordecai doesn’t care. I’ve spent years wilting under my father’s gaze. For me, the missionary’s defiance is a delight. I wait, watching to see if Dad will say anything about the breach, but secretly, I envy Brother Mordecai. I don’t see the point in mindless rituals. We only ever taste one bite before seasoning our food. If we were honest, we’d try everything before deciding on seasoning, as logically each component could require different amounts of salt and pepper, but I keep these heretical thoughts to myself. Dad ignores him.

The missionary points at the roof. “Surely, you’ve received the Vatican’s communique about the star?”

“The Scriptures are clear.” My father has made a career out of ignoring others. “Only angels and demons inhabit the heavens.”

Mordecai wipes his mouth with a cloth napkin. Being an itinerant missionary, he’s supposed to call on us regularly, but we haven’t seen him for almost six months.

“On the contrary,” he says. “The Scriptures hint at a divine realm extending well beyond that of mere angels.”

Napkins are typical of the contradiction that is life in the African jungle. We’re in an old colonial home with glaring white walls and a high roof. Fans turn slowly on the ceiling, giving the illusion of circulating air to cool the room. Monkeys scream in the trees just beyond the windows, struggling to compete with the incessant noise of millions of insects swarming through the night, and yet here we are observing etiquette as though we were dining in The White House.

Brother Mordecai replaces his napkin. “Ezekiel speaks of the cherubim and the seraphim—creatures other than angels—creatures that did not originate on Earth—giving us insights into a celestial order far beyond that of Michael, Gabriel and Lucifer. It could be that the heavens have as much diversity as life here on Earth!”

I’m loving this. It isn’t often my father gets flustered, and we’ve all seen the star. There’s no ignoring it—a brilliant white light sitting high above us, visible from twilight till dawn, shining directly overhead—stationary at the zenith of the heavens—the highest point in the night sky. It’s the one star that never moves. The Sun, Moon, and planets, the stars of Orion and Pleiades, they all drift through the sky each night, slowly rolling from east to west, but not this star. Like the missionary, it’s defiant.

My father adopts a defensive tone, using language far too formal for the jungle. “Ezekiel is not a book I’ve oft read.”

“You should,” Mordecai says between bites, talking with his mouth full and no doubt infuriating my father even more. Having quietly watched Brother Mordecai for almost an hour since he arrived, I don’t think he intends to challenge my father’s authority. He seems oblivious to the intrusion he’s created with just these few words, but the silence that follows drives the point home.

Sweat runs down my neck. Insects buzz around the gas lantern beside the open window. The only electricity we have comes from generators and depends on erratic diesel shipments from Tanzania, so most of our lighting and cooking is wood-fired or uses gas bottles dragged overland by traders.

Outside, natives sit around a campfire, tossing dried animal dung onto the flames to ward off mosquitoes. The fire crackles. Flames reach for the stars. Glowing embers rise into the night. The villagers are talking, laughing, yelling. Someone’s singing. To me, they’re irrepressibly happy, which is a stark contrast to how I feel.

“Haven’t you wondered?” Brother Mordecai pauses, pointing with his fork, yet another breach of etiquette. “Why here? Why is it hovering over the Democratic Republic of the Congo? What do they want with the jungle?”

They.

My father glances at me, but his eyes quickly return to our guest. I suspect he’d like to send me from the table as I’ve asked the same question only to be rebuffed. If he could, he’d get rid of me, but he doesn’t want his disdain to become too apparent. Such a reaction would be indecorous. Sending me away would raise awkward questions.

“What about you, Josh?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You’re the future. Your father and I—we do what we can. We pray. We teach. We minister and help the locals. And yet we are but a single generation. It is you and your friends who hold the future. What do you think of our visitors?”

My father would never speak to me like this.

“I—I don’t know.”

“But you must have thought about them? Sitting up there, looking down on us in the African jungle. What do you think they’re looking at?”

“The birds,” I say. “Or gorillas.”

He nods, chewing a piece of chicken and thinking for a moment before speaking again. “Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps there’s something they want from the Congo. The equator runs all the way around the world—through the Atlantic, parts of South America, the Pacific, Indonesia, the Indian Ocean. Even here in Africa it passes through Kenya, Uganda, Gabon, and Somalia. Maybe Josh is right. Maybe there’s something right here in the Congo they want. We do have the last of the wild gorillas.”

“Maybe.” Dad is trying to bury the discussion. Somewhat conveniently, his eyes stare down at his food, but he’s not hungry. He picks at his plate.

“You should read Ezekiel.” Brother Mordecai points at me with his knife, which to my father’s mind is an even more unforgivable than using his fork as a pointer. “You really should. It’s fascinating. Hmmm, here, listen to this.” He pulls a small Bible from his back pocket and places it on the table. The spine is broken, causing the book to fall open somewhere near the middle. The tiny margins have impossibly small writing—like the scratchings in a cave, only in blue pen as well as an ultra-fine pencil. There are numerous verses underlined in red. Several sections have been highlighted in fluorescent yellow. I feel as though I can read my father’s mind—this is no way to treat the Word of God. The missionary pushes a few pages brutally to one side, creasing the paper to prevent it flipping back.

“Yes, this is it. Listen to this, straight from the Holy Writ... and their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning.”

He stops reading, looking at me as though the conclusion should be obvious. My father shifts in his seat.

“Wild, huh? And that’s right here in God’s Word.”

“We focus on the New Testament,” my father says.

“But it’s all true, right? Haven’t you thought about this section? Haven’t you wondered about it?” Dad shakes his head, but the missionary is nothing if not zealous. “If you lived in those times, how would you describe a spaceship?”

“Now, Mordecai.” My father raises his hand in exasperation, wanting to be heard. “That’s nothing but speculation.”

“This is Ezekiel.” Mordecai is too excited to notice my dad’s reluctance. “This is the testimony of Scripture. Listen... Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were round; and they sparkled like burnished bronze.”

My father sighs, saying, “It makes no sense,” which is a stunning admission from him.

“Yes. It makes no sense if we’re describing a person or an animal. But this could be a description of the Lunar module setting down on the Moon. Think about that—thousands of years ago, Ezekiel described something that only now makes sense. That’s cool.”

“Mordecai.” Dad is not comfortable with this conversation, but I’m soaking it up. Ever since the star appeared, I’ve wondered. I’ve wanted answers. ‘Just because,’ is not a reason. ‘Don’t get distracted,’ doesn’t satisfy my curiosity. As much as Dad wants me to focus on here and now, it’s there and tomorrow that drives me on. Isn’t that true of all humanity? Has anyone ever really been satisfied with here and now? We’re restless. We long for adventure. Change scares my father because he’s afraid of the future, but for a teen like me, the unknown is exciting.

“The wheels within wheels.” Mordecai gestured with his hands, waving them in a circular motion.

“Now, Mordecai—”

“Listen, brother. Listen to the written Word… a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire… and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.”

Brother Mordecai looks up at my father as though those words alone are enough to convince him. When Dad shrugs, he continues.

“Surely, you’re curious. We read about this back in seminary. What does it mean? Why was it written? What was Ezekiel trying to tell us? He wrote that section for a reason. He wanted us to know about this encounter.”

Dad’s quiet.

“Nothing in Ezekiel’s world fits that description. Nothing. But what if he saw something that wasn’t from his world? What if he saw something from another world?”

My dad is stern. “Mordecai, I would have you refrain from filling my son’s head with such madness. This is nothing but speculation. Delusions.”

“A gyroscope.” Mordecai completely misses my dad’s comment. “Wheels within wheels, Jacob. Ezekiel was describing a gyroscope almost two and a half thousand years before it was invented!”

My father wipes his mouth with his napkin and pushes back from the table. Both the meal and the conversation are over. I take one last bite of chicken and get to my feet.

“You will get ready for bed,” my father says with a sense of determination that cannot be defied. I nod slightly and excuse myself. As I leave, I hear them arguing.

“Cardinal M’Butai is in Kisangani this week. Come with me, Jacob. Listen to him. He’s a good man. The church is embracing this. The Holy See says this is a catalyst for change.”

“I know my calling.”

“The church isn’t going to run from this. His Holiness is embracing the science.”

“I will have no more of this talk. Our mission is clear. We are here for the salvation of these people. No good can come from turning our eyes to the heavens.”

“Listen to yourself,” Mordecai says. “You would bury your head in the sand rather than accept that something wonderful, something marvelous, something miraculous is happening?”

“I bid you goodnight.”

“This is happening whether you like it or not.” The door slams. Brother Mordecai yells, “You cannot ignore this, Jacob! You can’t hide in the jungle forever!”

I brush my teeth, being sure to face the mirror squarely, making as though I have no other concerns. Definite strokes up and down, not side to side, being gentle on my gums but ensuring any food caught between my teeth is dragged out—just as I’ve been taught. As for the argument, I didn’t hear anything. Nothing. As expected, the bathroom door flies open and my father storms in. I keep brushing. I don’t care—it’s important he thinks that.

My father has always been on the outside of the church. I guess that’s how we ended up here, almost fifty miles of rugged muddy roads south of Kisangani, deep within the Congo. Raging rivers, impenetrable canopy, voracious insects, birds, monkeys, apes and leopards are our neighbors. Our parish consists of villagers, farmers, and occasionally a repentant poacher. Most of them only speak French and a muddle of local languages, but we’re teaching them English.

The star has been in our sky for almost two weeks. Everyone talks about it, mainly because we get a near constant stream of news snippets filtering down to us from the outside world. How much of it’s true, I don’t know. The tribesmen say it’s an omen, but they see ill in all change. When we arrived three years ago, we were blamed for bringing a famine.

From what we’ve heard, the church is divided on the issue, although Brother Mordecai would have us think otherwise. Contact with intelligent extraterrestrial aliens? Creatures that arose on some other planet? Around a strange sun? My dad’s right, it’s madness and yet somehow, it’s happening.

Not even Hollywood could spin the idea of aliens capturing an asteroid and moving it into orbit around Earth, and then just leaving it sitting there like a diamond in the sky. Nothing’s happening according to our schedule. It’s as though they’re ignoring us. There are no slick silver spaceships landing on the front lawn of The White House. No invasion. No buildings being blown up or alien death rays scorching our cities. Just a tiny pinprick of light high in the sky.

“I’m sorry you had to witness that.” My dad rests his hand on my shoulder. I keep brushing my teeth and shrug slightly. No big deal. He says, “I have to go to Ubandi to visit the sick. Asha will put you to bed.

I nod and spit into the sink.

My father isn’t a doctor, but he’s trained in first aid and once worked as a paramedic in Boston. He’s treated his fair share of gunshot wounds—mostly from people he knew when he was, somewhat ironically, a member of the Pagan’s motorcycle gang. On one hand, it’s surprising he ended up in the jungle with a teenage son, on the other, it’s right on-brand for him.

Nothing has ever been simple or clear cut for my dad, certainly not predictable. For him, discipline is the way to deal with demons. I think that’s why he’s so strict with me. He feels as though he needs to build a fence around me so I don’t end up like him. But I’m not him. I guess that’s hard for him to realize. He means well, but I feel as though I’m suffocating.

Around here, though, being a paramedic is like being a brain surgeon. Dad’s a miracle worker, although the medical aid he provides mainly consists of setting splints on broken limbs and cleaning out infected wounds. In the jungle, it’s impossible to keep sores clean and dry, so he ships in iodine by the crate load. Ubandi is a forty-minute drive across the mountains. He won’t be back until after midnight.

Once the sound of his diesel Jeep has blended in with the jungle noise, I creep to my bedroom window and peer outside. A black face stares back from the shadows below the windowsill. Pearly white teeth smile at me. Quietly, I lift the window and slip out into the night.

“I didn’t think you were coming.”

To me, Jana is the most beautiful teen in the world. Her hair has been plaited in tight cornrows winding across her scalp. Colorful beads hang from plaits at the back of her head. They knock against each other softly as she moves, which I find hypnotic. She’s wearing a traditional African dress, resplendent with color. Red, blue and yellow flowers have been meticulously embroidered on her black dress by her mom, spreading out from her collar like sunflowers. Both the sleeves and the dress itself are broad, catching the air and keeping her cool. Her dark skin glistens beneath the starlight.

I take her hand and she squeezes my fingers with a sense of strength I’ve never known in any other girl.

“We had a guest.”

“I saw him,” she says.

I sneak a kiss, leaning in and pecking softly at her cheek. Jana recoils slightly, leaving me feeling cold. I pause, unsure what to make of her reaction, but she responds to my impetuous advance by rushing in and kissing me briefly on the lips. Her kiss is almost a bump. Our noses squish and she pulls back as quickly as she came in, smiling, laughing.

Girls are strange. I’m not sure I understand Jana. There’s something mysterious about the way she reacts to me. It’s almost as though she’s as unsure of me as I am of her. Neither Jana nor I feel comfortable with the term ‘dating,’ and yet we want to be together. Is it the jungle? Is it that I’m the pastor’s son? Is it that I’m white? Forbidden love, though, carries its own allure.

“Come,” she says. “Raka has a television. He’s watching them on the news.”

Them. I’m not sure I’ll ever get use to that term.

“But how?” It’s not simply the lack of electricity or electronics that keeps us isolated from the outside world—television signals don’t reach this far into the jungle.

“He has a dish. He shipped it overland from Kinshasa.”

We creep away from the parsonage, staying in the shadows, leaving the neatly manicured grounds around the manse and cutting behind the church. Raka is a village elder and lives in a hut beside the river, so we sneak along the bank, trying to avoid being seen by the villagers, as word will surely reach my father.

I smell the diesel generator long before I hear it, such is the wall of noise coming from bugs and monkeys and various birds screaming within the jungle. Far from being quiet, night is when the jungle comes to life.

Lights flicker through the window of a mud hut. A large satellite dish sits precariously on a thatched roof, threatening to break through and crush anyone inside.  The generator chugs away with a constant rhythm, blowing dark smoke into the air. We peer in through the window at a grainy image. There are a dozen people in the hut, mainly men. Chunks of static break up the image, while the audio is patchy, but there’s no doubt about what’s being discussed.

“...you can see are of the alien spacecraft. Contrary to what has been spread on social media, there is no reason to believe the capture of the asteroid Cruithne presents a threat to life on Earth. NASA and ESA have confirmed the asteroid is in a stable geosynchronous orbit roughly thirty-six thousand kilometers above the equator. To put this in perspective, the asteroid is orbiting almost a hundred times higher than the International Space Station, which is why the prospect of sending an Orion spacecraft to investigate this occurrence requires considerable logistics and planning. There’s no conspiracy. No intentional delays. It simply takes time to bring everything together for a launch, but we are on track for tomorrow.”

The image is in black and white, which is surprising. If anything, it adds to rather than detracts from the intrigue. Dark shadows hide most of the alien spacecraft. Smooth curves, wavy lines and various bulges and tubes dominate the vessel, which reminds me of an instrument from a brass band—perhaps a Tuba, or a French Horn. At the rear, there’s a cluster of spheres and several bell-shaped engines. The craft itself, though, is dwarfed by the asteroid. To my mind, it looks like a steampunk cruise ship docked beside a floating mountain.

“The light we see when we look up at the night sky is sunlight reflecting off Cruithne. The starship itself is not visible at this distance without the aid of a telescope.”

“Have we established what they want from us?” a news anchor asks from somewhere off-screen.

“No.”

“Why are they here?”

“Why did we go to the Moon?” The aging scientist asks in reply.

From the subtle rhythm in his accent, it’s clear the scientist speculating on the nature of the alien visitation is from the Indian subcontinent but has spent years, if not decades, in either England or the US. He speaks with a soft voice, almost in a whisper, but his words carry a sense of dignity. Were he not wearing a microphone, his comments would be lost, which seems to make their preservation all the more important. His hair is wispy, as though it’s bracken from a bush caught in a breeze. Rather than being white, his sideburns appear almost silver.

“Why did we land rovers on Mars?” He asks. “Why did we send probes to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond? It’s just a guess, but there’s good reason to believe they’re as curious about us as we are about them. From what we can see, the universe is a lifeless desert, and yet in the midst of the emptiness and desolation, there’s an oasis teaming with life here on Earth. If you were out there, wouldn’t that make you curious too?”

The anchor doesn’t sound convinced. “But how can you be sure they don’t mean us any harm?”

“I can’t. But there’s no reason to assume they’re hostile. That might be our fear—our natural assumption, but that doesn’t make our assumptions right.”

“But they haven’t responded to any of the messages we’ve sent.”

“Maybe they can’t hear us… Think about how hard it is for us to communicate with other animals right here on Earth. We can’t decipher a conversation between dolphins or whales, and yet they’re mammals just like us. Cuttlefish communicate using color. Dogs use scent to speak to each other.

“It sounds silly, almost comical, but bees speak using what we’d describe as interpretive dance.”

For a scientist, he’s somewhat unorthodox, gesturing with his hands and rocking his head, making as though he’s ready to get up from the table and dance before the cameras to reinforce his point. I get the feeling he’s ready to party, but he smiles, laughing at himself and continues.

“Spiders communicate via vibrations in a web. What we think of as obvious—sound and pictures—may be nothing but static to them, so we need to be patient.

“We’re preparing a mission to conduct a flyby of Cruithne and attempt contact using a variety of transmission along the electromagnetic spectrum. Perhaps they’ll respond to a direct presence in space. The mission parameters are to use an elongated orbit, one that allows us to inch closer with each pass, but one that gives plenty of room to abort if need be.”

“Could that be perceived as a threat?”

“It’s a risk.” He sounds almost melancholy. “But they already know we’re here. Remember, they arrived on our doorstep. They chose to visit us. They know life is flourishing down here.

“Some scientists have called for an automated flyby, but we’re human. I think we should own First Contact. I don’t think we should shy away from what is arguably the most significant encounter in the history of life on this planet.

“A flyby with a crew of three is a low risk option. The thing about orbits is they’re highly predictable. They’ll know exactly where we are and where we’re heading, probably with a degree of accuracy that’s greater than anything we can calculate. It will also tell them something about our intelligence and our level of technological sophistication, as well as our interest in them.”

The anchor asks, “But why Cruithne? Why did they capture an asteroid and bring it into orbit around Earth if they’re not intending to use it to attack us?”

I whisper to Jana. “And why here? Why above the Congo?”

“Shhh.”

“Cruithne is a resource. From what we can see of the alien craft, it appears they’re mining the asteroid in much the same way we once intended to with the Orion Deep Space missions.”

“So what are they building?”

“I don’t know. Nobody does. But not knowing is no cause for fear, it’s cause for further inquiry.”

“Why are they flying above Africa? Why not America, or Europe?”

He raises an eyebrow at the suggestion. “You really want them flying over America?” His point seems well taken by the reporter. “We have a few ideas about why they’re over Africa. For a start, the location chosen by the alien vessel is the closest equatorial point to the African pole of inaccessibility.”

“You’re going to have to explain that one.”

“Every continent has a point of inaccessibility, marking its most remote location, the furthest point from any coastline.”

“So it’s difficult to reach?” He sounds confused.

“For us. Not them. For them, it represents the most central location on a given land mass. For them, it provides the greatest access to any terrestrial continent, which may suggest they’re thinking about maximizing their opportunity for exploration.”

The anchor doesn’t sound convinced. “So they hate water?”

“Maybe. Or perhaps there’s some other reason. Perhaps they’re interested in some other aspect of Africa. Maybe they’ve chosen a location with a low population density. Or perhaps they’re interested in the diversity of life in the jungle. Or it may be entirely coincidental and we’re reading too much into their location. Perhaps they have calculated some other approach and are intending to move into a low earth orbit, and the current location is simply a convenient parking spot. We really don’t know, but we’re open to learn.”

One of the villagers turns, looking out the window. Both Jana and I drop from sight as she bellows, “Hey, you kids! You should be in bed.”

“Go,” Jana says and I dart away, followed closely by her. A shadow looms at the window, looking out into the night as we slip behind the huts. My heart pounds in my throat as we run through the darkness. Jana giggles, laughing at our adventure. There’s yelling from behind us. It’s probably not related to our escapade, but it causes adrenaline to course through my veins regardless. Village life is loud. No Netflix and people find plenty of other things to do in the evening. Out of the hundred or so villagers, there were only fifteen people in Raka’s hut. It seems most of them simply don’t care.

We hide in the shadow of the church.

“Look.” Jana points up into the darkness. There, just beyond the steeple, is a single white star. There’s no shimmer, no sparkle or hint of any color. We lie on our backs in the long grass, staring up into the sky. “Do you think they can see us?”

“I don’t know,” is all I can say in reply. Seems everyone wants answers but there are none to be found.

“Is it a good thing or bad?”

I understand what Jana means. Life in the jungle is simple. One of the things my dad warned me about when we first came here was the high mortality rate among children. In the US, childhood deaths are rare. Death happens, but to older people, or sick people, or someone caught in an accident, and it’s rarely seen by anyone other than doctors and nurses. Here, death is an unwelcome guest at each home. People die all the time, especially kids. Old Raka had seven children. He has three. Jana’s sister Harma died last year. Death comes swiftly. Harma was fine one day—pale and languid the next—dead by the weekend. No one knew why.

Dad works with the World Health Organization and a number of other NGOs to provide vaccines and antibiotics to the villagers. If I get a fever, or even just a runny nose, Dad goes into a tailspin. Seeing that helps me to understand why he’s here, and why he’s so strict with me. He cares. For all his grumpy defiance, deep down it hurts him to see anyone die, especially children. When it comes to my life, he feels as though his discipline can keep evil at bay. I’m not so sure. I don’t know that microbes care about etiquette or protocol.

When Jana asks if the alien craft is good or bad, I know precisely what she means. Superstitions run rampant in the village. As crazy as some of them are, they’re a means of trying to reconcile cause and effect. People want explanations. For the tribe, that comes from the traditions of the elders. For my dad, it comes from the Scriptures. As for me... I’m not sure what I believe. A month ago, I would have been much more confident, but seeing an alien star above us is unsettling. There’s an intelligence there, but it’s not of this world. Like Brother Mordecai said, it’s neither an angel, nor a devil, but there’s no doubt about its intelligence. That brilliant light holds hidden intention, and that’s unsettling. Good or bad? Is life that simple? I hope so, but I doubt it.

I want to sound decisive for Jana, so I say, “Good.” She needs to hear that. We both do.

“I think so too.” Jana rolls over and props herself up on my chest. We kiss, although it does seem strange kissing in front of aliens—kinda like kissing in front of my dad. Now, there’s a thought I want to shake from my mind. My hand slips down to her waist and across her lower back. Suddenly, a red-hot poker stabs at my leg. I jump, pushing backwards in the grass. Jana swats at her thigh.

“Ants!”

I could never say this to my father, or even to Jana, but, goddamn you, Africa—you ruin everything.

Visitors

Breakfast is a quiet affair in our home as my dad reads a lot. Normally, just the Bible or an autobiography. He’s not much for fiction. Today, though, he’s moody. He storms into the dining room from the kitchen.

“I don’t want you hanging around with that girl.”

I stare at my mush, stirring it with a spoon. Ground millet and cornmeal wears thin after a few days. After a few years, it’s like eating glue. Someone told him about us last night. He hasn’t said as much, but it’s obvious. I want to protest, but I can’t. He’d shout me down.

“You have to understand. We’re different.” Dad tries to sympathize, but he’s not sympathetic at all. I’m not sure what he means by different. This isn’t the first time he’s been cryptic about subjects like sex and relationships. A biker gang member turned priest turned missionary—with a son in tow—isn’t exactly conventional and Dad keeps a lot bottled up inside.

“I’m seventeen, Dad. I can make my own decisions.”

“You will do as you’re told.”

I hate this. I hate him. I have no recourse. I want to argue, but there’s no argument to be had. Father wins. That is all. The anger must show on my face. Perhaps my body language is saying the words my mouth dares not speak.

“You need to realize. For you, this is puppy love. For her, it’s a ticket out of the jungle. She’s using you.”

My lips tighten. I stare at the wall, refusing to look at him.

“I forbid you, Joshua. You will have nothing to do with her. Is that understood?”

I clench my jaw, determined not to respond. If I cannot protest, I refuse to agree.

“Josh? Is that understood.”

Adrenaline surges through my body. I clench my fists beneath the table, doing all I can not to explode in anger. My knee bumps one of the legs of the table and my spoon clatters to the polished wooden surface, betraying my frustration.

“Do this for me, Josh. Joshua, I’m talking to you.”

All he’ll get from me is a slight nod, but no words.

“Say it.”

My blood seethes, boiling within me, threatening to erupt.

“SAY IT!”

I explode. Regrets be damned. “No,” I yell. “I won’t. You can’t make me.”

“You will do as you’re told.” He slams his fist on the table and a butter knife falls to the floor, but I’m too big to hit. He may threaten violence, but he dares not strike me as he knows I’ll fight back. I wouldn’t win. We both know that. Physically, he’s far stronger, but it would damage his perception of himself—man of peace and all that crap. “Josh—”

Our argument is drowned out by the sound of helicopters rushing in across the jungle canopy. We’ve had helo-drops before, but never this close or this low, and only ever in response to a medical emergency. The beating of the rotors shakes the house, causing the roof to flex with the changing air pressure. It’s as though a storm has descended on our home. Outside, dust kicks up off the ground, swirling in a cloud. Although unseen, the position of the chopper is clear from the thumping above the roof and the shaking of the windows. A military helicopter circles from one side of our home to the other. Dad runs outside. I follow close behind. There are four helicopters hovering over the village, beating the grass roofs of the various mud huts flat. Straw, twigs, sticks and branches swirl through the air. Villagers stop what they’re doing, shielding their eyes as they look into the sky.

Thick, heavy, dark ropes fall from the open sides of several helicopters, trailing from the doorways and landing with a thud in the grass. Soldiers abseil into the grounds of the church, which, even to me, seems sacrilegious.

Our village doesn’t have a helipad. There’s no room. The forest canopy is too thick to clear. As it is, most of the huts are set between trees. Keeping the jungle from growing back takes considerable work by the women while the men are out hunting, and our village is little more than a spotted clearing in the dense canopy.

My father marches over to the closest soldier as he unclips from his rope and secures his rifle. Several large packs glide down other ropes, with only the friction on their carabiners slowing their descent. They land with a thump in the dust.

Soldiers are common in the jungle, but never from choppers. Normally, we have one or two patrols pass through a week—either on training exercises, while searching for poachers, or out tracking rebels. These particular soldiers, though, aren’t African. I spot an American flag on the shoulder of the closest soldier, only the red, white and blue of the star-spangled banner has been replaced with khaki, beige and a deep winter green.

My father is protective, standing between me and the soldier, demanding answers. “What is going on?”

The soldier looks at him with indifference, speaking into a microphone slung over his shoulder.

“Jacob Chambers?” the soldier yells over the thumping of the rotor blades. “Father Chambers?”

“Yes.”

“Petty Officer Enrico Garcia, SEAL team two. Lieutenant Jackson is looking for you, sir.” Garcia points, but his movements are robotic. The deliberation he has with even the simplest of hand motions is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. He seems more mechanical than human. His gloved fingers are stiff, as though they’re reinforced with steel rods, while the muscles on his arm are sharply defined. He could be directing traffic.

Lieutenant Jackson sees us talking and jogs over with a hand outstretched in friendship. He yells, “Father Chambers, right?”

Over the sound of the rotors, I hear chainsaws starting up. Several of the SEALs begin cutting into the trees behind the church. Sawdust flies to one side, spraying through the air as the whirling blades eat into the trunks. The SEALs are methodical, brandishing their chainsaws with the precision of a samurai warrior working with a thin metal sword. Broad stance. Muscles flexed. Sweat dripping. Within a minute, the first of the massive trees is groaning, then cracking, and then falling, crashing into the jungle with the sound of thunder.

“What is going on?” My father points at the falling trees, but with far less vigor than Garcia. The Lieutenant looks relaxed. Garcia, though, stands to attention. He has his hands clasped behind his back. His chest is as thick and imposing as any of the trees. Everything about the SEALs screams of determination. Black military boots. Thick cotton trousers with disruptive patterns. Combat vest over a singlet. Camouflage paint on their bare arms. I have no doubt Petty Officer Garcia could whip his rifle down from his shoulder in less time than I could blink.

“We need to secure an LZ for the choppers.” Lieutenant Jackson sweeps his hand out, pointing at the jungle, making as though a mere gesture is enough to fell the mighty trees before him. Unlike the other soldiers, who are wearing what equates to bicycle helmets with camouflage markings, the lieutenant is wearing a baseball cap. His hair is straggly and not a typical military buzz cut.

“I can see what you’re doing.” My father is pissed. The veins on his neck are starting to bulge. He calls out over the sound of the helicopters buzzing overhead like a swarm of hornets. “Why?”

“We have four helos on station. Only two will stay with the team. We need to put them on the ground before they start sucking on fuel reserves.”

“But why?” Dad yells, as yet another helicopter passes low overhead. Rather than hovering, the helicopters are circling, shifting position, surveying the village from every angle. “You’re not answering my question.”

“No. I’m not.” The lieutenant turns toward another soldier running up beside him with a map. The two men point out features, discussing the clearing of the jungle. My father fumes. He’s not used to being sidelined.

Several of the village elders gather beside my dad, talking with him. Concern lines their weathered faces. The lieutenant points at them, still yelling over the noise of the helicopters flying overhead. “We’re going to need your help shifting those fallen trees. I need the ground cleared to five feet. Nothing above five feet so we can set these birds down.”

The village elders look to my father. Not all of them are Christian, but they all trust him. Religion and ideology aside, there’s no doubt his presence here has saved lives. I can see my father seething inside. His teeth are clenched, but he nods, looking to the chief. The village chief turns, waving with his hands and calling his men over. Above us, four helicopters sway just a few feet above the jungle canopy, thrashing the air. Branches sway as though caught in a storm. Leaves swirl in the wind.

The lieutenant marches over to the church, looking at it carefully. I’m not sure if he wants to knock it down or take it over, but he’s clearly evaluating his options.

“It’s the star, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Father Chambers. It’s the star. Now I need you to coordinate the natives. We have to clear this low-lying scrub—and quick. If we can’t flatten the area within the next sixty minutes the helos will be recalled.”

“Why should I help you?”

The lieutenant points up.

“Because I’m here to protect you from them.”

Nothing more needs to be said. My dad nods and moves off. He organizes the men of the village, explaining the urgency in cutting the undergrowth. A line of men spread out behind the SEALs, moving through the fallen jungle with machetes and long knives, hacking at the foliage.

I help some of the soldiers lift fallen trees, dragging them to one side. The trees are too heavy to carry, but by lifting one end, we can pivot, dragging the dense upper branches from where they fell, shifting the trunk out of the way. The villagers work with their machetes, hacking at the fallen branches, lowering the profile of the decimated trees.

“Stay close, kid.” Petty Officer Garcia grabs me, pulling me to one side as a ten-foot-long branch whips past just inches from my head, crashing into the undergrowth.

“Thanks.” I scramble to keep up with him. “It’s Joshua—Josh.” I extend my hand in friendship.

Petty Officer Garcia shakes my hand with an iron grip.

“You’re alright, kid.” I wish he wouldn’t call me kid. I’m not a child. If there’s one thing a teen wants, it’s to be grown up. There’s nothing worse than being caught in the middle and treated like you’re still a kid. He seems to sense some reticence on my part and ruffles my hair. Great, now I’m being patronized like a dog.

“Gum?”

That causes my face to light up. “Sure.” There’s something about the instant hit of sugar that comes from chewing gum. All is forgiven, Petty Officer Garcia.

The chainsaws being used by the SEALs are bigger and longer than anything I’ve ever seen. The blades are easily four foot in length and the stream of sawdust flying through the air behind them reaches ten to fifteen feet, sending wood chips cascading like water from a fountain, showering the bushes in tiny flecks. All the trees fall the same way, out in front of us. The precision with which the soldiers are attacking the forest dawns on me. The SEALs are laying the trees down between the various trees still standing ahead of them, avoiding them. Some of the fallen trees catch in the limbs and branches of other trees deeper within the jungle, but most fall clear, flattening the lower trees and bushes.

Several other soldiers have smaller chainsaws they brandish with one hand. They strip the trunks of various fallen trees, cutting down the debris rising above the jungle floor.

The noise is overwhelming.

Petty Officer Garcia and I join one of the teams lifting a fallen log. It’s hard work, but as I’m shorter than the soldiers, at times it seems as though I’m not lifting anything. Once we’ve swung the trunk around to the edge of the jungle, the soldiers give a count of three before tossing it into the foliage. If any of these logs were to land on someone’s feet, they’d crush them, bones and all. I’m sweating profusely in the heat but loving the work.

We clear enough ground for one of the choppers to land, and it descends with what feels like hurricane force winds, throwing tiny sticks and bits of debris at us. I turn my back to the chopper, but that doesn’t stop my legs and arms from being whipped by flying branches.

“Ouch!” My lower calf muscle erupts with pain, having been slashed by a loose branch hurled through the air. A thin line of blood seeps from my leg, but the injury doesn’t bleed as it is as fine as a razor blade. It stings like a paper cut.

“Makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?” Garcia yells as the rotors wind down on the chopper behind us. The whine of the engines dies and the wind drops.

I laugh, having never thought of pain this way.

“Sure. I guess.”

Garcia laughs as well, slapping me on the back.

Petty Officer Garcia is stocky, with broad thighs and a neck that seems to blend in with his shoulders. I doubt he’s carrying more than an ounce of fat on his body. He must be of Mexican descent, as his hair is jet black, while his skin has an oily sheen in the oppressive heat.

“You’re all right, Josh.”

“Thanks.”

The helicopter that landed behind us is considerably different from the one I saw Garcia descend from. He came out of a chopper with open sides and a soldier standing in the doorway mounting a machine gun. This helicopter, though, is longer and wider. Instead of soldiers, civilians begin climbing out, carrying crates and boxes.

The two military helicopters circling overhead depart, leaving only one more civilian chopper in the air.

Working with a machete is exhausting. We take turns slashing at the undergrowth while the village women bring us water and slices of millet cake. The ground is uneven, covered in rotten wood, thick vines and saplings. There’s a reason the natives haven’t expanded the village, and it’s not because of the work involved, or the astonishing rate with which competing plants try to repopulate the canopy. It’s insects. Flies, bees, wasps, spiders, leeches, beetles, termites, and millions upon millions of ants swarm over the foliage. For them, our intrusion is a declaration of war and they mount a counter attack. I’m not sure even the US Navy SEALs are equipped to deal with a nest of angry African ants.

Garcia slaps his neck and then his leg in a futile attempt to keep the insects at bay.

“Ouch!”

He hops to one side, peeling a large centipede from his arm. Roughly a hundred spindly legs clamber for something to hold onto, while the body of the creature curls, trying to find a stick or a branch to grab. Pinches snap at the air in anger, determined to inflict pain.

I can’t resist. “Makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?” And he bursts out laughing.

When I first arrived here from Boston, via Paris, and then Morocco, insect bites were torture—they’d burn for what felt like days. It was as though someone had stuck red-hot needles into my skin. Over time, I’ve developed an immunity to bites. They still hurt, but not nearly as bad, or for as long. I guess my body learned not to react.

“You need mud.” I pick up a handful and rub it on my lower legs. “They’re not smart. They’ll think you’re a tree or something—not an animal. Plus, it makes it harder for them to bite you.”

Garcia rolls his trousers up to his knee, exposing his lower leg. Already, there are dozens of red welts. Ants clamber over his skin. He slaps mud around his calf muscle, working the rich, dark soil down into the top of his socks.

“Thanks, Josh. Good tip.”

I smile. Having American soldiers drop from the sky is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened around here, and suddenly the presence of an alien spacecraft tens of thousands of miles away seems all too close, and yet not so scary. The soldiers are invincible, or so it seems. We finish working on the clearing and the second helicopter descends, kicking up a hailstorm of dirt and debris. I’m surprised my father hasn’t forbidden me from working with the SEALs, but I suspect that’s because he’s distracted by other things.

Pretzel

The SEALs are smart. They cleared the exact center of the two landing spots with meticulous care, but only out to about twenty feet. Beyond that, they’ve left the foliage and trees where they’ve fallen. This allows the helicopters to set down on roughly level ground, with the debris out to about forty yards lying on top of itself in a chaotic jumble, but it’s well below the whirling rotor-blades. Negotiating the rough terrain on foot is difficult as fallen trees of various sizes crisscross the jungle floor despite the soldiers’ best efforts, but the SEALs got their helicopters down.

Garcia crouches, ducking under a thick trunk, while I clamber over it, pulling on branches for balance as we make our way to the second helicopter.

There’s no time to rest. The SEALs switch from clearing the jungle to carrying supplies and equipment from the choppers. It’s painstakingly slow work. We set up a line to ferry crates and backpacks over to the village. It takes another hour before the cargo is unloaded and by then I’m exhausted.

Petty Officer Garcia sits on one of the crates and takes a swig of water from a canteen, offering me some. Sweat soaks through his shirt.

“Thirsty?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

It feels nice to be part of the crew.

“Hey, Pretzel.”

Pretzel? For a moment, I’m not sure I heard Garcia correctly, but a thin, elderly man wanders over without a care in the world. He’s wearing a drab olive uniform that looks ungainly on his slight frame. I don’t know too much about the military, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t standard issue. Besides, he looks too old to be a soldier. His helmet is two sizes too big for his head and leans to one side, angling down over his right ear.

Pretzel smiles. “What the hell are they doing letting you near a goddamn alien UFO, Petty Officer?”

As soon as Pretzel speaks, I recognize his voice. This is the scientist we watched last night on television, although that was probably prerecorded. From his accent, it’s clear he’s from India but he’s at home with the US troops. Garcia just laughs at his comment.

“Pretz, this is Josh.”

“Hi.” I wave, unsure why I’m waving.

Pretzel salutes me, which given I’m not in the military, I’m pretty sure is a breach of etiquette—not that I care. Dad would, but not me.

“Pratul Arjun Khatri-Lagharin. Ex-British Gurkha. Quartermaster. At your service”

“Don’t let him fool you, kid. He’s a civvy.”

“Pra—who?” And it’s gone. Whatever his name is, it’s already escaped me.

“Pretzel, Josh. Just Pretzel.” He reaches out a friendly hand and we shake. I guess he gets that a lot, but no one messes up Pretzel.

“So, you’re one of the scientists?”

“I am,” he says proudly, taking off his helmet and resting it on a nearby boulder. His wispy hair is a mess and matted down with sweat, making it look as though he’s just finished running a marathon. I know stereotypes are misleading, but I was expecting lab coats and reading glasses, the rectangular kind that instantly make someone look more intelligent. If I bumped into Pretzel in a crowd, I’d think he was retired or perhaps worked as a reporter, maybe an editor at some newspaper, as he’s got that kind of gravitas about him.

Garcia says, “Pretzel’s been looking for intelligent life in outer space for over fifty years.”

To which, he replies, “Because there sure as hell ain’t any down here.” Both men laugh and I get the feeling this is a common retort.

Lieutenant Jackson barks orders at one of the soldiers on the other side of the crate and Garcia jumps to his feet, expecting to be scolded as well. Pretzel doesn’t seem fazed by the lieutenant’s gruff demeanor. In his distinctly irreverent Indian accent, he tells me, “Don’t worry about him. He’s a jackass.”

Jackson heard that—that much is clear from the way the lieutenant’s head pricks up as he wheels around to face us.

“What was that? What did you say?”

It’s not hard to see there’s history between them. Lieutenant Jackson is incensed.

Pretzel is surprisingly relaxed given he’s just been caught cursing at a US Navy SEAL. “I was just telling the kid,” he says, taking his time, waving with his hand and refusing to be intimidated by the lieutenant. “If he needs anything.” Again, he pauses, forcing Jackson to wait for his reply. The lieutenant is impatient, seething inside, but the aging Indian scientist speaks slowly, enunciating carefully as he says, “Just... ask.”

Jackson isn’t impressed. The lieutenant heard exactly what was said but he doesn’t challenge Pretzel, rather he turns away, pointing at several soldiers erecting a tent and barking orders at them. He flinches slightly as Pretzel hisses, adding a single word spoken with deliberation.

“Jackass.”

Garcia raises an eyebrow, looking at me to see if I followed what just happened. Oh, yeah, I got it. I can’t wait till Pretzel meets my dad. I’m going to need popcorn. Lots of popcorn.

Pretzel turns to me. “You need anything, kid?”

“Me?” I shake my head, offering an emphatic, “No.”

I’m still not sure how I ended up in the middle of all this.

“Well…”

I finish his sentence for him. “Just ask, right?”

“Haha. I like you, kid.”

“Come on.” Garcia gestures for me to walk with him. We make our way to the grounds around the church. As the compound is largely free of trees, the church lawn is used for markets on the weekend and is ideal for the scientists and soldiers setting up camp.

“So. Um. Pretzel?”

“Yeah, he’s quite the character, huh? He’s been working with the Rapid Deployment Team for decades. Don’t be fooled by his appearance. He has a Ph.D. in physics and astrobiology and is on the board of directors governing this mission.”

“But he and the lieutenant?”

“Don’t see eye to eye. Technically, they’re equals. In practice, Lieutenant Jackson has operational command, while Pretzel’s over the scientific team.

“We do a lot of training exercises, coordinating with NASA and ESA, preparing for precisely this kind of scenario. A couple of years ago when we were first assigned a support role with the Contact team, Lieutenant Jackson thought Pretzel was a Sherpa during an exercise in the Himalayas and tried to order him around. Tried being the optimum word. There’s been friction ever since.”

“No kidding.”

“Come on. I’ll introduce you to the crew.”

We walk past soldiers setting up vast bubble-shaped tents without a center pole. They’re surprisingly spacious inside, with vast flaps that open like doorways, allowing scientists to move in equipment from all four sides at once.

“What are they like?” I ask.

“The aliens? No one knows. But there’s been no hostility, so we’re assuming they’re good.”

There it is again—oversimplifications about good and evil, but after four years in the jungle, I know there’s no such distinction. As the villagers say, twilight never ends, the night just gets darker. What’s good is often subjective. Good for me might be bad for Jana. Good for her and me might be bad for the tribe, the village, or the jungle. I hope Garcia’s right, but I have my doubts.

“And they’re coming here?” Dumb question, I guess, as there’s no other reason for soldiers to drop out of the sky. It seems strange to me, crazy that aliens would want to come to my tiny village in the middle of the jungle. “Aren’t they supposed to go to The White House? Or attack buildings in New York or something?”

Garcia laughs. “Haven’t you heard? They’re lowering a rope—a cable.”

“A rope? From where?”

My eyes look up into the clear blue sky, not understanding how that’s possible.

“From space.”

“But won’t it fall down?”

“Nope.”

“What holds it up?”

“I dunno, but the scientists say it’s advanced engineering, not magic.”

“That’s mad.”

“Yeah, crazy, huh? They tell me it’s like having an elevator in a building, only there’s no building, and this elevator reaches thirty odd thousand kilometers into space. If it fell, it would wrap around the entire planet.”

“Wow! So what’s stopping it from falling?”

“Ask Pretzel.” As an afterthought, he points at the sky and adds, “Or them.”

“So there are no spaceships? No flying saucers? Just a rope?”

“I guess.”

Several civilians work on setting up a satellite dish outside the church. Pretzel unfolds a solar panel, locking it onto a stand and angling it toward the sun. He activates a tiny motor at its base, allowing it to track the motion of the sun over the course of the day.

Garcia points. “See those guys? They’re scientists from the NASA/ESA First Contact group—Pretzel’s team.”

I’m a little nervous around Pretzel, which is strange considering he’s overly friendly and outspoken. Soldiers mill around brandishing rifles. Somewhere overhead an alien rope ladder is being lowered from the clear blue sky and I’m intimidated by a five-foot six aging Indian scientist! Hilarious, really.

Lieutenant Jackson waves Garcia over, no doubt with an assignment. The two men talk, point, nod, and agree on something. Garcia jogs back.

“Your dad isn’t happy.”

“No. He wouldn’t be.”

“He’s arranging to evacuate the villagers to Ubandi.”

I nod, knowing what’s coming next. I’m not dumb. With all the assignments the lieutenant’s been barking out at various soldiers, it’s kinda obvious that Garcia’s not being given one because he’s already on one—babysitting the white boy.

“I’m supposed to keep an eye on you until he gets back. Then you guys are heading up to Kisangani.”

Yep. There it is. As friendly as Garcia is, his interest is in a job, not the teenaged son of a missionary. I don’t hold it against him. I always knew all this was leading somewhere, and apparently that somewhere is Kisangani, about fifty miles from here.

“So we won’t get to see them land?”

“Oh, you’ll get the best view of all. You’ll get to see it all on TV from some nice, cushy hotel lounge. Me? I’ll be crouching behind a tree, scratching at insect bites, staying the hell out of sight.”

I feel a little disappointed, betrayed almost. This is my home. I don’t want to leave. Being forced to evacuate seems wrong. Before I can say anything, Pretzel storms over. He’s not happy. He drags another scientist in his wake, pointing at me.

“I’m telling you it’s too high. You want proof? Here’s your proof.”

I step back a little as the other man counters. “But the background radiation is barely 12 Roentgen. It’s hardly significant.”

“Josh. Can I have some of your hair?”

I knew Pretzel was a little eccentric, but I had no idea.

“Ah, yeah. Sure.” My mouth may say those words, but my heart doesn’t believe them. I don’t know what I’m actually agreeing to. Pretzel leans in, grabbing a single strand by the root and plucking it.

“Test this,” he says, handing the strand to the other scientist.

I’m baffled. “I don’t understand?”

Pretzel ignores my question, instead asking me, “How long have you been here?”

“Ah, just on four years.”

“Perfect. Josh is a perfect sample. Four years’ worth of accumulated protein capturing the impact of any background radiation. And don’t give me any bullshit about radon build up. We’re in the middle of a goddamn jungle. There’s a reason they’re coming down here, and it’s not to collect autographs. We can’t ignore the possibility they’re after heavy metals.”

The other man wanders off, holding the strand of hair as though it were some prized specimen. I’m confused.

Pretzel goes from annoyed to friendly in a heartbeat, which is just as bewildering to me.

“Hey, don’t worry about anything. You’re fine. You’re giving us a baseline, that’s all.”

I must look worried.

“Hair is like one of those old-fashioned tape recorders. Every day it grows a little. Every day it tells us a little more about what you’ve been exposed to—things in your diet, radiation around you, isotopes integrating into various molecules. It lets us understand what’s normal for the jungle.”

“Oh.”

I didn’t understand any of that.

“Hey, Pretzel. Tell him about the rope ladder.” Garcia points at the clear blue sky.

“Oh that? Yeah, that’s clever. Our alien friends are smart. You see, getting on and off Earth takes a lot of energy. A helluva lot. Most of our rockets have a payload ratio of around three or four percent, so 96% of any rocket is fuel and engines. Big rocket. Little capsule at the top, right? Lots of waste.

“So these guys are smart. Instead of flying down here, they’re are setting up an elevator. That’s why they captured the asteroid. They’re mining it to build the elevator cable, saving themselves a lot of effort. The ratio of what they can transport up and down from Earth will be pretty much the opposite of what we use for space flight. They’ll be able to shuffle stuff to and from orbit with remarkable efficiency.”

I nod. “Smart.”

At least, it sounds smart to me. I can’t figure out how the rope is going to stay up if it’s not attached to something like a tree or a cliff.

“Yep. Why waste fuel flying back and forth when you can just drop a ladder.”

Pretzel wanders off, talking to someone else. He’s like a whirlwind in the desert, dragging tumbleweeds along behind him. Garcia and I help set up the tents, unraveling nylon sheets and laying out poles but I’m intensely interested in Pretzel and the other scientists. They unpack computers and various pieces of equipment, run cables along the ground and build impromptu tables out of crates and planks of wood.

Jana holds up what looks like a meter-long ruler, resting it on a large boulder in the center of the village. Pretzel peers through what seems to be a telescope mounted on a tripod, while another scientist sprays red paint on the tip of the rock.

“I want a few more datum points.” Pretzel points at a couple of other boulders, one of which lies near the parsonage.

The other scientist working with Jana is elderly. She has thin grey hair and wrinkled cheeks. I notice a few of the natives staring at her, mesmerized by her pale skin as though they’ve seen a ghost. People don’t grow old in the jungle. Life here is too harsh.

Garcia and I unpack a crate, placing radio equipment and a variety of computer monitors on one of the impromptu desks inside the main tent.

“Hey, uh, I, um,” Garcia says, which to me seems to be a leading question, suggestive of what’s coming next. I feel as though I can guess what he’s going to ask. “Are there, like, long drops around here? You know, where do the villagers go for Number Two?”

“Ah,” I reply as we stand by a tent flap. “There are squat toilets over there, but you can use our toilet.”

Garcia’s eye’s narrow. “It’s—you know—a regular toilet?”

“Yeah.”

“A regular flushing toilet?”

“Yeah.”

His brow furrows. “How?”

“We have a rainwater tank.”

“And there’s toilet paper?”

Seems like an odd question, but, “Yes.”

“Oh, Josh. You’re a legend.” I must look confused as Garcia elaborates. “For the past few months I’ve been shitting into plastic bags and carrying that stuff around with me while on operations in the Middle East.”

“You poop into plastic bags?” I ask, trying to hide my surprise but not quite making it as my words are a little shrill.

“The places we go—no one can know we were there, so yeah, we normally do crazy stuff like that to avoid leaving any sign. A toilet, though, a real goddamn toilet. That’s gold. There’s nothing like taking a good shit.”

I can’t help but laugh. I’m not sure I agree with him on that point, but then again, I haven’t had to squat down and poop into tiny plastic bags.

“But we’ve got to keep this from Lieutenant Jackson, okay?”

I don’t know why it needs to be a secret, but, “Sure.”

Garcia peers out of the tent, looking either way, probably trying to spot the lieutenant.

I point. “Go in the back door, first on the left.”

“Be right back,” he says, and he darts over behind the manse as though he’s on some super-secret mission. As for me, I don’t know that I’ve ever talked about pooping with anyone before. Not sure I ever will again.

With nothing else to do, I join Jana as she sets up the meter ruler on another rock.

“Hold it just there.” Pretzel notes something on a computer tablet. “Mark 487.18 meters.”

Another scientist replies, “Got it—487.18.”

I’m surprised by the amount of equipment the scientists have. There are several satellite dishes clamped onto the side of trees, all pointing in different directions, but they’re smaller than Raka’s and probably not used for watching television.

“Is this your friend Josh?” the older woman asks Jana, offering her hand to me in friendship.

We shake as Jana says, “Yes.”

“Nice to meet you, Josh. I’m Dr. Angela O’Brien.”

“Hi, Dr. O’Brien,” I say, unsure why I’m suddenly a celebrity.

“Angela, please. No formalities in the jungle.”

Jana is excited. “They want to see the caves.”

“The caves?”

We’re not supposed to go to the caves, even though they’re near the local swimming hole. Jana and I like to sneak off exploring, but if my dad knew I’d been there he’d ground me for a month.

Bats roost in the caves north of the village. They’re known to carry diseases like Ebola and viruses like Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever. Dad had me memorize the names and the symptoms in case any of the villagers become infected. One scratch, just some guano getting into a cut, or even simply touching your nose, mouth or eyes with unwashed hands and wham! you’re dead. Whether that’s true or not, I’m not sure, but it’s what Dad says, and it’s a pretty damn effective way to make me paranoid.

I don’t know why we sneak away there. Defiance, I guess—the exhilaration of dicing with death and feeling alive. I’m always a little nervous on returning to the village, wondering if a sniffle is something more. Why do it? If Dad knew, he’d scold me for being illogical—stupid. He’d say, Jana’s a bad influence, but we just want to be ourselves and not controlled by someone else, constantly being told what to do and how to think. Even my dad’s guilty of that, running off to the African jungle. He wasn’t sent here. He chose to come here when everyone told him it was madness. Is that why he came? To prove them wrong? Perhaps that same rebellious streak runs in me.

“Why do you want to go there?” I ask the scientist.

Visiting bats is about as far removed from greeting aliens as anyone could get.

Angela gestures to Pretzel as he walks over. “Ask him. Going to the caves is his idea.”

There’s something regal in the way Pretzel walks and talks. His voice has gravitas, while his soft Indian accent lends an air of mystique to his words, making it seem as though he’s imparting ancient secrets.

Pretzel picks up on the conversation, saying, “I would love to see your caves.”

Angela clarifies, “My team is part of the Earth Sciences division at ESA. Our job is to monitor the jungle during First Contact to ensure there are no unintended adverse effects.”

Jana beats me to the obvious question. “So you don’t get to talk to the aliens?”

She laughs, pointing at Pretzel. “Him, maybe, but not me.”

Pretzel says, “No one will be talking to anyone at first. Not straight away. Honestly, at this point, we don’t even know what talking will involve. Speech? Sign language? Music? Strobe lights?”

Angela elaborates. “My role is to observe what happens on Earth during First Contact. We know nothing about the biology of our visitors. We don’t know how our world will react to them at a cellular level.”

Jana and I are silent. Angela pauses. I suspect she’d be happy to leave the explanation at that, but we’re clearly fascinated.

“You’ve both seen movies like this, right?”

We nod.

“Well, this won’t be anything like what you’ve seen in Hollywood. Forget everything you’ve seen on TV. There won’t be any dashing heroes or aliens with acid for blood.”

My mind wanders. We don’t have movie theaters in the jungle, but Raka gets films on DVD, so I know what she means. Mostly, they’re copies of a copy of a copy, so the quality is poor, but often that makes scary movies even more terrifying, as we can’t quite see what’s happening.

Raka doesn’t like too much horror. Most of the movies he has are old and often quite simple. Star Wars is a favorite because it’s one of the few movies he has an original copy of so it’s high quality. There’s something surreal about watching stormtroopers and Jedi running through an astonishingly clean, sterile spaceship. Wouldn’t happen in the jungle. Light sabers and blasters, spaceships and robots are all somewhat hypnotic to look at—it’s the clearly defined lines, the clean-cut images that cast a spell over us. In the jungle, everything’s dirty. There’s always humidity in the air. Nothing’s ever really dry, so seeing worlds like Tatooine with its crisp desert sands, or Hoth with its pristine ice holds an almost magnetic appeal. To hear Angela say, forget all that, is surprising, as the allure is overwhelming. If aliens aren’t like that, I’m at a loss as to what they could be like.

“We live in a microbial world.” Pretzel waves his arm toward the jungle. “All of this is an illusion. Trees. Monkeys. Snakes. Centipedes. Birds. None of that is real in itself. Every animal is a hodgepodge of individual cells—a collection of trillions upon trillions of microscopic lifeforms that combine like Lego blocks to form living creatures like you and me. Imagine a house made from Lego. Blue Lego stairs. Red Lego chairs. Yellow Lego beds and benches—that’s us! We are that house! You, me, the jungle, even the air we breathe, it’s all an assortment of tiny living cells.”

Jana is taken back by the concept.

“Even the air?”

“Even the air. With each breath, you’re inhaling roughly a hundred thousand viral particles, along with maybe as many as twenty thousand different bacterial cells.”

Jana and I look at each other in surprise.

“And that’s what we call clean air. Most of these microscopic components—ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, nine (stop me when you’ve heard enough nines) nine, nine, nine.”

Pretzel isn’t kidding about the nines, so I raise my hand slightly and he grabs a breath. “Aren’t harmful to us at all. Most of them are helpful, keeping us alive and healthy, and they’re everywhere. On every surface. In our lungs, our guts, on our skin. There’s no surface on Earth that doesn’t harbor microbes.”

“Even Mt. Everest?”

“Even Mt. Everest. We’ve found bacteria and diatoms at heights of around fifty kilometers, that’s easily five times the height of Everest.”

“How do they get there?”

“Storms. Bloody big storms. The sky is basically a microbial highway.”

“What about Antarctica?” I ask.

“Even in Antarctica—often hidden in lakes beneath miles of ice, cut off from the outside world for tens of millions of years, but still thriving in the darkness.”

He points at a patch of mud in front of his boots, saying, “Dig a hole in the ground. Dig down a couple of miles looking for gold or diamonds. Dig so far the rock becomes absurdly hot to touch and you’ll still find microbes in the water seeping through the cracks.

“Eight miles beneath the ocean, in the eternally dark depths of the Mariana Trench, we’ve found microbes in astonishing abundance. The pressure there is eight tons per square inch. That’s like Superman balancing a bus in the palm of his hand, and yet still cellular life thrives.”

