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Jing and Mara discussed what we should take. My friend isolated one of the construction robots while the xenobiologist unhooked half the tools from his belt. They located the machine’s joints and rivets. They planned how to dismantle it so the pieces would fit in the container.

I watched standing, shifting my weight from leg to leg. During the exploration, I had floated with the current, but the waves had deposited me on a beach, and I was freezing. We had descended to the second sublevel of a deserted outpost. If the station noticed the training ship was missing, they would file a report against me.

Mara ripped several plates from the robot’s casing, and Jing detached an arm. When the machine lay dismantled like a personal ship in the back alleys of some outer-rim colony, the woman searched around with her flashlight beam until she located the container.

“Enough material to study, advanced or not.”

She ordered us to haul the loaded container to the ship and return with two containers programmed to follow us. Meanwhile, Mara would dismantle the materializer.

We hurried up the ramp. I was getting hot. Jing panted over the radio. Droplets of sweat tangled in his eyebrows, and his mouth hung open like a dog’s on a summer day.

As we approached the first sublevel, Mara’s voice broke up. We had failed to anticipate that the aliens would have built two basements tens of meters underground. We lacked repeaters. Before the indicator on my lens alerted me that I had lost the signal, I asked Mara to check her oxygen level and other vitals. She obeyed with the tone of a child irritated at being reminded of some chore.

In front of our ship, Jing and I emptied the container and stored the scrap in the cargo bay. I wanted to climb to the cockpit and check the radio. Would a message be waiting for me, where one of the station’s bored controllers demanded I identify myself? Every passing minute increased the risk of being discovered. The adrenaline flowing through my veins sharpened the ship’s outline and the landscape’s features. The days I had spent going out drinking, or flying over ash-grey moors on so many exploratory missions, had passed in a blur, but this mission I would remember.

Before Jing programmed the other containers to follow him back, I said I would go ahead and help Mara. I hurried over the sandy earth that carpeted the dome. The maintenance robot crossed my path on its rounds towards the mounted sarcophagus, and I dodged it. I ran down the ramp. The indicator on my lens notified me it had acquired Mara’s signal, although silence followed.

In the second sublevel, one of the construction robots lay gutted, and the other two waited arm to arm, but the basement ended in a bulkhead double door. I stopped mid-stride. I looked back at the ramp, wondering if I had somehow found a third sublevel, but the path ended here.

I was approaching the door when my flashlight illuminated the back of Mara’s golden suit and helmet; she was hunched over an adjacent panel. I thought she would notice my beam washing over her, but when she noticed me standing beside her, she startled. The reflections sliding across the visor hid her features, confining the woman within a shell.

“Did we somehow miss that the basement ended in a door?” I asked.

“In that case, Kirochka, we should get our eyes checked. While I was studying the wiring on the upper floor, I discovered it ran down to this sublevel and connected to this wall with an absurd power spike, as if feeding it. I felt along the wall until I touched several buttons, and after pressing some combination, this door and the panel revealed themselves.”

“What do you mean ‘revealed themselves’? Was it a hologram?”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

“Why would they conceal the door?”

“Maybe I’m projecting our intelligence onto theirs, but likely to hide another room.”

A wave of electricity surged through me. When I leaned towards the panel, my helmet brushed against Mara’s, and she took a step back. On the panel, a mosaic of five hexagonal buttons—marked with symbols made of intertwined multicolored curves—accompanied a display screen. I pressed a few buttons. The display reproduced each symbol.

“How will you figure out the code?”

Mara showed the pry bar she was holding.

“You’ll have the privilege of providing me with the alternative.”

I forced the panel until it came loose and hung by a tangle of colored wires like synthetic hair. My friend gripped an instrument I didn’t recognize. She clipped its pincers onto some wires in the panel’s guts. Sequences of code and text swept across the instrument’s screen, and Mara analyzed them.

Jing let out an exclamation. He stood before the ramp, then ran towards us. As his white beam washed over the double door, the xenobiologist unhooked the thermal camera from his belt.

I peered over his shoulder at the screen.

“A hologram was hiding the door.”

