"Thirty minutes oxygen remaining"

The charming female voice inside Alex's helmet had been warning him of low oxygen levels for the past few hours. Amazing how calm she sounds, he thought. He had turned off the warning bells in his suit a long time ago, but kept the computer voice on. It was the only even remotely human contact he'd had in the last 24 hours, and he clung to it illogically.

He walked slowly around the jagged surface of the nearly barren planetoid, conserving what oxygen his had left, but never straying far from the crashed remains of a small space ship. The suit carried enough oxygen for 24 hours under normal exertion, and he had made it last slightly longer.

For Captain Alexander Cheruti, Interstellar Mining Company, yesterday was as ordinary a day as they could get. He and the crew of the scout ship Rocinante had been scanning this cluster of rocks in the Epsilon Indi system for the past 12 days. And then...

****

"Captain! I'm picking up a radio signal nearby!" Ensign Davon Mowdry sounded more surprised than alarmed as he relayed this information over the ship's intercom.

Alex sat up in his bunk, still half asleep, and toggled the nearby com unit. "Are you sure?" This system was supposed to be empty. At nearly 12 light years from earth, it had taken just over three months to get here in the tiny scout ship. There was no way another Earth expedition could have gotten here before them, and IMC was the only company with the resources or reason to go.

"Yes, sir! It's in a part of the spectrum we don't normally use, but it's definitely a signal. I can't figure out what kind of data it's transmitting, but it keeps repeating on a 12 second loop."

"Get the computers working on figuring out what it's saying. In the meantime, pinpoint where it's coming from. I'm on my way."

"Aye, Sir." said Davon. Of the four person crew, he was the youngest. This was his first tour on a mining scout ship, but he took to it easily, a natural at managing the scan computers.

Humans had been slowly expanding their reach into the stars for the last century, with colonies on the Moon and Titan, and stations in orbit at the nearest stars. Alex had worked for IMC for the last 15 years in scout ships just like this one, leading a small crew to scan nearby systems for their mining potential. If a system had the right combination of metals and other raw materials available, a later expedition would arrive to mine them and build a space station. Within a few decades, humans could live there and use it as a base for further exploration.

Alex pulled on his overalls and called on the com to his pilot. "Jenna, be ready to change course if needed. If this signal turns out to be something, we'll need to check it out."

"Aye, Sir!" she answered. He had worked with Jenna for his last two missions, and she was one of the better scout pilots in the fleet. She had an odd sense of humor, but could be counted on to do her job well.

Alex left his bunk and pulled himself through the tight passageway to the bridge, which didn't take long. The tiny scout ships of this class were made for speed and economy, not comfort. It took a special kind of mentality to survive being in tight quarters with three other people for months at a time, akin to the submarine crews of the 20th century.

"I've got a location, Sir." said Davon, as Alex entered the room. The bridge was barely large enough for three people, which it held now. Jenna was at the pilot's controls, and Davon at the scanners. Alex slipped into the captain's control station between them, and pulled up his view screens.

"See that bit of rock?" Davon pointed out a speck on the screen. It seemed impossibly tiny at this distance, but the scanner readout said it was roughly twice the mass of Earth's Moon. "The signal source is on the left side, as we're looking at it. It's rotating slowly, and just brought the signal around to our direction."

"Good work, Davon." said Alex. "Any idea what it is?"

"The computers have ruled out any known science probes. Could it be a top secret military mission?"

"I doubt it," said Jenna. "Terran government would never have given us clearance to come here if there was a military probe in the area."

Alex shrugged. "We need to check it out, then. How long will it take to get us into orbit around that rock?"

Jenna punched a few buttons on her console. "Roughly 8 hours, at comfortable acceleration. If you're willing to go past 1.5 gees I can get us there faster."

"8 hours is fine, just get us there safely. Davon, let me know as soon as we get close enough for visuals."

"Aye, Sir!" they answered in unison.

Alex strapped himself into the command console, and called on the com to the ship's final crew member. "Brand? Where are you?"

"Supply room, boss!" Chief Warrant Officer Brand Enderson had worked for IMC longer than anyone Alex knew. His duties as ship's medic slash nutritionist slash supplies officer usually kept him busy in the father reaches of the ship.