Jana asks the question I’m thinking. “But not the aliens? They don’t have microbes?”

“None of ours. Not yet anyway,” Angela says. “But as soon as they open the door and step out into our world, they will. What ever microbes inhabit our two biospheres will suddenly come in contact. In some ways, that’s the real First Contact. It’s inevitable, and that’s the problem. We don’t know what microbes make up their world, and we don’t know how they’ll interact with our microbes. I’d feel much more comfortable if these guys were landing in the Sahara. There are still microbes there, but it’s an easier environment for us to isolate and control.”

Pretzel points at a monkey swinging through the trees. Branches bend beneath its weight, on the verge of snapping when the blur of fur switches hands, grabbing for some other branch as its legs swing wildly beneath it. Like a trapeze artist at the circus, it defies gravity, soaring through the jungle canopy with ease.

“Here in the Congo, we’ve got an astonishing variety of species and an incredibly complex ecosystem. There’s so much energy, so much life.”

Angela adds, “It’s my job to monitor it. I’m here to detect any impact. We suspect our microbial lifeforms will be incompatible with theirs, but we really don’t know for sure. Our environment could be lethal to them, just as theirs could be lethal to ours. Both biomes might ignore each other entirely, or they could compete against each other, with one aggressively winning over the other. It could be that there are battles played out at one level but not another. The complexity of what could happen is off the charts. The only way we’re going to know what’s happening is if we monitor the interaction closely.”

Petty Officer Garcia comes jogging over, grinning like a kid at Christmas, clearly pleased with himself. He joins our group quietly, stepping softly and making as though he never slipped away, but he looks pleased with himself for having a poo, of all things.

Pretzel gestures to the rest of the scientists setting up their equipment, saying, “If it was up to me, we’d undertake contact in space. Things would be much simpler in a nice, sterile, isolated environment.”

“And the caves?” I ask.

Angela holds up a small plastic box with a spike protruding from one end. Chrome screws and rubber seals protect the contents from the humidity of the jungle. There’s a digital display, but it’s in black and white, with an array of dozens of seemingly meaningless numbers on it. Resting on a boulder beside her is a box with easily a hundred other monitors neatly stacked within.

“I need to distribute these out to a distance of five kilometers. They’ll monitor soil and airborne microbes within about two feet once shoved into the dirt. Getting these out there now will give us a good baseline during First Contact, allowing us to measure any change.”

Pretzel realizes Angela hasn’t actually answered my question. “Oh, the caves will give us access to ground water and subsurface microbes.”

“Microbes are our canary-in-the-coal-mine,” Angela says.

Pretzel claps his hands together. “So? What do you say? Are you up for a little adventure?”

“Ummm.” Garcia waves Lieutenant Jackson over. “There’s a few things we need to talk about first.”

Pretzel doesn’t look impressed, but I’m glad Garcia called the lieutenant over as with my dad in Ubandi I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t go wandering around the jungle. Garcia explains the situation to Jackson, outlining the plan.

Lieutenant Jackson confronts Pretzel.

“You really shouldn’t be going out there. Can’t someone else do this? You’re just planting monitors, right? I could send out a few soldiers with instructions.”

“No, no, no,” Pretzel replies, shaking his head. “We need to get an accurate baseline. Placement is important.”

“But why you? We need you here in case questions arise regarding First Contact protocols. What if CentCom calls for you?”

“We’ll have a radio on us out there, which is no different to being here and talking to them over any other radio.”

Lieutenant Jackson rubs the stubble on his chin, thinking deeply. Even though he doesn’t agree with Pretzel, it’s obvious the lieutenant is trying to be accommodating. He could be hard-nosed about this. My father would be, but not Jackson, which tells me something about his motives. Pretzel might still harbor some animosity over whatever happened in the Himalayas, but the lieutenant has put that behind him. He’s trying hard to be fair and balanced. For all Pretzel’s brilliance, that seems lost on him. I wish Pretzel could see that rather than thinking the lieutenant is being difficult.

“I don’t know about this,” Jackson says, and I can see he’s trying to balance being in operational command with deference to Pretzel as head of the scientific team.

“These guys don’t need me looking over their shoulders,” Pretzel replies, pointing at the scientists working on their equipment. “Besides, out there, I’ll have a bit of time to think laterally.”

“I really, really don’t like this.”

From the way the lieutenant shakes his head, I get the feeling he’d feel much more comfortable issuing orders that must be followed. Rational discussions aren’t his forte, and Pretzel seems to have another agenda. I’m not sure why he wants to get out of camp, but he’s intent on going into the jungle. It’s probably the novelty factor.

“We’ll be fine. We’ve got local guides. We’re following established trails.”

“And you want to take the boy out there?” Jackson asks.

I’m incensed. I’m not a boy. I’m a teenager, a young man. The look on my face must be telling as it doesn’t go unnoticed by either of them.

Pretzel says, “Not him. Them. The two of them. They’ve both lived here for years. They know the lay of the land so we won’t get lost.”

I appreciate the way Pretzel’s included Jana, but I don’t think it makes much difference to Lieutenant Jackson.

“Aren’t there any other villagers that could take you out there?”

“It’s close,” Pretzel counters, ignoring his question. “A couple of miles, no more. An easy stroll on tracks these guys use all the time.”

“And this is genuinely important, right? This isn’t some—”

“—it’s not the Himalayas.”

I’m not sure what happened between Pretzel and Jackson in Nepal, but I’d love to find out.

Pretzel reasons with the lieutenant, gesturing with his hands toward the jungle. “They know of a cave that’ll allow us to measure the microbial impact on the water table. That’s a Priority One target for us as it will allow us to monitor any contamination seeping out of the contact zone and into subsurface aquifers.”

To his credit, the lieutenant is professional, weighing the merits against the risk.

He says, “Command estimates touchdown at four hundred hours tomorrow morning. I’ve got a truck coming in from Kisangani, turning around at sixteen hundred this afternoon. That gives us a buffer of twelve hours prior to contact.” He points at us. “I want those two on that truck this afternoon. Is that understood?”

“Understood.” Pretzel has a smile on his face a mile wide.

“And if you’re not back by fifteen hundred, I’ll take a team of SEALs out there and hunt you down myself.”

Pretzel laughs. “Agreed.”

“Garcia. You’re with them. Stay in radio contact. I want reports on the hour. Any issues, you contact AWACS and report your location and operational status immediately. Understood?”

“Affirmative.”

Lady

Pretzel and Angela load equipment into a bunch of backpacks while Garcia unfolds a map, laying it out on a rock and positioning it using a compass.

“Can either of you point out the caves on this map?”

Jana and I both squint, looking at the squiggly lines marking the topography and various nearby rivers, trying to imagine we’re hundreds of feet in the air, peering down on the jungle.

Jana taps the map, lost in thought.

I run my finger along a stream.

“Is this Angawai? Over by Raka’s hut?”

She shakes her head, pointing to one side. “Nah, I think that’s over there. The map looks wrong.”

“It could well be,” Garcia says. “It’s the best we could find, but it’s at least twenty years old.”

“Don’t worry,” Jana says. “We won’t get lost.”

I add, “Promise.”

“Oh, I know we won’t.” Garcia grins. He knows something. He’s thinking about what he should and shouldn’t tell us, which I find peculiar. His lips shift to one side as he ponders what to say next. I tilt my head slightly, on the verge of asking him what’s so amusing. His eyes light up at my curiosity. “Hold your hand up—high as you can—with three fingers spread wide.”

Jana looks at me with a furrowed brow. I’ll play along. I have no problem looking a little stupid. Garcia grabs a radio the size of a shoebox and unfolds a floppy antenna, holding the headset up to the side of his face.

“Overlord. This is Sierra Charlie Six. Coms check. Confirm visibility. Over.” He cranks up the volume, holding the radio so we can hear the reply.

“Sierra Charlie. Overlord. Isolating imagery... Tracking your location... Confirm. We have acquisition… We make… three. Over.”

Jana and I look at each other in surprise. I switch to four fingers.

The reply comes with a chuckle. “Correction. Someone’s playing games down there. We’ve got four. Repeat four. Over.”

“Copy that, Overlord. Sierra Charlie Six out.”

“Y’all have a good day down there. Overlord out.”

I drop my hand, turning, looking out at the clear blue sky. Like me, Jana is scanning the heavens, no longer looking for aliens. Out beyond the tree tops, distant wisps of cloud drift lazily through the sky, but no planes.

“You won’t see them,” Garcia says, “but they’re out there. The eyes of the world are on this tiny village. Nothing is happening down here without everyone knowing about it, so don’t scratch your ass.”

“Hah.”

Jana’s still looking for Overlord.

Garcia picks up his pack, stuffing the radio inside. “Overlord is one of three US AWACS aircraft circling anywhere from a hundred to two hundred miles out. They’re coordinating a combat air patrol of F22 Raptors and a bunch of Predator drones, just in case.”

I smile, wondering if Overlord can see me grinning, and yet in the rush of the moment, in the back of my mind, Angela’s warning leaves me feeling somewhat unsettled—forget about Hollywood. I think she’s right. If a bunch of aliens can sail a bazillion miles through space, lasso an asteroid and build an elevator longer than Earth itself, they’re not going to be stopped by a couple of fighter craft. I keep that thought to myself, wondering if the Navy SEALs are overconfident. I help Pretzel as he adjusts the backpack slung over his shoulders, wondering about the eyes on our small village—human and otherwise.

“Okay, everyone set?” Already sweat’s running down the side of his cheeks.

Pretzel hands Jana a tablet computer.

“Would you like to be our scribe?”

“Sure.”

“Simply mark down the number of each unit as we place them and the computer will automatically geo tag them.”

“Okay.”

The rubber casing around the tablet is ridiculously thick. If it was dropped from a plane, I suspect it would bounce without breaking.

“Let’s roll.” Garcia grabs his rifle. Angela brings up the rear.

As we make our way through the village, Pretzel hunches forward, keeping the weight of his pack over his legs.

“We could carry something,” I say, gesturing to Jana and myself.

“What? And put me out of a job?” Pretzel laughs, but he and Angela are both in their sixties, at least. Pretzel hides his age well, more so than Angela, so I suspect he’s older again, probably in his seventies. Flecks of grey hair and deep wrinkles betray the march of time. “Keep your eyes on the counter marking our distance from base camp. We need to put down monitors every 200 meters or so.”

Jana touches the screen and among the various details there’s a GPS map revealing our distance from the datum point sprayed on the boulder in the center of the village. Raka’s hut is 48 meters from there. At 60 meters we’re crossing the wooden bridge, following a muddy road with deep ruts. Flies buzz around us.

“I’m liking this mud,” Pretzel says, sliding slightly as he steps over exposed tree roots.

“Me too,” Angela replies. “Microbial paradise.”

“Absolutely.”

Angela swings her pack down, leans it against a tree and pulls out a couple of sensors, flicking them on. She hands me one, pushing the other against the base of a tree, facing out across the road. “Can you put that one in the river? Just below the surface, facing into the stream?”

“Sure.”

Who knew science could be so much fun?

“You’ll need to extend the antenna so it’s above the waterline.”

“Okay.” I’m loving this. I jog down the bank, half-sliding in the long grass. Muddy water swirls around my legs. Startled fish dart into the shadows, flicking their tails and stirring the silt. I reach into the murky depths, watching as the glowing red LED disappears. The antenna unfolds to become quite rigid. It’s extendable, reaching up almost two feet in height. I push the spike on the base of the probe into the mud and rocks, leaving about half of the metal antenna rising above the surface.

“Looking good.” Angela is leaning on the bridge next to Jana, showing her how to enter information into the tablet. “Coming through loud and clear.” She turns to Pretzel, who’s shed his back pack, leaning it against the railing.

Pretzel says, “They’ll work well this close to base camp, but we’re going to need repeaters once we get deeper into the jungle.”

“I’ve only got four booster stations,” Angela says, focusing intently on the data streaming in from the first few probes.

“That’ll have to do.”

I climb back up the bank. Angela goes to pick up her pack, but Jana beats her to it. I like her style, so I grab Pretzel’s, hoisting it over my shoulder. Both scientists are polite, thanking us. Garcia winks at me. This is the best day ever.

Jana takes the lead, with Garcia and Angela following, while Pretzel and I bring up the rear. It’s roughly 10am and the sun is beating down on the jungle. Thin strands of light pierce the occasional gap in the canopy, forming sunbeams in the humid air, lighting up ferns and tree trunks. Sweat drips from me like rain, soaking my clothes, but I don’t mind.

Dead leaves and broken twigs crunch beneath my boots. Vines creep around massive tree trunks, slowly strangling these giants of the jungle. Occasionally, sunlight floods through a hole in the canopy where one of these Goliaths has fallen, flattening the undergrowth. Monkeys call out from the shadows, excited by our approach, warning each other even though we pose no threat. Insects swarm over the moldy leaves and rotten bark scattered across the ground. The smell of decay hangs in the air, but not from any carcass. Dead animals are stripped to the bone within a matter of days by the ants, so as pungent as the smell is, it’s never putrid, more like that of compost.

Pretzel pushes a probe deep into the rich, dark soil. Immediately, ants scurry over the box, claiming their prize, checking it for food.

Garcia has a machete. He swings with a steady rhythm, hacking at branches hanging over the path, which is a bit of novelty for Jana and I as we wouldn’t bother. We’re accustom to darting and weaving through the foliage, being able to spot the dark outline of a leech hanging from the underside of a leaf and avoid the slimy parasite. There’s something about their distinct shape that allows us to pick them out of the chaos, but Garcia’s got energy to burn—at least for now.

Like most paths through the jungle, we’re following an animal trail—humans by day, warthogs, chimps and leopards by night, hence the branches hanging over the narrow track. It’s only humans that are bothered by leaves.

“What do you make of all this, Josh?”

I’m taken back a little by Pretzel’s question. I don’t think he means the probes we’re laying down every couple of hundred meters. He’s talking about the aliens.

“Me?” I’m not sure why he’s interested in my opinion. I’m no one.

“Yes. You.”

I’m curious. “Why ask me?”

Funny, but from my perspective, that’s the more pertinent question. Garcia, Angela and Pretzel quite literally dropped from the sky. They’re scientists, soldiers, engineers. They’ve been working toward this day for decades. As for me? The lieutenant was right back in the village. I’m a kid. Son of a wayward preacher. At best, I’m just part of the crowd.

“Oh, you’re important. Never doubt that.” Seems Pretzel is pretty good at reading minds.

“I don’t follow,” I say, slipping slightly in the mud. The animal trail narrows to barely a few inches as it rounds the side of a hill, slowly descending toward the caves. I grab a sapling, keeping my balance.

“People get importance all wrong. Celebrities. Movie stars. Singers. Princes and prime ministers. They’re important, right? Wrong. They’re entertainers, politicians, that’s all. They’re individuals—just like you and me. Nothing more. Nothing less.

“Ah, but scientists, professors, doctors—surely they’re important. Nope, they’re individuals too. You see, none of this has any value if we aren’t all equally important.”

Pretzel slips on the same muddy rocks I did, grabbing at the same loose sapling. I bend under a vine, feeling leaves brush against my shoulder as he continues.

“Point is, what we’re doing out here in the jungle is meaningless if it’s not for everyone—from the President of the United States all the way down to some beggar on the streets of Mumbai. And you—you’re as important as any of them… so what do you think about our alien visitors?”

I’m not sure what to say. I’m just a teen.

As we’re talking, we’ve fallen behind the others, lagging back easily forty feet, but they haven’t noticed and Pretzel doesn’t mind. I get the impression we could we wading through three feet of pristine snow or walking along a sandy beach in Hawaii and Pretzel would still be asking me the same question.

“Me? I think it’s pretty cool—we’re not alone—there’s life elsewhere out there in the universe. That’s kinda exciting.”

Pretzel nods. Sweat drips from his forehead, but he’s oblivious. His dark eyes are kind, while his frail, aging hands seem to me like those of an artist. His fingers have the precision and elegance of a musician. Even the slightest motion portrays harmony, as though he were conducting an orchestra or crafting a marble sculpture with the utmost care. Pretzel moves a vine to one side with the grace of a surgeon caring for a patient.

“We’re intrinsically social,” he says. “All animals are. Hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary selective pressure has taught us to cooperate, so we seek out a connection with others.”

My mind is suddenly electrified by the concept. “You think that’s why they’re here? Because they’re social? Because they want to connect with us?”

He smiles and from behind pearly white teeth, says, “It’s a possibility.”

My dad wouldn’t be comfortable with all the talk about evolution and social ties. For him, if an idea can’t be expressed in terms of thee and ye, thou and shalt, it’s not worth considering. I can’t bring myself to tell Pretzel that my dad thinks the world is barely six thousand years old. Even among Catholics, his views are outmoded, but my dad has always held to a literal interpretation of the Bible. I love my dad, but the pressure to believe him at every step makes me feel uncomfortable.

Pretzel seems to sense reluctance on my part, but he’s not sure why.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

I nod. He thinks I’m worried about the aliens. Oh, they’re the last of my concerns. If anything, they’ve brought some welcome relief.

The track widens as we descend a gentle slope covered in thin trees. Jana waves at me through the undergrowth. She, Angela and Garcia have stopped, dropping their packs beside a clearing. Long grass reaches up to waist height. They crouch, hiding by the edge of the trail.

“What’s going on?” Pretzel asks.

“Oh, I think they’ve found Lady.”

“Lady?”

“Come on,” I say, creeping forward, careful not to step on any twigs, slowly lowering my profile as we approach the break in the jungle canopy. Sunlight streams in through the opening. I slip my backpack to the ground and point. Pretzel follows my gaze. Tall weeds sway, but not with the wind. Dark shapes frolic in the green grass. Bits of fur are visible through the undergrowth.

Pretzel whispers the obvious. “Gorillas.” To be fair, after four years, they still fascinate me. First timers always get a bit giddy. There’s something magical about seeing apes in the wild. There are tens of thousands of different species of birds and lizards and butterflies, but when it comes to humans, there’s just us—or so we think—until we meet chimps and gorillas. Suddenly, the distance between us and all the other animals on Earth becomes that much smaller. I’d never say as much to my dad, but I don’t think they’re just another animal. They’re special. It’s their eyes. Intelligence gleams from behind their dark pupils. I think they’re much closer to us than I’d ever admit to him.

Angela turns, mouthing something to Pretzel. She shakes her head in disbelief. The grin lighting up her face suggests she’s mesmerized by the sight.

I whisper, “Can you see Lady? Is she here?”

Jana cranes her neck, peering through the grass. “I’m not sure.”

Carefully, Pretzel opens the backpack and pulls out a sensor. He pushes it into the soft soil, extending the aerial. As quietly as he can, he presses the power button. A red LED glows and the box imparts a distinct beep. They’ve all done that, but it’s only now I notice as the sound is so foreign, so alien within the jungle. Even though the noises around us are a cacophony of confusion, with birds squawking in the trees, insects calling and the wind rustling through the leaves, that one solitary beep is distinctly out of place. It screams—unnatural. Pretzel cringes.

A dark head appears above the grass. Beady eyes stare into the trees, looking for us, knowing we’re here, hidden in the shadows.

“Oh, not good,” Jana whispers, crouched in front of me, batting at the air with her hands, wanting us to retreat.

“OUGH!”

We freeze. A gorilla rises up. Broad, dark shoulders blot out the greenery.

Garcia begins slowly bringing his rifle down from his shoulder.

I whisper, “No. He’ll think you’re a hunter.”

“And that’s bad because?”

“Well, he, ah…”

Jana provides a succinct version of what I’m trying to express. “He’ll rip your arms out of their sockets.” With that, Garcia shoulders his rifle, remaining crouched beside us. Jana continues, “Whatever happens, don’t run.”

Each cry echoing across the clearing is brutal, guttural, venting, clearing the air from the lungs in anticipation of a fight to the death. “OOH OOH OOH.”

Jana whispers, “No eye contact.”

We stay perfectly still. I dare not raise my eyes, catching only the motion of the grass on the edge of my vision. For a moment, it seems as though the grunting is subsiding. There’s been no other threat beyond that one solitary electronic beep and it was faint, just something off in the distance from their perspective. Jana and I visit the troop at least once a month. They know our smell. They know we mean no harm. I’m at the point where I think the danger has passed when the large male silverback begins pounding the ground. His arms fly up, loose and high over his head before his clenched fists thunder back into the dirt. Grass and rocks are thrown into the air as he continues working himself into a frenzy.

“Not good.”

“YEHAAR YEHAAR.”

He rushes forward on all fours, trampling the grass, covering the distance between us in a blur of anger. Broad muscular shoulders flex. Chest muscles ripple beneath coarse, straggly fur. The gorilla moves with a lope, a distinct gait that comes in waves. He surges toward us before pulling back a few feet, still unsure but threatening to attack. Clenched fists beat at his chest as he rises, baring his teeth and growling. There’s nothing as terrifying as the gaping jaw of a fully-grown silverback roaring into the jungle with coarse, dark hair, jet black skin, deep red gums and vicious white fangs. His mouth seems to over extend, reaching far beyond what a human could manage. A single bite could crush a skull.

“OOOH-AAAAH.”

The deep, echoing bellow passes right through me, causing the hair on my arms to stand on end. I don’t think even Jana’s seen the troop leader this upset before. It’s probably the helicopters. The troop would have been scared by the sudden, loud intrusion into the jungle and he feels he has to defend them from danger. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as small and helpless and insignificant as I do right now. My heart is racing. It’s all I can do not to turn and run. Jana has a firm grip on my wrist. She’s trembling.

“WHO—WHO—WHO.”

It’s not a question. It’s a threat, a challenge, an invitation. He wants to fight, to prove his prowess and his position as boss. The silverback smacks his chest again, pounding his black pectoral muscles like a drum. Deep guttural growls. Clenched fists. Sharp teeth. They’re a blurred haze barely visible through the long grass. The gorilla is so close I can smell his fetid breath drifting on the wind. The stench of piss and feces is rancid, intimidating, overpowering.

He paces back and forth through the weeds, coming within a few feet of us but not advancing. It’s as though he’s marking a line in the grass, declaring his ground, daring us to approach, calling for cowards to show themselves. We shrink back, edging away from the track. Angela has her hand over her mouth, crouching beside Pretzel. Garcia has positioned himself closest to the clearing, although I’m not sure he’d be much more than a speed bump to a rampaging silverback.

“YEHAAR WHO. YEHAAR WHO,” the gorilla bellows, tilting his head back and opening his throat, challenging all comers, letting the entire jungle know he’s the undisputed heavyweight champion of this world. His dense fur can’t hide his well-defined shoulder muscles and massive biceps. At a guess, he could bench-press a small car, if not throw it aside, tossing it like some fabled superhero.

Suddenly, from to our right, tree branches and saplings come crashing down. There’s screaming, yelling. Another gorilla comes bounding into the clearing, slapping at the grass and swinging her head from side to side. She gallops in front of the male, swinging her arms high and wide, waving them as though she were trying to make herself appear large. She has a broken branch in one hand, dragging it along behind her as she drops to walk on all fours. With a thick, leathery brow, dark eyes and flared nostrils, she grunts repeatedly, only her vocalization isn’t threatening and isn’t directed at us. She dances around the male. Her mouth opens wide, but unlike the silverback, she’s not baring her teeth.

“Who—Who—Who.”

She slaps the ground with the branch. Torn bark and green leaves sway around in her club-like hand as though she were waving a flag.

Pretzel whispers, “Lady?”

I nod. To my surprise, Lady twirls. She continues swinging her arms around her head. She’s distracting the male. All his bluster and bravado seem somewhat redundant as she makes light of our presence, ignoring us even though we’re less than ten feet away.

Lady passes between us and the male again, but she avoids remaining between us, prancing to one side of the perplexed male. She drops the branch and pulls bunches of grass out of the ground, throwing the thin strands at him. The grass, of course, simply flitters through the air, catching in the breeze and diffusing like confetti.

The male lets out a huff and drops back to all fours. His head sways almost as though he’s responding to something she said. Reluctantly, he turns and walks away on all fours through the long grass. His ass sways as he saunters back to the troop. Shit drops to the muddy ground, falling in a stream of sodden clumps as a final insult to us. There’s a definite rhythm, a deliberate plop, plop, plop as he empties his bowels in our direction.

Lady continues what seems more like a dance than a display of anger, letting out cries that are almost in mimicry of the big male. They’re softer, delivered without anger.

“Ooh Ooh… Who Who… Yehaar Ooh.”

Jana whispers, “Lady.”

Lady scuttles sideways, coming over toward us while still keeping an eye on the male. For his part, the big old silverback has worn himself out. His care factor is gone and he plops on a bed of crushed grass, stretching out in the sun—as if it wasn’t hot enough already.

Lady grunts, briefly crossing her fists over her chest and then grabbing at her thumb.

“Oh, yeah, he does.” Jana says.

Pretzel picks up on what’s happening before I can say anything. His eyes go wide and his face lights up. “What was that?”

Jana has a massive grin on her face. “She said, he likes a good shit.”

Garcia bursts out laughing and Lady reciprocates, hooting and slapping at the ground, only she alternates hands, hitting the grass on either side of her. The others stare at Garcia, surprised by his outburst. He blushes, pointing at Lady, trying to deflect attention back to her but I know precisely why he laughed and can’t help chuckle myself. Seems he can relate to taking a good shit.

Lady squats, facing us, rocking rather than nodding with her head.

“She can talk?” Pretzel asks.

“You understand her?” Angela asks, even more surprised.

Jana answers them both with a single word, “Yes.”

“Okay, you’re going to have to rewind this one for us,” Angela says.

“Sign language.”

“You taught her sign language?” Pretzel asks.

“Not me, silly.”

I love Jana. To her, all this seems as blatantly obvious as me describing a McDonald’s drive-thru to her dad.

“Gorillas sign all the time. They speak to each other with their hands and fingers, sometimes even their feet.”

As she’s talking, Lady signs and Jana replies, holding two conversations at once. I’ve seen Jana sign with Lady before, but never with quite as much vigor.

“My mother is deaf. She taught Lady our language—long before I was born. But Lady has her own language.”

Pretzel looks at Angela with raised eyebrows. “Bilingual?”

Angela shrugs. “We have apes that use sign language back in America, but I’ve never heard of it in the wild.”

“We had scientists here,” Jana replies, “from the jungles of York.”

“York’s not a…” Pretzel begins, although he never finishes his sentence, allowing Jana to continue.

“They studied them with cameras. Ape language is simple, but it’s there. Lady, though, she’s special.”

“She certainly is,” Angela concedes.

Jana and Lady sign.

“She’s saying, ‘Don’t worry about Tiny.’”

“Tiny?” Pretzel asks. “He didn’t look that small to me.”

“She means his—”

“Dick,” I say, seeing Jana feels a little embarrassed by the concept.

“She named him that?” Angela asks. Jana nods. “She knows that’s an insult, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jana says, laughing.

Lady points at the scientists, although when a gorilla points it’s unlike anything a human would intuitively recognize. Rather than sticking a finger out, she directs her knuckles at them, letting her black, wrinkled fingers hang limp before us. It’s as though she’s the Queen of England, offering us her hand to kiss. I guess she’s the queen of the jungle. Jana interprets the gesture.

“She wants to know your names.”

The aging Indian scientist says, “Ah, well it’s not Tiny.” Angela bursts out laughing, surprising Lady, who reciprocates with a few guttural hoots even though she can’t possibly understand what was said. It seems laughter is contagious across species. Jana looks a little confused. Pretzel faces Lady, pointing at himself. “I’m Pretzel.”

“Pretzel doesn’t mean anything to her—or me.”

“Oh, okay. How about this?” Pretzel turns around on the track, still crouching, shuffling with his boots. I guess he’s trying to mimic twisting like a pretzel or something, but as he turns, he taps his chest, saying his name a couple of times. Lady gets excited. She tears at a clump of grass. Roots dangle from the clod of dirt swinging below the fine grass stalks. Lady pulls the grass through her hand, stripping fine seeds from the kernels. We watch, mesmerized as she mimics Pretzel, turning around and round, sprinkling grass seeds on her head. She comes to a halt and grunts as she pulls at another clump of grass.

“She wants you to do it,” Jana says. Lady holds out a handful of grass seeds. Pretzel has no hesitation. He kneels just a few feet away and reaches out an open hand. Thick, dark, leathery fingers tap his palm, dumping a small pile of fine seeds in his hand. He copies Lady, holding one hand high above his head, allowing grass seeds to fall in his hair as he twirls on the muddy track, squatting as he spins, almost falling sideways into a tree as he gets a little dizzy.

Lady jumps up and down in the grass. She’s on all fours, snorting with delight. Angela backs up, as does Garcia, unsure about the intentions of this wild gorilla, but Pretzel doesn’t seem to notice, he’s found his inner gorilla and is joining in, jumping around like her, albeit crouched on two legs and using his hands to stop from falling over.

Jana laughs her ass off.

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

Both Jana and Lady point at Pretzel, who’s come to a stop slightly out of breath. He’s perplexed. Grass seeds have caught in his thin, wispy hair.

“She says, she fooled you. She made you look silly—made you look pretty like her.”

“She played a joke on me?”

Jana can barely talk she’s laughing so hard. “Yes.”

Pretzel plays up to the fully-grown female gorilla weighing easily three times his weight. He points his finger, pretending to scold her, but he too is laughing. Lady tears another handful of grass and tosses it in the air. Pretzel plays the fool, ducking his head beneath the strands, trying to catch them in his hair, which Lady loves. She slaps her legs, grunting in delight.

Lady turns to Angela, pursing her lips and signing to Jana.

“Oh, no,” Angela says, waving her hands, not feeling comfortable with the attention of a great ape.

“She wants to know your name,” Jana says. “But you’ve got to describe it in terms she can understand.”

“Angela. Ah, Angel.” She points at the sky. Lady signs something, seeking clarification from Jana.

“She thinks you mean leaves or trees.”

Lady picks up the branch she dragged into the clearing, pointing at it as Jana explains. “She’s confused as to why someone would be named after a branch.”

Angela laughs, pointing behind Lady at the clear blue sky. That communicates. Lady shakes her head, touching her hand briefly against the side of her head and then her lips.

“Loud bird. She thinks you mean helicopter.”

“That’ll do.” Angela nods, accepting that as close enough.

“She’s left handed,” Pretzel says, noting her preference for signing.

“Huh?” I say, I’d never noticed that.

“How many words does she know?”

Jana replies, “I don’t know. I’ve never asked her. I’m not sure she would know. I don’t even know how to ask.”

“And your mom taught her to sign?”

“I think they taught each other. Back when Mom was my age, the troop lived over by the village, on this side of the river. They stayed close for protection. From leopards, I think. As the village grew, they moved away.”

Angela points. “The scars on her arms.”

“Yes. Leopards will attack anyone that’s isolated. Humans, gorillas, chimps. The only safety is in numbers.”

I speak up. “About a year ago, we found two of them dead.”

“Two of them?” Pretzel asks.

“After a fight. A gorilla and a leopard. Lots of blood.”

Jana’s eyes go wide. “Blood everywhere. On the trees—the bushes—soaking into the mud.

“The gorilla ripped the leopard’s jaw off, tore out its throat, but he’d been so badly hurt by the big cat, he never made it more than twenty yards.”

As we talk, Lady’s eyes follow the conversation. She may not know what we’re talking about, but she understands we’re saying something about her and her kind. She nudges Jana, wanting in on the discussion. Jana, though, is unprepared for what amounts to a shove and has to reach out with her hand to avoid toppling over. Jana’s not bothered by it, though, just surprised. She signs something, although I’m not sure what.

Lady plucks some nuts from the broken branch, offering them to us. Her thick, dark, curled fingers reach for us, offering food.

Jana says, “She’s always trying to fatten us up. She thinks we’re apes. Skinny, hairless apes.”

“She’s right,” Pretzel says. “We are.”

“How often do you talk?” Angela asks.

“Once a week. My mother still comes out here, but not so often. She says the gorillas bring good luck. We bring Lady vegetables, stuff like yams.”

Pretzel nods. “I bet she likes them.”

“She does.”

Although the conversation is about Lady, it’s not centering on her and she tires of our company. As we’re no longer interacting with her, she gets distracted by a butterfly fluttering past. She leans back, rolling in the grass, losing interest in us entirely.

“Hey, Lady,” Jana calls out, pulling a small apple from her pocket. Here in the jungle, apples are small and sour. They’re nothing like back in America, but Lady doesn’t know any different. Jana tosses the apple and it rolls in the grass, almost disappearing in the weeds. Lady scoops it up rather than grabbing it as a human would, and bites through it. There’s no concern for pips in the core or the stem. She raises her head in acknowledgement, a tacit thank you, and turns to join her troop. As she saunters off through the long grass, her body sways, but there’s no poop. Lady’s far too polite for that.

Pretzel sits on his haunches, watching her with intense interested. “Just magnificent.”

“Who would have thought it,” Angela says. “We’re about to make First Contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species, but I’m more fascinated by contact with a troop of gorillas.”

“I wonder what they’ll make of all this,” Pretzel says, pointing at the sky as he gets to his feet. I pick up the backpack and we continue down the track. I too wonder. In the movies, it’s all about humans and aliens. There’s never any concern given to the millions of other species on this planet and I wonder what the aliens will think about gorillas like Tiny and Lady.

Mordecai

Within twenty yards, we hear the sound of a waterfall cascading over the cliff. Pretzel sets another monitor in the shallows of a nearby stream.

“This is a different river, right?”

“Yes,” Jana says. “The Utanga comes down from the tableland.”

“Awesome. Rivers are wonderful aggregators, concentrating particulate matter and pollutants. Everything flows downhill. Makes for good sample points.

“Angela, can you set up a repeater station? We’re below the brow of the hill so we’re going to need to start bouncing signals off the ionosphere to get them back to base camp.”

“On it.”

Angela straps a nondescript grey box to one of the trees, extending an aerial and checking the connection from her tablet computer.

As we approach the edge of the cliff, the trees thin as the ground drops away. Occasionally we get a glimpse of the valley opening out below us through the broken canopy. We stay on the track, winding our way down the slope. Although the height of the waterfall is roughly fifty to sixty feet, we’re following a trail that zig-zags back and forth, created by animals tracing the lay of the land, taking the most efficient but not the most direct route to the base.

Most of the cliff is hidden by ferns and bushes growing out of the rocks. In the jungle, space is at a premium and trees twist and wind their roots over the rocks, clinging on to the cliff face as they reach for the sun. The wind blows moist air from the waterfall along the track, cooling this small portion of the jungle. Garcia hacks at vines blocking the path.

Boulders form a series of pools at the base of the waterfall. The caves are visible further along the cliff face, appearing as dark shadows behind the undergrowth, deep cracks in the rocks.

Pretzel points through the trees. There’s someone swimming down there. Given the lily-white complexion, it’s clear he’s European and skinny dipping.

“Who’s that?”

“I dunno,” I reply, unable to make him out at this distance. There’re not many people it could be as the jungle isn’t exactly crowded. “Brother Mordecai. Maybe?”

“You know him?” Garcia asks.

“Yes. I think it’s him.”

We lose sight of Brother Mordecai as we descend, slowly trudging toward the base of the waterfall. Rocks and boulders hide our approach. There’s no path down here, and we’re forced to clamber over the debris that’s fallen from the cliff face as it has eroded over the years.

“Watch for snakes,” Jana says, which immediately gets Angela’s attention.

“Snakes?”

Pretzel raises an eyebrow. Garcia doesn’t seem bothered. Angela goes on to ask, “You get a lot of snakes down here?” I understand what she means as I was surprised by this as well when Jana first brought me down here. Snakes at the base of a waterfall is something that’s counterintuitive. It didn’t make sense until she explained it to me.

“Hundreds of them,” Jana replies, speaking as though it’s entirely normal. “Sometimes thousands during the Monsoon season.”

“Hundreds?” Pretzel asks.

“Thousands?” Angela says, latching on to the higher figure with a sense of alarm.

Jana shrugs. “They’re mostly dead—mostly.”

“Wait a minute?” Pretzel says, coming to a stop beside a boulder that reaches above head height. “You’re saying they get washed down here?”

Jana nods. “But even when they’re dead, they can be deadly. Watch where you put your hands.”

I say, “Smell that?”

In turn, each of them sniff at the air.

“Dead snakes.”

Pretzel nods. Garcia has found a snake lying between the rocks beneath our feet. He grabs it by the tail, raising it up. Although the snake is quite thin, it’s long and he has to work his hands along its body before its head finally appears. Angela’s eyes go wide.

“Black Mamba,” Jana says, even though the snake’s skin is more of a deep grey with a whitish underbelly. I’m not sure whether that’s because of some change that occurred after it died or if that was its natural color. The head hangs limp. Jana points at the mouth, which is slightly open, almost as if the animal is lying in wait, ready to spring upon its prey. “Still dangerous. If you catch your finger on those fangs…” She doesn’t have to elaborate further.

Garcia drops the snake back on the rocks. Pretzel and Angela give it a wide berth, clambering over a shoulder-height boulder as we continue on.

Jana says, “They get caught in the rains, dragged over the waterfall and onto the rocks. Be careful where you put your hands. Don’t reach for any handholds you can’t see as the snakes are often strung out on top of the rocks.”

Garcia slips on some leather gloves and climbs over the large boulder barring our way. Water winds its way around the rocks, flowing gently on. Reeds grow out of the gaps in the rubble. As we follow, Garcia occasionally points to one side, letting us know where a snake lies baking in the sun. Sure enough, as I step up behind Jana, there’s a shriveled carcass withering in the heat, thin scales clinging to a gaunt row of bones.

“That is definitely a Black Mamba,” Angela says, looking at the dark skin draped over the rock. We’re all extra careful when grabbing at outcrops while climbing over the boulders. Often, the snakes look like fallen branches or bits of cloth wrapped over the scorching hot stones.

I wonder if Overlord is watching us, or if the aliens slowly descending to Earth can see us. My eyes drift to the skies as my mind wanders, wondering if/when the ‘rope ladder’ will be visible to us from the ground. How big is it? How thick? Such a device is inconceivable to me, disappearing into the heavens. Dad taught me about Jacob’s ladder in the Book of Genesis, but I suspect even that pales in comparison.

“Hey!” Garcia calls out as we come to a rocky beach shaded by the jungle canopy.

Water thunders into the pool, cascading over the cliff above, kicking up a constant mist drifting across the boulders. Brother Mordecai is out in the deep and can’t hear us over the torrent of water madly churning the pool. Pretzel waves his hands around as though he were trying to signal a plane. Mordecai sees us and swims in, using freestyle, with long, carefully honed strokes. Although there are plenty of leeches in most of the rivers and streams throughout Africa, they’re not fond of waterfalls. Something about the noise and turbulent water seems to scare them off, which is nice. Jana and I love coming here, but normally in groups of eight to ten with other teens from the village.

As he gets close, Brother Mordecai stands, walking into the shallows without any regard for being naked. To him, the body is a temple—not something to hide or be ashamed of, but rather a jewel to be celebrated.

Angela looks up at the trees, around to one side at low hanging branches and then over at the far bank, anywhere but at his penis as it droops from his waist. Jana looks at me. I shrug. Brother Mordecai never was orthodox. For his part, Mordecai doesn’t care. I can’t believe he risked coming down here alone. If a leopard picked up his scent it would have attacked him, but as they generally hunt at night, I guess it’s low risk. Maybe.

Before Brother Mordecai reaches the shore, Garcia says, “We’re evacuating the area. I need you to head back to the village and jump on a truck to Kisangani.”

“Is that a fact?” Mordecai says, dripping wet as he opens his backpack and grabs a towel. Water laps at his bare feet. Much to the annoyance of Garcia, he rubs his hair dry along with his arms and chest, but doesn’t so much as touch his groin, let alone dry his legs. It seems he realizes precisely how awkward he’s making us feel and is happy to accentuate that with his reply. “I think you’ll find I don’t answer to the US military. Mine is a higher calling.”

Pretzel raises his thumb in agreement. “I like this guy.”

Garcia glances at Pretzel. He’s less than amused by the aging Indian scientist, annoyed by how he’s apparently switched sides.

“What?” Pretzel replies, holding his arms out wide in his defense. “He’s got a point. This isn’t our call. Who are we to say who they want to make contact with?”

Garcia’s military. Orders are the overriding concern. He reaches into Mordecai’s backpack as though it was his own and grabs a pair of shorts, throwing them at the preacher’s crotch. Mordecai catches them with one hand and slips them on, but he’s in no rush. Angela relaxes a little, but she looks as though she’s enjoying the standoff, clearly understanding the dynamic at work between the two men. Like Pretzel, I get the feeling she sees authority as a means, not an end, and wants to see a fight, of sorts. Not physically, of course, but like all of us, she’s curious how this will play out. Brother Mordecai is anything but predictable.

“Why should I answer to you?” Mordecai asks, which leaves Garcia enraged. The veins on his neck are pronounced. Rather than reacting, though, he slows down, picking his response, keeping it measured, using his military discipline to stay in control of himself, first and foremost.

“These orders are for your protection.”

Clever. He’s removed himself from the discussion, attributing the decision to some nameless officer, someone not present so Mordecai can’t argue with them. And it’s ‘for your protection.’ Ah, the personal touch. I’ve seen my father use this tactic with the villagers, only I tend to miss it when it’s directed at me, only realizing I’ve been played after the fact.

Pretzel seems intrigued by Mordecai’s point and wants to explore it further.

“Don’t get me wrong, Petty Officer Garcia. I know you’ve got a job to do. I understand you’re here for our protection, but we need to recognize, we’re in uncharted waters. None of our assumptions hold—not any more. Everything we’ve ever known is about to be overturned. All our preconceptions and ideas—none of them are worth squat. You and I might recognize one authority. He recognizes another. As for them, who knows?”

Brother Mordecai puts on a shirt, draping the damp towel over his shoulders like a cloak. He sits on a boulder with his bare feet still in the water. The contrast to Garcia couldn’t be more stark. Pebbles crunch beneath the thick soles of his combat boots as he walks around. His camouflage trousers are functional, with rubber kneepads and various pockets bulging with stuff. Even in the sweltering heat, he’s wearing some kind of combat vest with dozens of pouches, presumably full of ammunition or other equipment. He’s got his sleeves rolled up, exposing his thick, muscular forearms, which are a clear contrast to Mordecai’s thin, white arms. Garcia keeps his rifle slung over his shoulder, but it’s symbolic of his ability to project lethal force. Mordecai has nothing beyond the worn Bible sitting beside his backpack.

Garcia points at Mordecai and then Pretzel, using his trademark deliberation, acting as though he were a police officer directing traffic at a busy intersection.

“An alien vessel is about to touch down less than five miles from here. With all due respect, this is an issue for the government, not the church.”

Pretzel takes exception to that comment and comes to the defense of Brother Mordecai.

“The government? Really? You think a bunch of bureaucrats and soldiers are our best emissaries?”

Pretzel slumps down on a rock opposite Mordecai, with Garcia standing to one side on the pebble beach, roughly midway between them. Angela, Jana and I drop our backpacks and sit on a tree trunk in the narrow stretch of beach curling around the side of the falls, enjoying the cool wet breeze coming from the thundering water. I’m fascinated by the discussion.

“Science is our only option,” Pretzel says, holding his hands out with his palms open, making as though such a conclusion was obvious.

Brother Mordecai says, “I beg to differ. For thousands of years, religion has been the cornerstone of humanity, the driving force behind progress.”

Pretzel looks down at the stones by his boots, shaking his head. Given how outspoken he is, it must take all his resolve not to respond. He’s trying to be polite—diplomatic—something that doesn’t suit him. He presses his fingers together, lost in thought. I can see the pressure building in the intensity of his gaze as it narrows on the preacher. His dark eyes are piercing.

Just as he was with my father, Brother Mordecai is oblivious to the social clues around him. He continues, saying, “Given the sheer number of believers across all time, let alone the billions of faithful alive today, I’d argue that, regardless of faith, religion provides the best representation of humanity.”

Pretzel is brutal, offering only one word in rebuttal.

“Best?”

The jungle is never silent, but in that instant the water cascading over the falls, the screaming of monkeys in the trees and the incessant screeching of birds overhead seems distant. Even Brother Mordecai is quiet for a moment—something my father failed to accomplish. He regathers and counters.

“For you, this is First Contact. But not so for us.”

“Whoa, wait a minute there.” Pretzel has a finger raised, wanting some clarification.

Petty Officer Garcia cuts him off with, “What do you mean for us?”

I suspect Garcia’s motivation is more pragmatic than Pretzel’s scientific rationale. Garcia is thinking Mordecai may have knowledge of some earlier contact here in the jungle, but I know what Mordecai means. Our eyes meet.

“Tell them, Josh.”

The two men turn to me, looking at me as though I hold the key to some mystic secret. I’d rather Brother Mordecai didn’t drop me into his wild theory like this—I’m not sure what I believe, but Garcia and Pretzel are waiting on my response.

“It’s Ezekiel,” I say, getting a feel for the shifting dynamic at play between us.

When Garcia first marched in here he was leading our small band, providing Pretzel and Angela with the opportunity to set up their biometric probes throughout the jungle. Jana and I were guides of sorts, helping out. Brother Mordecai was the stranger—the outsider—the intruder. By directing the conversation to me, Brother Mordecai has flipped the tables on them, suggesting there’s more going on than they realize and showing the bond he has with me.

For my part, I feel conflicted. Brother Mordecai is an old friend of my father. I’ve known him all my life. Petty Officer Garcia’s a Navy SEAL that literally dropped out of the sky this morning. Pretzel and Angela are scientists. They couldn’t be more removed from my daily life if they tried, and yet I feel more of an affinity for them than I do for Mordecai or even my own dad. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s the sense of adventure. Perhaps it’s the energy and excitement they’ve brought with them. Maybe it’s the shifting perspective they’ve shown me, with the promise of opening new worlds. But now I find myself being dragged back to my roots and I don’t like it.

Before I can say anything, Pretzel asks, “As in the biblical prophet?”

I nod, but my eyes cast down. Brother Mordecai gestures with his hands, wanting me to go on, but this is his crazy idea. Mordecai doesn’t disappoint, quoting the Bible from memory.

“…and their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps… and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning.”

Pretzel raises an eyebrow, making eye contact with both Angela and Garcia as Brother Mordecai continues.

“It is the testimony of Scripture.”

Pretzel clenches his lips. Angela says, “No offense, Brother Mordecai, but we’re scientists. We need evidence.”

“How is this not evidence?” Mordecai asks, holding up his Bible. “When Columbus discovered the Americas and then returned to Spain, what evidence did he have beyond his word?”

Pretzel says, “Columbus brought back slaves, birds, plants.”

Mordecai isn’t impressed. “Things he could have found in Africa. He promised gold and spices, but he found none. His word, though, was his proof—his bond.”

Angela interjects with an afterthought, “He brought back syphilis. That’s something the Europeans didn’t have.”

“Score one to the microbiologist.” Pretzel smiles, turning back to Mordecai, trying not to laugh.

“You mock me at your peril,” Mordecai says. “But the Bible speaks of creatures not found on Earth. The Scriptures describe things that can only now be understood.”

“I get it,” Pretzel says. “You want to believe. You see something that seems to fit within your framework of knowledge and it’s easy to read that into the Bible. We all see what we want to see.”

Mordecai flips through the pages of his ragged Bible.

“Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were round; and they sparkled like burnished bronze.” He looks up at Pretzel and Angela. “What does that describe? Where have you seen that before? How is that not the pads of a landing craft like the Apollo?”

Garcia steps back. He seems content to let this play out between Mordecai and the scientists.

“There are a lot of things that could be describing,” Angela says, trying to be kind.

Mordecai continues with, “And the likeness of the firmament was upon the heads of the living creature and was as the color of the terrible crystal, stretched forth over their heads above.”

I’m impressed by Pretzel. He’s neither angry nor aggressive. He’s not treating Brother Mordecai with disdain. He seems genuinely supportive, even if he doesn’t agree. He asks, “And you think this is happening now?”

Mordecai says, “I think it’s what happened then. And it’s happening again. The firmament is the sky. The color of crystal is blue. Stretched out over their heads—how is that not your space elevator?”

“Wow,” Pretzel says, shaking his head and looking over at Angela. It seems as though he’s unsure where to begin and is looking for her to say something before he offends the preacher.

“If there was some prior contact, we would expect more evidence,” Angela says in a soft spoken, considerate voice. “Converging lines of evidence are convincing. A single source, like Ezekiel, doesn’t give us much to go on. If there were multiple references, perhaps from different observers in different cultures. Or if there was some physical evidence supporting the notion. Data is plural, not singular.”

Pretzel asks, “Ezekiel lived what? Around two and a half thousand years ago?”

Mordecai Nods.

“He lived in Israel, right?”

Mordecai says, “Yes. Before being exiled to Babylon.”

“Okay, that reinforces my point. He’s nowhere near the equator. Israel is above the Tropic of Cancer, right? As from memory, that passes below the Mediterranean, running through Egypt. Babylon’s even further north again, right?”

“Yes, but why is that important?” Mordecai asks.

Angela gets it. “So, the extraterrestrials are lowering a cable to Earth from an asteroid, but that can only happen at the equator. Anywhere along the equator, but only on the equator.”

“I don’t understand,” Mordecai says.

Angela replies, “Orbits are counterintuitive. They have very exact requirements.”

Pretzel clarifies. “Everything in space is in motion. The only way to stay stationary relative to a position on Earth is to remain directly above the equator. We have geostationary satellites, but they’re only ever over the equator. If what you say is correct, and the Book of Ezekiel contains an account of an extraterrestrial encounter like the one we’re witnessing, then Ezekiel wasn’t an eye witness—someone else was and he simply recounted the story, as this particular type of encounter could only occur in a very narrow geographic band.”

Pretzel gets to his feet, slapping his thighs. “Anyway, it’s a nice, entertaining idea but we have work to do. Where are those caves, Josh?”

And just like that, I’m back on Team Science.

Waterfall

We follow the base of the cliff, moving away from the waterfall, planting sensors in various locations, climbing trees and strapping probes to the underside of branches as well as digging into the rotten leaves on the ground to bury them just below the surface. The ants find them fascinating, swarming over them within seconds, diligently looking for some way to break into these alien devices. For me, that’s the strange thing about the scientists. They’re here to study extraterrestrials, but to us, they’re the ones from another world.

Petty Officer Garcia is out in front. Jana and Angela are walking ahead of me, with Pretzel bringing up the rear. Without meaning to pry, I’m interested to listen to their conversation.

“Yeah, she’s quite something, huh?” Jana says in response to a comment by Angela. They’re talking about Lady.

“I think she’s brilliant… You know, when we were dropped into the jungle, we thought we knew what to expect. We thought all the surprises were going to come from above. We never expected to meet you and Josh, let alone Lady.

Jana is a little embarrassed by the attention, her eyes drift down, watching the fall of her shoes on the track. Typical African modesty. She never gives herself enough credit.

Angela says, “Assumptions are always dangerous, Jana. Instinctively, we rely on them, but we shouldn’t. We really shouldn’t. Take Pretzel and me. We thought this was all about ET, but it’s not. It’s about you and Josh and Lady and Tiny. This is your home and they’re just dropping by.”

“Do you think they’re dangerous?” Jana asks, and I quicken my pace, not wanting to miss Angela’s reply.

“We can’t assume anything... Everything’s dangerous. Helicopters. Cars. Bicycles. We live in an inherently dangerous world, so we take precautions, like wearing seatbelts or a helmet.”

Jana doesn’t understand. “You mean, they’re dangerous? Kinda like snakes or leopards?”

“Not just them. Absolutely everything is dangerous in some way. Water’s dangerous. People drown, right? But it’s more than that—drink too much water and you die. Too much oxygen is poisonous. So even good things must be balanced or they become dangerous. It’s pretty wild when you think about life like that, huh?”

“Yeah, crazy,” Jana says. There’s warmth in her voice. She likes Dr. O’Brien. Although we call her Angela because she told us to, I’m sure Jana is like me, thinking of her more formally as Dr. O’Brien when she talks about science. She carries herself with an air of confidence we both find refreshing. She knows I’m listening, trailing in just a few feet behind them.

“I don’t think the aliens mean us harm. Their whole approach has been cautious, but there are dangers. That’s not a problem, though. We just need to manage those risks.”

“That’s why we have these probes,” Jana says.

“Yes. Exactly. We have these probes so we can understand any potential danger. It’s not something to be afraid of, but we need to be cautious.”

Jana nods her head in agreement. I like Dr. Angela O’Brien. She’s smart.

As we pass through the dense undergrowth, we come across a termite nest.

“Oh, this looks interesting,” she says, and we come to a stop. Garcia watches from afar, standing almost thirty feet further on, having walked past the mound without giving it a second thought. To the scientists, though, it’s an ideal spot for another probe.

“Nice find,” Pretzel says.

“I’m thinking one on the outside, one inside,” Angela says.

“That’ll work,” Pretzel replies, joining her by the termite hill.

Jana and I lower our backpacks and the scientists set to work placing the probes. Angela uses a stick to dig away at the side of the mound, exposing the catacomb within. Termites swarm everywhere, even though they hate daylight. Their home is under attack by giants, but it’s better those giants are from this world and not another.

Pretzel sets the probes, raising the antenna and checking the signal. Angela takes readings, tapping away on the tablet computer.

From the bushes behind us comes rustling leaves and the sound of shaking branches. Both Jana and I step away, turning to face the noise, but I’m confused. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the jungle, it’s that you never see or hear an attack coming. Leopards are too smart for that. No, this is something different. A dark, furry hand reaches around a tree trunk, snatching at Jana’s backpack as it rests on the track.

“Hey, put that down,” Pretzel yells as a mandrill makes off with one of the sensors, crashing through the foliage.

Jana laughs. Baboons are intensely curious and this one has probably been following us for some time, intrigued by the hairless ones, as Lady would call us. We catch brief glimpses of his plump, bright red ass flashing at us as he rushes through the jungle.

Angela shakes her head, laughing. “We did not train for this.”

“It’s sabotage,” Pretzel says, only half serious, laughing and shaking his head at this surprising act of animal theft.

Garcia smiles. “Well, you wanted a wide variety of readings.”

We continue along the animal trail. Mud squishes beneath our boots as we move through a shallow marsh at the base of the cliff.

“There he is,” Jana says, pointing. The baboon is sitting on a rock ahead of us, taunting us, apparently figuring out where we’re going. He’s chewing on the casing, trying to pry open the sensor with his huge canine incisors.

A small troop of baboons shelter from the sun beneath the broad trunk of a nearby rainforest giant, towering almost as high as the ragged cliff. Young baboons play among the thick roots, squabbling like children in a schoolyard, while the dominant male is intent on wrecking the sensor, pulling at the plastic casing and trying to pry it apart.

Although their fur is dark, mandrills are stunning, with tufts of fawn colored hair wrapped around their necks like a collar, leading to a goatee beard. With deep set, dark eyes and a slight mohawk, they look like punk rockers after a hard night out. It’s their nose that gets the most attention, though, as it’s a contradiction of color. Long blue bands span either side of their bright red nostrils. Picasso couldn’t have done any better.

“Put that down,” Pretzel says, hurrying along the track. In response, the baboon starts smashing the sensor on the rocks. “Oh, no, no, no.”

Garcia says, “Let him have his fun.”

“Yeah,” Jana says. “You really don’t want to argue with him.”

That comment seems to get Pretzel’s attention and he turns back to join us on the path. The baboon continues pounding the sensor, bending its antenna and cracking the case. Angela shrugs. “Don’t ask me how, but I’m getting readings from that thing.”

I think it’s hilarious.

“We’re close,” Jana says.

As we creep through the undergrowth, there are tiny bats hanging beneath the branches of several broadleaf plants.

“Oh, I’m loving this shit,” Pretzel says, reaching down beneath the plant and rubbing some grit between his fingers.

“He’s not kidding—he really does.” Angela sets up a sensor beneath the bats, positioning it in an area where guano is slowly accumulating.

The entrance to the cave is in shadow. Tens of thousands of bats hang from the ceiling, either trying to sleep or madly crawling over each other.

“Oh, yeah, this is perfect.” Pretzel uses a knife to scrape away some of the guano, examining how deep it lies on the cave floor. “Physically, this cave is sheltered, so we wouldn’t expect any significant change regardless of the weather, but these bats—I love ‘em. They’re our little collectors. What do they eat? Insects? Fruit?”

“I guess,” I say, not really having thought about it too much.

