Chapter Text
In the moments before the arms make contact, my free claws are already rattling against the control panel. I just can't help myself.
At last, with a very careful motion and a satisfying click, the arms find the neighboring ship and (if I may say so) cleanly attach their handles. I can hear an outside view of the scene, right next to me, and with a surge of excitement, I find that I can hear much more, a few dozen meters away as my enthusiastic rattling travels down the arms.
I just need a second. I put the controls on halt - I'm still rational enough to know that if I mess this up, the consequences will be dire - and focus with all my might on my newfound sounds.
The interior of the ship was largely made up of basic geometric shapes. There's plenty of complicated stuff going on, to be sure, stuff that's way too far away to speculate about right now, but the bulk of what I'm hearing is perfectly intuitive to understand - large, cylindrical chambers and a cone at the end, separated by flat floors of metal. I even hear what I'm fairly sure are ladders; how about that, aliens also use ladders!
Some people might be disappointed by all that, but me? Honestly, I'm relieved, and a little vindicated. As a kid, I would hear about stories with alien artifacts and structures made up of bizarre, "non-Euclidian" geometry, crazy shit that would give you brain damage or make you kill your neighbors or something just to listen to it, and I always thought those were dumb. If that were even possible, I think any alien species advanced enough to do it would have better things to do than futz around in this stupid system playing catch.
The whole flared end of the ship, about half the length but at least two-thirds the volume, is made up of cavernous, nearly-featureless chambers. Definitely the fuel tanks, that's the end of the ship the Astrophage flare was ejecting from. If I focus I can even hear some runny textures clinging to the inside - they seem to be mostly empty, weirdly, but I'm way too excited to think about why.
The rest of the ship is far more busy, and it gets busier the closer I listen to the opposite end. I actually spring from my handles with excitement and need to catch myself - I can't recognize a damn thing but there is absolutely technology in there, enough for me to take apart and put together for years on end and not come close to running out. If they're here for the same reason I am, they came prepared. A lot more prepared than me, I hazard to hope.
I'm still hesitant to think ahead too far, but I can't help myself anymore. I need to let myself feel a little hope or I'll have some kind of medical event.
Breathe.
Right, one step at a time. The ships aren't even ready to be attached yet, and until I get a hold of myself, they'll stay that way. I get the controls back online and slide all five claws in, bringing every arm at the robot's disposal up to the ship. I hold the handles against their targets with a gut-clenching, probably unnecessary amount of firmness. I know, intellectually, that the adhesive should be perfectly set already, but I can be forgiven for being extra careful given the circumstances.
That pause, combined with the additional pressure, causes me to notice something. I'm surprised I didn't notice it right away, actually: the ship, in as far as I can tell, doesn't have a crew. I half-expected the place to be bustling with excited activity, something readily apparent to me no matter what these aliens sound like or what they're made of, but it appears to be just as static on the inside as it is on the outside.
On some level, I'm aware I'm jumping to conclusions. I have no idea what the acoustics inside the ship are like, how the aliens would live in it, and absolutely no idea what to even listen for. These aliens could be the size of tiny insects for all I know, or burrow into the machinery of the ship when not at work like biomechanical parasites.
Still, I should be hearing something, shouldn't I? I heard one of them with my own carapace.
Cautious, and a little concerned, I begin to pull on the ship. The xenon adhesive holds perfectly fine, of course, but I still handle the operation like it could come apart at any second. It's painfully slow, millimeters at a time, but I don't dare lose my patience.
Despite my care, I hear the metal of the ship straining from so much force being exerted on such a small part of it. I almost stop, but it doesn't get any worse than a low groan, so I press on. The ship moves closer. Even with the introduction of all that noise, I still don't hear any movement.
"Where the hell are you...?"
They couldn't have just disappeared, could they? I've had my cameras trained on them this entire time, nothing has gone in or out of the ship since I got that hull sample. I wouldn't know, but, my new acquaintance that I watched pop in and out of the ship, it really didn't seem like something that could so easily hide in the space available.
I think, refreshing my memory of the mystery figure, the four-maybe-five-armed thing. The ship is a little over halfway to its destination at this point. I think I'm safe enough to divert just a bit of my attention. I listen...
And I almost jolt. I don't, I keep perfectly still, but the mental effort it took was not insignificant. Both me and my alien companions are incredibly lucky this has been my profession for as long as it has.
I hear it. It's been there this entire time. It's pressed up against a wall, almost directly across from the airlock, like it wants to be as far away from it as possible while still in a position to exit at a moment's notice.
