Neptune Crossing
Page 3
*
He awoke with his head pounding, wheeling with dizziness. The headache was almost welcome; whatever else had happened, the silence-fugue episode was over. The dizziness was another matter. He took several slow breaths, and finally realized that he was not just dizzy, but the world actually seemed to be spinning around him, in a strange, carousellike movement. He blinked and shifted his gaze around. He was underground, lying on his back in some sort of cavern. His visor’s light-augmentation had kicked on automatically. An arched, translucent nitrogen-ice ceiling glowed faintly overhead. Around him, glinting back icily, were solid walls . . . solid, except for the great, ponderous, inexorable movement with which they were wheeling around him.
He took a deep breath and moved his head—or tried. He felt a sharp stab of pain in his neck, and his helmet did not budge. Terrified, he froze, moving only his eyes for a moment. He wiggled his fingers and toes, and felt them move painlessly inside his suit. Next he lifted his arms, then his legs. No problem there. But when he attempted to push himself up to a sitting position, he found that he was glued in place, stuck to the ice. The pain hit him in the neck, as before, but this time it seemed an ache rather than a stabbing pain. A bruise, probably, from the suit collar. Good. Bruises he could handle; it was broken bones and spinal damage that scared him. He scissored his legs, trying to roll over. He might as well have tried rolling out from under an anvil.
He gazed up at the ceiling, trying to evaluate his predicament. He had never been in a cavern quite like this before. The ceiling was a flawed bluish ice with a tinge of reddish-orange methane coloration. It was at least fifteen or twenty meters above him. The walls, also ice, were steep and slick. They were still wheeling around him, and it made him dizzy to try to focus on them for longer than a moment or two. Nevertheless, he glimpsed, as it revolved past, an almost vertical trough in the wall, which was probably where he’d slid down. Directly over that trough was a dark shadow on the ceiling, perhaps the buggy atop the ice. He could not see the opening he’d fallen through. He hoped it was visible from the surface, because if it wasn’t, search parties from the base would never find him. Not unless he could think of a way to climb out of here unaided.
The thought made him shiver. He didn’t much care for the idea of lying here in a near-absolute-zero environment, waiting for his lifepack to expire. He pictured himself as a part of the moon’s lifeless deposits, one day to be revealed by the vaporizing heat of the company’s mining lasers. He shuddered, not just with fear but with fury at himself for the insanity that had led him to this. The damn silence-fugue. Prior to this, he’d had some episodes of loss of concentration and fleeting, moderate hallucination, when the neural silence became too great—but never anything he couldn’t control by effort of will. It had never hit him like this before, never actually put his life in jeopardy.
He shut his eyes, trying to think. He wondered how long he could safely lie flat on this supercold surface. The suit was not intended for prolonged contact in that position. How long had he been unconscious? How much longer would the power unit hold out?
With the neuro, he would already have had the answers pouring directly into his thoughts. But in the silence, he could not ask the questions merely by thinking them. Blinking his eyes open, he squinted at the tiny red numbers glowing in the corner of his faceplate. Either his eyes were watering or the numbers themselves were swimming; he couldn’t read a thing. He tried to speak his questions, but all that came out of his throat was a thin, desperate rasp.
He struggled not to panic. He drew several deep breaths.
He knew this much: he could have been unconscious for as little as a few seconds, or as long as a few hours. But given the absence of warning flashers in his visor, he figured that at worst he had another forty-five minutes, and at best several hours more—assuming that he hadn’t broken anything mechanical in his fall. That was a risky assumption, of course, considering that he had plowed his way to a landing, ending up flat on his back.
Flat on his back . . .
Covering up his exhaust ports.
Christ—all this time he’d been lying here, his heat exhaust had been slowly melting into the ice, embedding him!
No time to panic! he thought. No time to panic. He tried to think calmly. There were no datanet voices to help him; he would have to find his own answers.
Think, damn you.
The silence in his head echoed like a tomb. But in his ears, he heard the sound of his suit ventilator. He wasn’t entirely alone. He cleared his throat carefully and tried his voice again. “Hello!” he grunted. “Suit control.”
Beep.
“Thank God,” he whispered. “Suit control—what are my power reserves?”
