***
The terminal was easy to see, against the wall near the engine. A number of aliens clustered around it, and Fordice was training his captured weapons on the aliens.
“Don’t!” hissed BlyerLynn. “Let’s see if this works, first.” She took out her device and worked on it with her fingernails and a thin piece of metal. She crouched down around the door frame, aimed her device, and pressed a button and held it down.
“They’ve stopped moving,” said Fordice. “If they are moving, it’s very slowly.”
“Let’s go,” she said, holding her finger on the button of her device. They carefully, slowly, emerged from the doorway into the engine compartment, and moved carefully to the terminal.
“Why?” asked Fordice.
“Other aliens will look over here and see a bunch of figures standing around. Kill them, and they’d be piled on the ground, and any alien that sees them will get alarmed. Come on!”
Fordice got to the terminal. The aliens had not yet pried off the cover. Fordice quickly entered the commands. BlyerLynn hissed once without saying anything. He finished the sequence and locked it in. A subtle change occurred in the compartment lighting when he did so.
“Come on, we’re on the clock,” said Fordice. BlyerLynn turned off her device and put it away. The two retraced their steps when a shower of sparks erupted from the back wall.
“Come ON!” urged BlyerLynn, grabbing Fordice’s arm and yanking him towards the door. Energy bolts slammed into the walls around them. Fordice felt a searing pain on the point of his shoulder and smelled smoke from his smoldering camouflage cover. He dove through the door and pulled it tight, locking the handle in place with a stray piece of metal. He spied a series of controls near the large opening between the two compartments. Pushing the button with the large ‘down’ arrow on it, he heard the grinding of a large motor. He raced behind the oblongs and wasted no time in getting back to the stairwell.
Oh, damn. How are we going to get up?
Fordice would retell the story of the climb for the rest of his life. At the moment, though, it was exactly like being a walnut trying to escape the jaws of the nutcracker. Between the known aliens who infested the stairwell above, and the presumed aliens chasing them from below, the two humans were sneaking up the stairs as fast as they could.
This is really getting old. I must have been up and down this stairwell four times already.
They were alert for aliens during the long, nightmarish climb. BlyerLynn had her fingers hovering over her paralysis device, ready for instant action, but no alien showed its, well, the nightmare that was a face. Creeping, sneaking, ever upward, alert for the slightest sound from either above or below. Were the aliens still there? Were they lying in wait? Did they leave a rear guard?
Suddenly, they were at the top of the stairwell. Fordice could not believe it. No alien shots after the ones in the engine compartment. No aliens visible. He carefully checked the entire top of the stairwell, crept through the connecting passage, then examined the human compartment.
“They’re gone,” he said. “Vanished. But there’s a lot of broken growth that wasn’t there before. They probably went downhill to recon our side of the wall.”
BlyerLynn grabbed his arm and urged him downward. “Come on,” she said. “We have to go help them!”
“The aliens?”
“No, doofus, the humans! My village!”
Fordice sat down on the ground. “No. I don’t think that will be necessary.”
BlyerLynn stopped and stared down at him. Her fingers twitched around her device. “What won’t be necessary?”
“Chasing the aliens. Remember the radiation? We have to stay above the shields.”
“But that was only on the other side of the metal wall,” she said.
Fordice slowly shook his head. “The metal wall doesn’t matter. Radiation goes right through the walls. Only the shields, and distance, does.”
BlyerLynn stared at him, then jammed her fingers on her device. Since the magic box was set for maximum effect, Fordice fell backwards onto the slope. I wonder if I’m ever going to wake up.
***
Fordice came to with a rush. “Why?” he asked. There was no need to go into long explanation.
“I had a talk with your AI,” she said.
Fordice experienced the same kind of violation and loss that a burglary victim would have.
“I know, I know,” BlyerLynn said. “I had to get the bastard to admit it to me.”
“And?”
“He showed me things. Things he had not showed to you. And I admitted that it had a point. So I came back and turned off my device and let you wake up.”
“Thank you. And I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK,” she said. “They were tolerant of me, but just barely. To them, I was a witch, and therefore dangerous. Still, they were people, and to think of them dying by inches, even now.”
“If it helps, I am haunted by the same horrible dreams, BlyerLynn.”
“Now what?” she asked. “We’re stuck here for a couple of days. Then what?”
Fordice thought. “As soon as the shields are back in place, we’re free to go. I think you’ll like it in my village. The people are a lot more tolerant of different folks—that’s why I stayed there. Until then, we’re stuck up on this peak of land in the middle of a sea of death. Let’s get to know each other a bit more.”
Bill Patterson
Bill writes the Riddled Space series (near-future realistic SF) as has other stories out in the Family of Grifters series and the Paradisi Chronicles. He is the science brains behind Felix R. Savage’s Earth’s Last Gambit; reviewers liken the team to SF greats Heinlein and Asimov. Bill was nominated for the British Science Fiction Association’s Award for Non-Fiction.
Visit http://PattersonBill.wordpress.com for all of his work, as well as sign up for his newsletter to be the first to know about all of his upcoming publications.