“This is wonderful. These guys will fly easily fifty kilometers each night foraging for food before returning here. They’re going to do a lot of our work for us. If there’s any microbial impact from the alien presence or the introduction of toxic heavy metals, they’re going to inadvertently retrieve samples for us and politely deposit them on the cave floor.”

I’ve never seen someone so excited about bat shit.

Pretzel and Angela set up fifteen monitors throughout the vast cave, far more than we’ve laid down in any other spot. They position them strategically, with a few right at the back where the vast cave narrows to just a few feet. A stream trickles between the rocks. Garcia climbs up to place a probe on a ledge just below a swarm of bats becoming ever more agitated by our presence. Pretzel is patient, putting up with bat guano dripping on him. He nestles one of the devices right up by a bunch of sleeping bats. Their fur rubs up against the sensor, but they don’t seem to mind.

The radio crackles and we hustle out of the cave, heading back out into the brilliant sunlight.

“Sierra Charlie Six. Overlord. Come in. Over.”

Garcia speaks with deliberate clarity, holding the microphone barely an inch from his lips. “Overlord. This is Sierra Charlie Six. Go ahead.”

“Sierra Charlie Six. Be advised Alpha is on the move. ETA six hours. We need to clear civilians from the area. We have Romeo Charlie inbound. I repeat, Romeo and Charlie. Rendezvous at waypoint Tango Two. Over.”

“Copy that, rendezvous at waypoint Tango Two. Sierra Charlie Six Out.”

“What’s happening? Pretzel asks.

“Your friends are coming down a little early.” He looks at his watch. “They’re going to make landfall slightly after 7 PM tonight.”

Garcia turns to Jana and me. “Time to wrap this up. We need to get you guys out of here.”

“Okay. Okay. We’re good,” Pretzel says, looking down at his computer display and not realizing Garcia was talking about us, not him. “I would have liked to track a little further east to lay down more sensors, but we’ve got a pretty good spread as it is, and this cave is brilliant—exactly what we need.”

“Great,” Garcia says somewhat insincerely. He seems preoccupied by the contents of the radio call, although I didn’t understand much of it. Romeo? Garcia hoists his backpack and grabs his rifle. “Time to move.”

We trudge through the mud along the edge of a stream coming from the rock pool. Thunder rumbles in the distance and I’m curious how an alien elevator is going to deal with a tropical storm stretching up tens of thousands of feet—after all, this place isn’t called the rainforest for nothing.

“Hey, look,” Angela says, pointing off the track. Our friend the baboon has tired of his stolen property and discarded the sensor. Pretzel steps off the path, kicking at the sensor as he checks information on the tablet. Garcia doesn’t look impressed with the delay but lets it go without complaining.

“Oh, that reeks,” Pretzel says. The baboon has smeared feces all over the device.

Angela smiles. “Well, you do like your poop.”

“Not quite what I had in mind.”

“Hey, there he is,” Jana says, pointing.

Much to Pretzel’s disgust, the baboon stands at a distance, hurling feces at us. The curiously colored ape is a good shot, and I duck as a clump sails by. Angela takes a short video of the baboon with the camera on her phone. “This is definitely one for social media.”

Garcia laughs from further up the track, well out of range. Either the baboon tires of tormenting us or his bowels are empty, but he disappears into the foliage. Angela turns the camera on Pretzel, who has a few brown spots on his jacket, and then pans down to the crushed, filthy probe lying beside the track.

“Oh, you’re not going to post that, are you?”

Angela laughs. “Ten million dollars worth of advanced bio-scanning tech being road-tested on a baboon’s ass. What’s not to love?”

Pretzel shakes his head.

We continue to the base of the waterfall. Brother Mordecai is sitting on a rock in the sun reading his Bible. Garcia walks over to him and talks softly, pointing at the plateau and then circling his hand in the air. I’m not sure what he’s saying, but Mordecai nods and joins our band as we cross the stream and begin climbing over the rocks, watching for dead snakes as we make our way to the animal trail.

“It doesn’t bother you?” I hear Angela ask Brother Mordecai as we move away from the stream and back into the depths of the jungle.

“The aliens?” Mordecai replies somewhat in surprise. He points up at the thick branches of a Kapok tree stretching over the track some twenty feet up. “No more than the leopards.”

I don’t think he’s actually pointing at a leopard, but I double check to be sure.

Angela probably hadn’t thought about that. “I mean, it doesn’t worry you that there are beings up there that don’t believe in your God?”

Mordecai is irrepressible. “There are plenty of beings down here that don’t believe, and that doesn’t bother me either.”

She nods, grinning. I’m walking slightly ahead of her beside Pretzel, and although he doesn’t say anything, I notice the exchange isn’t lost on him.

I think it’s a good point. Sometimes, we can be too melodramatic—it’s the end of the world! And I understand that from both points of view. People like Pretzel think it’s the end of the old world and the start of a new, better one. Someone like my dad, though, worries it might be the harbinger of the apocalypse, but I think Brother Mordecai is probably right. For all the change that’s coming, there will be plenty of stuff that continues on as it always has. Religion has been pretty resilient to change. Dad thinks that’s good. He says we need the social structures and certainty that comes from continuity. I suspect Pretzel and Angela are in the other camp, where they’re quite willing to throw everything out and start again. It’s surprising to me that Brother Mordecai is somewhere in the middle.

“I love a challenge,” he says.

“I noticed,” Angela replies with a smile. In her mind, she’s probably referring back to the debate by the rock pool. Although that may have seemed heated to her, I don’t think it bothered Brother Mordecai. That’s something I admire in him. Getting angry is easy, but it makes it hard to see clearly. I think the dumbest decisions are made out of pride when people are angry, but perhaps that’s just me reflecting on my own hot head.

“It’s all rather exciting, isn’t it?” Mordecai says.

“It certainly is,” Angela replies, and I can see what Mordecai’s doing, breaking down the walls, finding common ground. He’s not trying to convert her. I’ve known him for years. He’s genuine in his love for people regardless of their beliefs. I once saw him give the local witchdoctor some anti-fungal cream even though he needed it himself, simply because he knew he could always get more when he returned to Kisangani.

Going uphill is harder and slower than coming down. Petty Officer Garcia sets a cracking pace. Even though our backpacks are half empty, it’s exhausting trying to keep up with him and he inevitably pulls ahead. Rocks, stones, mud and tree roots pass under my boots with a steady rhythm. None of us talk much, focusing instead on keeping a good pace. On those few occasions when I look up, which is only as we turn one of the zigzag corners on the track, I catch sight of Garcia at the far end, already tacking back in the other direction. Butterflies flutter through the air, mocking our efforts at climbing around the edge of the cliff.

“Is he always like this?” I ask, resting for a moment and leaning forward with my hands on my knees.

Sweat drips from Pretzel’s brow. “No. He’s going easy on us.”

After thirty minutes, we pass the clearing where the gorillas frolicked in the sun, but they’ve moved on. I look for Lady, hoping for even a glimpse of Tiny through the dark undergrowth, but the troop has gone foraging.

“Do you think we’ll see it?” Jana asks as we walk up the track. “I mean, not just on TV—in real life.”

“I hope so,” I say, spotting Garcia through the trees, following the track as it winds toward the top of the hill. I was hoping he’d give us a chance to rest in the clearing, but he’s already approaching the plateau.

Birds squawk throughout the forest. To me, the jungle’s like a crowded train station—full of buskers and passengers, station staff and transit police. Everyone’s got something to say and everyone’s saying it at once. Monkeys screech in the treetops, swinging between branches that sag and bend, flexing beneath their weight as they soar through the canopy. The ease with which they move is deceptive. With long, muscular arms and a steady rhythm, they sail into and then out of view in seconds, disappearing into the lush rainforest.

Finally, Garcia comes to a halt, standing on the crest of the hill some fifty feet ahead of us. He waves with his hand, wanting us to hurry. Yeah, that’s not happening. Cupping his hands so he can be heard over the cacophony of the jungle, he yells. “I can see it. I can see the alien craft.”

That gets our attention. Suddenly, the pack on my back feels as light as air. Jana is beside me. She quickens her pace. I look up at Garcia and start to jog, forgetting about the ache in my thighs, excited at the prospect of seeing an alien spaceship hanging from a rope, imagining it looks like a spider dangling from a thin strand of silk. I start to holler with excitement when the world goes deathly silent. I’m not sure how, but the jungle falls quiet in an instant.

Beams of light reach through the trees like spotlights shining in the dark. In an instant, the sky beyond Petty Officer Garcia turns white, appearing far brighter than the sun, leaving me looking at what is akin to a freeze-frame paused in the middle of a movie. As I’m running up the track, the sight before me is confusing. Nothing moves. I’m moving, but nothing I’m seeing is in motion, even though I know it is. My boots slide on the mud, catching on roots, but the sight before me is as though I’m standing still, which is disorienting. Branches that appear motionless slap me on the face forcing me to a halt.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I shake my head, wanting my vision to clear, but the image imprinted on my retina is overwhelming. Blood red shapes swirl behind my eyelids. I can still see Garcia even with my eyes closed, but his outline and that of the forest are seared on my retina as an afterimage. Like the photographic negatives of old, white is black, day is night. Rather than being light, the sky beyond him is as dark as coal. It’s as though a camera flash has gone off an inch from my nose.

A thundering boom shakes the ground, rattling my bones.

I blink, rubbing my eyes, still struggling to make out what’s happening. A fierce wind swirls around us. Trees flex and sway, all rocking in the same direction, leaning away from base camp, which is still easily a mile off over the hill. Sticks, twigs and leaves lift into the air, swirling around us, all being drawn in the same direction.

“What’s happening?”

I turn to face Jana. She’s a ghost, barely registering before my eyes, blending in with the vines and branches.

“RUN!”

That voice. It’s Garcia, but I still can’t make him out. A hand grabs me, swinging me around and pushing me on. Even with my eyes wide open, I’m struggling to see anything beyond the glaring impression on the back of my eyeball. The noise around us is like that of a jet plane roaring through the sky.

Off to the side, I catch the blurred image of the jungle clearing as we run past. Trees sway as though caught in a hurricane. Leaves swirl through the canopy like a heavy snow. On we stumble, half falling as we rush down the track.

“Run where?” I yell as my boots catch on fallen trees I cannot see. Whenever I look directly at anything, I’m blinded by the seething blur in front of me, a red haze seared on my eyes. To each side, I catch vague outlines, but little or no color.

“Down there.”

My shoulder slaps saplings and tree trunks as I pull myself on, rushing through the undergrowth, having lost the feel of the track beneath my boots. Branches scratch at my cheeks. The rush of wind is unlike any storm I’ve ever experienced, but there’s no rain. Above us, the jungle canopy reverses direction. Whereas moments ago, all the trees leaned out toward the stream, now they surge back toward the distant village. Birds tumble through the air, being thrown about within the jungle. I still can’t see clearly, but the sky above glows like the sun. Flames lick at the canopy. The ground beneath my boots drops away with each thundering step.

Fire lashes the sky. Somehow I’ve got hold of Jana’s hand, or perhaps she grabbed my fingers to pull me on, I’m not sure, but we’re crashing through the forest together, flattening saplings and crushing ferns under foot. Flames rush through the trees, curling around trunks and consuming branches. The heat is intense, scorching the back of my neck. Burning wood and smoldering debris hurl through the air, tumbling end over end. My eyesight improves as the blur before me fades.

On we run, racing downhill, with the ground dropping away beneath each plunging step. I’m running so fast I’m in danger of tripping and crashing into trees. The slope increases and then suddenly it’s not there at all. I’m not sure when I realize I’m falling, but my boots are still madly trying to gain traction on a hillside that’s no longer beneath me.

The spray from the waterfall offsets the scorching heat sucking the oxygen out of the air. In that instant, we plunge headlong toward the rocks below. I let go of Jana’s hand, tumbling over my own boots, catching glimpses of the rock pool racing up to greet us. The cliff face rushes past but the tens of thousands of water drops cascading down the waterfall seem to hang motionless beside me. It’s as though they’re suspended in midair, frozen in time, but we’re all in motion, plummeting toward the rocks. Flames reflect off the pool, revealing a sky consumed by fire.

Pretzel plunges into the water feet first, followed by Angela. I go to hold my breath, but I’m still tumbling, with arms flailing. Desperately trying to right myself, I crash into the pool, landing on my backpack. The wind is knocked out of me by the impact. Rather than feeling like water, it’s as though I’ve landed in a pile of sand. Flames roll over the cliff, rushing down toward me as water sprays outward. Before I can react, I sink into the depths, watching as fire rushes over the surface of the water.

I struggle to free myself from my backpack. My boots feel like lead weights. Darkness closes around me. My clothing is heavy, soaked with water, dragging me into the depths. With my lungs screaming for air, I kick, trying to propel myself toward the edge of the rock pool, but my efforts are feeble and down I go, sinking beneath the water as flames lash the surface, causing it to glow in angry, eerie shades of orange, yellow and a deep, burning red.

Stage II: Contact

Angela

A hand grabs me, hauling me out of the water, dragging me into the shallows. Garcia staggers, slipping on submerged rocks as he struggles through the waist-deep water by the edge of the rock pool. He’s got the collar of my shirt in one hand and a firm grip on Angela’s forearm with the other. I cough, bringing up water.

Garcia falls to his knees in the loose rocks and sand at the water’s edge, but the strength and determination with which he drags us on is astonishing. He leaves the two of us lying in the shallows. My feet bob in the water. Waves lap at my arms as I lie on the decimated beach.

Petty Officer Garcia turns away from us, wading back out into the depths.

“That’s them. That’s all of them,” Pretzel says from somewhere behind me and I watch as Garcia sinks to his knees, with water lapping at his shoulders. He faces away from us, looking at the waterfall. A fine mist drifts over the pool, but the water is filthy. Ash floats on the surface, mingled with broken branches and burnt wood. The cascading torrent slows to a trickle running down over the rocks.

Pretzel grabs me. “You okay, kid? Kid, are you okay?”

I nod. Given I just fell down a cliff into a rock pool, I’m doing surprisingly well. Everything aches, but it’s bruising not broken bones my body is complaining about. I’m stiff and sore, but alive.

Brother Mordecai is sitting on a boulder, rocking back and forth, mumbling. Long, straggly, wet hair hangs over his face, hiding his eyes. He’s staring down at his trembling hands. I want to say something, but everything’s wrong—and it’s not just him. Jana is wandering among the smoldering ruins of the jungle. She’s lost in every sense of the word. Trees lie piled on top of each other, having all fallen in the same direction, lying before us like dominos. Torn roots, clumps of dirt, rocks, boulders—nothing is as it was. Smoke rises from scorched branches, curling as it drifts on the breeze.

Above the cliff, a dark cloud lifts into the air, billowing and enfolding on itself, rising tens of thousands of feet in a column of smoke.

It’s the silence that troubles me. No birds singing. No monkeys yelling. No insects calling. The silence of the jungle screams in pain.

Pretzel drags Angela away from the water’s edge. “She’s not breathing.” He rolls her over, clearing her airway and pushing two fingers hard against her neck. “No pulse.” Initially, he panics, looking around for help from the others, but no one races to his side. “I don’t have a pulse. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Water dribbles from her lips.

“No, no, no.” Pretzel lies Dr. O’Brien on her back. Rather than reacting and becoming frantic, he’s methodical, slowing himself down, calming himself. I can see his training kicking in. He positions one palm over the other and interlocks his fingers, placing his hands with precision, just up from her sternum, and begins cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

I’m in shock. It’s not that I’ve never seen CPR—Dad had me do a First Aid course back in Boston. We had dummies, just a naked upper torso with a bland, generic head, but this is different. The speed and rhythm with which Pretzel moves is bewildering. All around us, there’s nothing but devastation. Smoke wafts from the ruins of the jungle. Fires reach up into the sky, but there’s no life. Nothing’s moving, and yet there he is, thrusting up and down, hitting a rapid pace, far quicker than anything I did during my training.

Pretzel is pushing hard, rising straight up and then driving down, using his body weight, not just his arms. Angela’s chest compresses back and forth, depressing by easily a third, which is alarming to see as it seems as though he’s crushing her lungs. For a thin, aging scientist, he’s astonishingly strong.

“Come on, Ange,” he says. Bones crack under his relentless pounding, but he refuses to let up. I drag myself out of the water, pulling myself up on my knees and crawling to the opposite side of Dr. O’Brien. Her blue eyes stare up at the sky without blinking.

“Garcia.” Pretzel calls out, quickly switching, pinching Angela’s nose and providing two deep breaths before returning to CPR. He looks to the rock pool. “Garcia, I need you… Enrico... Petty Officer Enrico Garcia. Can you hear me?”

Garcia doesn’t move. Water ripples around him, but he stays still, with his back to us. The hair on his head has been burnt off, leaving his skin blackened and peeling. Cuts and scratches line his neck.

“Please, I need your help,” Pretzel says, but he’s looking at Angela. He’s fixed his attention on her chest, keeping his eyes locked on the back of his palms, watching as he drives down time and again with what is almost a mechanical motion. “Damn it, man. I need your help. Dr. O’Brien needs you.”

Garcia turns. The skin on his face is torn and blistered. Blood seeps from the corners of his eyes. He’s looking at us, and yet he’s not. Somehow, he’s looking through us. He too never blinks. His lips quiver.

“Josh,” Pretzel says.

“Yes,” I reply, still trying to comprehend what’s happened.

“I need your help. I need you to administer breathing, do you understand?”

“Yes,” I say, positioning myself beside her shoulders.

Without slackening his pace, Pretzel says, “I need you to breathe for Dr. O’Brien. We have to work together for her sake. We can’t stop, not for one moment. For now, we are her heart and lungs. In about twenty seconds, I’m going to pause. When I do, I need you to pinch her nose with one hand, grabbing her chin with the other. Tilt her head back and her mouth will open. Do you understand?”

I nod.

“Two big breaths. Deep breaths. Blow hard, like you’re blowing up a party balloon. Then stop. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“In three, two, one.”

Pretzel sits back. I don’t hesitate, shifting her head back in the loose sand, locking my mouth over hers and breathing out into her lungs. I snatch another breath and exhale again, blowing hard. No sooner have I pulled away than Pretzel is back at work, lunging against her chest, moving hard and fast. He took those few seconds to rest and recharge. Now he launches himself back into a frantic pace, thrusting hard against her sternum.

“Jana,” he calls out. “Mordecai. We need you guys.”

‘We,’ not ‘I.’ Pretzel’s appealing to Jana and Mordecai on my behalf, desperately trying to stir them to action.

Brother Mordecai has his knees up in front of his chest, with his arms wrapped around his legs. There’s a gash on the side of his head. Thick, coagulated blood mats down his hair. He’s nodding, rocking like a child. His lips are moving, but no words come out.

“Jana,” I yell.

“Go and get her,” Pretzel says.

I hesitate.

“Go!”

With that, I scramble to my feet and run.

Jana is looking up at the sky, which has taken on a ghostly yellow hue. Tears run down her cheeks. She’s wandered among the fallen trees, oblivious to where she is.

“Jana,” I say softly, jogging up to her. She’s in a daze, a dream, but she hears me. “I need your help.”

“They’re dead,” she says, still staring at the sky, turning and looking at the mushroom cloud as it drifts to one side. “They killed them.”

“Jana. Dr. O’Brien needs our help. Angela needs us.”

“My mother. My father. My brother and sister. All of them. The scientists. The soldiers. Your dad. They’re all gone.”

“Jana, please.” I reach out, taking her by the arm. She looks down at my fingers as though they’re not real, confused by the sense of touch. Her eyes follow the contours of my arm, the crook of my elbow, my shoulder, my neck and face.

“Josh.”

“Yes. It’s me. I’m here. I’m here with you. It’s okay.”

It’s not okay. I’m lying, but lies are all I have.

“Why?”

I don’t know what to say to that. Before I ran up to Jana, she seemed lost. Now, though, I realize we’re all lost—me, Jana, Mordecai, Garcia, even Pretzel. I can feel her pain. The distress she’s in weighs heavily on me. In the background, there’s the constant crunch of gravel. Wet sand, loose pebbles and tiny rocks shift back and forth under Dr. O’Brien as Pretzel applies CPR with the rhythm and consistency of a musician’s metronome racing back and forth. I’m waiting for Pretzel to call me back. I look to him. Our eyes meet, but he too is in shock. He’s doing what he has to, what he knows he should do, but he too is just the shell of the man he was moments ago.

“Why did they do this, Josh?” Jana asks.

“I don’t know, but Pretzel needs us. Dr. O’Brien needs us. Angela, remember her?”

I take Jana by the hand, leading her back to the beach. She stands on the shore beside us as I drop to my knees, again positioning myself beside Dr. O’Brien.

“Ready?” Pretzel asks.

“Yes.”

“In three, two, one.”

Again, I mimic the precision I’ve seen in Pretzel. There’s comfort to be found in a sense of purpose, in following a carefully defined set of motions. My fingers pinch Dr. O’Brien’s nose. I push her head back, opening her airway, tilting her head and take a deep breath, turning after blowing out, making sure I can see the rise and fall of her chest, feeling the air rush back from her lungs onto my cheek. Not only am I helping her, I’m giving Pretzel a moment to rest before he launches himself yet again into action.

Dr. O’Brien’s lips are cold. He checks her pulse. Nothing. Her skin is clammy, almost plastic in appearance and I’m reminded of the lifeless mannequins we practiced on. Back then, I never thought I’d perform CPR on anyone in my life. Back in Boston, the thought of locking lips with someone seemed creepy, repulsive. Now, I only hope it works.

I’m not sure how long we administer CPR, but the shadows grow long. Our clothes go from wet to damp to mostly dry. Jana sits on the beach, leaning against a log, but neither she, Mordecai or Garcia move, which is more than a little unnerving given the frantic pace Pretzel is keeping. I try not to think about them. Like Pretzel, I’m focused on keeping Angela alive, but I can’t ignore them.

Garcia is still in the water. His face is a mess. Sores weep, oozing with puss and blood. His eyes never move. He still hasn’t blinked, not that I’ve noticed. It’s as though he’s a statue, caught somewhere between life and death.

Pretzel has his back to Mordecai. Not deliberately, it’s simply the way he dragged Angela from the water, but he knows the missionary is there, not more than five feet from him, perched on a boulder.

While I’m breathing for Angela, I occasionally see Pretzel turning his head to one side. It’s as though he’s trying to make out what Mordecai’s saying, although I don’t think the missionary’s speaking English. From what I can tell, Mordecai is mumbling in either Latin or ancient Hebrew. That probably tells Pretzel all he needs to know about his mental state.

I expected Jana to crouch beside us and offer to help, but she’s numb, sitting just a few feet from Angela’s head. Jana’s seen death before. We all have. In the jungle, death is inescapable. Perhaps it’s how close we came to dying that’s rattled her, that and the loss of her entire family. As for me, I’m too busy to think about what happened to my dad. I hope he escaped. I hope he was still on the other side of the mountain when they struck, but hope is an illusion. I guess it’ll hit me later, but at the moment, every minute or so, I’m breathing for another human being. That’s my focus. I never knew breathing could be such hard work. I guess Jana’s mind has shut down or something. If she was coherent, I’m pretty sure she’d help, but she doesn’t seem to even notice us here on the beach.

Pretzel rocks back, breaking away from CPR, and like a well-honed machine, I take my cue and assume breathing again, only this time it’s different. Instead of sitting there or shifting his weight to keep blood circulating through his legs, Pretzel gets to his feet. I’m confused but still focused on forcing air into Angela’s lungs.

A hand rests on my shoulder.

“It’s over… We did all we could.”

Tears stream down his cheeks. I sit back and Angela’s head rolls limp to one side. Pretzel crouches, pushing his fingers hard into her jugular vein. Neither of us speak. I’m waiting, hoping, but he releases and then gently closes her eyelids.

“Four, maybe five hours, Josh.” He gestures toward the sun hanging low on the horizon. “We tried. We were gallant, my friend. We gave her the best shot we could. But—but...” He sniffs, wiping tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. His arms are trembling, shaking from fatigue. “I’d hoped for a rescue flight, someone in a helicopter looking for survivors. I thought, maybe if we could keep her alive until someone arrived with a defibrillator, but no one’s coming for us. There’s nothing more we can do. Night will fall soon, and we have to care for the living.”

I’m speechless. I get to my feet, surprised by how sore my knees are and how stiff my legs feel.

“Jana,” I say. Her bottom lip quivers. I’m not sure what’s been going through her mind over the past few hours, but it’s as though she’s in chains, unable to move. “Hey, it’s...” I can’t bring myself to say okay again. Clichés are the cruelest of lies.

I take her by the arms and she rushes to me, burying her head in my shoulder and almost collapsing. She sobs, heaving as she cries, unable to suppress the grief overwhelming her.

“Easy,” I say, helping her over to a log and getting her to sit in front of it. She won’t let go of me, which makes it difficult to sit next to her, so I turn sideways. Her fingers grip my arms like a steel vice. It’s all been too much.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “I’m right here.”

Although I’d like to offer more words as comfort, it feels good not to lie, so that’s all I say. My silence, though, is an admission of loss.

Strange, but helping Pretzel and calming Jana is keeping me grounded. Just when I felt as though I was falling apart, I find myself pushing to help, getting outside myself.

Pretzel steps into the water, wading gently beside Garcia. Ripples spread out over the still water.

“Come with me.”

The wounded soldier gets to his feet, but he can barely stand. Pretzel hoists one arm over his shoulder, dragging him out of the filthy pool and onto the beach. He rests Garcia against the log, sitting him on the sand beside Jana, and turns his attention to Mordecai.

“Join us,” Pretzel says. He takes his hand, leading him over as though he were guiding a child, and sits him on the other side of me. Although Mordecai’s only gone a distance of a few feet, there’s something symbolic about getting everyone together. We need each other.

Pretzel says, “First aid, water and food.” It’s not a complete sentence, revealing the stress he feels and how he’s barely holding himself together, but I understand.

“There’s a pack over there,” I say, pointing at the pool beneath the waterfall. One of the backpacks has washed up against the rocks. I have to pry Jana’s hands from my arm, reassuring her I’ll be right back. Slowly, I work my way around the edge of the filthy water, clambering over rocks and fallen trees. It feels good to be doing something.

I manage to salvage the three packs. I hoist one on each shoulder and drag the third back to the beach, wading through the rock pool. Pretzel has begun the arduous task of placing rocks around Dr. O’Brien’s body, slowly entombing her where we fought for her life. A thin strip of cloth has been placed over her face, for our sake, not hers. I guess Pretzel did that, but I didn’t see him. Perhaps he took a moment to say a few words in honor of her life, words spoken in quiet, words meant only for the dead.

I leave the packs on the sand and help him collect rocks, wondering about the alien invaders, wondering if there will be anyone left to bury us.

Without saying anything, Pretzel leaves me, bumbling over to the packs,  stumbling on the rocky beach, mumbling to himself like a madman.

“Fallout determined by blast height... prevailing winds... but what was the yield? Why destroy what they came to find? And why now? Why not while they were above the atmosphere? And radiation… how are they going to deal with the contamination?”

He dithers, taking probes out of the pack, stacking them neatly on the sand and then putting them back in again.

“Pretzel,” I say, abandoning Dr. O’Brien’s impromptu, incomplete grave and joining him. He’s distracted. I tap him on the shoulder, repeating his name, but this time, my voice wavers. “Pretzel, please.”

“Hmmm. Ah, yes. Josh.”

“You’re scaring me.”

His bloodshot eyes go wide. Pretzel blinks several times. It’s as though his brain is rebooting.

“I need you. We need you,” I say, realizing he’s struggling in the moment, lost like all of us.

Pretzel nods, straightens and speaks with his peculiar Indian accent, honed by British rule over hundreds of years and still quite distinct. “First aid kit, right? That’s what we’re looking for.”

“Yes,” I reply. The pitch of his voice has changed as he mentally regains his footing. We’re all in shock, on the verge of shutting down. A sense of purpose is all I have left to cling to. Doing something, anything is the only way to stay sane.

Pretzel rummages through the packs, looking for the first aid kit. He tosses probes on the ground, discarding them like empty coke cans. Garcia is shaking, only his motion is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s almost a shimmer. With all the blistering on his fingers I almost missed it.

“I’ve found some painkillers,” Pretzel says, crouching before Garcia. “I’m going to put them in your mouth, okay?”

Garcia opens his mouth wide. Saliva sticks to his lips, stretching at the corners. His teeth are stained pink with blood. Pretzel crushes each tablet between his fingers, sprinkling the fine powder into Garcia’s mouth, crumbling the pills on his tongue, slowly feeding him four tablets.

“More.”

Pretzel nods, breaking up a few more tablets. Garcia crunches them, chewing the big bits beneath his molars. He picks up a canteen, saying, “Here’s some water.”

Garcia tips his head back and Pretzel pours slowly, allowing just a trickle to pass the soldier’s lips, giving Petty Officer Garcia time to swallow. I cannot even begin to imagine the level of pain Garcia is in. Even swallowing is difficult for him.

Pretzel screws the cap back on the bottle and rests it in Garcia’s hands. The blind soldier grabs at the bottle as though it were a life raft in a storm, clutching it to his chest.

“I’m going to bandage your eyes, okay?”

Garcia nods.

“There’s some antiseptic cream in the kit. It’s probably going to sting, but we need to stop infection from taking hold. You understand?”

Again, Garcia nods. He’s trying not to shake, trying to hide how badly he’s suffering, but he can’t. His body seems to demand more than he can handle, and he’s wracked with spasms every ten to fifteen seconds. His shoulders shift with a jolt as though he’s been shocked with electricity.

Pretzel needs my help. He gets me to hold some non-stick bandages face-up while he applies the medical cream to the slick surface. Then he places them gently over Garcia’s eyes and wraps a compression bandage around his head, holding the pads in place. Through it all, Garcia is subdued, desperately trying to control the convulsions seizing his body.

“Are you going to be okay for a few minutes?”

Garcia nods. With that, Pretzel returns to Dr. O’Brien’s body, again picking up rocks and packing them next to her. He’s strangely distant, not having said anything to me, but I want to help. It’s all I can do. Jana and Mordecai watch us intently. Before long, and without any prompting, Jana joins us, pushing through her own mental anguish. We start at Angela’s feet, slowly building a mound around her, only ever placing stones on top of her with the utmost care and respect.

Mordecai joins us as we reach her waist. Pretzel crosses her arms over her chest. He talks to her, speaking under his breath, but it’s so quiet in the decimated jungle, we can all hear him.

“Don’t you worry about Charlize… I’ll take care of her, I promise… You know me. I’m Methuselah... Ain’t no alien gonna get me... I’ll live to be nine hundred… She’s in old hands, but good hands, Ange… I’ll care for her like she was my own… I—I know this guy at Princeton. Geoffrey Archer. You’d like him. Dean of Physics. He’s a good guy. We go way back. I taught him how to ride elephants in Jaipur... I’ll make sure Charlize gets a good education. The best. Whatever she wants. Regardless of cost. I’ll make it happen. I promise.”

Tears run down his cheeks. Pretzel stacks rocks gently around her head, fussing with their position, rearranging them with care. At this point, we simply hand the rocks to him. Somehow, it’s more dignified this way.

“I’m sorry, Ange. I’m so sorry,” he says. The last rock is the heaviest of them all. Physically, it’s small and flat, but emotionally it weighs a ton. Pretzel places it slowly, positioning it as though he were an artist working with a sculpture.

Brother Mordecai crosses himself. Jana and I hold each other. Pretzel whispers, “Farewell, my dear friend.”

Nightfall

In the tropics, night falls fast. Given we’re normally surrounded by the jungle canopy blotting out the sky, it’s not unheard of to be caught unawares away from the village and end up traipsing back through the jungle in darkness. Tonight, though, the forest has been leveled. The skies are clear, almost magical, which is cruel given all we’ve been through. As the sun sets, the gradient of color stretching over us is as vibrant as a painting, reaching from a brilliant golden yellow to red, orange, pink, light blue and then the deep, dark of the coming night.

“Where are they?” I ask.

Pretzel takes his bearings from the setting sun and points. “Out there somewhere.”

“Why can’t we see it?” I ask. “The rope or ladder or whatever it is?”

“Given it’s quite thin, it’s probably not visible beyond a few thousand meters. If we were up on that ridge line, we might be able to see the base station dangling beneath it.” But Pretzel’s no longer looking at the sky. He searches through the packs. His thin, frail, aging hands move with purpose. Physically, he’s a slight figure, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone with more strength. The world is crumbling around us, quite literally, but he’s bounced back. He’s focused. Somehow, he’s found his reserves.

“What are we going to do?” Jana asks.

“Good question,” Pretzel replies, and I get the feeling he doesn’t know and is stalling for time, making things up as he goes, which is fine by me. I’ve always been deeply suspicious of people that have all the answers. I’d rather honesty over conviction.

“Look,” Brother Mordecai says, pointing. As the sky darkens, sparks flicker, forming a faint line disappearing into the night, rising straight up in the air. Like lightning breaking away from a storm cloud, there are flashes of electricity dancing through the sky high above the cliff. “Is that them?”

“I guess so.”

“What is that?” I ask.

“I don’t know? Electrostatic discharge? It’s probably been there all along but is only now visible.”

Mordecai speaks with slow deliberation. To Pretzel’s credit, he lets him finish. I wouldn’t. I feel as though Mordecai and my father are relics from another era.

“And their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth... lightning.”

Pretzel just nods, not offering any other commentary. Finally, he takes his cue from those words and says, “We’re going to need a fire.”

I’m keen to show Pretzel my support, so I say, “I’ll collect wood.”

“Is that wise?” Jana asks. “Lighting a fire?”

Mordecai says, “We’ll give away our location.”

Pretzel thinks for a moment. “I really have no idea… but we’re no threat to them.”

“They just nuked us,” Mordecai says, somewhat flabbergasted at Pretzel’s relaxed tone. “They declared war on us.”

He’s got a point, but I note that Garcia is quiet, not taking either side. Blood seeps from beneath the bandages wrapped around his head, but he’s listening intently. Like Pretzel, I suspect he’s finding his resolve.

“I wouldn’t presume to know their intentions,” Pretzel says. “For all we know, they were simply sterilizing the land to reduce the likelihood of microbial interaction.”

“What???”

Mordecai’s one-word response in reply to Pretzel’s long winded explanation is brutal. Pretzel explains his reasoning, but he’s rambling, searching for answers, wanting to believe in something.

“Given their technological sophistication, having traversed between star systems and built a space elevator from raw materials, the difference between us and them is beyond any terrestrial equivalent. This isn’t a meeting of equals. This isn’t even akin to Europeans in warships discovering naked aborigines in a canoe. The disparity is more like us trying to interact with squid.”

I must look confused as he clarifies.

“Only we’re the squid.”

Mordecai shakes his head in disagreement. Regardless of what Brother Mordecai thinks, though, Pretzel has my attention. Jana and I are silent, listening carefully. Garcia is quiet, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees. I’m not sure what those painkillers were, but they’ve helped him rebound.

Pretzel says, “I doubt we could hide from them anyway. Right now, our biggest threat is the elements. I know it sounds strange, but we’re in shock. All of us. Not just Petty Officer Garcia. A fire will do us good. Warmth. Raise our spirits. Who knows? Maybe they’re afraid of fire?”

He shrugs. None of us are buying that, but Pretzel doesn’t care. Besides, I agree with him. We’re on the edge of the mountains here in the jungle and often get a cool breeze at night, especially as the evening wears on. It’s nothing like a North American winter, but given we’re in thin, damp clothing, it’s easy to catch a chill. At a guess, the temperature’s already around 70F and falling. Without the jungle canopy trapping the heat, I suspect it’s going to get a lot colder after midnight.

“I’ll get some kindling.”

“I’ll go too,” Jana says, joining me.

If there’s one advantage to being by the water it’s that all directions lead up, meaning we won’t get lost. If we backtrack to the stream we can easily find the pool again.

I grab an empty backpack and we start gathering firewood, looking for dead branches of various sizes.

“Do you think he’s right?” Jana asks once we’re out of earshot.

“I don’t think even he thinks he’s right,” I say, trying to smile. On one level, starting a fire feels forced, almost futile. On the other, it’s important to try. We’ve lost Dr. O’Brien, while Petty Officer Garcia has been badly injured by the blast. We almost died plummeting into the rock pool. Jana’s family is dead. My father—I don’t even want to think about that. I hope he’s still in Ubandi. We’ve got nothing. Uncertainty clouds our future. If anything, a fire will help us feel alive.

“I think he’s right,” Jana says, and I know what she means. It’s not any one thing she’s latching on to, rather his attitude and resolve. My dad’s an optimist. In his sermons, he’d often say, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” I suspect he’d probably argue with Pretzel even more than Brother Mordecai does, but I think he’d agree with his approach. Don’t stop. Keep going. I hope my dad is doing something similar wherever he is. I know him. He’ll be helping someone. He’ll be doing all he can to comfort survivors, just like Pretzel.

We get back to the beach to find Pretzel kneeling before a broken branch. He’s got a thin straight stick and is rubbing it back and forth between his aging palms. Mordecai helps, cupping his hands around the tiny indentation that’s formed on the branch, keeping a smattering of dry leaves and fine twigs close. Pretzel blows softly as a few sparks fly, catching on the fine tinder.

Jana and I lay out our branches in order of size, putting the smallest twigs down first.

“Good work.” Pretzel begins building a teepee around the infant flame, coaxing it to life. “Easy, now.”

Slowly, flames rise. Mordecai feeds the fire, breaking branches and carefully placing them. Pretzel was right. Just the sight of the flames causes a weight to lift. Even Garcia seems to warm, relaxing as we make progress, regardless of how feeble our efforts may be.

Jana and I empty the backpack and return to the jungle, looking for more firewood. Most of the debris is still green, but we find an old log roughly six feet in length. It looks like a nest for ants, but they’ve fled or died. We carry it back between us.

“Oh, perfect,” Pretzel says. “Lie it just there, with the fire nestled into the bend.”

We place the log between the fire and the water, forming a low barrier from the wind coming in over the rock pool, giving the fire something sizable to consume. We’ll have to shift the burning ends as the night goes on, but a log like this will keep throwing out heat til dawn.

The jungle is unusually quiet. With nightfall, I’m expecting insects to start calling, but there’s nothing. It’s as though we’re the only living things on the planet—which is unnerving. I wonder what’s happening outside of the jungle. What are the military doing? How will they respond to the attack? What’s being said on the news? Crazy—we’re so damn close to this thing but we know less than anyone about what’s actually happening.

Pretzel finds some military rations in one of the packs. He cuts them open, dividing the two bars between us. I’m not sure what I’m eating, and it’s barely more than a mouthful, but food is good, kickstarting my system. I feel as though we have purpose—a plan—even though we don’t. The mind is easily fooled, I guess.

Garcia turns down his piece. “Give it to someone else.”

“You’ve got to eat,” Pretzel says.

“Me?” Garcia shakes his head slowly. Given the extent of his injuries, he’s surprisingly coherent. “You guys need that more than me. Give it to Josh.”

I couldn’t accept his portion. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

“Tell him, doc.”

Pretzel is quiet.

“I ain’t going anywhere, kid. With the amount of radiation I took, it’s just a matter of time before I’m vomiting my guts and bleeding internally.”

The fire crackles. Sparks rise into the night.

“I’m a dead man. One by one, my internal organs are shutting down.”

Jana’s hands tremble. She’s shaking. “We’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”

“She’s right, isn’t she?” I say, raising my voice beyond her soft whisper. “Radiation is going to kill all of us.”

Pretzel swallows the lump in his throat and I wonder if he’s about to lie. He looks me in the eye, clenches his lips tight and struggles to speak. “Josh—I don’t know. We were below the brow of the hill. There was a helluva lot of dirt and rock between us and the initial blast. We should be okay.”

“Should be?” I ask.

He raises his hands in defense, searching for something else to say.

“Ah, the cloud drifted away from us. We should escape the worst of the fallout.”

There’s that word again. Should. This time, though, I let it slide. Like Pretzel, I want to believe we’re going to make it, even if it seems impossible. Garcia, though, was on the ridge. He took the full force of the radiation from the blast. He hangs his head, speaking with slow deliberation.

“If I’m going to hell, I’m taking these fuckers with me.”

“But… but…”

“But what?” Garcia gestures toward his eyes. “I’m blind? Ah, don’t let that fool you, kid. I’m a Navy SEAL. I’m trained to operate in complete darkness. I can field strip a SAW blindfolded in under ten seconds to clear a jam.”

He pulls a pistol from his holster, resting it on his open palm, feeling the weight as he tosses it lightly.

“They taught us to clear pitch-black rooms. Three tangos in each one—three bad guys along with three hotels—hostages. The door gets blown off its hinges with a breaching charge and we run in. We were wearing noise-cancelling headphones, so to us the explosion sounded like a pop. Everything below 70 decibels was amplified, though. Everything above that was muted.

“With no vision, we could hear the difference between sand shoes and boots, the rustle of clothing as a firearm is raised, the click of a magazine being pushed in place, the slide on a Glock being pulled back.”

His head moves as he speaks, darting slightly as he remembers his training.

“Sometimes, it was what you didn’t hear that told you where they were. Hostages would cringe, ducking or dropping to the floor, but in one corner, no echo, no noise at all. Someone standing there deathly still. Bam, Bam. Double tap. Tango down.”

He smiles, staring past me with bandaged eyes, not able to see me but knowing precisely where I am. “Don’t worry about me, Josh.” But I do. I don’t want Petty Officer Garcia to die.

All his bravado is a lie, allowing him to hide from the only enemy he can’t defeat—death itself. I don’t want to lose anyone else. Not him. Not my dad. Not Pretzel or Jana or Mordecai. Deep down, I know I’m being naive. We all saw the nuclear explosion. If we weren’t protected by the hill, if we hadn’t fallen into the water, we’d be dead. It’s a chilling realization and one I quickly move on from.

Tears roll down Jana’s cheeks. She must feel it too—the helplessness. I guess we’re all dealing with this in our own way. Pretzel doubles down on stuff, pushing harder. Mordecai retreats into the scriptures. Garcia hardens. But Jana and I? They’re right. We’re just kids. We like to think of ourselves as adults. Physically, we’re in our teens, but mentally neither of us are ready for this. I wonder if any of them really are? Is it all just a pretense? Are they putting on a front? Could it be that Jana and I are the only ones dealing with this honestly? Pretzel’s silence following what Garcia said makes me suspect he’s struggling far more than he lets on. Finally, he speaks his mind, speaking with unfounded resolve.

“We’re going to get you out of here.”

Garcia doesn’t reply. He doesn’t agree.

There’s no moon tonight. With no artificial light for over a hundred miles, the night is dark. The stars are radiant. One in particular has our attention. A pencil-thin line leads from beyond the cliff, reaching up into space, slowly disappearing from sight, but clearly leading to the alien star. I guess, technically, it’s not a star, as NASA has confirmed it’s an asteroid, which is just a rock, and it’s nowhere near as distant as the actual stars. It’s not even as far away as the Moon, but it looks like a star to me.

Jana nestles in beside me, wanting to keep warm, so I put my arm around her. Without saying anything, she rests her hand on my chest. Trust. Comfort. These are the things we need, but will they be enough for us to make it through the night?

Mordecai asks, “What are they doing?”

Rather than appearing stationary like a laser beam, the thin strand of light reaching into the sky seems to crackle with energy. It’s as though lightning is racing back and forth along the cable.

“This isn’t entirely unexpected.”

That gets our attention. Pretzel thinks for a moment. He’s trying to distill years of research and various scientific discussions into a few brief points.

“Earth is like a battery—only instead of one end being positive and the other negative, our molten interior is positive, which means…”

He gestures with his hands for someone else to complete his sentence, so I say, “The surface is negative.”

“Exactly. Overall, the entire system is neutral, but isolate just one part and it carries charge.”

“So the aliens?” I ask.

“When they lowered the elevator, it was like connecting a wire to a battery. Current starts to flow, wanting to equalize.”

“So that’s what we’re seeing?” I ask, somewhat relieved the crackling flicker of light isn’t the makings of some alien death ray.

“Pretty much. It gets a little more complex—static electricity in the atmosphere, the Van Allen belts, there are a few other factors, but that’s the essence of what’s happening.”

“What do they want?” Garcia asks. From the intensity of Mordecai’s gaze, I suspect this is the question burning in his mind as well. Pretzel has a calming effect on us. The temptation is to panic, but there’s something almost hypnotic about listening to the elderly Indian scientist with his soft, distinct accent. His words are measured. Like the surface of the ocean, there’s depth behind each sentence. All we see are the ripples, the waves rolling toward the beach, but there’s so much more beneath each comment.

“This is out of character. The explosion, I mean.” Typical Pretzel, ignoring Garcia’s question and talking about what interests him. “We’re an island among the stars. Imagine Darwin sailing to the Galapagos, roughly a thousand kilometers off the coast of South America. The HMS Beagle anchors off-shore and Darwin rows into a rocky bay. Is there anything out there that can threaten his ship—the Beagle?”

Garcia looks angry, pursing his blistered lips. He shakes his head in disbelief as Pretzel continues, disagreeing with the analogy. Pretzel either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. He says, “We don’t know what they want, but we do know they’ve come a helluva long way to get it. That requires planning, patience, dedication, a goal.”

“A goal?” Garcia says. “In case you weren’t paying attention, they just dropped a goddamn nuke on us. This is war. We’re under attack.”

Garcia’s repeating Mordecai’s point, which seems strange to me. I guess they finally agree on something.

“Are we?” Pretzel asks. “Where are their alien war machines? Where are their tripods with their heat rays or whatever? Where’s the invasion force?”

“They bombed us!”

“They bombed the jungle. They came down in the single most inaccessible, sparsely inhabited region along the equator. Apart from touching down over the ocean, there’s no other place they could have selected that was less populated.”

“You’re defending them?” Garcia points at his own face, gesturing toward his eyes but not touching the bandages. “After all this, you’re on their side?”

“I’m not on anyone’s side.”

I feel torn. On one hand, I want to side with Pretzel, but Garcia’s got a point. They leveled the jungle. Dr. O’Brien is dead. Petty Officer Garcia is dying. As for the rest of us, we could be moments away from death and not know it. We had no warning about the attack. There could be a second at any moment. Seems Garcia is thinking along the same lines, as he says, “Who’s to say they’re not going to drop something bigger? Or start bombing cities?”

“All life is goal oriented.”

“For a scientist,” Brother Mordecai says, “You sure are dumb.”

Pretzel is frustrated. “So, you tell me—what do they want?”

Brother Mordecai is confused.

Pretzel clarifies. “In the Bible. You told us about Ezekiel. What did they want thousands of years ago? Why did they come here back then?”

Mordecai says, “I thought you didn’t believe in the Bible?”

“I don’t, but my beliefs don’t matter. Beliefs are irrelevant. It makes no difference what you or I believe, but if there’s a chance, however slim, that they have been here before then perhaps there’s something we can learn from that.

“We know they exist, right? Before now, we thought we were alone. We looked at the sky and wondered about Fermi’s Paradox—The Great Silence. Well, there’s no question about the existence of life beyond Earth—not any more. The only question is, why are they here?

“Could they have visited us before? It’s not out of the question, so you tell me, why did they come in the days of Ezekiel?”

Mordecai thinks for a moment before answering with a mere two words.

“To talk.”

That gets Pretzel’s attention. He raises an eyebrow in surprise. Mordecai elaborates.

“Ah… there was plenty of revelation in the Old Testament. God talking from a burning bush, angels in the form of men, stuff like that, but there had never been a visitation on this scale, nothing like the device described in Ezekiel—a machine.”

Pretzel leans forward with his elbows on his knees and one hand cupped around his chin. He’s listening intently, searching for clues.

“This was the first time—the only time—there had been something mechanical. Something physical. Something that didn’t originate on this world.”

Pretzel nods, speaking slowly. “What exactly did Ezekiel see?”

“An intricate, complex machine with multiple moving parts. Cogs. Wheels. Fire. And a creature with four heads.”

“Polycephaly?” Pretzel asks, genuinely surprised.

“What’s that?” Jana asks.

“Monozygotic twin embryos fused in utero.”

“You’re not helping,” I say, feeling I need to keep Pretzel on task.

“Ah, conjoined twins. One body. Two heads. Polycephaly occurs across the animal kingdom in humans, cats, cattle, pigs, goats, snakes, turtles. It’s a common theme in mythology. Cerberus was the multi-headed dog guarding the gates of hell, stuff like that.”

Mordecai says, “The seven-headed dragon in the Book of Revelation.”

“Yes.”

“Only this was different,” Mordecai says. “The heads weren’t the same.”

“Oh.” Pretzel replies. I can see he’s bursting with ideas but he keeps quiet, allowing Mordecai to explain further.

“In Ezekiel, the creature that talks has the head of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle.”

Garcia says, “I don’t see the point in any of this.”

“On the contrary,” Pretzel says, “I find it fascinating”

“Why?” I ask.

“Three mammals and a bird is unusual, but these creatures are all quite common, They’re easily recognizable in that they’re used by humans to represent strength. And they’re terrestrial—not alien.”

“And you think that’s significant?” Mordecai asks.

“I don’t know. We’re yet to see if there’s any correlation between what Ezekiel saw and what’s happening now, but if there is, it suggests they’re not a threat—that they want to communicate in terms we can understand.”

Garcia isn’t convinced. “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“I don’t know it,” Pretzel replies, getting defensive. “At the moment, there’s not enough data to know anything with any real confidence, but I’m not ruling out any possibilities.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m ruling out,” Garcia says, raising his voice. “Peace. You don’t send a nuclear weapon as a greeting card. The two of you are full of shit.”

“What?” Brother Mordecai says, offended by the notion. “Why would you—”

Without being able to see, Garcia addresses each of them individually, turning slightly to face them as he speaks.

“You think religion has all the answers, while you think science has them. Has it occurred to either of you two geniuses that there might not be an answer? Not one we would accept. Asking why they’re here or why they bombed us could have no more meaning than why you stepped on an ant. There’s no reason. You just did.”

Jana looks at me, but I’m staying out of this. I’m curious about the reasoning of these three adults from entirely different walks of life, but I don’t know what I think. As far as I can tell, there’s no right or wrong, just different perspectives, each with limited value.

Pretzel falls silent, which seems like quite an accomplishment for Petty Officer Garcia. Brother Mordecai clenches his lips, on the verge of saying something but he thinks better of it.

Garcia points at the bandaging wrapped around his head. “This isn’t theoretical. We don’t have the luxury of holding onto pious platitudes. This is real. They’re out there. They’ve signaled their intent.”

“So what do we do?” I ask.

“We get the hell out of Dodge,” Garcia replies. “This is being fought on a scale far larger than a bunch of us wandering around lost in the jungle. Tomorrow, we follow the river down into the valley and hook up with US forces. The army will have set up a cordon, a perimeter surrounding the area. Their priority is going to be containment and then eradication.

“Sorry, Pretzel. Your much lauded First Contact is now the First Interstellar War.”

Pretzel hangs his head in shame, unable to reply.

Romeo/Charlie

My eyes flicker.

Tiny pebbles stick to the outside of my cheek, embedding themselves in my soft skin. I’m not sure how I slept so soundly, as my body aches and just the slightest movement on waking has me grimace in pain, but last night it was as though someone pulled the plug.

The jacket I was using as a pillow lies scrunched up beside me on the beach. I was so exhausted physically and mentally that everything shut down. I roll to one side, with Jana leaning on me, groaning as I shift.

Trying to get comfortable while lying on rocks has to be the stupidest thing ever, but nevertheless, I squirm, wanting to sink into a mattress that’s not there. I brush the pebbles from my cheek, looking up at the sky.

A fighter jet roars in low over the ruins of the jungle. Jana pushes off me, rushing to get to her feet as the plane races in toward us. The engine screams as the fighter curls through the sky, banking as it follows the jagged edge of the plateau, passing right over the cliff. The aircraft is so low I can make out the helmet of the pilot beneath the curved Perspex cockpit. The plane begins to climb, rolling and twisting, turning as it follows some invisible trail in the sky.

“Who is it? Is it one of ours?” Garcia yells over the noise of the engines echoing off the cliff.

“I don’t know.”

We stand on the shore of the rock pool. Water laps at our feet. What started as exuberance quickly turns to horror as it becomes clear the plane is falling apart. There’s no missile strike, no violent explosion, no laser beams that I can see, but over several seconds the fighter breaks up, crumbling into pieces that slowly peel behind it, flipping in the air and tumbling toward the jungle—tail fins, wings, landing gear, fuel pods. Even the canopy breaks away, fluttering behind the fuselage as it continues roaring forward until even it comes apart. I’m expecting to see the pilot eject. I watch for a parachute, but none comes.

Debris falls from the sky, crashing to the jungle. The wreckage lies strewn along the slopes of the plateau. When the fuselage hits, there’s a flash of light. A fireball rolls into the clear blue sky. A few seconds later the boom of the explosion washes over us. The silence that follows is painful. None of us are sure what we just witnessed.

Pretzel is the first one to speak, but he’s thinking the same thing I am, wondering about Petty Officer Garcia’s comment. “What did you mean by—one of ours?”

More than simply being perplexed, Pretzel sounds uncomfortable, disturbed by the implications.

“Who else were you expecting up there?” he asks.

With all the talk yesterday about the AWACS aircraft Overlord and the US combat patrol of fighter planes, I never considered anything other than an American plane roaring overhead and was more concerned about what happened to the fighter than its nationality, but Garcia has cast doubt on that.

Petty Officer Garcia’s the only one that would recognize the type of plane that broke up before us, but he’s blind. He ignores Pretzel, asking, “One tail fin or two?”

“Two.”

Pretzel doesn’t look impressed by his question being ignored. Garcia stares as the sky with blind eyes. Sunlight warms his cheeks. He’s imagining a sight that has long since ceased to be.

“Were there intakes beneath the craft. Large, dark air vents running from midway down the fuselage, forming the engines?”

“Yes.”

“And the wingtips? Was there anything on the wingtips?”

“I think so,” Pretzel says. Like me, he was more focused on what happened to the aircraft than the subtleties of its design, but I think he’s right. “There were sticks, I think? I dunno, missiles?”

“And the wings, did they seem to start too far back, almost as if they were set too close to the tail?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s a Sukhoi Su-27, not the later 57.”

I don’t know what type of aircraft that is, but the look on Pretzel’s face is enough to convey that it’s not good.

“What the hell is going on?” Pretzel asks, marching up to Garcia on the rocky beach. Pebbles crunch beneath his boots, reinforcing his anger. “Romeo/Charlie, right? You were talking about that over the radio yesterday. What does it mean?”

Even though he can’t see, Garcia lowers his head, making as though he’s looking at his feet. He’s ashamed of what he’s about to say. “Russia/China.”

“Fuck.”

Pretzel marches away from him, striding, putting distance between the two of them. I’ve never seen him angry like this. He kicks at the rocks and stones, scuffing his boots against the ground, shaking his head.

“I can’t believe this,” he says.

Not more than fifteen feet away, he wheels, turning and charging back toward Garcia. “When were you going to tell us?” He points, holding his outstretched index finger barely an inch from the bandages wrapped around Garcia’s head. “We were it. We were the only UN sanctioned mission. The Security Council endorsed our mission—not theirs.”

Pretzel’s hand falls away. He seems resigned to what’s happening but he’s clearly frustrated.

Without any emotion, Garcia says, “We knew they had assets in the region. The Russians sent a task force through the Suez last week. We tracked them down through the Gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia. The Chinese deployed an aircraft carrier to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Forty fighter craft in all, but no match for ours.”

“No match for ours,” Pretzel says with sheer disbelief staining his words. “This is not a pissing competition.”

“But it fell apart,” I say, pointing at the smoke rising from the wreckage scattered on the hillside.

Garcia smiles. “I guess they gave them a bloody nose.”

“This isn’t funny,” Pretzel says. “This isn’t a joke. What the hell is going on?”

“You tell me, doc. They’re your people.”

“What?” Mordecai says, stepping forward and addressing Pretzel. “What does he mean by that?”

Garcia tilts his head. “Yeah, I’m not the only one keeping secrets.”

“Pretzel?” I say. The quiver in my voice betrays my uncertainty.

Pretzel holds his hands out, addressing us as a group, appealing for calm. “We trained for this day—on a global scale. NASA. ESA. CSNA. JAXA. RosCosmos.”

I’m only familiar with the first two terms, the American and European space agencies. At a guess, C is for China, while anything with cosmos in it must be Russian. As for JAXA, I have no idea. Japan, maybe?

