THE WHINE of air escaping from a punctured space-suit was unmistakable.

Viktoriya—‘Vikki’ to her friends and crewmates—knew that her time was up: it was only a matter of seconds. The suit’s oxygen level would fall to below breathable level in less than a minute, judging by the rate at which air was leaking out—and after that she would have a bare thirty seconds of consciousness before she passed out from anoxia. And worse would come after that, with blood vessels rup­turing in the near vacuum.

If she could but grab an emergency patch from her backpack and slap it on the puncture in time … but her arms were pinioned.

Her thoughts were crowding in on her—for in extremis, at the point of death, one’s thoughts race through one’s head like a hurri­cane—whereas in relaxation thoughts can be as sluggish as a glacier. She remembered her decompression drill—so often repeated during training, but so utterly useless now. Don’t try to hold your breath against the vacuum—you’ll only burst your lungs. Exhale deeply, then exhale again, shut your eyes, and wait for rescue.

Some hope!

She had been out investigating the mysterious hummock, shaped more or less like a giant slug—about four metres high and wide and thirty metres long—that stood out conspicuously from the otherwise almost level plain that made up much of the icy surface of this region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. And—foolishly—she had set out on her own, defying all the protocols. After all, the hummock was only about one kilometre away from where the Valentina lay moored to the ice, alongside the semi-permanent base which the crew were busy erecting. She was the expedition’s chief geologist and glaci­ologist, so it was surely her duty—and she was eager to investigate any unusual surface phenomenon. Besides, no-one else could be spared from their work. In the end, Alex Zygmond, the mission commander, had reluctantly allowed her to go—provided that she remained within sight and, of course, with her radio switched on.

So she had ‘walked’—insofar as walking was possible in the weak gravity of Enceladus, little more than a hundredth of Earth’s—it was more like gentle hopping. She had made her way with the help of crampons towards the strange hummock. Possibly it was just a snowdrift—but the expedition’s base was several tens of kilometres away from the nearest geothermal vent which might spew liquid water and methane out into the vacuum, to fall gently as ‘snow’ in the surrounding area. If this was a snowdrift it was nowhere near where it ought to be. And moreover, normally on a world like Enceladus, the ‘snow’ would tend to settle in a level layer, there being no wind to whip it up into drifts.

Vikki had arrived at the hummock and was carefully examining it by Saturn-light—it was night-time but Saturn, at full phase and vastly spanning almost one-sixth of the sky overhead, cast enough light to work by. Certainly the feature looked at first sight like a heap of snow—water snow, not methane snow—but snow that had part­ially melted and then re-frozen forming a granular surface of larger crystals. A common enough occurrence on Earth, but here she could not think of any explanation. Enceladus was one of the coldest places in the Solar System: no way could the feeble sun’s heat have melted the water-ice during the brief daytime.

Should she collect a sample and bring it to the base for analysis?

Tentatively she had prodded the hummock with a gloved finger.

It was not friable like snow. The surface felt like some sort of integument, softly yielding under pressure—like the skin of some large animal. But a skin with a granular texture. Hastily she drew her hand back.

Something was happening. An edge of the hummock, where it made contact with the surface ice, had lifted, and a vertical fissure was opening: a dark slit-like aperture. Startled, Vikki took a hasty step backwards—but in the negligible gravity the only result was that she launched herself into the ‘air’—or would have if this moon had any air.

At least she hoped to evade whatever might emerge from that dark slit.

But she was not quick enough. A black glistening tentacle, tipped with what appeared to be a nasty-looking appendage like a lobster’s claw, whipped out of the slit and coiled itself around her like a snake, pinioning her arms; then it retracted, pulling her back to the ground.

It was then that she knew her suit was punctured.

Her screams would be heard over the radio, of course, but there was no chance that help would arrive in time…

---§§§---

It was pitch dark.