Beep. “Forty-two percent,” chirped the suit.
He cleared his throat again. Could have been better, could have been worse. He had a couple of hours left. A couple of hours to get free, call for help, be rescued. “Suit control—transmit.” He heard the click of the comm switch and drew a tight breath. “Base Camp, Echo Unit. Base Camp, Echo Unit. Do you read?” He listened to the hiss of static; he swallowed with difficulty. “Base camp? Bandicut. Can you hear me? Anyone?”
He exhaled, and tried hard not to be upset. It would have been miraculous for any signal to have gotten out of this deep cavern, especially with his antenna buried in the ice under his back. Nevertheless, it frightened him not to get a response. He felt himself starting to hyperventilate, and he fought to control his breathing—slow and shallow. He took a sip of water from his feeder tube, then spoke again. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! This is Unit Echo. Bandicut. I’ve fallen through ice and am trapped underground. My location—” he struggled to remember “—two klicks east of position Wendy. Does anyone hear me?”
The only answer was a hiss of static.
He scissored his legs again, trying to roll; then he scissored the other way. He rocked just enough to give him some hope. Probably there was some melted ice directly beneath his heat exhaust. But even a few centimeters out from it, the nitrogen was almost certainly refrozen, binding him in place. If only there were some way of melting it again . . . but he was as helpless as a turtle on its back, kicking and thrashing. He had hands and tools, all of which were useless to him. His mind spun, ratcheting in the silent emptiness. What would the voices of the datanet have said to him?
What could this lone, struggling mind come up with?
Suddenly he blinked furiously. Perhaps there was a way.
“Suit control,” he murmured. “Raise internal temperature to maximum.” He waited, holding his breath. An instant later, he felt heat pouring in around his torso, then his extremities. He waited for the heat to taper off. It seemed to take forever; sweat ran into his eyes, and he felt like a fool cooking in a sauna. He began moving his arms and legs in fast chops, adding body heat. Finally he heard a beep, and the influx of heat stopped.
“Suit control,” he grunted, “reduce internal temperature to minimum. Fast.” He felt a change in the suit’s mechanical hum, and drew a sharp, painful breath as a blast of icy air flashed down his front. Within seconds, he was shuddering, his teeth chattering. He counted to three—then began scissoring his legs violently from side to side. Something creaked, and he felt a breath of hope. He wasn’t free yet, but his suit was pumping all that excess heat out through the port beneath his back, and he could feel the ice melting.
He hoped he wasn’t just melting himself in deeper.
He kept rolling, heedless of his bruises. Something kept catching, keeping him from going all the way over. The icy blast was tapering off; he had only seconds before it would all refreeze. He swung his left leg over hard, and dug his right elbow down sharply and levered himself up with the last of his strength. Something broke free, and he lurched, and suddenly was partway up, supported on his right elbow. Before he could fall backward again, he pitched himself forward to his hands and knees. He was free.
“S-suit c-control,” he gasped. “Tem
perature . . . n-normal! Fast!” Heat poured back into the suit, sending new shudders down his spine.
For a moment he didn’t even try to move. Then, as he caught his breath he struggled to his feet, supporting himself on an outcropping of ice. The low gravity helped, but he was fighting dizziness as much as weight. When he felt steadier, he told his suit to turn on his helmet lamp, and he played it over the cavern walls.
He nearly threw up at the sight of the walls spinning through the spotlight. He lowered the beam hastily and found that the movement stopped, closer to him. The spinning occurred only beyond a certain radius, about four meters from where he stood. Though he was sure that it must be only a visual illusion, he knew he had to keep from looking at it. He stared at the ground instead. In his headlight beam, the ice under his feet appeared solid and stable. Thank God. He turned around slowly to see what was behind him. He raised his gaze cautiously.
His headlight flashed crazily among some darkened ice formations—and his breath went out with a shuddering gasp, as he saw it. It. A machine of some sort.
A machine made by no one human.
Bandicut blinked hard and felt an almost overpowering urge to rub his eyes behind his visor. The artifact, a few meters from his outstretched hand, seemed to be squirming in his headlight beam. It seemed to consist of a great many spheres, some jet black and some iridescent, intersecting like clusters of soap bubbles. They were moving and sinking through one another, disappearing and reemerging in different positions, at various rates of speed. Beneath their mirror sheens, the spheres appeared to be spinning. The assemblage was about as tall as he was, standing on the ice floor, balanced on a single spinning bubble. It was strangely hard to focus his eyes upon.
