“WHAT THE fuck have you been up to, Dr Viktoriya Andreyevna Rozhkova?”

It did not need the profanity to make clear to Vikki Rozhkova that Mission Commander Alex—Alexandra Zygmond—was in a fury. Usually she addressed Vikki—like any other crew member—by her familiar first name ‘Vikki’. To use her full name, Russian patro­nymic even, was quite exceptional. Alex’s face was almost purple with rage, her lips drawn back in a snarl, her face so close to Vikki’s, that Vikki almost gagged on that dreadful perfume (not as obnoxious as Murielle’s, luckily. Vikki loathed perfume and never used it. Why was it even allowed on space missions?).

Vikki was used to Alex’s authoritarian persona at the best of times, but she could not help recoiling, sweat beading from her hairline, as she cowered on the bridge of the Valentina. She was struck dumb. She hadn’t expected this sort of reception, not after the apparent ‘miracle’ of seemingly ‘coming back to life’ days after she’d been presumed dead…

It was some time before Vikki spoke up.

“It’s complicated, Alex … Commander Zygmond. I hardly know where to begin…”

“Indeed it must be ‘complicated’. Have you the slightest idea how complicated it’s been for the rest of us? So you promise to stay within sight and with your radio on, while you examine that ‘snow­drift’, or whatever it is. You prance off, and promptly dive behind that thing—vanish from view. We hear what sounds like a shout or a scream over the radio—then silence. Your tracker cuts off too. Of course we send out a search party at once. Our guess is, you’ve fallen into a crevasse or a sinkhole—but we found no crevasses or sinkholes in the neighbourhood when we last checked and we found none this time. We search all round but can find no trace of you. After some six hours—remember, your suit only holds six hours’ oxygen—we have to assume that you’re dead. We notify Earth. We notify the SSSA and are still awaiting instructions from them. Your parents and your brother have been told of your sad demise. What do we tell them now? Of course we go on searching for two whole days—Enceladus days, that is: nearly three Earth-days—hoping to recover your body. No luck. We even dig into that snowdrift of yours—”

“You dug into the snowdrift? But you couldn’t have!” interrupted Vikki. “It’s not a snowdrift, it’s a—” She caught herself just in time. It would not do to reveal her discovery that the ‘hummock’ was in fact some kind of alien artefact: a spaceship even. Not yet!—not until she was more sure of herself and could claim the credit. “It’s rather more solid than a snowdrift—like a mound of re-frozen water-snow,” she continued, lamely. The lie was not far from the truth, after all.

“Not what we found,” continued Alex. “We checked all over. Just a loose pile of CO2 snow, with a trace of methane snow.”

“Water snow, you mean. That’s what it looks like.”

“We took a sample, and it’s definitely CO2 and methane snow.”

“You think I can’t tell the difference, Commander?” retorted Vikki. “One glance was enough to tell me, it looked like partially melted and re-frozen water snow, just like on Earth.” She stopped. Had she run away with her remarks? It would never do to sound patronising—especially not with Alex!

But Alex was unfazed. “I can only surmise,” she continued, “that you were imagining things. Were you drunk, or otherwise dis­oriented? Had you been fiddling with your oxygen—given yourself hypoxia or hyperoxia?”

“I had done no such thing. But I was disoriented, certainly. I thought I was starting to lose air. Maybe my suit was playing up?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your suit. We checked—or rather, Dr Ye, here, checked it over as soon as you took it off. Plenty of oxygen reserve.” She nodded to Dr Ye Wu-Jia, the mission’s medical and life support officer, standing beside her: he nodded back.

Had they noticed the patch? The aliens’ patch? Vikki would have to invent a cover story for that—as soon as she could get her hands on her suit once more.

“Well—anyway, I must have passed out, I suppose. How I stayed alive … how long was it?”

“You were out of contact for fourteen days. Ten Enceladus-days, that is. Without oxygen! That’s incredible, to say the least. Neverthe­less, we have to find out how it is you managed to survive that long without air, food or water. Have you any more to say, Vikki?”

At least Alex was addressing her by her familiar name once again. Her aggressive stance had softened somewhat! Vikki was silent for a while. If she had ever contrived any sort of cover story, it was falling apart. She tried a desperate ploy:

“Alex—do you believe in miracles?”

“No, I don’t believe in miracles. Are you about to tell us how some sort of angel or god descended on Enceladus and nurtured you for fourteen days?”

“Well, Alex—I hardly know how to explain it, either. Can’t people exposed to extreme cold go without air or water for many days?”

