"I see," Altia nodded, "An accelerated process. So the question is, how much time do we have? Do we have enough time to go up to the apex of the mountain structure and get some more supplies?"
"Like you said," Knave nodded, "Difficult to know. The Imperturbable was taken out just minutes ago, I didn't see by what, probably a missile, and I've been feeling impacts through my feet ever since, growing in frequency."
He stopped, bent down, and picked up a small rock. He looked up at the ceiling above, looking in vain for a place it might have come from.
"It seems the impacts have been powerful enough to shake loose some debris."
The whole corridor was then rocked by a tremor, a mist of rock and ice particles was shaken loose and descended on them like snow.
"At the speed this invasion is progressing, I'd put our chances of successfully getting more supplies at fifty-fifty. At best."
"I'm inclined to agree," Altia said.
Her mouth was open to continue speaking, but she was interrupted by a noise from the corridor they had just come down. They didn't see anything, so the noise was probably being transmitted from further away by some strange trick of the corridor acoustics.
"Buzzers?" Altia whispered.
Knave shrugged and drew his blaster. He pointed down the corridor, indicating they should carry on trying to get where they were going. They both started trotting down the corridor. Altia became painfully aware of just how much noise an environment suit could make. Her backpack thumped against her back with a dull bump, her rubberized boots squeaked on the floor, her arms and legs swished as the suit fabric rubbed against itself, the fasteners and flaps on her utility belt jangled, and innumerable other bits clapped and rattled.
"These things aren't exactly built for stealth," she whispered.
"I know," Knave said, smiling despite the gravity of their situation, "but we don't have to be ninja scouts, just stealthy enough to avoid attracting the whole swarm down on our heads."
They reached the elevator room and Altia immediately went to her inscription and started work with her laser tool. What had seemed merely an annoyingly long time to carve a symbol before now seemed like centuries. He wanted to yell at her to hurry, but he restrained himself. The last thing she needed now was him stressing her. Instead, he went to the room entrance and peered down the corridor, his gun already aiming at the spot where the corridor went round a corner and out of sight.
He amplified his suit microphones and almost immediately heard it, a metallic dragging noise. He couldn't imagine what could be making it, one of the Vipers perhaps, but he was pretty sure they had all been destroyed. Whatever it was, it was coming closer, getting louder."
"Almost there," Altia hissed.
"Wait," Knave hissed back.
There at the end of the corridor was a robotic shape he recognized.
"Jay," he hissed, "Is that you?"
The robot just waved.
"Come on in," Knave yelled.
The robot came along the corridor as fast as it could, dragging one leg, which was all torn up and looked to have a badly damaged knee actuator.
"Any way you can change that graffiti to say three beings?" Knave asked.
"All right," Altia said.
Knave helped his robot friend to limp into the center of the room. Altia bent to work again, the little laser torch sending flashes of red light across the dimly lit room, making the wall relief on the far wall seem to move in a jerky dance. Knave's microphone was still turned way up, and he suddenly heard another metallic scratching noise. It was coming from the corridor.
"Was anyone with you?" Knave asked Jay.
The robot shook its head slowly.
"Cat got your tongue?" Knave asked as he went back to take position at the mouth of the corridor.
The robot nodded.
Knave knew it was a bad idea, but he couldn't help but keep glancing away from the corridor to look at Altia, even though he had no real way of gauging her progress. And eventuality he glanced back to see an oncoming Buzzer, already half way along the corridor. He fired by instinct and ducked as far as he could out of sight while still being able to see the hostile alien. He scored a hit, blowing off one of the creature's arms. The creature paused and took time to aim at him.
Knave ducked as a section of the wall he had been leaning against exploded, the force of the blast knocking him skittering across the room.
"Got it," Altia said, as the Buzzer came through the doorway, then suddenly vanished. The corridor was gone too, replaced by the same dark chamber as before.
Then Knave noticed that the Buzzer hadn't completely vanished. It had been almost half way into the room and its head and one of its legs, the parts that had already made it through the door, had been neatly amputated. They were lying, inert near the door. Altia turned away from her freshly carved inscription and saw the remains of the Buzzer too.
"I guess we cut that quite fine," she said.
"Skin of our teeth," Knave nodded.
They stood side by side, the tension slowly draining from their bodies.
"I was hoping we wouldn't be seen when we came down here," Knave said.
"Me too," Altia said, "But the one that saw us is dead, and even if they do work out where we have gone, their understanding of the Drifter language seems far inferior to ours. They have to use brute-force methods to input commands, and as far as we know, the only Buzzer who could do that is dead. They can't expect to easily achieve any results, and the results they do get, it seems, are unpredictable. I think we'll be safe down here for a while."
"Until our air runs out," Knave said.
"Well," Altia said, "I guess we don't have much time to waste. I'll go investigate."
She switched on her helmet light and went through to the other chamber. Knave was about to follow her when he noticed Jay's slumped form.
