Little Green Men

by Peter Cawdron

part 2 of 3

Mitchell was in shock. It took a couple of seconds before he realised Johnson’s right arm was gone, seared off at the shoulder.

The screaming ceased abruptly. Mitchell could hear himself hyperventilating inside his suit. He fell to his knees beside Johnson, dropping the coral limb off his shoulder and onto the ice.

Johnson was still screaming, he could see that, but there was no sound. His mouth was wide open, his eyes were pressed shut, but there was no noise, just the sound of the wind gusting by. The Deis Gratia had cut Johnson’s audio feed.

“What the hell is going on?” demanded Dallas over the radio waves.

Something brushed against Mitchell. He turned and caught sight of something, someone disappearing into the darkness. He swung around, staggering to his feet. There were more of them, crowding around him, but the light from his helmet seemed to repel them.

“Mitchell. Sit-rep.”

Mitchell fumbled with a flare from his leg pocket. His thick gloves struggled with the twist-top of the flare. Suddenly, the darkness was illuminated with the brilliance of magnesium alloy burning at over a thousand degrees.

“Mitchell,” Dallas commanded.

Mitchell held the flare aloft, pushing back the darkness by thirty feet all around them. Blood stained the ice. Brilliant arcs of red and crimson spread out across the frozen ground. Johnson lay still. Mitchell stuck the flare into the ice and knelt beside him.

“Mitchell. Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

He was breathing heavily, adrenalin surging through his veins. His hands trembled. Johnson was either unconscious or dead, Mitchell dared not guess which.

“Stream your video,” came a call across the airways. The voice was soft, feminine, soothing. It was Dr. Jane Summers. “Can you hear me, Mitchell? I want you to stream your video.”

Mitchell mumbled to himself as his thick gloved fingers struggled with his wrist-pad controls.

“That’s it. We can see your vision now. What happened to Johnson?”

Mitchell was numb. He couldn’t speak. He simply bent forward, directing the camera down at the still body before him. In the background, he could hear several people talking, including Dallas and Dr. Summers. They were hurriedly discussing the video feed, trying to take in what had happened. After a few seconds, Summers came back on the microphone.

“OK, Mitchell, I want you to lean forward. I need to get a good look at Johnson’s shoulder. Do you understand? I need to see the injury.”

Mitchell didn’t respond. He reached out and rocked Johnson on his side so the frozen, bloodied stump on his shoulder was visible, and held him there, shaking. Again, there was a heated discussion away from the microphone.

“Mitch,” Summers began. His shortened surname didn’t seem so relevant any more. “Listen to me. Whatever happened out there, Johnson’s suit is still transmitting vitals. He’s alive. Do you understand me? He’s not dead. He is still alive. His suit still has partial internal pressure. The wound has fused to the fabric, it’s sealed the rupture. The cold has cauterised the arteries and stopped the bleeding. Now I need you to get him back to the Deis Gratia. Do you understand me? You need to get him back to the shuttle and then back to us here on the Deis Gratia.”

Mitchell couldn’t speak. He simply dragged Johnson up beside him, pulling Johnson’s one good arm over his shoulder. He stumbled onward toward the shuttle, leaving the flare in the ice behind him.

As the darkness closed in, so did the creatures. They buffeted and bumped him, coming from behind and brushing up against him as they darted by, forever staying out of the light of his helmet.

Mitchell pressed on. As he approached the shuttle, the landing lights came on automatically and the creatures scurried for the darkness. Over his headset, he could hear Dallas and Summer talking about what they were seeing from his video feed, but their words seemed to blur.

Mitchell didn’t worry about de-suiting. Once inside the airlock, he simply opened the faceplate on both helmets, removed his gloves and struggled inside.

“Listen, Mitch,” said Summers. “Harris is going to remote pilot you back from here. I want you to set up a medi-cast monitor beside Johnson and add four litres of plasma to the resource tray. I’ll be able to do the rest from here.”

Mitchell obeyed dutifully. He barely even felt the craft lift off the ground. The fifteen minute flight time seemed to pass in seconds. It confused him. He’d only just set up the monitor when Dallas and Summers came through the airlock and took over from him.

For a moment, he wondered how they’d got out there so fast. He didn’t realise he was already back at the Deis Gratia. Summers took him to the sick bay and gave him a shot of valium to put him to sleep.

When Mitchell awoke he felt refreshed. For a moment, he didn’t remember anything specific. The incident at the thermal pool seemed to have faded like a bad dream, but when Dr. Summers walked in and he realised he was lying on a bed in the medical bay, reality came flooding back.

“How is Johnson?”

“How are you?” Summers asked, gently touching his forehead. She had her hair down, which was unusual for her. She normally kept her long blonde locks pulled back in a ponytail. Dr. Summers was all business, always professional, but she looked rattled. Her eyes were bloodshot. She seemed preoccupied, distracted. She looked down at her electronic clipboard. “Are you feeling OK?”

“I’m fine. How’s Johnson?”

“If you’re up to it, Dallas would like you to come up to the bridge.”

“And Johnson?” Mitchell repeated a third time.