Jing pointed out, amidst the blue hues, two mirrored shapes a meter and a half tall—almond-nail-shaped struts supporting nothing. His mood soured.

“Empty.”

Mara straightened up and held the loose panel against the opening. She alternated between looking at her instrument and the panel as she pressed a button combination, while the display reproduced the chosen symbols. She stepped back. My helmet muffled a sound of gears. Mara and I waited shoulder to shoulder as the door’s sliding leaves slid into the rock.

In the center of a basement the size of a bedroom, between two metal struts, levitated a creature like some superorganism floating in an abyssal depth. Its layers of translucent, undulating skin intersected each other. A tangle of energy. Across its surface, pink and purple patches flowed like watery reflections.

We approached, aiming the ovals of our beams onto the struts to avoid letting the wash of light blur the creature, or artifact. Did it belong to those who had excavated the outpost and built the robots? No, the installation must have grown up around it, as if through this totem some god had ordered its servants to settle here.

“What does this thing suggest to you?” I said.

Mara grinned from ear to ear, showing white teeth worn down as if from chewing her nails daily.

“I have no idea what it is.”

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Acid Rain” by LORN.

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I stepped up to the panel and slammed the button with my palm. At the bottom of the precipice, the drill slowed its revolutions, grinding less and less rock until it stopped. The ringing in my ears faded. Maybe when we flew back to the station, I’d need to go to the infirmary to get my eardrums stitched up.

Mara breathed deeply.

“Whoever lives here is a deep sleeper, or their evolution forgot about ears.”

We spread out nearby as we adjusted to the still ground. Our beams swept across the precipice walls and the drill, which had crushed chunks of a rust-colored ore vein. Around the drill, a hundred loose rocks lay piled up like gold nuggets.

Mara lowered her beam about ten meters down the precipice wall. The oval of light picked out a bronze disk hanging like a shield, made up of spinning rings. Between the shield and the rock wall, telescoping appendages extended, unfolding like an insect’s legs. The telescopic arms ended in pincers. The robot glided down the wall, its rings coordinating to counteract gravity.

It reached out its appendages towards the piled, football-sized rocks, then clamped its pincers around several. The robot ascended the wall calmly, rotating and spinning its rings, until it reached our level. It moved sideways towards the edge of the precipice. We retreated out of the appendages’ reach in case it meant to throw the rocks at us, but the robot approached the wardrobe-sized machine and dropped the rocks it held into the feed chute, like sugar cubes into coffee. The machine powered up; the cavity behind its door lit up. It sounded like an industrial fan.

We crouched down in front of it. Inside, a maintenance robot identical to the one we had stolen was materializing. When it was done, the robot pushed the door open from inside and, exiting, tumbled down the drop between the machine and the rock floor, tipping over.

“I don’t know what kind of intelligence we’re dealing with,” Mara said, “but we’d better lower our expectations.”

In moments, the robot righted itself. Its legs moved in sequence as it stumbled away toward the ramp, swinging a honey-colored beam before it. The machine disappeared behind the ramp’s pillar.

Mara stooped to study the materializer’s interior. She shook her head, then returned to the precipice. The crab robot that had hoisted the material had returned to its post on the wall and camouflaged itself as a shield.

“Too big,” Mara said, “besides, we’d risk falling. Let them retrieve it when we reveal the discovery.”

She peered into the mouth of the feeder tube and pulled out a piece of rust-colored mineral, the size of an orange. Under our beams, it sparkled like sequins. As she turned the rock over, the arm pinning the electroshock lance to her side relaxed its hold; the lance fell and rolled away. Mara stooped, muttering. Her forehead gleamed with sweat. She picked up the lance and straightened.

“Should we dismantle the materializer?” Jing asked.

“If we had time to spare, perhaps. Someone will do it—us, or whatever team the station dumps it on. Standard model, I guess. Not many alternatives available.”

Mara scanned around until her beam fell upon the container waiting several meters away, analyzing our movements. She lifted the lid. Before dropping the mineral inside, she turned it over between her fingers.

“Perhaps it’s a stable isotope in an unusual crystal structure.”

Jing approached and narrowed his eyes at the bronzy reflections the mineral gave off. He slid his fingers over his helmet, near his chin.

