“Perri, come back!” Nic screamed. “Jarek! Max! Somebody help me! Send out... distress beacon! Something’s wrong!”

The indicator never changed.

Scarlet Team Chat: OFFLINE>

The rest of his HUD seemed to be malfunctioning as well.

ARMOR INTEGRITY/BATTERY: 100%//89% O2 CAPACITY: 94/data missing?/% WEAPONS: (NO/NE)//// UPGRADE PAKS: (N/data missing?/NE) ARMOR TEMP./PRESSURE: 17CCCC/CC/1ATM OCCUPANT: 117BPM, /data missing?/C, 96O2 AMBIENT TEMP./PRESSURE: 20C/1/ATM//////

The ground receded below him, shrinking ever-smaller.

I don’t know if I can survive this fall, Nic thought, even with vac-armor. The comms aren’t working... Somebody help!

“RTIFIS!” Nic cried out. There was no response even from his AI. “Dammit.”

But he wouldn’t need to worry about a freefall. The source of his sudden impromptu flight was soon revealed.

Where there had been empty sky a minute ago, now he saw the outline of the egg-shaped object he’d seen on the secret beacon recording. He shuddered. His upward momentum slowed and, for a moment, he drifted in the dreamlike state of zero gravity. Not zero gravity, said a memory from one of his Space Studies classes. Low gravity. There’s always gravity...

That was the last thought he remembered.

***

When Nic woke up, he was still wearing his vac-armor. He could tell by the light fog accumulating on the inside of his visor—moisture from his own breath. His HUD was totally blank; the suit felt like nothing more than a prison for him now. A prison...

…or a barrier. A barrier for which he was suddenly very grateful.

Nic couldn’t make sense of his environment at first. He could barely even see it. It took some time for his eyes to adjust to the low light. When he finally began to process what he was seeing, he felt the overwhelming urge to scream—but there was an even more powerful instinct in him that kept him silent. Fear. Primal fear. His heart beat like a taut drum that was about to burst.

He was in a room. A room-like place of sorts. Its walls were not so neatly rectangular and straight like the rooms he was used to, but curved ever so slightly, and the ceiling was similarly concave. The floor was the flattest side of the “room” and lined with small ridges. The walls were a pinkish-gray color accented sparingly by darker speckles. There was a certain humidity and warmth to the place. Somehow it felt strangely alive, or like it had been alive at one point. It was akin to a room made entirely of wood—foreign to Nic, reminiscent of something biological, and yet it seemed not quite living, but rather repurposed from a living thing.

And then he saw something that was indeed very much alive.

It skulked at the other end of the room. Nic was situated on some kind of elevated section of the floor—a platform that bulged out of the floor itself, with rounded edges but still clearly defined. He felt himself being watched. The thing... the creature, or being, across the room was watching him. This feeling was apparently a universal sensation for humans, the sensation of being observed, of being perceived.

Nic wondered if it also knew that he was watching it. It must, he thought.

The creature stood at over two meters in height, but not quite three, by Nic’s horrified, awestruck estimate. Its skin was grayish—similar to the interior of the room but lacking that vital pinkish hue. The creature had two eyes, two arms, two legs... not unlike the body plan of a human. Snippets of educational sims on potential alien life flashed through Nic’s mind—he recalled that scientists were once certain that aliens couldn’t possibly resemble humans, that the chances were just too astronomical for such a coincidence, and yet there were other thinkers who posited that the anthropic body plan was so efficient that it was bound to evolve elsewhere in the universe. They were almost certain that alien life would resemble humans in many ways...

Its eyes were black and glassy, at least twice as large as human eyes, bulging somewhat out of its head. Its head... The head was massive as well, rising into a rounded, sturdy crest at the top with softer-looking, protruding lobes on either side of its temples. Its body was covered in what Nic’s mind could only categorize as muscles. Sharply delineated, dynamic muscles with gray skin stretched tightly against them. Abdominal muscles—if the alien anatomy could be described in such a way—lined the being’s midsection all the way down to where its torso split into two legs.