It's completely still, no signs of life whatsoever. It's no surprise I missed it - lacking movement it blends in almost perfectly with the mechanical, complicated shapes that fill the rest of the room. I hold my breath.
Then I have to hold myself back again, because suddenly, it does move. One of its arms bends and reaches for something, another one turns a bit. The whole figure lightly drifts in the lack of gravity, letting the ship pull it along. The significance and motivations of these actions, total mystery, but who the hell cares? It's alive.
Focus.
Right, shit. That life is literally in my claws right now, I can't get so giddy that I snuff it out before we've even said hi.
I keep myself steady on the controls, and I wait. The arms retract further and further, the ship slogs closer and closer. More and more little details inside it try and make themselves known to me as the sound has less distance to travel, and I think I deserve a little credit for managing to not be completely absorbed by them.
Then, at long last, a tremendous clunk announces contact.
My gut tightens again. If my claws weren't clamped inside metal apparatuses they'd be shaking, mostly with excitement but not entirely.
The interior of the ship has gone from clearing up little by little to starkly more audible all at once. After I make a few adjustments, making damn sure the alignment is exactly as I planned it to be, I neutralize the controls. The adhesive will need about a minute to set. I'm free to fully redirect my attention.
Something about being semi-permanently connected to the other ship has muddled a lot of anxiety into my good mood. Some part of my insect brain must be expecting the ship's airlock to burst open and flood my ship with xenonite-permeating neurotoxin or something. Still, I'm far too curious.
I give another listen around the ship. I... can't help but feel really weird for doing it all of a sudden, why? There's far more alien detail to take in but I still don't recognize anything, and least of all, any new signs of life. There's the familiar sounds of general life support running through the guts of the ship - electronics humming, air pumping, liquid flowing - but I can't identify anything meant to support living, no private spaces, no room to exercise, not even anything to comfortably sleep in.
Not that I have any idea what would be comfortable for these people, would I?
I'll stick with what I know. I redirect my attention to the airlock room.
The alien is much closer to me now, close enough that I can hear more detail with my own skin than I ever could with my cameras. There's a staggering variety strange bits and bobs on its outside, everywhere, some soft and ambiguous but many geometric and metallic. I'm still not sure where the equipment ends and the body begins but at least a good part of it is definitely man-made. Maybe my wild guess about them being cyborgs was more correct than I thought.
But that isn't even the strangest part. There's this "miasma" of noise, all throughout the space the figure occupies. At first it's hard to tell apart from everything coming from the ship, but after a moment's concentration I get my bearings.
It isn't one sound, but rather, a complicated mess of many different sounds all acting in unison. Some are constant, almost mechanical, some come and go in a rhythm, and some are entirely sporadic. The whole cacophony is very faint but still distinct and impossible to not notice, like a distant siren.
It's not at all familiar, but, there's no way it could be anything else: that's the sound of biological machinery, fine-tuned by math and probability over billions of years, hard at work. Very, very hard, if I can hear it all the way from over here.
Is he afraid?
The thought comes without warning, surprising me. I assigned the title arbitrarily, but... why did I think that? I don't know what his resting vitals should sound like...
Probably because an alien just yanked his ship through the soul-destroying nothingness of space, with five enormous metal arms. Aluminum is perfectly adequate for the amount of hull pressure the ship needs, but... it's aluminum. I could've killed him in seconds if the inclination had struck me.
My body acts unconsciously. I drum a claw against the control panel - if he can hear me in there, that will get his attention - and I wave.
He doesn't wave back.
I try again, a little faster.
"Hey...?"
Nothing. No indication whatsoever that I've been heard.
I should have left it at that. This is an alien, there are endless possible reasons it could hear me before and not now, and hell, no way to know if this was even an appropriate situation to do that gesture. But, of course, I don't.
I do something very stupid. It isn't really conscious on my part, something primal in me is just compelled to act as other communication methods seem to fail: I send out a thrumming signal.
This was already a bad idea, conceptually. Thrumming, as we know it, is an incredibly specific adaptation, orders of magnitude more complicated than its equivalent in even the smartest animals. There's no way of knowing whether or not this alien would have something similar - it's tremendously helpful but far from necessary for cooperation, history has shown that - and even if it does, there's no possible way our signals could resonate. It can take a lot of effort and social cognition to thrum with someone from one country over, and we're dealing with literally trillions of times that distance. But it gets worse.