Vikki gradually slipped back into consciousness and took stock. So she was alive! Or was this some sort of afterlife? No—a staunch materialist and agnostic, she had never believed in any of that stuff. She was in air—she could breathe. She was good at sensing the ambient pressure, and this felt like the pressure that was maintained aboard the Valentina, as well as in the space-suits. Forty kilopascals, about 0.4 atmospheres, made up of a mixture of about 70% oxygen and 30% inert gases, with a trace of CO2 and water vapour.

Familiar air—standard across all SSSA (Solar System Space Agen­cy) in-space facilities. So she must have been rescued, and be back aboard the Valentina. But why was it so dark—or had the vacuum exposure blinded her? And how long had she been unconscious? In a panic, she shakily groped the space around her. She was lying on a cold, slightly yielding surface—but not soft like a blanket, instead it felt scaly, like a snake’s skin. None of the bunks on the Valentina were covered in material like that—so perhaps she wasn’t back aboard ship. But she was still feeling the microgravity, so she must still be on Enceladus—but where? Had her crewmates finished setting up the base, and had it been equipped with this unusual bunk material? And where was her space-suit—her punctured space-suit she now recalled? Had it been taken away to be repaired?

At least she still had her jumpsuit on: just as well, because she realised that she was feeling rather cold—shivering even.

How had she survived; how had she come to this? And how could she ever find anything in this blackness?

Suddenly it wasn’t completely dark. Several rows of dim green shapes—squares—gradually formed in what appeared to be a ceiling above her head. Whatever they indicated, they conveyed no inform­ation she could understand. Just long arrays of squares.

□■■□■□□■ □□□■□□□■ ■■■■■□■■ □■□■□□□■ □□□□■□□■

□■■□□□□■ ■■□□■□□■ □■□■■□□■ ■□■■□□□■ ■■■■■□■■

■■□□■□□■ ■■□□■□□■ □□□□■□□■ ■■■■■□■■ □■□■■□□■

□□■■□□□■ □■■■■□□■ □■□■■□□■ ■□■■■□□■ ■□■■□□□■

□□□□■□□■ ■■■■■□■■ □■□■■□□■ ■□□□■□□■ ■■□■□□□■

□■■□■□□■

So she wasn’t blind, thankfully. But was this a message of some sort? An alien message?—because it wasn’t in any language she could understand. Or was it? There appeared to be only two different symbols: a solid square and a hollow square, in a seemingly random sequence.

But was it quite random? Morse code—dots and dashes? Vikki knew a few characters from the long-obsolete Morse system: a single dot for ‘E’; a single dash for ‘T’, dot-dash for ‘A’, and so on. No, it didn’t look like Morse. But she looked at the squares more intently and then it dawned on her.

They were arranged in groups of eight, with gaps between each group. Two different symbols … ‘0’ and ‘1’ bits?

Bytes!

Bytes written out in binary code. ASCII code? Now, which were the ‘0’s and which were the ‘1’s? Time to start decoding. Luckily, Vikki recalled that she had a notebook and a pencil in the pocket of her jumpsuit. Were they still there? Yes! She tried tentatively decoding the groups, starting from the top left.

01101001. She counted: 69 in hex—letter ‘i’ in ASCII. Yes! we are getting somewhere: this could be a message. Time to write down a table of all the letters of the alphabet in order, and then their ASCII-hex representations. She knew that the lower-case letters began with 61h—thanks to the basic science and IT segments which were part of general spaceflight training.

Next group: 00010001. 11 in hex. Vikki couldn’t remember what 11H stood for in ASCII, but it wasn’t in her table: it wasn’t a letter: it wasn’t even printable, she thought.

All right. Swap the ‘0’s and the ‘1’s. Then we get 10010110 11101110. 96H followed by EEH. Even worse: this made no sense at all.

So much for being the first human to make contact with what seemed to be intelligent alien beings! If this really was the work of extraterrestrials, maybe they were sending her a message. Vikki might well be the most important person in the Solar System at this moment. But if she couldn’t decipher the ‘message’, what was the use?

