BLACK BOX
OR WHATEVER
BY ANDREW GORDON
PROLOGUE
Williams sighed and fidgeted and glanced up at the little monitor that showed the plane's distance from the impact zone for the tenth time that minute. He had put the elastic band back in his pocket; now he took it back out, tied it into a knot, pulled it through the gaps between his teeth like dental floss.
"Christ,' said one of the soldiers, "I'm getting antsy just watching him." A few others nodded agreement.
"Calm down friend," one of them called over, "when this is all done we'll club together and get you a nice new dress."
"Heh," said Williams. "Because I'm nervous, like a woman. Good one."
Backer nudged him and muttered "don't antagonise them, please."
"What, you're scared of them just because they're armed?" said Williams, very quietly because he didn't want the armed men to hear him. "Why are they armed? Do you remember?"
"Yes, of course I-"
"They're armed," Williams continued, "in case something goes wrong at the site. And they have to protect us from something."
"Actually, we're armed in case we need to kill something," said the soldier who was sitting the closest and was the only one wearing a jacket, so Williams assumed he was in charge.
"What do you mean by that?" said Backer.
"I mean that our commander didn't say anything about protecting you. We're investigating the impact and performing whatever cleanup needs to be done." His eyes narrowed as he said this.
"Cleanup?" Backer wiped nervous sweat from his brow. "Do you mind explaining what that entails?"
"I don't mind," said the soldier. "It means getting rid of things which need to be got rid of. Hostiles. Toxic substances." He lowered his voice, looked away, and said "Witnesses."
"Don't scare them, Aloan," said Rockley. "We're all a little highly-strung already, I'm sure you can imagine."
The soldier grinned and nodded. They might bait Williams and Backer, but the soldiers recognised that Rockley, as the man in charge at the observatory, was the closest anyone actually came to being in command of this mission. It wasn't strictly a military operation, after all, it was a scientific expedition, albeit one that had been rather hastily thrown together.
Just three or four hours ago, as the stars had begun to come out and the night staff of the Monterey Peninsula Observatory had begun to settle in for yet another uneventful nine hours, Williams had been startled by an alarm from his control desk. He had never heard it before and alerted Rockley immediately. It transpired that an orbiting satellite had detected a fast-moving object which was not part of the catalogue of asteroids and meteors. This happened very rarely, as the chance of two rocks colliding and knocking each other off course was very small, and it was even rarer for one of them to be knocked into the vicinity of Elarel. What data the satellite had gathered confirmed that the object was too small to cause any damage- once it hit the atmosphere it would burn up almost before the observatory's computers detected it.
But it didn't. It hit the atmosphere, and the sensor displays showed it coming down, down, down, not even the slightest disturbance in its progress towards the surface.
Until it changed course and slowed its descent. At which point it stopped being a meteorite and became an unidentified flying object. Almost as soon as this happened Rockley received a priority one wave from the military, whose sensor net had registered the falling object as a piloted craft based on its movements. Rockley gave them what information he could- mainly that it was far to small to be any kind of craft, which only seemed to make them angry- while Williams just stared at the readouts concerning the thing in rapt fascination.
The object was descending over desert, but the change in direction meant that it was now heading for a city. Not directly towards it, but the descent had been steered so that it would land nearer to people than it would have had it simply dropped straight down. And its descent continued to slow, until when it reached the ground it was barely travelling any faster than a car. A fast car, certainly, a racing car perhaps. But compared to the speed at which it had entered the atmosphere it landed at a snail's crawl.
The nearby Hodginson military base had scrambled a plane and soldiers to investigate the object, with three scientists from Monterey Peninsula on hand to study whatever it was they found. Williams had not realised at the time that he would be part of the expedition to the impact zone. Finding that out had set off the nervousness that had driven him to volunteer for the night shift in the first place, and thoughts of what the object was, its nature and purpose, swirled barely coherently in his mind.
Was it some kind of message from an alien civilisation? A greeting? But why would you fire a greeting at your new friends like a cannonball? If they could manufacture a device which could fall through a planetary atmosphere and land intact then surely they could send a signal or land a proper ship.
Was it a weapon then? Some kind of planet bomb? Rockley had sent messages to other observatories and no other objects had been detected. Was there an alien race out there so ridiculously advanced that they could wipe out an entire planet with one bomb which, from the sensor data, was small enough for a person to carry? Some kind of black hole generator or something? But the human race had colonised eight planets and never encountered one sentient alien species. So there was no reason for these aliens to start a war unless they needed the planet for themselves. Could you wipe out a planet's inhabitants without rendering the planet itself uninhabitable? With one suitcase-sized weapon?
Or was it some piece of debris from an alien ship? Some sentient piece of debris which could steer itself? Williams realised his thinking was getting more and more ludicrous and tried to blank it out. But it kept coming back to him, like a toothache. What the hell was this thing which was too small to be a ship and yet could not be anything but artificial?
The plane touched down at a distance which had been judged to be safe. Just who had judged this Williams didn't know, but it seemed to him as good a distance as any. This object was likely to be either totally harmless or unimaginably destructive; it probably didn't matter how far they were from the plane when they find out which.
The three scientists fumbled into their Hazmat suits as the soldiers, already suited up and ready to go, shook their heads and waited. Eventually everyone was ready, and the party ventured forth towards the small crater the object had left in the rocky landscape.
"Badges on, everyone," said Aloan, and the eight soldiers and three scientists all pushed on the badges set into their suits until they beeped. Williams saw the vague red outlines around his companions turn green as the display in the Hazmat visor's screen was updated.
