Transmission

The former soldier shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes you work with people and you don’t know what they’re going to do down the road. For the moment, only one thing matters.”

“We’re going to find the capsule,” Kevin said.

Ted nodded. “We’re going to find the capsule.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kevin had never been in a jungle before, but it was nothing like he’d seen on TV. There, jungles were just a few palm leaves in the background, with plenty of space for people to run and fight, and they moved quickly. In the real thing, plant life pressed in on all sides, with only a few tracks worn by animals, and soldiers having to hack a route for them as they got deeper into it.

They didn’t show the rain either. That came down as they walked, steadily soaking their whole party in bursts that seemed to fill the whole world beneath the canopy.

“Is it always like this?” Professor Brewster called out.

One of the guides shrugged. “It is called a rainforest for a reason, sir.”

Kevin wasn’t sure how quickly they were moving, but it didn’t feel that quick. He’d assumed that, as ill as he was, he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the rest. Instead, he trekked along with them, the slowest of the scientists moving far slower than he did. Maybe it didn’t help that half of them wanted to stop every few hundred yards to take samples of insect life or unusual plants.

“They can’t help themselves,” Ted said. He kept pace with Kevin, never more than a few yards from his side, as if afraid that going further would mean losing him in the jungle. “Cleverest people you’ll ever meet, but it just means that a place like this is too full of potential discoveries. They think about being the one who spots a new species of butterfly, or finds a substance that will cure cancer, and they forget about how big the thing we’re here to do is. All they can think about is how full of life the jungle is.”

Kevin couldn’t blame them, because the jungle was full of life, in a way he couldn’t have believed. It seemed that everywhere he looked, there were plants he hadn’t seen before, from the giant trees that formed a canopy to the creepers that wound their way between them and the lower level things that snatched what light they could on the jungle floor. There were insects and lizards, small mammals and occasional rustles in the brush that suggested bigger things.

Oh, and spiders, big enough that Kevin didn’t want to go anywhere near them. The only fun part of that was that it seemed Professor Brewster was particularly afraid of them, jumping so high every time he saw one that Kevin thought he might reach the canopy.

“What do you think about when you’re here?” Kevin asked Ted.

“Aside from the mission?” The soldier shrugged. “Mostly memories of the last time I was here. You need to be careful, Kevin.”

“I’m not going to wander off,” Kevin said. Sometimes people treated him like he wasn’t thirteen. Like he was just… a child or something.

“Not what I meant,” Ted said. “Things are better after the peace with FARC, but there are still cartels out there who don’t like people coming into their territory. Even the army. A collection of different scientific groups? We’d be easy prey for the wrong people.”

He shot a look to where a group of soldiers from half a dozen different nations were helping to clear the way, hacking their way through with the certainty of people who’d had to do it many times before in other places.

“It’s not just that, is it?” Kevin asked. “You don’t trust the people we’re working with.”

“After they’ve spent the last day racing to be the first one there?” Ted shook his head. “But that’s common enough. We’re all going for something valuable. We have a valuable asset, in you, because you can translate the signals. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe this will all go fine, but you know what they say: hope for the best, prepare for the worst.”

Put like that, the jungle seemed a more threatening place than it had before, full of spots where it might be easy to reach out and grab someone. Kevin did his best to ignore it.

One thing he couldn’t ignore was the heat. He’d thought that, since he was from California, the difference wouldn’t be too much, just a few degrees hotter, at most. He hadn’t thought about the effects of the rain, which combined with the heat to turn the whole place into a kind of giant pressure cooker, steam visibly coming off people as they walked.

“Are you doing okay, Kevin?” Dr. Levin asked.

He nodded. “I’m fine.”

“You’ll tell someone if you aren’t?” she asked. She looked over to where Kevin’s mother was making her way along the track behind them. “Your mother is pretty worried that we’re doing the wrong thing, bringing you here.”

“I want to be here,” Kevin said. He knew that the scientist was just trying to look out for him, but he wanted to see this. He wanted to find the object that the aliens had sent to Earth. He wanted to see where everything he’d translated led.