"Be ready for hard acceleration. We're changing course to investigate a local signal."

"Already on it, boss. All loose equipment is strapped down, including me."

*****

"Fifteen minutes oxygen remaining"

It was tricky to keep track of time out on the planetoid. The crazy thing rotated very slowly, and Alex had been on the "day" side since landing. Maybe in a few weeks there would be a sunset, but he wouldn't be around to see it.

Alex wondered what the rest of humanity would think once they found out what had happened here. His son was grown and married, starting a family of his own. The boy would mourn losing his father, of course, but he would carry on. Alex's wife had moved on years ago, and he had never found the time for another relationship. The fleet took up all his time now, right to the end. At least oxygen deprivation is a painless way to go, he thought.

*****

"I've got visual, Captain!" came Davon's voice over the com.

"On the way!" Alex flew through the ship and strapped himself to the command console in the bridge. Jenna and Davon were already in their respective seats.

The screens showed lights of some kind, spread across a very rough and rocky area of the planet's airless surface. As he studied it, Davon tweaked his controls and zoomed the view in closer. What they saw was obviously a space ship of some kind, crashed on the surface. There were two main parts, broken in half like the Titanic, with bits of wreckage strewn over a long stretch.

Alex could only watch, speechless, as Davon manipulated the resolution, revealing more details. The crashed ship was relatively small, not much larger than their own scout ship, but didn't look like anything Alex had seen before. The exterior was an odd mottled green color, with bizarre curves to the hull and bright white and yellow lights placed sporadically across its surface.

"The computers can't identify it at all, Sir." said Davon.

Alex considered this. That meant it was like no ship in the scan database. Usually if the computers couldn't tell an exact class of ship, it would guess at something close. This had it completely stumped.

"That means it's either some crazy obscure private ship," said Alex, "or we're looking at the first non-human spacecraft ever discovered."

Jenna gasped at hearing that; Davon grinned wildly. Alex was just stunned. Aliens? How was that possible? In the century of interstellar human travel, there had never been even the slightest indication of any other species out here. No sightings of any ships, no signals of any kind, not even any planets supporting more than basic life had been found. How could the first contact with something so significant happen like this?

"Have the computers made any progress on the radio signal?" Alex asked.

"Not a bit, Sir. If it's an alien language, we might never be able to decipher it without help."

"What do the other scans say?"

"No noticeable radiation. No electromagnetic transmissions other than the radio signal. The ship likely had an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, lost in the hull breach, but we're too far out for that to be reliable." said Davon.

"Jenna, can you put us down near there?" Alex asked the pilot.

"It's going to be tricky, Sir." she replied, "The surface is very rough. Let me check the scans and see what we have to work with."

Alex unstrapped himself from the console. "Davon, suit up. You and I are going to check it out on foot."

*****

"Five minutes oxygen remaining"

So this is how it's going to end, Alex thought. He sat near the crashed alien ship, with his back against a rock the size of a large duffel bag. Not the most comfortable place, but it would do for the next five minutes. After that... well, he wouldn't care much anymore.

The ship had a strange beauty to it, and he tried to imagine what it had looked like before the crash. There were portholes and spires and spikes in odd directions, and he wondered what their purpose could have been. Some of the technology would be way ahead of anything humans had developed yet.

Alex turned his head to take a sip from the water tube in his helmet. He didn't regret what he had done. He had no choice, really. Future generations might judge him, but they weren't here. In the moment, you do what you must, without benefit of hindsight.

*****

Alex and Davon had left the airlock some 30 minutes ago, and were making decent progress to the crash site. The rough terrain of the planetoid made walking difficult, but with gravity about 1/2 that of Earth it wasn't too strenuous. Landing anywhere closer would have been impossible, with huge boulders and outcroppings that would have torn the ship apart.

Alex watched the homing device strapped to his left arm, where he could see his location in relation to both ships displayed on a grid. It worked fairly well, and showed they were nearly to the crash site.