What did she know so far? These beings grouped bits into bytes—that seemed evident. Had they picked up that format by listening in on messages between Valentina and Earth, or Valentina and Ceres, or Valentina and Ganymede? Or other traffic criss-crossing the Solar System? There had been a lot of radio communication, and the data was indeed grouped in bytes.

But perhaps grouping of data into clusters of eight bits—a power of two—was intuitive anyway. A completely alien species might well have hit upon the same system. After all powers-of-two were relatively easy for binary computers to work with—and these aliens must surely know about computers.

Vikki sighed. She put the notebook back in her pocket. Sitting up for a moment, she surveyed her surroundings as best she could in the dim light shed by the ‘squares’. She was in an enclosed space, some­what irregular in shape but roughly cubical. Floor, walls, and ceiling all had the same scaly texture. It was almost as if a huge reptile’s (dinosaur’s?) skin had been turned inside out, and she was inside it. Everything had this greenish tinge, but that was probably due to the colour of the illuminated squares. No sign of any doorway, nor furn­iture of any kind. No visible food or drink—nor in fact anything that might serve as a toilet. If she was going to be confined here for long, she would certainly die of starvation and thirst—air or no air. She might have made First Contact—but be doomed never to tell anyone about it…

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Unless she could figure out the message—and somehow reply to it. How long had she spent puzzling over it? About half an hour she reckoned—she didn’t have her watch on her—but she was dog-tired. Best to rest for a while. Vikki lay back again: the surface she lay on was quite comfortable, if a bit chilly, and she soon dozed off.

---§§§---

Vikki woke with a start. She had been dreaming: dreaming that she was trapped in a hall of mirrors—trapped and running frantically this way and that, colliding with her own reflection, unable to escape. She shook herself and waited for the disorientation which comes with sudden awakening from a dream to ease off. She rubbed her eyes. At least the green squares were still there. Time to address herself once more to the task of trying to figure out the ‘message’.

Was there some arcane clue buried in the dream? Had her sub­conscious been trying to tell her something? Hall of mirrors! What was it about mirrors…?

Of course! Mirrors reverse right and left. At least, if you hold written text up to a mirror, you see it in reverse. English words would run from right to left. Why hadn’t Vikki thought of this before? If the aliens had no knowledge of human written orthography, they could not tell whether any particular language was written from left-to-right or vice-versa. Grab that notebook again and get scribbling, reading the groups from right to left. Let’s assume that the solid squares are ‘0’s and the hollow squares are ‘1’s.

79H, 6FH, 75H, 20H…

Three lower-case letters followed by a space! ‘y’, ‘o’, ‘v’, then a space. ‘Yov’. Well, whatever that means, it isn’t English. No—wait! Vikki had miscounted: 75H is the letter ‘u’, not ‘v’. ‘You’. Excitedly, Vikki painstakingly worked out the rest of the message:

‘you will release one orbit’

That was certainly a message in English, although it didn’t make a lot of sense. So the aliens (Vikki was convinced she was in the grip of aliens, now) had somehow ‘learnt’ a form of English by listening in on messages sent out or received by Valentina. The data would have been compressed, Vikki thought—so the aliens must have also figured out the compression system. Clearly they must be super-intelligent!

But their grammar wasn’t quite up to the mark. Vikki would ‘re­lease’ what? Perhaps it meant, she was to be released after one orbit. Presumably one orbit of Enceladus about Saturn, which was also the length of Enceladus’ day—about 33 hours. That was encouraging—if she could survive that long. But how to tell the ‘aliens’ that she needed her space-suit—and food and drink?

She stood up carefully in the low gravity. She was feeling really chilly now, and she did her best to warm up by hugging herself and gently lifting and lowering her legs. The ‘ceiling’ was only a metre or so above her head and she had to be careful not to bang her head on it by too much exertion.

