by Tara Basi
The Maxinquaye’s medical scanner gave Mina a clean bill of health, though her exercise regime had to be intensified to get her ready for any flight home. Under the old plan she would have had months of convalescence back on Earth, now she had to hit the ground running, or at least walking, slowly. That meant spending even more hours on the Small Business having her muscles tortured. It was the same for everyone. Only Anton escaped the torture.
While their shuttle was wrestled into shape by Grain and his men, Mina concentrated on getting the little ship’s system back online. There had been huge advances in technology and science in the seventy-five years before the monoliths had arrived. The Small Business crew were spoon-fed the best bits by mission control during the years they’d been awake. No time was wasted on theories that turned out to be wrong or on dead-end technologies. Mina had kept Trinity as current as she could within the limits of the hardware she had to work with. Now, on the Maxinquaye, she had access to very latest hardware and she could rebuild Trinity.
Despite the progress they were making Mina knew she was missing something, something important. Then, quite unexpectedly, it came to her during one of Cole’s regular briefings.
“Another couple of days and the shuttle will be ready for a test flight,” Grain announced to the assembled gathering, Sara, Greg, Anton, Cole and Mina. Grain didn’t seem his usual charming self, the smile had gone. He looked drawn and haunted. His relation with his men had changed as well in the last few days. They weren’t laughing or kidding around as much, and when they did, it had a desperate edge.
“Greg, Sara any news?” Cole asked.
“Nothing new, no signals, no signs of life, and those things just carry on flying back and forth, like clockwork. We’ve been taking a much closer look at the area surrounding the monoliths; they’re all ringed by what look like fences.”
“Man made?”
“I would guess so, they’re set about fifty kilometres out from the monolith.”
“Something to do with census, Anton?”
I don’t know, sorry.
“What do you think Sara?
“Like I’ve said before, we’ll learn nothing more from up here. We have to get down to the surface or visit the spot near the moon where the oblong things appear,” Sara answered. The same answer she’d been giving for the last few weeks.
“From a planetary perspective, no change. It’s like the garden of Eden down there, without the people,” Greg added, with a smile.
“Understood. Mina, what about the systems’ side?” Cole asked
“Remember telling me how you faked your death on the station’s HR system, and that seemed to work?” Mina asked Anton, ignoring Cole’s question.
“Yes,” Anton said, slightly caught off guard.
“It could mean there’s a virus in the Maxinquaye system. Did you find it?” Mina asked hopefully.
“Oh, no, didn’t look. Not really my field. Why are you asking?” Anton replied, puzzled by Mina’s questions.
“I’ve been thinking, something accessed the HR records on the space station. It could still be there, and if I can find it we might learn something.”
“But the main systems are all up and running. Is that safe?” Anton replied, suddenly alarmed.
“Why didn’t you mention this before, we should shut everything down,” Cole exclaimed.
“Should be fine, there’s no external comms but if there is a virus, it could infect the Small Business and the ship we’re rebuilding.”
“That’s just great. Can you find it, neutralise it?” Cole demanded.
“Yes, probably, give me a day,” Mina replied, already working on the options for the search in her mind.
Greg looked terrified, “Jesus, we could be called up, the census, something could already be on its way to get us,”
“So? Thought we were supposed to go with the flow? Acquiesce to God’s will,” Mina barked, infuriated by Greg’s hypocrisy. She threw her hands up in disbelief and turned to leave.
“This has to be your top priority, we’ll meet again in twelve hours,” Cole called after Mina who was already floating out of the room.
“It’s a top-of-the-range military-grade worm, with a twist,” Mina started to explain to the reassembled group twelve hours later.
“You found it? What’s the twist? How did it get there?” Cole fired back.
“Is it alien?” Sara threw in.
“It’s one of ours, nothing alien about it, except it was sending the data collected as an email attachment to every spam bot in the world. The bots passed it on to millions of addresses. Probably only one was actually expecting the message. Impossible to trace.”
“Is it dealt with?” Cole asked.
“Yes, it’s harmless, there is no internet any more, no signals, nothing. The worm had nowhere to send anything. It was completely passive, just collected and posted specific data, personnel records.”
“That’s all? What was the point?” Sara asked.
“An inventory, a list, of everybody in the world,” Anton whispered, uncomfortable with remembering. “The census.”
“Stop worrying. I’ve taken the bugger to bits and hardened all our defences, including Trinity’s and the shuttle’s. Nothing like it, or even smarter, is going to get through my firewalls. And, I’ve added a few top hacking tools of our own.” “Hacking stuff?” Greg asked, looking slightly uneasy.
“Might get a chance to infect one of those monoliths or an oblong, get some payback if not some info,” Mina proudly explained.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. You know, I really think we should consider leaving them alone,” Greg answered, looking agitated.
“Are you mad? How can we ignore them? Cole said to Greg, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Greg, we’re only having a look around, we’re not going do anything till we know a lot more,” Sara said, trying to soothe Greg.
“When will the first shuttle be ready?” Cole asked Grain.
“A test-flight’s scheduled for tomorrow and then we should be ready to leave, in say, seventy-two hours. The bigger freighter should be ready to fly in a couple of weeks,” Grain answered, without much enthusiasm. Grain still looked distracted.