“Don’t you recognize it?”

She shot him an irritated look I knew well.

“A couple of hours ago, I was in my pajamas getting ready for bed. Now I’ve ended up tens of meters underground inside an unknown alien species’ outpost, stressed out because the station mustn’t know we jumped the gun. Give me a break. I’ll take the mineral back and analyze it properly when I have time.”

Jing raised his gloved palms and smiled. Mara dropped the mineral; it clattered against the kidnapped robot’s casing. She secured the container’s lid.

The ramp descended into another sublevel. As we went down, the oval beams of our flashlights bleached the uneven, curving wall.

A certainty washed over me that treasures awaited below. In the past, I had approached each exploration as if we were studying ancient ruins that some beasts used as nests. But here, we had broken into a dwelling, and we would burst into a basement where a dozen aliens might be bustling about.

We emerged into a room the size of a private hangar. The ramp ended on this level. Our crisscrossing beams illuminated a void. The floor was marked with the dirt and dust tracks of treads, which reached the far wall as if the machines had parked there. We found them resting against a side wall like sleeping gorillas. Construction robots, two meters tall and as wide as a person and a half. Their arms ended in pincers. Two dirty tires encased in treads served as legs.

We clustered before the robots. A compound eye bulged from the front of their casings. Jing sighed. He wandered to the back of the basement, which, unlike the side walls, terminated in a wall of polished rock. The oval beam of his flashlight scanned it from top to bottom, perhaps searching for the hint of another passage. The xenobiologist spoke, his tone somber.

“What did they intend to do here? Use it as a warehouse in case someone organic—of their species, I mean—visited this star system?” He paced through the basement like a buyer assessing a house. “No hypersleep chambers, nothing to suggest they planned to accommodate anyone who breathed and needed to eat.”

Mara clipped the multimeter to her belt.

“Perhaps it’s part of a repeater system. No. They would have put it in orbit to prevent atmospheric interference. But it sends a message home, which I imagine includes the coordinates. To a civilization that might exist hundreds of light-years away, or that might have died out.”

“And which I’ll never know. What interested them about this dead planet?”

The robots’ treads were stained with crusts of earth. When I scratched one, it crumbled onto the padded palm of my glove.

Mara tracked Jing with her gaze as he wandered in oval patterns.

“Perhaps they dispatched automated vessels programmed to scan multiple star systems and, if they discovered any promising environment, transmit the information back home. But what they consider valuable might elude us. We know this mineral interests them.”

The xenobiologist halted and faced us. His shoulders had slumped.

“I came to interact with intelligent beings. This hole lacks biology.”

“I didn’t know we’d meet robots,” I said.

Jing forced a smile and sighed.

“I’m sorry. I’m being unfair. I appreciate that you included me. Someone was listening when I complained about other xenobiologists monopolizing opportunities, something that bothers me more than I let on. We’ve stumbled upon an abandoned ruin, but perhaps another day we’ll have better luck.”

Mara, rigid as a pillar, pierced me with one of her inscrutable expressions.

“Are you more satisfied?” I asked.

“We’ve encountered obsolete technology. Ordinary at best. Counts as field experience, provided I’m not demoted or fired for accompanying you on a looting expedition.”

“I take full responsibility. At worst, I’ll be the one in trouble.”

“But you don’t care about that.”

“We’ve explored a facility no human had ever seen.”

Mara twisted one side of her mouth.

“You know I don’t do this for the thrill. It triggers my migraines.”

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

The exposition featured on this part feels too heavy-handed to my current self, all these years later.

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I brandished the stun spear, then pressed its twin prongs against the figure and thumbed the trigger on the grip. With a muffled crackle dampened by my helmet, the figure crumpled, inertia dragging its limp form across the ground to carve a furrow in the earth.

We slunk closer, like wary cats, to the overturned machine. Its six metallic legs—narrow, jointed, eerily reminiscent of flesh-stripped limbs—splayed rigidly to one side. As Jing crouched, the oval beam of his flashlight skated over the reflective metal.

“Did you see it make a move to attack us?”