"You're not doing so good, are you?" he asked.
In reply, the robot just weakly shook its head.
"Your audio us definitely off line. That's for sure," Knave murmured to himself.
He looked around the room, and noticed the tools that Altia had left piled around the vent thing in the center of the floor. He gathered up a handful of likely looking implements and went to kneel by Jay.
He knew a little bit about android physiognomy, mostly from checking over and troubleshooting drones, and soon found the most urgent problem that needed his attention. The line connecting the robot's systems to its primary power supply had been partially severed, meaning he was extremely starved of energy.
Ideally, it would need to be replaced, but no replacements were available so Knave would have to jury rig something. He'd done similar repairs before, but usually with better tools and usually working on the thicker and more robust cables of combat drones.
He took his time, worked methodically, heating and fusing strands of the cable, and some more life seemed to return to the robot.
"I'm going to need some feedback if we're to get you ticking again," Knave said, "So let's see if I can't get you talking."
Knave removed the robot's faceplate and was confronted by a mess underneath. Something had impacted it severely full in the face. The components beneath were split, crushed, torn and irreparable.
"This is going to be tricky," Knave said, "But I've got an idea."
His own environment suit was heavy duty with quite a lot of redundancy. He found a speaker system that didn't seem to be connected to anything vital and transferred it to Jay's lower face.
Once he had it securely in place, it took forever to hook it up. It hadn't been designed for the complex connectors in the robot's face, and they were pretty busted up, needing fine repairs to fix, but eventually Jay spoke.
"Hello world," he said.
"What?" Knave yelped.
He hadn't realized that he was so close to getting the robot's audio working and the words had taken him by surprise.
"It's the traditional first message that should be tran
smitted through any output device," Jay explained, "Don't worry. I haven't lost my marbles. Not according to standard diagnostics anyway."
"Where did you pick up all this damage?"
"I was aboard the shuttle," the robot explained, its speech still modulating, climbing up and down in pitch, "We were coming down from the Imperturbable on Imp 3, to come get you."
"Oh," Knave said, "I didn't think anyone had survived. I didn't even see where the shuttle went down, and I didn't know you were inside, otherwise I would have come and looked for you."
"Just help me fix my leg and all is forgiven."
It was some hours before the leg was working with anything approaching full mobility again. It had a noticeable limp, but they had to give up on it for lack of spare parts.
"It'll do," Jay said, "Hey. Where did Altia go?"
"She went through to the aquarium."
"Aquarium?"
"Yeah," Knave nodded, standing and looking through the dark doorway, "In there."
A light could be seen dancing around the walls, Altia's helmet torch, as her gaze moved from one interesting artifact to another.
"Come on," Knave said.
He drew his blaster and switched on the flashlight that was slung beneath the barrel. It illuminated the same room he remembered from before, but there was no hint of a life form behind the striated ice wall.
Altia was off to one side, examining some seemingly random piece of alien technology.
"Hey there," Knave said, causing her to move her attention from the strange gizmo and towards him, "Can I help?"
"Actually, yes," Altia said, "Oh, hey Jay.”
"Hi," Jay said, raising a busted looking arm in greeting.
“Glad you're better," Altia said.
"What would you like me to do?" Knave asked.
"Do you see this hieroglyph?" she said, pointing and, when Knave nodded, carried on, "It looks a bit like a bird, if this bit here is the wing."
"It's a pretty deformed looking wing," Knave said.
"That's not the important thing," Altia said, "The important thing is that, the first time I looked at it, it had two feathers."
"Now it has three," Jay said, "At least if you ask me."
"Exactly," Altia said, "So unless I'm losing my mind, it got erased and rewritten while I was in the room. But I haven't seen anyone in here with a laser welder."
"I don't understand," Knave said.
"Me neither," Altia said, "This is something new, a symbol spontaneously changing."
"Unless you're losing your mind, you said," Jay mumbled, less than tactfully.
"That can't be ruled out," Altia nodded, "So I checked the video records of my suit, and, what with the lighting conditions down here, I couldn't find an image of the hieroglyph before the change. I can't prove I'm not just misremembering. So Knave, seeing as you offered to help, if you would, could you sit here."
She put one hand on each of his shoulders and pushed him down into a sitting position in front of the symbol.
"You just keep an eye on that, and, more importantly, see if you can get a good image of it with your suit camera and that big, ol' flashlight you've been waving about."
"Okay."
"And give me a shout if it changes, the moment it changes."
"Can do."
"Do you want me to do anything," Jay asked, "Watching unchanging points on the wall is, after all, often considered to be robot work. We're good at it. Not to toot my own horn, you understand. It's a question of concentration."
But Altia was already engrossed in her alien artifact again, a column of metal emerging at an acute angle from the intersection between wall and floor, completely covered in a cascade of hieroglyphs.
"You seem to he a very capable member of the team," she said absently, "A bit of initiative is called for here. Just make yourself useful somehow."