“Johnson...” She thought about it for a second. It seemed to take a deliberate effort to recall the details. “Johnson is in a chemically-induced coma. He lost two-thirds of his blood out there on the ice. At this stage, we’re not sure if there was irreparable brain damage. His ECG scan is not good. The area that was cauterised by the cold suffered severe cellular damage and had to be cut back to the base of his neck. I’ve stabilised him but the physiological shock to his body was massive. I simply don’t know if he’ll live or in what state he’ll live. I’m sorry.”

Mitchell was silent. He’d sat up on the edge of the bed but his head hung low.

“I am sorry,” Summers offered again, her soft hand resting on his shoulder.

She shouldn’t be, Mitchell thought. It wasn’t her fault. She’d done all she could, he knew that, but his mind wouldn’t let him follow that thought further. Deep down, he wasn’t ready to consider whether it was his fault this had happened.

Mitchell stood up slowly. His body ached. Although the medical quarters were warm, he felt cold.

“You’re still in shock,” Summers warned him. “Physically, you’re fine. But your eyes are partially dilated. Mentally, you’re still coming to grips with what happened.”

“What did happen?” Mitchell asked.

“That’s what we all want to know.”

They walked to the bridge. Without the gravity modifiers built into their EVA suits, the 2G environment made each step laboured. It was as though they were each struggling with a heavy backpack. Normally, it didn’t seem so bad, but Mitchell felt weak and Summers seemed numb, as though she were drugged and simply going through the motions. Something was wrong, something other than what had happened to Johnson.

Dallas was seated in front of the navigation desk. He looked as though he’d aged ten years. The natural silver-grey highlights in his hair seemed to have gone white. He needed to shave. The wrinkles on his brow and the stubble on his face made him look worn and weathered.

“How are you feeling?” Dallas asked.

“Like crap.”

“Don’t we all,” replied Dallas, sipping some coffee.

“How long was I out?”

“Ten hours,” replied Summers, sitting down next to Dallas. “You slept like a baby.”

Mitchell sat down. Harris handed him a cup of black coffee. The rich, dark coffee moved like mud in the heavy gravity.

“They hit us hard,” Dallas began. “Punctured the containment tank. We were venting H3 for almost an hour before we managed to seal the rupture. If we fired up the anti-matter drive in this state there’s a good chance she’d go nova, so, for now, we’re not going anywhere.”

Mitchell was silent. As science officer, he knew the dangers of a core leak.

“Doc saw one of them,” Harris said, butting in, wanting to add his bit to the conversation. “Tell him, Doc. Tell him what you saw.”

Dr. Summers ran her hand through her hair. “It was dark. I was down in the hold. Came around a corner and there he was just standing there in the corridor.”

Mitchell hung on her every word. He felt overwhelmed by the pace with which events were unfolding and confused by the diversity of incidents on what should have been a lifeless planet, but he wanted to hear more, he wanted to understand.

“Ah... It just stood there. I think it was afraid.”

“Hah!” cried Harris in disbelief.

“I backed away and came straight back up to the command deck.”

“What are we dealing with?” asked Dallas, looking squarely at Mitchell.

Mentally, he was still waking up. Everything seemed to be coming at him so fast. He simply raised his shoulders in a shrug, unable to say anything more.

“On the tapes,” Dallas continued, “you said there was life in those thermal pools.”

“Yes,” replied Mitchell. “But simple cellular life, perhaps some kind of alien bacteria, but not this. This is... highly developed.”

“While you were out, I had Harris analyse the footage from your helmet cam and reconstruct events using holography.”

Harris fired up the holographic projector on the navigation desk.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Dallas asked.

Mitchell nodded and sipped his coffee.

The three-dimensional image before them was only partially complete. For those angles where there was no footage from either Mitchell’s camera or Johnson’s, the image was transparent. Mitchell watched the drama unfold from the vantage point of The Eye of God, a hypothetical spot about twenty feet above them.

The computer reconstruction made it look as though there had been a camera on a boom following them as they took the coral sample, waded through the thermal pool, out onto the frozen steppe and into the full force of the storm.

Harris zoomed in as the creatures began their attack. Because both men had been facing forward, the majority of the reconstructed images lay before the astronauts as they struggled against the wind. Mitchell watched in silence as Johnson’s arm was severed in a flash of light and the creatures began to buffet them, darting in to harass them and then darting out, away from the light.

“Can you enhance the image?” Mitchell asked, trying to distance himself from what had happened and view the scene objectively.

“Increase the gamma as well,” said Dallas. “Let him get a good look at these little buggers.”

Harris adjusted the scene, amplifying the light in the image.

“They’re men,” Mitchell began, astonished by the view in front of him. “They’re small. And the colour, it’s green. Is that true colour? Not an amplification distortion?”

“They’re a deep sea-green,” replied Harris.

“I don’t believe it,” Mitchell continued, “That is impossible. They’re little. They’re little green men.”

Dallas, Summers and Harris were all silent.

“But that’s not possible.”

“Apparently it is,” Dallas replied.

Proceed to part 3...