Imagine, just bear with me for a second, the hungriest day of your life. Imagine your relief as you finally make it home, get your little personal space all ready, and open up your cupboard. Now imagine if, instead of whatever delicious junk food you were excited about all day, the cupboard was full of slimy, writhing, parasitic worms.
That might give you some idea of what the caterwaul which echoed back to me felt like. That "distant siren" from before was now right up in my business - hissing, rumbling, roaring, thudding, sloshing, all of it distorted and warped in ways God surely never intended.
It doesn't last very long, I think my brain aborted the whole operation before it started to consciously registered it, but it was still the mental equivalent of being punched in the gut. I jolt from my place at the controls and clench right up, tumbling stupidly like garbage caught in the wind. There's an echo for a good while but it, thank God, doesn't actually hurt for very long.
Okay. Never trying that again.
Actually, thinking rationally for a second, there are a lot of reasonable conclusions I can draw from this. Whether those are his resting vitals are not, the fact that I can hear them from this distance must mean their bodies are enormously loud, very bad at insulating sound, or both. On Erid, this would be evolutionary suicide - you might as well walk through the wilderness hollering "Fresh alien bites!" - so sound must not be as critical of a factor to whatever ecosystem they're from. If it was a factor at all. Maybe the entire planet is deaf, and everything navigates their environment in some way I can't even imagine.
Don't pretend you were trying to gather data, dipshit.
"Shut the fuck up."
Anyway, that's real interesting and all, but I don't really have time to think like a biology nerd. I've already surmised that this guy can't hear very well, but if he can't hear me at all, we have a serious problem.
That's all the ruminating I can do, though, before I catch him moving gain. I listen, a little relieved, as he pushes himself off the wall. The loss of physical contact causes a very odd shift in my perception. The outline fades and becomes harder to track, I expected that, but there's more to it than that.
The way the whole drifts across the room feels "off", like the movement should be faster based on how much force I saw him use. But then, in spite of that apparent slowness, the wall catches up and it catches him far too fast - or rather, as fast as it ought to have in the first place. It's hard to describe without hearing it yourself, but the whole movement seems to defy the laws of physics.
It's disorienting, enough to make me a little queasy. It's probably some kind of auditory illusion, I'm sure, but in the absence of any rational explanation my brain can't help but think of those dumb stories again.
Come on, don't be stupid. There has to be a physical reason for this, think...
Oh, wait!
"Shit, thank you for reminding me."
I command the robot arms to release, and then fully retract into the hull. The tunnel holds, of course; in my shock, I'd left it to set for significantly longer than necessary. I push myself off the wall and hurry down the hall - not so fast that I hurt myself this time, at least - and clamber my way to the airlock.
It's tempting to go full steam ahead but I need to do a test first. I let air valve into the chamber until it pressurizes, then I close it tight. I then open the second door, allowing that pocket of air to vent into the tunnel with a whoosh. It isn't remotely enough to fully pressurize it, but it will prove whether or not it's airtight.
I wait, and the readouts remain stable. No turning back now. I return to the controls, take a breath, and expose the atmosphere of my ship to what had, only hours ago, been the unrelenting vacuum of space.
The atmosphere of the other ship, that's what had been making everything sound so weird. Sound is, ultimately, molecules and atoms physically bumping into each other. Whether it's travelling through air, ground, or the wires sending garbage entertainment into your home, the further apart those particles are at rest, the longer it takes for sound to travel through them.
I remember the readouts when he sent me his first message. The "atmosphere" inside the neighboring ship is so meager it's practically non-existent: one oxygen atom for every two hundred ammonia atoms in mine. Sound physically takes longer to travel through it, significantly, and my brain doesn't like that - it has a very stubborn idea of how fast sound "should" travel through air. Thankfully, identifying the cause has already made it a little easier to listen too, I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually.
The alien moves again, drifting over to the outside door of his airlock. He hangs there for a while, doing nothing I can audibly identify, then he turns. His weird claws grab onto a mechanism of the ship and the air starts to dissipate from the room. I well know by now that he can survive in a vacuum, somehow, but it's still nerve-wracking to witness. From my point of hearing, his noisy body slowly fades into non-existence, only to abruptly reappear, briefly, every time he touches a surface.
A mechanism on the outer airlock door turns in the aliens claws, and then the door swings open. It's odd to hear that and not get a corresponding jump in volume from the other side, but that's a vacuum for you.