“If you wanted me to waste time weighing pros and cons before stunning anything that approaches,” I snapped, my voice edged, “you should’ve let Dr. Halperin carry the spear. But if someone does come at us with ill intent, she’ll try to reason with them.”

I handed the stun spear to my friend. After she wedged it under one arm, her gloved hands reclaimed the multimeter.

“If you’re going to mention me, use my title.”

Jing traced a gloved finger along the machine’s bronzy carapace.

“A robot.”

Its compound eye—a clustered dome of hundreds of bulbous diodes protruding from the chassis—glowed with amber light. Metal groaned inside the machine, the casing shuddering. We lurched backward. A sound like a steel ball grinding through clockwork innards erupted from its core. The robot righted itself. Its six spindled legs flexed, hoisting it upright before it marched between us, the amber light swaying as its gait stabilized. The container trailing us calculated a collision course with the machine, and pivoted sharply aside.

The robot led us to the sarcophagus mounted on the wall. It halted in front. We encircled the machine, dousing it in the beams of our flashlights. A flexible appendage—an antenna resembling that of some insect—emerged from the robot’s compound eye, probing the air until it brushed the sarcophagus’s casing. The robot froze.

Mara aimed her multimeter at it. Behind her helmet’s visor, an eyebrow arched. We waited as if standing before a melting block of ice, anticipating the trapped creature within to stir.

The robot retracted its antenna back into its chassis. It maneuvered its six legs in a choreographed pivot, spinning 180 degrees before trudging toward the rear of the dome, imprinting circular tracks into the sandy earth. We hurried after it.

“You plan to introduce us?” I asked.

“Would you chat with one of our robots?” Jing replied. “They likely programmed it with just enough intelligence for maintenance tasks.”

“Kirochka, stop it,” Mara said.

I stepped ahead to block the robot’s path. Stretching out a leg, I planted my boot like a barrier over its compound eye. The machine shoved against my limb, its legs thrashing. When Mara gripped the robot’s base and lifted it, its own limbs scrambled for purchase in the air.

“Heavy?” I asked.

“Like a materializer.”

She hobbled, cradling the machine, to the cargo container trailing us. Jing opened it. Mara placed the robot upside-down inside. She straightened and puffed audibly while she lighted the interior of the container as though expecting defiance. Five seconds later, she secured the lid. Behind her visor, she narrowed her eyes and exhaled sharply.

“Why bother?” I asked.

“It’s alien tech, dimwit. Who knows if they stumbled on some revolutionary method while building a maintenance bot.”

The muscles of Mara’s mouth, which I’d assumed were atrophied, curved upward. But if any hangar employee discovered the burner was missing, it would erase that smile and the ones to follow.

We were advancing toward the ramp when a muffled series of thuds distracted us. The container trailing behind us shuddered as if someone inside were thrashing against its walls. After a few seconds, it grew still.

“Poor thing,” I said.

“They programmed it to maintain this facility,” Mara replied. “We didn’t kidnap a child.”

We gathered at the summit of the ramp and lit the descent. They’d polished the curved slope of rock but left the walls raw, as excavated: overlapping sheets of smoke-gray stone, streaked with clay-colored veins like rusting metal. The angles of some outcrops neared ninety degrees, threatening to snag and tear our suits. Under my flashlight’s beam, the rock looked powdery, like the walls of an apartment abandoned for decades.

Jing and Mara stared at me as if awaiting permission to proceed. I took a few steps down the ramp to prove it would hold under our soles. Caterpillar tracks had littered the floor with crusts of dirt. When I turned, the beams of their flashlights whitened my vision.

“Stay close.”

Jing and I descended shoulder-to-shoulder, though our opposite shoulders grazed the rock walls, while Mara lagged behind. The Geiger counter shattered the silence with its crackling.

A different kind of excitement thrummed through me, distinct from the tension that had gripped me when nailing a difficult landing or overtaking another racer on a curve. What awaited us underground? How would I react to what I’d see? During missions where I’d had to land in clearings amid alien vegetation, the scientists and soldiers had infected me with their enthusiasm, but their expedition ventured forth without me. I kept the ship running in case we needed to flee, and to stave off boredom, I’d invent dangers.