He and his wife of a third of a century, Barbara, live in Central New Jersey.
Trouble Aboard the Starship Warden
Steve Peek
Dreams were rare in the beginning. They said he would neither dream nor remember anything from his old life, but dreams and flashes of memories sometimes came. At least when he first entered hibernation aboard the great ship.
He was not told the CAS-9.911 DNA process accelerated mutations which changed his physical body.
Since emerging from deep hibernation, he dreamed more often. The dreams were pleasant, always about his friendship with the Warden.
The first time, the Warden woke Travis to repair an area on the hull corroded from long term exposure to unknown radiation. Travis moved along the corridors and bays, drifting, weightless, following the Warden’s directions. He loved feeling needed and demonstrating his new repair skills.
The Warden provided Travis everything. There was no better friend. When, during the brief periods of wakefulness, Travis lost physical contact with the ship, as he drifted freely toward his destination, he became confused, frightened, anxious the Warden abandoned him. But when he again touched the ship, his calm, a sense of purpose and happiness returned. He was at one with his friend, Ward.
Once, upon returning to his station, Travis wanted to talk to Ward. Travis had questions.
Ward’s way of conversing centered around transmitting minute pulses of microwaves to Travis’s nerve center. In the before, this communication would not have worked because Travis’s brain was far too complicated and amok with possibilities. A large portion of what had been his brain mutated millennia ago to work with what had been the pineal gland and some other parts of his head. This rearrangement of organs functioned to produce plasteel from Travis’ body fat, which comprised the bulk of him. His ability to extrude instant hardening plasteel made Travis the perfect crew member to put things back together.
Ward reassured Travis they were friends forever. They were more than friends; a symbiosis welded them together
forever.
Travis grew excited when Ward mentioned ‘welded.’ He no longer remembered himself before the Warden. But he knew he must have loved welding, bonding things together, before the Warden. That must be the reason he felt he was so good at repairing the ship by oozing plasteel from one set of pores or another onto the ship’s surface, or machines, or anything Ward told him might break.
After performing a duty, Travis would flatten out, putting as much of his pliable surface on the Warden’s deck as possible. The more of him that touched the deck the easier it was for Ward to nourish and entertain him. He possessed no sense of time, but after a while, probably a long, long while, he found himself gently drifting into hibernation mode where he would remain until his friend needed him.
***
Lawrence Astrides Smith lived among the wealthiest families on Earth. His father’s position as a junior vice president of the security systems department, technology advancement division of The Corporation insured Law, as Lawrence liked being called, would always enjoy the life of a luxor in the Warrens surrounding the once thriving cities of Earth. His father’s position and high-level associates insured Law’s acceptance to the finest schools until he graduated at the age of twenty-eight and became a junior executive assistant in some sub-section of The Corporation.
Law should have been happy. Everything he needed, and pretty much everything he wanted, was delivered via the penthouse’s hyper-tube within minutes of ordering it using his implanted nano-processor linking him to the world. Of course, whatever popped out of the hyper-tube became no fun, obsolete, and a useless piece of junk within half an hour of arriving at the posh residence.
Law’s parents praised the government’s One Child program. Law was an unlikable, spoiled shit within, it seemed, weeks of his birth. Too often, Law’s mother considered putting him into the hyper-tube and sending him back. Back to where didn’t matter so much as just creating his absence in her life. He grew too quickly and she realized she could no longer execute the fantasy. His parents learned to tolerate him, most of the time. When they could not tolerate him, they ignored him, and, on a few isolated unbearable episodes, placed him in a ‘time out force field.’ The force field was his father’s brainchild. It was developed by The Corporation’s Security Department as a transportable isolation cell for law enforcement agencies. The one he ‘tested’ at home held Law within a four-foot diameter circle and no one outside the circle could hear a thing.
Law’s father thought about using it more often, but it pulled enough power that twice the building’s maintenance board queried him. So, nothing was unlimited, especially power and the cell drew too much attention in a world consumed with anticonsumerism.
The parents and Law settled into an unhealthy, dangerous family dynamic. Dad and Mom tried their very best to pretend Law did not exist and their unloving son escalated his tantrums and negative activities until they had no choice but to accept their ugly reality and deal with their genetic menace.
Law’s parents took solace knowing it wasn’t long before their son would be taken away to higher learning. The legal responsibility for their son ended in less than eighteen months. They longed for that grand day.
As his departure date neared, Law’s outrageous acts of delinquency increased in frequency and intensity. It was when he began starting fires in the mag-train tunnels and the parks on the land above the trains, did authorities take note.
Law’s fires were fabulously inventive. They were also furious infernos. He was caught by security forces after a particularly hot blaze threatened to melt the Tesla receivers powering the magnets which propelled the train.
His father’s position in the Corporation kept him from the full brunt of the criminal justice system. Law’s rosy future ended before it began. His mother would not allow her husband to abandon their son completely. Calling in every favor owed him and contributing a large sum of money, Law’s father secured a place for Law in the crew’s hibernation chambers of the soon to be launched Starship Warden, the largest thing ever created by humanity.
