Dying on Alien Shores
by John Normyle

They didn’t tell us about the storms.  Great planet-wrapping monsters.  Country sized hurricanes of thin air sucked away by the angry red sun.  We’d seen solar storms on Proxima Centauri, the flickering red dwarf that’s the junior partner of the three body system here at Alpha Centauri.  But we hadn’t suspected such big storms on the planet.  The whole atmosphere is being ripped away. We’ve just arrived at our nearest Earth-like neighbour and we can’t live here.  We packed up five thousand colonists in this town sized ship and hurled them out here with our brand new warp-drive.  It takes a stupid amount of energy to pass our ship through space like a needle through folded cloth.  Just like sewing, we make a hole in one cloth and come out of a hole in the other.  It costs so much energy that we’re limited to twenty lightyears each way.

Proxima b might not be a good candidate for our first interstellar colony, but with a range of only twenty lightyears we had few choices.  ProxB orbits very close to its parent star, which is prone to random solar flares.  All our nearest neighbours are red dwarfs, whose planets likely face their sun and get ravaged by solar flares.  But we sent colony ships to the most likely stars anyway.  Because we’re dying on our planet and we’re hard-up for choice.  Here we are, spending country size fortunes to send off colony ships, when a hundred years ago we could have stopped killing our planet for a thousandth the cost.  But as always, we’re short on foresight and long on self destructive folly.

The very clever people who put our mission together anticipated this.  If ProxB turned out to be unliveable, we need only harvest fuel and go home.  Other ships have been sent out to Eridani d and Ross 128 with the same mission, so they may have more luck.  

We’re to drop robotic fuel scoops to fill up under the colossal pressures down in the stars chromosphere.  And as we bring up the gas we’ve harvested, we burn it in the ring of fusion reactors circling our ship like a beautiful silver necklace.  Between each reactor is a Warp Station, connected to both neighbouring reactors.  When enough power has been pumped into the stations they fire in a circle, like a delicate Catherine Wheel four miles across.  And when the beautiful fury has ended, we’re not there anymore, and the Warp Ring hangs empty like a hole in space.

It’s a failed mission.  So now we have to hang here in orbit for a couple of years while we harvest fuel and prime the Warp Stations.  And then go home in a sad purple flash.

And it also means we won’t find what we came here looking for.  Our main mission goal wasn’t just to colonize.  As soon as I stepped aboard and accepted command, I was handed Secret Orders.  In the months before our launch, astronomers received a radio signal that seemed to come from this planet.  A signal like it had been recorded back in 2019.  The signal from last century was weak and hard to localize; but this was the same signal, blasting out again and again.  Like a beacon.

The signal from last century had been explained away as radio reflection, but this one is real.  But how could anything live down there, when the dull red sun has torn away the atmosphere? 

 
The beacon signal comes from the terminator zone on the planet below.  The region on a tidal locked planet that lies in eternal twilight is the most likely place to find life.  The signal’s a second flash, just after the natural one.  Not every time, but it’s always the same.  Intelligence?  Not in that hellish storm-scape down there, that’s for sure.

We’ll be stuck here for a couple of years, so we might have to move down to the surface while we wait.  We can’t bring the ship down and live in it on the ground like we’d planned.  It has to stay in orbit to take us home.  We can break off six or eight modules and bring those down to be the focus of a settlement, and ferry ourselves up and down in the forty shuttles we have aboard.  The slow grind of building a storm-proof base should keep us occupied.

And I’ll get a chance to investigate this beacon signal.  The scientists think this could be First Contact.  But now we know that’s not possible.  No life could evolve with the scouring of those storms.  Now I think the signal must be some kind of natural reflection of the solar flash, and maybe not a distress signal at all. 

It’s murky down here near the surface.  It only took a few hours to bring this shuttle down to the terminator zone and begin scouting for a landing site.  The day side is too hot, with the rocks glowing in the dull red light.  But here in the narrow thirty mile band around the planet that’s liveable it’s a balmy five degrees.  The light on this planet is heavy in UV, so everything has an eery purple hue.  I’m flying over a ridge above a deep ravine.  The surface is rocky and fairly Earth-like, so maybe we could drive foundations....