Its long, sinewy arms stretched down toward its knees, proportionally reminiscent of the extinct Earth animal known as a gorilla, though not quite as exaggerated. Each of the being’s two hands had six long, thick fingers without nails or claws of any kind—five digits with an opposable thumb. Meanwhile, its legs terminated in long feet of three “toes” with slight webbing between them.

Its face sported a wide mouth that appeared to be frowning into a strong jaw, with no visible external nose or ears. In terms of recognizable human and other Earth-based traits, the being appeared hugely powerful, intelligent, hairless, and sexless. More importantly to Nic, however, it looked incredibly dangerous.

And yet he was still alive.

I have to say something, Nic thought. Maybe it’s waiting for me to initiate some kind of contact. Maybe it doesn’t know I’m awake yet. Um...

“Hello,” Nic rasped. He wasn’t sure if his vac-armor’s external speakers were even functioning. Beyond that, he wasn’t even sure if this creature was able to hear him, much less understand his alien language. “My name is Nicolas Siegfried. I... I am peaceful. I mean you no harm.” There was no response. No indication that the being understood, heard, or cared about the message being delivered. No change in body language, either.

Just then, there was movement in the doorway. At least it looked like a doorway. It was a large opening in the fibrous, organic wall, its edges hemmed on all sides by a rigid structure like a finger of a bat wing. A new creature entered. This one was even more grotesquely alien than its counterpart.

It had bright green skin that appeared to give off its own light. Bioluminescence was the schooling term that popped into Nic’s mind. It had four arms and two legs, with thick, veiny forearms concealing vein-like tubes beneath the skin; these tubes glowed brighter than the surrounding skin, suggesting some kind of bioluminescent fluid or material inside them. These veins contracted and relaxed unpredictably and out of sync. Both of its legs terminated in two long, almost birdlike toes—more accurately, they resembled the hindlegs of an Earth kangaroo. Its four hands all bore eight fingers each—six proper fingers and two symmetrical, equidistant thumbs.

The green one had even larger lobes on the sides of its head, but a smaller cranial crest than the gray one, and it was only about two-thirds as tall. It was less muscular, with a rounder face and a strained paunch of a belly. The tall one’s neck was longish and strong, but the short one barely had a neck at all. Its eyes were much larger than those of its counterpart, protruding out of its face above two tiny slit-like nostrils. Most disturbing of all was its mouth. Nic thought it lacked a mouth at first, but upon closer inspection, it had some kind of opening where a mouth should be... several openings, in fact. They were tall slits like gills that opened and quivered rhythmically. Breathing, maybe, he thought. He couldn’t tell for sure.

The gray one opened its mouth. Made a sound. Its lips sneered to reveal teeth and Nic tensed up. In the low light, in the split-second, he could see that some were sharper than others, but generally they seemed small. He heard a garbled vocalization of sorts—a vocal tone, followed by hissing and clicking sounds. He would never decipher their meaning in a billion years, but he sensed their purpose immediately: communication.

Neither the tall one nor the short one ever took their bulbous black eyes off him, but the green one seemed to respond to the gray one after a few seconds. With its lack of lips or teeth, it was limited in the sounds that it could make, at least to Nic’s untrained ears. He heard some hissing and the flapping of its gill-like oral slits. That was it. I wish I could record this, he thought. Maybe the camera is still working in this thing. Even just the audio recording—that would be a gigantic discovery to send to WorldGov. I’m hearing aliens speak to each other!

His emotions were a whirlwind in that moment, vacillating from dread, from terror to a strange kind of excitement and even pride. He had no reason to believe this encounter necessitated violence. Even in his relatively short years, he already understood the basic instinct to fear what he didn’t know. Maybe the aliens were working out how to communicate with him. Wondering if they’d hurt him somehow. Wondering if he was afraid of them—or maybe they didn’t even know he was alive inside his vac-armor.

While he was pondering this possibility, a muffled rumbling sound reached his ears. The floor shook—then caved in below him.

Instantaneously, his HUD came back online, blaring an alarm in his ears and flashing bright red warnings.

>>>EMERGENCY!<<< >>>11.1KM FREEFALL – CORRECT COURSE!<<<