“It was theoretical—hypothetical—what-if stuff. We never thought anything like this would actually happen. Space is too big. It takes too long for light to travel between stars, let alone anything else. Out of two hundred and fifty billion stars in our galaxy alone, barely a hundred lie within fifty light years of us. Most are so far away travel would be impractical—even for an advanced technological society.”

He shakes his head. I think I understand. Neither he nor anyone else ever thought this day would come.

He says, “We’re surrounded by such a small fraction of stars the number rounds to zero.”

“And yet, here they are,” Mordecai says.

“Here they are,” Pretzel replies, dropping his hands to his thighs in exasperation. “We put in place protocols for a variety of scenarios. What we would do if we received a signal from outer space, or detected an artificial object on another world, like Mars or Europa, stuff like that.”

“And?” Jana asks, getting impatient.

Pretzel shakes his head. “We were supposed to work together.”

“But you didn’t,” Mordecai says.

“No.”

“Why?” I ask.

“There were… differences of opinion.”

Garcia laughs. “Opinion? Pretzel went ape-shit in front of the United Nations General Assembly, ridiculing the Russians, calling their concerns childish. He demanded a direct approach, convincing the UN his team could manage First Contact.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. I’m sure Jana doesn’t get it either. “What difference does it make?”

Jana asks, “Why did the Russians or the Chinese or whoever fly in here this morning after what happened yesterday?”

Mordecai gestures to the valley. “You can ask them yourself.”

We all turn. Even though the jungle has been flattened and is chaotic, with trees lying piled on top of each other, I catch the motion of someone following the stream. They’re on the other side of the river, coming up from the valley. For a moment, they disappear behind debris. Several more soldiers come into view, each walking along the same path.

“How far away are they?” Garcia asks.

“Ah, not far. Maybe a quarter mile,” I say. “Maybe less.”

“Their uniforms. Are they wearing uniforms like mine?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Mordecai says, “But they know we’re here. They’re not heading for the wreckage, they’re coming straight for us.”

“That was probably a reconnaissance flight—a sacrificial pawn.” Garcia fiddles with his combat vest, unclipping the straps and working his way out of it. “Josh. Hide this.”

Looking around, I can’t see anywhere to stuff his vest. As he’s blind, Garcia doesn’t realize I’m still standing there, confused as to what to do with the vest. If I throw it in the water, they’ll see. They might not know what I did, but there’s a good chance they’ll see the splash and realize I was trying to get rid of something.

Garcia pulls his pistol from the holster on his hip and lifts his shirt, tucking the gun and a bunch of magazines into the small of his back and his pockets. He unclips the holster from his leg, handing that to me as well, saying, “This too.”

I take it from him as Mordecai says, “Over here.”

Brother Mordecai pulls at loose reeds flattened by the blast, lifting them up. I hand him the holster and then the vest. It’s not the best hiding spot, but the khaki material is muddy, blending in with the dirt. Jana pulls a couple of branches over, tossing them carelessly so they look naturally chaotic. I kick at stones, covering our bootprints in the soft mud.

“What are you thinking?” Pretzel asks.

“Not good,” Garcia replies. “Like us, their team will be a mixture of soldiers and scientists. It’s important they don’t realize I’m a Navy SEAL.”

It’s clear from the way the two men are talking, they have a fair idea who’s coming up the track, which is something I find unsettling.

“They’re going to play us,” Pretzel says.

“I know,” Garcia replies.

Mordecai picks up on their concerns. “We could run. Move out. Hide.”

“They’ll find us,” Garcia says. “There are no clear tracks to follow—not any more. They’d quicken their pace and be on us within a few hundred yards. No. They’re fit, rested, well-trained, healthy, properly equipped—the advantage is all theirs.”

Jana looks to me to see if I’m going to say something, but I’m bewildered by what’s happening. Within 24 hours, our world has been torn apart by a firestorm. I trust Pretzel and Garcia, but I have no reason to—none beyond simply liking them. They’re friendly, but I’ve known them for barely a day. If anything, I should be turning to Brother Mordecai as at least I’ve known him for several years. Pretzel and Garcia are strangers, but not to each other. They must know they’re being cryptic, not bringing us into their confidence. I want to say something, but I suspect they’re talking like this because they’re protecting us.

Pretzel says, “We play it straight. Demand to be returned to US forces.”

Garcia smiles, which given the state of the sores on his face and the bloody bandages wrapped around his head, looks creepy.“You really think that will work?”

“What else can we do?” Pretzel turns to Jana and me, adding, “Listen, you’re just a couple of locals, you’ll be fine.”

“They’re witnesses,” Garcia says, which to me is a distinctly unnerving term to use in this context. Witnesses to what?

Garcia adds, “Maybe Brother Mordecai is right. He and the kids should make a run for it. We can stall the Russians. Buy them some time.”

“I’m not leaving,” I say, watching as the foreign soldiers approach to within a hundred yards.

Pretzel takes me by the shoulders. “You and Jana should go. They don’t know about you two. They’re not after you. You could make it out of here.”

“No,” Jana says. I love her determination. Pretzel probably thinks its stubbornness, but it’s not, it’s resilience.

“It’s probably too late,” Garcia says. “If we can see them, they saw us long ago. They wouldn’t approach like this—out in the open—if they didn’t have contingencies setup, covering the angles. Run and they might open fire.”

Brother Mordecai is strangely silent, leaning back on a nearby boulder. He’s listening intently but not contributing to the discussion. He’s got his hands in his jacket pockets, but there’s something else in there as well, something bulky, something he took from Garcia’s vest. I’m about to speak up and ask him about it when Pretzel mutters a handful of words that make the hair on my arms stand on end.

“They… might not be the biggest problem we face.”

I turn, looking to the cliff. The water trickling over the rocks, running down the side of the waterfall, has taken on a distinctly green color, only it’s unnatural, almost fluorescent. To me, it looks like antifreeze. Already, it’s staining the surface of the rock pool. It’s diluted by the dark water, but is slowly winning out, rippling across the surface, causing the pool to glow.

“What?” Garcia asks. “What is it?”

“Something’s coming down in the water,” Pretzel says, “Dying it fluro-green.”

“And that’s bad, right?” Jana says.

“I don’t know.”

For once, I wish Pretzel would just guess. He reads the uncertainty on our faces and elaborates, “It’s not normal, that’s really all I can say. Whether it’s good or bad depends on what effect it has.”

Yeah, still not good enough, Pretzel. I can almost read Jana’s mind. Good or bad. She just wants one option to hold to. Clarity. Aliens above us, soldiers below. Give us something to go on.

I say, “Good.” I’m going out on a limb, wondering if Pretzel’s going to contradict me, but I feel something definitive needs to be said. “They know what they’re doing, right?” I’m using the same kind of logic Pretzel has shown me over the past day, talking through the details we know. “They captured that asteroid because they know what they’re doing. They built the space escalator—elevator. They knew how to do that. So this has to be the same, doesn’t it? It’s got to be deliberate.”

Pretzel nods thoughtfully. After a few seconds, he says, “Okay. Good. Let’s go with good.” He smiles. I get the feeling he likes my reasoning, even if it’s unfounded. Poison is deliberate, so is bombing the jungle, but I block those thoughts, pushing them out of my mind.

Arriving at some kind of conclusion, regardless of how frail it may be, has a calming effect on us, especially with the Russians or the Chinese or whoever about to reach us. I need certainty, as does Jana. My heart is beating out of my chest. I’ve got to cling to something, even if it is a lie. Perhaps lie is too strong a term, but a guess, a baseless assumption. I think Pretzel appreciates the resolution. We have enough to deal with without assuming that’s alien acid blood streaming over the waterfall.

The approaching soldiers clamber over boulders in the stream with the agility of a herd of gazelles running across the savannah. The wind picks up, causing leaves to swirl through the air. With heavy packs and rifles, thick boots and camouflage baseball caps, the approaching soldiers jump from the rocks onto our side of the pool.

Pretzel has his hands up, not so much in surrender as to show he’s unarmed. Rather than dropping down onto the beach, the soldiers take up positions around us, towering over us, standing on the surrounding rocks. Garcia notices. I’m not sure how as he can’t see and given the wind and the sound of alien water falling into the pool, there’s not much to hear, but the subtle motion of his head gives away his depth of perception. He twitches slightly to either side as the soldiers take up their positions, telling me he knows precisely where they are. He whispers, “How many?”

Barely moving my lips, I reply, “Two on the left, one to the right. Two in front of us.”

If Garcia heard me, he doesn’t acknowledge it, keeping his head facing forward. I get the feeling he’s being very deliberate about his bearings.

A civilian drops down to the beach with one of the soldiers, landing with a thud on the rocks and stones.

“Hello, father.”

Father?

The Russian standing before us is something like six foot a million inches tall with pale skin, short blonde hair and deep blue eyes, while Pretzel is five foot nothing with dark brown, wrinkled skin. They’ve got some serious history between them.

“Sergei.”

“Still picking up strays, I see,” the Russian says.

“Leave them out of this,” Pretzel replies, stepping forward, positioning himself in front of us.

“And who’s this?” I’m not sure how I know, but there’s something malicious in the words of this Russian, something beyond just his accent. Words that would be trivial in any other context sound menacing from him.

Pretzel doesn’t hesitate. “Petty Officer Enrico Garcia, US Army Corps of Engineers. He’s helping us survey the land.”

Damn, Pretzel is quick, offering an entirely plausible explanation for having a soldier accompanying us. Garcia shows no emotion, but he has his arms raised slightly, showing he’s compliant. If this was poker, I’d fold, but neither of them flinch.

The Russian nods and in response the soldier beside him jogs over, frisking Garcia. As Garcia is blind, the sudden intrusion of hands pressing up under his armpits and down his side takes him by surprise. He cringes, wincing, bending forward with each pat against his clothing.

“Leave him alone,” Pretzel says. “The man’s dying. Can’t you see that? He’s no threat to you.”

The Russian soldier pauses at Garcia’s waist as he recoils yet again from being touched. The Russian looks back at Sergei, wanting to know whether he should continue. Sergei signals with his head and the soldier retreats, but without turning his back on us. He keeps his gun on Garcia. For his part, Garcia has lowered his head. I’m not sure if he’s genuinely sore or play acting, but he appears to be holding back considerable pain, moving slowly.

“And the others?” Sergei asks.

Without lowering his hands, Pretzel says, “Brother Mordecai, a local missionary, and two kids from the village.”

The tension is as unbearable as the humidity building toward a storm.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Pretzel says, apparently reading something in Sergei’s face, a slight smirk on his lips. “You did this, not them—not the aliens.”

Sergei’s thin lips widen into a wicked smile.

Pretzel marches up to him. The anger on his face hardens his features. If we weren’t surrounded by armed soldiers, I get the feeling Pretzel would lash out at him. Given the weight/size difference between the two men, I’d still put my money on Pretzel. The way his shoulders flex and his chest moves, he looks like he could rip apart a giant.

“Are you stark raving mad?” Pretzel yells at him. “You dropped a nuke on the LZ? Cruithne’s a goddamn planet killer. If they threw that thing at us we’d go the way of the dinosaurs!”

Sergei replies, “Oh, it was nothing so crude. What do you think we are? Barbarians? No, that was thermobaric—an air/fuel fire bomb with a yield in the kiloton range.”

I can’t remain quiet. I know it’s not smart, but I have to say something. “You bombed the aliens? That’s stupid.”

“My, my… the young one has some spunk. No. We detonated while the elevator was still over 50,000 feet. They would have seen fireworks clearing the forest, nothing more. The prevailing winds blew the cloud away.”

Pretzel says, “You have no idea how they could react to such violence.”

Sergei is angry. He counters with, “They took out eighteen of our satellites—those used for military communication and GPS. Eighteen of them, Pretzel. Crippling our command-and-control assets in this region. In any other context, that’s an act of war!”

“But you know,” Pretzel says. “You of all people understand that wasn’t their intent.”

“Do I?” Sergei asks.

I’m bursting with questions. I have to speak. “Why did you bomb the jungle?”

“Ask him,” Sergei says, pointing. “Pretzel knows better than anyone… Indigenous species are fragile, vulnerable.”

Pretzel purses his lips as Sergei continues.

“Everywhere on Earth, in absolutely every isolated habitat, the microbes that come with migration have caused death and destruction.

“The Mongol hordes brought the Black Death to an unprepared European continent. At least twenty million Indians were killed by Smallpox when the British arrived in North America. The Spanish brought measles and tuberculosis to Latin America, wiping out 90% of the population. We couldn’t risk that here. Pretzel understands. He wrote the paper.”

Pretzel shakes his head as Sergei adds, “You look at me as though I’m somehow evil, like I’m the monster, but you’re the traitor. You’re the one that turned his back on decades of his own research.”

“What does he mean?” Jana asks, looking at Pretzel in alarm.

“He hasn’t told you, has he? Pretzel wrote the book on the biology of First Contact. He’s the one that pointed out that, regardless of where it arises in the universe, life cannot employ highly volatile chemical reactions—they’re simply too destructive. No, life needs subtle pathways, slight imbalances, just enough to provide energy, not enough to be damaging or corrosive. Life has to be contained. Tell them, Pretzel. Tell them your theory.”

Pretzel is sullen. His lips clench tight as his eyes narrow.

Sergei explains. “Life on Earth converges on common designs. Dolphins and sharks are unrelated, but they share dorsal fins. Eyes evolved independently over forty times. The wings of birds, bats and insects are astonishingly different and yet they share the same characteristics of flight.

“What was your conclusion again?” Sergei asks, pretending he’s forgotten. He turns his head, lowering his gaze, trying to get Pretzel to respond, but the aging Indian scientist is quiet. “That we should expect the same kind of convergence at a celestial level, that life will exploit largely the same chemical pathways. They may not look like us, but at a cellular level, the chances are there will be striking similarities.”

In almost a whisper, Pretzel says, “But we don’t know that.”

“You disappoint me, father. It was your idea, but you didn’t like the conclusion, and yet it was inevitable—that we would need to protect ourselves from First Contact. Invasive species always win. You said so yourself. The more isolated a species is, the more vulnerable it is to harm, and what could be more isolated than a planet floating in space?”

Pretzel shakes his head. “Look at what you’ve done. You’ve declared war on an alien species.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit and you know it.” Sergei grows in anger as he bellows, “Our world. Our rules. They came to us—not us to them. We have a responsibility to protect life on this planet. This is our biosphere. They have no rights here. None. We meet on our terms, and those terms are a sterile patch of dirt.”

“You fool,” Pretzel counters, seemingly forgetting the guy standing next to Sergei has a machine-gun slung over his shoulder and a pistol drawn. Pretzel points at Sergei’s face, hammering home his reasoning with his finger, on the verge of punching Sergei. “You think you can control this? You’re an idiot. You sterilize the ground and in blows the wind, bringing trillions of microbes with it.”

“What about that shit?” Sergei counters, pointing at the green gunk glowing on the surface of the water. “How does that fit into your little playbook, Pretzel? What do your pathetic little probes tell you about that junk? Still think I’m wrong? Well, do you?”

“You killed Ange,” Pretzel says, ignoring him, gesturing to the rocks piled on the beach. “You killed her, Sergei. You did. You might as well have pulled the goddamn trigger.”

Sergei is unmoved, which upsets Pretzel. “You don’t care, do you?”

The soldier beside Sergei is nervous at the hostility in the argument. He holsters his sidearm, swinging the AK-47 down from his shoulder. Sergei, though, seems oblivious to the escalating tension.

“There were always going to be casualties. When it became clear the Americans wouldn’t act to preserve our world, we stepped in. We had to.”

“And what about us? What happens to us?”

“We will escort you down the mountain.”

“You asshole.” Pretzel looks as though he’s about to tear Sergei’s head off. His fists clench, while his knuckles go white. “Let me guess, you don’t want anyone to figure it out. Bullet holes in the back of the skull would raise too many questions, right? What’s the plan, Sergei? Walk us off a cliff? Claim it was an accident? Or just leave us to rot, starving to death in some cell?”

He goes to grab Sergei when the barrel of an AK-47 pokes him in the chest, reminding him of the power imbalance.

“Now, Pretzel,” Sergei says, smiling with delight.

“Don’t patronize me. At least be man enough to be honest.”

Sergei doesn’t reply, but to my horror, he nods ever so slightly while struggling not to grin.

“No, you can’t do that,” Jana calls out.

“And what about Ezekiel?” Brother Mordecai blurts out, speaking over the top of Jana.

“Ezekiel?” Sergei looks perplexed.

“He means, the aliens,” Pretzel says.

Brother Mordecai marches forward across the loose pebbles on the beach, which makes him the focus of the Russian soldier beside Sergei. The soldier levels his rifle at him. The barrel threatens to erupt in anger at the slightest twitch of his trigger finger. Sergei raises his hand, signaling not to fire.

Mordecai mumbles, “The wheels within wheels, the four-headed creature, the fire going forth like lightning.”

Mordecai’s rude, pushing Pretzel roughly to one side as though he were rushing through a crowd to address Sergei. “We have waited for two and a half thousand years. You don’t understand. The prophecy will be fulfilled. It must.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Sergei asks.

Pretzel starts to speak, but Mordecai cuts him off, stepping forward and quoting what I guess is from the Bible. “When all men are blind, there is but one who can see.”

I feel a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back. It’s Petty Officer Garcia. He seems to anticipate what’s coming.

“Get behind me, kid,” he says, reaching for the small of his back.

Mordecai pulls his hand from his jacket pocket, tossing something in the air. I’m confused, it looks like a can of soup but without a label. For a second, it seems to hang before him, almost floating at chest height.

“Grenaaaade!” is yelled by one of the Russians at the same time the world turns white. For a fraction of a second, the outline of the missionary glows like the surface of the sun. Light streams past Mordecai’s arms and legs, surrounding him in a halo. It’s as though he’s been transformed into an angel. Pretzel is thrown backwards by the explosion, but Mordecai never moves. His clothing billows with the blast. Bullets tear through his body as the Russians open fire, but he seems to be consumed by the light.

The compression wave resounding out from the grenade causes me to stagger.

Following the deafening boom, my ears are left ringing, but I can still hear the rapport of gun fire. I can barely see anything beyond the imprint of light on my retina. It feels as though someone just hit my head with a baseball bat, and I shuffle, struggling to maintain my footing. Garcia, though, is shooting at the Russians. He may be blind, but he knows exactly where they’re standing.

Apart from the soldiers, everyone cringes, cowering from the blast even though it’s already passed. Petty Officer Garcia squeezes off round after round with astonishing precision. I’ve seen handguns fired before. My dad had me shoot one so I understood how it would kick. He showed me where he kept it in his bedroom, in a pouch taped beneath the bed. He said he never thought either of us would need it, but if we did, it was there—insurance. Now, though, watching Garcia, it’s as though there’s no kick whatsoever. His arm seems to absorb the recoil as though the gun were an extension of his body. Empty shell casings fly from the breech as he squeezes off shots with surprising accuracy. He pivots, firing again and again.

Several Russian soldiers fall. Pretzel grabs him, pulling him away, pushing us on and we run through the decimated forest toward the caves, clambering over logs and scrambling beneath fallen trees. Garcia continues firing, although now he’s firing for effect, simply to deter our pursuers.

I’ve never run so hard in my life, even when the forest was decimated yesterday. My heart and lungs feel as though they’re on fire. Once Jana and I are well clear of the beach, we turn and look back. Occasionally, I get a glimpse of Pretzel and Garcia, following along behind us, but there’s no sign of Brother Mordecai.

Jana

“We need to get to the caves,” Jana says, dragging me on. I want to wait for the others. I keep looking back, hoping to see Brother Mordecai, but I know he’s dead. He gave his life to buy us a chance.

Sporadic gunfire erupts, echoing off the cliff face. Garcia fires behind him but doesn’t have any hope of hitting anyone. He’s simply trying to slow the Russians.

Closer to the cliff, the trees have fared better. They’re scorched, but most of them are still standing, making it easy to wind our way between them. Within a hundred yards, we’re hidden by their thick trunks.

“This way,” Jana says, tugging on my arm. I’m slowing her down, but I have to. I can’t abandon Pretzel and Garcia. “Josh, we have to get out of here.”

“And go where?”

“There’s another track. It’s steep, but it leads up to the plateau.”

“We have to help them,” I say. To my surprise, it’s only now Jana realizes we’ve become separated from the others. She looks around, confused not to see Pretzel and Garcia beside us. I let go of her hand, darting back through the undergrowth, catching sight of the two men moving through the trees. To my surprise, it’s Garcia that’s helping Pretzel. The seemingly indestructible Indian scientist has been hit in the leg. A bullet has ripped through his upper thigh and he grimaces with each step as blood runs down his trouser leg. Petty Officer Garcia has Pretzel’s arm slung over his shoulder. Together, they’re rushing through the saplings and bushes, with Pretzel providing direction.

“Josh,” Pretzel says as I run up to them. Beyond simply greeting me, he’s letting Garcia know I’ve arrived. “Keep going. Don’t wait for us.”

I ignore him, of course, grabbing his other arm and looping it over my shoulder. Between Garcia and me, we lift Pretzel off the ground, allowing us to run. I take over the role of steering wheel, pulling and pushing as we weave through what’s left of the forest. Garcia responds like a horse beneath a set of reigns, trusting my judgment. Jana sees us coming and continues on, leading us around the rocks. I swear, if I didn’t know better, I’d think Garcia was cheating, peeking from beneath his bandages. His boots never falter.

Jana comes to a halt.

“This is it.”

I don’t see anything. The cliff before us is imposing. Dark, jagged rocks bar our way, reaching up to a vertical section with a cliff face as smooth as a concrete wall.

“I—I need to sit,” Pretzel says.

I go to rest him on a rock at the base of the cliff when Garcia says, “Not there.” How does he know? “Not anywhere he could leave a bloodstain.” Without looking around, he says, “On the ground. Preferably on grass, something we can mess up or cover. We can’t leave any sign, any indication we came this way.”

I lower Pretzel to the mud. He grimaces, keeping his right leg straight, asking, “How bad?” I’m not sure who he’s expecting to reply. Garcia can’t see anything, and neither Jana nor I have any idea about gunshot wounds. He can see the injury for himself. He probably knows better than us, but shock has a funny way of playing on the mind.

I pull off my shirt and try to rip the long sleeves off, wanting to turn them into bandages, but apparently that only works in movies. I try again and a couple of the stitches give, but I’m a long way from tearing it apart.

“Hold still,” Jana says. Unlike western dresses, Jana’s got deep pockets sewn into the sides of her clothing. She rummages around and pulls out a pocket knife. Jana saws at the seam of my partially torn shirt with a rusted blade, slowly cutting the threads.

Garcia crouches beside Pretzel, holding onto his shoulder with one hand and working his way down Pretzel’s body with the other, allowing his fingers to skim over the scientist’s legs. He reaches the wound and Pretzel stiffens.

“Aw, you got scratched,” Garcia says.

“Scratched?” Pretzel says, somewhat indignant.

“Clean entry and exit. Outer thigh. Muscular damage, but no broken bones, no ruptured arteries. You’re our lucky charm.”

He laughs. Pretzel’s not laughing. I don’t think he likes Garcia making light of his injury. Jana and I shred the rest of the shirt, tearing it into strips.

“We’ve got bandages,” I say.

As usual, Garcia is characteristically blunt. “Save ‘em.”

I’m confused. Jana shrugs.

Garcia explains. “They’ll only ever slip down. The thigh tapers, so it’s notoriously difficult to wrap without a compression bandage.” He pauses, holding his open palm out. “Knife.”

How did he know Jana had a knife? For a man without sight, his level of perception is astonishing. Jana places the knife in his hand with the blade facing outward.

“Now, this is gonna hurt.”

“What?” Pretzel says, his eyes going wide in alarm.

“Just kidding.” Garcia laughs, pinching Pretzel’s trousers just below the knee. He slips the knife through the thick material with ease. I know how blunt that knife is, but Garcia works with it as though it were a razor blade.

Pretzel shifts on the ground, moving slightly backwards.

“What’s the matter?” Garcia asks. “Don’t trust a blind guy with a knife?” He’s rough, sawing at the seam running down the side of the trousers. “No sudden movements, okay?”

After working the knife all the way around Pretzel’s lower leg, he flips it in the air, catching it by the blade, with the hilt facing Jana. She takes it from him, looking at me somewhat startled. My turn to shrug.

Garcia starts rolling the torn trouser leg up, working it over Pretzel’s thigh. As he moves higher, the material becomes tighter. By the time it reaches the wound, it’s quite thick, applying pressure on his leg. He takes Pretzel’s hand, placing it on the rolled-up fabric. “Hold this… Hey, Jana, are you wearing a bra?”

“I—ah…”

“I need wire. Are you wearing an underwire bra?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have it?”

Jana hesitates, looking at me, wanting me to say something either way—in support or protest. She’s looking for some direction, but I’m still trying to process the request.

“You can have it back—the bra. It’ll still work. Just won’t be as rigid.”

“Okay.” She looks at me and then turns away, unfastening the clasp by grabbing at the strap through her dress material. As her dress is traditional, it’s breezy, with large, baggy sleeves, so she can slip the bra over her shoulders and out through the opening with ease.

Garcia says, “Make a small incision at one end of the cup and feed the wire out. That should leave the bra usable. I’ll need the wire and the knife.”

“Okay.” Jana hands the bra to me and picks at one edge with her knife, working the wire out before swapping, handing both the wire and the knife to me as she takes the torn bra from my hands. I’m more than a little bewildered by the whole process.

“Here,” I say, crouching and placing the wire in Garcia’s hands. With astonishing contortion, Jana puts her bra back on, but without taking her dress off. I try not to stare, but I’m fascinated by her motion. Given she lives in a single hut with her parents and brothers, she’s probably quite used to this.

Garcia makes several small incisions in Pretzel’s trousers, cutting through the fabric just above the wound. He squeezes the plastic-coated wire around the makeshift bandage, holding it in place directly on the bloody mess. He winds the wire back and forth, twisting the ends together.

“There—that’ll keep the bleeding to a minimum.”

“What? What was all the talk about a barbaric bomb?” I ask, still trying to process all that’s happened in the past half hour.

“Thermobaric,” Garcia replies. “It’s a grass-cutter, air-fuel. Not a nuke.”

With a rush of euphoria that even I recognize is misplaced, I say, “So you’re not going to die?”

Garcia laughs. “Everybody dies, kid. Whether it’s the Russians, the aliens or old age, none of us are getting off this planet alive.”

“We should keep moving,” Pretzel says, getting to his feet.

“Josh,” Garcia says, keeping one hand on Pretzel, using him as a guide. “Make sure there’s no sign of blood.”

“On it.” I ruffle the grass, grabbing a handful of dirt and sprinkling it over the patches of blood. I drag some branches and leaves over the area, scattering them liberally.

“Up here,” Jana says, climbing the rock face. Doesn’t look like a track to me. Jana presses herself hard against the rock, with her arms above her head, searching for handholds as her boots stab at narrow footholds. Her dress blows in the breeze.

“I can’t climb that,” Pretzel says.

“There’s a ledge,” Jana replies, pointing, “just up there, beneath those bushes. From there, we can reach the plateau.”

I help Pretzel onto the rocks, getting him to place his feet where Jana did. As they’re roughly the same height, I’m sure he can make it. Jana leans down from the ledge, stretching out a hand to help pull him up. Blood gets smeared on the rocks as Pretzel hauls himself over the rocks. Once he reaches the ledge, I grab a handful of dirt, rubbing it on the bloodstains, trying to lessen them, but my efforts aren’t convincing.

“You’re next,” I say, taking Garcia by the arm and leading him to the cliff. I talk him through where to place his hands and feet, and then follow him up the rock face. Although the ledge is low, barely twenty feet off the ground, we can see through the broken canopy for several hundred yards. Being set below the cliff, this section of the jungle survived most of the blast. The trees are scorched, but still standing. Quietly, Pretzel points out movement in the distance. The Russians are following one of the other trails, one that circles around back to the rock pool.

Jana leads us up the cliff face. Far from being a track, we’re following the jagged edge of the rocks, often climbing in steep crevasses, but they’re set on an angle. They have small trees and bushes growing out of them, giving us both handholds and cover from below. If the soldiers down there have seen us, it’s not apparent as they don’t shoot at us. As Garcia’s blind and Pretzel’s injured, our ascent is slow. Sweat drips off us as the sun rises high overhead. It’s noon by the time we reach the plateau.

I thought I was ready for the devastation given what we’d seen by the rock pool, but the jungle has been leveled. To me, it looks like the battlefields of World War One—churned earth, splintered trees, smoke still drifting from the ruins. A bluish white haze hangs in the air. Fires rage in the distance. We sit huddled in the root ball of an overturned tree, using it as shade from the sun and for cover from anyone on the prowl. It’s a crater, a muddy shell hole from the battle of the Somme.

Jana is visibly distressed. No one could have survived in the village.

I put my arm around her, pulling her in tight, trying to provide some reassurance, but of what? We’re caught in the middle of a war. The great superpowers of our age are fighting over who gets to talk to the first visitors from another world, only I’m not convinced those guys are going to want to talk to anyone down here. After seeing the fighter plane destroyed and the green goo in the water, I think we’re running in the wrong direction.

Garcia says, “What’s the plan, boss?”

Jana and I assume he’s talking to Pretzel, but the elderly Indian scientist is pale. It took everything he had to climb the cliff. For now, he’s not going anywhere.

“What can you see, Josh?”

Although I appreciate what Petty Officer Garcia is trying to do, I don’t agree. He wants us to stay on the move, to keep looking for new direction. If we’re in motion, we’re doing something. Anything seems to be the plan, but I don’t think that’s wise. We’re running on empty.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” he asks.

I shake my head, not that Garcia would know it, hoping my silence speaks for me.

We sit there in the dirt, waiting for the shadows to grow long. The heat of the day saps not only our strength but our will. Sweat betrays our bodies, drawing water from us, leaving us dehydrated. I know the signs. Lethargy. Aching joints. Headache. What I’d give for a glass of water.

“Is anyone going to talk about what just happened?” Garcia asks, not content to let us rest. I’m not sure which part of ‘what just happened?’ he’s referring to. The Russian fighter that disintegrated in midair? Russian soldiers in the Congo? Mordecai dying so we could escape? The realization that we—humans—bombed the jungle beneath a descending alien spacecraft, potentially triggering an interstellar war?

Pretzel decides he knows. “I’m not a religious man... but I understand what Mordecai did and why—No greater love hath any man than that he lay down his life for his friends.”

I’m pretty sure that’s from the New Testament, which is appropriate for Brother Mordecai as he loved the words of Christ. I wonder if that’s what he was thinking in those last few seconds when he diverted the soldiers’ attention, confusing them with his babble about Ezekiel. He wanted them to think he was mad, but I don’t think he was ever any more lucid and sane than he was in that moment.

Jana nods and the conversation comes to an end.

As the sun begins its slow descent toward the horizon, a cool wind blows, teasing us with the prospect of relief. Clouds billow in the distance, promising rain but tormenting us. We watch the clouds, longing for their approach, but they pass to the south, drifting behind the mountains.

Looking out over the plateau, I can see for miles. To the west, the sky is clear. Contrails wind their way through the azure blue, following tortured paths that twist and turn before being blown away. I don’t think I’ve ever seen contrails over Africa before. We used to get them all the time in Boston, especially in winter, and I wonder how high those fighter jets are. I can’t see them, just the faint lines they’ve left in the sky—graffiti written in anger.

From our vantage point on the edge of the cliff, we can see to the north, out beyond the jungle. Dark smoke rises from the farmlands surrounding Kisangani, dotted on the horizon like ink blots. A war is being fought out there. To us, it unfolds in silence. I feel numb. Russian, Chinese, American, Tanzanian or Congolese? Makes no difference who’s flying those planes or shooting those tanks. People are dying. For what? I should probably say something to Garcia as he’d be interested in this but can’t see it, but what could I say that would make any difference? Oh, look, more otherwise intelligent people are killing each other over there. Do the aliens think we’re dumb? Or are they as petty and self-centered as we are? God, I hope not.

Out of nowhere, Jana says, “I am not a rock.”

Pretzel’s eyes were closed. He wasn’t asleep, though, as her words immediately grab his attention. He sits up. Dirt crumbles around him, falling from the sides of the empty root ball.

“I’m not,” Jana says, reiterating her point, fighting back tears.

I know precisely what she means. The destruction of the village, the loss of her parents, seeing the death of Dr. O’Brien and then Brother Mordecai. It’s too much. It has left her reeling with a sense of loss.

Pretzel starts to speak. He’s about to explain something he thinks is important, but I cut him off, as I don’t think he understands what she means.

“It’s a game.”

Doesn’t sound like one, I know, but it is. Jana’s bottom lip quivers as I explain.

“We play this in the village all the time. I am not a rock, so what am I? Do you have wings? Do you have claws? Fur? Do you swing from trees? Stuff like that. You’re supposed to guess what I am within five tries.”

Pretzel nods. He gets it. Jana’s expressing herself the only way she can. For her, that silly little game has become all too real. Garcia leans his head back on one of the upturned roots. If he could, he’d be staring at the clear blue sky, and I imagine that’s what he’s thinking, feeling the sun on his face and the wind in his hair.

“We’re all just rocks, aren’t we?” Jana asks, picking up a muddy stone and turning it in her hand, cleaning off the dirt.

Pretzel’s lips tighten. “Brother Mordecai would say, dust. I’d say, stardust, but yes, we’re all just rocks.”

I don’t think that’s quite what Jana wanted to hear. Sometimes lies provide more solace than truth.

“What’s the point of all this?” Jana has tears in her eyes, welling up in the corners and threatening to roll down her cheeks. Her voice rises in alarm as she speaks. She’s hurt. “If this is all there is, why go on?”

Pretzel lowers his head but doesn’t reply. Garcia’s quiet. Given his gung-ho attitude, I guess he normally ignores a little introspection, as my dad would call it. Too easy to chase bad guys and stuff. Abseiling from helicopters is a great distraction.

“What does it all mean?” I ask.

For my father, there’s meaning in each breath. He finds purpose in serving the Lord. He gives unthinkingly, but perhaps that’s his distraction.

Is it wrong to doubt? To have questions? Pretzel’s got his test tubes and telescopes. Garcia has his guns and muscles. Dad’s got the Scriptures. Jana and I are still trying to find our way in this crazy world and now it looks like our lives will be over before they’ve begun. Russians? Aliens? Does it really matter?

I’m not sure if I’m more afraid of dying or death itself. One’s painful, the others permanent. As for finding meaning in life, all I know is holding onto something gives me purpose. If I lost Jana, I’d fall apart. Funny, but I guess I’m more afraid of her dying than myself.

Pretzel’s face contorts, betraying the turbulent mix of thoughts and emotions rushing through his mind. His eyes narrow. His cheeks rise a little. His lips are clenched in anguish, but they shift slightly to one side as he ponders his next few words. I don’t think he’s got any answers, not really. Jana’s right. We’re rocks.

“We want miracles,” Pretzel says in barely a whisper. “We look for meaning in life, but we’re asking the wrong questions. There’s nothing out there that will give meaning to our lives. On the contrary, it’s our lives that give meaning to the universe.

“Don’t go looking for miracles. You are the miracle. Every day, your body creates roughly three hundred billion new blood cells. That’s more than all the stars in the galaxy. Imagine that. All of them. As big and as vast as they are, you’re more amazing. You.”

His eyes glance briefly at the sun and then back to us. He points. “For billions of years that’s kinda where we were. The atoms in our bodies were superheated and scattered throughout a plasma that hit temperatures of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of millions of degrees in the heart of some now long dead star. Seething and boiling and glowing with raw, unbridled energy.” He gestures with his hands, opening them out before us as though he were offering a present. “And here you are.”

Pretzel looks around at the decimated forest. Splintered trees dot the landscape. The smell of smoke seeps through the broken branches. We’re nestled in a hollow. Thick, gnarly upturned roots and clods of dirt surround us.

“Life itself is a miracle.”

In the midst of the devastation, with blood seeping from Pretzel’s leg and the hideous burns on Garcia’s arms and neck, those few words seem incongruous—perhaps spoken in denial. But for Pretzel, the heartache and helplessness we feel is temporary—fading. He holds his hand out, turning it slowly, looking at his wrinkled, brown skin, fleeting grey hairs, his own chipped fingernails, and then speaks softly of a deeper truth.

“You, me, Josh, Garcia—our lives are more than eighty years and a hole in the ground. We think of our lives as being just this moment, but that’s not true. Your life is more than just here and now.”

He pauses before asking, “How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen? I was sixteen once. Hard to believe, huh? We think we’re sixteen or, in my case, seventy six, but we’re not. You and I are part of an unbroken chain of life reaching back at least 3.8 billion years!”

Jana’s eyes go wide.

“Yeah, it makes me feel much older too,” he says.

Pretzel reaches out to her, offering her his empty hand, not that there’s anything he can give her. Not physically.

“You. Your parents. Your grandparents. You’re part of something bigger, something far grander than any one family or even any one species. The DNA that formed your body first sprung to life billions of years ago while the planet was still cooling. Oh, atoms have swapped in and out, DNA sequences have evolved, but the essence of the life you carry was born in that moment and is shared by every living thing on this planet. You—are—a—miracle.”

Gently, he takes the rock from her fingers, examining it closely, looking at the patches of dirt still clinging to its surface, staining the fractured granite a ruddy brown.

“You’re not a rock.”

Pretzel laughs softly to himself, not saying anything more.

“What’s so funny?” Jana sniffs, wiping away tears. To my surprise, she’s on the verge of laughing as well, but not because she found anything humorous in his words, perhaps more so as part of some social pact that says the people we admire are the funniest of all. I too am intrigued. Pretzel rubs some of the grit off the stone, rolling it beneath his fingers.

I think I know what he’s thinking, so I say, “We’re the dirt, right? Not the rock. That’s what you were going to say.”

“Something like that. You know, there are more microbes in this ditch than there are humans on Earth. Life really is far more amazing than we give it credit for.”

“That’s why they came,” Jana says, making the connection. Pretzel nods.

Them.

I haven’t thought about them in hours. I’m so exhausted mentally, I haven’t bothered looking for the space elevator. I’m not even sure which way I’m facing. I guess I’m looking east as the battle is to my left. I could figure it out for sure by checking the position of the sun, but why bother? Pretzel, though, sees something other than death and ruin around us.

“Think about something beautiful. Like a sunset. We look at a planet like Saturn and see beauty. For hundreds of millions of years those magnificent rings have been there, stretching out around a gas giant that’s seven hundred and fifty times larger than Earth, but it’s only now they’re beautiful, only now when we look at them through a telescope or through the eyes of a robotic probe. Don’t you see, without us, they’re meaningless. We make them beautiful.

“Flowers are beautiful, but not to ants or bees, only to us.

“Sunsets are beautiful, but not to cats or dogs, only us.

“Corals are beautiful, but not to sharks and dolphins, only to us.”

Jana squeezes my hand as Pretzel continues.

“I can’t lie to you. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us, but right now, we’re alive and that’s a privilege beyond compare.”

Jana doesn’t hesitate to clarify her thinking. “I guess, I’m afraid.”

The matter of fact way in which she speaks, takes me by surprise. There’s no reluctance, no emotion. She could be describing the color of the sky as she doesn’t sound fearful.

Pretzel looks at his boots. “I know. Me too.”

From behind blood-soaked bandages, Garcia says, “Yeah, me too.” From him, it’s a startling confession—sobering. I feel as though I should say something, but I don’t. This isn’t about me. This is her heart laid bare. I respect that so I simply nod in agreement.

Pretzel sighs. For a moment, he seems genuinely lost for words. After a few seconds, he says, “My parents are dead.” He raises his hands as if in surprise, shrugging his shoulders as though that point is outlandish, something too incredulous for words. “I know. I mean, look at me. You’d never guess it, right?”

Jana laughs. Her parents were just killed and yet hearing a septuagenarian talk about his parents dying seems laughable. No one ever thinks about elderly people having parents, but everyone does—or did. Seems everyone’s lost someone. The difference is mere timing.

“When I visit the graves of my parents, do you know what I see? Words scratched in stone. Clumps of dirt. Tall grass. Is that all they are? Is life just a short reprieve from death? We look on those that have died as though they’re unlucky, thinking we’re the lucky ones, we’ve cheated death. But we haven’t cheated anything. Death is no fool. We differ only in time. In a hundred years—a thousand—a million—it makes no difference—we’ll all be dead.

“So what is this death we fear? It’s our natural state. We may not like it, but it’s true.

“Don’t feel sorry for the dead. Pity those that think they’ll never die, because they’re the real fools. You see, they live for everything other than life itself. But you. You know the secret. You understand the meaning you bring to this world.”

He holds the stone between his thumb and forefinger, pinching it lightly between two points and flicking it slowly with his other hand so it turns around. Somewhat lost in thought, he adds, “You’re alive on this tiny rock spinning in the depths of space, and that makes you special, incredibly unique.”

Pretzel drops the stone and reaches out, taking our hands in his. With eyes as dark as coal, he smiles. Wisps of grey hair and wrinkled skin around his face betray his age. Frail fingers squeeze our hands. Mere words inspire strength within us.

“Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.”

Death

There are voices. At first, that causes my heart to race, thinking we’re being rescued, but then I peer over the scattered branches, looking out at the crushed remains of the jungle and catch sight of Russian soldiers searching through the fallen trees. Their camouflage uniforms differ from the Americans, being more granular. In the jungle, they’d be effective, but not up here on the scorched plateau.

“Там! Я вижу их там.”

They’ve seen us. Thick black boots bound across the broken trunks, leaping from fallen tree to tree. A burst of machine-gun fire rattles my bones. I know the bullets never actually hit me, but the sheer violence seems to pass clear through me as though I was paper thin.

“Покажи мне свои руки! Оставайтесь на месте!”

No translation is needed. The bullets whizzing by overhead and the shouting of the soldiers makes their intent clear—Do anything stupid and you’re dead.

We’re dead anyway. Why the pretense? I get the feeling Sergei isn’t finished with Pretzel. The bitterness between them is probably all that’s keeping us alive.

I raise my hands over the edge of the ditch, moving slowly, making sure they’re open wide in surrender. Garcia remains where he is. There’s no bravado from a blind man. Not this time. He places his hands on his head, knitting his fingers together. Jana stands beside me, mimicking my motion with her arms held wide and high, trying to allay their nervous fingers already squeezing thin metal triggers. Pretzel attempts to get to his feet, but his muscles are sore and stiff, and he struggles, grabbing at the branches behind him, working his way up.

Four soldiers approach, but not from the same direction. They converge from different angles. Two of them are out in front of us, easily twenty feet apart. The other two are quite wide, coming in from the periphery on our right and left. We have our backs to the cliff. There’s nowhere to run to this time.

Three of the soldiers hang back, covering us with their weapons while the leader approaches wearily. One of them is holding a large machine gun with a thick magazine slung beneath it. Rather than the distinct curved of the AK-47 magazines I’m so used to seeing here in Africa, this magazine is box-shaped and wide, and probably holds hundreds of rounds.

“Из, из!”

No prizes for guessing that means either up or out. Either way, the gesture with the barrel of the gun makes it clear. Jana climbs out first, simply because she’s on the higher side of the empty root ball and can clamber over the branches.

“Пушка? Gun?”

Garcia is still in the dirt bowl, but he’s on his feet. He turns slowly, keeping his hands on his head, allowing the Russian to see the Glock pistol tucked into the small of his back.

“You. Throw gun.”

He’s talking to me. Gingerly, I pull the gun from Garcia’s belt, pinching the pistol grip between my thumb and forefinger rather than grabbing it, making sure the soldier can see my every move, keeping my fingers well clear of the trigger. I hold the gun at arm’s length, offering it to the soldier, but he has no intention of taking it from me. With the barrel of his AK-47, he signals.

“There.”

I place the pistol on one of the upturned roots. Smoke drifts across the jungle floor, sitting low to the ground like fog. The silence is ominous. It’s as though a storm is about to break. There’s something out there, something dark, something moving through the haze behind the Russians, but it ain’t human. It’s too big. The soldiers, though, are facing us, so they don’t catch the faint motion.

“Out.”

Pretzel and Garcia clamber out of the ditch from the other end, well away from the handgun. I join them, climbing up next to Jana, who has her hands high in the air.

Another soldier closes in, shouldering his AK-47, and grabs her hands, twisting them down behind her back. He slips a plastic zip-tie over her wrists, locking her arms together as effectively as with handcuffs.

In the same way, my hands are zip-tied behind my back, with my wrists pulled tight together. Almost instantly, I get a prickly feeling in my fingers as the blood supply is cut off.

“Too tight,” I yell, but if the Russian soldier understands me, he doesn’t care. He pushes me roughly to one side and ties up Pretzel, but Pretzel doesn’t complain. He’s distracted. He too sees it, just the flicker of a shadow moving through the smoke, hiding in the haze. Branches crack, breaking under the weight of the dark beast as it circles out wide, but the soldiers are focused solely on us.

One of the soldiers grabs Jana around the waist, hoisting her into the air. She screams as she’s dragged toward the edge of the cliff.

I react. “Leave her alone.”

Those words have barely left my lips when the wooden butt of a rifle strikes the side of my head, slamming it forward with more force than I’ve ever known. At first, I think I’ve been shot as the pain is so acute, but there was no deafening blast. My ear has been ripped open. Blood runs down my neck. I stagger, barely able to stand on the broken branches beneath my boots, on the verge of toppling forward, unable to halt my fall with my arms.

“Nooooooo,” Jana shouts, screaming at the top of her lungs. Her legs swing wildly as the soldier drags her toward the drop. Although her arms are pinned, she wrestles, shifting her weight, desperate to break free, but the soldier is far too big and strong.

From out of the mist behind them comes a chilling reply.

“Nooooooo,” resounds over the decimated trees, only this is no human voice. It’s far too deep and raw, rough and ill-defined, echoing around us. Even the Russians fall silent. Their constant jabber comes to a halt. The guttural cry demands obedience and the soldier drops Jana, slipping the AK-47 from his shoulder. He pulls back on the bolt, loading a round. I’m not sure what I heard. I’m not even sure it was a word, it was more mimicry than anything coherent. Smoke curls through the air, rising from smoldering trees, reducing our visibility.

Through the haze comes the sound of thunder. A dark shape looms on the edge of our vision, hidden by the smoke. The soldiers level their weapons at the creature charging in toward us. Branches snap and break, flying beneath the monster as it pounds at the jungle floor, and yet the soldiers hold their fire. They close ranks. It’s as though they’re spellbound, confused, bewildered, each waiting for the other to signal the counterattack. They’re afraid. I can almost smell it on them. They’re as unsure as any of us about what lies out there in the mist.

Rocks and branches are hurled through the air, pelting us like hail.

“ПОЖАР!” is yelled in a burst of anger.

In that instant, four machine-guns open up on full automatic, sending a hail of bullets into the smoky haze.

Over the insanity of the staccato burst, I hear Jana yelling, “Tiny, no!”

Jana’s on her knees, barely a foot from the edge of the cliff, with her hands strapped behind her back.

Bullets pepper the large male Silverback, but he will not be stopped, hurling thick branches like baseball bats swung carelessly aside, only these are on target, twirling as they rain down on the soldiers. Each one is the size and length of a beam of construction timber and is thrown with vehemence. The soldiers duck and weave, but one of the burning branches collects the large Russian with the big machine-gun and he’s knocked onto his back. He fires blindly into the air and then rakes the ground with bullets as his machine-gun topples to the ash and dirt.

I can’t stand by and do nothing. Without thinking, I charge, yelling, screaming. Like Tiny, I’m consumed with rage. It’s foolish, stupid, crazy. My arms are pinned behind my back, but in that moment, I understand the anger of the gorilla. How dare these brute beasts intrude upon our domain, destroying the jungle and all that we love.

One of the Russians turns to face me with his AK-47 out in front of him. There’s fear in his eyes. Bullets fly past me, catching my clothing, tearing at my skin, ripping through my flesh. Blood sprays out behind me, but I am unstoppable. I collide with him. The top of my head catches his chin, sending his head lashing backwards and he’s knocked to the edge of the cliff. He loses his grip on the rifle and scrambles to reach it, but I’m quicker, bringing my boot down on his hand, crushing his fingers against the rock.

Beside me, Tiny hurls a branch like a club, knocking over soldiers like toys—they’re action figures being smashed in a kid’s sand box. He’s incensed, baring his teeth and bellowing, commanding respect. One of the soldiers has a hand gun out and is on the ground, scrambling backwards, trying to get away from the silverback, firing repeatedly into his chest. Tiny grabs the gun, crushing the soldier’s fingers against the pistol grip, and with barely any effort, swats him, hurling him over the cliff and sending him flying easily twenty feet in the air. He screams, plummeting to his death.

The Russian in front of me scrambles to his feet, pulling out a knife. Blood drips from his lip. He waves the knife, keeping me at bay, unable to process that I’m no threat with my arms locked behind my back. I advance, stamping at the ground, and he retreats in line with Jana. She kicks at his knee and he buckles, desperately trying to keep his balance on the edge of the cliff. Having fallen forward on his knees, his chest is at waist height, allowing me to reach out with my right leg. I plant my boot firmly on his shoulder and shove. He tumbles backwards, yelling as he plunges down the cliff face, bouncing off the rocks.

As I turn, I catch sight of Tiny grabbing one of the soldiers by his shoulders, pulling his arms out wide. To my astonishment, Tiny tears them off, ripping the man’s sleeves apart and tearing the soldier’s arms away from his body. The gorilla flexes with his massive chest muscles, roaring in anger as he flings two severed limbs out into the smoking ruins. Dismembered arms catch in the smoldering branches, tumbling to the ash covering the jungle floor.

The soldier stands there in shock as blood pumps from his shoulders, squirting onto the trunk of a burnt tree, draining the life from him in a matter of seconds. The Russian sinks to his knees as deep red blood soaks his uniform. His eyes. I will never forget the look in his eyes. So full of disbelief. So wide. So white. So full of terror.

The last soldier crawls through the fallen trees, trying to escape, but Tiny isn’t done with the Russians. He’s badly hurt and clutching his chest, but he refuses to relent. Blood seeps from dozens of bullet wounds, but Tiny will have his revenge on those that destroyed his home. He cradles one arm, scrambling forward with the other, leaping over fallen trees, breaking branches and leaving bloodstains on the bark.

Tiny grabs the soldier by the back of his shirt, pulling him up from between the branches. He opens his gaping jaws wide, revealing massive canine teeth. His jaws close over the man’s skull. The Russian screams in terror, trying to push away from the gorilla, but in a single, swift motion, the fully-grown Silverback cracks the man’s head open like an overripe melon, crushing the soldier’s skull in his mouth. The Russian’s body convulses, spasming as deep red blood sprays out over the white ash lining the rocks.

Blood drips from the gorilla’s mouth, soaking his fur and covering his chest. With a sense of disgust, Tiny tosses the lifeless body to one side and sulks off, disappearing into the mist. I’m shocked. The soldier’s body rolls across the rocks, flopping like a rag doll. Legs and arms flay wide without any control. Witnessing such sheer violence leaves my heart racing, almost bursting through my chest.

Pretzel stands beside me agape, with his mouth wide and his jaw slack, stunned by the speed and ferocity of the gorilla. The soldiers were well trained and fully armed, and yet they never stood a chance—not that they would have given us one—but such brutal deaths are hard to process. Through the haze, we see the gorilla stagger, leaning momentarily on the severed trunk of a tree before limping on.

“Tiny,” Jana whispers, but the massive gorilla never looks back, disappearing into the haze.

Pretzel hobbles over to the other Russian bleeding out on the edge of the cliff and pulls a knife from a pouch on his waist. For a moment, I think he’s going to plunge it into his heart, but he leaves the soldier staring up at the sky as his life slowly fades. Two severed arms lie discarded like trash, tangled in nearby branches.

“You okay? Everybody okay?” Garcia asks as the silence settles around us. He heard, but never saw what happened, which must have been terrifying.

“We’re okay. We’re all good,” I say as Pretzel cuts the plastic tie behind Jana’s back. He cuts mine and a rush of blood reaches my fingers, bringing with it a sense of relief. It’s the look on Jana’s face though that alarms me. I follow her gaze and see a bloody mush of pulp and cloth where my shoulder should be. I’m surprised by the lack of pain. I feel as though I’m fine, but I can’t raise my left arm. Regardless of what I try, it just hangs there limp. Blood drips from my fingers.

Pretzel sits me on a rock.

“It was the gorilla, right? The one from the clearing?” Garcia asks, having pieced together what happened from the shooting and screaming and yelling.

“Yes,” Jana says. “They’re dead. All of them.”

“Take it easy, kid. You did well. You were great,” Pretzel says to me “Don’t you worry about a thing. We’re going to get you out of here. Okay?”

“Okay?” I say, feeling dizzy. The world is but a dream. I feel light, as though I’m full of helium. With a slight nudge, I could float away on a breeze.

Garcia speaks with deliberation. “How bad?”

Pretzel rummages around in one of the soldier’s packs. “Shoulder. Took some of the bone. Part of the clavicle, possibly the scapula. Can’t tell. It’s a bit of a mess.”

Jana crouches in front of me, holding my good hand. “It’s going to be okay.”

I get the distinct feeling everyone’s telling me it’s going to be okay because it’s not.

Pretzel pulls a small package out of one of the Russian packs dropped by the edge of the cliff. “I’ve found some kind of first aid kit.”

“Good,” Garcia says. “Look for a large, wide bandage, but not one sealed in thin plastic. Look for something in foil or really thick, durable plastic.”

“Got it, but why?” Pretzel replies, looking at the Cyrillic letters on the packaging.

“These guys will be carrying major trauma kits. As none of us can read Russian, anything that’s in a heavy protective seal probably has blood clotting agents, contact analgesics, stuff like that. Use that first. Then put regular bandages on the wound to hold them in place. Pressure. You need lots of pressure to stop the bleeding.”

“Ah.”

Pretzel tears open the packaging.

Garcia asks, “Is the shoulder socket intact?”

“Yes,” Pretzel replies. “Why?”

“The main artery runs beneath that. So long as that’s intact, there shouldn’t be any arterial bleeding. If the humerus is broken, the bone leading down to his elbow, it could still sever an artery just by moving around so check for any breaks.”

Given how much of a mess my arm is, I’m not sure Pretzel knows how to determine that, but he runs his hands down my tricep and bicep, squeezing and flexing. Oh, there it is. Pain. I grimace.

“It’s good. The bullet clipped the top of his shoulder.” Pretzel tears open the Russian bandage.

“Focus on stopping the bleeding. Look for any fragments of broken bone, anything that could grate with movement and cause more damage.”

I’m not sure what Pretzel does as Jana is stern, saying, “Don’t look. Look at me. Keep your eyes on me.” I nod. She’s right. I really don’t want to know.

“Where are the Russians?” Garcia asks as Pretzel pokes around inside what’s left of my shoulder with tweezers. “Where are their bodies?”

It’s a strange request. Jana answers.

“There are only two left. The others fell.”

“Or flew,” Pretzel says, “Depending on which way you look at it.”

“Good. Good. Listen, those soldiers are in combat gear, right? They’re going to be carrying Fentanyl. It’s a drug. A painkiller. It’ll be close, really handy, something they can grab quickly in a firefight. I need you to search their bodies for it.”

Jana looks at me in horror. Petty Officer Garcia has no idea. One body has been decapitated, the other dismembered. Blood soaks into the rocks, spreading out around the Russian corpses, staining the ground a dark, ruddy brown.

“I’ll do it,” Pretzel says, taking Jana’s right hand and placing it on top of the bandage on my shoulder. “Keep pressure here.”

She nods and Pretzel makes his way over the fallen branches, past the empty shell casings littering the ground, over to the soldier without any arms.

“What am I looking for?” He’s standing at the feet of the soldier, looking down at the blood splattered rock.

“Fentanyl is administered orally. Medics call it a lollipop but it looks like a cheek swab, you know, the kind you scrape against the inside of your mouth to get a DNA sample.”

Pretzel crouches beside the body. Blood, piss and feces seep onto the ground.

“Where am I likely to find it?”

“It’ll be somewhere easy to reach, like on a waist pouch or in a jacket pocket. Look for something like a small personal injury kit.”

Pretzel tears open a velcro pack, revealing bandages, scissors and an array of tubes carefully aligned for easy access. “Got it.”

“Good. Good. How many are there?”

“Ah, only one.” Pretzel makes his way to the other soldier. With his boot, he rolls the headless body over and retrieves another kit. “And one more over here.”