It looked almost . . . alive.
In the silence of his mind, one word reverberated in his thoughts. Alien. And he knew, despite the violence of the silence-fugue that had brought him to this place, that the fugue had passed, and that this object, and its alienness, were no hallucination of the fugue-state.
It hurt his eyes to stare at it. He glanced away, and that was when he realized that it was at the center of the visual disturbance that made the cavern seem to spin. He clutched again at the ice outcropping, fiercely trying to suppress a new wave of dizziness.
It was at that moment that he felt something new pass through the silence—a whisper of something in his mind. He felt it for just a moment, then it was gone. A tingle ran up his spine, and for an instant it reawakened the blinding headache that he’d felt at the end of his fugue episode. But the tingle ended in a quick shiver, and the headache was gone as suddenly as it had appeared.
But the inner awareness was not.
He didn’t know whether this object was alive or not, but one thing he did know—he felt it in his bones, like a creeping chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
He was not alone in this cavern.
Chapter 2
The Quarx
HE COULDN’T TELL if the feeling came directly from the object or not. Something made him feel that he was being watched from behind. He turned partway around, but saw nothing except the spinning ice walls and their rocky protrusions. He shuffled awkwardly back around to stare at the alien object, and shivered.
This time the feeling came purely from within. He felt as if something had blown open in his mind, like a shutter in a strong wind. The wind was sighing through his head now, rustling his inner order like so many fluttering leaves. It reminded him of the feeling of silence-fugue, but this was different. This was something from the outside touching him—and yet touching him within, intimately and profoundly. He had a feeling of a great door swinging silently open somewhere in his mind, and slamming shut again behind him as he passed over some invisible threshold.
He let out a startled breath. The curious inner feeling faded away, and was replaced by cold, outward reality. He was trapped in an underground cavern, with no idea how to get out. And he was standing in front of . . . the discovery of the century. An alien machine! It was what the Neptune/Triton explorers had looked for in vain, for years—an intact, and possibly functioning, artifact of the long-vanished alien race, the slag of whose technology laced the crust of this moon. This could be a discovery beyond price or measure, a discovery that could make him famous, possibly even rich. A discovery that could redeem him for his idiocy in falling into this cavern in the first place.
If, that is, he lived to tell anyone about it.
He was breathing fast again, thinking about it, wondering what knowledge was contained in that machine, what history, what capabilities. What power. And even, perhaps . . . what consciousness. Though he no longer felt the tangible sensation, an awareness that he was not alone continued to bubble inside him. He exhaled, flexing his hands in his gloves, trying to relax, trying to maintain an edge of alertness.
He was keenly aware that this machine, whatever its purpose or nature, could well be dangerous—despite the fact that it undoubtedly had been here for millennia. He had to assume that it was dangerous. He was in enough peril already, trapped here underground, without compounding his danger by triggering some ancient defense mechanism. Unless, of course, he already had triggered it.
He tried to think.
First: don’t move any closer until you know what you’re doing. Your antenna’s free of the ice. Call for help again. Don’t try to handle this alone.
Of course, he was still deep underground, and for that matter he might well have broken his antenna in his fall. But there was only one way to find out. “Suit,” he said. “Comm—”
Before he could finish saying “on,” he felt a sharp poke in the center of his forehead. It was followed immediately by a startling sensation, almost like being connected to a datanet . . . in a flickering, tenuous way, as if a single, remote voice had caught him in midaction, and out of the vast darkness had whispered, Don’t.
What the hell? he thought. Was he hallucinating again?
Or . . .
Had this thing just spoken to him?
He shivered with a sudden chill, and stared at the object with a mixture of fear and fascination. Had it just told him not to call for help?
“Is that it?” He spoke aloud, his voice reverberating in his helmet. “Are you telling me not to call?” There was no answer.
If he didn’t call, he could be stuck here forever. Survive first, ask questions later.
“Suit,” he muttered again, a little more determinedly. “Comm on, trans—”
NO.