"No problem," Jay said.
Knave was already asleep before the robot had finished the sentence. He dreamed about a lot of strange things, things that he would only start to remember with any clarity a long time later, but one thing united all the dreams - the colors. The colors felt, somehow, more vivid than he was used to. It was like that time he had been controlling drones on a nighttime mission. The conditions had been terrible and the drones were reduced to using a 3D model of the environment that they were creating on the fly from sensor readings. It was enough to target hostiles, but it was no substitute for actual vision. His dreams were like natural vision, after being forced to look at a colorless 3D model of reality for a long time. But there were still things he couldn't see, presences that were actually absences, humanoid in shape, but he knew, the way people know things in dreams, that they were far from human in nature. It was like he couldn't see them, but he suspected the reason he couldn't form a visual impression of them was because he didn't, couldn't, understand them.
He awoke with a start, and, from habit, the first thing he did was check his suit chronometer. It wasn't in the usual place. It had moved from upper right in his field of vision to lower left. It told him he had slept twelve hours.
"Why didn't you wake me;" he said.
But when he looked round for Altia, he saw that she was asleep too, curled up against one of the walls, her ribs rising and falling rhythmically Jay came in from the other room.
"I assume it was you messing with my environment suit's operating system."
"That's right," the robot said, "Altia asked me to make myself useful and the settings on your suits were all wrong. You'll be able to squeeze an extra week out of them with my adjustments."
"Thanks," Knave said.
"You're welcome."
Knave turned to look at the hieroglyph, and immediately saw that it had changed again. He compared it to the picture he had taken before falling asleep and noticed that a few of the hieroglyphs around it had changed too.
"What the," he said, "She was right."
"So she was," Jay said, looking over Knave's shoulder.
"Should we wake her," Knave asked.
"She said she wanted to know immediately," Jay said.
Knave nodded and went over to the sleeping form.
"How much sleep has she had?" he asked the robot.
"She got her head down not long after you," Jay said.
Knave reached gingerly for her shoulder and shook it gently.
"Altia," he said, voice hushed, "You're hieroglyphs are doing strange stuff."
She came bolt upright, her eyes snapped open, making Knave involuntarily recoil backwards.
"Really?" she asked.
"Really," Knave said, "For all the good it does us."
Chapter 17
––––––––
To take their minds off their situation, they all spent the next couple of weeks helping Altia research the aquarium room. They had no particular reason to do this, but there were rewards for their progress. They had an important breakthrough on day two when Altia discovered how to open a door that turned their single-room domain into an entire labyrinth.
They explored the new areas and discovered all kinds of machines that Altia said were completely new, unknown to previous Drifter research. In these new areas, there were rooms where the hieroglyphics were changing so quickly that they were a blur.
"It's like this is the only living part of a dead organism,” Altia said, “If this is a reef, then the rest of the complex is just dead coral and this area is the only place with living organisms."
The most active machines were near the striated ice of the planet's submerged sea, which often formed a wall, here and there, within the complex, and the most active machine of all was built into the ice itself. It seemed to have bronze roots that spread out across the striated ice and even penetrated through it, seen as a shadowy presence, floating this way and that with the submerged ocean currents.
They set up base in front of the machine and often saw dark shapes swim by on the other side of the ice. When one of the shapes swam past, th
e machine went nuts, humming and clicking, as waves of symbols and hieroglyphs swept across the surface.
They decided it was as good a place as any to wait for the end. It was three days, or so, before their supplies of breathable atmosphere and hydration fluid were due to run out. Their food had run out long ago, but, luckily, the suits were well supplied with appetite suppressing drugs.
Knave, as usual, was the first of the two humans to wake up the first morning. He said hello to Jay, who had been keeping watch all night, as had become usual, and went over to the machine. He had started to get comfortable with alien machinery, designed and forged long before his ancestors had come down from the trees, and he gave it an affectionate pat.
"And hello to you, too," he said.
The machine reacted instantly. The surface of it went clear of carved hieroglyphs. They simply melted away as if the metal had been suddenly heated, but Knave was still touching it and there was no change in the frigid temperature.
The clear surface changed again. A single hieroglyph formed right in the center.
Knave looked round at Jay, his face a mask of shock and discomfort.
"Don't move," the robot said, "I'll wake Altia and get us a translation. But, I gotta say, seems to me like it might be saying hello back to you."
Jay woke Altia and pointed. That was all he needed to do. From the look of Knave grabbing onto the ancient machine with just a single hieroglyph in the center of the machine's display panel of liquid metal, she knew it was communicating.
"That translates as..." she paused, "as...Hello, yes, that could probably be something like hello."
"What do I do now?" Knave said, "I don't want to piss it off."
"Don't worry," she said, "If I had to guess, I'd say this is just an automated system, like when your hologram projector says hello to you, just because you switched it on."
Galaxy Dog Page 17
