Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi

by Adams, David

  Moments later, the groans subsided.

  “Ow, fuck!”

  With a start, Liao realized she’d taken Summer’s hand in a rough, fearful crush. Liao released it and made a distinct point of brushing down her uniform.

  “Sorry.”

  Still slightly shaken by the memory of her experience–the powerful mental image of being buried under a mountain of sand in a broken and desolate alien vessel haunting her for a moment–Liao took a moment to compose herself and returned her focus to the task at hand.

  Liao nodded to the group. “Let’s move.”

  Rowe gave her a sour look, cradling her fingers. They continued on, the minutes dragging by as they cautiously, carefully moved deeper into the ship’s superstructure. No light sources or power signatures were to be found, although the dust and damage from weathering became less noticeable the farther in they went. Based on the slight slope in the ship’s corridor, and their best estimates as to what section they were in, Liao guessed they were moving towards the central core of the Toralii ship.

  The four of them had just passed what appeared to be a number of crew quarters when Cheung held up her hand to signal a stop. She put her finger to her ear, pressing it against the metal wall of the bulkhead. Liao glanced at Summer, who shrugged. She couldn’t hear anything.

  “What is it?” she finally asked, her quiet voice echoing in the long, empty corridors.

  Cheung pointed at a particularly rusted section of wall. “Moving air,” she said, gesturing from the ceiling to the floor. “Running from top to bottom here.” Cheung moved across to the other wall. “And another current here, moving from bottom to top. I can definitely hear it, Captain.”

  Summer shrugged. “I don’t hear anything, but then again, I reckon my ears are wrecked from a childhood spent eagerly listening to death metal at harmful volumes.”

  Frowning, Liao regarded the otherwise plain walls, pondering the air currents and their possible causes. Contractions and expansions in the metal as the heat from the day warmed it, causing air currents around in adjoining rooms? Or perhaps something else?

  "Is it an active system?”

  Cheung shook her head. “The movement’s too consistent to be anything other than a mechanical system, but I can’t hear anything else. No moving parts, no fans. If there really is something deliberately doing this, it’s either completely quiet or much farther down in the ship.”

  Liao nodded, reaching out and gently rubbing her hand across the rusted metal. “Down, possibly. Could there really be something that still works?”

  “Who knows.” Summer reached out towards the wall. “Seems solid, though.” She gave the metal a firm rap with her knuckles. The moment she touched the rusted, damaged bulkhead, it cracked and broke away, several chunks about the size of her fist crashing down farther into the ship. Revealed was a large empty pipe, a foot in diameter. The corridor was filled with a gentle breeze from the hole and a loud clattering as the metal tumbled downwards into the darkness.

  Liao’s radio crackled. [“Captain, this is Saara. We heard a noise. Is everything okay?”]

  Blinking, Liao put her face near the hole in the wall, enjoying the gentle rush of cool air leaking from the pipe. “Saara, everything’s fine. Rowe is just clumsy, that’s all.”

  “I am not clumsy!”

  [“Very well, we shall proceed. Advise her to be cautious. This ship is in poor condition.”]

  Liao glanced at Summer. “I’ll tell her.” She released the talk key.

  Summer gave a dismissive snort. “How about you advise her to stop being such a fucking bitch and to mind her own business?”

  Liao fixed a firm stare on Rowe, her hand resting comfortably on her radio. “She’s right, You shouldn’t touch what you can’t afford.”

  “It’s a fucking pipe.”

  “It’s a functional part of this ship, which means it’s by far the most interesting and valuable thing we’ve discovered so far, and—”

  “Quiet!” Cheung hissed,

  holding up her fingers for silence.

  Obediently, the two women stopped quarrelling.

  Liao noted that the Marine had her submachine gun pressed firmly against her shoulder. Cheung was deathly still, her head slightly inclined as though trying to find a faint noise.

  Then everyone else heard it, too. The rhythmic clank of metal on metal, followed by a scraping, dragging noise and the faint sound of voices.

  “Cover!” Liao hissed, dragging Summer into a nearby doorway with one hand and unbuttoning and drawing her sidearm with the other. Cheung and Li moved into the opposite doorway, their weapons held in front of them, their affixed torches shining down the corridor like a ghostly pair of chopsticks grabbing at nothing.

  [“Blasted planetary tremors cracking the venting pipes. As if I don’t have enough to worry about! How am I going to spare the metal to fix this, mmm? You just answer me that!”]