“Well, I just hope it isn’t too much further,” Dr. Levin said. “You might be fine, but I’m melting in this heat.”

“Not much further to the spot we saw,” Ted said, checking a robust-looking GPS readout. “Just a little more that way.”

They kept going, finding a clearing to use as a base while they searched. Some of the soldiers started to set up rough awnings to keep the rain off, while the different groups of scientists set up equipment that they had carried through the jungle. They brought out what looked like metal detectors and strange devices that fit onto small carts that could be pulled by hand. Some set up enough computing equipment that they could probably have run their usual labs from there if they hadn’t been so cut off from the world. The strangest part of it was watching half a dozen sets of nearly identical equipment dragged out

“The object that came to Earth fell somewhere in this vicinity,” Professor Brewster said, obviously assuming that he was in charge. “We need to find it. That means that we spread out and locate the general area of a crash site by looking for damage, then use our equipment to locate the object.”

“Stay safe,” Ted said, and Kevin suspected that if he didn’t say it, no one would have. Professor Brewster would happily have sent people off into the jungle with no more direction than that. “Always work in pairs, so that if anything happens, the other one can get help. Stay close to camp, and stay in contact. The jungle will try to get you lost. Watch out for the wildlife, and don’t go into any watercourses. There are caiman and snakes in this area.”

The scientists moved out cautiously, accompanied by soldiers and whatever local guides they’d been able to find.

“Do we go and look?” Kevin asked.

Ted shook his head. “It’s better to wait for now. Let other people do the work of finding it. You’ll see it soon enough. Now, I’d better go make a phone call.”

He got up, taking out a satellite phone that would probably work now that they were in the clearing, with a clear path to the sky. He walked a little way away, talking quietly. Kevin thought about creeping closer to hear what he was saying, but something about the way the soldier was talking suggested that it might not be a good idea.

“I think we’ve found something!” one of the scientists called out, from within the jungle.

Kevin couldn’t sit there, and neither, it seemed, could any of the others in the small camp. He found himself just one of those rushing forward, hurrying to keep up through the jungle, the soft earth underneath giving way as his feet pushed into it. He followed the scientists into another small clearing. Kevin had been half expecting a crater there, surrounded by desolation. Instead, there were just a few scars on the earth, hinting at something coming through there.

The strange part was that the trees around it didn’t seem to be damaged. If something had fallen to Earth in the recent past, shouldn’t there have been damage, wreckage, even smoldering embers?

Then Kevin realized that he was thinking about it the wrong way. The aliens had sent their messages years ago, even traveling at the speed of light. Why would their escape capsule have only just arrived? Why wouldn’t it have been here years, even decades, waiting for someone to discover it? He found that he liked that idea, of something secret waiting there for him to uncover it. It made him feel like a treasure hunter.

The scientists had already started to work their way along it, working with their various devices. From what Kevin could hear, he didn’t think it was going very well.

“I’m not getting any responses from the metal detector,” Phil called. The researcher had sweated clean through his Hawaiian shirt by now. “I haven’t heard it this quiet… well, ever.”

“I’m not getting any response looking for a heat signature,” another of them called out.

“Well, we wouldn’t,” Phil called back. “It’s been cooling all the time since it landed, and we don’t know when that was. What about the magnetometer?”

A scientist dragging the thing that had looked like a handcart shook his head. “The ground’s too uneven. I can’t tell if I’m getting signals or just interference.”

Apparently, the ground-penetrating radar had the same problem, although Kevin hadn’t known before then that such a thing existed. He didn’t really know how half of the scientists’ equipment worked; it could have been magic, although he doubted they would have liked that comparison. From where he was standing, it just meant watching a bunch of scientists run about with devices and wires, watching screens or listening to things beep. It was fun to watch, for maybe the first hour.

“We will just have to dig,” Professor Brewster said eventually. “It must be here somewhere, so if we dig up all of it, eventually we will find it.”