“They bury their living spaces,” Jing said, and I couldn’t tell if he’d been speaking for a while. “To shield them from explorers, weather, and meteorite impacts.”

My flashlight traced with inky curves the fissures between slate-gray rock layers. In some veins, bronze-like flecks sparkled like sequins. Our beams painted shadow-drawings across the curved wall and central pillar, while five meters down the ramp, a wall of blackness loomed. How many intelligent creatures could tolerate living in this darkness?

“Mara, what kind of rock did they excavate here?”

“What’d you say?”

I glanced back, but my friend was gone. I hurried up the ramp until I collided with the woman’s outstretched fist—she’d been mapping the route as if planning a documentary.

“You vanished,” I said.

“Surprised?”

I ran my fingers over the streaked protrusions on the wall.

“I was asking about the rock.”

Mara studied me with her feline eyes, as if deciphering a joke.

“Do I look like a geologist to you?”

A couple of minutes later, as we descended, a roar of machinery assaulted us. A work shift starting at some factory. We froze mid-step, staring at each other, dazzled by the intersecting beams of our flashlights. The ramp and walls vibrated. My helmet filled with a thunderous noise, like a rock crusher grinding stones.

My ears rang, and I wanted to jam my index fingers straight into my eardrums. I hurried down the ramp, determined to stop whatever was happening.

I reached a landing that opened into a rectangular basement carved from raw rock. Four metal pillars braced the ceiling, and to the left of the entrance gaped an abyss. About twenty meters below, my beam illuminated a quivering mound of bronze-colored crushed stone.

Jing wandered dazedly. I stepped ahead, gripped the shoulder of his suit, and yanked him back. When the xenobiologist noticed the chasm, he rubbed my helmet like it was a dog’s head.

We edged cautiously toward the precipice—the source of the roar. From the ceiling of the cavity hung a fluted metal column, greasy and gleaming, terminating at the bottom in a massive drill bit. It spun relentlessly, pulverizing rock and spewing debris.

My eardrums throbbed. The floor trembled, threatening to hurl one of us into the abyss with the next violent shake.

A few meters from the edge stood a pedestal topped with a control panel. A hexagonal button jutted prominently. Crowded into the corner was a wardrobe-sized machine, forged from the same bronzy metal as the sarcophagus. A feeder tube snaked from its side. I leaned in: rubble had piled up at its base. At the machine’s front, I found a door, and when I opened it, the lattice of guides and tubes inside reminded me of a materializer.

I swept my flashlight beam across the rest of the basement, searching for hypersleep chambers, but the room was barren.

Mara, her face contorted from the noise, aimed a multimeter at the pedestal’s panel. Jing hunched nearby, staring at me through eyes narrowed to slits, his mouth twisted as if he’d bitten into a rancid almond. Someone’s voice crackled over the radio—drowned by static.

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

I feel like I need to apologize for the quality of this story’s beginning. The translation improves upon the original prose, but I can’t do much regarding the rest of the awkwardness. I’ve even had to remove a few sentences whose meaning was lost to my current self. I considered removing Mara’s cryptic “If you’re going to mention me, use my title,” which I’m not sure what it refers to, and felt like an odd thing to say regardless. These days I wouldn’t write such a story, as I’m no longer in the same headspace.

Anyway, I hope that at least one person out there is getting anything out of these first few parts. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the worst first act of the six novellas I wrote back-to-back all those years ago.

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I ordered the helmet’s AI to enlarge the complex’s map and keep it suspended five meters ahead. The three-dimensional map skimmed the folds of sandy earth like a piece of fabric floating on the sea. We circled the hill while Jing and Mara flanked me as though trying to bolster their own courage.

At the base of the crater, the dome emerged. Starlight bathed its crystalline shell, but failed to banish the cavernous darkness of the dome’s three-meter-high mouth.

Mara aimed her camera at the tracks etched into the esplanade before the complex. These crisscrossing, overlapping patterns had been imprinted by the parallel treads of some vehicle, one that had worked around the smaller crater centered in the clearing. We approached. Jing knelt and traced the outline of one track with a gloved finger.