She surveyed her surroundings more intensely. Ah! There was something on one of the ‘walls’—something she’d missed until now. Two symbols side by side: faint representations of a solid square and a hollow square, in black against the greenish background:

■ □

Unlike the symbols on the ceiling, they were not illuminated. Were they the input interface: some kind of keyboard? Tentatively she reached over and touched the solid square. Then she looked up. Beneath the ‘text’ she had already seen, there was a new illuminated square—but this time it was in red:

■

Very good. User input. Vikki could type in binary—tedious but it would get her somewhere. But a keyboard with just two ‘keys’ wouldn’t be much use unless she could backspace over any errors. Surely the aliens must have thought of this—or were they so super-intelligent that they never made a mistake? No: there ought to be a way to backspace. She touched the solid square again, but this time held her finger on it for a few seconds. Yes: the red square dis­appeared. So she could correct any errors. Time to put a question to them.

Would the aliens understand her request? And what should she ask for? Did she need to ask for anything? If the aliens were keeping her alive in a breathable atmosphere—and if they were really promising to release her, surely they were benevolent? But would they under­stand a human’s basic needs?

Her space-suit was probably the first priority. Even if it hadn’t been repaired, it would contain a small supply of water and com­pressed emergency rations. Enough to keep her alive for what was left of the 33 hours, perhaps. And wearing it would keep her warm. She would need to relieve herself at some point—using the hideous­ly uncomfortable space-suit catheter—but that could wait. She was still shivering: she must get a message out without delay before her fingers became too numb.

Out with the notebook again. She tentatively wrote down a mess­age:

i need my space suit

No: perhaps ‘space suit’ wouldn’t be understood. And the ‘my’ was superfluous. She crossed out what she’d written and wrote:

i need pressure suit

Using the lookup table which she’d already written out in her notebook, she laboriously converted each character of her message into ASCII hex,:

69 20 6E 65 65 64 20 70 72 65 73 73 75 72 65 20 73 75 69 74

Now to get to work. Would it be high bit first or low bit first? Vikki looked at the green ‘text’ and reasoned that it was probably the former—although if she was wrong the aliens would probably figure it out. She started ‘typing’, gingerly with one finger:

■, □, □, ■, □, ■, ■, □, ■, ■, □, ■, ■, ■, ■, ■ …

and so on, until the whole message was out. As expected, the text built up on the ceiling in red squares running from right to left. Barring a few mistakes which she carefully corrected, she was doing it right.

Now all she could do was sit and wait.

---§§§---

It was over an hour before something did happen. As before with the strange hummock, a part of one of the walls curled up at its base, a dark vertical slit formed—and sure enough, a dark glistening tentacle slowly emerged from the slit. Vikki shuddered and hopped back to the further wall, but this time the tentacle made no attempt to grab her. Instead it looped its claw-end back into the slit and then re-emerged drawing in a bundle, which it deposited in the middle of the room; then the tentacle retracted into the slit which promptly closed. Vikki cautiously approached the bundle and sighed with relief: it consisted of her balaclava, socks, and space-suit—neatly rolled up. No sign of the backpack or helmet, but maybe those would come later So her request had been understood.

She thankfully donned her balaclava and socks, relieved to gain some protection from the cold, and reached into the suit for an emergency ration bar and drink bubble. She was both thirsty and ravenous. She also—uncomfortably—made use of the catheter in the suit to relieve herself. The ration bar was tasteless and uninspiring—some sort of high-energy synthetic food—but that was what it was meant to be: for emergency consumption only: not something to be relished!

Examining the suit closely, Vikki discovered that the puncture had been patched—but not with a patch from her backpack: this patch was entirely alien, hexagonal in shape, and appeared to composed of the same scaly material as the room’s walls, floor and ceiling. Never­theless it seemed to adhere well to the suit’s surface, and hopefully was stopping the leak. She wondered whether to put on the suit—it would hamper her but it would keep her warmer, although without helmet or backpack she couldn’t turn on the heater or display, and it wouldn’t be much use outside. In the end she made up her mind and wriggled into it.