As Pretzel hobbles back to us, Garcia speaks to me, saying, “Listen, these things are strong. Damn strong. Just suck on it. Don’t bite it. Don’t swallow it. This stuff is designed to be slow release. Stick it up between your teeth and the inside of your cheek.”

He holds out his hand and Pretzel places one of the Fentanyl sticks in his palm. Instead of giving it to me, Garcia unscrews the cap and sticks it in his own mouth before holding out his hand again. Seems I get the second stick.

Oh, wow. Within seconds of it resting in my mouth I feel warmth running through my body. My fingers tingle. Just the slightest movement leaves my forehead reeling.

“I—I feel great.”

“Well, you’re not. It’s an illusion,” Pretzel replies, using tape and a compression bandage to hold a thick gauze pad in place over the wound. He finds a sling in the first aid kit and folds it in triangles, positioning it gently beneath my arm before resting my hand in it. To my surprise, he tightens the knot around my neck, raising my hand so it sits up near my other shoulder, with my left elbow pointing down. I’m expecting the traditional arm-resting-horizontally approach. I must look confused as he clarifies.

“Takes pressure off the shoulder.”

To me, it seems unwarranted. I feel as though I could run for miles. Garcia has a big grin on his face. Given he can’t see me, he still knows exactly where I am.

“Good, huh?” he says, holding up his medical lollipop like a trophy.

“Oh, yeah.”

Jana helps me to my feet. Pretzel limps between discarded packs, looking for anything else that could be useful. He picks up a rifle, stares at it for a moment, and tosses it away like garbage, but he finds two canteens with water and some ration bars. Water never tasted so good. The Russian version of a granola bar is sickly sweet and as tough as an old boot, but I’m not complaining.

“What’s the plan?” Garcia asks. Plans are always needed, apparently.

“I don’t know,” Pretzel says, hobbling along the edge of the cliff with Garcia walking behind him, holding onto his shoulder. We follow the rocks to avoid the debris scattered through the jungle. “We’re not going far. Not like this. We need medical attention. Jana’s the only one capable of covering any reasonable distance. The rest of us will barely make it a mile.”

“We’re not splitting up,” I say. Jana is quiet. I’m not sure whether she agrees or not. She has a chance of getting out of here. Who am I to hold her back? And yet it feels like defeat to admit that she should go. Neither of the others say anything in response to my comment.

Garcia says, “We should make for base camp. We might find a radio or a flare gun. Anything that survived the firestorm could help.”

As far as plans go, it’s flimsy. I’m not convinced. I don’t see any sense in moving closer to the alien craft, besides, Pretzel’s right about our pace. We’ve only walked a couple of hundred yards, constantly stopping to negotiate fallen trees and branches, and hobbling along with our injuries.

The heat saps my strength. Yards feel like miles. I watch the fall of my boots, picking my steps as we follow the cliff, trying to avoid the worst of the debris. Garcia is just ahead of me. Ash kicks up from beneath his boots, slowly settling in the soft breeze.

“Tiny,” Jana says, and we turn to see the male Silverback huddled in the crook of a branch half torn from a blackened, fallen tree. He has his arms out wide on either side of him like a boxer resting on the ropes. Jana steps toward him and he growls, baring teeth still stained with the blood of a Russian soldier. Pretzel comes to a halt, having almost walked past Tiny without realizing he was there. There’s trepidation. Tiny snarls, wanting us to keep our distance.

“Please.” Jana holds out her hands as though she were trying to soothe a horse, inching closer to the injured gorilla.

Pretzel whispers. “He’s an animal. A wild animal. One that’s hurt. We should keep moving.”

“No,” Jana replies, ignoring Pretzel and edging closer, stepping over broken branches with care. Tiny snorts, clearing his nostrils.

“He’s dying,” she says.

“Jana,” I say, not feeling comfortable this close to the massive ape. “We should leave him.”

“No one should die alone.”

Twigs snap beneath her boots, rousing the semi-conscious gorilla, causing his eyelids to flicker and his head to roll. He flexes, as though he’s ready to launch himself at us.

“It’s me,” she says. “You know me. Remember? Me and Lady. We’d talk. I brought your troop potatoes, yams, crab apples. Lady was my friend.”

The mention of Lady seems to raise a semblance of awareness. He grunts softly in acknowledgment. Muscles surge and ripple. Hairy arms stretch out along the branch.  Dark fingers reach for Jana. Weighing in at close to five-hundred pounds, the silverback shifts his weight and the fallen tree rocks. He sits on his bottom, pushing with his legs, trying to get to his feet before slumping back against the tree.

“Lady. Where’s Lady?” Jana asks.

Tiny turns his proud head to one side, showing his thick jawline and the crown at the back of his head. He’s becoming more lucid by the second. His lips curl, almost as though he’s trying to speak, while his eyes cast up and to the right. He grunts in reply, as though suggesting a direction.

“Jana, please,” I say, but neither Garcia, nor Pretzel or I move. We’re some twenty feet away, with hearts pounding in our chests and muscles coiled, ready to flee, but Jana inches closer. Garcia looks nervous. He reaches with his hands, feeling for the branches around him, testing the ground with his boots, clearly thinking we’re about to be attacked, but Jana’s right. These are the Great Ape’s last moments.

Her tender, petite fingers brush against dark, leathery, wrinkled fingers.

Tiny lets out a sigh. His nostrils flare.

Garcia whispers. “This is not good. We should keep moving. That gunfire would have echoed for miles. There could be more soldiers closing in on this area.”

Without turning back to face us, Jana says, “We’re not leaving.”

“But—”

“No.”

Jana is resolute. There’s no negotiation. Garcia could press the point, but he knows. Pretzel too is quiet. Logically, this is the wrong decision, but sometimes life demands more than cold, uncaring facts, sometimes emotions are more important.

Tiny wheezes. His breathing is labored. Sticky blood seeps from bullet holes in his chest. Jana runs her hand over his arm, clawing at his fur with her fingers.

“Touch is important,” she says, looking deep into his dark eyes. He vocalizes in reply, relaxing, not feeling threatened by her presence.

I creep up beside her and to my surprise, Tiny holds out his other arm, turning his hand up so his palm is open before me. I trace the lines in his skin, touching gently at his hand. His fingers close over mine, but without any force, surprising me with their size, easily dwarfing mine. My heart races, but I refuse to panic. Tiny breathes deeply, releasing me. Like Jana, I touch at his arm, wanting to comfort him as his life fades. His fur is coarse, with each strand of hair being much thicker than any of mine. It’s almost like the bristles of a brush. There’s texture to his muscles. They’re lean and tough and yet I can feel the life draining from them with each passing second.

“Give him this,” Garcia says. I turn. He’s holding out his Fentanyl stick.

“I’ll give him mine.”

Garcia says, “Place it just inside his mouth, on the outside of his teeth, against the soft flesh of his cheek.”

Edging closer to a fully grown, injured Silverback is unnerving. He eyes me with suspicion. His brow narrows and his nostrils tighten. With his lips, he tries to speak in whatever guttural tongue is used by the gorillas, but his voice fails.

“Easy,” I say, slipping the Fentanyl stick from my mouth and holding it out so he can see it. I’m hoping he’s noticed I’ve been sucking on it.

Jana says, “Food,” signing with her hand. She bunches her fingers, dipping them into her palm and then positioning them before her mouth, making as though she were about to eat. Tiny copies her. I’m not sure if he understands or is just mimicking her. Certainly, he’s seen Jana sign with Lady so he knows we talk with our hands as well as our lips. I’m hoping that’s a universal sign. I reach out, holding the Fentanyl stick before him and he opens his gaping jaws wide. Large canine incisors threaten to tear my right hand a part, but I’m not afraid. Slowly, gently, I slip the Fentanyl stick in the side of his mouth, pushing it up against his cheek. His breath stinks. It’s hot and heavy. Slowly, he closes his mouth, seemingly realizing we’re doing something to help. There’s a soft grunt and a sigh.

“That’s it,” Jana says. Her voice is gentle, soothing him even though he can’t understand her words. Garcia slumps against the fallen branch, sliding to the muddy ground. Pretzel sits on the opposite branch.

None of us know what the future holds. The temptation, the impulse is to do something—anything—to stay on the move, to push on, to go somewhere, but being busy is an illusion. We’re no better or worse off by staying with Tiny. We have no guiding light, no plan, as Garcia would put it. We could continue on along the edge of the cliff and run into more Russians.

“Are you sure this will work?” Jana asks.

“We’re all apes,” Pretzel says. “If it works on humans, there’s a better than fair chance it’ll bring him some relief.”

Tiny’s eyes begin to glaze over. His breathing becomes shallow. Whereas before his nostrils would flare when spasms of pain tortured his body, now he seems at peace. The shadows grow long. The setting sun lights up his face, softening his features, giving warmth to his dark skin. He holds my hand. Jana continues grooming his fur, combing her fingers through the hair on his broad shoulders, soothing him.

As the sun dips below the horizon and darkness falls across the land his body goes limp, sagging. With his head bowed forward and his arms resting on his thighs, he breathes his last, falling silent.

Jana cries.

I say, “Thank you.”

First Contact

My arm aches.

Pretzel retrieves what’s left of the Fentanyl stick, rinsing it with water and giving it to me, but it seems to have lost its mojo.

“We need to get out of here,” Jana says, and I know what’s coming next. These should be the words of Pretzel or Garcia, but they’re not, and that has me on edge. “I should go.”

“No,” I say almost instantly. “We stick together.”

“Josh,” Pretzel says. “She’s right. She’s the only one of us that can make good time out there. She knows the lay of the land.”

“She doesn’t stand a chance alone.” I don’t know that. It’s not logical, but it’s what I feel.

Pretzel says, “She’s more likely to slip past unnoticed alone. Jana can travel farther and faster than any of us.”

Garcia’s quiet. He’s thinking, but doesn’t say anything. Pretzel elaborates. “She can tell the others where we are. Jana is our only hope of getting out of here alive.”

“Jana,” I say, lost for anything more.

Garcia leans forward, pulling a handgun from the small of his back.

“It’s Russian,” he says, holding it on the flat of his hand before her. I never even saw him retrieve it from one of the fallen soldiers. He points. “There’s a round chambered. This is the safety. Flick it up with your thumb and it is good to fire. It holds ten to twelve rounds.”

Jana takes the gun from him, running her fingers over the handle, examining the safety.

“Don’t aim.” At first, I’m confused, but Garcia’s serious. “Just point and squeeze, then run. Remember that, point and squeeze, and run. You don’t need to hit anyone, just keep them at bay. The less you fire, the better. Save your ammo. Stay on the move. If you come under fire, shoot back and go, go, go. Don’t stay in any one place for more than a second or two or they will pin you down. Moving targets are hard to hit. Distance is your only ally.”

She nods. Even though he can’t see, Garcia seems to realize she’s acknowledged him. “Bullets need line-of-sight. If they can’t see you, they can’t hit you. Rocks are better than trees. Trees are better than buildings. Buildings are better than nothing at all. Whatever happens, keep moving.”

Pretzel says, “God speed.”

Jana looks at me for barely a second and then disappears over the fallen branch we’re sheltering beside. I was expecting her to say something. I wanted to say something to her, to tell her to be careful, to tell her that I love her—however crazy that may be for a teen still learning about life—but she’s gone. I turn, leaning over an upturned root, watching as she darts between the dead standing trees devoid of leaves and branches.

“She’ll be back,” Pretzel says.

“Liar,” Garcia replies, and I’m glad he said that. He’s right. Even if she makes it, she won’t be back—not her. At best, the US Army will dispatch someone to get us, but even that’s wishful thinking. We all saw what happened to the Russian plane. Besides, there’s a war being raged down there on the open plains to the north.

Burning military vehicles release long thin columns of dark pungent smoke, still visible in the twilight. Explosions light up like flashes of lightning, but there’s no accompanying thunder—the battle is too far away. I keep my eyes on Jana, watching as she disappears into a hollow, dropping from sight before emerging on the far hillside. The further she gets the harder it is to make out anything other than a slight blur of motion in the growing darkness.

Suddenly, there’s screaming.

Gunfire shatters the silence of the coming night.

One, two, three shots, staggered, not in rapid succession. I’m on my feet. A fourth shot rings out and I’m climbing over the branch, trying to identify the location of the gunfire but the sound is echoing around us. I can’t see her. I know where she was moments ago, but the shots seem to come from behind me, which is confusing.

“J—”

A hand clamps itself over my mouth. I’m dragged back and down into the ditch between the branches. I struggle to break free from Garcia’s grip, swinging with my arms and pushing off the ground with my feet, but Garcia holds me firm, with his head pressed hard next to mine and his lips right beside my ear.

“One shooter,” he whispers. “Only one.”

I don’t understand. Pretzel does.

“She’s not shooting at the Russians.”

My blood runs cold as my body falls limp. An overwhelming sense of futility drains the strength from my arms.

There, barely visible in the twilight, towering over the decimated ruins of the jungle, is a machine unlike anything ever seen on this planet. Long, spindly legs descend from a barely visible fuselage. Smoke drifts through the fallen trees, causing the needle thin legs to disappear into the darkness.

“Describe it,” Garcia says, intuitively realizing we’re looking at something that originated on another world, around some other star. He releases my mouth but continues to hold me back. “We need to learn everything we can about it.”

Pretzel is beside me. I’m expecting him to speak, but he’s dumbfounded.

Garcia asks, “Is it moving toward us?”

“No,” I reply, unsure what I’m looking at. I’m trembling uncontrollably, unable to command my body to come to a halt. In contrast, Garcia is relaxed.

“Is it airborne or ground-based, like a tank or a helicopter?”

“It’s not like any tank I’ve ever seen. It has legs.”

“Good, good,” he says, not referring to the machine, but to my description of it even though I’m horribly vague, still being in shock. I’m shaking at the thought Jana was just killed by that thing. “Tell me more.”

“Ah, it’s tall.” My voice breaks as I speak. Tears fall from my eyes, but Garcia can’t see that.

“How tall? Think in terms of buildings. How many stories? Three? Five? Ten?”

I understand what Petty Officer Garcia’s doing, keeping me focused, getting me to talk in general terms. In one breath, he’s trying to distract me from what happened and understand the threat looming on the hillside just beyond the creek.

“At least twenty,” I say. “It’s as tall and thin as a construction crane. I—I don’t know how we didn’t see it. It’s quiet, silent, moving like a ghost.”

“How many legs?” he asks in a whisper as Pretzel and I watch the machine walk on.

“I don’t know. There are too many to count. They move independently, at different times, stabbing at the ground. There’re no hinges, no knees. The legs are like snakes—thin, slithering metallic snakes hanging from its belly.”

“And the body, how big is it? The size of a car, a van, a truck, a bus?”

“A van, maybe? A small truck.”

Garcia asks. “What are you thinking, Doc?”

Pretzel is pale. His eyes are wide. Sweat beads on his forehead.

“Stay with me, Doc.”

Garcia releases his grip on me. As the realization of what has happened sinks in, the desire to run to Jana’s aid is gone. I’m lost, unsure what I feel. Garcia, though, seems jubilant, something I don’t understand, but I guess that’s because he can’t see this thing and is relying on us to describe the machine. He reaches out with his hand, feeling for Pretzel, finding his knee and squeezing it.

“Hey, Pratul? Dr. Khatri-Lagharin?”

“Ah,” Pretzel says.

In a whisper, Garcia says, “Talk to me. Tell me what you’re looking at. What is that thing?”

“It’s—It’s.”

“It’s reflecting the stars,” I say.

Garcia doesn’t understand. Neither would I if I couldn’t see this strange alien machine for myself.

Pretzel says, “It’s body. It’s like a mirror. A sphere, or an orb. There are no lights. No front or back. No aerodynamics. I can see the shattered ground reflecting beneath it, the dead trees below and the sky above.

“Wait. There are more of them.”

Pretzel and I both lean on the fallen limb, peering out through the tangle of broken branches across the hillside. The machine we saw is just one of many towering over the ruins of the jungle.

“They’re moving in unison,” Pretzel says. “Marching over the plateau.”

“That’s bad,” Garcia says, creeping over next to us, with his blind, bandaged eyes facing out at the machines as they pass.

“Why is that bad?” I ask.

“Because they’re forming a line—and we’re behind it.”

The machines are on either side of us, some on the plateau, others down below near the rock pool, although their silvery bodies reach up above the cliff.

“I need options, Doc,” Garcia says. Seems the Navy SEALs thrive on options and plans. “Talk to me. You’re the expert. What are they doing? Is this an invasion?”

“No,” Pretzel turns away from the hillside, slumping to the mud with his back against the fallen tree. Garcia and I join him. “They’re scout craft. Too small to go any real distance. Good for a few miles, not hundreds of miles or thousands.”

“So they’re securing a perimeter?” Garcia asks, translating Pretzel’s science-speak into military terms. “What kind of offensive capability are they likely to have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“Well, they’re too small to carry much in the way of projectiles, but they could have lasers or some other kind of energy weapon.” From the way Pretzel is speaking, I can tell he doesn’t like talking in these terms. He’s uncomfortable, feeling forced to provide a commentary he doesn’t believe in.

“Like whatever brought down the Russian fighter?” I ask.

“Maybe,” is all Pretzel will offer in reply. “We really don’t know.”

“We do know,” Garcia says, insisting on making his point. “We know they shot down an aircraft. We know they killed Jana. We know they’re circling the wagons around their craft.”

In a soft voice, Pretzel says, “She’s alive.”

Aliens be damned, I’m on the verge of yelling as I reply, “What?”

“She was drawn up into that machine.”

“You saw her?” I ask.

“She was still moving, struggling, held in the grip of those mechanical arms.”

“We’ve got to go—” I don’t get to complete my sentence as Garcia cuts me off.

“Go and do what? We’re injured. We’re unarmed. We’re outnumbered and outgunned.”

I thump my fist against the ground, frustrated, angry. It was a dumb move as the shock that reverberates up my good arm rattles my bones, making my wounded shoulder ache.

“But—But Jana.”

Garcia says, “But nothing, kid.”

I don’t think he means to, but I’ve never felt more humiliated and belittled in my life. It hurts to admit he’s right. I’m a kid. I’m not an adult. I’m nothing compared to these machines towering hundreds of feet above the devastation around us. With dangly legs, they walk on with impunity, set high above our world.

This is all wrong. I feel cheated. Jana has been stolen from us and yet Garcia’s right. What am I going to do? With one good arm, just what do I think I could do against these alien spider pods that defy any mechanical device on Earth. For all I know, they’re indestructible by our standards. Their curved, mirrored surface reflects the stars from whence they came, while their lanky legs seem to defy gravity, propelling them on with ease, allowing them to cover hundreds of yards in a single stride, refusing to buckle even though they appear frail.

Pretzel speaks softly. “We’re still seeing this through the prism of our own experience. We wage war, so we assume we’re under attack. They could simply be defending themselves. They could have seen the Russians clearing the jungle and interpreted that as a hostile act.”

Lightning breaks through the night, casting an eerie, pulsating glow over the debris scattered across the jungle floor. Pretzel and I shift, peering out over the cliff at the open plains some fifty miles away. The jungle below the cliff is largely intact, being outside the blast radius of whatever the Russians dropped. Beyond the rolling canopy lies farmland.

Bolts of lightning rain down on the plains, but there’s not a cloud in the sky. The machines have advanced off the plateau and are towering over the jungle, wading through the trees like a child might walk through water at the beach. Flashes of lightning cut through the night, lashing out from the alien machines, following jagged paths, twisting and stuttering into the distance before arcing back toward Earth. Explosions rock the plains. There are hundreds, if not thousands of strikes. At times, the waves of raw power arrive in sheets. Given the distance we are away from the plains, they must be several miles in length, carving up the ground.

“There’s your energy weapon,” Pretzel says as the sound of artificial thunder rolls over us. Several of the bolts lash out into the sky from machines down below the cliff, apparently hitting airborne targets. Whether those were planes or missiles, I’m not sure, but this is different to what we saw with the Russian aircraft. This is electrical power being released at staggering levels.

“What are you looking at?” Garcia asks.

“Lightning,” I say. “They’re producing lightning bolts, just like in Ezekiel.”

Pretzel is quiet, but I feel that had to be said. Brother Mordecai was right about that at least.

“They’re evenly spaced,” Pretzel says, observing where the machines are by the bolts hurled into the sky. “They’re maybe a mile or two beyond the blast radius, out in the middle of the jungle, but they’re stationary—for now.”

Whereas our machines of war are thick and armor-plated, designed to survive a direct hit from opposing forces, the aliens appear impervious. Their mirrored canopies look almost fragile, like they’re made from glass. To me, at least, it seems as though they don’t feel any real threat from us.

Pretzel says, “Their energy device makes a mockery of our guns and bullets, missiles and bombs. They’re displaying a mastery of physics and engineering well beyond anything we can accomplish.”

“They’re sentries,” Garcia says. “They’re sending a message.”

“What message?” I ask.

“Don’t fuck with us.”

“But it’s not an invasion,” Pretzel says, insisting on his previous point.

“I admire your optimism,” Garcia replies, “but all invasions start with a beachhead. You said it yourself, that space elevator is capable of transporting tens of thousands of tons of machinery from orbit with little effort. They ain’t here for sightseeing, Doc.”

As we’re sitting there, spindly legs reach from below the edge of the cliff, probing the rocks in front of us. We peer out from under a trunk that’s splintered and collapsed. Although the machine is standing beside the caves, its head is already well above the plateau we’re on. Starlight reflects off the smooth mirrored surface. Rather than being a perfect sphere, it’s oval in shape, as though it has been squashed slightly. With little or no effort, the mirrored-machine steps up onto the plateau. It passes above us, but not quite directly overhead. Garcia can hear but can’t see what’s happening. The slight tremble through the fallen trees is enough for him to realize what’s occurring, and, like me, he shrinks from sight.

Pretzel stands. It’s almost as though he wants to be snatched by these creatures.

“Get down,” I say. I tug at his trouser leg, wanting him to join us nestled into the underside of a log, but he stands there staring up at the machine as it walks on. He raises his hands, holding them toward the sky, reaching out and touching at one of the alien probes dangling from the craft. He wants to be taken. Dozens of legs hang from the underside of the machine. They’ve been retracted, but only slightly, not being as long as those used for walking. The extra legs drag over the fallen jungle, brushing lightly against the debris.

Within seconds, the machine has moved on. I clamber out from where I was hiding, helping Garcia up.

“What the hell were you doing?” Petty Officer Garcia asks.

“Experimenting.”

“Experimenting?” I ask, flabbergasted at the notion.

“They know we’re here. They’re not dumb. They knew we were here when they took Jana. Why don’t they want us?”

“You seriously want to be abducted?” Garcia asks, shaking his head.

“It’s the legs that bother me,” Pretzel says in his characteristically absentminded manner. When he gets like this, it’s as though reality has ceased to exist. He’s in the zone, racing off on some tangent that—to me, at least—is entirely unrelated. His gentle voice, dark eyes, soft brown wrinkled skin and thin wisps of grey hair are hypnotic.

“Why so many legs? And the way they dangle. From what I can see, it only uses three or four for locomotion, why are there dozens more hanging there like the tentacles of some exotic jellyfish?”

Petty Officer Garcia faces the faint sound of the retreating alien machine. His hands grab at the thick limb in front of us. Seems he’s ready for the battle of Little Big Horn. Even though he’s blind and unarmed, I have no doubt he’d lead the charge at Gettysburg. No musket ball would dare fell him. Given the chance, he’d leap over stonewalls, brandishing a cutlass against cannons. Pretzel, though, seems to have the sum total of Indian wisdom and patience running through his mind following the alien encounter. As for me? I seem to be stuck somewhere in between these two extreme reactions. I’m still shaking. I have been ever since they took Jana. I want to ask Pretzel more about what happened to her. I want to know why they took her, where they took her, but I know what his answer will be—I don’t know. Seems scientists are never shy admitting what they don’t know when all I want is a little conjecture.

Pretzel’s smart. If the numerous legs are a sticking point for him, perhaps it will lead somewhere. Perhaps like a jigsaw puzzle, we have to fill in what we know before we can see the whole picture.

“Why does that bother you?” I ask, wanting to understand his reasoning as he stands there watching the alien craft walking back toward the distant space elevator. The legs of the alien machine reach out, probing trees as it walks on, touching lightly at them, while the elevator crackles with energy.

“Machines are efficient. That’s why we build them. A plough being dragged by a horse is more efficient than a man with a spade. A tractor is even more effective again. At each point, we simplify and focus our design. We build machines to accomplish specific tasks. Everything has a purpose. No wasted parts.”

“So?” I ask.

“Why so many legs? You only need two to walk.”

“Cows have four,” I say.

“Four brings stability,” he replies. “Natural selection settled on two legs for us so our other two limbs could be repurposed as arms, allowing us to work with tools. Efficiency, see? It’s all about being efficient with what you have.”

“But what about an octopus?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s efficient for its environment. Suspended in fluid, it can jet about, darting with astonishing agility. An octopus can manipulate clams and oysters to find the weakest point in their shells.”

“And centipedes?” I ask. Here we are, in the middle of a burnt jungle with alien war machines firing lightning into the sky, and Pretzel is more interested in an intellectual conversation about the evolution of legs.

“Ah, repeating segmentation. Centipedes have elongated bodies where the genes code for repetition, much like our spinal column. All animals have this, only when it comes to centipedes, their repetitive elements contain legs, but these are efficient for their environment, tunneling within rotten wood. You don’t see gazelles with a hundred legs.”

“But the aliens?” I ask, knowing he’s working himself toward a conclusion.

“Tall and thin. No need for a dozen or so legs. Two would do. Or if you don’t want to be preoccupied with balance, four—but not a dozen or more. No, those legs are probing the environment, acting as arms.”

Garcia is content to listen.

“So?” I ask.

“So, we can conclude these machines were designed for a very different purpose. They may be acting as sentries, but that’s not their original role. They’ve been repurposed.”

“What are the arms for then?” I ask.

“It’s a guess,” he says, “but hopefully an educated one. You were right about comparing them to an octopus. All those arms or legs or tentacles or whatever you want to call them are not intended solely for locomotion, they’re designed for examining things, manipulating objects, sampling the environment.”

“Jana,” I say.

“Yes,” he replies.

“That’s why you think she’s alive.”

“Yes.”

Finally, Garcia speaks. “Why did they leave us alone? They had to know we were here, right?”

Pretzel shrugs. “Maybe because we pose no threat? Maybe because we weren’t moving around? Maybe because we don’t have any war machines like planes or tanks or guns. Remember, from their perspective, there’s not much difference between us and any other animal in the jungle.”

“Why did they take Jana?” I ask.

“Maybe she fired first.”

“But she’s alive, right?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“We have to go get her.”

“Whoa,” Garcia says. “Doc, tell me you think this is a crazy idea.”

With his soft accent originating from somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, Pretzel says, “I think it’s a crazy idea, but it’s the only one we’ve got.”

He pauses before adding, “I think it’s time we introduced ourselves to Ezekiel.”

The Village

Garcia reaches out with his hand, touching at Pretzel’s shoulder. It’s not only a means of orienting himself, but seems to bring him some comfort as well.

“Hey, doc. I don’t mean to second-guess you, but are you sure that’s such a great idea?”

“What’s the plan?” Pretzel asks, almost in mimicry of him as we start walking, picking our way through the debris. “What are our options? Walk fifty miles to the graveyard that is the battlefield to the north? Wait here until we die from dehydration? Surrender to the Russians? We might as well take the initiative.”

Pretzel’s smart, using terms that appeal to a soldier.

“We might find a radio at base camp,” I say, repeating a point Garcia made earlier, hoping to reinforce Pretzel’s idea.

Petty Officer Garcia shrugs. “We’re dead anyway.”

“That’s the spirit,” Pretzel says.

Ah, that wasn’t quite what I wanted to hear.

It’s dark, but the Moon has risen, casting light across the ruins of the jungle.

“Take us home,” Pretzel says to me. My arm hurts, but the pain is dull. It’s persistent, an ache fading into the background. For now, I guess my body has accepted this as the new norm.

Pretzel adjusts the strap on his leg. He’s trying to find the right balance between too tight—cutting off the blood flow—and too loose. As it is, the side of his leg is dark with blood seeping from the gash. He hobbles along as Garcia follows.

I lead the way, changing direction, leaving the cliff behind and cutting in toward the village with Pretzel limping along behind me. Garcia follows with his left hand on Pretzel’s shoulder. For his part, Pretzel provides commentary as we walk on through the night, giving Garcia notice about each upcoming obstacle. They’re in-step with each other.

“Broken branches, tightly bound,” and with that we step on an almost trampoline like mesh of twigs and vines and branches lining the ground. Whenever Pretzel crouches to go under a log or sits on a fallen trunk, swinging his legs over a downed tree, Garcia replicates the motion almost exactly, reaching out with his other hand to check for the obstacle.

“Muddy rocks… Lots of crushed bushes. Stomp with your feet. Lift them high… Low hanging branches, shield your head.”

Occasionally, Pretzel provides a little more by way of commentary.

“There’s a dead leopard over there—such a shame… Birds—the ground is littered with dead birds… I can see movement on the elevator—things going up and down—capsules, maybe…”

But for the most part, the hours pass with, “Slippery rocks.”

Neither man questions my sense of direction. I think I’m going the right way, but I’m relying more on the lay of the land and the position of the space elevator than anything else. We see several more alien machines traipsing across the plateau, thin and tall, towering over the devastation, but Pretzel never comments on them. Thankfully, they leave us alone.

When I first saw the machines, they filled me with dread, but not anymore. Even though I know one of them snatched Jana, I’m not afraid of them. I should be, but as they ignore us, I’ve come to accept them. There’s a surreal quality to their design. Stars reflect off their hull almost perfectly, so much so it is almost impossible to spot them when they stand still, even with their lanky legs. When they move, though, the stars shining against their slick, mirrored hull appear to go in the opposite direction. It’s as though a tiny portion of the sky is being played in reverse—which is magical to behold. I’m not sure if Pretzel feels the same way. He probably thinks of them in more scientific terms, but for me, they’re enchanting—graceful. Even though we all saw the bolts of lightning blazing out from them, their sedate nature when moving over the jungle gives me hope that Jana is still alive.

Smoke drifts across the ground as we march on. Sometimes it’s quite thick, causing us to cough. Most of the fires have burned themselves out, but logs still smolder in the dark of night. Several trees have glowing coals at their heart, breaking through the bark as fire burns from the inside.

I’m not sure how long it takes us to reach what’s left of the village, but the Moon has started descending to the far horizon. It’s funny, but I never realized the Moon casts shadows. I’ve watched them slowly arc around us over the last few hours, shortening and straightening before growing longer in a different direction.

The bridge leading to the village is still standing. Glowing yellowish green gunk washes along the creek. Raka’s hut is gone. The burnt, mangled remains of his satellite dish have been caught in one of the few trees still standing—an old Kapok, easily two hundred feet in height. It has branches, but no leaves.

An aardvark scurries past. We both jump, each equally surprised to encounter the other in this lifeless landscape. With its arched back, long snout and floppy ears, the aardvark is about the size of a dog. Jana calls them fourmi ours, or ‘ant bears' in French. Funny how something as simple as a chance encounter with an aardvark can bring my mind circling back to the loss of Jana. There are over two hundred languages in use within the Congo, but French is the most prevalent. We use English in the church, teaching the natives about the Bible, but most of the daily conversation within the village is French. I miss Jana. I wonder where she is and what she’s doing. I hope she’s okay.

As I’ve come to a halt, Pretzel nudges me, but he’s not wanting me to move on, simply trying to get my attention. He points.

Tentacles wrap themselves gently around the aardvark, lifting it into the sky. I never even saw the alien machine following us, but it’s towering over us, being taller even than the burnt Kapok tree. Mechanical arms entwine themselves, holding the aardvark as it struggles. Within seconds the small animal is twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred feet above us and rising fast. We’re almost directly below the machine. Its remaining legs carry it on as it consumes the aardvark. I don’t think it’s eating it, as such, but it’s difficult not to arrive at that conclusion. The aardvark disappears into the darkness long before it reaches the vast dome that forms the alien craft. From below, the craft appears almost black. With barely any noise, it moves on, hunting some other creature but leaving us standing there in shock.

“What?” Garcia whispers, wondering why we’ve come to a halt but not hearing the machine. “What’s going on?”

I’m not saying anything. This is on Pretzel. He’s the alien hunter.

“Nothing.”

Garcia never says, “liar,” but I know he’s thinking it.

I want to talk about what just happened, but Pretzel says, “Come on,” taking the lead and walking into the flattened remains of the village.

My heart sinks at the devastation. My home is gone. Nothing is left, not even the floor, just a bunch of concrete supports reaching up to waist height. The church has been leveled, but curiously, one wall still stands. It looks surprised, as though even it isn’t sure why it’s still upright. There are four windows, but the stained-glass is gone, leaving an empty shell. The wood panels, originally painted white, are as black as coal.

Pretzel crouches, picking up the singed remains of a Bible. Several of them lie scattered across the ground, with their covers torn or burnt. Most of the surviving pages are black and curled. He dusts it with his hand. I wonder what he’s thinking. He must know what it is even though he can’t actually read any of the small text in the moonlight. I wonder if he’s thinking about Brother Mordecai and Ezekiel.

“Has anything survived?” Garcia asks—anything, not anyone.

“No,” Pretzel replies, tucking the Bible into the small of his back.

We pick our way through the ruins. Charred bodies lie trapped under fallen walls and torn branches. I try not to step on them, but I can’t help it. In the darkness, it’s not until I’ve felt the soft squish of flesh rather than breaking twigs that I realize what I’ve stepped on, and I find myself taking double-steps, shuffling before planting my boots. I can’t help wondering who’s trapped beneath my feet. I knew these people. All of them. There’s nothing I can do for them, and that hurts. Tears roll slowly down my cheeks in the darkness.

I stray away from Pretzel. It’s not deliberate, but we separate. I’m drawn to the areas I knew within the village, recognizing denuded trees, spotting burnt bits of clothing scattered on the ground.

It’s funny the things that survived the firestorm. I reach down and pick up a china plate with ornate gold leaf running around its rim. It’s dusty, but otherwise immaculate. No chips, no cracks, no scratches. The plate is easily fifty feet from the stumps that mark the manse established by the Church. There’s a verse of Scripture on it, written in ornate calligraphy.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.

This particular plate wasn’t ours, it was on display in a glass cabinet along with several other relics left by previous missionaries. I’m not sure when it was dragged through the mud and grime of the forest, probably hundreds of years ago when the church was first built. It seems cruel that something lifeless would survive unscathed when everyone around it has died. I don’t know what to do with the plate. I place it gently back on the ground, curious about what will become of it. Will someone else pick it up? Or will they just stand on it, finally breaking it into a thousand pieces?

I’ve often wondered about this plate. I’ve wondered who designed it, who made it, where it was sold, who cared for it and brought it into the jungle. I always thought there were other more appropriate verses for our home, something about love or hope, faith or belief. Given how much death we saw during a Cholera outbreak when we first arrived, it always seemed inappropriate to me. Thirty people died within a week. Back then, I’d have much rather stared at some obscure verse that didn’t remind me of death. Now, I hope it’s right.

As I stand there looking at the ornate calligraphy just a few feet from my muddy boots, a tentacle slithers through the debris, slowly wrapping itself around the fragile plate, gently picking it up. My eyes follow the thin arm. It curls up through the air, bending over me. The alien machine is standing behind me, towering over me, silently watching but not touching me. The plate, though, is a prize. Without any noise, the machine moves on. Within seconds, it has disappeared beyond a clutch of burnt trees still standing in the lee of a hill. I’m numb.

A soft whistle drifts on the breeze. I turn. Pretzel’s waving with his hand for me to join him over near a section of the jungle canopy that’s badly scorched but still standing. For a moment, I just stand there, still looking for the dark outline of the machine, but it’s disappeared into the night. Pretzel whistles again. I guess he’s trying to be quiet, trying to avoid drawing the attention of the aliens, but it’s apparent even he didn’t see the machine looming over me in the dead of night.

“Josh,” carries as a whisper on a breeze, and I turn to join him.

I clamber over burnt roofs lying on the ground, across collapsed mud walls and the rock we used as a datum point just yesterday. A helicopter lies on its side, with its skids in the air, set on an angle. Rotor blades stretch idly into the night, sagging slightly. The tail boom is mangled but the cabin is intact.

Pretzel has seated Garcia on a rock and is circling the craft, trying to figure out how to get into it, but one side is crushed against the ground while the other is high in the air, not quite vertical but easily beyond 45 degrees.

Clouds roll overhead. Thunder rumbles in the distance. A storm is coming, which will bring welcome relief from the humidity.

“Must have been a rescue flight,” Pretzel says, and it’s only then I notice the chopper isn’t burnt. The smell of avgas is pungent, stabbing at my nose. I’ve been on enough flights between Ubundi and Kisangani to recognize the biting smell.

“If we can get the cockpit door open there might be something inside,” I say. I can reach the handle with my hand, leaning up against the fuselage and keeping my injured arm from knocking against the craft.

“I can probably climb up there,” Pretzel says, limping over to join me. Garcia doesn’t miss a thing. He may not be moving, but he’s assessing every action, listening to every word we speak, every sound we make.

“Give me a leg up,” I say, ignoring Pretzel. Even with my arm in a sling, I’m nimble. I’ve always been a scrawny kid, easily blown away in a breeze. Perhaps now that will come in handy. Pretzel crouches with his back against the helicopter, allowing me to step up on his good thigh and then step off his shoulder to reach the upturned side of the chopper.

“Careful,” Garcia says, which is out of character for him. He seems to sense what’s about to happen before either of us, which makes me hesitate on reaching the dark, open side door of the helicopter. I’m sitting on the cockpit door. There’s movement inside. A scratching noise. Not human.

Suddenly, I feel exposed. Vulnerable. Overhead, a machine reaches across the trees, towering above us, waiting, watching.

The chassis of the helicopter rocks, swaying beneath me. Something crashes into the inside wall of the chopper, growling and snarling, beating at the sheet metal. I shuffle with my legs, wanting to drop clear of the helicopter, but only being able to work with one arm I’m slow and clumsy. From where I’ve climbed, it’s easily fifteen feet to the ground below, and I’m left wondering if I’ll fall down there only to be crushed by the helicopter as it topples to one side. Out of the darkness, something swings at me, an arm as black as the night itself. I sway, trying to get back down the way I came, but Pretzel has moved away from the helicopter.

The chassis of the chopper groans, sagging, shifting. I’m so busy trying to hold on with one hand, not wanting to fall and be crushed beneath several tons of aircraft, that I barely notice the dark shadow looming beside me. Hot, heavy breath hits the back of my neck. A stench of foul air rushes past, causing me to recoil. I turn, there, inches away, is a fully-grown gorilla. Singed, matted black hair. Bloodshot eyes. Flared nostrils. Teeth bared. Angry. Roaring. Bellowing over the shattered remains of the village.

“Lady,” I yell, edging backwards, starting to slide on the slick, cracked Perspex window lining the cockpit. “Lady, please.”

The gorilla pounds its fists on the sheet metal, shaking the helicopter, causing it to shift beneath us. I’m not even sure this is Lady. In the dark it might be, but it could equally be any of dozens of other gorillas in this area—scared and hurt. I’m not even sure this gorilla’s female.

I’m at an impasse. Large, canine incisors threaten to tear into my neck. Any sudden move could trigger an attack. I want to flee, to jump to safety but, there’s no doubt who would be faster, so as crazy as it is, I sit still—as still as my trembling body will allow me.

“Lady. Jana, remember Jana?”

Beyond that dark brow, somewhere deep beneath her black, leathery, wrinkled skin, behind those marbled hazel eyes, there’s a spark of recognition. Lady’s facial features relax, sagging.

“Yes, Jana. Jana is your friend. Jana is my friend—our friend.”

Lady raises her head, snorting softly, suddenly docile. Her lips turn down, while her nostrils shift slightly as she tests the air, looking for familiar smells. She turns her head slowly, but not as a human would. Her motion is more resigned, almost as if she’s expecting Jana to appear beside me.

The alien machine has moved on, but its tentacle like legs are probing the trees, severing branches. Lady hasn’t seen it before now, but a spasm of fear ripples through her as she peers at the strange alien device. She slips back into the shadows, dropping inside the helicopter and hiding from sight.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I won’t let them take you. I won’t.”

It’s a promise I can’t keep and one she doesn’t understand, but it’s something I feel I have to say—something Jana would say.

The helicopter rocks, shifting again under her weight and settling on the broken limb of a fallen tree, with the far skid now only about six feet off the ground.

Pretzel is wary, edging closer to the helicopter. A light rain begins falling.

“It’s okay,” I say, speaking to both him and the gorilla. Lady shelters at the back of the open deck, huddling in the shadows. The tempo of the rain increases.

“She’s in shock,” Pretzel says, peering in before slowly climbing up beside me. Garcia feels his way along the helicopter, joining us as the rain cascades down, pelting the sheet metal on the chopper, making a racket.

I slide across the deck, shuffling with my feet, inching toward her.

Lady signs something. I’m not sure what. I should have paid more attention when Jana would talk with her, but that she’s signaling with her hands is positive. She recognizes us. She doesn’t see us as a threat.

“Tiny,” I say. Even if I knew how, with only one good arm, I couldn’t speak to her using sign language, but I think she understands. “Tiny saved us.” Lady's eyes are full of sorrow. She doesn’t know quite what I’m talking about, but she recognizes the name of the male Silverback. She must realize we came across him in the jungle.

Dark fingers flicker in the shadows. She’s signing, hoping I understand. I’m guessing, but I think she’s asking after Jana.

“They—they…” I can barely speak, choking up with tears. “They took her. Jana’s gone. I—I’m sorry. No Jana.”

With my good arm, I pretend to pluck something off the floor of the helicopter, accentuating my movement, lifting my hand vertically, wanting her to understand. “Those things—they took Jana.”

Lady moans. She knows. Thick, clubbed hands reach for me, resting on either side of my neck. The strength latent in her arms is apparent, but she doesn’t hurt me, rather she gently draws me closer, resting her forehead on mine.

My lips tremble. “Jana,” I say through the tears falling from my cheeks.

Lady rests her head on my good shoulder, but her forearm is leaning on my injured arm, sending spasms of pain into my fingers. I want to pull away, but don’t. Like Garcia said back when we were clearing the landing strip, sometimes pain makes you feel alive. Right now, in the middle of the decimated village, with everyone I’ve known over the past few years either dead or missing, I’ve never felt more alive than I do in the arms of a wild gorilla.

Lightning crackles through the sky. Thunder shakes the jungle. Torrential rain falls from the heavens. Outside, alien legs probe the mud, picking up logs and laying them gently on the ruins, searching for something, but what? Ornate china plates?

Pretzel and Garcia remain by the cockpit, staying clear of the rain running over the floor of the helicopter. Lady and I are in the rear, hidden from the wind and rain circling within the open side of the chopper.

Lady fusses with me, gently brushing my injured shoulder, recognizing the blood seeping from around the bandages. It’s strange, but I feel at peace. My dad would be horrified. Gorillas have roundworm, scabies, lice, fleas. The inside of the helicopter smells of feces so she’s been hiding in here for a while. Given my wounded shoulder, it’s hardly a sterile environment, but I don’t care. Lady cradles me, resting me on my good side, holding me with an embrace I’ve never known. Her fur is coarse, but her skin is soft to touch. There seems to be a common understanding shared between us. We’ve both lost someone. We need each other.

With the wind howling through the ruins of the village and rain coming down in squalls, I drift off to sleep with the warmth of a gorilla imparting life.

Stage III: Capture

Cats

Sweat drips from my brow. The morning sun streams in through the open side of the helicopter, creeping through the remaining trees and branches. Already temperatures are soaring. Pretzel and Garcia are in the cockpit, talking in hushed whispers. I’m lying beside rather than on Lady. She stirs but doesn’t wake as I creep forward.

Two bodies lie on the ground outside the helicopter with the dark visors on their helmets pulled down to hide their faces. Already, ants are swarming over them. As they’re lying neatly beside each other, with arms folded over their chests, Pretzel must have moved them in the night. There’s no way he could bury them, so he’s given them as much dignity as he could, making sure their legs are straight, their combat uniforms cover their skin, their shoulders are square and their palms lie flat. Nature will consume them as it will all of us given time.

Already the jungle is coming back to life. Saplings are pushing up through the burnt ruins. They’re probably not seedlings as such but rather plants that partially survived and are now reaching for the canopy as they have done for millions of years. Flies buzz through the air. Pretzel was right when he told Sergei his efforts were futile. As devastating as the explosion was, the jungle will not be mocked. It’ll take a few years to fully recover, but it will wipe away this stain.

“Hey, Josh,” Garcia says from the copilot’s seat, hearing me moving about.

Pretzel is fiddling with a radio and a large battery. “Good morning.”

Even he doesn’t sound convinced by that. Pretzel is grumpy. With alien machines walking by just a few hundred yards away, I can’t bring myself to reply with anything even remotely approaching good. They took Jana. Thankfully, they’re ignoring us, at least for now, although I don’t know why, which confuses me.

“What are the aliens doing out there?” I ask.

“They’re busy,” Pretzel replies, without offering any more by way of explanation, but I notice the Bible he picked up yesterday is sitting on the cracked cockpit console. The pages have been dog-eared and the spine is bent. He’s been reading it, but not as I or my father would, not with a view to understand theology. He’s looking for clues. I’d like to ask him about it as I’m sure he’s reached some wild conclusion, even if that’s to ignore the concept entirely, but he continues fiddling with the radio.

“About yesterday,” I say, but Pretzel cuts me off.

“Sergei’s wrong.”

That wasn’t what I was going to talk about, but I’m intrigued. The conflict between these two scientists seems deeply bitter.

Garcia seems to pick up on that as well, asking, “How do you know he’s wrong? None of us know what the hell we’re dealing with. Who’s to say you’re right and he’s wrong? What if those aliens are carrying the celestial equivalent of the Black Death?”

To his credit, Pretzel doesn’t take the point personally. I think he’s frustrated with the radio. He sets it aside, resting it on the center console so he can address our concerns. Just that act seems to calm him.

“Nothing in life is black and white,” he says.

“So he could be right? You might be wrong?” Garcia asks. It’s a fair question given how much we’re trusting Pretzel’s judgment, but it ignores his point, still only considering two possibilities. I wonder if reality is more complex. I don’t want to be responsible for some dumb ass decision that poisons the world, but Garcia sounds a little like the villagers wanting simple answers.

Pretzel sighs, thinking for a moment before saying, “There’s wrong, and there’s wronger.”

“That’s not a word,” Garcia says.

“It’s a word,” Pretzel says in his defense, with a cheesy grin lighting up his face. Although Garcia can’t see him, he seems to grasp the cheeky attitude in the tone of his voice and smiles in response.

“It’s really not a word,” I reply, trying not to laugh. “Although, I must say, I do like it.”

“You won’t find it in a dictionary,” Garcia says.

“You will if your dictionary is from the 15th century.”

“Did they even have dictionaries back then?” Garcia asks.

“Well,” Pretzel replies. “They had to have something as they knew the difference between wrong and wronger.”

Garcia doesn’t even offer a comment in reply to that, simply shaking his head.

“You understand it, right?” Pretzel says. “So it is a word. It communicates. It conveys a specific meaning—there’s wrong and there’s wronger.”

I laugh.

“Stay with me,” he says. “How do you spell cat?”

I reply, “C. A. T.”

I’d like to think I’m confident in my answer as there’s no way I could get that one wrong, although with Pretzel I’m never quite sure what I’m getting myself into.

“But what if I spell it K. A. T?”

“You’d be wrong,” Garcia says, keen to make that point.

“Would I? Phonetically, my version is correct. And it’s better than spelling cat as A. B. C.—that would be wronger.”

Garcia says, “I don’t see how this has anything to do with aliens landing on Earth.”

“And that’s the problem. It has everything to do with what’s happening here in the jungle. Maybe I’m wrong about them.”

I get it, saying, “But Sergei’s wronger.”

“Yes. You see, I know for sure I’m wrong, as we’re still figuring this out, but Sergei can’t consider that he might be wrong—and that’s a serious problem.

“When it comes to science, there’s no bigger problem than thinking you’re right. It’s too early to make a call on exactly what’s happening, but what I do know is Sergei’s wronger than me.”

I’m not sure wronger will ever catch on as a common word, but I get what he means. Pretzel explains further.

“We’re so used to treating life as if everything can be described in terms of black and white. Aliens arrive and the only options we have are good verses evil, right verses wrong, Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader with his lightsaber, but what if it’s more complex than that?”

I say, “What if we’re dealing with kats with a k?”

Pretzel raises his finger. “Exactly. Now we’re getting somewhere my young padawan. What if we’re wrong but still actually quite close. What if the differences between us and them come down to spelling cat with a C verses kat with a K?”

“So, we’re becoming less wronger,” I say.

“Exactly.”

Garcia laughs. “That’s a terrible word. It’s so wrong. Not wronger, just plain wrong.”

To which, Pretzel replies, “Sometimes it can be right to be wrong, as long as you’re not wronger.”

“Oh, Doc,” Garcia replies. “You’re making my head hurt.”

Pretzel laughs, picking up the radio again and fiddling with it, trying to get it to work. Casually, he asks, “Is Earth flat or round?”

I know it’s a trick question, but I can’t resist. “Round.”

“Wrong. It’s neither.

“For tens of thousands of years, we thought Earth was flat—and if you’ve ever been to Kansas you’d still think that, but then we looked up at the Moon during an eclipse and saw the curve of Earth’s shadow. So then we said Earth must be round, but that was wrong too, just not as wrong as being flat.

“We looked at planets like Saturn and Jupiter through telescopes and saw them spinning rapidly. They looked squashed so we called both them and Earth oblate-spheroids. Finally, we were right, or so we thought, but we were still wrong.”

I’m loving this. I have no idea what some of these terms mean, but I love hearing about the progression of knowledge.

Pretzel works with a screwdriver, twisting deep within the open back of the radio, saying, “Being wrong is a stepping stone to getting things right, but you’ve got to be willing to leave behind past notions.

“We sent up a bunch of satellites to measure Earth and found the southern seas are higher than those in the north, meaning Earth is slightly pear-shaped; then we looked at the gravity density and saw that Earth looks a little like a punching bag, with dents all over it, albeit on a very small scale relative to its size. You see, there’s no right and wrong, just differing degrees of accuracy. As we keep looking we keep learning and refining our approach.

“If you’re building a house, it is entirely fine to consider the Earth as flat as its curvature won’t affect your construction. On small scales, Earth is flat.

“Now if you’re building a replacement for the Golden Gate Bridge then you need to take the curvature of Earth into account, but it’s okay to consider it as round. You don’t need to account for the flattening of Earth at the equator or gravity density fluctuations.

“You see, thinking in terms of right or wrong misses the point. It’s a question of precision. At the moment, we simply don’t have enough to go on in regard to our visitors. We need more data points rather than arguing about flat or round.”

The radio’s old and battered. Pretzel works with a greasy rag, cleaning gunk off the circuit board. Suddenly, the radio crackles into life. “Oh. Got it.” He puts the handset in Garcia’s open palm.

“Nice work.”

“What channel should we use?” Pretzel asks.

“Look for a band called SAR—Search and Rescue. If there are any US airborne assets from the army, air force or navy, they’ll be listening in on that channel, that is, if the Russians aren’t blocking it.”

“Okay. You’re live.”

Garcia squeezes the transmit button, speaking clearly. “Overlord. Sierra Charlie Six. Overlord. This is Sierra Charlie Six. Come in. Over.”

He releases and we listen to the slight hum coming from the speaker, willing it to respond. After a few seconds, Garcia repeats his call.

“Overlord. This is Sierra Charlie Six. Come in. Over.”

Again, the silence is painful. Finally, there’s a reply spoken so rapidly I can barely distinguish the individual words being used.

“Sierra Charlie Six, Marine Delta November One-Zero-Two. Status check. Over.”

“Yes!” Pretzel does a fist pump.

From behind bloody, dirty bandages, Garcia smiles. “Marine Delta November One-Zero-Two. Sierra Charlie Six is one plus two civilians. Repeat. One plus two civilians. We are at Lomami base camp in need of evac. Over.”

“Copy that, Lomami base camp, Sierra Oscar Charlie Six. Marine Delta November One-Zero-Two. Out.”

The quiet that follows is bewildering. Even Pretzel seems confused.

“And?” I ask, wanting something more.

“That’s it. That’s all there is for now.”

“I don’t understand? Shouldn’t we say something else?”

“Kid. We’re compromised. From their perspective, we’re behind enemy lines. And it’s not just the aliens they’re worried about. They’re dealing with the Russians and have no idea what our true state actually is. Right about now, they’ll be scrambling to figure out just who the hell Sierra Oscar Charlie Six actually is and wondering if the call was made with a gun held to my head.”

Pretzel says, “I thought you were Sierra Charlie Six?”

“Adding Oscar is a tactical way of telling them we’re not transmitting under duress, but given we’re in alien-held territory with Russians on the ground, they’re not likely to believe that.

“They won’t tell us anything. They won’t want to give away any details that could compromise any other operations. For now, all we can do is wait.”

Pretzel has salvaged some rations and a couple of canteens. He hands me one and although it’s just water, I drink like I’ve never tasted anything so sweet before.

Lady joins us, which is a rather unusual, unsettling experience as she snorts and grunts, expecting a reply but none of us know quite how to react to her. She walks on her knuckles, scooting over beside me. The muscles on her arms are impressive, far beyond anything I’ve ever seen on a bodybuilder. Pretzel unwraps a granola bar and hands it to her. She sniffs it before eating it and then nudges him for more. He laughs.

“I take it she liked that,” Garcia says, chewing on another bar and listening in to the grunts and chomps.

“Oh, yeah.”

Pretzel takes a drink from a canteen, holding it in an exaggerated manner, overstating his movements as he shows her how his lips wrap around the small opening. Then he hands it to her and she copies him, drinking the entire canteen dry. Water dribbles from her mouth, running down her chest.

“We’re one plus two plus one,” I say.

Garcia replies, “Yeah. I’m not sure how I’m going to explain that.”

The radio crackles back to life and Garcia scrambles with his hand, running his blind fingers over the sloping center console, searching for the handset.

“Sierra Oscar Charlie Six, Marine Delta November One-Zero-Two.”

“Marine Delta November One-Zero-Two, this is Sierra Oscar Charlie Six, go ahead.”

“Sierra Oscar Charlie Six. We are unable to effect evac. Recommend you go overland to Obekote. Over.”

“Obekote,” I say in alarm. “That’s a long way from here. It’s almost as far as Kisangani but to the south-east. We’d have to cross the Congo, but it’s flood season. The river is over a mile wide at this time of year.”

Garcia replies. “Negative, Marine Delta November One-Zero-Two. We are ineffective. Repeat, we are incapable of travel and in need of medical evac. Over.”

“Sierra Oscar Charlie Six. We are unable to approach within fifty miles of your location. Your only option is to go overland to Obekote. Over.”

Garcia is frustrated. “Negative, Marine Delta November One-Zero-Two. Negative.”

I’m not sure what Marine Delta November actually is, but given the constant buzz in the background when he transmits, I’m thinking he’s airborne, probably in some distant jet. As much as I understand Garcia’s impatience as I want to get out of here as well, I can’t see how they could help us. At best, they would have to send a team in on foot as there’s no way those alien machines are letting anyone fly in here. Hiking through the jungle would take days.

There’s no reply to Garcia’s comment, which I take to mean some other discussion is happening on another channel.

Pretzel gets impatient, snatching the radio from Garcia. “Give me that.”

Garcia doesn’t have time to reply before Pretzel starts transmitting.

“This is Dr. Pratul Khatri-Lagharin, Director of Operations for the First Contact team, put me through to General McCallister in CentCom.”

“It’s not a phone,” Garcia says, flabbergasted by Pretzel’s audacity.

For his part, Pretzel doesn’t care. He squeezes the transmit button once more, adding, “Make it happen.”

The reply is somewhat sheepish but formal. “Sierra Oscar Charlie Six, Marine Delta November One-Zero-Two. Hold. Over.”

“They’re not going to do it,” Garcia says. “We’re an unknown quantity. They won’t trust us.”

Pretzel doesn’t reply, but he doesn’t surrender the handset either. We sit there in silence for a few minutes. I’m perched sideways on a seat facing the back of the craft. Lady seems content to groom herself, something I find hypnotic to watch. Rather than being repugnant or dirty, it seems almost dignified the way she works with the hair on her arms and shoulders.

