by Isaac Hooke
Rade made up his mind. “It’s probably in our best interests to get back there. Even though we don’t know where they’re headed, the alternative—staying here—is a lot worse. We’ll take a roundabout route, as mentioned.”
He highlighted the route on the map. It essentially mirrored the path the team had taken here, except it followed a side street.
They climbed down the far side of the building, and made their way through the thick foliage, keeping an eye on their surroundings for any ambushes. Rade could see the starship perched on the rooftop in the distance the whole time.
They never made it.
Before they arrived, the ship stopped glowing. Rade and his team were still in the streets below as the starship began to vibrate; then it shot upward, receding into the night sky, becoming just another star among many.
The surrounding buildings stopped glowing, casting the city in darkness.
“Now we’re well and truly fucked,” Bender said.
13
Wary of potential ambushes, Rade and the team carefully returned to the spot where they had placed the charges, and retrieved them from the building.
“What now?” Pyro said.
Rade had been dreading that question. He had brought the team back here to buy some time while he tried to figure out what to do next. But the truth was, he had no clue.
When Rade didn’t answer, Tahoe said: “It’s so beautiful.”
“What’s that?” Chow asked.
“Our galaxy,” Tahoe replied.
Rade glanced up, and gazed at the twin spiraling arms of the galaxy that floated in the sky between the buildings. It was beautiful. He was looking at something that no other human had ever seen before. It was a bittersweet feeling, because he knew it might be the last time he saw such a sight.
“Now I know how Shaw felt, when she was stranded eight thousand light years away from home,” Rade said.
“Shaw had it easy,” Bender said. “Eight thousand light years? Chief, we’re millions of light years away now. And our only ride back just left town.”
“We’ve traveled further than anyone else from Earth ever has,” Tahoe agreed. “We’re pioneers.”
“Yeah, pioneers my ass,” Bender said. “It’s not going to matter what the hell we are when we’re gingerbread dead men in a few days’ time.”
“Gingerbread dead men?” Pyro said.
“Uh huh,” Bender told him. “We’re going to die inside our jumpsuits, with our bulky arms and legs splayed like gingerbread men. Not going to be a pretty sight. Inside the suits our bodies will probably mummify, so that we’re preserved for future generations to gawk and marvel at. Well, whenever those future generations get this far out, that is. Humanity will probably have evolved into something unrecognizable by then, and they’ll wonder just how the hell we, their precursors, got all the way out here. They’ll come up with all these theories about how this was the birthplace of man, and how we migrated to Earth eons ago.
“They’ll shove us into glass boxes, of course, to showcase at museums throughout the world. Holographic guides will explain our theorized origins to the museum visitors, and when they get to me, they’ll point at my crotch and say: ‘the penile extension on this one was particular long and powerful. We believe he was a hyper sexual, impregnating thousands of females in his time, passing on his genes to most of the future population. In fact, we have extracted his DNA and determined that he is the direct ancestor of ninety percent of us.’”
“Uh huh,” Pyro commented. “More likely they’ll say: ‘The dick on this one has long since shriveled up. We believe it was the size of a small turnip, and the only one he was capable of impregnating was himself. His genes died off shortly after he did.’”
Before Bender could mount a comeback, Rade said: “Eighty percent of our water is recycled by the jumpsuits. So we have some time before that particular commodity runs out. And if we ration our meal replacements, we can make our food last a week, maybe longer. That leaves oxygen as our most important, and yet scarcest, resource at the moment. We have about two and a half days left.” He glanced at Bender. “There’s oxygen in this atmosphere. Only a little, true, but tell me you can jury-rig some kind of scrubber, based on the tech we’ve got in our mechs, to gather it…”
“I should be able to figure something out,” Bender said. “We’ve got some of the best minds in the business here after all. Not to mention AIs.”
“All right, work together with Cyclone and the AIs,” Rade said. “Solve our oxygen problem.” He glanced to the south, where the hollowed out building with one missing wall resided. “We’ll use that building as our base of operations.”
The team made their way there and secured the outer perimeter of the structure. Satisfied that the area was clear, Rade gave the order to set up camp amid the rubble inside the building. Well, setting up camp meant the humans disembarked from their mechs, leaving behind cockpits and passenger seats and seating themselves on the bare rock. Meanwhile Valjean assumed a defensive position at the fallen wall, while the mechs of Pyro and Bender patrolled the outer perimeter of the structure.
Tahoe and Bender huddled together nearby, working on the oxygen problem. They were drawing some sort of augmented reality schematic in front of them, with sharing turned on so that everyone else could see.
Meanwhile Pyro, Rade, Jiang and Chow sat together.
“We should plan to explore the city sometime,” Pyro said. “Who knows what weapons and technology we might find? Maybe we’ll discover archives of some kind. If we could figure out how to access them, we could learn all about the aliens that once lived here.”
“We’d still need a way to translate the alien language,” Jiang said. “Plus, interfacing with the alien tech would be borderline impossible. It would take years of research and study by dedicated AIs. And any weapons or technology we found? Very likely we wouldn’t know how to use them. Again, not without years of study.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Pyro said. “Either way, we have to get the lay of the land… find out if there’s anything living on this world other than flora. Pick out defensible positions in case the Slicers return, and so forth.”
