Tempted by Celestial Bodies

Chapter 1

chapter one

anya

Moon Station Alpha Lunis - Day 72 of Mission: Rebirth

There’s a dead body outside my window. It’s definitely not human.

I stare at it for a moment, keeping my panic tightly leashed thanks to extensive training and sheer force of will. You can’t panic in space . Observe first, then freak out.

Five irregular limbs sprout from a bulbous, wolf-sized body—or possibly a head. Short, reddish-orange fur covers it completely and I can’t make out any discernible facial characteristics. It reminds me of a five-legged ginger tarantula, except for its massive size. What the hell is it?

There’s no way it came from Earth. The creature doesn’t look like any of the known alien species I recognize from my training. I squint slightly, and I can see a light dusting of fine gray silt coating its fur where it touches the ground in a small impact crater. Yet, there are no footprints or tracks marring the powdery soil anywhere near it. Did it crash into the surface from some distant trajectory?

Or did something put it there?

I’m supposed to be alone on this shithole lunar station while the rest of my crew takes their well-earned leave. My restrained panic finally breaks its tether and I suck in deep, rasping breaths . Icy dread raises goosebumps on my skin and my heart hammers a tattoo of fear in my chest when I consider that perhaps I’m not as alone here as I thought.

Whatever the corpse is, it certainly wasn’t there when I went to sleep last night at zero dark thirty. I glance down at my bio-cuff to check the time—well, Earth Nova ship time—0530. That means that at some point in the last five hours, a dead alien creature crash-landed right outside my room in the Alpha Lunis station. But there’s no other disturbance I can see from my small round window, and the fact the body didn’t vaporize on impact suggests…

No. It couldn’t have been placed there. Surely, there’d be tracks. The station’s scanners would’ve picked up a signal from another ship. I would have seen something, heard something, or sensed something. It can’t be there. How is it there?

I squeeze my eyes shut and turn away from the window. Maybe when I look again, it’ll be gone. There’s a comforting hum from the station’s artificial gravity generators and if I stand still enough, I can feel the distant vibrations of the massive football stadium-sized plasma heaters working around the clock to melt the ice embedded in the lunar poles. The off-gassing vents mile-high geysers of steam into the air, which slowly condenses into what will become the new atmosphere on the moon. Humanity’s last resort and fledgling hope.

I take a sip of water from the aluminum flask tied to my bunk’s bedpost and turn back to the window.

The body is still there—not a hallucination, then. My pulse races fast enough that my bio-cuff beeps in warning, asking if I’m having a medical emergency.

“Calm down, Anya,” I tell myself. “First thing’s first: figure out what you’re dealing with and then send in a report. Someone will come. It’s a fucking alien—they have to come.”

My soft voice has a metallic echo in the spartan bedroom, but it gives me a strange sense of courage to hear my plan out loud. Heartened, I strip off my thin cotton pajamas and start layering my daily uniform: insulating layer first, followed by thick, utilitarian coveralls and my metal-soled boots. I twist my platinum blonde hair into a severe knot on top of my head, wash my face and brush my teeth in the tiny sink in my room. One of the best parts about living here alone is that I can listen to my choice of music without anyone giving me a hard time, so I crank the Billie Holiday through the station’s PA speakers. “Blue Moon” warbles throughout the dead space and soothes my frazzled nerves. I mentally prepare for my next task: searching the entirety of the Alpha Lunis station for an interloper.

If there’s even the remotest possibility of an alien intruder, I should be smart and bring protection with me, but this outpost isn’t a military installation and weapons are hard to come by. Plasma blasters are forbidden inside the station due to risk of depressurizing accidents, so the best I can do is grab an eighteen-inch monkey wrench and a small, handheld plasma torch from my toolbox.

My stomach rebels at the thought of breakfast, but I manage to choke down a bland green nutri-cube to power me through my search. With that, I steel my nerves, roll some of the tension from my shoulders, and open the heavy door leading into the main corridor of the station living quarters.

Blue-white LED lights flicker on as I make my way through the station, barely daring to breathe. I search rows of empty berths in the living quarters, all pristine and ready for the relief crew that will arrive in four months. I quickly clear the med bay, science labs, and the mess hall, all sealed and untouched in sanitary stasis. No signs of life.