General McCallister

There’s clicking on the radio. It’s intermittent, sometimes quite deep, at other times rapid and at a high pitch. Finally, a woman speaks, “Please hold, transferring you.” After a few more clicks, another woman speaks. “Putting you through now, thank you for holding.”

We listen, unsure if we should speak. Finally, a male voice answers, “Whitehouse switchboard.”

Before Pretzel can say anything, the last woman to speak says, “This is Lieutenant General Anders from CentCom for General McCallister in the Situation Room. He’s expecting this call.”

“Understood, Lieutenant. We’ve been awaiting your call. Please hold.”

Pretzel and I look at each other. Garcia shrugs. None of us speak, not that it would matter as we’re not transmitting, but it feels as though suddenly our words should be measured carefully.

The next voice is one from the deep south, speaking with a relaxed tone that belies the formality we feel.

“Pretzel, are you still there?”

“Yes, General.”

“They—they told me there was no way you could have survived.”

“You know me, general. I’m a goddamn cockroach.”

The general laughs somewhat nervously. “Okay. Well, I’ve got you on speaker. You’ve got the Joint Chiefs, National Security Advisor, President and Vice-President listening in. Go ahead.”

From what I’ve seen of Pretzel, there are very few situations that leave him flustered, but this is one. He wasn’t expecting quite this much attention. He pauses, gathering his thoughts.

“Ah, I don’t know about you guys, but we’ve had a rough couple of days over here.”

He waits as there’s a slight delay on the line.

General McCallister replies, “We noticed. Things are pretty rough here too. We’re trying to downplay fears of an alien invasion and an escalating ground war with the Russians. What’s your perspective from there in Africa?”

I get the distinct feeling Pretzel’s words are going to be carefully scrutinized by dozens, if not hundreds of people following this call. He seems to realize that as well and speaks with clarity, making sure his accent doesn’t blur any of the terms he uses.

“First. This is not an invasion.

“What we’re seeing is revealing. The alien species has only deployed one type of surface craft, and one that is only capable of motion in a limited geographical area, extending not more than a hundred miles from their First Contact point.”

He pauses. There are no questions or comments, so he continues. I imagine everyone at the other end is hanging on his every word.

“We expected to see airborne vehicles. This species is capable of interstellar travel. Atmospheric flight would be simple by comparison, but we’re not seeing that. That we’re only seeing one type of vehicle deployed in multiple roles is telling—they came with a specific intent that did not include travel beyond the jungle, let alone beyond the DRC or the African continent. Whatever their objective, it’s local.

“These vehicles are small and slow. They’re designed for navigating rough terrain with a minimal amount of intrusion or disruption. Their primary purpose appears to be sampling the environment, but a number of them have been deployed in a defensive manner. They’re not intended for carrying anything from the space elevator, at least nothing of any size or for any large distance.”

He pauses and it’s not hard to see why he’s in this role as his observations are fascinating. Listening to him has a calming effect on me, and I suspect that goes for everyone else as well.

“Like the space elevator, these craft were manufactured locally—on Cruithne. They’re identical. They’ve been mass-produced specifically for traversing the Congo, with legs that reach just beyond the jungle canopy—which is a detail they would have only picked up once they entered orbit. From what I have been able to observe, they’re drones. They appear autonomous rather than piloted, but they move independently, not in a coordinated fashion.”

He pauses and the general asks, “Can you explain that last point in more detail?”

“They snatched one of our team, but have left us alone, allowing us to move unhindered—which is confusing. We’ve seen them take animals, like an aardvark, and bits of plant matter. With the exception of when they established the outer perimeter, their motion is random, being chaotic rather than systematic. It’s like they’re searching for things.”

The general asks, “Who did they take and why?”

“A local girl from the village. A teenager. Why? I’m not sure.”

My heart sinks. She has a name—a past and a future beyond simply being ‘a local girl.’ I know it’s nothing personal on Pretzel’s part, but I can’t divorce myself from what happened to Jana.

My mind casts back to something Dr. O’Brien said when we first met her by the datum point not more than thirty feet from where I’m sitting in the crumpled hull of the helicopter—forget everything you ever saw in Hollywood. As much as I’d like to imagine we’re somehow going to save Jana, it’s stupid wishful thinking. All three of us are injured. Even if we weren’t, even if we had guns and grenades, flamethrowers or nukes, we wouldn’t stand a chance against aliens from around some other star. That’s just a macho delusional fantasy, and I know it. A knot forms in my chest at the realization she’s gone. Forever.

Someone speaks over the top of Pretzel, asking, “What do you mean by autonomous? Do you mean there are no aliens?”

“Not that we’ve seen, but we are yet to reach the elevator. There might be a control point, some kind of ground base established there, or they could have remained in orbit, or the whole mission might be robotic. Earth is a temperate, moderate environment for us, but for them it could be as hostile as a lunar walk is to humans. In the wrong concentration, even oxygen is poisonous. Earth might be a hell hole for them.”

A woman asks, “Can you tell us about their purpose here on Earth? What are they trying to accomplish?”

Pretzel replies almost instantly. “I’m yet to establish their purpose, but I think there’s a distinct possibility this is not their first visit.”

He pauses, waiting a little longer than previously, but it seems no one wants to break his chain of thought.

“SETI has been conducting a detailed scan of possible systems of origin out to a distance of a hundred light years. I recommend that be increased to at least eight hundred, if not a thousand light years, which will encompass several million stars.”

A disembodied voice asks, “That far out?”

While another asks, “What makes you think they’ve been here before?”

Yeah, that’s the question I’m interested in too. Is Pretzel going to mention Ezekiel?

Pretzel’s trying not to talk over the top of anyone but the time delay due to the routing of the conversation between planes, satellites and whatever makes it difficult.

“Their approach is very specific—too specific. Singling out a small portion of Earth’s land surface when two thirds of the planet is covered in water is highly unusual. They’ve picked a region that has the highest concentration of plant, animal and insect species along the equator. How did they know to come to this particular spot? Their vehicles are custom built to traverse just this location, but why?

“All this implies some prior knowledge and what we would call ‘target selection.’ A previous mission may have been undertaken for reconnaissance and planning.

“Also, they’ve effectively ignored us—which doesn’t make sense unless their goal is quite narrow and very specific. Although it’s conceivable they could select Africa using telescopes, based on the density of plant coverage in this region and assuming that corresponds with a high proportion of associated species, the other possibility is that some earlier probe conducted an initial survey and the results of that mission have directed the current activity.”

General McCallister asks, “But why search for their home world at a distance of a thousand light years? That’s a helluva long way out.”

Pretzel replies, “If they did encounter Earth at some earlier time, given the nature of their spider-like craft and the minimal impact they have on the environment there wouldn’t be any remaining physical evidence, but any interaction with humanity would have been recorded in writing—probably not in scientific terms, but it would have been notable to those alive at that time.”

I’m on the edge of my seat, waiting for him to talk about Ezekiel, but Pretzel downplays that angle.

“If contact was made in the last five hundred years, there would be ample documentation available today.

“If it happened in the last thousand years, we’d expect to find numerous surviving manuscripts, but once we go back more than two thousand years, our ability to preserve information is extremely poor. As an example, there are numerous books by writers such as Euclid, Aristotle and Archimedes that have been lost. All we know about them is their titles as recorded in other books because mediums like papyrus simply aren’t suited for surviving for more than a few hundred years. So, if this is a follow-up mission, as I suspect, then we have two constraining factors that govern the distance to their home world.

“First, their craft is limited by the speed of light so their point of origin must be local. The further away they are, the less likely it is they would be willing or able to undertake such a journey. Put simply, they haven’t come here from Andromeda.

“Second, any initial probe must have arrived over two thousand years ago or we would have substantial documentation about its exploits in our writings. By my reckoning, that puts the band of when they could have previously encountered Earth at roughly two to two and a half thousand years ago. That sets the upper limit on their home world being eight hundred to a thousand light years away when you account for a round trip.

“You have to realize, regardless of who these aliens are, for them this is a colossal undertaking. It requires planning, logistics, resources, investment of time and effort, probably spanning dozens of generations. For them, this would be on par with the great works of our civilization—the building of Stonehenge, the pyramids, sailing to the New World, walking on the Moon. We’re probably not the only ones that think this is a big deal. They probably first discovered life on this tiny rock by accident, searching the skies with their telescopes, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago, long before our civilization arose. For us, this is a surprise—not so for them.”

The President interrupts, asking, “So this is definitely not hostile? You’re sure of that?”

“Put yourself in their shoes, Mr. President. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to fund such a mission, to sustain public interest and support over multiple administrations, to divert resources and dedicate scientific institutions to figuring out the sheer logistics of such an endeavor? All because you want to watch another planet burn? It’s far more likely they’re driven by a desire to explore and understand—not invade. There would be tens of millions of other nearby planets and moons they could choose from if they wanted land. No, they’re not here to take over. They’re reaching out like Magellan and Darwin, sailing among the stars, looking for life.”

Pretzel pauses. There’s murmuring in the background along with someone madly typing. Pretzel takes their silence as a license to continue.

“Given it would take hundreds, perhaps even as much as a thousand years for messages from the first probe to reach their home world, then some time for them to design and deploy a follow-up mission and another thousand years for that mission to get here, traveling at a reasonable proportion of the speed of light, we’re probably talking about a total elapsed time of two-and-a-half thousand years. They’ve been watching us, working toward this moment for a very long time, so—at a minimum—we should be looking at least eight hundred to a thousand light years away in all directions.”

My head is swinging.

“What about the Orion?” Pretzel asks. “What have we learned from that approach? Were the astronauts able to establish communication or get any kind of response from the ship?”

“We sent it up without a crew,” General McCallister replies.

“What? Why?”

“We’re fighting wars on multiple fronts down here,” the general says. “It’s not just the Russians that want to attack. We’re fighting public opinion, with 48% of the US population thinking this is an invasion and we’re fools not to strike while we still can. We simply couldn’t afford casualties, so we sent it up under remote control from Houston.”

“And?”

“And they intercepted it—no comms. All our sensors cut out at the point they brought the Orion into their craft.

“There’s a helluva lot of fear over here, Pratul. People are saying this is the end of the world.”

“It’s not.”

Someone else within the room asks, “Why haven’t they made any meaningful contact with us?”

“They probably don’t know we exist—not in our current form. It’ll be at least another seven to eight hundred years before anyone on their home world sees any kind of industrialization in our atmosphere or detects us harnessing the electromagnetic spectrum for communication.

“They know they’re probing a planet with life, but they probably don’t recognize it as one with advanced intelligent life. When they first encountered Earth, we were entangled in superstition, barely able to master the rudiments of metallurgy, scrapping over patches of dirt in the desert. To them, we’re like pigmies in the jungle—or we were.”

“But they’re here now,” a woman says. “They’re right here—in orbit. Right above us.”

“Are they?”

I don’t know quite what Pretzel means and I doubt anyone else does either as no one interrupts him.

“I do not believe we have been visited by aliens but rather by their ambassadors—their machines.”

Garcia can’t contain himself, “What the hell?” But he’s cut off by the radio.

“Wait,” the President says. “So there are no aliens, just machines?”

“I don’t know that for certain,” Pretzel replies. “But that would explain the lack of communication, the lack of variation in their actions. When the Russians bombed the jungle the aliens made no attempt to shift their landing zone. They stuck with the plan, releasing their walkers and simply sending them out further, which doesn’t make sense unless they were following a prescribed program of action.”

“But you don’t know that for sure?” some other nameless voice several thousand miles removed from us asks. “They could be sitting up there with an army of invaders just waiting to send them down.”

“Waiting for what?” Pretzel asks. “Why would they do that? Every action is driven by motive. Why would they want to wage war? What have we got that can’t be found anywhere else in absurd abundance? Water? Gold? Platinum? You can get all of that from the asteroid belt. No, they have nothing to gain by destroying our world.”

He pauses before continuing.

“I need more time. If there is an alien crew up there, I need time to establish comms with them. You’ve got to keep the Russians out of this.”

“We’re doing all we can,” the President says.

General McCallister says, “On a practical note: we know of at least one Russian team that made it through the cordon, so be careful.”

Before Pretzel can reply, the President asks, “Dr. Khatri-Lagharin, could you clarify your point—point—point—p—p—point.”

“We’re losing you, say again?”

Garcia shakes his head softly. I think he was surprised any contact could be made at all, let alone a conversation.

“—by the Russians.”

“Sorry, could you repeat that?” Pretzel asks, becoming frustrated.

The radio fades in and out. At times it’s clear, but then becomes vague and muddy.

“The Russians are the wildcard,” the President says. “They’re insisting this is an invasion. They want to launch a counter-offensive. Throw everything we’ve got at these things.”

“Mr. President,” Pretzel says. “We can’t let that happen. Their fear would be a disaster for life on this planet.”

I’m not entirely sure if the President can hear Pretzel as he keeps talking over the top of him.

“They’re calling this Stalingrad.”

“This is not an invasion.”

“How can you be sure this is not an invasion?”

“This is not an invasion,” Pretzel says again, repeating himself, trying to sound confident, wanting to convey certainty, knowing we could lose contact at any moment. He speaks swiftly. “There’s no military objective. No geographic importance. No strategic value.”

He pauses. The radio is silent.

“Mr. President? General McCallister?”

There’s no reply.

Capture

Garcia and Pretzel tinker with the radio but it’s dead.

I try to coax Lady out of the helicopter, but she won’t leave. She mulls around in the back of the fuselage, trying to stay out of sight. Sheet metal groans as her weight shifts. She rocks on her backside, fiddling with her hands. As the sun rises through the trees, casting shadows around us, she becomes agitated.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

Leathery fingers grip the edge of the open metal door. Intelligent eyes stare out from the darkness, but she’s nervous. Her world has been devastated—the once mighty jungle shielding her from the outside world has been scorched and leveled. Trees that appeared unmovable have been uprooted and tossed aside like twigs. Her family is dead, leaving her alone.

“We need to keep moving,” Pretzel says, which surprises me as normally it’s Garcia cracking the whip. Pretzel climbs over the center console, gathering a bunch of things he’s salvaged and stuffing them in a day pack. He drops to the dirt, grimacing slightly on his sore leg.

Garcia says, “We should make for Obekote.”

“You heard Josh,” Pretzel replies, checking the bandage around his thigh. “It’s at least fifty miles away across the swollen Congo river.”

Garcia is pragmatic. “Once we clear the blast zone, we’ll find tracks, trails, possibly roads. We may encounter other villages—other humans. They’ll have medicine, canoes, boats. We can do this.”

I take Lady’s hand, gently tugging, urging her out of the fuselage. Although her fingers are large, they’re soft, hanging limp in mine, but she remains where she is, unable to leave the safety of the crashed helicopter. I wonder how she sees this metallic bird. Jana said the gorillas were scared of the noise made by the rotors. She must have seen the helicopters flying low over the jungle with a bunch of crazy, hairless apes all neatly dressed in clothes, sitting in the cockpit or hanging out the open sides. To see such a mechanical beast humbled must be unnerving. I doubt she hid here willingly, perhaps more out of necessity.

What goes through the mind of a primate when looking at humans? We think of them as animals, but do they see us as fakes, frauds pretending to be something we’re not, something other than Homo sapiens? They must marvel at how we chatter like birds in the trees, squawking and jostling. For all the diversity of our language, we have highly repetitive elements that must make them think we’re mad, like laughing—repeating the same sound over and over while convulsing. We smile, revealing our teeth when we’re full of joy, but to them it’s a sign of anger—that must be confusing. The only time I’ve seen Lady smile and mean it the way humans do is when she grins, but she makes sure her teeth are hidden. Imagine that, having to translate body language between species.

As she walks on her knuckles, taking her by the hand isn’t as practical as it seems, but I’m at a loss on how else to coax her from the crumpled remains of the helicopter.

Pretzel reaches into the cockpit, leaning through the broken Perspex front window. He grabs the tattered Bible from where it sits nestled on the flight controls of the helicopter, saying, “We need to get to that elevator.”

From what I can tell, picking up the Bible is a calculated act. Pretzel knows Garcia can’t see him and doesn’t realize I’m watching. I want to ask him about it, but Garcia is annoyed, perhaps angry about the idea of going to the space elevator.

“And why should we do that, Dr. Pratul Arjun Khatri-Lagharin? What the hell could that possibly accomplish? Look at us. What? You think we’re somehow going to fix all this?”

That’s the first time I’ve heard Petty Officer Garcia refer to Pretzel by his full name, but he’s being facetious. Pretzel tries to speak, but Garcia isn’t finished. There’s spittle on his cracked lips, anguish in his words.

“We can’t fix shit.”

“We have to try,” Pretzel says, discretely tucking the Bible into the small of his back, under his belt. I ignore them, not wanting to leave Lady. Whatever we do, she should come with us.

“Come on,” I whisper, letting go of her fingers, beckoning to her, trying to get her to follow me.

Lady rocks her head, neither nodding in agreement, nor shaking in disagreement—if she even understands those motions. With short hair surrounding her dark, leathery face, she seems pensive, unsure whether she can trust me. Her thin lips move as if trying to articulate a word so I speak for her, telling her what she needs to hear. She won’t understand the terms, but she’ll grasp the meaning from my tone and tempo.

“It’s okay. Come with me.”

Were it not for the blast, it would be a beautiful day in Africa—hot, but I’ve learned to love the sauna-like atmosphere here in the Congo. Sure beats freezing to death in a blizzard.

Looking around, the handful of trees still standing sway in a light breeze. Birds dance between the branches, flittering as they chase insects, calling to each other with passion, reassuring each other that life has returned to the jungle. Flies buzz through the air. Ants form lines on fallen branches, carting leaves and twigs back to their nest, moving with almost military precision. An eagle soars high in the sky, riding thermals with its feathers splayed at the end of its broad wings. No aliens.

The space rope or elevator or whatever is visible as a thin line reaching straight up, disappearing into the blue yonder, but I haven’t seen any machines since I first crawled up into the cockpit this morning. Somewhere over the next hill there’s an alien base, I guess, but they’ve left us alone. We’re safe. I hope. In the back of my mind, I wonder if that’s a dangerous assumption.

“What about you, kid?”

Ah, I really didn’t want to be drawn into this, but Garcia isn’t content to simply follow Pretzel. Being blind, he doesn’t have a lot of choice. He clambers out of the helicopter, feeling his way out through the open side door, stepping on the skid and then down onto the rocky ground. Twigs break under his boots.

“We all get a say in this.” Garcia is adamant. “You don’t have to blindly follow along, Josh.”

I really haven’t thought about that until now. I just assumed we were all in this together, that we would all stick together, that we should stay together because… I’m not sure why I think that, but it seems like the right thing to do.

“What do you say, Josh?” Garcia asks. “We’ve made contact with the outside world. We’ve done all we can. We should make a run for safety, make for Obekote. We need medical care.”

I look to Pretzel, but he doesn’t say anything. His eyes cast down at the debris around us, refusing to meet mine.

Garcia’s oblivious to the body language passing between us, but he seems to sense something is going on. He says, “You and me, Josh. We can make it out of here. If Pretzel wants to continue on, let him. We should get out while we still can.”

“I—”

I feel conflicted. I like and respect both men. I’m not sure who’s right. At this point, I don’t think there is a right or wrong decision—just a bunch of shitty decisions we need to make together. Africa be damned, with its gross over-simplifications of good and bad, black and white, righteous and evil. I agree with Pretzel. Maybe the aliens are just alien, and our notions of right and wrong are all messed up. For once, I want a decision to just be—and not have the pressure of being one thing or the other. Chocolate ice cream or vanilla? Soft gummy bears or hard candy? Mets ball cap or Seahawks jersey? It doesn’t matter so why should this?

This is what I hate about my dad. Everything’s sacred. The hand of the Lord guided our every step in coming to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but I don’t believe that—not any more. We came to Africa because that’s what dad wanted, not God or Jesus or anyone else. Certainly not the church. Our bishop back in Boston did all he could to talk dad out of coming here, but dad had heard his calling. Well, I don’t hear anything. I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t want to hear or there’s nothing to be heard, but for once, I just want to be. No more grandiose motives.

Pretzel is more like my dad than I’d like to admit. There’s a gulf between them in terms of science and religion, and yet beyond that, they’re both driven by conviction. The source of those convictions may differ, but not the sincerity or the passion.

“Josh?” Garcia asks, wanting my input. I look up into Lady’s dark eyes, noticing the bushy prominent cranial bump at the back of her head, the thick dark brow on her forehead, her wrinkled skin, broad nose and soft lips. The irony of our contrasting positions isn’t lost on me. Physically, she’s far stronger than me and yet she knows she’s more vulnerable because she’s alone, separated from her troop, most of whom are dead. Her eyes dart between mine, looking for a sign, wanting to believe me. I think she knows we’re leaving. I don’t think she wants to stay, but she feels conflicted. She feels safe here, but out there the unknown scares us all.

Finally, I say, “There’s what we want to do and what we should do.”

Neither man responds, allowing me to continue. Without facing either of them, looking Lady in each eye and seeing her intelligence longing, desperate to span the void between us, I say the only thing I can. “We should leave.”

Garcia nods. Pretzel hangs his head. This isn’t a democracy. He could go on alone, but he won’t.

My shoulder aches. Garcia’s skin is becoming red and inflamed. Pretzel hobbles when he walks. Honestly, I don’t think it makes too much difference what we do. We’re probably going to die long before we reach Obekote, but Garcia’s right. We’ll run into villages along the way and hopefully will get some help.

“Come on,” I say to Lady. She looks up at the sky and then around at the piles of debris lying scattered throughout the village before stepping down out of the helicopter, walking on her hands and feet. The long hair on her arms sways with her motion, giving elegance and grace to what would be a clumsy, cumbersome movement for me. She presses her knuckles into the soft mud, leaning forward as she walks on all fours, sniffing at the air.

Before I know what’s happening, she’s raised off the ground. Her shadow shifts, rippling across the broken branches. Tendrils wrap themselves around her waist, coiling over her arms and shoulders, holding her tight as she’s hoisted into the sky. An alien machine rises from where it was lying in wait, hiding on the far side of the helicopter. Its silvery dome reflects the wreckage back at us along with the clear blue of the sky. I see myself in its reflection—small and insignificant.

“No!” I yell as Lady is drawn up toward an opening in the base of this strange, celestial vessel. Without making any noise, its legs puncture the ruins of the church, pushing through to the ground beneath, propelling the machine on. Each leg is segmented, being made up of hundreds, probably thousands of joints, almost like the bones surrounding the spinal cord. They flex and sway, supporting the weight of the machine as Lady is dragged into its hull by dozens of mechanical tentacles. She’s fighting, screaming, bellowing, panicking, grabbing at the metal arms, trying to peel them from her body.

I run after the machine, leaping over boulders, jumping from the crushed remains of fallen roofs and collapsed mud walls. Swinging my arm causes it to throb as though it were struck by a red-hot poker, but I push through the pain.

“LADY!”

Pretzel’s running too, yelling at the top of his lungs, but the alien machine continues to rise, unfurling its legs as it reaches its full height, towering above us.

I grab a metal pipe lying on the ground, part of the plumbing that once allowed water to flow through the taps in my home, and I swing at one of the legs, striking at the gap between joints as the machine pivots, shifting its weight from one leg to another. Dozens of dangling tentacles swing beneath the alien vessel now that Lady is inside the mirrored dome. They fall toward me, unraveling as they descend hundreds of feet toward the jungle floor.

My efforts are futile, but I have to do something. The alien legs shine like the chrome alloy fittings on my father’s old Harley Davison. Again and again, I hit the rear leg. The reverberation coming through the pipe shakes my body, causing my injured arm to pulsate with pain, but I will not relent. To my surprise, the leg remains planted in the soil before me, while the other dangly appendages hanging beneath the machine swirl around, closing in on me as the alien machine twists around to face me. The dome descends rapidly, forcing the arms, legs and tentacles to splay wide, hovering above the ground like the tails of a dozen scorpions.

“No,” Pretzel yells. “Get away from that thing.”

I can’t. They took Jana. I can’t let them take Lady as well—not without a fight.

I strike harder, leaving rusted metal chips and flecks of paint wedged in the gaps between what looks to me like the joints of chrome-plated knuckles.

The head of the machine lowers, curling around in front of me, distorting the light. Inside, I can see Lady. She’s faint, ghost-like, but she has her hands pressed hard against the inside of the dome and in the silence is roaring, screaming with fear. She pounds her fists, but there’s no sound.

Dozens of metallic arms reach for me, spreading out on either side and looming over me. The sky, the jungle and the wreckage of the village reflect back at me in crazy, distorted shapes. Electricity arcs over the mirrored body of the craft, running along the arms and crackling in anger. I’ve seen this before, when the aliens shot into the distance, but I refuse to relent, striking at the leg again and again.

Suddenly, fingers wrap themselves around my wrist, holding my arm back, preventing the next blow.

“No,” I yell, seeing Pretzel standing behind me in the smooth, curved surface of the alien machine.

“Fight the battles you can win.”

“They took her,” I say, struggling to hold back tears. “They took Jana. They took Lady.”

“I know,” he says, but his grip is unrelenting, holding my arm high and wide.

I struggle, trying to pull free. Tears stream down my cheeks. The massive alien dome is so close I could reach out and touch it. My distorted reflection peers back at me. I could smash that image into a million pieces.

“Be smart,” Pretzel says as electricity arcs just inches from my face, threatening to explode in violence.

“Please,” I say, begging him to let me go. I don’t care if they take me. I don’t care if I die. I can’t go on like this. I can’t pretend anymore.

“Not here. Not now,” Pretzel whispers, dragging me slowly away from the machine. The vast reflective dome retreats as well, pulling back at the same rate. I drop the pipe.

“No lies,” I say with my lips quivering. “We’re going to get them, right? Both of them.”

“Both of them,” Pretzel replies, stepping back carefully over the ruins.

Tentacles reach for us. Although the body of the alien machine is rising in the air it is as though its tendrils have a mind of their own. Thin steel probes touch at our arms and heads, pressing softly, probing.

Pretzel whispers, “No sudden movements.”

He pulls me hard against himself, making as though we’re one. The dangly appendages taper to a point no thicker than my little finger, running over my chest and shoulders, poking beneath the bandages. Several of them prod the blood-soaked trousers rolled up over Pretzel’s leg.

I’m shaking. The alien machine reaches full height, walking away with its feelers trailing behind, reluctant to leave us. We stand there for a moment under the scorching sun with sweat dripping from us, still trying to process what just happened.

“Breathe,” Pretzel whispers.

The Plan

“What’s the plan?” Garcia asks.

“We go over there, get Jana and Lady, and get the hell out of here,” Pretzel replies, limping along with Garcia holding onto his shoulder, trailing behind him, stepping over debris as we make our way toward the space elevator.

“That’s not a plan. That’s an objective. Actually, that’s a series of objectives. How are we going to do all that? How do we even know they’re still down here? They could have been sent up there by now.”

“I don’t know,” Pretzel snaps. “I don’t fucking know, okay? Are you happy now? I have a dual PhD in Astrobiology and Astrophysics and can calculate relativistic metric tensors in my head—and I don’t fucking know!”

My arm really hurts. My fingers are throbbing. Blood seeps from the wound on my shoulder, running down the inside of my arm. I’m burning up but not from the heat of the jungle. I’ve had this before. Infection. Tiny splinter in my finger. Ignore it for a few days. Goes a little red. Turns into a boil. Dad panics when he finds out and scolds me and starts pushing antibiotic tablets into my mouth every eight hours without fail until at least a week has passed. I miss my dad.

I stumble but regain my footing, not wanting the others to realize how quickly I’m coming apart. Jana and Lady, they’re important. I’ve got to make it for their sakes. I don’t want Pretzel and Garcia stopping on my account. One boot in front of the other. Concentrate on the next step. Don’t think about anything else. Distance is no object. I only need to take that next step. Stay in line with Pretzel and Garcia. Follow the rhythmic plod of their boots and the crunch of dead foliage.

We reach the brow of the hill and look down into the valley. Now we’re close, I can see the rope forming the space elevator is actually a ribbon. We’re approaching on an angle, so we can’t see the full width, but it’s probably thirty feet wide, if not more and has a shine to it as though oil was spilt on a stream cascading over a waterfall. At the base, there’s a platform. Alien machines swarm over the smooth, flat surface like ants, being dwarfed by the sheer height of the elevator. Seeing our goal so close gives me strength. It’s all downhill from here.

“Magnificent,” Pretzel says.

“I take it we’re staring at this thing, right?” Garcia asks.

“Yep.”

“And it’s?”

“Big,” I say, being horribly vague. “Lots of alien stuff.”

Not the most scientifically accurate description but as even Pretzel is at a loss to describe the base station, it’ll do. Honestly, the less Garcia knows the better. It looks like we’re walking straight into a hornet’s nest.

“Sounds like fun,” Garcia says with his head hanging low and his arm set firmly on Pretzel’s shoulder.

“Oh, so much fun,” Pretzel replies. All pretense is lost. None of us have any illusions about what’s going to happen down there. There’s no Sigourney Weaver with a flamethrower or Arnold Schwarzenegger covered in mud ready to take the fight to these aliens—just us.

Another alien spider-like machine walks past with its curiously thin legs and dangling arms reflecting the sunlight. It passes surprisingly close to us without making any noise, ignoring us entirely. Are we invisible?

We move into the shade of a small clutch of burnt trees, which brings relief from the oppressive sun. I catch sight of a monkey swinging from the branches. How he survived, I don’t know. He’s looking for food, calling for other monkeys, but there’s no response to his eerie cries. Given the wall of noise that normally surrounds us, his hollow, echoing call sounds sad, almost a cry of grief.

Pretzel looks up at the tall machine swaying as it passes by. “Well, the good news is they don’t see us as a threat.”

“That’s because we’re not,” Garcia replies, laughing.

Alien machines approach the central platform from all directions, converging on the base of the elevator.

“Look,” I say, pointing, only then realizing that’s insensitive to Garcia.

Pretzel explains. “The machines—they’re shedding their domes, swapping them out, sending them up on the elevator and grabbing new ones. It’s like they’re swapping heads.”

I’ve become so accustomed to watching the lanky alien spider machines picking their way over the devastated jungle that to see just the legs moving around is startling. Their tentacle-like appendages pluck off the dome and replace it with a new one before venturing back out. Wide strides have them clear the platform and disappear over the surrounding hills in a matter of minutes.

Garcia doesn’t seem bothered by any of this, keeping his head down, following along behind Pretzel.

“Being blind gives yah time to think, you know.”

I can’t imagine what Petty Officer Garcia’s going through having been robbed of his sight. I’d be tripping and stumbling, scared of bumping into things or falling over, but he strides confidently behind Pretzel, listening to the sound of Pretzel’s boots so he can anticipate what’s coming next. When Pretzel steps on some spongy branch that bends and cracks, Garcia lifts his boots a little higher in the next step. If Pretzel walks on loose gravel, Garcia picks up on the crunch and lets himself relax a little, allowing his boots to fall naturally.

“I’ve figured it out. I know why they don’t want us.”

“Why?” Pretzel asks.

“No one’s willing to pay for damaged goods... That’s right, isn’t it, Doc? That’s why they’re here. They’re collecting specimens. They’ve got their butterfly nets and tranquilizer darts, hunting big game and small. But you don’t shoot the sick. Not if you want a trophy kill.”

Pretzel is a little introspective, neither confirming nor challenging Garcia’s point, simply saying, “I guess.”

A mud slide has buried the fallen trees in this region, making it easier to traipse through the ruins. The dirt has dried but is soft under foot.

The base of the space elevator is flat but circular and looks as though it’s made from polished concrete or marble. There are staging areas. Large bundles of mirror-domes are stacked on one side, being picked up by the machine legs and transformed into the walking alien spiders we’ve seen throughout the jungle. At a guess, the platform is the size of a football stadium. The sides slope away, tapering to the ground, but there’s some kind of tunnel under the platform. Without any discussion, we make for that, even though it appears to be the source of the yellow/green goo flowing into the streams and rivers.

“Plan seems to be going well,” Garcia says, clearly enjoying the soft mud shifting beneath our boots.

“Best plan I’ve ever had,” Pretzel replies. He’s salvaged a straight-ish branch and is using it as a walking stick, picking his way over the rocks and hard-packed mud like some wizened sorcerer on an epic quest. If only he could cast spells and draw upon magic.

On reaching the platform, Pretzel leans down and touches at the smooth surface, running his fingers softly over the marble-like stone. Garcia crouches as well, simply because Pretzel dropped down and it’s easy to mimic his action. He too reaches out in the same direction, following Pretzel as he leans to the left.

“So this is it, huh?”

“This is it,” Pretzel replies.

I kneel, placing my hand on the slick surface. I’m not sure what I expected to feel, but there’s no epiphany. This could be the war memorial in Kisangani or the base of the George Washington statue in Boston and yet it’s not. This is from another world. I guess technically that world is the asteroid Cruithne, as that’s where this material would have come from, but it was crafted by creatures from some other star system and that is pretty damn wild.

I notice Pretzel chooses to walk alongside the platform in the mud rather than stepping on it even though there’s what looks like a concrete lip we could walk on.

Yellowish green gunk runs from the opening in the base of the platform. The tunnel is oval in shape and big enough for a car to drive inside. We come to a halt somewhat symbolically, pausing before stepping up and into the darkness. Whereas the outside of the platform was slick and plain to look at, inside there’s a hive of activity. Alien machines clamber over the tiered walls of the tunnel, which seem to act like shelves. Like the machines we’ve seen carrying the mirrored domes over the jungle, they’re conglomerations of thin, chrome-plated tentacles. They’re like a mechanical octopus without a body—spiders without an abdomen.

The only light within the tunnel comes from glowing points embedded in the walls.

“Are you sure about this?” Garcia asks, which is precisely what I was going to ask. Although he can’t see the spindly robots, he can hear them scurrying about, scratching at the walls. “Is this really necessary?”

“All part of the plan,” Pretzel replies.

“Liar.” This time, it’s me providing the counterpoint and Garcia laughs softly at how I’ve beaten him to his punchline.

As the machines are no larger than a small monkey and can clamber upside down on the ceiling, they give us a wide berth, which is fine by me. Pretzel pulls out a flashlight he must have retrieved from the helicopter and examines the various things on the wall. None of it makes any sense to me, but he seems fascinated by the array of soft, flickering lights. As the tunnel winds within the base, we lose the light from the opening and find ourselves relying solely on the flashlight.

“What are you thinking, doc?” Garcia whispers, sensing Pretzel’s growing curiosity as we walk on.

“It’s a laboratory,” Pretzel says. “There are hundreds of sterile vials—the equivalent of our petri dishes only on a smaller scale. They’re growing cultures, analyzing microbes, testing them in a variety of manners. Look at how everything is connected and yet sealed.

“None of this would be out of place in a sophisticated lab on Earth. They’re running gas analyzers to look at the respiration of microbes—it’s  textbook stuff.

“There’s even a UV light to stimulate growth. That, up there, is some kind of centrifuge to separate components. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an autoclave in here somewhere.”

He’s excited at recognizing the equipment and forgets Garcia can’t see.

“That’s an orbital shaker. Look at how it’s swirling the liquid around, teasing out bio-chemical reactions. Oh, and there’s a vortex mixer.”

Garcia asks, “What does it all mean, doc?”

“It means we’re not that dissimilar—not in terms of chemistry or time.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, falling a little behind, fascinated by the sheer scale of all the work being undertaken and the robotic helpers clambering over the walls to tend to their experiments.

“We assumed—I assumed there would be more of a gap,” Pretzel says, walking slowly on through the darkness, losing any apprehension he had. “Time scales in the universe are vast. We’ve only just reached any appreciable level of technology in the last couple of hundred years. Given complex life has existed on Earth for at least six hundred million years, that’s such a tiny fraction it would normally round down to zero, and yet we call it civilization. As they’ve followed some similar evolutionary path, they could be hundreds of thousands, millions, perhaps even tens of millions of years more advanced, but they’re not. This is equipment I could use. They’re our contemporaries.”

“How do you know?” I ask as he examines a dim hologram floating above one of the devices. To me, it looks like a bird’s nest, only there’s no soft, squishy, padded-down section in the middle. It’s a tangle of twine.

Pretzel doesn’t reply, he’s too busy examining the hologram from different angles. He’s found he can manipulate it, rotating and enlarging it with his hands simply by grasping at the thin air around it.

“Looks like the ear phone cords in my desk,” I say.

“It’s DNA,” he replies. “They’re trying to understand our biology.”

“I thought DNA looked like a ladder or something, you know, twisting in a spiral. That looks like an afro.”

He laughs. “In the textbooks, maybe, but within the nucleus of a cell it’s all squished and compressed, jumbled up like this, but meticulously jumbled in a chemically astonishing manner. DNA is only neatly arranged when a cell divides.”

“So, they want to know what makes us tick,” Garcia says. “To what end? So they can be more effective at killing us?”

“Think like a scientist,” Pretzel replies. “Not a soldier. Not everything is about death and destruction. If they wanted to kill us, they wouldn’t need this level of detail.”

Begrudgingly, Garcia accepts that point.

As there are all kinds of levers and devices stretching into the darkness, most of them too high to reach, Pretzel doesn’t respond when I say, “Hey, there’s an arm.” He’s probably thinking I’m describing something mechanical with hinges, but it’s a human arm, severed at the shoulder. At first, I wonder if it is from one of the Russians, but the skin is dark and charred. It’s mounted as though the person was somehow embedded inside the middle tier of the wall, with just their arm hanging outside the alien concrete.

I touch it. Stupid, I know, but there’s something alluring about a human arm in the middle of this meandering alien laboratory. Perhaps it’s that it’s not encased in anything, like the microbial specimens. Perhaps it’s a sense of familiarity, but I reach out, touching softly at the muscles on the forearm, watching as they twitch slightly under my fingers.

Life in the jungle is very different from growing up in the suburbs of Boston—and it’s not just the lack of snow in winter. Chicken dinners come with feathers instead of plastic, with fat drumsticks that allow the bird to strut around looking for seeds rather than being skinned and vacuum-packed ready for cooking. Here in Africa, we’re used to dinner having a name. Old Hen Solo or Princess Lay-ah stops producing eggs and that night she’s neatly arranged on a bed of rice. Before that can happen, though, her head needs to be severed from her body, and the kids in the village loved playing ‘catch,’ chasing a headless chicken around until it finally keels over, so I’m not surprised to see fingers flex and twitch in response to my hand gliding over the back of the wrist.

I know it’s morbid, but I don’t feel repulsed by the arm, more curious. I wonder about the owner. Is owner the right word? This was someone once. Not anymore, though. Now, it’s nothing more than Sir Clucks-a-lot with us teens running after it as blood spurts from its neck, staining its immaculate white feathers in a brilliant red.

The skin is rough. Veins run over the back of the hand. There are calluses on the fingers. Perhaps it’s a little macabre, but this is who we are as humans. We interact with the world using our hands, and yet we never think of them in mechanical terms.  This could be me, which is a chilling thought.

In a single, swift motion, the arm flexes, shifting, rolling under mine and then whipping over the top, grabbing my wrist. Fingers like iron seize my arm and I scream, pulling away.

Light flashes around me as Pretzel rushes back down the tunnel. The more I pull, the tighter the hand holds me. As my other arm is in a sling, I’m helpless.

“Get it off. Get it off me,” I yell.

Pretzel runs up beside me, leaving Garcia somewhere further along the tunnel.

“Easy,” he says, quickly assessing what’s happened. He shines the light up and down the arm, looking at where it protrudes from what appears to be a mechanical socket.

Pretzel holds me tight, wrapping his arms around my chest, which hurts. He lifts me off the ground, moving me closer, which is precisely where I don’t want to be.

“Relax. Don’t struggle. The more you fight, the more it’ll hold fast.”

I’m not sure how he knows that, but even in my panicked state I can see the logic. Pulling away caused it to tighten. Although it’s my natural, instinctive reaction, it only makes the severed hand squeeze harder.

I’m hyperventilating.

“Raise your arm, reduce the pressure,” Pretzel says, and as I do so, the fingers relax. They don’t let go, but I can feel them easing.

“Slowly,” he whispers, scanning the arm with the flashlight, looking at the strange alien device it’s attached to like the ball and socket of a shoulder. Hundreds of tiny red and green lights flicker rapidly, no doubt processing the interaction. Without provoking it further, he guides my hand backwards, slipping my wrist from the cold, dead fingers. As soon as I can, I whip my hand away, down beside me.

Pretzel runs the flashlight slowly over the arm, spotting tiny silver threads embedded in the skin, forming an elaborate mesh, looking at it with what I can only describe as admiration, something I do not feel at all.

“They’re exploring the mechanics of our biology.”

I’m quiet.

“Don’t touch.”

“Yeah, I got that,” I say. “This is all part of the plan, right?”

Pretzel just smiles, trying not to laugh.

Jolly Ranchers

I’m shaken by what just happened, but I’m okay. Pretzel shines the flashlight in each of my eyes, although I’m not sure what he’s looking for. All he seems to accomplish is the destruction of my night vision and for the next few minutes, everything outside of the flashlight rippling across the tiered shelves is pitch black.

“Do you want to go back?” he asks.

“No, I’m good.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I know.”

“You could wait outside.”

“I’m fine.”

He doesn’t say anything, but my trembling hands scream, “Liar!” I know he saw them as his flashlight rippled across my chest and arms, checking for injuries. In the darkness, things scratch the walls. Things, not creatures. These things are not whole, just parts. A wing flexes in the shadows. Claws stretch. Somehow, dismembered heads groan. Deep down, I want to turn back, but I can’t. I have to know.

Within a few minutes, Pretzel is back to his usual inquisitive self, absorbed in what he’s seeing around him and forgetting we’re in the bowels of some alien laboratory with partially dismembered and dissected animals all around us. They’re alive and yet they’re not.

There are numerous smaller side-tunnels branching off from the main walkway, but they’re thin and narrow. Some of them are quite low, being something I could only crouch within. Pretzel shines his light down them as we pass. I’m not sure what he’s expecting to see, but chrome legs scurry back into the darkness, staying out of the light. A few of these areas are little more than alcoves recessed in the lower tier, others appear quite deep and curve away from the main tunnel.

One thing I notice is that there are very few straight lines within the platform, which is strange. I guess I’m so used to human architecture where everything is based on squares and rectangles, or shapes like triangles. The alien structure, though, is dominated by curves.

“Hey, look at this,” Pretzel says, pointing at a clear container on the lower tier. “What does that remind you of?”

He taps on what looks like a plastic tray, but probably isn’t. There are three elongated bright red pellets lying next to each other, each roughly the thickness of my little finger.

“What are they?” I ask.

“Dunno, but they look like Jolly Ranchers?”

I get what he’s doing. He’s trying to find something, anything to take my mind of what just occurred, but it’s not happening—we’re in the depths of an alien base station with severed arms and legs mounted on the walls.

There’s a leopard skin with the skull intact. The eyes move, following our motion as though the creature is about to pounce. A severed elephant trunk flexes, mounted on a silver approximation of a skull. The dismembered face of a Mandrill yawns, stretching its jaw and baring its teeth as the flashlight ripples over it. Birds slowly flap their wings, making as though they’re about to take flight, but they’re securely fastened to the middle tier with metallic footings.

Silver threads surround torn fragments of various trees, with fine tendrils reaching into the bark. Vines and leafy branches are mounted inside what appear to be glass cabinets, only like everything else, the glass is curved, being akin to vast test tubes turned upside down. This place is a nightmare, but Pretzel’s trying to distract me with something I might find familiar. I don’t have the heart to tell him, but I’ve been in Africa for just over four years—I haven’t seen candy since I was thirteen. As for those “Jolly Ranchers,” I wonder what they’re actually made from? Dried-up blood? If so, whose?

Jolly Ranchers do remind me of my childhood, though.

My dad saw the light in prison. He’d lived a life of hard drugs, stolen motorcycles and bar brawls. Along the way he robbed the odd 7-11 for rent money, but it was Jolly Ranchers that landed him in jail.

With tattoos on his arms and shoulders, stretching up the back of his neck, Dad wasn’t the most congenial guy to run into in a swanky shopping mall. The way Dad tells it, he was frisked by a couple of cops in the food court because he matched the description of a rapist—which seems to be the excuse the cops would use for just about any stop-and-search. For once, Dad really was going to the store for diapers. I was a year old and my Mom was still living with us. The police found a bunch of old Jolly Ranchers in the upper pocket of his jacket. They’d been there for months and were nasty, which made the cops think they were a cover for something else—meth colored in disguise.

A field test of the sticky, gooey, not-so-Jolly Ranchers came back positive and Dad was thrown in jail on a $500,000 bond. Needless to say, neither Mom nor Dad nor any of our relatives could stump up half a million bucks so he sat there in jail for four months until the backlogged judicial system finally brought him to trial.

Oh, they figured out the Jolly Ranchers weren’t drugs after about two weeks, but no one connected the dots—not the least his court-appointed attorney. It wasn’t until the arresting officer was called as a witness by the prosecution that the matter was cleared up. False positive, they said. Dad threatened to sue, but thought better of attracting more scrutiny from the cops.

During that time, though, Dad found the Lord—or the Lord found him. He tells the story both ways. His cellmate had a passion for teaching from the King James Bible and Dad had nothing but time to listen. When he got out, he said he was a new man because of something Saint Paul said in Corinthians. Mom didn’t believe him. She left. That she left us both still bothers me. Him, I can understand. The stress of being falsely accused and thrown in jail, and knowing the real thing could occur with the right witness stepping forward was too much for her, but why didn’t she take me with her? I guess she looked at me and saw him.

For the most part, I was raised by my grandmother on my dad’s side of the family, with Dad living in the basement.

After a few months volunteering at the local church and helping out as coordinator of the local addict group, Dad applied for seminary college. He was rejected, of course, but he never took no for an answer and through self-paced study and night school finally made the grade.

No one was going to tell my dad where to go or what to do. In some ways, I think the local bishop was glad when Dad shipped off from Boston as a missionary, as Christian or not, Dad still had a fiery temper and could raise the roof in an argument.

Whoever thought Jolly Ranchers could change someone’s life?

Pretzel’s flashlight falters, threatening to plunge us into near total darkness were it not for the binary flicker of the soft greens and reds from within the laboratory. Spider-like legs cast shadows around us as alien machines creep over the walls and ceiling. Call me paranoid, but I think they’re watching us, following us. Haven’t we seen enough? Can’t we go back now? I’m about to say something when Pretzel holds out his hand, signaling for me to come to a halt.

“Josh,” he says. “Go back to the entrance.”

“What?” I reply, suddenly defiant. Back when he was blinding me with the flashlight, it was a suggestion. This is a command, and that provokes a backlash. It feels wrong so I push the point, asking, “Why?”

“Josh. Please. Just go.”

I turn and look behind me. There’s a dim glow on the walls of the tunnel, barely enough to navigate by. Not enough to avoid bumping into something again. The thought of being grabbed by another dismembered arm is less than appealing.

“But—”

“Josh?” another voice says, only this isn’t Pretzel or Garcia. This is a voice I’d recognize anywhere.

“Dad?”

“Josh,” Pretzel says with a commanding voice that doesn’t suit him. “Get out of here now.”

“Dad, is that you? Where are you?”

“Josh?” my father replies. “What are you doing up at this time of night. Go back to bed.”

I’m confused. I creep forward beside Pretzel, who shines the flashlight at his feet. He holds his finger to his lips. I nod, unsure why, resisting the temptation to call out to my father.

“Josh? Are you there?” Dad asks.

Pretzel shakes his head, holding me back with an outstretched arm, wanting me to retreat.

“You can’t do this,” I whisper. “He’s my father.”

“He’s not your father,” Pretzel says, trying to block my view. “Not anymore.”

“I have to see him.”

Pretzel says, “Don’t do it, Josh. There are some things you can’t unsee.”

“I must,” I say, pushing past and taking the flashlight from him. For his part, Pretzel doesn’t fight me anymore. He could wrestle the flashlight away or refuse to give it to me, but he doesn’t. He must understand. I could never leave here without knowing what happened to my father.

Pretzel whispers, “Don’t get too close.”

A lump rises in my throat. Like Pretzel, I keep the flashlight low, pointing just in front of my boots. Darkness surrounds me like a cloak.

“Josh, is that you?”

My voice is soft, but I have to say something, even though I’m unsure who or what I’m replying to in the darkness. “Yes, Dad.”

“I don’t want you seeing her, do you understand me?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“I forbid it. You will have nothing to do with that girl.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Say it. I want to hear it from your lips... Say it, Josh. Say you won’t have anything to do with her.”

It’s then I realize, Pretzel’s right—this isn’t my father. Here in the darkness, all I’ve done is agree with him, but he can’t process that. Whoever or whatever this is, it’s not my father, not as I knew him.

Slowly, I bring the light up. There are four tiers on the wall, each just a couple of feet high and acting as a ledge for the various workstations used by the machines clambering over the tunnel with their shiny chrome legs.

The lower level has more of the instruments we saw earlier, shaking samples and spinning them, growing cultures and making comparisons. Some of them include insects seemingly frozen in resin. The second has a series of holograms, each dim, awaiting a hand or some other movement to brighten and spring into life, each looking like a tangle of wool. The third has body parts, but they’re burnt or have been violently severed—the tail of a monkey, the hind legs of a leopard, the wings of a once majestic bird, coiled vipers, branches, vines.

The upper tier has larger, more complete animals. A bonobo languishes with its arms hanging limp and its head rolling to one side. Its fur is badly burnt and it has lost a leg, something that would be fatal within seconds in the jungle. Blood drips from the stump below its waist. Shiny chrome fittings anchor its back to the wall. It twitches, but not with life, not as I know it. To me, the bonobo is more reminiscent of those headless chickens we’d kill for supper, going through the motions of life without any hope of life itself. Nerves fire, muscles respond, arms move, but it’s dead.

A pangolin has been mounted on the ledge beside the bonobo, but its overlaid scales, which normally act as natural armor, have been largely stripped away, revealing burnt flesh. Its snout samples the air. Beside it is the upper torso of one of the villagers. The man’s body seems to grow out of the wall. The pseudo-concrete surrounding him gives way to precision machined parts extending into his ribs. His arms twitch, while his head occasionally moves, responding to the light even though his eyes are blind, with just the whites visible. Yellow gunk oozes from wounds in his chest, running down his skin, dripping onto the next tier.

My father is next to him. A lump rises in my throat. The left side of his face is badly burnt. He’s lost his hair and one ear, with only a mass of raw, angry flesh remaining. His body is more complete than that of the villager, extending from his waist, but his legs are gone, replaced with metallic stubs. His left arm is badly injured while his hand is black and has shriveled up like a burnt twig. The skin has peeled away from his shoulder, revealing muscle and sinew. Black soot lines his neck, hiding his tattoos. Spider-machines crawl over his bare chest, apparently probing him as we speak.

“Dad, I—”

His head moves with a tick, as though he were more machine than man, like the animatronics in a theme park. His eyes too are blind, staring into the darkness, not looking at anything in particular. “You have to understand. We’re different.”

I know what he’s saying. He’s not talking about here and now. This is our conversation from the morning the soldiers and scientists arrived, and yet it’s equally true for us in the depths of this alien base station.

Tears fall from my eyes. I can still hear the helicopters roaring overhead on that fateful morning, shaking the manse, causing the plates on the table to rattle as the downdraft pounded our home. The surprise in his eyes, his sense of alarm at the coming danger, his instinctive reaction to protect me. I remember how abruptly our conversation ended without any conclusion. Perhaps that’s why it’s seared into his memory and replaying now.

“It’s a ticket out of the jungle.”

Back then in the safety of our home, he was referring to Jana wanting a way out of the village, but not now. Perhaps I’m reading too much into his words, but I feel as though he’s trying to tell me something by recalling that particular conversation. Perhaps this is all he has left. Perhaps this is all he can do to help me one last time. Perhaps what little of him remains is somehow reaching out to me by repeating that conversation.

“Do this for me, Josh.”

Yellow fluid drips from his lips, running down his neck and onto his burnt chest.

“Okay,” I say.

“Joshua, I’m talking to you. Do this for me, Josh.”

“I will, Dad.”

In the silence that follows, his shoulders stoop and his head hangs.

Pretzel is standing behind me with a hand resting gently on my good shoulder. He’s not trying to pull me away, merely to comfort me. I turn to him. Our eyes meet and I see the anguish in his soul. Tears run down his cheeks. Garcia has his head bowed. This moment hurts us all.

With the light no longer on him, Dad is still.

“Let him rest,” Garcia says. I nod and Pretzel leads me back toward the opening of the tunnel. I’m a mess, sobbing, burying my head in his shoulder as he comforts me. Is this what happened to Jana? Has Lady been subject to some cruel alien experiment as well? If we continued on up the tunnel, would we find them mounted like trophies on the wall? Pretzel was right, I would have rather not known.

“Why did they do this?” I ask as we approach the opening of the tunnel and step out into the bright sunlight. Birds soar past. Beetles crawl over the broken branches. Ants wind their way along the debris, busily, hurriedly going about their work. Life, it seems, refuses to stop for death.

Pretzel hangs his head, not making eye contact. “I don’t know.”

“It’s not fair,” I say, feeling angry. Emotions well up within my chest, causing me to choke. “It’s not.”

“No. It’s not.”

I turn, furious, wanting to direct my anger somewhere, at someone, and it’s then I realize Garcia’s not with us. I look around, confused, wondering if he’s still coming down the tunnel, but he’s not. My heart races. Pretzel seems to arrive at the same realization as his expression is one of horror.

“Garcia!” he yells, resting one hand on the opening of the tunnel and yelling into the darkness. “Petty Officer Garcia?”

Suddenly, I’m acutely aware of the slightest sounds around us. The rush of the wind, sticks breaking beneath my boots, the sound of alien water dripping from the tunnel, birds squawking in the distance.

Pretzel grabs me by my good shoulder. “Stay here.”

He takes the flashlight and limps back into the tunnel. I follow him. I never have been good at obeying adults. There are muffled sounds within the darkened tunnel. It’s as though someone’s screaming into a pillow somewhere in the distance.

“Garcia?” Pretzel’s worry is betrayed by the quiver in his voice.

Rather than rushing back along the sloping, curved path, he reaches out, steadying himself with each step, checking his surroundings, not wanting to move too fast. Darkness surrounds us. Vials and vats continue to stir their muddy ingredients. Spider-machines tend to their experiments, ignoring us. Tiny red and green lights flicker, pulsating with a rhythm like that of a heartbeat. Pretzel hobbles on, rocking on his injured leg.

“There!” I say, pointing at the ceiling.

Pretzel brings his flashlight up and we catch sight of Garcia pinned to the roof of the tunnel some ten feet above us. Chrome-plated snakes entwine themselves around the soldier, wrapping themselves across his arms and legs, coiling over his waist, tightening their grip, constricting his chest. Spider-machines cover his face. There are dozens of them hacking away at him, tearing at his bandages. Loose threads drift to the ground in front of us, floating on the slight breeze within the tunnel.

“No,” Pretzel yells, but we’re no threat and the machines continue their gruesome task. Glints of light reflect off knife blades and whirring saws. Blood drips from the ceiling as Garcia screams, yelling in pain.

“Please, no,” I say, and one of the thick chrome snakes peels away from the ceiling, gliding down through the air toward us.

I can hear Garcia hyperventilating, but I can’t see him, just a writhing, seething mass of alien machines hanging from the ceiling, entombing him in a metallic cocoon.

Pretzel pushes me behind him, stepping back slowly as the segmented snake-like robot twists and contorts before us. A face appears in the blunt mirrored surface that marks its head. At first, it’s like that of a viper, with eyes set on either side of the skull and the faint outline of scales, but the face changes, morphing into that of a bird not unlike an eagle, then a monkey with its gothic, deep-set eyes, long nose, thin lips and gaunt cheeks. Seconds later, the robot’s face distorts to become a gorilla somewhat similar to Tiny, with a dense, thick brow, beady eyes, wrinkled skin and a wide, broad, flat nose, all rendered in stunning chrome. It’s trying to match the pattern before it, trying to find the correct representation of us, as finally a human face appears—male, but African in its silvery appearance.

Even though the robot is highly reflective with its mirrored exterior twisting through various shapes, the face drifting in front of us is not European or Asian—high cheekbones, a broad nose and thick lips, along with a prominent chin and wide eyes stare at us coldly, not revealing any emotion. This looks like one of the villagers, but it’s no one I’ve ever seen.

