She Came From Outer Space Chapter 3
It was beautiful. For a little while, Lily just stared at it.
Eventually, she began setting up a long list of tests for the system to run. Immediately, she could tell that there was something odd about the golden sphere in front of her. Somehow, she doubted it was a satellite, but neither was Lily quite ready to admit to herself what her mind was implying it could instead be.
The Exposure Capsule - or as she called it the “pod” - was, in essence, just a sealed observation booth where oxygen could be introduced or vented, exposing something to the vacuum of space. Or, as she had just done for the first time, you could collect something from space and take it into the interior of Orbital Station 1. While it was sealed from the void now, the interior was still a vacuum, and the golden sphere rested weightlessly on the soft padded surface within.
Around the edge of the pod were countless small instruments, which could take readings of whatever lay inside while in the vacuum of space. After queueing up two dozen tests for the pod to run, which would in total take over four hours, she decided to wait for the results before getting her hopes up. With one last, long, longing look at her prize, as it glinted wondrously, she headed off to do her rounds.
The muldrum of the day was only broken up by a couple of attempts to contact Earth, all unsuccessful, and occasionally flicking over to the security camera to watch the golden orb for a while. She would, each time, catch herself staring far longer than she had planned to, or expected to. It made sense, she reasoned, given the potential of what it just could possibly be.
Skipping a couple of steps here and there in the daily routine was fine, given the circumstances, but the problem with maintenance was that anything you missed would take longer the next time you did it, and things had a tendency to spiral out of control if left unchecked - especially on an undermanned space station.
What was beginning to worry her was that while she could use the security cameras, and could see everything ground control could have seen before, she only had one pair of eyes. It had already been a calculated risk for her to remain aboard alone, and that was because there was an entire organization on the ground dedicated to watching over her shoulder. Now, though, even if they were able to get data from the station, there was almost no way they could communicate any issues they were seeing to her.
The impact and sealing the airlock had already shaken her, even if there was no way anyone could have seen it coming. The last thing she had heard from ground control was some kind of, what was it, ‘interference’? Even so, she felt the sheer weight of responsibility, the scale of disaster which could occur if she was missing something, begin to weigh down upon her. Lily was acutely aware that, somewhere on the station right now, any number of potential problems could effectively be a ticking time bomb she hadn’t noticed.
She swallowed deeply and tried to force herself to calm down, using a few breathing exercises designed specifically for this purpose. Whatever happened, she was already doing the best she could. Panicking and getting anxious would only make her more likely to miss something. There were failsafes on top of failsafes. Life in space was not safe by any means, even at the best of times, but they operated well within a broad safety limit already.
However, it was really about much more than just those tedious worries. The nagging thoughts that had dwelled in the back of her head for weeks were fighting with each other to bubble to the surface, catalysed by the accident. What if something had gone wrong? What if that impact had done more than superficial damage, and there was nothing she could have done about it? What if the next flight of astronauts couldn't make it? How long would she be stuck up here, alone? Would supplies last that long? Should she begin to ration her supplies now just in case?
A panic attack began to creep its way up her neck, an itchy, awful feeling which began to course through her veins. Lily screwed her eyes shut and forced her breathing back into patterns which – so she had thought – could help to control this. It wasn't working.
For a while, she floated there, doing nothing – conscious of the fact that everything she was worried about was being made worse precisely by floating there doing nothing. The security footage on her data pad glinted out of the corner of her tired eye. She turned her head and stared at the glowing, golden orb, and the small flashing notification that the Exposure Capsule had reported.
A small device was at that moment attempting a surface reading of the golden sphere, not invasively of course, but simply by remotely analysing the make up of particles on the surface. However, as she took a look at the list of results thus far, the scientist within her was shaken from her stupor by a word which gets any self respecting scientist excited – inconclusive.
Every test, save the most basic ones like measuring circumference and diameter, had all come back inconclusive. Whatever this thing was, it was certainly not made by any space agency back on Earth, that was for damn sure.
This was it. This was what was going to get her through the isolation. She was going to get to the bottom of whatever this thing was, and that would be what she brought out of this. No minor celebration as a plucky astronaut survived an extended stint in space. No, she was going to be presenting a genuinely unique find to the scientific community – no matter what it took.