“That’s possible—but you don’t show any visible signs of hypo­thermia, Vikki,” put in Dr Ye. “I shall of course be checking you over thoroughly—but for now I can only say, I find your survival inexplicable.”

“I can’t argue with that. But, somehow, I’m alive. Can we move on—can I get on with my work, then?”

“You can catch up on your reports, Vikki—but you’re confined to the ship, or to the base once we’re ready to occupy it—until I give further orders. And furthermore, you’ll report to sick bay for the next two days, to give Dr Ye a chance to give you a proper check-up.”

“But—Alex—I really need to investigate the features outside—especially the hummock. That’s my primary assignment on this mission, surely? Please can I go outside, Alex?”

“You are confined to the ship and base until I decide otherwise, and that’s an order, Viktoriya. So no more arguments please. I’m sure you understand the need for this.”

“Y-yes: I suppose so,” muttered Vikki, disconsolately. So much for having an opportunity to learn more about the artefact! And surely one or other of her crewmates would go exploring, and learn its secret. Dr Murielle, in all probability. Would Vikki still be able to claim priority: claim First Contact for herself? After all, it hadn’t been much of a contact: just a few words tapped out laboriously in binary. Could the aliens be ‘taught’ somehow to communicate more readably?

And Vikki knew that she could not just ask for her space-suit back. Alex would surely suspect her of wanting to go outside again, and would discipline her more severely. ‘Insubordination’ or whatever. But perhaps Dr Ye would be more sympathetic.

---§§§---

Dr Ye Wu-Jia, who preferred his crewmates to address him as ‘Dr Ye’, spent much of the next two days checking Vikki over, in the sick-bay. He, at least, did not order her around: he, a softly-spoken, kindly little man in his late 50s, was perhaps the most self-effacing, modest and sympathetic crew member of them all. Just what was needed in a ship’s doctor, Vikki mused to herself: he reminded her of ‘Bones’ (alias ‘Dr McCoy’) in the vintage Star Trek TV series—although he was far less tetchy than the latter.. He was charmingly tactful and discreet. On examining her intimately, he noted that her pubic hair had not grown despite her fourteen days absence (female cosmonauts were advised to shave regularly, to avoid the problem of urine collecting in the hair). That was puzzling. After hesitating for a while, Dr Ye ventured, shyly and with some embarrassment, to ask Vikki when her next period was due. With a start, Vikki realised that it should have begun just three or four days into her ‘disappearance’. But it hadn’t: there had been no sign of it when she ‘woke up’. Since Dr Ye was a doctor and a professional, she wasn’t shy about explaining these things to him.

Another mystery. More than just being unconscious. Suspended animation?

Although Dr Ye had his suspicions, Vikki did not put him under more pressure by trying to concoct a plausible story for him—and certainly she dropped no hint as to what she had experienced. Indeed she was beginning to wonder whether she’d been dreaming, or suffered some sort of hallucination. Had she accidentally adjusted something in her suit?—had she been getting too little or too much oxygen?—and had that interfered with her sense of reality. It seemed improbable: making such an adjustment, even intentionally, was not normal procedure and it was by no means easy to over-ride the automatic controls.

And if it was all a dream or a hallucination, it was extraordinarily detailed for that. All that figuring out of messages in binary!

Dr Ye was mainly interested in determining how she had survived for ten Enceladus-days—nearly 330 hours—starting with only six hours’ oxygen. His best guess was that she must have somehow entered some near-frozen state, in which all the bodily functions including metabolism, respiration, and heartbeat, would have slowed down to a mere fraction of their normal speed. A process akin to the hibernation seen in many terrestrial animals. In a human such a state was inconceivable—but strange things happened in space and Dr Ye kept an open mind. He carried out every test on her he could think of, making use of almost every piece of equipment at his disposal in the sick-bay—but nothing shed any light on what could have caused this condition. Nor for the fact that she seemed to have recovered sufficiently to walk back from the hummock to the ship, unaided and seemingly in perfect health. He was baffled, but maintained an even expression, concealing his unease.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The semi-permanent base on Enceladus was not yet ready for occupation, so after her sick-bay confinement was over, Vikki was sitting in the cramped cabin on the Valentina that she shared with Murielle (who, to her relief, was elsewhere at present), tapping out her report. Dr Ye had, of course, passed her as perfectly fit and discharged her from sick bay. What could Vikki possibly write? There was no way she could reveal anything about the aliens—not yet! She concocted a more or less plausible description of the hummock, detailing its composition as being of partially melted and then re-frozen water-snow, and postulated one or two theories as to how this could have happened. Nothing, of course, about the flexible yielding ‘skin’ of the hummock.