It seemed that “we” in this case didn’t include Professor Brewster, because the institute’s director made no move to pick up a shovel. Plenty of scientists did, though, and even a few soldiers helped, attacking the earth around them as if it might reveal its secrets if they just worked hard enough.

There didn’t seem to be anything for Kevin to do except wait. He didn’t have a shovel, and in any case it didn’t seem like the best way to find anything. It was just digging randomly in the hope that something would happen. It seemed a bit like digging random holes on a beach in the hope that one would contain a pirate chest. He stood there instead, trying to keep out of their way as they dug.

That was when he felt the whisper of connection through the trees, almost indefinable. It felt a little like the pulse of the countdown within him, except that this pulsing seemed to get stronger as he took a few steps along the path the falling escape capsule must have taken. When he stepped the other way, it grew weaker.

Kevin stopped, trying to be certain. He didn’t want to say that he knew what he was doing until he was sure it was more than just some random feeling inside him. What if it was just the heat?

“It isn’t,” Kevin told himself, wishing he were as certain as he tried to sound.

Kevin started forward, trying to follow that pulsing, staying with it as it grew stronger, picking his way between the trees. Every time it got weaker again, he stopped, walking around in a circle until he found the direction that felt strongest. It wasn’t long before he had a clear route, which brought him out onto what looked like a small deer track. Kevin followed it along until he reached a space where it opened out to reveal a large natural pool, as wide across as a swimming pool, its water green-brown. Instinctively, Kevin knew that the object that had come to Earth was there somewhere, beneath the surface. He could feel its pull so strongly now that he took a step toward the pool, then another, trying to remember the reason why he’d been told he shouldn’t do exactly that…

A scaled shape came up out of the water, teeth snapping in a lunge that sent Kevin backpedaling, barely fast enough to avoid it. He would have thought of alligators if Ted hadn’t given them all a warning earlier. This creature’s snout was too long and pointed, its shape a bit too sleek. The caiman kept coming, moving out of the water low to the ground, its tail dragging an S-shaped track behind it.

“Help!” Kevin called. He wanted to turn and run, but he guessed that the moment he tried to, the thing would be on him. Instead, he continued to back away, while the caiman advanced with a growl that promised that Kevin would be its next meal. Kevin felt the press of a tree against his back and knew that he’d missed the trail, which meant that the caiman was gaining ground. It opened its jaws, showing what seemed like endless teeth—

The roar of gunfire came, so loud against the jungle that Kevin thought he might go deaf. The caiman made a hissing sound of pain, then slumped. Kevin slumped too, only the tree holding him upright as Ted moved into view with a rifle raised to his shoulder. He only lowered it once he seemed certain the beast was dead.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Kevin managed to nod, in spite of the fear that still gripped him. “I think so.”

“What were you doing? I thought I told you not to wander off.”

Kevin wanted to say that he wasn’t a little kid. Instead, he nodded to the pool of dark water. “I had to, I sensed… I think that it’s in there.”

He saw the soldier blink, then look toward the water. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Kevin said. “I don’t know how I’m sure, but it’s there.”

To his surprise, Ted didn’t question that any further, just called for the others. They came, in just as much of a hurry as when they’d found the initial signs of damage. They weren’t quite as quick to plunge into the water, though, obviously afraid of what might still lurk there. Eventually, Ted and three other soldiers, two Scandinavian and one American, stepped into it, wading around with a tarpaulin for a net.

“We have something,” Ted called back, and they wrapped it around the thing, hauling together to lift it, dragging it from the water. It seemed to take forever, and Kevin found himself expecting something huge as they worked to pull it out, a dozen of the scientists moving to help them.

When it finally rolled out from the tarpaulin onto the ground, it wasn’t what Kevin expected at all. He’d been thinking it would be bigger, for one thing. His imagination had told him that there would be a vehicle bigger than a car, maybe close to the size of a house. He’d thought it would be silver and shining, or so black that it looked like the space through which it had flown.