With new-found confidence, she worked through her list of tasks calmly and diligently, occasionally checking to see that – as predicted – almost every test was inconclusive. There was no way, mathematically, every single device in the system was malfunctioning – and besides, she had run a full diagnostic just before the tests began.
This thing was special.
At last, the day was done. She hadn't finished everything, but she had accepted that working herself to death was just a guaranteed way to die, rather than merely offering herself the chance of one. She needed rest and recreation like any other animal, and as she drifted down into the lab, this was going to be what she focused on for the next few weeks.
Poring over the data for half an hour, she came to the same conclusion a computer much better suited to doing so had done – it genuinely was inconclusive. Nothing about the golden sphere which sat inside the pod had been revealed beyond what anybody with a functional set of eyes could have told her. What was most impressive was that not only had the pod been unable to figure out what the thing was made of, that was because it had been unable to even find anything to read. No stray particles at all. The pod's sensors knew something was there, but beyond that, it barely got a reading.
Slightly disappointed that an entire day's analysis had turned up very little, she moved on to alternate means. Keying in a few commands, she queued up some more involved tests, and observed closely.
A small metal spike, with a sample collector, moved in as padded prongs got into place to hold it as the sample was taken. She watched, a small camera zooming in to give her a focus on the tip, as it got closer and closer... until...
It stopped dead. It didn't penetrate the surface.
For a little while, she just looked between the readings and the screen, and over to the window to make sure. The sample collector hadn't just stopped dead... it had snapped. Something designed to take samples from ultra-hard asteroids, space debris... had snapped like a tooth-pick. The sample collector was built from the strongest materials Earth could create, and it had done nothing.
Lily was... giddy. The implications of what that could mean, of what she had sitting in front of her, were... overwhelming. She was a scientist, and she believed in the scientific method, but... no scientist was a machine. She was, deep down, still a grown-up child who was fascinated by the world of beakers and rockets.
Dozens of ideas for tests she could perform ran through her head, and each time she discounted them. Turning to a laptop, she started to browse through a few data files, looking for something.
As she did so, a small red light began to flash, followed by a few others. Data started coming in which she wasn't seeing. It wasn't until, at last, a raking chime made itself known, that her head snapped around.
A small hiss alarmed her. For a dreadful moment, she was unsure what was causing it. Then she saw it, a tiny shimmer at the top of the exposure capsule. When the probe had broken, it had caused a leak. Pressurised oxygen was leaking in and creating a thin atmosphere.
The pod was definitely getting readings now, but ignoring those, she moved to look at the point where the sample collector had touched the orb, and saw the surface... moving.
It rolled, roiled, and swirled – a tiny but slowly growing anomaly on the surface. It looked like the surface of a gas giant, a roiling storm, silent in the void. Then, for lack of a better term, a tiny portion of the surface... melted.
For a while, Lily stared, distraught. Whatever was happening now was being recorded, she was sure, but the oxygen must have disturbed the substance, whatever it was. The thin atmosphere was corroding it, somehow. She slammed a fist on the thick, sealed glass in anger… and froze once more.
A red substance flooded through the small hole, pouring out as if pressurised, and sprayed across the window of the pod. Lily screamed, falling back, hands in front of her face.
Nothing happened. The interior of the pod was entirely opaque as a red mass coated it. The readings were... simply off the charts, she acknowledged, looking at her data pad. Lily staggered to her feet and rushed for the door only for it to not respond. Every single type of hazard alarm was going off, and for the safety of the station, the door was sealed. At least for the foreseeable future, it wasn't going to be opening.
Lily groaned in frustration, and sat back down, staring at the pod. Somehow, on some level, it felt familiar. She shook her head. Her nerves were strung so tight she was sure they'd snap. At least she had completed her tasks for the day before getting locked in the research bay…
Forcing herself to feign normalcy, she began to take readings. The pod was still secure, and no breach that she was able to detect had taken place. As such, an automated timer would open the doors. Normally, someone else could have overridden it, but they had to be outside of the room to do so. As she was alone, she was at the mercy of the fail-safe. It would take six hours, as the station performed obsessive scans to guarantee the safety of opening the doors.
Lily curled up against the pod, and decided whatever happened, it was out of her hands now. When she woke up, she'd either be dead or the most famous person in the history of Earth – possibly both.
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