Mara and I continued toward the hole, which had depressed the earth in a five-meter circumference, exposing a rocky base. She focused on the crater with the camera mounted on her arm while pressing buttons along its side. The camera took photos, emitting a succession of flashes. Mara unclipped her Geiger counter from her belt and pointed it at the hole.

I listened, trying to distinguish the crackles.

“Should we be hearing it through the helmet?”

“I’m sending the signal to my suit.”

“What’s it telling you?”

The woman commanded her helmet to display the options. Mara’s gaze drifted up and down as she blinked to make selections. The Geiger counter’s staccato crackling broke into the radio frequency like an uninvited speaker.

“Does that mean it’s radioactive?” I asked.

“Slightly above the ambient radioactivity.”

“Enough to worry about?”

She shook her head.

“Not unless you’re planning to build a house on top of it.”

Jing overtook us while brandishing his thermal camera. He headed straight for the black mouth of the dome waiting about a hundred meters away. When we caught up to the man, his nerves were tugging at his smile.

“How do you think we should approach the unknown?” said the xenobiologist.

“You’re asking me?”

“I’ve studied every previous encounter, reviewed the reports, devoured the documentaries. I’ve read the novelizations for pleasure. But you’ve transported scientists to virgin planets.”

“I used to land as close as safety regulations allowed. I kept the ship running hot in case a stampede of scientists and soldiers pursued by some beast came charging out of the jungle. But it never happened. I just transported tired scientists and soldiers back.”

Jing raised his gaze to the black mouth of the dome, that loomed larger as we approached, and he furrowed his brow as if organizing his assumptions at a forced march. He swept the frontal space in an arc with the thermal camera. I stole glances at the blue-toned figures that materialized on its screen. The black mouth of the dome opened into a void. Orange hues painted the vault, which the starlight was heating. To the left of the dome, a rectangular, sarcophagus-like box mounted horizontally on the wall swayed yellow.

“Entrance twice as tall as those in our equivalent buildings,” Jing said. “Bipeds.”

“Or they just prefer to build them tall,” Mara said.

I commanded my helmet to shut off the projection of the complex’s map. About fifteen meters from the mouth of the dome, its darkness lightened to dark grays. Parallel caterpillar tracks extended inward until merging with the shadows.

Mara advanced diagonally ahead of us toward the right flank of the dome, and aimed her camera at the piece protruding from the hexagonal panels. An antenna oriented toward the skies, constructed of crystalline material.

“They communicate with their civilization, assuming they power the antenna.”

We drew close to the mouth of the dome. The angle from which the star poured its arctic-blue light eclipsed the interior.

My chest tingled as if I were venturing to explore a cavern whose ceiling hung with thousands of sleeping creatures. The evolutionary adaptations their isolated development had afforded them for survival would bewilder me, just like those videos broadcast on news programs whenever explorers uncovered another ecosystem.

I commanded my helmet to activate its flashlight. Its white beam illuminated the sandy ground and the layers of tread tracks. When Jing and Mara mimicked my action, their ovals of light danced across the earth and climbed upward through the emptiness toward the vaulted ceiling.

We ventured into a cavity, as if those who had constructed the dome had abandoned it before furnishing the interior. Jing studied the surroundings while frowning. Mara moved away toward the left flank, where the sarcophagus had gleamed in the thermal camera, and I followed the xenobiologist, who swept the oval of light from his flashlight along the curved wall. The light skimmed over the inner face of the hexagonal panels like it would over tarnished metal.

“No signs or engravings,” said Jing. “No evidence of language. Nothing that denotes the intelligence they employed to construct the building.”

As I twirled the electroshock lance like a baton, during one glance at the ground I noticed circular impressions distributed between the caterpillar tracks—the kind that a staff would make. I tapped Jing on the shoulder and pointed to the circular hollows. The xenobiologist crouched. With his index finger, he traced a pattern in the air.

“Six legs.”

We followed the hollows toward the left flank of the dome. The beams from our flashlights illuminated the golden back of Mara’s suit as she studied with an instrument the mounted sarcophagus. It had been molded from a single piece of bronzy metal. She turned, then narrowed her eyelids against the brightness of our beams.