Instead, a perfectly round sphere of rock sat there, still slimy with the water, but smooth beneath. It looked as though someone had fired a rocky bowling ball across the universe, or perhaps shot it out of some great cannon toward the Earth.

Even so, the scientists clustered around it until Kevin could barely see it because they were so many of them.

“Is this it?” Professor Brewster asked. “Let me through, let me through. Have we found it?”

“We found something, definitely,” Dr. Levin said. She sounded as though she was trying to force herself to stay calm, not get too excited. “Now we just have to work out exactly what.”

Ted was shaking his head. “Before we do any of that, there’s at least one other thing that we need to do. We need to get it back.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kevin didn’t want to take his eyes off the rock while they carried it back on a kind of stretcher, not entirely sure what to make of it as they walked it back through the jungle to their base camp. He was both excited and puzzled, caught between the joy at having found what the alien signals had pointed them toward and the surprise of it not being the great silvery spaceship that he’d imagined it might be.

It felt weird, having actually found it, even though they’d all come here to do exactly that. It felt as though it shouldn’t be there, but it was, and now Kevin could barely contain his excitement at the possibility of seeing what lay inside.

“We’ll open it up when we get it back, right?” he asked Dr. Levin, who seemed to be looking on with the air of someone waiting for Christmas.

Beside him, Dr. Levin nodded. “That’s the idea. There will be a lab waiting for us at the UN compound outside Bogota, and we’ll see what’s inside.”

He could hear her trying not to get too excited by it all. In fact, most of the scientists there seemed to be just as happy to have found this strangely smooth rock as they would have been if they’d found some kind of intact alien spaceship, bristling with advanced technology. Maybe it was just that they were scientists, and a rock seemed more real somehow to them. They were probably used to testing rocks from outer space, being from NASA, while spaceships seemed impossible to them.

Even so, Kevin was hoping that things would be a lot cooler once they opened it up. Maybe there would be alien technology inside, or messages left in it like a message in a bottle. Unless the aliens were really tiny, he doubted that there were any in there, but maybe they were that small, or they’d found a way to fit more into spaces than they should hold, or something.

Whatever it was, it would be amazing.

They walked back to the space where they’d left the trucks, and already, there were scientists there packing away their gear. It seemed as though they were as eager to get back and open up the rock they’d recovered as Kevin was. When they were getting the equipment out they’d been delicate with it, but now they practically threw it into the back of the vehicles.

“We should get into the trucks,” Dr. Levin said. “We’re almost ready to go, I think.”

Kevin nodded, starting to go back to the Jeep. He saw Professor Brewster along the way, and was going to run around him, but to Kevin’s surprise, the NASA institute’s head actually looked happy. He was practically dancing in place with excitement.

“We found it,” Professor Brewster said. “We actually found it. This is… I know I’ve been hard on you, Kevin, but it was only because I wanted to be certain of this. Ever since I was… well, since I was your age.”

Kevin could hardly believe it; he had never expected Professor Brewster, of all people, to have a childlike optimism.

He ran back to the Jeep where Ted and his mom waited. For possibly the first time since this had begun, his mother had the kind of wonder on her face that told Kevin she finally understood this, that she wasn’t just doing it for Kevin’s sake. Ted seemed a bit less obviously happy. If Ted was worried about something, that couldn’t be good. After all, he’d faced down a caiman with no problems.

It couldn’t dent Kevin’s happiness, though. All the scientists had come in with their testing machines, and he’d been the one to pick out the spot where the alien capsule sat. It felt as though it was his somehow because of that, even while it sat in a truck twenty yards away, guarded by a mixture of scientists and soldiers of different nations. It felt as though whatever happened from now on, it would be down to him.

“What do you think will be inside the capsule once we open it up?” Kevin asked.

Ted thought about it for a few seconds

 “They could have sent a time capsule full of information. Maybe they’re hoping that someone out there has the technology to bring them back from what happened to them. You’d have to ask the scientists. They’d know more.”