Where were the helmet and backpack? Why hadn’t they been returned to her at the same time as the suit?

Vikki waited for what she reckoned was another hour. At least she wasn’t shivering any more—although being able to switch on the suit’s heater would have been welcome. She was still hungry but thought it best to conserve the remaining ration bars for now.

Now another slit opened in a different wall, opposite the one where the first had appeared. Vikki stood still and waited to see what might be delivered this time. But the tentacle that emerged was different from the others: it ended not in a claw but in a bunch of smaller tentacles, almost like fingers. It reached out towards Vikki’s face. Seen in close-up, she could see that each ‘finger’—there were six in all—ended in a small hemispherical swelling rather like the sucker cup on a toy arrow. She shrank back but the tentacle was deter­minedly closing in on her face. Best to submit, she decided, not without a shudder. Whatever these aliens were, they didn’t appear to be hostile. But why wouldn’t they show themselves, instead of just extending their tentacles out through a dark slit? Perhaps they reasoned that the sight of the complete creature would be too disturbing? Vikki could well understand that. She had read Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, in which the devil-like aliens wait fifty years before showing themselves…

The tentacle’s ‘fingers’ deftly probed her face. They felt warm and dry—not quite like human fingers but close enough. Perhaps they were performing some sort of medical check on her. But then, all of a sudden, the fingered tentacle slithered down into the collar of her space-suit—and not only that, it wormed its way inside her jumpsuit and even her underwear.

Vikki managed to suppress an impulse to squeal in protest, just in time. She reasoned: how could these aliens understand anything about human modesty and immodesty? They were only being help­ful. Best to pretend she was being intimately examined by a gynae­cologist. In fact, that seemed to be a pretty good analogy: she was sure now that the aliens were just performing a ‘medical’ to assure themselves of her well-being before they released her. And the sensation was not unpleasant.

After a few minutes the ‘examination’ stopped and the tentacle withdrew into its slot. Almost at the same time, the slot on the other side re-opened and, to her relief, her helmet and backpack appeared. Hastily she strapped on the backpack and connected it up, then she donned her helmet, clamped it down, and powered up the suit. Batteries still showed nearly full charge, and plenty of oxygen reserve. Good. They must be planning to let her out, and she would have no trouble getting back to the Valentina. It was nowhere near thirty-three hours since she had woken up, but perhaps the ‘one orbit’ the aliens had mentioned, meant the maximum time she would have to wait.

There was something odd about her suit—but for the moment Vikki was too excited to notice.

Sure enough, the head-up display showed her that the pressure outside her suit was dropping. The aliens must be operating this ‘room’ as a sort of airlock. When the pressure had dropped to almost zero, a much wider aperture opened on one of the walls. And through the aperture, instead of complete darkness, Vikki could see the bleak surface of Enceladus, dimly lit by Saturn-light, stretching out ahead of her. She was free! Excitedly she hopped through the ‘door’ and onto the Enceladean ice. She was standing right next to the ‘hummock’—so her place of captivity had indeed been inside it. Somehow…

---§§§---

It was only as she was rounding the ‘hummock’—or alien spaceship, not of Enceladus, as she must surely now regard it—that it clicked with Vikki: what the anomaly was. The date and time indications on her head-up display showed that she had been out of contact for nearly fourteen days! And all that time, equipped with a space-suit that held only six hours’ worth of oxygen. Was her suit lying? If not, what would they have been thinking at the Valentina? They must surely have presumed her dead…

Should she tell the truth? That she had been held captive by aliens inside some sort of spaceship? Vikki stopped and considered her options as she stood by the hummock, hidden from view from the Valentina. No! Firstly, she would surely never be believed. Then—even if her crewmates did believe her incredible story—that she was indeed the first human to make contact with an alien intelligence—surely that odious Dr Murielle d’Anterre, the expedition’s exo­biologist, would take the credit to herself.

Vikki needed a cover story. She took her time trying desperately to think up something plausible, before she showed herself. Not with much hope—she would have to try her best.