Law’s catatonic form slumped in a wheelchair as he entered one of the warden’s crew chambers. A team placed him on the hibernation table and administered the CAS-9.911 DNA Modification Procedure. The team knew everything about Law’s background. They snickered and made fun of what the brattish boy would become over the next thousands of years of hibernation. The team hoped he might remember being human but knew he would not.
The team of young genetic researchers knew a lot about CAS-9.911. They knew it was ninety-nine-point eight percent accurate in predicting the outcome of its mutations. They knew that, so far, of the point two percent of the cases that were less than accurate, though the mutations continued longer than predicted, the outcome remained within model parameters to deem the procedure safe and successful.
Then again, the long-term layering of mutations of the Warden’s crew members was unique, so the CAS-9 team accepted the remote possibility the DNA procedure might – just might – create a monster.
When Law awoke, the remaining portion of his thinking brain function could not conceive of a monster, let alone know he was one.
The CAS-9 team’s goal was fairly straight forward: Mutate Law’s DNA to produce a living thing which produced and processed chemicals already present in a human body. The cellular structure was altered to cause the body to increase and store a higher level of magnesium, potassium, iron, and copper. The liver, grown to twenty times its normal size, as well as the endocrine system, processed the chemicals radically differently than normal human bodies and deposited them into compartmented stomachs created from the digestive system. The lungs were altered as well as the kidneys and bladder to work with the compartmented stomach and redesigned intestines to converge and create four, closely spaced, enamel covered sphincters. The concept was to create a controllable living entity capable of providing a constant level of heat so long as it was attached to a source of various chemicals.
Like everything else in Law’s life, nothing went as planned. The early mutations produced the desired change, but instead of stopping as predicted, something caused the mutations to accelerate. Law’s new amorphous form occupied a body weighing nearly a ton. It locomoted by undulating and lifting various parts of its underside to inch forward before lowering its crushing weight and attaching itself via suction to the surface. As it moved, millions of pores, created from what had been hair follicles, sensed and absorbed needed chemicals from the surface. So long as Law’s underside held to a mineral object, it extracted chemicals to process for later use.
Essentially, Law mutated into a creature capable of shitting fire. Not just any fire, but an extremely hot one. His system produced and excreted streams of chemicals that, when contacting one another, created an exothermic reduction-oxidation reaction, or more simply, a fire burning upwards of three thousand degrees centigrade. When Law mixed in the long continuous blasts of air from his reinvented powerful lungs, he was nothing less than an uber-flamethrower capable of burning through almost anything, including Duralloy, the Warden’s primary structural material.
If this were not bad enough, Law’s new existence carried forward one trait from his past – a constant anger. His underlying rage stemmed from no specific cause and aimed at no specific target. He was mad at the world and, at the moment, his world was the Warden.
While experimenting with new senses and learning how to control his movement, he felt the urge to fart. What emerged was no gentle bubble of methane but rather a white-hot blast. Though its duration was less than a second, a small hole halfway through the deck occupied the area of the intense flatulence.
The material so far sensed by his pores contained very little of the necessary chemicals to maintain his health, let alone grow larger. Something about growing larger drove him on a primordial level.
It wasn’t long before all of his bladder/stomachs were aching for food.
While pulling himself over an obstacle, another igniti
on of lava-hot flatulence burned through the substance beneath him. Almost immediately he sensed food.
Melting more of the object beneath him, he lowered himself, secured the suction cups on his underside onto a subsurface. When these mutated pores locked into place, they automatically began extracting nourishment. In a few seconds, sensing the object below was depleted, he unlocked the suction cups and undulated forward, back down onto the deck, then, in a few minutes, climbed another obstacle and executed another searing fart to drain another object on the subsurface.
It was a painstakingly slow acquisition of nourishment, but until he discovered something more substantial, he continued the process.
Law extracted chemicals from the thirteenth obstacle when something touched his top side.
***
The largest known asteroid, Psyche, became the home of the JAXX Consortium late in the twenty-second century. Mining commenced within three months of the engineers slowing the asteroid’s spin rate.
Psyche is a collision formed asteroid believed to be part of a much larger, planet sized object named Vesta which was destroyed during the formation of the solar system. The surface of Psyche’s two-hundred and sixty-four-kilometer diameter body presents areas containing crust from Vesta.
While Psyche’s crust areas became of significant interest when astrogeologists first became aware there was a 94% probability it contained significant deposits of water and oxygen. Psyche, the largest metallic, or ‘M,’ type asteroid, contained iron, nickel, manganese, and titanium but the asteroid’s orbit and spin were erratic because of its relative nearness to Jupiter during twenty-five percent of its year. Psyche failed to make a list of the first one hundred asteroids scheduled for exploration.
That all changed when analysis lander probes indicated Psyche contained large amounts of gold, iridium, silver, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, and ruthenium. The asteroid’s value was estimated to be more than seven times the total precious metals on earth. The gold rush was on.
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