The jab was sharper this time. He tried to keep speaking anyway, to overcome the resistance—and found that he couldn’t. He could exhale and inhale, but was mute, as if stricken by a physical impediment. His breath hissed loudly in his helmet as he struggled to regain his voice.
“What do you want?” he thought—and heard his voice again, croaking the words aloud. Startled, he continued, “Are you keeping me here for some reason?”
There was no audible answer. But he had a strong sense that there was an answer, just as he had a sense that he was not alone here. “Can you talk?” he asked.
Silence.
He sighed and turned, playing his headlight around the cavern. The light danced back from the blue, translucent ice, glimmering as though it were alive. As the beam strayed outward, it picked up the spinning effect again. Clearly this machine was doing something, and whatever the hell it was, he would probably be smart to get out of its physical sphere of influence, and then worry about communicating with it afterward. Or better yet, let someone else worry about it.
He felt a vaguely disquieting sense of disapproval, but no physical resistance, as he took a few unsteady steps away from the device. He approached the boundary where the spinning seemed to begin, and found he had trouble focusing his eyes. He hesitated, then stepped forward. A wave of nausea flushed through him. He staggered, fell—and as he fell, a strange twisting force seized him, spun him, and set him gently down on his hands and knees.
“Mind if I try again?” he muttered. This time, as he approached the boundary, he closed his eyes to slits—hoping to avoid dizziness. He felt himself falling, and twisting, and landed on his hands and knees again, lightheaded and indignant, facing the machine. He rose, panting, squinting at the object. It showed no reaction. He swept the area again with his light. There had to be some way to get away from it. Everywhere he swung the beam, cavern walls gleamed back at him, moving by in carousel fashion. He turned back to the alien device and hissed, “What do you want with me? Am I your prisoner?”
Not prisoner, he thought. Guest.
Where had that thought come from? Stunned, he walked toward the artifact. “Can you talk?” The thing squirmed, black and iridescent in his helmet light. “Can you talk . . . in my thoughts?” he asked. There was no response. But he felt certain that it was aware of him. Perhaps it would react if he touched it.
Perhaps it would kill him if he touched it.
Perhaps he could find something to throw at it. That ought to get its attention.
Glancing around, he found a loose chunk of ice, and with a gentle underhand toss, lobbed it toward the machine. It sparkled as it passed through his headlight beam, then dropped toward one of the black globes—and would have hit it, except that it vanished in midair. No flash, no sound. It was just there, then gone.
He decided that it was a good thing that he hadn’t touched the machine. On the other hand, he had to get through to it somehow. He picked up another small piece of ice and lobbed it like the first one, this time toward one of the iridescent sections. He missed the machine altogether. One last try: a chunk of ice twirled and tumbled in an arc toward one of the iridescent bubbles . . . and turned to glittering dust before being sucked into the sphere like an indrawn breath.
He waited for something more to happen. Nothing did.
“All right,” he muttered. “I guess you don’t want to talk.”
The wind rose again in his thoughts and whispered: We’re learning. We want to talk.
He swallowed nervously, fear clamping around his throat. Was that his imagination? He didn’t think so. Please, he thought, let me get out of this alive. I will never never let the fugue carry me away like that again! Just let me get out alive.
We want you to stay alive, he heard the wind say.
He choked, and instinctively reached out with his mind to catch the wind, to make the connection hold, to make it real, like the datanet—and at that moment something erupted from within, not in audible words, but in thoughts that seemed to turn into words:
/// Help me—I’m trying— ///
“Jesus!” he cried, grabbing the sides of his helmet. “Who is it? Who is this?”
/// I am— ///
whispered the voice from within.
“What?” he croaked. “You are what? The machine? The alien? Is that you talking to me?”
There was a short silence, and a sense of puzzlement. Then:
/// Alien . . . ? ///
“Yes!” he hissed. “Alien. Jesus Christ—what’s happening to me?”
/// It’s . . . already . . . happened. ///
Already happened? he thought dumbly. He barked, not quite cursing, “You’re that thing. What are you? What are you here for?”
/// I am . . . quarx. ///
“Uh—?”