“Pyro’s right,” Rade said. “We’ll have to explore this place at some point. Not just this city, either. Once we have oxygen, eventually I’ll want to leave it behind, if it’s safe to do so. Or actually, if we could construct some autonomous probes, that would be the best solution… sending them out planet-wide so we have some idea of what’s out there.”
“And if we can’t find a way to extract oxygen from the atmosphere?” Pyro pressed.
Rade glanced at Valjean, who was standing guard at the collapsed wall that served as the entrance to the structure. “Then the mechs will be our legacy. They will live on, trapped on this world, and search for a way off without us.”
“They could be stuck here for millions of years,” Chow said.
“No,” Jiang said. “They’ll build a starship before then.”
Pyro tapped his faceplate with one glove. “Starting from scratch, it won’t be easy. They’ll have to build 3D printers. Mine for materials. They might be missing key elements that need to be synthesized, so they’ll have to build special processing plants to create them. Overall, it could take hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. And even if they construct a starship, they’ll still have to put a Gate around the closest Slipstream. In fact, there’s a chance there are no Slipstreams nearby at all… in fact, I bet the alien ship created its Slipstream dynamically, opening and closing it on the fly, so there definitely isn’t one. Which means it’ll take forever for any ship built by the mechs to reach our galaxy.”
Jiang shrugged. “Maybe they’ll figure out how to create their own Slipstreams.”
Pyro laughed. “Yeah, I doubt it.”
“If we find alien archives here, on this world, as you suggest,” Jiang said. “It isn’t such a remote possibility. Once the mechs translate those archives, who can say what discoveri
es they will make.”
“I suppose so,” Pyro said. “But either way, we’ll never see our galaxy again. Even if we can make oxygen, and find a way to solve our food problem. I think you’re all going to have to come to terms with that.”
“Unless we can find an alien ship intact somewhere on this world,” Chow said.
Pyro glanced at Rade, and nodded slowly. “I can see us spending the rest of our lives here, searching the planet fruitlessly, in the hopes of one day coming across an abandoned alien ship in one of their ruined cities.”
Rade smiled grimly. “Let’s try to focus on one problem at a time. It worked in training, after all. If we spent too long visualizing the pain and suffering that awaited us, we risked letting hopelessness overcome us. Many recruits simply got up and quit because of that hopelessness. The knowledge that the cold they felt now, the exhaustion, the starvation, wouldn’t end, not for many, many weeks, was too much to bear. The key to surviving back then, to making it through the training, was to concentrate on the present moment, on surmounting the current evolution, whatever it might be. That’s the key to surviving now as well. Oxygen. That’s our first problem. We focus on that.”
“Yeah except, there’s only a couple of us with the specialized knowledge needed to overcome that problem,” Pyro said.
“Then we support them in any way we can,” Rade said.
Tahoe and Bender consulted remotely with the mechs, and eventually came up with a solution that involved the three 5-ways on the mechs. By firing the weapons in certain patterns, they could convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen, stripping away the carbon. The trick was choosing the optimal pattern. They experimented with the mechs until they got it just right, but at that point needed to construct something to gather the oxygen from the air, and compress it inside the oxygen tanks.
Bender ended up repurposing the jumpjets of his mech to that task. Rade didn’t completely understand what he did, but the gist was: jumpjets had an air intake vent at the top meant mostly for cooling purposes—a fan inside sucked in air. By redirecting that air into the series of pistons that were partially responsible for the fuel ignition, Bender could compress that air, using the built-in scrubbers to filter out unwanted particles. It required opening up the jumpjets and installing fresh tubing from spares in the storage compartment, with a final tube linking it to the intake valve of the oxygen tanks. That last tube could be connected to any O2 tank, so the other mechs and jumpsuits could be topped up, too.
It took Bender and Tahoe all day to finish the contraption; the mechs helped where needed, but mostly stayed out of the way.
Meanwhile, Rade and the others in their jumpsuits alternated standing watch at the entrance to the building and patrolling its perimeters. They took turns napping two hours at a time.
The blue sun began to rise by the time Bender announced: “So, boys and girls, we’ve got the problem solved. I present to you the Bender-O-Matic O2 Regenerator Extraordinaire.” He pointed at his mech, which seemed to stand their sheepishly, its jumpjet pack opened up with tubes running all over the place. “It takes about two hours to refill a single oxygen tank, mostly due to downtime caused by the 5-ways overheating.”
“All right,” Rade said. “Might as well get us all topped up. Then we can work on the food problem, next.”
Bender and Tahoe took their turn napping while the others replenished their oxygen tanks. Rade’s mech went first: he connected the output tube to the intake valve of Valjean’s oxygen tanks, and then the Falcons crossed their 5-ways above the large funnel Bender had installed above the air intake vent of his mech and unleashed their lightning bolts repeatedly until the weapons overheated, at which point the units waited the prerequisite ten minutes before firing again. It only took an hour and a half to refill the tank, since Valjean already had some oxygen in the tanks; after that, Pyro’s mech swapped places with the Falcon.