"OK, now the central comp on the plane knows where we all are. Any movement that isn't triggered by someone who's wearing a badge will be flagged and its location indicated on your HUD. If this thing tries to take off again we want to pin it down if we can. We're not letting it get anywhere near civilians until we know whether or not it's dangerous."
I'm a civilian, grumbled Williams to himself as the group dispersed. They spread out in a search pattern intended to cover the estimated epicentre of the impact and as much of the surrounding terrain as they could cover. Each of the three scientists had two soldiers searching alongside him, three torches scanning the floor and hand scanners analysing the environment for any trace of strange gases, radiation, electromagnetism and Christ knew what else. The remaining two soldiers went around the entire group, establishing a perimeter.
What's the point of this? thought Williams, looking up at the night sky as often as he surveyed the ground and his scanner's dull "nominal" readout. Perhaps whatever it was had survived the impact, and perhaps it had shattered into a million pieces which would be found by holidaymakers and taken home as curious pebbles for years to come. Maybe it was a tiny craft with some kind of stealth system which could bamboozle the plane's motion detectors; maybe it had taken off as soon as it hit the dirt, and was now in the city whose lights were dimly visible in the distance.
Or, the thought suddenly occurred to him, maybe the object was that curiously square black lump of matter at the bottom of that gully.
"Um," he said, puncturing the sullen silence which had persisted over the radio for the last half hour. Nobody responded. He looked at the scanner, which still said "nominal". If that was the UFO it wasn't radioactive and wasn't giving off any mutant space virus. There was, in fact, no activity going on inside or outside of the thing that he could detect. Perhaps it had been damaged and rendered nonfunctional by the fall, perhaps it was recharging, perhaps it was just a square rock. Still, he was encouraged by the scanner readout.
"Um," he said again, "I think I've found it."
That got their attention.
"Williams?" That was Aloan, the soldier boss. Williams wondered what he was supposed to refer to him as. "What do you see?"
The torch beams of the two soldiers accompanying Williams focused on his as he made his way into the gully to get a closer look at the object.
"Williams, have you scanned it?" This was Rockley. "Can you tell us anything?"
"Nothing," said Williams, "it's completely inert as far as I can tell." Towards the bottom the walls of the gully were almost vertical and he made his way to the floor cautiously, yet eagerly, keeping his eyes on the black square object illuminated by the soldiers' beams above him. After half a minute which seemed so long to him that he half-expected to look up and see sunlight, he was standing over the object. He looked up to the soldiers and gave them a thumbs-up. He saw their green outlines nod and turn away, either to find a more reliable way down or to meet up with the rest of the group. He neither knew nor cared which, as he turned his attention to the object.
It was a black cube. He couldn't tell what it was made of; it looked like shiny black plastic. It reflected the glow of his torch and didn't seem to have a scratch on it that he could see. It was small, he estimated just under an arm's length to a side. Was that two feet, or more like two and a half?
"What? Williams, please repeat."
Williams shook his head and realised he had just asked that last question out loud. "Sorry," he said, "I'm studying the object."
"All right," said Rockley, "we're coming to you. Tell us what you see."
"This is almost certainly the object we tracked," said Williams. "It's a cube, black, each side about two feet in length. Or perhaps two and a half. It's... it's just lying here, not far from the crater but definitely outside it. Perhaps it bounced? Or propelled itself this far before running out of power. I don't see any kind of propulsion system though. It's totally blank, featureless. That I can see. Maybe on the other sides..." he reached out to move it, and as his hand was within a few inches of the object, a light appeared.
Williams gasped. He barely heard Rockley asking him what had happened. The light... swivelled. It was like the pupil of a big black square eye, looking around and trying to figure out where it was. When it stopped moving he somehow knew that it had focused on him.
There were several voices on the radio now, talking over each other. He ignored them.
More lights appeared on the object's surface. He moved his face closer to it, trying to see where the lights were coming from. He couldn't see anything except featureless black where a moving light had been.
More and more lights started to appear. Some stayed where they were, most of them coalesced into one big spot on a random part of the object's surface. Williams stood back to see if he could make sense of the patterns the lights were forming, and the large collection of lights diminished. And he suddenly realised what he was looking at. He turned around and studied the night sky to be sure, and then turned back and looked at the stationary lights.
The cube was showing him his own reflection.
Before he could begin to wonder why, he started to hear a low hum. He spun around, but the hum spun with him- it was coming from everywhere. It started to get louder, and more high pitched. He backed away from the cube. The hum didn't change. It was getting very loud. It was starting to get painful. He couldn't hear the radio any more. "What is that?" he shouted. "What's that noise?" He could almost hear someone reply "what noise?" or possibly "sock drawer". Given the cacophony currently assaulting him both statements made an equal amount of sense.
The hum became more of a speech as it rose again in volume and pitch. The mad thought occurred to Williams, as he dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around his head that the noise wasn't coming from everywhere; it was being transmitted directly into his brain. Some kind of subsonic frequency which was going to melt his goddamned brain if it didn't stop soon-
He curled into a foetal position on the ground, turned his head towards the sky and screamed. He blinked tears out of his eyes and dimly saw the green shapes of the rest of the group peering down at him from the edge of the gully's wall. He had run out of air to scream; all he could do was gasp desperately and clutch his head in a futile attempt to keep the psychic attack out. He thought he felt wetness running down his ears.
It was either lack of oxygen or the telepathic barrage, or a combination of the two, that finally caused him to lose consciousness.