With luck, if Alex ordered another team out to examine the hum­mock, all they would discover would be consistent with her report.

But then Vikki remembered, with a jolt, that Alex had told her that she had sent a search party to look for her—and that they had dug into the hummock.

How could they, if it had a sort of skin, without noticing and perhaps tearing the skin?

Perhaps the aliens could change the outer texture of the hummock, and even its composition, to disguise its nature when they didn’t want it to be investigated.

Perhaps Vikki was the only person the aliens trusted. After all, they appeared to have saved her from death, and they had somehow repaired her suit.

Her suit!

Vikki got up and made her way to Dr Ye’s cabin. He wasn’t there, but eventually she found him in the Mess room, helping himself to a bulb of tea. Luckily he was alone.

“Dr Ye, may I have a look at my space-suit for a moment?”

“Uh-huh. Sorry Vikki, Alex has given strict orders that you’re not allowed outside for the time being.”

“I don’t want to go outside. It’s just that I think I recorded a message while in the suit, and I’d like to retrieve it. I can’t remember what I said, now: it was just before I blacked out. It may be import­ant.”

“We checked everything in your suit, and we didn’t find any message.”

“You may have missed something. Please, Dr Ye!”

Dr Ye was an affable and kindly soul—in stark contrast to Alex. Vikki was fond of him and wasn’t shy of asking him a favour. “All right. Let me finish my tea first,” he said. Having downed his drink, he led Vikki to the suit lockers and opened one of the doors.

Vikki lifted out the suit and looked at it carefully. There was no sign of any patch, nor of any repair work.

“Are you sure this is mine, Dr Ye?”

“Of course it’s yours, Vikki. Look, there’s your name: ‘Dr Viktoriya A. Rozhkova’ printed across the front. What made you think otherwise?”

“All right, sorry, it must be mine,” muttered Vikki. She connected the helmet to the backpack, powered up the suit, and fiddled around for a while with the controls, pretending to search for a saved mess­age. Of course there wasn’t one. In the end she returned the suit to Dr Ye. “I thought I’d left a message, but I suppose I must have been mistaken and confused,” she said, feigning contriteness.

And with that, she thanked Dr Ye and returned to her cabin.

Time to think.

She could only surmise that the aliens’ patch must have somehow ‘blended’ in with the fabric of the suit, forming an invisible mend. And this despite the fact that the suit was made of purely terrestrial materials! Whatever technology the aliens possessed must be far beyond anything of Earth’s.

She must find a way to investigate the aliens’ ship further, before she was forced to reveal her discovery to the others. Alex’s ban wouldn’t last for ever, surely! But if she was ever to communicate anything more meaningful with the aliens, she couldn’t go on typing in messages in binary. Could she find a way to persuade the aliens to use ordinary text?

Of course she could! The aliens were evidently eavesdropping on the Valentina’s communications. She could transmit something ‘edu­cational’ and with luck they would pick it up and figure things out…

Best to send too much information, rather than too little. Vikki made her way to Paul Udike’s cabin—and not finding him there, on to the communication hub of the ship. Paul was the crew’s IT and communications specialist, and was the only crew member of about the same age as Vikki—who felt attracted to him. She found him busy at work over the main computer console, and hesitated at first about interrupting him. Paul could get irritable at best, if he was disturbed whilst working on something complicated.

After a while Paul paused in his work and looked up at Vikki.

“Oh, hi, Vikki, so you’re out of sick-bay, yay! Are you feeling all right then?”

“I’m fine, Paul. Never felt better. But I’ve got to get down to some work. Tell me, is there a copy of Wikipedia on the computer?”

“Wiki? You’re pulling my leg, surely, Vikki! Have you the slightest idea how many petabytes Wikipedia takes up these days? This isn’t a quantum supercomputer we’re running here, you know!”

“Sorry Paul. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“You could access Wiki back on Earth. It’d have to be a relay via Ceres: Earth is out of direct contact at the moment, on the far side of the sun. And you’d have to be patient: the lightspeed turnaround would be around…” Paul paused to do a quick calculation “…three-and-a-half hours. What do you need Wiki for, anyway? I’d have thought all those papers you brought along in the Geology database—which we do have stored here—would meet your requirements.”