“If we had to defend ourselves how are we placed,” Cole asked Grain.
“The Maxinquaye’s got a reasonable arsenal, assault weapons, side-arms and the like. The Small Business has the real fire-power, six moon-busters in the military section,” Grain answered, surprising everyone.
“They’re illegal, banned, you bastard. How come they’re on our ship?” Mina demanded. She looked angrily to Cole.
“I’m the commander for god’s sake, I didn’t know. What are they doing there?” Cole asked, looking genuinely shocked.
“Same as me and my unit, some kind of experiment. I wasn’t supposed to know either,” Grain answered, shrugging his shoulders.
“Bullshit,” spat Mina.
“It isn’t worth fighting over,” Sara interjected “Whoever put those evil things on our ship is long gone. Besides, they’re not much use unless we want to kamikaze the Earth.”
Mina smiled sheepishly and said, “Sorry, you’re right.”
Later, when Mina was alone, she returned to the puzzle of why the worm in the Maxinquaye systems was so familiar, and performing such a simple task. It left her feeling uneasy, had governments been involved, the UN? That didn’t make any sense, the authorities already had access to the records, why use a worm?
“The worm, any ideas on where it came from?” Mina asked the new, much improved Trinity in the privacy of her Maxinquaye cabin. New Trinity, two point zero, was no bigger than a pack of playing cards and had thousands of times the computing power of the two metre-square metal box on the Small Business that housed the old Trinity.
“You killed my dad, you bitch,” Trinity answered with mock anger.
“What?” Mina replied in surprise, immediately having third thoughts about keeping her self-developed i
nterface.
“I forgive you, but I just wanted you to know, it wasn’t nice what you did,” Trinity replied.
“Your ‘dad’ is not dead, idiot computer. Your stupid ‘dad’ is happily spinning away on the Small Business. Now, can you answer the question?”
“Oh joy. Can we visit, why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Answer. The. Question,” Mina hissed through clenched teeth.
“Touchy. The worm’s familiar because it has to interact with our systems. Probably copied from one of ours but doesn’t mean it is one of ours.”
“What does that mean?”
“It could mean their systems, whoever they are, use a human style computing shell, which could be attacked. And when you see my dad, could you give him a big wet kiss from me?”
Just as she’d thought, whoever, or whatever, sent the worm might be vulnerable to her hacking tools, she just needed a connection.
“And listen, you don’t want to mess with these things; they’re the dog, big bad dogs, and you’re a flea,” Trinity added.
“Fleas can drive dogs mad,” Mina answered and switched Trinity off.
The next day Cole took the shuttle out for its maiden flight, a short jaunt around the Small Business, safely hidden from the things on Earth’s surface by the bulk of the Maxinquaye. The trip was uneventful, just as they’d all hoped.
The day afterwards every one reassembled to finalise their make-shift plan for getting back to Earth, and, maybe, saving the world.
“Where are we going?” Sara asked out of the blue.
“What?” Cole answered, surprised by Sara’s question before he’d even had a chance to open the meeting.
“It’s a big planet, or had you forgotten? We don’t know what we’re looking for; we should at least have a known place to start. So where’re we going first?” Sara pressed.
Where to start nosing around involved a lot of debate. It came down to a couple of simple parameters. Common sense dictated it should be somewhere any surviving locals they might stumble across spoke English, or another mainstream language, which ruled out two of the giant monoliths. A landing site reasonably close to a major city seemed logical, which eliminated another three.
“So, finally, it’s agreed, we’ll land in open country between the capital and thing number seven,” Cole said, obviously exasperated such a simple matter had taken so long to decide. “I’ve considered the risks and Grain and Mina will take this first flight. They’ll be on the ground for just eight hours.”
“Why those two, what about me?” Sara immediately blurted out.
“Any systems still working might tell us what’s been going on, so Mina needs to go, and Grain will provide security. So, next time Sara, we don’t want to take unnecessary risks,” Cole answered.
“You want to know what’s going on, right? I can get those answers, but not from up here. Besides, I’m an experienced pilot, either of you fly?” Sara asked, defiantly taking in Cole, and then Grain and Sara with a look that told Mina she was not going to back down.
“Really, you fly? If your file checks out then you have a point, auto-pilots fail, there’s always the unexpected,” Cole conceded and, looking at his watch, continued, “You’ll need to spend as much time as you can in the exercise machines between now and departure. You’ve got forty-eight hours.”
As the meeting wrapped up and they started drifting away Greg pulled Mina to one side.
“You think we’re doing the right thing? Is it what God would really want?” Greg asked with a tormented look in his eye.
Mina’s first reaction was to say something acerbic but when she looked into his face she felt her anger melt away. She’d seen that look before, in Doug’s eyes.
“Look, don’t worry; we’re not going do anything, just take a look around. OK?” Mina answered, then squeezed his shoulder. Greg’s still looked troubled as he turned away.