“They built the dome with solar panels made of some photovoltaic material,” she said, “and the flow of electricity converges here. Batteries, I imagine. They siphon from the star all the energy they need. A fraction will drain into the antenna and the machine that manages communication.”

“And the rest for the habitation pods,” said Jing. “The hypersleep chambers.”

“Which we haven’t seen yet.” She pointed with her measuring device at the furthest end of the sarcophagus. “The electricity flows inside the panels toward the back of the building.”

We followed Mara as she tracked the wiring like an arrow marking the path. Our beams swept across the sandy earth, their white ovals distorting with the depressions and ridges of the caterpillar tracks.

“What will you call the aliens?” I asked, my voice electrified.

“I hadn’t thought of a specific name,” Jing said. “It would depend on their physiognomy, their culture. Though I had considered slipping in a reference to my young son, if the teams that review the nomenclature accept it.”

“Whoever discovers the aliens names them, I suppose.”

“You’re assuming your superiors will refrain from stealing your credit,” Mara said to Jing.

“I should be able to name them. But I will have co-discovered them with you ladies.”

Our beams revealed the curve at the bottom of the dome, and when lowered, the beams converged on a hole excavated in the rock beneath the layer of sandy earth. A polished stone ramp descended like a spiral staircase. I had stepped forward and opened my mouth to ask Jing’s opinion when a honey-colored glow emerged from the ramp, followed by a meter-tall figure gleaming bronze, that headed straight toward us.

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

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Jing’s voice, which belonged to the type of neighbor who would occasionally show up offering a tub of food, invaded my helmet as if the xenobiologist had hunched over my ear.

“Can you help me?”

He had climbed the steps to the cargo compartment and was gripping the handle like the lid of a stubborn jar refusing to open. When I approached, Jing descended the steps and moved aside.

“I’ve never worked with one of these vessels before.”

I released the safety mechanism on the handle and slid the door open with a single pull. In the circular hollow, like the inside of a can, the containers waited stacked and secured with taut netting.

“Don’t worry. Nobody is born knowing.”

Jing laughed politely. I gave him space while the xenobiologist removed the containers one by one and gathered them several paces from the ship. When he crouched beside a container, I stood up next to him.

“Have you done this before?”

“I’ve been transported to many planets.”

“To an uncivilized one?”

He lifted his face to smile at me.

“That’s new.”

He sank one knee into the sandy earth and opened the container’s lid. Inside he had organized smaller containers and measuring instruments. I recognized a thermal camera.

At the top of the ladder to the cabin, the hatch to the depressurization chamber had closed. I surveyed the ship’s surroundings. Dozens of meters up the slope, the previous landing had carved descending tracks in the hillside, like the drag marks of some deep-sea monster across the abyssal floor.

“Have you seen Halperin leave?”

Jing, who was emptying the container and arranging the instruments on the sandy ground, looked up in surprise, glanced around, and shook his head.

“I’m in the cabin,” Mara said over the radio.

I bit my lower lip and took a deep breath. I climbed the ladder. Turned the hatch handle, yanked the hatch open, and entered. As hissing sounds enveloped me, I waited for the chamber to pressurize, then I opened the door to the command cabin.

Mara, seated at the control panel with her helmet and gloves on, was refreshing on a monitor the frequencies used by the station. I approached until I could distinguish the profile of her face through her helmet lens. The curvature magnified my friend’s features in a way I had never seen before, a face from which strangers expected to receive the same candor with which they treated her, but it belonged to a nervous creature.

I leaned on the upper section of the control panel.

“I suppose you’re checking to reassure yourself.”

“For now, we remain invisible.”

“With luck, we’ll return to the hangar stuffed with artifacts, long before anyone notices the ship is missing. Some days they don’t even bother to inventory the old burners. They think nobody would pilot them.”

“After that first landing, I understand.” When Mara stood up, her features twisted as if seized by a gut-wrenching cramp. “I hope we’re lucky as you say. I thought I would acclimate when we reached the planet, but my nerves are getting worse.”

We passed through the decompression chamber and descended the ladder. Jing was emptying the second container. We advanced toward him, but Mara lagged behind, contemplating the vast stretches of walnut-brown earth as if she had awakened in the middle of the night in some unknown bedroom. The landscape was crisscrossed by layers of hills and mountains that faded into purplish hues with distance. The mountain peaks jutted out bone-white like splinters.