The words were starting to form more clearly in his thoughts:
/// I am trying . . .
to talk with you. ///
“Well, I—I can’t stay here much longer. Can you understand that? I need to get back to the surface. I’ll come back later. To talk. I only have enough power—”
/// I know, ///
whispered the voice.
/// I can . . . help. ///
“What? How?” Bandicut was panting. He was hyperventilating again; he had to slow down. God, it was terrifying, and yet . . . exhilarating! A living alien, talking to him, as if through a neuro! He wondered if he could talk back to it the way he could the datanet. /Can you . . . hear me when I do this?/ he thought, forming the words in his mind with careful deliberation.
/// Yes.
I’ve been hearing you . . . all along.
It’s talking that’s . . . difficult. ///
He blinked. /How do you talk to me . . . from way over there? Do you use some kind of . . . transmitter . . . that reaches directly into my brain?/
The answering thought seemed startled.
/// “Over there?”
I’m not, I’m right here. ///
He swallowed. /Where?/
/// In your mind. ///
Well, yes, he thought. But . . .
And then he understood what it was saying to him. /Do you mean . . . are you saying . . . in my . . . /
/// Yes. ///
He froze, trying not to jump to conclusions. /You don’t mean in my actual . . . brain, do you? You don’t mean you’re actually in my head, do you? Not just connecting, but—?/
/// Living there?
Yes.
Not physically, as you think of it, but . . .
close enough . . . ///
Bandicut was suddenly dizzy, too dizzy to hear the voice complete its thought. Not physically, he thought. And suddenly he knew. It had taken him a while to catch on, but now he understood . . . oh yes, it was like the neurolink, and yes, he was connected; it was like having a memory-resident program alive in his skull, only it was an alien mem-res. Not physically there, maybe, but . . . an alien voice in his head. It was different from the neuro, and yet strangely familiar at the same time.
/// Am I—
causing you difficulty? ///
Sarcasm? he thought. But no, it wouldn’t understand human sarcasm, would it? It was alien. He let his breath hiss out, not knowing how to answer. “What exactly . . . did you say you were?” he asked suddenly, speaking aloud.
The answer felt muted, almost tentative.
/// Quarx. ///
“Quarx.” He swallowed. /Quarx./ He felt like pacing. He paced mentally, framing his words. /We . . . we always wondered . . . who you were. We just knew you were . . . here before us. Here on Triton. A long time ago. Quarx, you say./
/// Yes. ///
/I . . . there’s a lot I . . . should ask you. That I want to ask you./ He felt clumsy and stupid. What should he be asking?
/// There will be time enough
for all of that. ///
He shook his head. /No, I—I mean I—look, tell me please—/ He drew a breath and asked, almost plaintively, /How the hell did you get into my mind like this?/
The voice seemed to stumble.
/// Well, I . . .
it would be difficult to explain physically.
It was the translator that did it. ///
The translator. He sensed that the voice was referring to the machine in front of him. /This thing?/ He felt an affirmative response. /Is this thing a part of you? Are you a part of it?/ he asked, groping for understanding.
/// No.
The translator is . . . a machine.
I was . . . occupying its space-time, before.
Now I am . . . living . . . with you. ///
With you.
Living.
Bandicut shivered. /I—/ He’d thought he had understood before; he’d thought he could . . . an alien mem-res . . . an enhancement program, like the neurolink; he’d thought he could accept that all right. It was terrifying, yes, but exciting. An alien program. Information. Datapoints. Not . . .
Living.
In my mind.
/// I am alive, yes. ///
He felt himself beginning to hyperventilate again. He couldn’t make himself stop. H
is faceplate began to fog up. He heard the voice whisper,
/// I’ve been waiting such a LONG time. ///
and somehow that stopped his hyperventilation short. He felt a strange rustling sensation, as if someone were riffling through the pages of his mind, trying to find a connection that was missing. He recalled that he needed to be getting out of this cavern, but the outside world seemed a million miles away now.
/// I’m sorry if this is . . .
startling to you. ///
He erupted with a cackle of near-hysterical laughter. /Startling? No . . . no . . . not at all./ He gulped. /You aren’t . . . living with me to stay, are you?/ He clenched his fists, closing his eyes, swallowing, trying not to scream, WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME?
/// I—
for a while, yes. ///
Bandicut reeled silently.
