Earth Star(129)
I gasped with delight, and forgot all about the viewing billions, and the need to act Military, professional and adult. ‘Hoo eee!’
‘Look!’ Fian tugged at my arm, turning me to face the wall. He’d set his lookup to project images from the Military vid feed against it. It showed the plaited column of light appearing out of the ground above us and continuing up into the night sky. I stared at it in utter disbelief.
‘The light went straight through solid rock and into space?’
‘It appears so,’ said Leveque. ‘The aliens have obviously developed laser light technology to …’ He dropped that sentence to start another, his voice finally shaking off its habitual calm to sound human and eager. ‘The sphere is responding.’
The image on the wall changed to show a close-up of the alien sphere. I couldn’t see what Leveque meant for a second, but then I realized the strange curved markings on the sphere were growing deeper. Whole sections began to unfurl, like the petals of a strange alien flower opening to the sun. When they reached their fullest extent, light suddenly blazed around the sphere. Not just a simple twisted column like the signal we’d sent, this was an incredibly intricate, multicoloured light sculpture, formed of literally thousands of light strands that were constantly revolving and changing.
‘The sphere is talking to us,’ said Leveque. ‘We’ve no idea how to disentangle the multiple light signals, let alone translate them, but it’s definitely talking.’
It was nearly an hour later that Fian and I were winched out of the hole in the tunnel roof. As soon as we were above ground, several figures in Military impact suits started spraying jets of decontaminant liquid at us.
‘You’ve been in contact with alien technology,’ said one of them, ‘so we have to follow Planet First procedures. We’ll put you through decontamination here, then portal you to a quarantine post for the follow-up medical checks. We’ve set the post up in an isolated safe area of Earth Africa.’
I gave a breathless giggle. When I was at school, my class had to watch a vid about Planet First that showed the decontamination procedures. I’d been furious about it, thinking how pointless it was to teach the Handicapped these things when we could never leave Earth. Now I was going through Planet First decontamination procedures myself!
After the jets of liquid stopped, we were given scans, and then sent through a portal to where two Military doctors were standing outside a small dome. Fian and I opened our suit hoods, and the doctors moved towards us, but I shook my head at them. They could give us a few minutes to celebrate before taking their blood and tissue samples.
Fian and I grinned at each other, then kissed like mad things, before looking up at the night sky. Among the constellations of Africa, the countless distant suns of worlds that I could never reach, was a dazzling jewel of light. Earth had a new star, and this one belonged to me.