Pretzel continues stepping back, pushing me away as the metallic face at the end of the segmented alien snake dances through the air before us, swaying like a cobra hanging from the ceiling. Its lips are pursed as though it could speak but won’t. It seems to stare right through me.

We edge back into the devastated jungle and the robot retreats, returning to what’s left of Petty Officer Garcia. Slowly, the moans and mumbling echoing down the tunnel subside. We stumble back into the sunlight, feeling numb.

Pretzel falls to his knees among the broken branches scattered across the ground. Like me, he’s physically and emotionally wrecked. To have my father reduced to an empty shell, and then to have Garcia snatched from us is gut wrenching. Although we always knew coming here could result in tragedy, we never really expected it—at least, I didn’t. Even with my arm in a sling, I felt invulnerable, invincible. We’ve survived so much. It seemed as though nothing could stop us—no explosions tearing through the jungle, no alien walkers towering over the land, no soldiers hunting us down, and yet here we are, reduced to just two.

How long before two becomes one?

And who will that be?

Pretzel or me?

As the sun is high overhead, the shadows are stark. The darkness within the tunnel seems impenetrable. Just when I feel as though nothing can take my focus off the alien platform there’s the distinct sound of a ratchet moving a hammer as it’s pulled back within a handgun, locking in place.

“Hello, father,” a distinctly Russian voice says. “Did you miss me?”

Sergei

“Sergei?” Pretzel says, surprised, scrambling to his feet.

“It’s good to see you again, father.”

Sergei holds a handgun outstretched toward us as he clutches at his side. The gun is a fancy chrome-plated revolver with a big barrel and a large hammer at the back, raised high, ready to lash out and strike the primer on a cartridge already loaded into the chamber. His finger twitches on the trigger. Squeeze and a bullet is going to lash out, exploding from the barrel faster than the speed of sound. It’ll tear through one of us before we have time to even register what’s happened.

Sergei’s clothing is burnt and torn from the grenade blast. He’s grabbing at a bloody patch on his uniform, just above his hip, where he was clipped by one of Garcia’s shots. He waves with the barrel of his gun, getting us to move away from the platform. I have my one good arm raised in surrender, holding my hand at shoulder height even though I’m no threat.

Pretzel pleads with him. “What are you doing, Sergei? You must know. You must realize you’re on the wrong side of history.”

“Am I?” Sergei asks with bitterness hanging on his every word. “You’ve been in there, right? You’ve seen the freak show.”

As he speaks, he becomes more animated, consumed with anger, yelling at us. “It’s an abomination! Look at what they’ve done. They’re experimenting on us!”

“Sergei,” Pretzel says with his hands out in front of him, appealing for calm.

“We’re lab rats! We’re nothing more than animals to them—test subjects.”

“They’re trying to understand—”

“That’s bullshit, Pretzel! That’s a lie and you know it. They have no regard for our intelligence. No compassion. No empathy. No ethical concern at all.”

Sergei spits as he yells at us, leaning forward and baring his teeth, flexing every muscle in his body in utter anger.

“I’ll tell you what this is. This is Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. This is the Nazis experimenting to probe the limits of human suffering, dissecting people, skinning them alive, and you want to talk about First Contact as though it is somehow the height of human endeavors? You’re blind, father. Blind.”

I don’t like the way Sergei’s waving his gun around. He’s using it almost like a pointer against some imaginary blackboard set between us and him. He jabs at the air, drawing sweeping arcs and scribing shapes as though he were madly scrawling some wild equation as he speaks.

“No, Earth must be cleansed of this filth. These atrocities must be stopped. First here, then in orbit. We need to send a message. Earth is off limits. The harvest is over.”

“Sergei,” Pretzel says. “This is a mistake.”

“This is a mistake?” Sergei asks in surprise, pointing the gun behind him, making as though he were about to shoot randomly into the tunnel. Then he swings the pistol around, pointing it at his own chest for a moment, “Or is this a mistake? Which is it, Pretzel?”

“We can’t judge them by the actions of barely 24 hours.”

Veins bulge on Sergei’s neck as he screams, “They’re silent!” He yells in stark contrast to his point, jabbing at us with the gun, making as though he’s about to shoot. “They haven’t said a goddamn word.”

White knuckles flex around the pistol grip. Spittle sits on his beard. Bloodshot eyes peer at us with hatred.

“Don’t you get that, father? They’re not talking to us. They spent four months on approach to Earth. Four months during which we knew they were coming. We hailed them in every possible, conceivable manner. Then they moved into orbit with a goddamn asteroid—a fucking planet-killer—and still they won’t talk to us.”

He marches back and forth, pacing as he speaks.

“You think you can do it, don’t you? That’s it, isn’t it? You—the great professor. You’re convinced you can get them to speak when no one else could.

“It’s not going to happen. You can’t ignore this, Pratul. You’ve seen what they’ve done. Do you really think that monstrosity in there is the basis for opening dialogue? Is that what it means to treat us as equals? Do you really believe the world will listen to you when they see images of humans being butchered? Even you can’t spin this. They have violated our trust, our humanity.”

“No,” Pretzel says softly, although I’m not sure which part of Sergei’s diatribe he’s objecting to. As much as I respect Pretzel, Sergei’s got a point. I may despise Sergei for the death of Dr. O’Brien and Brother Mordecai, but I can’t ignore his logic—that’s my dad in there pinned against the wall, twitching and squirming with yellow goo dripping from his butchered chest.

“No?” Sergei shakes his head. “I knew you were stubborn, but even I didn’t think you were this cold and hardhearted. Your ego. Your ego is... Would you betray even your own kind, dear father?”

Sergei pauses, looking at me and then back at Pretzel. He seems to latch on to my confusion about his use of the term father.

“He hasn’t told you who I am, has he?”

I shake my head.

“You’re not the first one to be swept into orbit around the great Dr. Pratul Arjun Khatri-Lagharin. He does this everywhere he goes, you know. He finds impressionable young girls and boys, teens mostly, and molds them into his own image, sponsoring them through college.

“Oh, it’s all very sweet. He flatters you, grooms you, lures you into his little cult. Before you know it, you’re as passionate as he is and you find yourself dedicating your life to his research, leaving family and friends behind. Then—and only then—will he introduce you to your real family, and you find out there are others, all at different stages, all devoted to the cause.

“His is the ultimate new age religion—worshipping life in outer space.

“Ah, there are no church pews on Sundays, no psalms to sing or tithes to collect, but make no mistake, you are expected to perform. Nothing is as painful as having father withhold affection. Nothing will make you—”

Pretzel snaps. “Leave him the hell out of this, Sergei.”

“Did I strike a raw nerve?” Sergei asks. He turns back to me, saying, “You’ve seen them, right? The specimens on display, the chimeras—part human, part monster, part alien, part machine.”

My lip quivers at the thought of what happened to my father. Sergei pauses. For a moment, it’s as though he’s compassionate, sensing that what happened in there has affected me on a personal level. Then a smile betrays the depths of evil in his heart.

“You knew them, didn’t you? And the American? Oh, wait, is that your father?”

I’m quiet, bowing my head as tears run down my cheeks.

“It is.” He laughs, addressing Pretzel. “Oh, you have outdone yourself.”

I feel hurt, betrayed. My father isn’t some monstrosity to be poked and prodded in a laboratory or displayed like a freak in a museum. It’s cruel, hateful.

Sergei laughs at my heartache, pointing at Pretzel with the gun as he addresses him. “The boy trusted you. He thought you had the answers. He believed in you and look at what happened to his father.

“Can’t you see? There are consequences to your actions. Your bravado sealed his fate. All your bluster—they come in peace, they mean us no harm, this is the start of a new age, a new era unlike any we have seen before—no, this is the beginning of the end, father. The only thing you have started is the apocalypse.”

“You don’t understand,” Pretzel says, pleading with him.

“And what is it I don’t understand?” Sergei asks, holding his arms out wide and bowing slightly, making as though he were seeking audience with some foreign king. “What is it you would teach me, O Great One?”

Pretzel is barely able to contain himself. His lips are pursed, while his jawline is hard and unyielding. I can see anger in his eyes.

“We don’t have enough information. What we do know is incomplete.”

“You’re lying,” Sergei says.

Pretzel is frustrated, searching for the right words. “We assume too much. They came here expecting to find biological life, not sapient life. It is up to us to prove we’re equals in intelligence. And what have we shown them? What have we demonstrated by detonating a thermobaric bomb or by fighting each other in the jungle and out on the plains? What is our intelligence to them? Is it akin to that of a dolphin to us? Or a dog? An octopus or an ant? We’re not making a case to be taken seriously.”

Sergei laughs. “Do you know what I think? I think you can’t admit when you’re wrong. I think pride has blinded your eyes.”

A cloud passes overhead, but it’s dark, heavy with rain waiting to fall, forming a stark contrast with the brilliant light of day and instinctively my eyes cast up. That motion is enough of a distraction to get Sergei to look up as well, although I’m not sure what he expects to see, perhaps one of the alien machines looming overhead. Pretzel seizes the opportunity to attack, lunging forward while the gun is faced haphazardly away from us. He strikes Sergei with his flashlight, hitting him across the face, raking the heavy casing over his cheeks and nose. The gun goes off, breaking like thunder.

“Run!” Pretzel yells as Sergei is knocked backwards onto the broken branches scattered across the muddy ground.

Run where?

I scramble into the tunnel with Pretzel following hard behind me. He’s limping, but forcing himself on at almost a running pace, swinging his injured leg madly and grimacing in pain. The flashlight flickers across the walls of the tunnel, not settling on anything, rippling over the various tiers as we rush on.

I’m tempted to dart into one of the small side-tunnels and pause. I come to a halt beside the severed arm hanging from the wall, desperately trying to find somewhere to hide, but Pretzel pushes me on.

“Keep going.”

Sergei yells down the tunnel, “You can’t run from me. I’ll find you.”

The flickering flashlight brings the various specimens mounted on the walls to life. A leopard growls, baring its teeth. Burnt fur and severed hind-legs betray it as an alien automaton. Birds squawk, shrieking in the darkness, their calls are shrill and loud, echoing around us. Monkeys yell as if in response, but there’s no life in here, just mimicry.

We follow the path as it winds higher and turns tighter. Pretzel flicks the flashlight down and into a side-tunnel, tossing it in there while pushing me on up through the main walkway. The flashlight tumbles, rattling along the ground, illuminating the crawlspace leading away from us.

He pulls me to a halt just around the corner. Something claws at my head. Metal fingers touch at my bandaged shoulder. I bat them away, unsure what scares me more, Sergei or the aliens. My heart leaps into my throat. Sweat drips into my eyes, causing them to sting. I blink, rubbing them, desperate to be able to see nothing at all in the darkness.

Suddenly, the side-tunnel goes dim. Sergei is crouching. Pretzel rushes at him from behind, using two fists clenched together to hammer him on the back of the neck. As Sergei is well over six foot in height, while Pretzel is shorter than me, I can see why he lured him toward that narrow crawlspace. He’s trying to negate the height difference.

Sergei collapses under the blow, falling to his knees. Pretzel strikes him again, aiming for the base of his skull, keeping his hands bound as though he were holding the handle of an axe, but he’s frail, humbled by age, unable to draw on reserves of strength. Over the noise of a dead jungle coming to life, there’s yelling from the two men. Birds screech. Monkeys scream, hollering in the darkness, excited by the fight.

Punches are thrown and blocked. Fists lash out. Heads rock back under crushing blows. Shadows flicker in the half-light. The Russian head-butts Pretzel and he falls into me, pushing me against the narrow wall of the tunnel. Suddenly, the barrel of the gun emerges from the darkness and we both hold still.

“I’ve waited a long time for this,” Sergei says, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, but he doesn’t notice the dark figure dropping silently from the ceiling, landing low and quiet on the ground behind him, still somewhat curled up. Spider-machines clamber across the wall beside us, excited by the conflict. A snake hisses. A wild dog growls, ready to bite if it could. The arms of a dismembered gorilla slap the walls in anger.

From behind Sergei, a familiar voice speaks from the darkness. “Well, I hate to disappoint yah.”

Sergei turns but he’s no match for Petty Officer Garcia. The Navy SEAL is ruthless, grabbing Sergei’s right hand and twisting it up, forcing the gun away from him. Sergei yells in pain as his wrist is bend backwards, but Garcia isn’t finished, slamming him into the wall. The gun clatters to the ground, slipping into the gutter and disappearing beneath the yellow gunk.

Sergei steps back and tries to use his size and weight to his advantage, throwing hay-makers—wide, swinging fists that, should they connect, would knock someone out, but Garcia has spent over a decade in the Navy SEALs preparing for a fight like this. He ducks beneath the punches, hammering his fists into Sergei’s ribs and sternum. Whereas Sergei is like a Panzer tank, Garcia hits with the speed and rhythm of a machine gun. Bones break, cracking like twigs.

Watching Garcia shuffle with his feet, dancing in the shadows thrown out by the flashlight lying on the ground, I get the feeling he’s enjoying this. For him, it’s a training run.

He can see.

He must be able to see as he’s dodging Sergei’s swinging arms.

How can he see?

Petty Officer Garcia has his own means of making hay. Rather than wild, wishful swings, he moves in close, getting inside Sergei’s reach and sending a succession of upper cuts into his jaw. Blood sprays out from Sergei’s nose, coating the alien equipment in thousands of tiny red spots. Immediately, silver spiders set to work cleaning or perhaps sampling the blood.

The huge Russian falters, falling against one of the tiers, grabbing at the ledge, trying not to collapse on the ground, but that makes him an easy target for Garcia and the Navy SEAL has no hesitation in sending a thundering blow into the side of his head.

After the brief, one-sided struggle is over, Garcia drags Sergei’s limp body behind him, walking back down the tunnel toward the daylight.

“Come with me,” Garcia says, but there’s something wrong. Even in the low light, it’s obvious. At first, I thought Garcia was wearing some kind of helmet, but his head is metallic.

Pretzel takes my hand. He’s shaking, trembling like a leaf in a storm. Rather than providing comfort, he’s holding onto me for the same reason I’m clinging to him—there’s a fleeting sense of relief in that we’re both still alive, but it’s fragile. We’re as helpless as a chrysalis inside a cocoon hidden beneath a broad, green, drooping rainforest leaf, desperate to avoid attention, longing for a chance at life.

“En—Enrico?” Pretzel asks, still standing inert beside me, not willing to move from the darkness.

“The one and only.”

“Petty Officer Enrico Garcia?”

Garcia just laughs, continuing on and disappearing around the bend. We follow along, unsure who or what we’re following, with footsteps that seem to barely touch the ground. As Garcia approaches the opening, the silhouette cast by his head is unsettling. Machines crawl over his shoulders and neck. The bandages are gone. Whereas there should be the curved outline of his skull, instead there are bumps and bulges as though he was wearing a helmet with clunky night-vision goggles.

“Garcia? Is that you?” Pretzel asks as the Navy SEAL dumps the barely conscious Sergei on the mud outside.

“Who else would it be?”

As my eyes adjust to the light, it’s clear the upper portion of Garcia’s skull has been replaced by an alien machine. Segmented chrome-plated worms wind through a metal crown covering his eyes, starting at the bridge of his nose and extending around to the back of his head. Tiny spider-like machines clamber over his face, working their way on top of his metallic skull.

“It’s—I—ah,” Pretzel has his hand out, on the verge of touching the machinery wrapped around Garcia’s head but not daring proceed the last inch or so. His fingers twitch in response to the spiders, wanting to touch them, but fearing the worst.

“I can see you, you know?” Garcia says. He laughs. I’m not sure what’s funny, perhaps the look of disbelief on our faces.

“Can I?” Pretzel asks.

“Sure.”

He reaches up, touching at the slick metallic surface with its grooves and channels forming an ornate, almost decorative pattern where once the soldier’s skull lay. The skin on Garcia’s face presses hard up against the alien skullcap, with just a thin red line showing where one ceases and the other begins.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“And you can see?”

“Yes, but it’s not what you think.”

I’m not sure what I think as there are no eyes in the polished finish. Were it not for the placement of his nose, cheeks and mouth there would be no way to distinguish front from back, or one side from the other.

“What can you see?” Pretzel asks, holding his hand up before Garcia, flexing his fingers roughly in front of where Garcia’s eyes should be.

“Everything. In front and behind. Out to the sides. It’s all visible.”

“You can see in 360 degrees?” Pretzel asks in disbelief. “All around you?”

“Yes.” Garcia’s grinning, unable to suppress a smile. “Only there’s no color.”

“No color?” Pretzel replies. “Okay, that makes sense.”

“Wait. Why would that make sense?” I ask, confused by what to me seems like a trivial consideration. Petty Officer Garcia has been turned into one of those things within the tunnel and Pretzel thinks seeing in black and white makes sense? How does any of this make any sense, let alone a lack of color?

“Colors don’t exist,” Pretzel says, gesturing with his hand and waving as though he wants to be rid of this point as quickly as possible. “They’re artificial, just constructs of our minds. Reality is shades of grey. Colors are evolution’s way of helping us distinguish things of importance, but they’re not real. Different animals see different colors.”

Okay, I’m not sure what freaks me out more, seeing Garcia with some alien implant set over his brain, acting as his eyes, or the realization that the blue of the sky, the green of the weeds growing up between the cracks in the dirt and the red blood seeping down Pretzel’s leg are all actually grey. What the hell? If I can’t trust my own eyes, what can I trust? Surely, colors are real. They’re real to me. Is that all that matters? Science has a way of shattering illusions. Sometimes, I wish Pretzel would just let me be—I’m content with colors.

Garcia isn’t finished. “I see other things.”

Pretzel is fascinated, ignoring the small alien machines and running his fingers gently over the device crowning the soldier’s skull.

“What else can you see?”

“If I concentrate, if I focus, I can see through things… see through you. One moment, you’re standing there in shades of grey, the next, I can see your heart beating, your lungs expanding, the blood pulsating around your body. Squint and I can see your bones. Then there’s the little things.”

“Little things?” Pretzel asks.

“At times, everything seems to be alive with energy. It’s like it flows through stuff. Like rain falling, only coming up from the ground and passing through the trees, through people and stones, following their shapes, flowing around them like water running over rocks in a stream.”

I’m freaked out. I’m still a few steps behind the conversation.

“You can see bones?” I ask, still trying to process that.

“I can see the bones in your arm and shoulder,” Garcia replies. “I can see what they’ve done.”

“Done?” I ask, stunned by the past tense. “To me?”

My eyes cast down at the filthy bandages padding my shoulder and the dirty sling holding my arm against my chest. My heart races. There’s something under there.

“Get it off me,” I yell, jumping to one side as a small spider alien machine moves beneath the fabric. Its thin legs reflect the sunlight.

“Easy,” Garcia says.

I start to panic, but Pretzel takes me by both shoulders, saying, “Just relax.”

He pulls back the bloody bandages, peering beneath them. A shiny chrome plate curves over my shoulder, but there’s no pain. Surprisingly, it’s the absence of pain that feels most unsettling. For the past two days, there’s been a persistent ache, like a background noise. Now that it’s gone, I feel strange, as though I’m not myself. I’m hyperventilating.

“It’s okay,” Pretzel says. “Breathe. That’s it. Slow things down.”

I touch at the metal. No pain. No feeling at all. My arm, though, is fine.

“Is it? Is it?”

“It’s okay,” Garcia says.

“I don’t understand,” I say, loosening the sling, looking into the tunnel, thinking about my father and the monster he’s become. “But—what they did to him?”

“Not them,” Garcia replies, pointing at Sergei. “Him.”

I’m confused. Pretzel, though, seems to realize what actually happened. “It wasn’t them,” he says. “It was Sergei.” He gestures to the Russian, who’s lying against a burnt tree trunk, rocking slightly as he cradles a broken arm. Blood streams from his nose, soaking his shirt. He’s lost several teeth.

Garcia says, “He killed your father. Not them.”

Pretzel adds, “They must have found your dad in the ruins after they set down.” He pauses. “They did what they could. They tried to save him, tried to revive him, but it was too late.”

“The aliens didn’t kill your father,” Garcia says, kicking one of Sergei’s boots. “The Russians did.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sergei says through gritted teeth. “All of this will be over soon. This blight on the planet will be erased.”

“What have you done?” Pretzel asks, towering over Sergei.

“I videoed the whole thing. It’s being uploaded via satellite. Once they see the freaks in this circus, they’ll bomb the place.”

Pretzel reaches around Sergei’s waist, frisking him and pulling out a satellite phone.

“It’s too late, father. They’re on their way.”

“Garcia?” Pretzel says, handing the phone to him.

Garcia examines the phone, turning it over in his hand. “Russian military issue... it’s still uploading.” He slams it against the opening of the tunnel, cracking the casing and breaking it apart. Garcia crushes the exposed electronics under his boots. Bits of plastic splinter and break as the speaker crackles.

“It’s too late,” Sergei yells. “If I’m going to hell, you’re coming with me, father.”

Escape

“Yeah, well, I hope you enjoy fireworks,” Garcia says, rifling through Sergei’s pockets and pulling out a set of industrial zip-ties. He straps Sergei’s one good arm to a thick branch, flattening his wrist against the wood as he cinches it tight. “Because you, my friend—you’ve got a front row seat.”

Pretzel leads us away from Sergei, who’s rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself. To my surprise, Pretzel says, “I’ve been thinking. I could be wrong about this, but what if Brother Mordecai had a point. What if the answers we’re looking for lie in the past?”

As he speaks, tiny robots clamber from Garcia’s shoulder onto Pretzel’s open hand. He transfers them to his leg, loosening the wire holding his torn trousers over the bullet wound. The spiders set to work. They’re fascinating to watch, consuming the wire and part of his trouser leg, using that material to somehow fashion a repair to the muscle. It’s as though they’re car mechanics improvising with a blown gasket. I’m astonished, but Garcia is preoccupied by Pretzel’s statement.

“Seriously?” Garcia asks. “You really think they’ve been here before?”

“It was inconceivable up until the point they arrived in orbit. But now, anything’s possible. Why not? We conduct multiple missions to various planets in our own solar system, why wouldn’t they do something similar between stars?”

On the platform, another pod shoots off up the elevator ribbon, racing into the sky, only it’s surrounded by what looks like thin, concentric rings spinning around the mirrored pod, rotating on all three axes. To my mind, it’s like the old models of an atom with electrons spinning around the outside of the nucleus.

“Look at that,” Pretzel says. He pulls out the tatty, burnt Bible, bending the spine and searching for something on the page. “…and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.”

I know he said, ‘Look at that,’ but I’m more interested in looking at the smooth silver patch covering the wound on his leg, blending in with his skin, but neither man is interested in these astonishing machines. Once their work is finished, the tiny machines drop to the ground, disappearing beneath the branches and making their way back to the opening of the tunnel.

“You sound like Brother Mordecai,” Garcia says.

“Listen to this—I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live.”

“What the hell does that even mean?” Garcia asks.

“What if it means more to us now than to them back then? What if laying sinews is precisely what just happened to us? It’s describing a physical change, right? Repairing the body. Isn’t that what happened to your injuries? Isn’t that what happened to mine?”

“I wasn’t dead, Doc.”

“You weren’t far from it. You were blind. Infection was setting in.”

“You really think this explains what’s happening?”

Pretzel hold up his finger, reading something else from Ezekiel. “How about this section: Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves… and I shall place you in your own land.”

“I don’t get it,” I say, wanting to be part of the discussion.

“Two elements,” Pretzel says. “To revive. To bring back to life and then to place somewhere else—in your own land.” He points at the space elevator with the Bible in his hand, saying, “I think I finally know what this is.”

“What?” Garcia asks.

“It’s a sample-return mission.”

“Sample-return?”

“Yes, yes. We’ve got this all wrong. Don’t you see?” He holds up the tattered Bible with its muddy, torn, burnt pages, saying, “It’s not an invasion. It’s not even a visit as such. We look at this alien civilization like it’s all knowing—all powerful. We treat them like they’re gods, but they’re not. They’re just like us. They sent out probes to look for life, to find evidence of biology elsewhere in this desolate universe—and they found us. So just like us they sent out a follow-up mission, only this time the goal wasn’t exploration, it was to retrieve samples.”

“But why not just come here themselves?” I ask.

“Because they can’t. Just like us, their machines can reach far further and travel far faster than they can themselves. In the same way we struggle to reach the Moon while our robots can fly beyond the outer edge of the solar system, they’re on the verge of what they can accomplish with their technology. We’ve sent robots tens of thousands of times further than any humans, and perhaps so have they.

“Think about it. We’ve sent orbiters to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn looking for life. Then we followed up with landers on Mars and Titan, but that wasn’t enough, so we sent out rovers. At each point, we’ve stretched the bounds of exploration, pushing what we can accomplish with our technology. We can send astronauts to the Moon but not somewhere like Saturn or Pluto, regardless of how astonishingly interesting they are from a scientific perspective, so the next best thing is to send a collection device to bring samples back, all in a quest to better understand the nature of the universe and our own origins. Don’t you see? They’re doing the same thing, but on a grander scale.”

“So, Ezekiel?” I ask.

“Whatever happened back then, that mission paved the way for this one.”

“So, there are no aliens?”

“Alien machines,” Pretzel says, “But not aliens. Not here. But out there.” He points. “Somewhere roughly a thousand light years away, someone is watching for signals coming back from this mission, waiting patiently for the return-samples to arrive. This mission is so important to them they’re content to wait for millennia. But the prize. The prize is worth the wait—it’s a sample of life on another planet—Earth.”

Garcia says, “Well, I’m not sure how many samples they’re going to get. How long have we got until the Russians wipe this place off the map?”

“That is a problem,” Pretzel concedes. “If that imagery got through, they’ll destroy this station.”

Garcia nods, which takes a little getting used to as there seems to be an ecosystem of tiny alien insects clinging to his metallic skull, somehow interacting with it and him.

“Yeah, nothing like fear to stoke a fire.”

I’m still getting used to his head. “Are they really going to nuke us? Won’t the aliens shoot the missile down?”

“Hard to say,” Pretzel says. “The Russians could detonate just outside the perimeter with an air burst. They have bombs that can clear five hundred square miles. Imagine a hurricane raining down fire. It’s pretty damn hard to survive against a wall of superheated gas moving at hundreds of miles an hour.”

“But could they survive?” I ask.

“Maybe,” Pretzel replies. “But we couldn’t.”

“Well, I don’t want to be around here to find out what happens next,” Garcia says.

“We’re not going to get out of here, are we?” I say. “I mean, there’s no way we can escape in time.”

“Not if we move horizontally,” Pretzel says. “But vertically, we’re less than sixty miles from space.”

His eyes cast up at the elevator.

“You’re serious?” Garcia asks.

Pretzel laughs. “You’re the one with an alien machine hard-wired into your brain. Why not?”

I crane my neck, looking up at the ribbon on the space elevator disappearing into the light blue sky. Pods shoot up the ribbon, rapidly shrinking as they climb ever higher.

“If you want to find Jana and Lady?” Pretzel points. “That’s where they are.”

I can’t argue with that, and yet it is daunting to stare into the unknown. Somewhere above us an asteroid is swinging in orbit around Earth, harboring an alien spacecraft and whatever factory produced these machines. I’ve never been good with heights and even though we’re still standing on Earth it feels as though I’m on the roof of a skyscraper peering over the edge, looking at the fall.

Garcia doesn’t seem convinced, although reading the body language of someone with only the lower half of their head visible is less than easy. If anyone should be ready to launch themselves into space, I’d think it would be the guy with Superman’s x-ray vision, but he’s unusually subdued.

“Unless you want to wait here for the Russians?” Pretzel says. “Look at what these machines did to your injuries. What we’re seeing here is intent. They aren’t the bad guys.”

“We could call off the attack,” Garcia says. “Go back to the helicopter and radio our findings to US forces.”

“If we could pick up a signal,” Pretzel says. “Big if. Not to mention, if they can convince the Russians to hold fire.” He steps off the mud and onto the sloping side of the platform. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

In unison, Garcia and I both say, “Liar.”

We trudge up the slope, which is probably set on an angle of not more than twenty degrees but feels steeper as we bake under the hot sun. I look back a few times. Sergei hasn’t moved. His head has slumped forward.

“And how exactly are we going to convince these things to give us a ride?” Garcia asks.

“Ah, that’s where you come in,” Pretzel replies. “I’m thinking all this is largely an autonomous collection process, using some kind of artificial intelligence to manage the workload. I’m hoping you can interact with that and get us some first-class tickets.”

“I don’t know how that’s going to work,” Garcia replies as we reach the top of the platform. Hundreds of empty pods sit stacked to one side. Incoming alien machines traipse over the jungle to unload their pods, placing them beside the elevator. They pick up a new pod before heading back out to look for other samples of life on Earth. There’s some kind of manager, which to my surprise, is a much smaller machine. It has stocky legs and is orchestrating activity on the platform, setting pods on the elevator.

We dart between the silvery snake-like legs towering over the platform as machines exchange pods, and jog over to the collection area. Pretzel leans in toward one of the newly deposited pods, cupping his hands on either side of his eyes so he can block out the sunlight and peer through the mirrored surface. I copy him, reaching out and resting my hands on the surface of the pod. The strange alien device responds to my touch like water, with ripples moving out across the surface. Inside, two gazelles from the lowlands lie with their legs tucked beneath them and their heads resting on the smooth surface. Their hides are tan in color, except for dark marks on their faces. One’s a male, with long curving horns. At a guess, they’re asleep, having been sedated.

“Do you think they’re going to breed them?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Pretzel replies. “It’s possible. If I’m right and this is a sample-return mission then they’re going to want to collect as much as they can as they may not get another shot at this, certainly not within their lifetimes. They’re trying to gather as much as they can to understand how life arose on this rock.”

He turns to Garcia. “What do you see when you look at the surface of these things?”

Garcia stands in front of another pod. “This one’s empty, but I see what looks like circuit boards. Lots of incredibly fine wires weaving intricate patterns. They move when you touch the surface, shifting out of the way.”

“Who’s going to be the guinea pig?” Pretzel asks. The look on my face must suggest confusion as he clarifies with, “Stepping inside there is probably a one-way ticket. At best, we’ll have a chance to get to the alien spacecraft, but we could equally be put into some kind of hyper-sleep and out for the count until we reach wherever. Hopefully, the sedation process is governed by the machines and not the pod itself.”

“I’ll do it,” I say, feeling I owe that to Jana and Lady.

“Hell no,” Garcia says. “I’m already a lab rat. I’ll go. If I’m knocked out, make for the hills. Try to get out of here before the Russians hit.”

We stand back as Garcia rests both of his hands on the pod. He breathes deeply, making as though he were about to plunge into ice water, and then pushes, leaning into the smooth, curved, mirrored surface, passing through it as though it were a bubble. His body, then his legs, and finally his boots disappear inside the pod, leaving the surface rippling like a crystal-clear lake after a large stone has sunk into the depths.

Pretzel and I look at each other, wondering what’s next. I guess we should peer inside the pod to see if he’s out cold. We wait for a minute, which feels like an eternity. Slowly, we step forward, wondering what we’re about to witness when a hand appears poking through the silvery surface, waving for us to join. The sky, clouds, the warped legs of alien spider-walkers and the concrete on the platform all appear distant in the reflection, making the dismembered hand even more unsettling as it beckons us to approach. It’s unnerving to watch fingers disappearing back into what appears to be mercury shimmering in the sunlight.

“Well,” Pretzel says in a rather unconvincing tone. “There’s no time like the present.”

He places his hand on the surface before pushing slowly, watching as his fingers pass through the membrane. He wiggles them, looking at the faint outline before stepping through. I follow. The surface of the pod feels like silly putty, being clammy and smooth to touch. There’s a little resistance, like wading through water, but I step in beside Pretzel.

“Welcome aboard,” Garcia says, smiling.

“I hope you can get us down from up there,” I say.

“Hey,” Garcia replies. “I always thought this was a bad idea. I didn’t even want to get on the chopper out of Sinai. I was quite happy squatting behind rocks in a hundred and twenty degrees and shitting in small plastic bags.” He slaps me on the shoulder, winking, “Makes you feel alive, huh?”

Pretzel looks befuddled, but I reply, “Oh, yeah. Been feeling alive for a while now.”

Garcia laughs. Pretzel shrugs, not being privy to our banter.

“See anything else in here?”

“Yes. The circuits are lighting up. It’s as though they can sense the pod is occupied.”

“Good.”

The gazelles are picked up before us and placed on the ribbon of the elevator where concentric rings begin swirling around them, then, whoosh, they’re gone, racing up into the sky. We’re next.

“Lie flat,” Pretzel says, “and try to relax.”

Although the pod is oval-shaped, inside the floor is raised and relatively smooth, with only a gentle curve. The glass surrounding us appears to be a one-way mirror, allowing us to see clearly out of the pod, while the floor is milky white and a little spongey.

Our pod is picked up effortlessly and placed against the ribbon that forms the space elevator. It looks metallic, as though oil has been spilt on chrome, lighting up with the hues of the rainbow. Lying on my back, the ribbon seems to taper into nothing. Clouds billow through the sky, but they’re well clear of the elevator.

“No countdown, huh?” I ask.

Pretzel starts to say, “No,” but never gets to complete that one word.

To me, it feels as though we’ve been shot out of a cannon. I’m not sure what kind of speeds rockets reach, but I’m pretty sure they accelerate over time. We seem to go from zero to infinity, and in that fraction of a second it feels as though the skin on my face is going to fall off. My hips dig into the floor, while my arms and legs feel as though someone’s attached lead weights to them. Outside our capsule, thin rings swirl, moving in all directions. They’re not overly fast, but they seem to have something to do with our locomotion on the space elevator—wheels within wheels.

Once we’re up to speed, I feel normal again. To me, it’s kinda like being in a car doing 60mph—trees and lampposts flash by, but I feel as though I’m stationary.

I sit up and peer over the edge. Oh, mistake. Big mistake. Apart from the floor and the occasional ring swirling past, it’s as though there’s no barrier.

Behind me, the ribbon of the space elevator rushes by so fast it feels as though I’m hanging from the open door of a car racing down the freeway.

The jungle recedes below us. Although they appear tiny, I can see alien machines stepping over the canopy out beyond the blast zone. I try to look for the remains of the village and the helicopter, but even the cliff and rock pool aren’t visible from this height. Blink and clouds rush past.

“Whoa,” Pretzel says. He’s got his hands out, pressing against the invisible barrier surrounding us, but not too hard. Seems even he’s not entirely confident he won’t fall through the clear membrane. “Oh, wow. You’ve got to see this,” he says, looking straight down.

Garcia is beside him, but he can see through the pod itself and so doesn’t need to move to the edge. As the pod is oval in shape, it’s possible to lean over the edge without being outside it. I’m not sure I can, but I summon the strength and crawl closer to the edge.

“Look at the way the ribbon disappears above and below us,” Pretzel says. I lie down and lean forward. He’s right, the broad, rainbow-colored ribbon shrinks into a point converging on the jungle in one direction and up into the nothingness of space in the other.

“So what now?” I ask.

“Sit back and enjoy the view,” Pretzel replies.

Already the clouds are well below us. Above, the sky is dark even though it’s still daytime in Africa. Out on the horizon, the atmosphere seems to glow like a blue neon light, forming a haze in the distance. Slowly, Earth begins to curve away on all sides as the Atlantic comes into view. I’m surprised by how sedate the ride is after the initial burst. Were it not for the slowly darkening sky and the ribbon whipping by behind us, I’d swear we were sitting still.

The floor of the pod is soft, almost as if it’s made from gel, making it comfortable to kneel on. Within a few minutes, the sky is completely black. Swirling clouds dominate the southern part of the African continent, spreading out over the ocean, but they’re frozen in place. To me, the clouds look like daubs of white paint, or perhaps someone with an eraser scrubbing out parts of a drawing. To the north the desert is visible. Earth itself is not yet a sphere, but the curvature is pronounced, something no flat-earther could mistake. The blue neon glow on the horizon shrinks, looking thin and fragile. It’s as though the planet is surrounded by electricity fighting off the dark of night.

Coming from America, the tales we told in the village seemed farfetched to the likes of our housekeeper, Asha—Earth is round, astronauts fly like birds in space, men have walked on the Moon. Asha struggled with these concepts. Even the need to wash her hands ‘all the time,’ to use her words, seemed excessive to her. She thought it incredulous that bacteria could be invisible, covering her palms and fingers. To her, we were no more credible than the local shaman with his tales of ancestor spirits deep within the jungle. If Asha saw something in a movie, she believed it, which was strange to me as movies are make-believe. I wish Asha could see this.

“Are we in space?”

I know it sounds like a dumb question, but it’s genuine. Pretzel tries to suppress a smile.

“Yes.”

“Where are the stars?” I ask.

“I can see them,” Garcia replies.

“I can’t.”

“They’re out there,” Pretzel assures me, pointing at the pitch-black darkness. “It’s just our eyes aren’t sensitive enough. Wait until nightfall. Once we move into the shadow of the planet you’ll see more stars than you’ve ever imagined.”

“Shouldn’t we be floating?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Garcia says. “I’ve been wondering that too. If we’re in space, why aren’t we drifting around like astronauts?”

This time, Pretzel can’t contain a laugh, but it’s good natured. I think he appreciates our curiosity. He looks around, trying to gauge something, but I’m not sure what. Earth still dominates our view, but everything looks small and the planet is beginning to look like a globe.

“By now, I guess we’re at roughly the same altitude as the International Space Station.”

“So why aren’t we floating like them?” I ask.

“Because they’re not floating,” he says. “They’re falling.”

The confusion on my face must be telling as he continues.

“They’re falling in exactly the same manner as someone jumping into a swimming pool, bungee jumping from a bridge or skydiving from a plane, the only difference is there’s no wind in their hair.”

“I don’t get it,” Garcia says. “Aren’t astronauts like in zero-gee?”

“Gravity is everywhere,” Pretzel replies. “There is no zero gravity. If you’re not held by Earth’s gravity, you’re held by the Sun, if not the Sun then the Milky Way. If not our galaxy then the entire local group of galaxies, and if not them then everything in the whole wide universe.”

“So why do astronauts float?” I ask.

“Fall,” Pretzel says, gently correcting me. “Why do they fall? That’s the question.”

I’m really not getting this, but he explains further.

“They fall because gravity is pulling them back toward the center of the Earth, just like gravity is pulling you down against the floor of this pod. If the pod wasn’t here, you’d fall back to Earth, right?”

“But they don’t fall back to Earth,” I say.

“Ah, but they do,” Pretzel replies, laughing. “They’re just really bad at falling—they keep missing.”

“What?” Garcia says, shaking his head. He’s not buying this explanation at all.

“Instead of falling straight down to Earth, they’re falling around it. They’re going so fast sideways they fall around the round Earth, but they’re falling just as fast as you or I would if we jumped from here.”

“Really?” I ask.

“Really,” Pretzel replies. “Have you ever seen someone throw a dart at a dartboard and miss, hitting the wall below the board? That’s exactly what happens to astronauts, only there’s no wall to hit.”

“So there’s still gravity this high up?” Garcia asks.

“Yep.”

“But they don’t feel it?”

“Oh, they feel it,” Pretzel says. “They’re falling precisely because they feel the pull of gravity. They just don’t hit anything, so it looks like they’re flying around like superman, free from gravity, but they’re not.

“If they were free from Earth’s gravity, they’d shoot off in one direction instead of being caught on this celestial merry-go-round.”

“My head’s going to explode.” Given Garcia’s crazy metallic alien skullcap, I’m not sure that’s something he should be joking about.

Pretzel says, “Earth’s gravity is less up here, and it’ll continue getting weaker the further we move away from the planet, but make no mistake, gravity rules.” He points at the Moon which is rising slowly over the curved horizon. “Think about it. Earth’s gravity is strong enough to hold the Moon in orbit even though it’s hundreds of thousands of miles away!”

He’s got a point. The Moon does go round and round Earth, although it’s hard to think of it as falling and missing.

Garcia says, “You’re probably going to hate this question, but—are we there yet? How far away is this place?”

Pretzel shakes his head, laughing. “It’s a long way. I’m not sure how fast we’re going, but Cruthine is at least 38,000 kilometers away, that’s roughly the same as circling Earth. We’ve got a LONG way to go. The good news, though, is the view is going to be spectacular.”

“Out of this world,” I say.

Cruithne

I’m not sure when I fell asleep, but I slept soundly. I think it was the combination of the exhaustion of the past few days, the lack of any pain in my arm, the pitch-black darkness and the warmth coming through the floor of the pod. When I wake, I sit up only to bounce, which is unnerving. At first, it feels as though I’m on a trampoline, but each movement of my arms or legs, pressing against the floor of the pod, has me rebound in slow motion. It’s as though I’m suspended in water—not quite weightless, but close enough to feel strange as I topple forward, catching myself with my hands.

“Oh, wow.”

Pretzel wasn’t wrong when he said Earth’s gravity would continue to decrease as we moved further away. I wonder just how far up we are. As gravity is so low, I’m cautious, moving slowly. I lie down on my stomach but even that motion seems to unfold in super slow-mo and it takes a second or two before I’m resting lightly on the floor of the pod. I creep forward, peering over the edge, feeling as though I could topple and fall.

Earth looks small. Awfully small. I mean like, ridiculously small, like a basketball held at arm’s length small. It’s shocking to see just how tiny our planet is when viewed from the depths of space.

Earth is partially in shadow, while the elevator ribbon appears to disappear before reaching the planet. As I’m watching, a tiny pinprick of white light appears on the night side, fading to yellow over a few seconds.

“Pretzel?” I say, shaking his shoulder, trying to rouse him from a deep slumber, but rather than shaking him my entire body shifts back and forth with that effort.

“Huh?”

“Ah, Pretzel,” I say. “I think you need to see this.”

He’s drowsy on waking and looks like he’s ready to roll over and go back to sleep.

“You really need to see this,” and I insist on waking him, only in low gravity, the motion of shaking his shoulder causes us both to move.

As he’s lying on his back, his eyes glance up at the ribbon of the space elevator catching the sunlight and the asteroid looming beyond. With that, he wakes with a jolt, although that jolt has him rise slightly in the air before settling like a feather.

“Josh.”

It takes him a second to realize where he is and for his memory to scramble up to date.

“There was an explosion,” I say. “On Earth.”

He grabs at the side of the pod, twisting to look over the edge, only to have his body sail into the air, floating a few inches above the surface before gently settling on the floor.

“That’s going to take some getting used to,” he says as I join him, still feeling uncertain about leaning out as it feels like someone is pushing me from behind, trying to send me plunging over the edge, even though I know that’s not possible.

“The Russians?” he asks, spotting a faint glow in the clouds on the dark side of the planet.

“I guess so.”

Earth really is a blue marble. I can barely see any land at all, even though I know it’s down there. Thick white clouds swirl around. Patches of blue poke through, but there are no green or browns. Antarctica is visible, I think, as there are points where the blurry white clouds seem to blend with sharp lines and jagged edges, which I assume are gigantic ice sheets smothering the continent. If I squint, it looks like there’s a faint smudge of sandy grey in the north, but there’s nothing distinct and no way to tell which continent it might be. The clouds are fascinating as they seem to interact and respond to each other in super slow motion. If one cloud forms in a swirl, looking like a thin, wispy whirlpool, then the other nearby clouds arc around it, swerving so as to avoid crossing it, forming a bizarre maze made out of curves.

“Well, that brings their exploration to an abrupt end. It’ll take time for the cable to drift away. We’ll be off the elevator long before that happens.”

Our talking wakes Garcia. How he sleeps with a metal head is beside me, and it’s not possible to see if his eyes are open or not, but he rolls onto his side and sits up, yawning.

“Are we—”

“Yes,” Pretzel replies, cutting him off. “We’re here.”

“Um,” I say. “Have you thought about how we’re going to get down from here?”

Garcia looks at me confused so I say, “We just lost our ride.”

“The Russians, huh?”

I nod, but he doesn’t seem bothered. I guess having an alien machine on your head changes your perspective on life.

Sheepishly, Pretzel says, “Oh, yeah. About that.”

“We’re not going to escape from up here, are we?” I ask.

“We’re alive,” Pretzel says.

Small consolation.

“For now,” I reply.

“Optimist,” Garcia says, which really doesn’t help. “Oh, wow,” he says, distracting himself with the novelty of being in low gravity. He bounces on his hands, rocking back onto his feet, struggling to get up. Pretzel and I have figured out it’s easiest to stay seated.

Garcia adds, “This is pretty cool,” jumping and then drifting back to the platform like a leaf falling in a light breeze. As cool as it is, I notice he doesn’t really jump as such, rather just pushes off. Like us, he’s more cautious than he’d like to admit.

“What if we’re wrong?” I ask, looking at the asteroid in the distance, looming above us. It feels as if we’re slowing, although with the meager pull of Earth beneath us, it’s hard to tell. “What if this isn’t a sample-return mission? What if they decide they don’t need us? What if they’ve already filled their quota?”

“Then we’ll have to convince them,” Pretzel says.

“How are we going to get back to Earth?”

“Let’s tackle these problems one at a time.”

That’s not really the answer I was looking for. Actually, it’s not an answer at all. Pretzel seems to realize that as he adds, “We’re going to make it.” I doubt I look convinced.

The sun is stupidly bright. I can’t look anywhere even remotely near it, while the dark emptiness of space is awfully lonely and astonishingly vast, making even the sun appear small. On Earth, the sky is half of the picture. At any one time, there’s an entire planet literally keeping us grounded. In space, that illusion is shattered. Earth is small. Space is endless. The darkness seems to stretch on into eternity, which is scary. I feel like an ant. Back on Earth, the aliens were intruders. Up here, they’re all we have. It’s hard to imagine, but beyond the thin, transparent walls of our pod, there’s nothing. And it’s not just a nothing nothing. It’s the kind of nothing that’s instantly fatal. It’s not just that there’s no air, like when I’m swimming underwater, it’s that there’s negative air. Out there, any air I have would be sucked from me, ripped out of my lungs. I don’t know that I’ve ever sat so close to death.

“Are you okay?” Pretzel asks, apparently recognizing the machinations of my tortured mind. I must look terrified. I am. Perhaps I’m a little pale. I feel sweaty even though it’s not hot.

He ruffles my hair, which is more than a little patronizing, but right now, I don’t care. “I’m not going to lie to you.”

“No, please,” I say. “Lie to me. Tell me everything’s going to be okay. Tell me we’re going to rescue Jana and Lady. Tell me we’ll make it home.”

“I’m scared too.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Well, I am. I’d be a fool if I wasn’t.”

Garcia’s quiet, listening intently. He’s standing, but he’s positioned himself at the back of the pod, near the broad ribbon. I understand why. It’s something other than nothing—even though it’s whipping by in a blur. The thin circular bands swirling around our pod every few seconds are slowing, giving us a visual indication that our speed is dropping.

I ask, “What do you think we’ll find up there?”

“I dunno. An ark, maybe. Machines preparing to ship specimens across the galaxy.”

“Will we find her?”

“I hope so.”

Garcia crouches, trying not to bounce, before sitting beside Pretzel. I lie on my back, staring along the ribbon, watching as we approach Cruithne. The alien ship is docked alongside the asteroid, catching the sunlight. My mind casts back to Raka’s hut and the grainy black and white image we were looking at. The ribbon wasn’t visible in that shot, and I wonder if NASA has improved on that. Is anyone watching as we approach? What would they see? They wouldn’t see anything as grand as this.

Cruithne isn’t black and white. Dark shadows hide the depths of various craters, with the night side of the asteroid disappearing entirely, but the surface is a mixture of colors.

Living in the jungle, my dad encouraged me to take up a hobby. PlayStations and Xboxes were out of the question, so I tried my hand at painting. Acrylic paints are cheap in Africa, although I don’t know why. They come in tiny silver tubes that all look the same with a white label printed in French. First thing I did was paint the labels so I could tell them apart. Jana likes my paintings, but I think she’s being kind. I mostly paint trees and rocks. I tried painting a monkey once, but it ended up looking like something out of a horror movie. Being a painter, though, I understand the subtleties of similar colors. Most people visiting the jungle just see a wall of green. Me? I see sapphires and viridian greens, agate and jade.

To me, the surface of Cruithne is a tapestry of muted browns like ochre, burnt umber and raw sienna. I could paint this. There’s even a fresh crater with lines of ruddy red spreading out in a splatter pattern. I’d use a little cadmium red mixed with a bit of charcoal black. A combination of sponge techniques and dry brush and I think I could pull it off.

Pretzel and Garcia are talking, but I’m not really listening. I catch some of their comments, but try to block them out, wanting to lower the anxiety eating away at me. Thinking about painting the asteroid helps. Maybe one day I will, and that thought gives me something to hold on to, something to hope for.

“This is a one-way ticket, right?” Garcia asks. “With the cable cut, there’s no way down.”

I’m trying not to listen. I’m trying to shut them out, but I can’t and my heart races.

Reluctantly, Pretzel says, “Yep.”

“So what are we going to do? We’re gonna demand Jana and Lady are returned to us, and then what? Walk home?” He laughs at the thought.

Pretzel whispers. “I don’t know.”

I don’t think Garcia’s happy with that, but what else can Pretzel say? I get it. I don’t like it, but I get that he’s just one man. He’s doing all he can. It hurts to think we’ve lost before we’ve even begun, but I appreciate Pretzel giving this his all. Who are we against the might of beings from the other side of the galaxy?

“Hey, look,” I say, still lying on my back and pointing up at the asteroid as it looms overhead, growing ever larger. The ribbon on the space elevator leads into some kind of cave, disappearing within Cruithne.

“What can you see?” Pretzel asks Garcia.

“Ah, well… oh, hey, I’ve got zoom. Damn, this model is fully spec’d. Mmm, they’ve hollowed out the asteroid. There’s some kind of bridge or tunnel leading to the ship. They’re taking animals out of the pods and transferring them to some kind of hold on the spaceship. It’s big, but far from full.”

“They’re sedated?” Pretzel asks.

“I guess. No one’s moving.”

“Can you see anyone? Anything other than machines?”

“I don’t think so. It’s like a factory in there. Everything’s automated.”

We move into the shadow of Cruithne. Our pod slows, gliding past rock walls and into a cavern carved into the asteroid. The tunnel narrows. It’s as though I could reach out and touch the sides. Our pace is leisurely, almost relaxed, slowly bringing us to a halt. Rather than sliding sideways into the asteroid, it feels as though we’re coming up from below, like a submarine surfacing.

Garcia says, “The contents of the pods are opened up ahead and shifted to some kind of cold storage on the alien craft.”

“Machines have no need for an atmosphere,” Pretzel says. “But living things do. Here’s hoping they’ve kept that hold pressurized.”

“What are the odds?” Garcia asks.

“Good.”

Both of us reply, “Liar.”

“No really,” Pretzel says, but I get the feeling he’s trying to talk himself into this. “Biology is fragile. They know that. Not understanding the precise limits of our particular biology, they’re going to handle us with care. There’s too much at stake. Blow this and you ruin the entire mission, so I think the chances are good. Our chemistry is only viable within a very narrow range of temperatures and pressures. They’re going to want to simulate that to some degree. They’ll have all kinds of fail-safes in place for a journey of this duration.”

“I hope you’re right, doc,” Garcia says. “Here it comes.”

It’s dark within the chamber, but I can feel the capsule being lifted from the space elevator and turned to one side.

“You can still see, right?” Pretzel asks.

“Yep… Get ready.”

I want to ask for what. Garcia drags me to my feet, which given I weigh almost nothing up here is easy. Toughest part is feeling for the floor of the pod with my boots. Just the slightest motion has me drifting sideways, but Garcia keeps his hand on my shoulder, crunching up my shirt in his clenched fist. I reach for the floor with my boots and end up on tiptoes.

“And it’s open. Jump.”

I go to jump, but Pretzel and Garcia have already jumped, springing off from the pod and dragging me with them. Unlike Earth, where I’d stay upright, my legs trail behind me and I can feel myself toppling forward. Garcia’s got a good grip. I feel as though I’m going to go splat—landing face first on the asteroid. I have no idea which way is up. One of my boots scrapes against the ground and I scramble with the other, only that motion has me drift away from the surface and I have to wait to come down again, which is crazy bizarre.

“Slow and easy,” Garcia says.

I’m hating this. Back on Earth, he was blind. Up here, Pretzel and I are blinded by the pitch-black darkness surrounding us. Garcia switches his grip, scrunching up the shirt in the center of my back as he guides me on. I have my arms out, expecting to bump into things. I keep losing my balance and toppling forward, but Garcia rights me.

“Small movements,” he says. “Bunny hop. Better yet, skip.”

I take my sense of direction from him, trusting I’m not about to go plowing into some wall in the darkness, but we skip at different times. The result is we seem to undulate, bouncing as we move along.

Gradually, light appears. It’s faint, but stars break through the darkness. They’re fine, nothing like the stars as seen from Earth. There’s no shimmer, almost no size to them at all. They’re like the fine splatter of paint on a black canvas, barely pinpricks in the night, all except for directly in front of us where the alien starship looms as a dark shadow.

The air is cold. Vapor forms on my breath. Pretzel and Garcia come to a halt in the tunnel. In the half-light of ten thousand stars, all I can see is silhouettes.

“What can we expect?” Pretzel asks.

“It’s hard to know for sure, but there’s movement up ahead.”

We inch forward, leaning on an angle that would have us perform a face-plant on Earth. Up here, my boots barely touch the surface of the clear tunnel. I feel as though I’m tiptoeing through water. I’m getting used to the low-gravity, though. Garcia was right. Less is more. Try too hard and it’s a bit like a car spinning its wheels in the mud.

The outside of the alien spaceship is covered in more pipes than I’ve ever seen in my life. To my mind, it looks like an oil rig in the middle of the ocean. I was expecting a smooth, curved hull, but there’s no surface as such. Most of the ship is just support struts and pipes. Like the laboratory we saw on Earth, there are no right-angles and very few straight sections.

“Welcome aboard the Medusa,” Garcia says, and he’s right. It’s as though a million metallic snakes have been tangled together to form this spacecraft.

“Look,” Pretzel says as we pass beneath the superstructure of the vessel. The same spider-like robots we saw on Earth clamber over the outside of the craft in the vacuum of space. No abdomen or head, just a bunch of legs spreading out like silver-coated starfish flexing as they drape themselves over silver corals.

We enter a dark antechamber. The tube we’re bouncing through bends over a series of rings set into the hull.

“Airlock?” Garcia asks.

Pretzel’s guessing, but he says, “Yep.”

Beyond the antechamber is a vast open cavern.

“This is the cargo hold,” Garcia says.

“It’s probably the only pressurized compartment on the ship,” Pretzel says.

“Where is everyone?” I ask. “How are we just waltzing in here?”

“Feels wrong,” Garcia says.

“And you’re only just arriving at that conclusion now?” Pretzel asks.

A dim red light casts an eerie glow over the chamber. Spider robots tend to thousands of custom pods. Unlike those used to transport plants and animals from the surface, these differ in size and shape depending on the occupants, being much smaller, barely larger than the specimens they contain. They’re arranged in rows with most of the vast chamber being empty.

“They were expecting to be able to gather a lot more than they got,” Pretzel says.

“Where’s Jana?” I ask. “Lady?”

“Let’s split up,” Pretzel says.

“Split up?” Garcia asks. “You’re not serious, right? That never ends well in the movies.”

Pretzel can’t bring himself to reply. The look he gives Garcia is priceless. With his forehead furrowed and his eyebrows raised, his body language speaks for him. A slight shake of his head in disbelief and he sails off to examine a bunch of irregular shapes sealed in what looks like frosted plastic at the rear of the compartment. I know we’re supposed to split up, but I follow him. If Pretzel’s curious about this section, so am I.

“This is going to take hours,” I say.

“No rush,” Garcia replies, starting on the other side. “We’ll start at the back and work forward. Hopefully, they’re stored chronologically.”

“Nope,” Pretzel replies. “All I’ve got over here is branches. Dozens of pods with branches and vines in them.”

Gravity is so low the easiest way to move around is using our hands, pulling ourselves along like scuba divers working their way over some sunken wreck. Only occasionally do my feet swing back to the deck, and only if I linger. The more I move, the more it is like the weightlessness I’ve seen on YouTube where astronauts drift around within a spacecraft.

We brush away ice crystals, peering through the thick milky white plastic from a couple of nearby pods.

“What have you got?” Pretzel asks.