Then I hear the sound of airflow, much weaker than my own ship's, but still unmistakable. With so little pressure, it's going to be a bit before the tunnel is full, giving me much-needed time to psych myself up. Assuming nothing goes wrong, and I don't actively expect it to, I have just a few minutes left to prepare the most important meeting in Eridian history, and likely Star-11-Resident history as well.
I don't even have a name for them yet, fuck...
No, no, get a grip. We're nowhere near ready to exchange actual words yet; we just need a get a semi-shared environment set up. I run to the metalworking room to retrieve my satchel of goodies, return to the airlock, take another breath, and make a bold stride out into my new, makeshift environment.
Everything's holding up so far. I experimentally grip a few of the handlebars, tugging on them, and they seem to be in working order. So, I direct my attention to the most important part: the xenonite hexagon wall.
I'd spent a long time agonizing over the alloys I would use. There's practically an endless variety to choose from, and I needed to represent a wide range of sound conductivity without compromising too much on gas permeability, strength, chemical reactivity - basically everything that will make sure nobody explodes. In the end, I found 103 alloys I was satisfied with, and so far, none of them are reacting to the neighboring ship, at least not audibly.
I climb closer to the wall, assessing my work. I reach a claw towards it and give it an experimental prod, feeling all kinds of ways about the fact that it's the only thing separating me from an alien environment that could kill me in at least four different ways.
And that's when I realize I fucked up.
No, nothing catastrophic, at least not yet, but it was still enough to make my gut lurch.
"Shit..."
The other ship's atmosphere isn't nearly at full pressure, but the air around the wall is already cooling. It isn't much, like the difference between night and day, but it's noticeable. I did my best to make sure the alloys I used were graded for insulation, but I guess I didn't do it well enough.
The other side of the wall is still practically a vacuum, if there's already a temperature differential, if heat is already leeching out into the opposite room, it's going to get a lot worse. I refocus on my alien counterpart, his body gradually "reappearing" as the room repressurizes. I have absolutely no idea how sensitive these people are to temperature. What if a 40 degree jump is enough to kill them instantly?
"Shit, shit, shit..."
I pivot anxiously, contemplating what I know.
These people are smart, clearly. They've already intuited everything I needed them to do in order to coordinate this meeting, however odd their methodology, and they didn't hesitate to pressurize their half of the tunnel after I pressurized mine. They've probably considered all of the same potential problems that I did, and recognize that we're not ready to gun-blaze into a full conversation.
Their ship is teeming with technology, and however they do it, they're able to survive in the unforgiving nothingness of space. Heat isn't the same problem as atmospheric pressure, but, it's still a similarly important thing to grade your equipment for if you're going to space and planning to study other environments.
Hell, their ship is powered by Astrophage, I can literally hear it networked all throughout the hull (for some reason, I'll ask later). That implies a long history of working and experimenting with it, and hey, how convenient: that stuff is always the same temperature, no matter where you're working with it. 240.22 degrees is air conditioning to us, but to a being that lives in a 34 degree atmosphere it would be sweltering, far hotter than even my most pessimistic estimates for the heat loss in this situation. That implies either an innate tolerance to heat, or robust, well-practiced protocols for safely handling it.
Yeah, if this is too much for them, they'll be able to act accordingly. Hopefully.
I take a breath and hook my satchel on the wall. If I'm going to be working in a group again, on something this complicated and dire, I'm going to need to extend them a little confidence eventually. Get comfy with the idea that someone besides myself has things under control.
Man, I hate doing that.
Oh, get over yourself.
I return to my airlock and clamber my way through the tunnels, not as fast as before but still trying not to dawdle. I can't do anything for the aliens I hopefully didn't just kill, but I can do one thing to ameliorate this problem for myself.
I make it to my room and start digging around in the back, searching for a storage compartment I haven't touched in... a while, I'd rather not put a number on it. There's no dust, of course, but that's only by the mercy of microgravity and the ship being so aggressively sterile. Finally, I find it, open the old thing up, and pull out what I came here for: one of many standard-issue jumpsuits.
I'll accept no judgement, from anyone. You spend over a thousand years in solitary confinement, on a ship full of recycled, muggy air and find out for yourself how long you continue to give a shit.
"The most important meeting in Eridian history, huh?"
Oh fuck you, these are aliens. And if I'm hearing the inside of their ship right, they're a bunch of goddamned freaks - there isn't a single soundproofed surface anywhere in there, that's why I was feeling all weird before. Maybe I'm committing a faux pas here by prioritizing warmth over their social norms, ever think of that?
Maybe you should stop talking to yourself.