FLASH.

Another solar flare.  Only three days after the last one.  The huge blast of Xray has fried my engine and I’m coming down fast.`

As the ground rushes up to meet me, my helmet radio cuts in.

“Captain! We’ve lost engine power.  We can’t re-fire them.  We’ll crash in twelve hours.”  comes my panicked First Officer.

“Okay Jones.  Let’s abandon ship.  Fast and orderly.  You’ve all done the training.”  Twelve hours with forty shuttles holding thirty cramped passengers each...  A few trips and we might just make it.  Unless another flare kills the shuttles too.

Movement.  Off to the edge of my vision.  I turn to look and it’s not there.  Maybe I’ve got a concussion, or it’s a trick of the strange purple light.

 
Again.  Something small, about the size of a dog but shiny and translucent.  More than one this time.  And they’re headed over that rise in front of the crashed shuttle.  I drag myself from the wreckage and scramble to follow.  How can this be?

From the top of the rise I see a plain stretched out below.  The rise is the ring of a crater a mile across, and the whole floor is moving.  Seething with shiny glass spiders, each the size of a dog.  There’s hundreds of these spiders teeming over an irregular pockmarked field covering the whole crater floor.  There’s a web of silvery threads, like a chicken-wire mesh strung ten feet over the holes.  With my binoculars I can see what the potholes are.  They’re holes with spider eggs in them.  The whole crater floor.  Hundreds of millions of baby spiders.

Another flash lights up the whole area.  This wasn’t a solar flare, and my helmet radio screeches with static.  There’s a spectrometer built into my visor, and its results are yet another shock.  That was the beacon signal.  Identical in every way.  Happening just after a solar flare, just like every other time we’ve seen it. 

 
But this is no solar flare.  It comes from the mesh above the holes, as the spiders scurry away beneath.  The mesh glows silver, with a yellow spark arcing down to each hole.  The spark seems to linger over the egg holes, moving from one to another.  And the hole it leaves behind shows movement.  A wisp of steam with little shards of ice rising from the hole.  Only to be revealed as the ice-spiky legs of a newborn spider.
What do they eat?  There’s not even air here, but they’re alive.  Then it hits me.

Heat.  They live off heat.  They live in the cold area, and move close to the hot area to get the energy they need to live.  They can move, so maybe there’s something for them to chase.  A prey animal?

The flash has germinated each of the eggs.  The so-called Beacon Signal was no kind of communication.  No alien was reaching across the dark to say hello.  It’s just a mindless breeding process.  These creatures need energy, just like anything that lives.  But they take it from the flare to germinate, and use heat not food.  So, if something evolved on the cold side to use heat as food, maybe something evolved on the hot side that it eats, just to get the heat from?

One of the spiders has turned in my direction.  It senses my body heat.  Energy is the Currency of the Universe.  And my body heat is energy.  That’s the hard science of it.

As they skitter towards me in the icy dark, I suddenly wonder.  These things are made of ice.  So touching me should melt them, surely?  

That must be true.  They’ve stopped their swarming rush towards me.  They’ve squashed themselves into a rough circle surrounding me, but staying out of arms length.  I’m safe: they’ll melt if they approach me.
And yet again I’m wrong.  After two hours of turning in circles watching their glistening fangs I see their plan.  They’ll wait me out.  And I’ll freeze until my outside’s cool enough for them to bite me.

And so it was.  I could barely feel my arms as the first one ran up my leg and raised its fangs above me.
The strange eyes glitter in the purple dark, and here we have First Contact.  No mind is looking back.  No priceless exchange of perspectives.  First Contact will be contact, but only the sharp spikes of spider fangs to blindly suck my heat away.

The shuttles are crashing, fried by another flare.  And shining in the airless sky, I see our ship in its slowly falling orbit.  Each time around the planet swooping a few miles lower, with no engines to hoist her back up again, and no shuttles left to ferry us down.  In a few days this whole sleeping field of spiders will awake. 

 
To a breakfast of warm bodies falling from above.