The command pod in the center of the complex is my second-to-last stop. I consider taking the time to contact the base and let them know I’m not alone on this station. How would they respond? I wonder.

Looking out the main window of the command pod, I watch the distant formerly blue-green marble swirl in desolate streaks of brown and white. In the velvety blackness beyond, stars twinkle and shimmer—evidence the plasma heaters and lunar steam are starting to work and the beginnings of the new, proto-atmosphere are forming. In my opinion, there’s something warped about altering the landscape of our ever-constant, gentle gray moon, but it makes for one hell of a view.

Too bad there’s no one to share it with.

A soft throb of loneliness unfurls in my chest, but I shove it down. My crew is a month out on their way to the Earth Nova colony ship and the next group won’t arrive for some time. Not that I’d sit and watch the stars with anyone on my crew . A hysterical giggle bursts from my lips when I think of the dead alien in my front yard—perhaps they came for the view, too.

Not likely.

When humans first made contact with extraterrestrials ten years ago, it was all so anticlimactic. No abductions, no invasions, no two-way contact: just the confirmation that somewhere in the distance, other beings existed. More importantly, they existed and wanted nothing to do with us. Who could blame them? What sentient species would care about a decimated population on a dying world? We’re a guttering candle too dim to bother extinguishing.

The remnants of humanity evacuated into hideous, unwieldy colony ships that still orbit the parched, choked, utterly cooked rock I can’t bring myself to miss. My family was gone long before the colony ships were built, and besides, I’ve always been too in love with the endlessness of space and the promise of the stars to feel homesick for Earth.

As a kid, I dreamed of being an astronaut. I wanted to explore distant galaxies, befriend alien species, discover new worlds. Instead, I’m as good as a graveyard shift grease monkey trying to turn an old, abandoned deep space research station into a terraforming luxury resort. Apparently, I’m the only unattached solitary loser they could find to help lead the re-engineering mission on the old lunar station, tasked with getting it prepped and ready for the first wave of colonists wealthy enough to buy their way off the ships.

I rub at the hollow ache in my chest when I think about all the couples and families planning on a future here on Alpha Lunis. What I wouldn’t give to have the hope of my childhood dreams again. My own future stretches out before me like space: vast, unknowable, embarrassingly isolated.

Assuming, of course, the dead alien outside isn’t a sci-fi portent of doom. Yeah, one thing at a time, Anya. I have bigger problems than contemplating the lonesomeness of my pathetic existence or trying to figure out how to turn an outdated laboratory into luxury living accommodations.

Sighing, I turn on the main computer and key in my ID code. A symphony of grating beeps and clicks shatters the silence of the command pod, and I type out an urgent message to my team on the base. Just as I’m about to hit Send, I pause. I’ve seen Alien. What if they want me to bring the thing back for study or something? Or worse—what if they don’t believe me in the first place? What if they think I’ve gone nuts from too much solitude and solar radiation?

Unease twists my stomach into knots and stutters my pulse. I should get some kind of proof, but what if the thing isn’t really dead? What if it’s hibernating? Or gestating? The last thing I want to do is go outside, especially when I still have no idea where it came from. If something put it there, that something could still be hanging around using the dead tarantula alien as bait, maybe.

It sounds crazy. I feel crazy. I feel like I’m going to look out my window again and there won’t be anything there. It will have been a trick of the light, or a fever dream from eating an expired ration, or something. Something .

The anxiety I’ve been brutalizing deep down in my gut rears its head and I delete my message one heavy keystroke at a time.

I scroll back through yesterday’s station data, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary. A tide of worry laps at the fringes of my mind as I consider my next move. I don’t think I can handle all this alone. At some point, I’ll need to contact the ship and tell them, but I don’t want to risk everything I’ve worked for. If they think I’ve lost it, they’ll cart me back to Earth Nova and I’ll lose my chance to lead the engineering team on the next space station, which is the closest I’ll get to exploring the stars.

Earth Nova has to believe me. That leaves me with one nauseating option: finish searching the last remaining section—the garage and landing decks—then head outside and document the carcass.