Just ahead, as they came around a large boulder formation, was the crashed ship. The mottled green surface they had seen from orbit was even more obvious in person, and lights were still shining brightly in many directions. The major wreckage was in two parts, with random bits of hull and cargo strewn all about. Through the huge crack in the hull, what he could see of the interior looked like it had burned. It had been a rough landing, but it could have been much worse.

It must have been beautiful, thought Alex, and definitely not human. What he took for the engines were like nothing he had ever seen on a human ship – two large cylinders that ran half the length of the hull, flaring to bells that looked like trumpets.

Alex called on the radio back to his ship. "Jenna, are you getting the video feed?"

"Yes, Sir, and oh my god is it amazing." She answered.

"Ever see any ship like that?"

"Not even close. I can only guess at what any of the parts might do. Are we going to attempt to salvage it?"

"We don't have the capacity for that. We'll get close and get all the scan data we can, then a future expedition will do a more thorough job. Something this important, Terran government will probably want to send a full science team. Davon, what are you reading from here?"

"Scan shows no radiation, and only the same radio signal we picked up earlier." he reported.

"That's good, we're safe to get close." Said Alex.

And then he saw it: something near the hull of the ship was moving. He froze, his heart suddenly pounding. Was something alive there? He watched as a shape stepped away from the ship. It was more or less humanoid, with what could be a head and arms and legs, although shorter and wider than most humans. It wore what appeared to be a pressure suit, of the same mottled green colors as the ship's hull. As it moved slowly in their direction, a second identical shape joined it.

Alex gasped, "Oh my god, there's survivors!"

"What do we do, Sir?" said Davon.

"Stay calm. Their ship just crashed here, I don't think they're likely to attack us. We'll go toward them and see what happens."

The humanoid shapes moved slowly, sometimes upright and sometimes on all fours. Their legs were shorter than an average human, but their arms were longer, so this movement seemed better suited to them. As the groups came closer to each other, Alex could see the faceplates in the alien's helmets were larger and shifted more to the top of the head than his own helmet.

The parties stopped about 10 feet from each other. The aliens stood on all fours, their helmets pointed toward the humans, roughly chest high to Alex. He could just make out what their heads looked like through the glass. They were round and hairless, with very dark brown wrinkled skin, and two large black orbs on the sides of their heads that he took for eyes. He couldn't make out any discernable mouth or nose, and the whole thing reminded him of a big sausage, with eyes. The heads moved and turned slowly inside their helmets, apparently examining the humans. They made no other movements or attempts to communicate that he could tell.

Alex didn't move, only talking into his helmet communicator. "Davon, get what information you can from your scanner, but try not to look threatening. They have no way of knowing if that thing in your hand is a weapon."

Davon aimed the hand scanning device in the aliens' direction, watching the readouts on the screen. He read off the results in a voice shaky with excitement. "The atmosphere in the suits is similar to ours, but under higher pressure than we're used to, and higher O2 levels."

Alex called back to the ship, "Brand, are you getting all this?"

"Roger that, boss. I've got the scanner feeds going through the ship computers. They're carbon based, oxygen breathing, only some minor variations on trace gasses. Heck, they even metabolize similar sugar molecules. If I had to guess, I'd say they come from a planet with slightly higher gravity and air pressure than Earth. It's going to take some time for the computers to analyze it all, but it looks like we're practically cousins. Ugly ones."

Alex held in a laugh, knowing how important this situation was. He wondered how he could possibly communicate. Any hand or arm gestures could mean something completely different to them. Even smiling might be a bad idea – he remembered something from a nature documentary he had seen ages ago, that said smiling at chimpanzees could make them attack, because they saw teeth as a weapon.

One of the aliens broke the stalemate by rising slowly upright, and spreading its arms wide. Alex took this as a possible greeting, perhaps showing it had no weapons. He raised his own arms wide, mirroring the alien. It responded by raising its right leg, moving it in a slow circle. Alex had no idea what that could mean, and knew he didn't have the balance in a pressure suit to attempt the same maneuver.

The creature then used its toe to scratch five circles into the dust on the ground in front of it. As Alex watched, perplexed, the creature scratched a line through three of the circles, then waved its leg toward the ship it had just walked from. It pointed its foot at one of the remaining circles, then at its partner, then stepped onto the final circle itself.