With her muscles wrung up so tight they continually screamed in protest, Mina sat in the freighter, trying to relax and keep the cramps out of her calves. All of that pain just so her legs would be strong enough to support her own weight. Something she hadn’t experienced for ten years. To her left was Sara and beyond her, Grain. Their transport was more delivery-van than truck sized. There were five seats up front and a hold in the back.
Mina was frightened and excited that she was finally going home. Not the homecoming or the home she had dreamt about but it still gave her a thrill to think she would soon be standing on terra firma, a hundred years after she’d left. Assuming they were not shot out of the sky on the way down. Grain looked surprisingly relaxed, almost fatalistic. His usual smile had been permanently erased, while Sara was breaking out in smiles whenever she imagined no one was looking. It was obvious why Sara was here but why had Grain volunteered? She was going to have to keep an eye on both of them. Trinity was tucked away in Mina’s space suit, thankfully muted for now. She didn’t like being trussed up again in the awful costume but at least she wasn’t outside and didn’t have to wear the helmet, just keep it ready, at her feet, if anything went wrong.
The three explorers sat quietly waiting for Cole to complete his checks and start the countdown. Once they left there would no communications until they returned. Everyone agreed they should keep quiet for a while longer, at least until they knew a bit more.
“What shall we call her, this ship?” Mina blurted out, suddenly realising their little ship didn’t have a name.
Grain, unexpectedly, suggested, “Piglet,” and, for a moment, he smiled. “That’s so cute,” Sara squealed.
“Piglet? Not something more macho, like Thor?” Mina asked, surprised by Grain’s suggestion.
“I’m a big fan,” Grain answered, deadpan.
“Piglet it is, and may God bless all who sail in her,” Mina announced just as Cole started the countdown, the last the time they’d be hearing from him till they got back.
Mina could hardly feel Piglet separating from the Maxinquaye as it headed off to a lower orbit. She thought to herself that it felt a bit daft going to save the world in a ship called Piglet. Stupid name or not it was a powerful craft, capable of flying long distances through the Earth’s atmosphere and returning them to the Maxinquaye. Mina twisted in her seat and looked back at the space station, it seemed to be the one pulling away, eventually shrinking to nothing in the distance.
They had nothing to do while Piglet’s auto-pilot spiralled them carefully down to the chosen landing spot, open fields a hundred kilometres to the north of gigantic monolith number seven. They would be well outside the fence and about the same distance from a large city that was completely intact, but deserted. The landing was timed for sunrise. Mina was enjoying the view of the Earth as it floated up to meet them. She was lost in nostalgic reflection when an alarm sounded, then another, then another.
“Auto-pilot failure, flight systems failure, engine systems…” the flight console announced, as though it was giving a weather report, before falling completely silent.
They were still fifty kilometres up and suddenly plunging faster than was right. Mina’s heart sank, almost as fast as Piglet was falling out of the sky.
“Can you do anything,” Grain shouted over the din of the alarms.
“I’ll try,” Sara screamed back as she grabbed the controls.
Mina could see that Sara was struggling. The rate of descent hadn’t slowed and a faint glow outside was brightening as air friction started to bite at the ship’s hull.
“Most of the controls are completely dead, I’m only just keeping its nose up, there’s limited power. Strap yourself down, put on your helmets, I’m going to fire the crash-landing thrusters and drop her down,” Sara shouted, with surprising authority.
Before Mina could even ask how that was possible when they were still in the stratosphere, a giant kicked Piglet in the belly, really hard. The sudden feeling of having weight again and the bone wrenching impact of the floor flying up, pushing her knees towards her chin, kn
ocked Mina unconscious.
When she came around she saw they were gliding only a few metres above the ground, a smooth dark plain and only seconds away from touching down.
“Oh, shit,” Mina gasped. It was obvious Piglet was going way too fast. The ship smashed into the plain with ferocious force. Mina’s head almost vanished into her chest. Her spine compressed like an accordion. They were skidding along at a crazy speed. Sparks lit up the air all around them. Mina was amazed, Piglet had made it down in one piece and so had she. Why weren’t they slowing? Piglet was barrelling along at an outrageous rate, shaking as though it were about to disintegrate. Ahead the same featureless plain that was keeping them alive stretched to the horizon. Was it featureless? In the far distance, and rapidly approaching, was a line that looked like an edge.
“Can you see that ahead, what is it?” Mina shouted.
No response from Sara who was still wrestling with the controls. Grain also remained silent, he had a death grip on his seat and was staring directly ahead.
“Can’t you hear me?” Mina shouted. She looked down at the displays in her helmet, most of her suit systems appeared to be dead, including her radio, only basic life support were still functioning. Mina unlocked her visor and cautiously slid it up, Piglet seemed airtight despite the serious mauling of the continuing crash landing. She tapped Sara’s helmet and indicated she should lift her visor. Grain followed when he saw what the others were doing.
“What’s happening?” Mina shouted over the din of scraping metal.
“We’ve landed on the roof of seven,” Sara screeched back above the din of Piglets washing machine rattle. She pointed ahead, “That’s the end and then it’s twenty-three kilometres straight down.”
“Is there any way to slow us down?” Mina hollered back.
“Grain, try manually lowering the landing gear, use the emergency crank,” Sara said pointing to a small red hatch in the floor.