Grabbing my wrench and plasma torch, I venture from the sterile sanctuary of the command pod and take the service elevator down six decks to the lowest level. This is the area I’ve been dreading—the biggest, most labyrinthine, and most likely to harbor some alien invader bent on terrorizing the station’s hapless human meatsicle.

I start in the garage by inspecting the rows of lunar rovers. The maintenance lockers, storage bunkers, and machining shop are all as they should be, with nary a swipe of grease or dusty footprint to be seen. By the time I finish searching, my stomach is rumbling and my bio-cuff beeps, reminding me that I haven’t eaten since my depressing breakfast eight hours ago. I’m exhausted, sweaty, famished, and my nerves feel as if they’ve been stretched into spun glass and shattered.

“Almost done,” I remind myself. “Then it’s a hot shower and a full ration for dinner.”

With leaden limbs, I pull on my heavy spacesuit and wait for it to pressurize in the garage’s outer chamber. When the preliminary tests indicate everything is copacetic, I smash my fist into the airlock release and step out onto the surface of the moon.

Without the assistance of the station’s artificial gravity, it takes me ages to leap and plod and shuffle toward the dreadful heap of ginger limbs outside the window near my berth. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I feel as if I’m being watched, but I can’t tell if it’s my proximity to the alien carcass or the odd sensation of standing on the chalky lunar regolith staring out at the boundlessness of space.

I toe the corpse, but the lifeless body is frozen solid. I want some kind of proof to show the base that I’m not crazy and yes, there are aliens knocking on the door of our brand-new home. As I study the corpse, something catches my eye—in the silty soil, strange slithery tracks I didn’t see earlier encircle the alien body. Like desert sand after the rain, there’s no real pattern to them and no evidence they move off in any singular direction. Perhaps they’re not tracks at all, and it’s a natural phenomenon. We’re growing an atmosphere; maybe this is where some water has condensed.

Grimacing, I bend down to grab one of the furry legs and tug it with me onto the lower loading bay that opens into the garage. In zero gravity, I can manage the weight, but as soon as I get inside, I’ll need a hover cart to help me transport it to the cryo-freezers in the lab. I figure keeping it frozen and entombed in the lab is my safest bet until I can convince everyone on the Earth Nova ship, and then I’m going to fling this creepy bastard back out into space…or vaporize it with one of the plasma heaters. I’m not taking any chances.

The trek to the lab is uneventful—well, except for the fact that I’m lugging a dead alien through the hallways of a lunar station. But the moment I seal it inside the cryo-freezer, I exhale with a jittery kind of relief.

Despite the overall horror show of the day, I feel much better by the time I trudge back into my room. I take a twenty-minute volcanically hot shower, stuff a full dinner ration of rehydrated spaghetti into my face, and tenderly pull on my pajamas. My bio-cuff reads 2200 Earth Nova time, which is a little earlier than I normally turn in, but I’m glad for the extra rest.

Tomorrow morning, everything will go back to normal. I’ll send in my report with evidence, get a security team here to help watch my back, and dive back into work. In another few months, I’ll have earned my own fancy suite on Alpha Lunis and then be right in line to lead my team on the next galactic adventure. Maybe the dilapidated Mars outpost. Now there would be a fun challenge.

I snuggle into my covers, trying not to allow the emptiness of the station, my room, my life suffocate me. I refuse to let my mind wander to the mysterious dead thing stashed in the lab’s freezer or the unnerving marks in the dirt outside that don’t seem scientifically possible. I did my best today and tomorrow, everything will be fine.

I’ll be fine.

* * *

Just after I manage to drift off, a nightmare sends adrenaline surging through my body and I leap out of bed, convinced there’s someone—something—here with me. I reach for my wrench, tucked safely beneath my pillow. Sweat beads on my skin and my bio-cuff beeps at my elevated heart rate and respiratory distress.

But once again, I’m alone. Always alone. Even so, it takes several minutes for me to calm down, and as the stress finally starts to ebb from my muscles, I make the mistake of opening my eyes and peering out my window.

There is another dead body outside.