“A motorcycle,” I say.

He replies with, “Tractor. I’ve found a bright red tractor with huge wheels covered in thick mud. What are they going to make of that?”

We drift between pods, calling out the items stored within them.

“Hut,” I say, scrubbing the freezing cold plastic with the flat of my hand. “An entire mud hut, complete with thatched roof. There’s a bird’s nest on one side.”

“I think I’ve found one of the Russian spy satellites,” Pretzel replies.

Garcia doesn’t stray more than a couple of aisles from us. “Does a Cessna count?”

“A Cessna counts,” Pretzel says. Looking at Garcia, I’d never guess the vast blob he’s working around was an airplane. Unlike us, he doesn’t need to rub at the surface to see beneath the cloudy plastic. To me, that’s cheating, and I’m tempted to joke with him about it, but he’s turned his back on us and is examining some other pod. I’m surprised the alien machines didn’t snatch our helicopter, but they seem to prefer machines and people in working order.

“Oh, there’s a bunch of rifles, guns and grenades in this one,” Pretzel says, peering in a pod no bigger than a desk. “And a helluva lot of ammo. I sure hope these guys handle this stuff with care.”

“I’ve got an old metal water tank,” I say. “I think it’s empty.”

To me, such an artifact is meaningless. Why would anyone want an empty water tank? And yet, having been to museums in London and Paris while on our way from Boston to Africa, taking a few extra days with my dad to see the sights, I know even the smallest, most insignificant archeological find can be revealing. Dad tried to push me along from the Denisovan tooth on display in the British Museum—he only wanted to see the Greek, Roman and Egyptian displays, go figure—but I was fascinated by it. I remember marveling how scientists could learn so much from a single tooth. I’ve forgotten what was written on the sign beneath the carefully sealed tooth mounted on a pedestal beneath a soft light, but they treated it as though it were a crown full of jewels. There were blurbs about what the person ate, how old they were, the kind of interactions they had with humans. That was the point that got my attention—there were people that weren’t human. To me, it was like something out of an episode of Star Trek, and yet here it was in a museum describing life as it existed tens of thousands of years ago. I wonder if this battered, rusted water tank will be revered in the same way on the alien home world.

“Oh, I think I’ve found our ride home,” Garcia says. That gets our attention. Pretzel and I both abandon our current pods, pushing off and drifting through the micro-gravity toward him. I’m loving low gravity. It’s akin to being in a celestial playground. Fun doesn’t describe it well enough. If it weren’t for the nerves I feel searching for Jana and the uncertainty around how we’re going to get out of here, I’d be hollering with delight. Now, though, it seems Garcia’s found a way out of the alien vessel. It’s surprising how quickly I’ve adjusted to moving through the alien hold, and the slight push brings me down within a few feet of him—like a pro.

“The Orion?” Pretzel asks, having overshot. He clambers, grabbing at the next pod, trying to reverse his direction, skidding as though he’s on ice. The challenge is not to overcorrect, and he takes his time, gently pushing off and sailing back next to us. I rub at the plastic, clearing away the outer layer of ice crystals, peering beneath the surface.

“Yep,” Garcia says somewhat proud of his discovery.

Pretzel looks worried.

“Why so glum?” Garcia asks, picking up on his negative sentiment. “This is our ticket home.”

Pretzel peers at the spacecraft, which to me looks amazing. My heart is racing with excitement. This is brilliant. We’ve got a way to get back to Earth. I don’t understand Pretzel’s worried look. He’s quiet, examining the craft but not speaking his mind.

To me, the Orion looks like one of the Apollo capsules that went to the Moon, with machined aluminum panels wrapping around it. The craft is a teardrop shape, kinda like a round pyramid. There are windows, a bunch of small circular openings that look like exhaust points, and a hatch. My heart leaps at a familiar sight. UNITED STATES has never looked as good as it does in bold, black lettering set below the red, white and blue of the Star-Spangled Banner and the NASA logo printed on the side of the Orion.

“This is it. This is how we get home,” I say.

“You’re not going to get a gorilla in that thing,” Garcia says.

“The Orion’s not going anywhere,” Pretzel finally says.

“What? But we need to get home.”

“Kid. I know. I understand. But we have no idea if we can even power this thing up. We don’t know how much oxygen it’s got, let alone things like electricity, food, water… it’s impossible.”

I hate being called a kid.

“It’s not impossible,” I say. “We have to try.”

“We’ll die,” Pretzel says.

“But you could do it,” I say with unfounded enthusiasm.

“I wish I could,” he replies. “But even if Houston could take control remotely, there’s simply not going to be enough fuel.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Orion got here by coasting, by drifting on a wild, eccentric orbit—skating across the ice, so to speak, sliding through space. But once it got here, the alien vessel captured it, removing that momentum. To get it started again. The delta-v required. I just don’t know that it carries enough fuel.”

“But it’s got rockets,” I say.

“Tiny ones,” Pretzel replies. “Small ones designed for maneuvering, not blasting from one place to another… I’m sorry Josh.”

“But. But.”

“We’ll find another way,” Garcia says. That Pretzel doesn’t comment on Garcia’s enthusiasm leaves me feeling there is no other way. We’re trapped. We’re going to die up here. I try to shake that thought from my mind. Jana and Lady. I’ve got to focus on finding them, but then what? How do we get home?

I hate turning my back on the Orion. It seems like a mistake, but Pretzel and Garcia move off, examining more of the custom pods.

“I just want to go home,” I say quietly to no one in particular, feeling my heart sink. The others are too far away to hear me mumble. I’m on the verge of crying. Our cause seems hopeless. Even if we find Jana, what chance do we have of escape?

“Found a bike,” Garcia says. “Not one of those fancy ones with gears. A kid’s bike. Real simple.”

Pretzel replies with, “I’ve got a jeep. It’s white with UN markings.”

We continue examining the artifacts in the hold, but our enthusiasm is gone. We might be calling out our findings, but the passion is dead. I don’t know what I feel. Anger? Disappointment? Defeat? Hurt? Resignation? I’ve got to bury those emotions. I’ve got to push on.

“I’ve got mammals,” Pretzel says with a sudden burst of excitement, and Garcia and I flick our way across dozens of semi-transparent coffins, for lack of a better term, working our way over to join him in the soft red light.

There are monkeys, bonobos, chimps, even a howler. It’s easy to forget just how much diversity there is in the jungle. Often, the pod shape offers no clues. Even small creatures like bats can be in large pods because there will be three or four of them laid head-to-toe. They have their wings wrapped tightly around their bodies as though they’re asleep, which makes the overall length of the pod similar to that of a human, which is misleading. I come across an Okapi with its young. Okapi look like half-finished Zebras, with horizontal stripes on their thighs and legs, while their upper body resembles a deer. Dad called them ‘God’s mashup,’ but I’m sure Pretzel would disagree, providing some longwinded explanation about natural selection.

“I’ve got a villager,” Garcia says.

“Here,” I say, rubbing the ice off the surface of a nearby container. “I’ve found her.”

Jana looks dead. She’s lying on her back with her arms neatly by her side. Her skin is pale, while her lips are blue. I’ve never seen her naked before. Her body looks almost fake, as though her head has been seamlessly attached to a department store mannequin. Her dark skin is flawless and smooth. Her breasts follow a graceful curve, while her stomach is flat. She has a small tuft of hair set perfectly between her hips, while her thighs taper down to her knees, with her legs curving to petite feet. To my mind, she looks more like the idealized carvings that sit on top of a stone casket in some ancient crypt. It’s hard to believe she’s alive, or indeed that she ever was.

Her eyes, though, are open, which is unnerving. They’re haunting, staring up, looking at nothing. There’s a light frost on her cheeks, just a touch of ice crystals giving her dark skin an almost pearlescent shine.

Pretzel swims through the frigid air toward me, so I say, “Open the graves, right? That’s what it said.”

“That’s what it said,” he repeats, although he doesn’t sound convinced.

I look down at Jana lying there so peacefully, wondering if we’re about to kill her, hoping we can save her.

3zekiel

“What can you see?” Pretzel asks Garcia.

“Hundreds of machines.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, not seeing anything beyond her cold body lying on a bed of white foam.

“Beneath her,” he says, spinning slowly around and working his way down beside her waist, looking sideways into the pod. As he speaks, his legs drift slowly back to the surface of the craft. “They’re attached to her back, just above her hips.” He reaches around, touching his own back, showing us where. “About here. Not near the spine, though. Just above the small of her back.”

I look to Pretzel. He isn’t happy.

“Kidneys, spleen, liver, adrenal gland,” he says. “They’re all easily accessible from there.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“They’re keeping her alive,” he says, resting his hand on the cold transparent surface, looking beyond his fingers at her inert body, neither breathing nor moving. “They’ll be tapping into the abdominal artery.”

“So we get her out of there.”

“We’d kill her.”

“But—there must be something we can do.”

Garcia’s quiet.

I fight to hold back tears. “Where are they?” I ask, looking around. “Where are the monsters that did this to her?”

“There’s no one—just the machines.”

“No. No,” I say, shaking my head. “What about Ezekiel? He saw these machines. He survived.”

Pretzel doesn’t reply. His head hangs. He hasn’t moved his hand in spite of the cold. His fingers are splayed wide, stretching out across the frozen surface of Jana’s coffin. He’s trying. He wants to help, but desire is not enough. I can see the pain this causes him. He too wants to believe there’s a way, but the reality of what we’re seeing is telling him, no. Garcia moves around the pod, examining it from different angles, trying to see something with his super vision, desperate to break the impasse.

I can’t accept defeat. My heart races. A hot flush rushes over me. Emotions well up, choking my throat. I feel helpless. There must be something that can be done. We’ve come so far. Instinctively, I want to lash out, to flex my muscles, to hit something, to break into the casket. It’s as though violence can somehow succeed where reason has failed, but that impulse is futile and I know it. I turn, looking around the multi-layered hold, desperate for a solution.

Garcia and Pretzel talk in hushed whispers, but in the desolate chamber even a murmur carries in the frigid air.

“What?” I ask.

Garcia’s quiet, although I know it was him that spoke first.

With a sense of calmness I don’t understand, Pretzel says, “He can open it.”

“But,” Garcia adds. “She’ll die.”

“You don’t know that,” I reply, pushing off and sailing over next to them. “You don’t.”

“Josh. I’m sorry.”

“There’s got to be another way.”

“I’m sorry,” Pretzel says. “This is the end. We can’t open her pod. We’ve reached the end of the line.”

“No,” I say defiant. “This can’t be the end.”

Pretzel is resigned, speaking quietly. “We’re out of options.”

“B—But the tractor,” I say. Both men look at me as though I’ve gone mad, and perhaps I have, but as I continue speaking a smile slowly reaches Pretzel’s face. “The water tank. The bike. We can open them, right?”

“Oh.” Pretzel grins, on the verge of laughing. “You little devil. You’re a genius.”

Coming from Pretzel, that’s high praise. He gets it. That thin strand of a thought I’m grasping at has already blossomed into a fully-fledged concept in his mind.

“What?” Garcia asks.

Pretzel’s already on the move. I’m beside him, pushing off the floor and dancing over the hold, skipping between pods, using my hands to pull myself back to the surface so I can go faster without waiting for gravity to pull me down. Garcia follows as Pretzel explains.

“We can’t open Jana’s pod. We can’t open any of these pods without killing whoever’s inside, but—”

“But?”

I complete the thought, pointing at the tractor. “But we can open these ones.”

“Why would you do that? How is that going to help?”

Pretzel says, “Because it breaks the program. It’s going to cause an alarm somewhere. It’s going to provoke a response.”

We come down beside the sealed tractor, bouncing slightly, slipping on the thin coating of ice covering the slick floor.

Garcia says, “And you’re sure this is a good idea?”

“No,” Pretzel replies. “But it’s all we’ve got.” He holds his hand out, signaling for Garcia to do his thing. With his mechanical head, Garcia looks at me—looks through me, for all I know, and then turns to the pod with the tractor.

Quietly, he says, “These things are sealed. But they’re just like the pod we rode up on. I saw how they opened our pod. There’s a mechanical release. It seems to trigger some kind of electronic lock, but the seal starts down here, under the rear section.”

He points. I don’t see anything. I doubt Pretzel does either, but Garcia reaches down and his hand disappears inside the cloudy plastic.

“Ready?”

“Ready,” Pretzel replies.

A mist spills over the floor, seeping out of the pod. Garcia fiddles with his hand. Cracks appear in the alien plastic. There are dozens of them slowly running up over the middle of the casing before dividing like the petals of a flower opening to greet the sun. The pod slowly falls apart, exposing the tractor.

Pretzel and I look at each other. Nothing. He squeezes between the petals, stepping into the pod and examining the tractor. Diesel has dripped onto the casing. Mud still clings to the wheels. It’s slightly moist so he takes a handful of it and tosses it out into the alien vessel, yelling out, “Hello? Is anyone out there?”

There’s a key in the ignition. I climb up on the worn leather seat and sit on the spongy padding, feeling the old springs sag. If there’s one advantage to living in Africa over growing up in Boston, it’s learning how to use heavy machinery. I may not be able to drive a car, but a front-load tractor is easy. I reach down and pull out the glow plug toggle, warming the engine block, unsure if the tractor will start in the cold. For a few seconds, I rest my fingers on the key, waiting, wondering how long it’ll take to heat the cylinder, hoping there’s plenty of juice in the battery.

Pretzel nods. I put the clutch in, pushing hard against the heavy spring set behind the metal pedal, half-pushing myself out of the seat in low gravity. After making sure the gearbox is in neutral, I release the clutch and turn the small silver key. The tractor splutters, sounding less like an engine and more like an old man with a persistent cough.

Black smoke billows from the exhaust, which is little more than a sawn-off pipe leading up behind the seat, with the opening just above head height. A metal flap clatters at the top of the pipe, designed to keep rain from running down inside the exhaust. It chatters in time with the engine, slowly opening up as the engine idles.

I turn on the lights and push on the large black button in the middle of the steering wheel, sounding the air horn. The blare echoes through the spaceship. I doubt this craft has ever heard anything as alien as the fog horns farmers use to scare off wild buffalo. Most newcomers to Africa think lions and crocs are dangerous, but those critters are amateurs. Hippos and buffalo kill far more people each year than the big cats. Buffalo, in particular, can be grumpy as hell—to quote my Dad. They look nothing like our American buffalo. They’re more of a pimped-up black panel van with horns. I heard of one ramming a tractor just outside of Ubandi. The animal’s horn punctured the radiator. Buffalo: 1 — Farmer: 0.

I rev the engine as the tractor splutters, spitting pungent smoke into the air. The frame of the old tractor rattles. Tractors like this are common throughout Africa, being relics of the past, handed down from father to son. This one’s probably forty to fifty years old. As the engine comes up to speed, the roar goes from deep, throaty blasts to a steady hum.

Spider-like aliens come clambering over the walls, hanging from the ceiling and climbing over the surrounding pods, all converging on the tractor. Pretzel signals with a finger running across his throat and I cut the engine. The lights go out and the cargo hold within the alien vessel is plunged back into darkness.

“Quick,” he says, and we hurry out of the pod as alien machines begin pouring over the edge of the plastic, rushing into the broken casing, trying to figure out what just happened.

“Ah, I think that worked,” Garcia says. For someone that can see in all directions at once, he still orients his body as though he’s staring ahead. Instead of facing us as we climb out of the casing, he’s turned sideways, looking at the closest wall.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Pretzel says, stepping back and drifting through the frigid air as the tractor is consumed by thousands of spindly metallic legs.

“No. Not them.” Garcia has his hands outstretched as though he’s trying to keep someone at bay. “Him.”

“Who?” Pretzel asks. “Where?”

“There... No, there... Wait, it’s all around us.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. It’s taken a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light again, but I don’t see anything beyond the small spider-like machines. The aliens are preoccupied with the tractor, closing the casing and sealing the plastic.

“You can’t see that?” Garcia asks. “It’s everywhere. The whole thing is coming alive. The walls. The floor. The ceiling. They’re all…”

A mist drifts over the ground, swirling as if in response to a door opening, forming eddies that dance around us. There’s a sound as of a heavy breathing. With the tractor pod sealed, the small alien machines disappear, shrinking back into the shadows.

“But there’s no one here,” Pretzel says.

“It’s the entire craft,” Garcia replies. “It’s come to life. There’s energy. Everywhere.”

“Who are you?” Pretzel calls out, yelling within the vast hold.

In the silence that follows, his voice carries with an echo.

We wait. No one speaks. The response that comes is haunting, like the wind whispering through the trees on a dark, lonely night. Rather than being a sentence, it’s as though a single word has been spoken in reply, slowly passing through various vowels and syllables without any clear distinction between them. It’s mimicry, repeating Pretzel’s question back at us but without any clarity.

“Ooooooo-wwwhoooooo-arrrrreeee-yoooou?”

A rush of blood causes me to blurt out the one word that’s been burning in the back of my mind ever since I sat at dinner with Brother Mordecai and my father.

“Ezekiel?”

No one moves. None of us dare. A cool wind swirls around us, enveloping us, chilling us to the bone. I don’t know where to look. The alien speaks from everywhere and nowhere at once, but it makes no sense to me.

“Threeeeeeee,” drifts through the cargo bay.

Pretzel, Garcia and I have our backs up against each other, facing all the approaches, unsure what’s happening. I go to speak, but Pretzel turns slightly, holding a finger to his lips as the alien intelligence completes its response.

“Zzzzzzekiel.”

Suddenly, light surrounds us, bathing us in a brilliant, all-pervasive white. There’s no source in particular, no spotlight as such, but rather, the light comes from all around us, even the floor. I blink, struggling to see, looking down at my feet—there’s no shadow. My boots, my jeans, even my shirt turn white, slowly melting, losing all sense of form, blinding me. It’s as though my body is being dissolved by the light.

Pretzel takes one hand, Garcia holds the other. We all have our heads bowed, but the light is so bright it penetrates even our eyelids, saturating my sight with a blur of blood red veins. I keep my eyes clenched shut, but I can’t block out the pulsating white light.

As suddenly as it came, the light is gone, only the darkness is a patchwork of blotches and neon shapes dancing before my eyes. They’re artifacts of the light, imprints on my retina preventing me from seeing reality. For me, it feels as though not only was the light cut off, but all sound was drained as well. Although I don’t remember any noise accompanying the light, the darkness is eerily silent.

A low rumble breaks into words like distant thunder echoing off the mountains.

“Noooooo-one-hereeeeee.”

We keep our shoulders pressed hard against each other, all desperate for the reassurance that another human is standing beside us, hoping we haven’t unleashed a monster.

“Wheeeeeere-issssssss-it?”

Under his breath, Pretzel whispers, “These are our words. It’s repeating them back at us.” I’m not sure if Pretzel has opened his eyes yet. I’m still seeing spots. Slowly, I peer out at the darkness but I’ve lost all points of reference. It’s as though the hold of the craft is entirely empty even though I know it’s not.

“All-around-ussssssssss.”

“Why is it copying us?” I mumble.

Pretzel ignores my question, whispering, “Keep it talking.”

I don’t reply as such, but I’m thinking—Me? Why me? Why not the soldier? What about the scientist? How did the preacher’s teenaged son get tasked with First Contact?

“Jana,” I say, raising my voice, putting on a show of bravery betrayed by my sweaty palms and trembling legs. “Lady… You took them. We want them back.”

“Youuuuu… Weeeee…”

“What’s it doing?” I whisper.

“Learning,” Pretzel replies, his lips barely moving.

“Lady. Jana,” I say, being quite deliberate in repeating their names, reversing the order, though, trying to show they’re distinct and interchangeable as equals. “Let them go.” But this alien intelligence wouldn’t recognize them by their names. It wouldn’t even recognize them by their species—human and gorilla. I’m tempted to move over to Jana’s pod to make my point clear, but I don’t want to leave the safety of our group.

“Ladeeeeee… Jannnnnaaaaa”

“It’s you. Isn’t it?” I say, again being conscious of my words, trying to provoke this alien intelligence into revealing something about itself. “You’re Ezekiel, aren’t you?”

“Threeeeeee-zzzzeeeeekiel.”

“Interesting,” Pretzel whispers. I’m not sure what he finds so fascinating, but that’s the second time it’s got the name Ezekiel wrong.

“Ezekiel,” I say, blurting that name out with confidence, projecting from my diaphragm rather than simply shouting. The ancient Hebrew name echoes around us. The response is equally sharp and abrupt, but incorrect.

“3zekiel.”

“It’s broken,” Pretzel whispers. “It’s trying to repeat what it heard, but it can’t quite mimic us. I think it’s busted.”

In unison, Garcia and I both say, “What?” But we speak a little louder than either of us intends as that one word slips from our lips.

“It’s malfunctioning,” Pretzel says, somehow able to refrain from blurting that aloud, still talking in hushed tones. “Think about it. Back in the base station—we saw the silver head of a snake, then a bird, then a gorilla and a monkey before finally settling on a human. Didn’t that strike you as strange?”

To which, Garcia replies, “Everything about this strikes me as strange.”

Pretzel ignores his comment.

“This is why they never contacted us when they moved into orbit. They couldn’t. The machinery didn’t survive the journey—not intact. Their mission was compromised. Perhaps by cosmic rays? Micro-meteor impacts? Faulty parts? After thousands of years, there could be any number of reasons.”

“What do you mean?” I say, watching as spider-like alien robots swarm around our feet, encircling us. “I don’t understand.”

“We do this,” Pretzel says, not noticing the tiny machines, still looking out over the hold of the alien vessel. “We have fail-safe modes for our spacecraft. Exploration modes. Communication modes. Sleep modes. Recovery modes. At each point, if there’s any failure, we do everything we can to ensure something still works, that something can continue. We have dozens of contingencies to avoid catastrophic failure so the mission can go on. Lose one antenna, reroute traffic through another. Stuff like that.”

“Doc, uh—” Garcia says, but Pretzel is distracted by his own reasoning. He doesn’t see the machines circling us, slowly building into a swarm, forming layers, with the smallest machines barely a few feet away while the larger spiders clamber over nearby pods, positioning themselves to face us.

“We design our robotic probes to gather whatever information they can, to transmit whatever they find. At each step there are fail-safes to ensure the mission isn’t a complete loss.”

“Ah, Doc.” Garcia’s worried. There are thousands of alien machines surrounding us, moving in unison. “Did it ever occur to you they might interpret your little stunt as sabotage?”

“Wh—” Pretzel never finishes his sentence.

Back on Earth, our problem was that there was never a plan. It’s a fault we brought up here. At no point did we know quite what we were going to do on Cruithne or how we could ever hope to survive and escape from the depths of an alien spacecraft, and in this brief flicker of time, that realization strikes me with stunning clarity.

Garcia knew there was no plan, of course. He was blind, but he wasn’t blind to that. He tried to warn us, but Pretzel, so rational and level-headed and scientific—he was blind to his own enthusiasm. Me? Up until the point the machines circled us, I thought there was hope. Now, as they swarm toward us, charging at our feet, I realize I was naive. It’s the first bite, the razor-sharp prongs tearing through my trousers and puncturing my skin that send those thoughts racing through my mind along with spasms of pain. There’s no way to rewind time, no opportunity to correct mistakes.

Needle-like prongs punch through my trousers, sinking deep into my skin, reaching the bone.

Oh, please. No.

Pain surges through my legs, but my feet are numb, having already succumbed to the alien horde trampling over them, burying them from sight.

No. This can’t be the end.

I try to move, to pull away, but I can’t. My feet are stuck fast, trapped as though they’re held in a vice.

I’m sorry, Jana. I’ve failed you.

I try not to scream, but I can’t help myself, shouting out, “Ezekiel, no! It doesn’t have to end this way.”

Wave after wave of alien machines race up my legs, clambering over my waist and tearing my hands from Pretzel and Garcia. I try to jump, wanting to spring out in low gravity and shake the machines from my body, but I can’t. I’m paralyzed, but not out of fear. Every inch they crawl across falls under their sway and I feel myself slowly dying, losing control of my body. Most terrifying of all is the large machines with their spindly, spider-like legs, working their way over the others, closing in on my head.

Metallic probes puncture my clothes, cutting through the skin and plunging deep into my spine, tearing at the nerves. My head lashes back in response to the pain and I yell, “EEE—ZEEE—KIEEE—ELLL.”

I twist with my shoulders, flexing my neck, struggling to break free, but it’s hopeless. Metallic tentacles wrap themselves around my throat. Icy cold metal squeezes my skin. The splayed body of a silvery machine rests over my face, nestling its soft underbelly against my mouth, choking me.

A single phrase is spoken by the alien intelligence. As before, it’s a sentence echoing us in mimicry. I recognize not only the words but the context in which they were first spoken by Pretzel, just before we realized we were being watched.

Convulsions seize my body. Pain surges through my skull. Those few words, though, hurt far more than anything I feel. It’s something Pretzel said when we found Jana in the pod, just moments ago when he first realized we could never rescue her. Deep and resonant, these four words reverberate around us as I struggle to take one last breath. They’re cruel, mean, spoken with a sense of finality.

“Thisssssss isssss the end.”

I gasp, struggling to breathe.

Darkness finally brings relief from the pain.

Home

Rain falls gently on the windowsill, tapping lightly at the glass, beckoning me to wake. My eyelids flicker. I was just thinking about something, but what escapes me. It was important, something serious and alarming, but now it’s gone. Dreams are like that. On waking, the concept has disappeared, having faded like an early morning fog drifting through the trees. I know that something held my mind with an iron grip, but I have no idea quite what it was. Lying there on my back in my warm bed, staring up at the ceiling, I don’t know why my heart is racing. I pull at the covers and a sense of comfort and familiarity washes over me.

There’s something undeniably soothing about the steady rhythm of the rain, the constant pitter patter, the slight ebb and surge as the wind swirls through the trees, stirring the leaves.

Normally, the jungle is subject to sudden, torrential downpours. I’ve been caught in plenty of African storms and they’re like someone dumped a bucket of water over my head. This morning, though, the rain is soothing. There’s no flickering flash of lightning breaking through the clouds, no waiting with bated breath for thunder to rattle the trees. Rather than being blasted by a firehose, it’s as though someone left the lawn sprinkler on outside.

I roll over, pulling the bedsheet up over my shoulder, turning away from the window. A good night’s sleep is rare in the jungle. The humidity never ceases. Often, it’s a hundred degrees plus at midnight. This morning, though, is one of those rare times when even the monkeys take shelter under a broad leaf, shivering in the cool air.

I close my eyes and bury my head into my pillow, tired, not wanting to stir. Light streams in through the open curtains, making it difficult to sleep, but I’m warm, comfortable and relaxed, sinking into the mattress.

The wooden window shakes in the loose frame, rattling the glass. At first, I assume it’s the wind picking up, but a voice calls out, “Josh?”

I twist, rocking onto my hip, opening my weary eyes to see Jana standing outside in the rain. Our house is next to the church, but my bedroom backs onto the grassy area behind the old wooden hall at the back. As the manse is raised up on concrete posts with metal caps to keep insects at bay, Jana has to back up on the grass to be seen from the bedroom. She waves with her arms, attracting my attention. Rain washes over her face, matting down her hair, causing it to stick to her neck, soaking her clothes, but she doesn’t care.

I stumble to the window, pulling on the wooden frame, raising it up and feeling a cool breeze rush in. Spits of rain drift on the wind, landing on my cheeks, something that’s always welcome in the jungle.

“What are you doing out there?” I ask, blinking, somewhat bewildered and still half-asleep.

Jana has her arms out wide, with her hands turned up toward the sky, catching the rain. She twirls, relishing the cool relief a morning storm brings from the scorching heat of Africa. Give it a few hours, though, and the village will be a sauna. It’s not uncommon to see steam rising after a shower has doused the jungle.

“Come,” she says. “Come and see.”

“But my dad,” I reply, turning toward the closed wooden door leading to the hallway, expecting it to burst open at any second. I just can’t deal with him today. For once, I’d like breakfast without a lecture. Why can’t he just accept things as they are? Why must everything/everyone bow to his iron will? Who made him God? Oh, such heresy as I dare not speak.

“Come on, Josh,” she calls out, twirling as though she were drunk—twisting and stamping at the grass with her shoes, dizzy with life, splashing in the puddles.

I’ve got a shirt on, hanging down over my thighs, but no shorts or underwear. I could put on some fresh clothes, but I’m about to get drenched so I grab my crumpled-up underwear and pants from the floor.

Stepping to one side, just out of view, I get dressed, tucking in my shirt and trying to look presentable for Jana—as though that somehow matters. I know it doesn’t. Not to her. I know she doesn’t care what I wear or how I look, even with my hair sticking out at odd angles, but I have a longing to be handsome—for her, at least. In some ways, I can’t wait to get wet so the punk rock impression on top of my head settles down.

“What’s taking so long?” Jana calls out, laughing.

I shove my pillow under the sheets, ruffling them, trying to make it seem as though I’m still asleep, hoping that’s enough should my dad peek inside the door.

“Coming,” I say half-heartedly, not wanting to yell inside the house lest I rouse the beast.

“Hurry,” she says with a smile lighting up her face. “I want to show you something.”

It’s madness to venture out without shoes on, not even within the village, and certainly not in the jungle. Everything bites. As tempting as it is to jump out the window, I work to loosen the laces on my boots and put them on properly.

Jana sings. Her voice is soft, barely carrying over the sound of the rain, but it makes me nervous, encouraging me to rush before Dad walks in. If I’m busted now, he’ll ground me for a month, which in the jungle means no heading off with my friends after chores. That would suck so bad. I want to call out to Jana, wanting her to keep quiet, but that could wake Dad. I’m torn between hurrying and not wanting to be heard moving around my bedroom.

With my boots on, I stand at the window, pausing for a moment, wondering if I should go and spin some yarn to Dad and come up with a baloney excuse to go into the village in the rain. He won’t buy it. He hates it when I sneak out, but a brief adventure with Jana is worth a growling. I’ll plead ignorance. I’ll say I was going to the market to get some fruit for breakfast. Dad takes things too seriously. He’s compulsive. He has to know everything—every last detail. He’ll analyze the slightest frown with Freudian precision. Anything done without full disclosure is suspicious and, in his mind, more than likely evil. Privacy isn’t a word found in the Bible, or so I’m told, but neither’s micro-management. Defiance is its own reward and I can’t help but smile. Consequences be damned. I hoist my butt onto the windowsill and swing my legs over the edge.

It’s a drop of about six feet to the muddy ground and I land with a splash. The rain’s growing heavy. Within a few feet, I’m drenched but it feels great. The thing about rainy days like this is they’re Sundays in the jungle. Well, technically every seventh day is a Sunday, but in practice people work seven days a week here. It’s tough for Dad to corral more than a dozen villagers for a few hours on a Sunday morning because there’s so much to do, but on those rare days where we joke about building an ark, it’s like a Sunday back home. People lounge around inside. Life slows down. It’s not quite lazing at the lake house on the fourth of July, but it’s close enough. It also means Jana and I are the only ones moving about.

I grab a cinderblock and prop it against one of the stumps keeping the house off the ground, and stand on it, tiptoeing as my fingers reach for the edge of the window. Slowly, I draw the wooden frame down, leaving a gap of a few inches—not enough for the rain to get in, just enough for me to pry it back open later when I come home.

“Come with me,” Jana says playfully, taking my hand and leading me on. She’s giddy, laughing. Like a flower in the rain, she’s embracing life. Jana skips along behind the church, leading me over to the river. I skip too. Skipping is cool. Skipping is fun. It’s surprisingly efficient. It’s a refusal to be glum. If more people skipped, the world would be a better place, I’m sure of it. It’s just not possible to skip and be mean or angry or anything but full of joy, and I am drunk with Jana’s presence. I have no idea what the future holds. Dad thinks she’s using me as a ticket out of the village, but he sees what he fears. I see what I’ve found.

Water runs down my face. Life has never felt so good.

“I had this crazy dream,” I say to her, but in the context of skipping down a muddy track, trampling grass and splashing in puddles, it seems silly to bring up a dream that’s barely more than a few scattered fragments.

“Me too,” Jana says, swinging her arms and drawing me into her rhythm. We pass beneath a Kapok tree. These are the giants of the forest, reaching above even the jungle canopy. Their roots spread out over the muddy ground, growing like blades of wood, long and thin, reaching down into the soil. Their bark is smooth. Water drips on us rather than raining down from the clouds, being collected by the leaves and channels formed by the branches.

Jana takes to jumping in the puddles with both feet, splashing me with mud and laughing. Monkeys swing through the trees. Birds chase insects. Big leafy plants sag with water dripping from the canopy. We hop along the trail, laughing—at what, I’m not sure, at life itself, I guess.

“I found her,” Jana says as we approach the bridge beside Raka’s hut. “It took some time, but I did.”

The satellite dish on the roof is slowly filling with water. I doubt it’s designed to operate like that, but Raka probably hasn’t noticed.

“Who?” I say, distracted by Raka’s hut. The shutters have been closed over the windows. In all the time I’ve lived in the village, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them shut. Raka was a bit strange like that. He said his home was always open to the forest spirits. Dad said he had mental health issues. To see those shutters closed is surprising, distracting and I wonder if he’s gone up to Kisangani.

“Lady,” Jana says as we come around the other side of the broad Kapok tree.

To my surprise, Lady’s sheltering from the rain, sitting in a gap between the roots. Normally, the gorillas stay well clear of the village now it’s grown in size. Humans are too noisy.

Lady runs branches through her mouth, stripping berries from the thin twigs. The sun breaks through the clouds, streaming through the leaves, casting long shadows as the storm slowly clears and rain drips from the tree.

I come to a halt, suddenly feeling overwhelmed as memories come flooding back.

“Lady?”

“Lady and Jana, right? That’s what you told them, isn’t it? That you came for us.” She signs, speaking aloud as her fingers move. “Look, Lady. It’s your friend Josh.”

“Whoa.”

My head seems to swing around me. I’m dizzy, on the verge of collapsing, unsure of my footing. I reach out, touching at one of the thick roots winding its way over the jungle floor, grabbing it not just for balance, but for surety, trying to determine what’s real.

“Josh?”

“I—I don’t understand.”

Lady looks up and grunts. In the cool morning air, her hair has bristled, giving her the appearance of being meticulously groomed. It’s as though she’s just walked out of a hair salon, if there was such a thing for gorillas. Water beads on her shoulders, rolling off her greasy hair as she rocks forward onto all fours. Her eyes go wide. From behind pitch black skin and a broad, flat, open nose, she smiles.

“OOH. OOH.”

Lady avoids showing her teeth, but smiles broadly, revealing the lush pink inside her cheeks as she stretches her mouth wide in excitement, rushing over to me on all fours.

“Lady told me what you did for her, how you found her, how you cared for her and fought for her.”

I stumble backwards, confused, looking around me at the trees, listening to the call of the birds, watching monkeys swinging between branches, obscured by the leaves. Ants wind their way over the trunk of the Kapok tree, twisting as they follow contours in the bark, marching in single file, carrying bits of leaf from the jungle floor.

“Are you okay?” Jana asks, reaching out and taking my hand. Her fingers entwine with mine. “It’s okay. They said it might be a bit much at first.”

Lady rocks up to me on her knuckles, pressing them deep into the soft mud. She snorts, sniffing the air, and reaches out a clubbed hand.

“It’s for you,” Jana says. “A present.”

I hold out my hand and Lady places a handful of torn grass in my open palm. I feel everything, the subtleties of the breeze catching my wet clothing, the touch of her warm fingers against my skin, the thin strands of grass resting on my outstretch palm. The smell, the sounds.

“Is this real?”

Jana smiles, rocking her head to one side. “Yes, silly.”

Lady tears another handful of wet grass, throwing it into the air, wanting to dance beneath it, but it’s sodden and heavy, falling rather than drifting to the ground. She twirls regardless, wanting me to copy her. Feeling numb, I go through the motions, raising my hand and sprinkling the grass so it falls on my hair and shoulders, but I’m lost in a daze.

“She says, you’re pretty,” Jana says.

“Just like her,” I mumble, remembering something more than a dream.

“Pretzel,” I say as the realization strikes my mind like a bolt of lightning.

“He’s in Raka’s hut.”

We walk out from beneath the Kapok tree. The clouds have cleared and yet others remain, only they’re hundreds of thousands of miles beyond us, out in the depths of space, trapped within a gas giant that, to my mind, looks like Jupiter, but how could it be so close? Stunned, I come to a stop in the mud, dripping wet and looking up at the sky in awe.

“Where—are—we?”

“We’re here,” Jana says. “They brought us home.”

Rather than being blue, the sky is dark, bordering on black even though we’re bathed in sunlight. Clouds swirl through the atmosphere of a gas giant. The planet rises slowly over the tree line like a full moon on a crisp winter evening, only it’s easily ten times the size of the moon. Layer upon layer of milky-white creams blend with oranges and browns, swirling within the distant planet, forming an intricate tapestry of curves and layers like oil drifting on water.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jana asks.

“Yes.”

There are eddies and whirlpools in the clouds, entwined with each other, forming interlocking patterns. It’s as though van Gogh painted the sky. Although they must be in motion, the clouds appear locked in place. They bump up against each other, curling like waves at some celestial beach. Smokey blue threads weave their way between turbulent hurricanes of ruddy brown, only there’s no eye to these storms, rather some other swirling pattern rises up from beneath, filling the gap. There are white clouds, but they’re elongated, appearing like a thin smudge stretching around the planet—a layer of butter cream icing slathered in between two sections of some gigantic cosmic cake.

To one side, there’s a small black spot, perfectly round, blotting out the clouds on one tiny section of the planet. As I stand there struggling to take in another world, I realize the blot is moving—not quickly, but with a smooth motion that’s unmistakable. It’s then I see a moon out in space, well beyond the planet, casting its shadow on the clouds of the gas giant.

“And… And Pretzel’s here?” I ask.

“Of course. Come on.”

I struggle to tear myself away from the alien world dominating the sky. For Jana, it’s as though nothing is out of place, which is perhaps the most unsettling point of all. She pulls gently on my hand, leading me over to Raka’s hut.

As we approach, I can hear talking within.

“Waikiki,” Garcia says. “The Outrigger Hotel. Hell, I’d settle for the Hilton, but tell them Waikiki in Hawaii.”

“They’re not going to know what Waikiki means,” Pretzel replies with his back to the door. Garcia’s lying on a cot with his hands behind his metallic head, apparently staring at the ceiling. One of the shutters is open now the rain has passed. Sunlight streams in, only it’s not from our sun. I pause by the door, intrigued, trying to glean understanding from their conversation. Jana squeezes my fingers. I suspect she’s as curious as I am about the references to Hawaii, although my curiosity extends a little further.

Garcia says, “You’ve got to tell them. We don’t live in mud huts.”

Pretzel counters with, “You’ve got to remember, to them, there’s not much difference between a mud hut and a mansion. Just a bit of plumbing and a few wires. It’s all primitive by their reckoning.”

“Oh, man. I cannot live the rest of my life in a mud hut.”

“Okay, I’ve found a scan of homes in Malibu. There are floor plans. Blueprints.”

“Is there a lap pool? If there’s a lap pool, I’ll take it.”

Pretzel laughs. He’s holding what looks like a computer tablet, only it’s circular in shape rather than a rectangle. As he shifts his weight, stepping to one side, he notices our shadows in the doorway.

“Oh, hey, Josh.”

Garcia sits up swiftly, swinging his legs over the cot and getting to his feet. “Hey, buddy. How are you doing?”

Pretzel says, “Jana was supposed to let you sleep in.”

Jana lowers her head, not so much from being scolded but as though she’s been caught out being cheeky. She grins.

Pretzel pretends to be angry with her, but it’s beyond him. “We were supposed to go together, remember?”

“I wanted him to see Lady,” Jana says in her defense.

Pretzel shrugs. Good enough reason for him. He and Garcia walk out into the sunlight.

“So what do you think?” he asks, gesturing with his hand to the village and the jungle beyond. Birds squawk as they always have. Flies buzz through the air. Millions of insects call for each other now the rain has stopped. Branches bend and flex, drooping under the weight of monkeys swinging through the canopy, screaming at each other.

“Where are we?” I ask, although I know where we’re supposed to be. This is my home, my village, my jungle. I recognize everything. The weathered rocks dotted between the huts, too big to move so the villagers built around them. Several boulders have trees clinging to them, with their roots clambering over them, following a tortured path down to the soil. Others are worn from where generations of hominids have sat on them, resting from the heat of the day. Hominids, not humans, as regardless of what my dad might say, there were people here long before us.

Pretzel is silent, letting me take everything in. I walk over toward one of the rocks. I can see the datum point where all this started. I remember Jana holding a pole as someone peered through a laser sight, calling out the height above sea level. I think it was Pretzel that spray painted the number on the rock, or it might have been Dr. Angela O’Brien. I’m not sure. It’s still there, though. My fingers linger on the paint, running slowly over the rough texture, only it’s not real. Not the original. This is some facsimile, a re-creation, and yet I’m glad it’s here as it’s a testament to her life.

Pretzel rests his hand gently on my shoulder, knowing it takes time to process the magnitude of all that’s unfolded.

“We’re home,” he says. “That’s what this place is.”

“It was Jana’s choice of name,” Garcia says.

“I figured, Earth was already taken,” Jana replies.

“Home?”

They all nod.

“So this is it?” I ask. “There’s no going back?”

“There’s nothing to go back to,” Garcia says. “Not in the jungle.”

“Where is it?” I ask. “Where’s our real home?”

“Earth?” Pretzel replies. “He points at the ground on an angle, circling slightly with his hand. “Around 780 light years that way.”

“Which—which star is this?”

“Dunno. It’s probably not even visible from Earth. There are roughly three million stars within a thousand light years of Earth—of which we can only see a couple of thousand from Earth with the naked eye, so it could be any of them, I guess.”

“So which constellation are we in?” I ask.

“Constellations aren’t my thing,” Pretzel says. “I should have paid more attention to astrology, I guess. Who would have thought that would ever come in handy?” He laughs. “We see constellations as things that are flat, but they’re not, so the shapes are distorted in the sky. I tried looking for Sirius as it’s so bright from Earth, but it’s only about 7 light years away from the Sun. From out here it’s just another nameless dot in the sky. I think I’ve spotted Orion, but it’s kinda messed up. Betelgeuse is obvious enough, but everything else is skewed and stretched. It’s like someone threw a star map in a blender.”

Pretzel smiles. He’s trying to put my madly beating heart at ease.

“We can never go back,” he says softly, reiterating Garcia’s point. “There’s nothing left from our time. Our journey took roughly 1200 years, from what I can tell. These guys don’t exactly speak in terms of years, so it’s more a guess than anything. If we were to return to Earth, it would be like someone from ancient Babylon being dropped in Times Square. Spacetime is a strange beast.”

“But Earth’s still out there somewhere?” I ask.

“Oh, yeah. They can see them—humans like us—spreading out from our solar system. They’ve had numerous interactions since our time, but it’ll be hundreds of years before those reports arrive and we’ll be long dead by then. We thought of First Contact as an event, but it’s a process spanning thousands of years!”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “How is that even possible?”

“During the First World War, news was shipped across the Atlantic in tin cans. Films from the Battle of the Somme arrived months after the attack had ended. The horror the public expressed at the butchery of American soldiers dying in muddy trenches was for a fight that was long over.

“Back then, even seemingly instant forms of communication, like telegrams, took days to reach the families of fallen soldiers. Sometimes weeks. Even months depending on how difficult it was to identify the dead. In some ways, it’s a bit like that. They can see humans establishing an outpost in orbit around Jupiter, but it’s probably long gone by now, or tripled in size. They can see our probes reaching out beyond the Oort cloud, racing toward nearby stars, but those spacecraft aren’t there anymore. They’ve moved on. Several of them are heading this way. One of them is big enough to sustain a crew, but it’ll be several thousand years before it gets here, so dozens of generations will live and die before they make landfall here at Home.”

I’m in shock.

“But the aliens. H—How did they do all this?” I ask, gesturing around us. Were it not for the gas giant rising over the trees and the pitch-black sky in the middle of the day, I could swear I was back home in my old village in Africa.

“They thought it would make us feel safe,” Jana says.

“Waikiki,” Garcia replies, laughing. “Waikiki would make me feel safe.”

Pretzel says, “Once they realized they’d caught intelligent beings in their dragnet, they went to extraordinary lengths not to hurt us. Their scientific ethics committee demanded that a habitat be established before we were revived. They’ve waited hundreds of years, carefully building up the jungle, reconstructing the village from their scans, and all so we’d feel at home.”

“This is our home now,” Jana says, squeezing my hand, wanting to assure me everything’s going to be okay. I don’t know how she can be so confident.

Garcia hands me a bottle of water and I drink heartily.

Pretzel says, “They woke us based on our ability to absorb emotional change, with Jana going first. Apparently, we all needed her.”

Typical Pretzel. He scrunches up his face a little, raising an eyebrow and nodding in admiration at a teenaged girl from a tiny village in the middle of the African jungle.

“Where are they?” I ask, trying to hide my trembling hands and the quiver in my voice as I put the bottle down.

Pretzel points up in the sky.

Garcia says, “They don’t even have a planet.”

“What? How is that possible?”

Pretzel smiles. “They evolved around the moon of another gas giant in this system. Just as we once spread out between continents, they jumped between moons, establishing their civilization in orbit around a planet that looks a lot like Neptune.

“This particular moon is smaller than Earth, but has a dense core, so gravity is similar, but get on even a small hill and you can see the curvature. I think Home is closer to Mars in terms of its size. Maybe Titan.”

“And them? What do they look like?”

“Like starfish,” Garcia says. “Kinda like those spider robots we saw, but without the chrome.”

‘They struggle in one gee,” Pretzel says, “So all our meetings occur in orbit.”

My eyes cast up, catching the sight of a thin strand reaching from the jungle into the sky, marking the location of another space elevator. “Oh, wow.”

“Do you want to meet them?” Jana asks, bubbling with enthusiasm.

“There’s no rush,” Pretzel says.

I nod and force a smile, trying to be brave.

“You only just woke,” Garcia says. “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

I lie.

“Absolutely.”

With a sense of resolve, I take hold of Jana’s hand again. What I really want to say is, ‘I want to go home,’ but this is our home now. It’s not that I want to go back to the jungle—I want to return to America. In all my years in Africa, I never doubted there would be a time I’d walk the streets of Boston again, or stroll through Central Park in New York. But now, that’s all gone.

Doubts crowd my mind, but with Jana, I feel I can do this. The future is ours, I tell myself, the future is exciting, not threatening. Perhaps that’s the greatest lesson I learned from my father—to face my fears, not run from them.

Jana smiles. The warmth in her fingers gives me strength. It seems we both got our ticket out of the jungle, although not quite in the way either of us expected.

The End

Afterword

Thank you for taking a chance on 3zekiel. I hope you’ve enjoyed this novel as much as I have. Without your support, stories like this aren’t possible. Books live and die based on the enthusiasm of readers. Without you, this is just a manuscript shoved in a drawer somewhere, so thank you for being part of the journey.

I’d like to thank Luann Miller and David Jaffe for their assistance in reviewing the preliminary draft of this novel, along with Petr Melechin, Chris Roberts, Rob Engel, Ken Bruce and Bruce Simmons (who’s been helping with beta-reads since the early days of Anomaly, Monsters and Little Green Men). Retired U.S. Army medic Bob Bickford also helped with insights into the military activity in this novel.

As much as possible, I base my stories on established science. I’m not a fan of Ancient Aliens but if we are ever visited by extraterrestrials at some point in the future, it would be valid to consider whether we might have been visited in the past as well, simply because such an undertaking is too vast for a single journey. In the same way we’ve sent multiple probes to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, etc, it would be highly unlikely for ET to show up just once.

The movie Independence Day also recognized this point. Although it showed vast armadas of spacecraft, huge base ships and dozens of mile-wide atmospheric craft, these were tied into the earlier (mythical) Roswell crash. Why? Because the risk/cost associated with an interstellar expedition is so extreme any explorer would want to be absolutely sure about the return on their efforts. I’ve taken that idea and extended it further, tying it into obscure texts from the Bible as a past record that could possibly be reinterpreted in light of some future encounter.

Why does this story revolve around alien machines instead of aliens themselves? In Confessions of an Alien Hunter, SETI scientist Seth Shostak points out that, given the extreme distances involved in space and the ridiculous amount of time required to traverse star systems, let alone entire galaxies, if extraterrestrials ever do reach Earth it will probably be in the form of von Neumann machines—self-replicating robotic probes spreading throughout the universe. This type of exploration was popularized in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where a sentient alien monolith observes the rise of Homo sapiens from the lunar surface, and later journeys to the moons of Jupiter.

At first, this might seem absurd—why don’t extraterrestrials simply come here themselves? The cosmic speed limit imposed by relativity and the vast distances involved make it practically impossible to journey to other stars within anything even remotely resembling a lifetime. Our fastest spacecraft would take roughly 70,000 years to reach any of the nearest stars. By comparison, 70,000 years ago, there were multiple hominid species on Earth, all competing for similar resources. Homo sapiens had only just ventured out of Africa, following the coastline of Asia and encountering Homo floresiensis among coastal islands, while Europe was dominated by Homo neanderthal. Where will we Homo sapiens be in 70,000 years time?

Although it’s not a popular opinion, robotic exploration is the most practical and efficient means of reaching the stars.

‘Generation ships’ are popular in science fiction, but they’re impractical. The resources and maintenance required to keep people alive are exorbitant while the risk of catastrophic failure will only ever increase over time.

‘Seed ships’ carrying sperm/eggs along with robotic womb/incubators will be possible one day, but whoever launches them has to be extremely confident about the viability of the target system to sustain life. Once life germinates onboard, they have all the same problems as generation ships.

When it comes to galactic exploration, that leaves von Neumann probes: robots powered by artificial intelligence, like the craft described in this story. Their advantage is they can mine asteroids to build replicas of themselves and spread like a virus.

The problem with von Neumann probes is as they replicate they’re susceptible to degradation—and that’s the angle that’s been explored in this novel. In the same way a copy of a copy of a copy of an original document slowly introduces errors by way of ‘noise’ in the image, often showing up as blots or grainy/blurred edges, von Neumann probes will be subject to mistakes being introduced that affect their function. These may occur during replication or even just with the passage of time and constant exposure to cosmic radiation over the years.

By comparison, biology has learned to protect itself and even exploit such errors, something machines can’t replicate due to the structural differences in how they’re made. To start with, the error/mutation rates in biological replication range from as low as one per hundred million to one in a billion nucleotides (mostly in bacteria). This is an astonishing degree of fidelity, far beyond anything we can achieve in engineering.

On the surface, the idea that each biological cell contains its own copy of the blueprint for the entire organism seems highly redundant. It’s like the brake pads in your car having the plans for the engine, and vice versa. But in practice, it’s an extremely efficient way of protecting an organism. When errors do occur, rather than being crippled by mistakes, life evolves.

Life escapes the photocopying trap by embracing errors.

Biological life reproduces at such an astronomical rate it wouldn’t be sustainable if the vast majority of offspring didn’t fail. In this way, by having a callous disregard for the prospects of each individual copy, natural selection favors errors that introduce even the slightest advantage. Too many bacterial cells divide, too many seeds fall, too many eggs are laid, and too many puppies are born for all but a fraction of them to survive, weeding out errors that detract from the overall survival of the species.

Whereas machines seek to maintain an optimum design, life repudiates the status quo, embracing errors/changes that improve the species (even though this is often to the detriment of individual losses and the emergence of replication-based diseases like cancer). From there, species branch out, splintering in different directions rather than breaking down like a machine. Instead of remaining static, natural selection exploits the tendency of things to degrade, and in this way life has survived for almost four billion years on this rock! The most advanced von Neumann machine, by comparison, simply cannot replicate and survive for more than a fraction of that time, hence the central conceit in 3zekiel is that von Neumann probes will become faulty—either through long-term exposure to the harsh environment of space or during replication.

Although the likelihood of alien machines visiting Earth is astronomically low given the difficulty/distances involved, the prize would be worth it. Rather than exploiting gold and silver, or enslaving us in some celestial slaughterhouse, extraterrestrials would consider observing and cataloging life on another planet as the greatest possible reward.

From a scientific perspective, aliens would be fascinated to observe how life arose and survived here on Earth. All life on this planet is part of an unbroken chain stretching back 3.8 billion years. There’s just one form of life on Earth, but it has branched and diverged into hundreds of millions of species over the ages, evolving into viruses, bacteria, microbes and complex organisms like us. Our planet is a testimony to the triumph of simple biological processes. The chances are, these same processes are common elsewhere, although they would undoubtedly arrive at entirely different species.

All stories draw upon external resources and 3zekiel is no different. The anecdote about spelling cat/kat is based on a university commencement speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Isaac Asimov’s essay The Relativity of Wrong.

Why set this story in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Although the jungle spans barely 6% of the Earth’s surface, it is home to more than half the planet’s land species! The jungle canopy is a belt of interconnected tree-tops forming a distinct ecosystem in its own right and is home to 90% of all jungle plant and animal species, making it an ideal target for our fictional aliens wanting to learn more about the diversity of life on Earth. The rate at which we’re polluting and decimating environments like this is heartbreaking, and something that would give extraterrestrials cause to wonder about our supposed intelligence.

When it comes to gorillas using sign language, most people have heard of Koko, a captive female gorilla who had a vocabulary of around 2000 words, or roughly the same as a preschooler. Researchers from St Andrews University, UK, and the University of York, UK, have both found that in the wild, apes naturally use about a hundred distinctly different hand gestures to communicate with each other. What was surprising was that these gestures seemed to be innate rather than learned, and were common across ape species from vastly different, unconnected geographic locations. Apes combine these to form a complex repertoire of concepts that reinforce their social bonds, which is something I wanted to explore in this novel.

As much as is practically possible, I try to keep stories like 3zekiel realistic—as realistic as something that’s entirely fictitious can be. For example, when our protagonists approach Cruithne they look back at Earth and it appears about the size of a basketball. In reality, the size of Earth as seen from a geosynchronous orbit is about 20 degrees. To put that into perspective, with your arms stretched out wide on either side of you, you’re covering 180 degrees. Place one arm vertically above you and you’ve reduced that to 90 degrees. Half that is 45 degrees. Half again is about the size Earth would appear—roughly the size of a basketball held at arm’s length.

In the same way, the section describing gravity for those on the space elevator is based on actual physics. When you see astronauts in orbit around Earth, their sense of weightlessness is deceptive. Rather than floating freely, their motion is akin to being shot out of a cannon—only they never hit anything. They just keep going round and round. The only way NASA gets astronauts into orbit is by being really, really good at missing Earth.

Dr. Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway from Monash University double-checked my back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine the strength of Earth’s gravity at the various altitudes described in this novel.

The formula used was:

altitude-gravity = gravity@sea-level / (altitude/sea-level)2

Using 9.8m/s^2 at sea level, this results in gravity being approximately:

•   9.69m/s^2 when in an SR-71 Blackbird flying at ~35,000m

•   8.65m/s^2 in the International Space Station at ~400km

•   0.22m/s^2 at the fictional height of Cruthine in this novel

Somewhat astonishingly, the Moon is held in orbit around Earth by a meager gravitational acceleration of 0.0026m/s^2 or a mere 1/4 of a centimeter per second squared. Out that far, Earth’s gravity is akin to a fluffy feather drifting on a breeze, but it’s still enough to ensure the Moon orbits Earth! Science really is far more wild and crazy than anything a science fiction author like myself can dream up.

Writing is a marathon, not a sprint. For writers, patience isn’t a virtue, it’s a necessity, as is the ability to absorb criticism. Book publishing is a tough gig. Only two of my twenty-plus books have been picked up by a traditional publisher, which is a shame as it means most of them have slipped into obscurity. Independent authors like myself are buskers standing on a street corner, pouring their heart and soul into each song, working at their art for the love, not the money, dreaming of one day making it big. The odds are 3zekiel will disappear beneath the waves within a few months, but I’m glad you found it, and I hope you enjoyed this First Contact story as much as I did.

Thank you for taking a chance on 3zekiel and for supporting science fiction as literature. You can find all of my novels on Amazon. If you’re interested in new releases, sign up for my monthly email newsletter. You can find me on Facebook and Twitter, so feel free to drop by and say hi.

Statistically, less than 1% of readers leave a review, which often distorts the actual merits of a novel as the majority of readers are underrepresented, so please take the time to leave a review online as your opinion of this novel counts far more than mine.

Peter Cawdron

Brisbane, Australia, 2019