"I think it's telling us that there are three who didn't survive the crash." Said Davon. "These two are the only ones left."

"That makes sense." said Alex. "I'm amazed anyone survived that crash. They're very lucky."

"What do we do now?" Davon asked, his voice still shaky with excitement and fear.

Alex quickly considered all the possible outcomes. There was no protocol for a situation like this, nothing in the IMC manuals. He was in completely uncharted territory. The aliens' ship was useless, and their suits were likely running low on oxygen, if they were anything like human ones. It was a miracle that they had survived this long, and that Alex and his crew had been able to receive their radio signal and came to investigate.

"Brand, are you still listening?" Alex said into his communicator.

"Yes, boss!" The reply crackled back from their ship.

"Can we make it back with six people?"

"Impossible." said Brand, "It would tax the oxygen and water recycling systems beyond capacity. Maybe for a few days, but even at top speed it's a three month trip to the nearest human outpost."

Alex cursed silently to himself. Of all the possible things that could happen on a scouting mission, this was one he had never considered, never planned for. He knew what he had to do.

"How about five?" he asked Brand, "Could you ration water and oxygen to make it with one extra?"

There was a long pause before Brand answered. "I think so. It's going to be tight, but I can make it work."

"Right. Make whatever preparations you need, you're going home with an extra body."

"Aye, Sir!" Brand replied sharply.

Alex turned and called to the young Ensign, "Davon!"

"Sir?"

Alex removed the homing device from his left forearm and motioned for Davon to take it. "Take our two new friends here back to our ship."

Davon hesitated. "Sir?"

"Was the order not clear, Ensign?"

"Yes, Sir. It's just... Brand said there's only room for five. That means..."

"I know what it means." Alex said, calmly. "They're stranded here, who knows how far from their home. They can't survive without each other. That means you're taking them back."

"But..."

"That's an order, Ensign! Get moving!"

Davon's training took over. He straightened up and saluted, then did his best to communicate to the aliens to follow him. Alex watched as the party moved slowly into the distance, picking their way through the rough terrain.

His helmet radio crackled as Jenna's voice came through loudly. "Alex! What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"You're taking these two aliens back to Earth. I'll wait here."

"Like hell you will!" she shouted through the radio, "Get your ass back to the ship. I'm getting suited up. If anyone is getting left behind, it's me."

"Jenna, you will stay on the ship, that's an order. You're the best pilot we've got, and you have a wife and daughter at home that need you."

"Screw that. Leave one of the aliens behind then." she said.

"Do you really want the first contact we have with an alien species to start with us murdering one of them?"

"If that's what it takes to keep you alive, hell yes." He could hear her voice cracking even over the tinny helmet speaker.

"Not while I'm Captain." Ales said, sternly. "I've made my decision, I trust you to carry it out. You will take off as soon as possible and make the fastest speed you can to the nearest station. Don't you dare let me down." He knew she wouldn't, even as she tried to argue. He shut off the com and video feeds from his suit, and walked toward the crashed ship.

*****

"One minute oxygen remaining"

The warning lights in his helmet were flashing red now, ticking off each second of impending doom. Alex leaned back and looked up at the black sky, full of stars. One of them, he knew, was home. Davon would have been able to point it out easily, he had a knack for those things. He wondered how well the aliens were getting on, and if they had been able to figure out some way to communicate.

Alex laid back and folded his arms across his lap. The view through his helmet visor showed only stars now, a vast and incredibly peaceful panorama. At least, he hoped, the rest of humanity would remember him. The first person to contact an alien species. What an honor. The entire relationship between the two races would be shaped by this first meeting. There was so much we could learn from them, so much we didn't even know we could learn.

Humans would eventually return to this system. The aliens likely would too. When they did, his body would still be here next to the remains of their ship, silently keeping watch.

"Oxygen depleted"

Alex sighed, and took what would be his final breath.

"Make a wish"

Did she really say that? Or was it just his oxygen starved brain imagining things? It bothered him that he would never find out.