/// What do I want?
I—to get to know you better—
to begin with. ///
/Get to know me,/ he whispered. /Get to know me? Would you mind . . . telling me what the hell you are—?/
/// Quarx. ///
/Quarx,/ he repeated. /WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?/
The alien device suddenly flickered, and something appeared in the air off to one side. It looked almost like a hologram—but that wasn’t quite right. It was more like a pocket of darkness, and within the darkness, something bright and coruscating and very hard to look at. It was ghostly and frightening, like a glimpse into the heart of a nuclear reaction. He stared at it dumbly for a second, then blinked and yelled, “Suit!”
Beep.
“Analyze the image in front of me.”
Boop. “Specify image.”
“The one right in front of me, damn it! Record it—full spectrum!” At that moment, the image vanished. Whatever it was, he had scared it away.
Beep. “Recording. Analysis indicates nitrogen and methane ice at a distance of four and one-half meters.”
“Not the wall! Didn’t you get that other thing, that—”
The quarx interrupted him.
/// That’s the best I can— ///
He shifted his attention angrily to the interior of his mind. /What?/ If it had really been the datanet, he would have issued a freeze command, so that he could get a grip on what was happening.
/// You asked . . . what I was.
I tried . . .
I exist in a partial,
you might say . . .
a fractal displacement
from your physical continuum.
But I require an anchor point
a merger
in this space-time
for coherent survival— ///
/What the hell are you talking about?/ Bandicut whispered, incomprehensible images flickering in his mind.
The voice became more subdued.
/// Sorry.
It is difficult—
the words.
I was trying to show you—
not clear. ///
He struggled to follow, but the images were lost now. Too much was happening, too much all at once. Maybe if you don’t think of it as an alien, he thought desperately; think of it as a mem-res, and you’ll be able to handle it.
The quarx reacted to his thought.
/// Don’t think that I’m just . . . ///
and it hesitated for a moment, apparently sensing his unease.
/// Still . . .
if it helps . . . ///
Bandicut hesitated. What the hell was he supposed to do now, or think? He might have made humanity’s first contact with a living alien, but that didn’t mean he wanted a goddamn alien living in his mind. At least not for very long. On the other hand, it was an inner voice again, even if it was different from the neuro. Perhaps while it was here it would help keep the silence-fugue at bay.
/// I’ll try.
I am aware of your . . . difficulty. ///
His thoughts were spinning onward; he didn’t respond to that. There was, of course, the discovery of the alien machine, which he had to report . . .
/// NO!!! ///
He felt a barrier slam down in his mind, as he envisioned reporting his find. He growled indignantly, “Why shouldn’t I report it?”
/// Because—
of what we have to do. ///
Bandicut’s thoughts narrowed. “We—?”
/// For your world, yes.
It’s . . . critically important.
I need time to explain to you.
Please. ///
Bandicut grunted. Critically important? He wondered what that was supposed to mean. At the moment, he seemed to have no choice, anyway. He hesitated. /Do you have a name?/ he muttered. /Besides “quarx”?/
The alien seemed to want to say something.
/Well?/
A low, rising squeal began in the front of his head. The sound shot backward, reverberating in his skull. Abruptly, it rose to a horrifying shriek, like the sound of a transmission belt shredding. His teeth vibrated. He could not breathe, or think, or cry out for it to stop. He could only endure. And suddenly it ceased, leaving him shuddering in silence. /What . . . the hell . . . was that?/ he gasped, barely able to form the words.
The voice sounded puzzled.
/// My name.
Do you wish to hear it again? ///
/Christ, no!/ He shuddered one more time. Before he could recover, he felt a renewed riffling sensation in his mind.
/// You could call me . . . “Charrleeee.” ///
“Charlie!” he grunted aloud. Jesus. He snapped inwardly: /Are you making fun of me now?/
/// Fun?
It’s the closest . . . approximation I could find.
That you could pronounce. ///
“Great,” he whispered. “Charlie. Right?”
/// Charrleeee. ///
He sighed. It could be worse. Better than that horrible shriek. He turned around, clumping in his awkward boots. Hadn’t this . . . Charlie . . . told him that it could help him get out of here? They had better get moving, if he was to get out alive.