By the time I return to the tunnel it's definitely gotten colder. Still not anything serious, to me at least, but uncomfortable. If the temperature is any kind of problem for the other crew, their embassy isn't showing any signs of it.
With his claw affixed to the airlock controls, the alien figure is fully audible to me again. Only now does it occur to me that this is the closest I've ever been to him, and the clearest I've ever heard. I'm literally meters away from a goddamned alien.
It'll take about a minute for the pressurization to finish, and with nothing else to direct my focus on, I have no choice but to take the sound in. My grip tightens.
The figure is, to begin with, enormous. I'd already expected that, I'd made mental estimates based on my camera feeds, but it still didn't leave me prepared. If you take my arms into account, we're more or less equal in width, but he's at least three times as tall. And if you don't take them into account, the difference is just absurd - he could grab my carapace in both claws and chuck it like an oversized discus.
I still can't make any sense of his arrangement, it all just seems to be "stuff" moving arbitrarily. I've been having this problem the entire time, but from this distance, it was almost making me feel queasy.
But then, when it lets go of the valve and rotates around, apparently ready to head down the tunnel, something clicks: he's bilaterally symmetrical. Like a fish, but, no fish ever sounded like this.
The body is separated into two distinct sides, with largely-identical features diametrically opposed to each other: one clawed arm, one similar but clawless arm of yet-unknown purpose, and half a thorax. The fifth "arm", the huge round thing, sits at the top (or the front?) of the whole arrangement, directly in the middle of the plane. If you folded this alien in half, each half would more or less cover the other exactly, but only along the longest plane.
Also, I know I just expressed doubt about him being a fish, but now that I'm up close, there does seem to be something liquid going on in there, somewhere. A lot of it, actually; it's hard to define the boundaries and surfaces but the more I listen, the more signs I pick up on that this guy's body and/or equipment is just wet.
Maybe I am about to meet an advanced, intelligent alien fish, and that whole setup is built to support some kind of aquarium? If it is water, it's far more than any terrestrial animal should ever need.
God, I don't want to sound dumb in front of our stellar neighbors, but I can't keep myself from shaking. I have to secure another arm to the wall.
Last chance to back out.
No, no time to think like that. He knows I'm here. And from this distance, maybe he can finally hear me.
I raise a claw. I know he couldn't possibly understand me, but, I feel compelled to say something, and just go with whatever my numb brain comes up with first.
"... hey?"
I am not a creative man. Not when it comes to words, at least.
"Uh... sorry about the heat. Are you... is everything holding up okay?"
The alien just looms ominously.
I raise a claw toward the wall and begin to speak again, but then-
The alien "answers" me, and it almost makes me lose my mind.
One side of the body, the side facing away from the airlock door, splits wide open. It sounds distressingly similar to someone molting, which would be bad enough, but nothing emerges from the opening. He just hangs there, insides exposed to the outside air. Then the whole body slumps, bending forward at the middle, arms limp and drifting in the lack of gravity. He's dead.
No... no, not dead, calm down. I get what I'm hearing now.
There isn't nothing emerging from the outside, something is definitely there and it's roughly the same shape as the figure from before. I just couldn't recognize it at first because, still hanging freely in the atmosphere, the real body is a significantly worse conductor of sound than the "shell" it's "shedding." The juxtaposition makes the image wobbly and vague, recognizable but indistinct, almost like a ghost.
Have I run into a ship full of space ghosts?
Shut the fuck up, Rocky.
I listen, dumbfounded, as he shimmies himself free. The whole motion is, again, way too uncannily similar to molting, I hate it, but I know that's just my own bias. Unless this a species that somehow molts as a greeting, that whole thing must never have been part of his body in the first place. It's some kind of highly-engineered, full-body article of clothing.
"Holy shit..."
I guess that properly rules it out. These people aren't highly-evolved extremophiles. They invented the ability to survive while suspended in a vacuum. Not as a crew, not in an enormous heavily-controlled environment with several metric tons of life support, but in... that.
Every time we'd sent one another a message, in every second of the camera footage I'd recorded and obsessively studied over the last few days, it really had been exactly what it sounded like: a living thing, just as dependent on an atmosphere for survival as myself, casually meandering around in the void of space.
And what really gets me? The real kicker here? They have advanced robotics inside the ship. I can hear them perfectly clearly. Their exact function is a mystery, but they're unmistakably a set of complicated, powerful arms, the basic engineering is blatantly recognizable. They had other options for performing extravehicular operations, and they chose to do this instead.
Oh, I'm going to die. Sweet merciful God, I am in for it.