Clustered around the xenobiologist were containers and gauges. I nudged a metal box with the toe of my boot; on its top surface, a display showed rows of numbers and codes.

“I can’t imagine what half of this stuff is for.”

“Routine equipment,” Jing said.

“But you haven’t come to explore a cave bordering on a colony, Jing. Time is pressing. By now we should be heading down toward the dome.”

Mara hurried to the closed container and opened it. She pulled out a Geiger counter. Crouching, both scientists focused on readying the equipment. Each piece of gear they set down on the sandy ground kicked up a cloud of dust that the limited gravity was slow to settle.

If only I could rub my face. I paced about ten meters away from them, longing to scout the crater alone before the two scientists appeared at the crest of the slope lugging their gear. The waiting chained me, and I pictured a hangar employee stopping before the burner’s vacant spot and reporting its absence to his superior.

“Got a moment?” Jing asked.

I approached. The xenobiologist had gotten to his feet, and from that angle, the star’s light highlighted the gray strands at the side of his head, where his black hair was still thick. With his right hand, Jing brandished an electroshock spear. Extending fifty centimeters up from the handle was an iron-gray shaft terminating in two prongs like a snake’s fangs.

Jing handed me the spear. I hefted it, turning it over as light glinted along its polished shaft.

“Planning to wake them from hypersleep?”

“It looks abandoned from the outside, but maybe someone keeps watch in shifts. Security measure. Even if we just came to say hello, no one invited us.”

I raised the spear and pressed the button. A crackling arc of sky-blue flame leaped between the prongs at the tip. When I released the button, the arc vanished, leaving a wisp of smoke that dissipated in the breeze.

“The charge will run out,” Jing said.

Mara appeared at his side. She had clipped an array of meters to her suit’s belt, among which I recognized a multimeter and a Geiger counter. She had mounted a camera on the thick, reinforced fabric of her left sleeve. It would record whatever she pointed at. The woman hid her nervousness behind an expression carved from milky quartz.

Jing programmed an empty container to follow him. He slid a pry bar through a loop on his belt and clipped on an electric screwdriver. He walked closer, each footstep kicking up a plume of dust. The container trailed the xenobiologist like a dog.

“Ready?” I asked.

As they nodded, arctic blue reflections slid up and down their helmet visors.

I marched towards the edge of the hill, tapping my suit’s shoulder with the electroshock spear.

“Let’s go say hello to those aliens and dismantle their house.”

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

In case you’re thinking, ‘This is shit,’ I must admit that the beginning of the story is my least favorite part of the six novellas I wrote about ten years ago, and this scene in particular may be the most boring. It makes me cringe to think that the judges of a couple of contests read it. So if you have gotten anything of value out of this scene, the story only improves from now on, as far as I remember.

This story is something of a homage to two stories: first, Michael Crichton’s Sphere, my favorite novel as a teen. Second, the first novel I ever attempted to write: a disastrous, almost-incoherent tale about space marines doing dodgy shit, which I started when I was fifteen or so and eventually abandoned when I was twenty. I dreaded to read any excerpt of those manuscripts (I rewrote the story several times, as I had no fucking clue what I was doing), because they mainly displayed my psychotic state in that miserable period of my life.

A few years ago, as I cleaning out stuff from my youth, I threw away all my remaining copies of that manuscript. A stark contrast with an instance when I was nineteen in which I forgot a corrected manuscript in a neighboring city and I nearly had a mental breakdown until I managed to get it back. Discarding stories that don’t work, and that may even poison your current writing if you let them in again, is a way of growing as a writer. I think so, at least.

Although I thankfully remember little of those years, I recall I used to be a bit of a pantser (writing without a clear map), which I have abhorred since. Every scene in a story functions effectively only in relation to the broader constellation of planned scenes. You won’t fix it in post, trust me; by then, the words will feel carved in stone. These days not only I keep chronologically organized notes and Excel files with scene lists, but I have also adopted the “manga series” style of nailing a scene in one shot, which forces you to make all individual parts compelling in some way.