/// You mean,
if WE are to get out alive. ///
He froze. Yes, he supposed that was what he meant. He blinked suddenly, realizing that something had just changed in his headlight beam. The walls were no longer revolving around him. There was a strange sensation of stillness about the cavern, and he stepped toward the wall for a better look. Maybe now he could try to climb out. Or jump. He might be able to jump high enough in this gravity to reach a handhold near the ceiling.
/// You don’t want to do that.
Too risky. ///
/I have to get out of here, damn it!/
/// Yes, but wait. ///
/For what?/
/// A better way. ///
/What’s that supposed to mean?/
There was no immediate answer. But something made him turn back to the alien device, and his heart thumped. The thing was glowing, and the movement of the spherical sections had become quicker and more frantic, or erratic. He felt a chill of uncertainty. /Is that thing going to blow? Christ, I do have to get out of here!/
/// Wait. ///
/But I—/
Before he could complete his thought, he felt a sudden rush of warmth and light, and a spinning wooziness. Then his vision went cottony and white, and he floated up into a dreamy unconsciousness.
Chapter 3
Beginnings
REMEMBERING THE FLIGHT out . . .
In the crystal clarity of the neuro, the planet Neptune floated in deep space with the kind of majesty that only heavenly bodies seemed to possess. She was ghostly and beautiful, a pale blue orb streaked with white storm systems and ringed with faint circles of dust that glinted into visibility only when his thoughts stroked the augmentation driver and brightened the scene to an astral glow. He recalled how the planet looked through the unamped porthole of the ship, cerulean and
dim, almost sepulchral, floating like a phantom against the stars; and he felt a powerful rush of gratitude for the vision of the neuro, for the union with the ship’s AI that let him experience the approaching planet as a vision of beauty, of wonder.
Bandicut was practically the only person on the shuttle who’d actually enjoyed the long haul out from Ceres Base. While everyone else counted the weeks and months, slowly going stir-crazy as they crossed the endless billions of kilometers, Bandicut had spent hours viewing the approaching planet through neuro-enhanced imagery, and exploring various threads of related information from the datanet.
At this point, near the end of the flight, they were starting to get fairly clear realtime images of their actual destination—the moon Triton, in its crazy, backwards, interloper’s orbit around Neptune, well outside the ring system. By fiddling with the image mag, he could enlarge Triton from the small disk that the naked eye saw to a full-sized, three-dimensional body. It was about the same size as Earth’s Moon, but there the resemblance ended. Triton was covered with a brownish pink coloration from the darkened methane that coated much of its surface ice. Its countenance bore the scars and craters of a face with a complexion problem. Bandicut could not yet resolve the MINEXFO encampment in the realtime imaging, but he’d glimpsed a few puffs of haze above the areas where he knew the great mining lasers were vaporizing swaths of the surface, exposing veins of metals that lay beneath . . . veins of alien metals, exotic alloys that had melted and refrozen eons ago.
It was an exciting prize, those alien alloys that offered the promise of revolutionizing everything from nano-optronics to armored weaponry. And that of course was why human miners were here, at vast expense, with the multinational/multiworld consortium of the Mining Expeditionary Force. Triton had once been a wandering orphan, possibly originating in the solar system, but more likely straying in from the interstellar void. Uncounted millions of years ago, it had passed close to the gas giant Neptune and been captured for eternity. Triton was a moon with an obscure history, but one thing was known for certain: it had hosted a nonhuman civilization at some point in its past. And even if no live aliens (or even dead aliens) had been found, it nevertheless bore a treasure lode of metallic compounds that to date had confounded the ability of human science to reproduce.
As a place to live and work, however, Triton was ranked near the bottom of the list for creature comforts, somewhere between Mercury and Arctic offshore oil platforms on Earth. Triton’s surface was one of the coldest naturally occurring spots in the solar system, the mercury hovering at around two hundred forty below zero on the Celsius scale, at midday. The sun was four and a half billion kilometers away, and at its height during Triton’s six-Earth-day diurnal period, cast a pallid glow about as bright as a moonlit night on Earth. From the Neptune neighborhood, Earth was over four hours away, even at the lightspeed of laser and maser transmission beams.