Maybe they would. At the very least, most of them seemed to be talking about it, so that the convoy’s radios seemed alive with speculation in different languages. Kevin hadn’t heard them as excited as that since the messages began. Maybe it was the part where they had something more than a signal translated by a thirteen-year-old boy. Maybe they liked having something solid to prove what was happening.

Kevin couldn’t blame them for that. Even though he’d known that what he was seeing was real, finding the rock had been a kind of relief. It had been proof of just how much all this meant.

“How long until we’re at the UN compound?” Kevin asked. He just wanted to get there now, so that they could get on with looking.

“That depends,” Ted said. “We’ve already seen how tricky the roads can—damn it.”

For a moment, Kevin thought there must be another blockage across the road. Then he saw the ribbon of uniformed figures there holding guns.

He stared at them in shock. Kevin could hear the chatter of the others on the radio as they saw what was happening. Even Ted seemed tense. Although not surprised. He looked, if anything, as though he’d been expecting this.

“Too late to reverse,” Ted said, slowing the Jeep. “There’s too many people behind us. Looks like we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

He brought the vehicle to a halt, turning to Kevin. “They look like Colombian military rather than one of the cartels, so this should be okay, but if it isn’t, stay here and keep your heads down. Understood?”

“Yes,” Kevin’s mother said.

Ted looked to Kevin. “Understood?”

“Okay,” Kevin said. What did the former soldier think he was going to do? “Um… they aren’t going to shoot us, are they?”

“Probably not,” Ted said.

“Probably not?” That didn’t sound very reassuring. Kevin would have preferred “definitely not” or even “don’t worry about it.”

Ted nodded to where Professor Brewster was already making his way to the front of the convoy. “I suspect it depends on who we let do the talking.”

He jumped down, and Kevin could see a bunch of other figures moving past too, either eager to help, or wanting to show that they had some kind of authority there, or maybe just wanting to see what was happening.

That was certainly the reason he started to get out of the Jeep.

“Kevin,” his mother said. “Ted told us to stay in the vehicle.”

“I know, Mom,” he said, “but I don’t think it will make a lot of difference if there’s some kind of fight.”

“Kevin!” his mother said again, as Kevin hopped down from the Jeep and started forward. He heard his mother following after him, but he kept going. He wasn’t going to miss this.

By the time he reached the group of armed figures, they were already discussing things in a tone that sounded dangerously close to violence. Kevin had seen kids at school when they’d gone past insulting one another, and they didn’t want to back down because they thought it would make them look stupid. They always had that sense that they didn’t want to fight, that they were scared and the whole thing was stupid, but they were going to anyway. Kevin had never expected to hear adults sounding like that, but at least some of them did.

“…And I am telling you, Professor, that this is Colombia’s sovereign territory,” an older man was saying to Professor Brewster. “If this artifact had fallen on US territory, are you telling me that you would permit us to take it away as you are trying to?”

“No, of course not, General,” Professor Brewster snapped back. “Because we have the finest scientific facilities in the world.”

“Are you impugning the quality of Colombia’s scientific program?” the general asked.

“I’m saying that it doesn’t have a tenth of the resources that we do,” Professor Brewster replied.

That didn’t seem to impress the other man. If anything, it only seemed to annoy him.

“So that’s it, is it? The USA is the biggest and richest, and so we must all bow to what it wants?” Kevin saw him shake his head. “We’ve had enough of that in the past. You think I don’t recognize some of the men here from the past?”

“When we were invited,” Ted said, moving up to them. “General Marquez, I didn’t hear you complaining when we were here helping your country against the cartels.”

“And now you are helping yourselves,” the other man said.

“We made contact through diplomatic channels,” Professor Brewster said. “We told you that we would be coming.”

“But you did not wait for permission,” General Marquez said. Kevin had the feeling all of this was heading downhill fast, and he was caught in the middle of it with adults arguing around him. Adults who definitely wouldn’t listen to someone like him, and who seemed to be determined to argue and shout until it all turned into violence.

“If you’ll give me a minute, sir,” Ted said, “I’m sure I can get our president on the phone for you, and yours.”