And so it went.
While he waited for the other tanks to refill, Rade talked to Jiang, who had been analyzing the different plants that were native to this world, and reported that none of them were compatible with the human digestive system. “Poisons, all of them. We can’t eat these.”
“There have to be some plants we can eat,” Rade said.
“Well, if there are, I haven’t been able to find them,” she said. “I plan to catalog whatever new plant species we discover, but so far, the biome is oddly lacking in diversity.”
A few hours later found the team branching out from their former base of operations, and exploring the city beneath the light from the blue sun. Jiang paused twice to catalog new plants the team came across, but otherwise, there were mostly the same crawling plants and shrubs out there. Everything that had been growing around their temporary base of operations essentially repeated, ad infinitum, out there.
Still, Rade was hopeful that they’d find something edible out there, if not a plant, then some kind of animal life. Their MREs would still last another five days, but the rationing meant he and the others would feel insane levels of hunger, as they did now.
“I can feel my muscles digesting themselves,” Bender complained at one point.
“You and your muscles,” Pyro said. “They’re fine.”
“It’s true,” Bender said. “Muscle tissue is the first to go when you’re starving. Especially if you don’t use ’em. Why do you think so many people who go on diets get such skinny arms, while their bellies stay fat!”
“Given how much test you take, I don’t think you’re a prime example of the typical dieter,” Pyro said. “In fact, that’s why your muscles are wasting… you’re on the no-test diet at the moment.”
“I’m too weak to argue with you,” Bender said. “You win.”
“We have to starve Bender more often,” Tahoe quipped. “He’s much more amiable like this.”
Rade and the others briefly explored any buildings they came across, courtesy of the rectangular openings found at the bases of the structures, but without fail they all proved hollow inside, as if the entire city had been struck by some sort of disintegration bomb that had eliminated everything except for the resilient shells of the buildings—any floors, machinery, and organics were vaporized along with everything else.
“You know, if these buildings have been reduced to mere shells, why did they glow when the alien ship touched them?” Pyro said.
“I’m guessing power receptors are embedded inside the material,” Jiang said. “Receptors that survived along with the outer shells, allowing them to remotely accept any power the alien ship provided. Maybe it was a way for the aliens or AI running the starship to confirm that the city was destroyed… when they realized the power was simply being reemitted by the buildings and not put to any actual use, they departed.”
“And hunting us down wasn’t worth the trouble,” Tahoe said.
“Most likely,” Jiang agreed.
“Then again,” Rade said. “We still don’t know if they left some of those creatures behind to look for us. I’d say there’s a good chance they did. Which is why we have to stay on our toes.”
The team continued sweeping the buildings as they advanced, until they arrived at one particular structure that wasn’t hollow within.
14
Rade stared at the video feed from Bender’s mech. His Falcon had entered the rectangular opening in the base of the latest building, and was transmitting a view of a chamber that was far from vaporized.
“Well, well, well,” Bender said. “Looks like some of the buildings survived after all. This could almost be an alien library. Or something.”
On Bender’s feed, Rade saw a vaulted room whose concave walls were lined with form-fitting shelves. On the shelves were small rectangular crates, with small, handle-like indentations at the front. Rade was reminded of the safety deposit boxes one might find at a bank. Everything had a slight blueish tinge, courtesy of the sunlight pouring in from the entrance.
In the central area, a series of
crates were placed in neat rows. They were of the same size and shape as the crates that had harbored the Slicers abroad the alien vessel.
“Alien library?” Rade said. “I’m not sure I like those bigger crates in the center of the room.”
“Me neither,” Bender admitted. “Last thing we need is a few indestructible aliens rearing their ugly heads on us. All we want is a little food.”
“Maybe the aliens are biocompatible,” Pyro suggested.
“Bro, you want to eat those ugly ass aliens, you go right ahead,” Bender said. “Assuming you can kill them, first. Should I enter, Chief?”
“Yes,” Rade sent. “But I want you to proceed alone, for now. We’ll follow once you reach the ramp on the far wall.”
Rade highlighted the ramp in question, which climbed the farther wall of the building in a spiral along the concave surface, leading past the vaulted ceiling presumably to the next floor, as that ceiling was well below the exterior height of the building.
Bender moved into the room. He stayed close to the wall. Chow, perched in his passenger seat, scanned the room with her rifle.
“Should I try opening one of these smaller crates?” Bender asked.
“No,” Rade replied. “I don’t want to unleash anything. Explore only, for now.”
“You got it, Chief,” Bender said.
“Maybe this is some kind of seed or genetic vault, like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault of Earth,” Chow said.
“Yeah, or maybe they contain smaller versions of the Slicers,” Pyro said. “I agree with the chief, let’s not touch anything. We could try a few shots with our stingrays once we’ve fully explored the rest of the place, but that’s the most I’d recommend.”
“I doubt Bender would be able to open them even if he tried,” Tahoe commented. “These survived whatever bomb attack the alien city endured centuries ago, making it likely they’re composed of the same material as the buildings.”
“You know, I feel safer knowing I have you watching my back, Chow,” Bender said. Rade couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or not.