Triton in short was a cold, dangerous, and lonely place to be. Bandicut already knew, even before he got there, that he was likely to be asking himself, repeatedly, over the next two years, what the hell he was doing in such a godforsaken corner of the solar system. At the moment, the answer was self evident, and he hoped he would remember it when the going got difficult. It was a job—and a good chance to use his piloting skills at a time when good spacing jobs were few and far between. Plus it was deep space, which held a special fascination for him, God knew why. And it was a chance, maybe one in a thousand but a chance nevertheless, to be the one to find a real artifact of alien technology, not just metallic slag, and maybe even make himself rich with the bonuses.
One other thing he knew: he was going to save up a goodly pile of earnings between now and the year 2166. There weren’t too many places to spend it on Triton. So confident was he of his accumulating earnings that he had arranged to channel a full third of it into a trust fund for his only living relative, his niece Dakota Bandicut—twelve years old, an orphan, and his favorite person on Earth. The remainder of his earnings, if he lived to collect it, would give him more than enough money for any easily foreseeable needs of his own.
It would be lonely on Triton. But unlike some of his grumbling shipmates, he didn’t think he was going to mind the loneliness too much. He was pretty much of a loner anyway, and whenever he got fed up with the work, he could always just immerse himself in the neurolink, which was where he found most of his pleasure anyway . . . .
•
Unfortunately, following his actual arrival on Triton, it hadn’t quite worked out that way . . . .
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. . . in the neuro, it was as though he had wings and could change pitch and yaw and roll just by thinking it, maneuvering like a bird with wondrous freedom. It was a skill he’d finely honed; it was the way he’d piloted back in-system, in the Mars and Luna jobs. It was flying the way he loved to fly. But there were certain differences in the equipment and the situation out here, and that was why he was working through the full simulations, to get problems straightened out while he was still on the Triton surface. Except the problems seemed to be getting worse, not better . . .
It was a low, fast surface pass in a light survey ship, the ochre body of Triton filling his view to one side, the full piloting readout directly before him, the scanning-instrument readings to the other side, Neptune a blue reference point behind him at five o’clock. His altitude was reeling down, and he needed to make these course adjustments to a fine degree of accuracy . . . and every maneuver he made seemed to just miss, always a fraction of a second late, and now he had to fire his course outward again to keep from plowing a groove into the moon with his ship, and it was driving him crazy.
/Krackey, is this image-cruncher lagging half a hiccup behind my movements?/
/What’s that, Bandie?/ The voice of his coworker and simulation instructor seemed to vibrate in his head, like a bad acoustic speaker. That wasn’t right, either; it felt as if there was a bad connection in the neurolink.
/I said, the image processor seems to be lagging. Is that lag going to be real in the survey runs, or is the damn sim computer screwing up?/
Krackey’s voice rasped back, /Lagging, you say? Naw, it shouldn’t be. Hang on a sec’, I’ll check. They had a system malfie yesterday, and maybe they didn’t get it all flushed out./
/Great./ Bandicut hesitated, half tempted to just dive into the moon. It was only a sim, after all. Still . . .
/Hang on a sec’ longer, Bandie—/
He hung on, orbiting at a safe distance, thinking maybe he ought to just unplug from the thing until this was straightened out. The whole point of running the sim in neuro was to make it totally realistic, just like flying around the rock in realtime. The last thing he wanted to do was rehearse under misleading conditions and practice wrong habits. If they’d put these sims on the shuttle out, he wouldn’t have had to be wasting everyone’s time with it now that he was on Triton.
There was a crackle of static in his head. He almost grabbed for the abort-cutoff, but then he heard Krackey’s voice through the static, saying, /Bandie, the sim-ops guy is on it, he says for you to just hold tight for another minute or two. You want some muzak or something?/
/Shit no, I don’t want no muzak, I hate that—/
And then the pain hit him, like a flash of fire across the top of his skull, like a blazing poker—
/Bandie . . . you okaaaaay . . . ?/
—and he wanted to scream, but he couldn’t even breathe—
/Bandicooooot, what’s wroooonng—?/
—and then the voice fled, and Triton and all of the readouts with it, and the only escape from the pa
in was by diving into the silence and blackness of unconsciousness
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