Uh-oh, thought Vikki. It wasn’t the turnaround delay—between putting out a request and getting the response—that bothered her. No: it was the sheer impossibility of getting Earth to transmit the entire contents of Wikipedia to Enceladus. SSSA would never allow her that much bandwidth! So her wild scheme of ‘educating’ the aliens would have to be scaled back. “I just wanted to do some additional encyclopaedic research—outside what I’ve got in my database. Have you any suggestions?”

“Well, Vikki, we do have a copy of a rather archaic encyclopaedia called ‘Britannica’, which Dr Murielle insisted on bringing along. I guess she had the same reasons as you have.”

“Murielle? Uh-oh…”

“Don’t worry. It’s in English. Yes, Murielle wanted the French version, of course, but Alex over-ruled her. Anyway, if you want to consult it, I’ll send you the file name.” And Paul tapped out a message on his console.

Half the job done! Now Vikki had to search for an ASCII table, render it into a bitmap graphic for the aliens’ benefit, and append it to the Britannica file. Having done that, she had to wait for a quiet moment to carry out the other half of her plan. Best to wait until Paul and Alex, at least, were asleep…

---§§§---

It was almost two days later that Alex summoned Vikki. She sounded angry once again: though nowhere near as angry as she had been a few days before. Vikki made her way to Alex’s cabin with some trepidation. She had guessed what it would be about!

“So what tricks are we up to now, Viktoriya? I’ve just had a very brief communication from Ceres. All it said was ‘WTF?’. So I asked Paul to look into the communication logs, and lo and behold, a huge transmission from us to Ceres just prior to that—completely unauth­orised of course—of an entire encyclopedia. And Paul tells me he passed you a copy of this same encyclopedia the day before. What can you have been thinking of? Surely you realise that communica­tions use up power, especially over the distance from here to Ceres. And we haven’t got an unlimited resource of solar energy to generate that power—and it’s needed for other systems. Don’t you realise you are putting the whole expedition at risk?”

Vikki was floundering. Best to play it dumb. “I’m sorry, Com­mander. I thought I was just copying the file to my tablet, not send­ing it out. I must have tapped in the wrong place. Silly me!”

“Well, you must have tapped several ‘wrong’ buttons in success­ion. Seems improbable to me. Were you out of your mind?”

“I don’t know, Alex. Maybe it’s still the after-effects of my four­teen days ‘under’. Once again, I’m very sorry. But I don’t feel as if I’m going crazy…”

Vikki’s contriteness had the welcome effect of softening Alex’s mood. In a more kindly voice, she said “All right, Vikki. But I’d like you to go and present yourself to Dr Ye once again. Perhaps he can pick up something he missed. And don’t worry—I can’t afford to lose your expertise, so we’ll hope to have you back in action as soon as maybe…”

This sounded more hopeful. After some hesitation, Vikki ventured:

“Does that mean I’ll be able to go outside once more. I really need to, Alex…”

“When I give you my permission, Vikki. Not before.”

---§§§---

Being grounded in the ship indefinitely was far harder for Vikki to endure than being imprisoned in the ‘hummock’ for—how long had Alex said?—fourteen days. At least she had been out cold for most of those fourteen days—possibly literally. She itched to sneak out and learn what was going on outside; she felt peeved at not even being allowed to help in finishing off the base. But she had no wish to annoy Alex even further, and she was not the kind of person to disobey orders.

At least—not unless she felt she had to…

As well as writing her report, Vikki took time to reflect upon herself and what her real role was in this mission. She was a small woman, slim, in her early thirties, with short straggly black hair and piercing green eyes. She had a considerable knack for arguing her case—and for feeling frustrated and impatient when she lost the debate, like on this occasion; she often had bouts of ill-temper. She had been chosen for the mission on the strength of her profound expertise in geology, especially in ice formations. Was she also there to make First Contact with any ETs that might show up? Assuredly not. The mission’s prime directive was to examine the liquid water which was now known to lie beneath the ice, in the hope of picking up evidence of primitive life-forms—almost certainly nothing more advanced than Earth’s archaea and bacteria. That was what the mission’s exobiologist, Dr Murielle, was tasked with.

Aliens who could, after a few days’ eavesdropping, figure out how to speak in English—albeit not-quite-perfect English and only in binary code? And displaying said ‘English’ text on the ceiling of a room in their spacecraft (if it was a spacecraft—or was it a semi-permanent habitat similar to what the Valentina’s crew were at work constructing?) Completely off the agenda! Which means that anyone ought to be able to claim the credit for such an amazing, stuff-of-science-fiction discovery. Why can’t it be me? thought Vikki.