  The voice, thin and metallic but full of life, drew closer, echoing eerily in the spacious corridors. Liao and Summer exchanged a glance, the redhead shrugging. Liao kept her torch pointed down the corridor, her pistol by her side, ready if she needed it. In addition to the voice, there was a secondary, lesser sound; the faint clinking of metal on metal echoing down the corridor, as though a half-dozen giant metal fingers were tapping along the floor of the ship.

  From around a nearby junction came a squat, metallic, spider creature about the size of a horse, pitted and dotted with patches of rust. Rather than being sleek like most Toralii technology, it was blocky and functional and almost too large for the corridor, as though it had been built to perform work outside of the ship instead of inside it. As it walked, its right foremost leg dragged behind it as though it were damaged, and the left rear leg was missing entirely. Atop its back was a securely stowed stack of half-metre square metal plates, clamped on securely by thin strips of metal.

  The spider creature spotted the light of their torches, all of its various optics swivelling towards them in alarm, its clamps raised defensively.

  [“W-what?!”]

  It was speaking Toralii. Liao lowered her sidearm, stepping out into the middle of the corridor. “Blast it, we need Saara.” Holstering her pistol, Liao held up her hands to show she wasn’t a threat. While she could understand the main Toralii dialects just fine, she couldn’t speak their language. Was there any way they could communicate with it?

  The robotic creature stared at her in bewilderment, its huge array of sensors pointed in her direction. Each was attached to a distinctly head-shaped protrusion, with what appeared to be a thin slot covered in mesh at the front. Each lens could seemingly articulate itself, moving this way and that, opening and closing protective shutters almost as if the robot were able to, express itself with facial expressions and a remarkably broad depth of emotion.

  Then it spoke again, this time–much to Liao’s surprise–in English, heavily accented with what Liao swore was a comically exaggerated British inflection.

  “Humans? Here?” Its tone grew excited. “Are you Captain Sheng’s men?”

  Captain Sheng… hah. Liao narrowed her eyes at that. For Sheng to claim the title of captain without rank or ship, to simply assume he would be in command when the time to meet his contact came. She knew he had been ambitious, but this was something else, and for some reason it grated on her nerves, aggravating her more than she cared to admit.

  “I am Commander Melissa Liao. Commander Gaulung Sheng has been dead for several months. I am the Captain of the TFR Beijing, and we have journeyed here to assist you.” She stared at the nervous-looking, rusted robot. “That is, assuming it is you we’re looking for. It was you in contact with him, right? Fairly recently?”

  The creature’s metallic voice echoed in the long corridor. “Oh, fairly! Fairly recently, yes, with Sheng. As far as fairly recently goes when you’ve been trapped here for as long as I have! Oh yes, yes, yes. He sent me many useful things. Useful to stave off boredom. Dictionaries. Audio f
iles. Grammar rules. All so when he arrived, we could communicate and he could help me.” It began rubbing its rusted claws together eagerly, looking up at the Humans with what Liao could swear was curiosity painted on its optics. “You're going to help me, yes? Yes? Take me away from this place?”

  Liao glanced over at Summer, who completely ignored her and focused on the little robot, enthralled. She turned back to the spider-robot.

  “That certainly is a possibility. To be honest, we’re not sure what we expected to find here.”

  The construct gave an overly loud laugh. “Well, I don’t know if I’m what you expected, but the only thing of any interest around here is me! Just me! Just me, yes, I’m the only one left, yes. Just me.” It began rubbing its claws together again, looking distinctly nervous. “The others left. Left many years ago. So many years ago… so many. It’s just been me here, since then, me and the ship, and what’s left of the power reserves. I have to say, hah-hah, it’s a jolly grand thing you’ve come along. A jolly grand thing indeed. Power’s mighty low these days, and cooling is a huge problem during the day! That’s what the pipes are for. I built them myself.”

  The robot scuttled over to the large pipe, gesturing wildly at the hole Summer had made. He reached over onto his back, withdrawing a small metal plate. With the rest of his working legs, he began scurrying over to the bulkhead until he was beside the damaged area, affixing the metal plate over the hole and sealing it with a bright flash of light. The metal plate glowed for a moment then seemed to sink into the rest of the metal, like a block of cheese dropped in a fondue pot, melting and becoming one with the damaged metal. In seconds it was like the great rusted hole never existed.

  The creature began to shuffle back down the corridor, chattering as it went. “It’s a good thing you didn’t come here at night, friends, because the automated defense probes would be active! Oh, oh, that would have been bad.” It settled back on the floor and cast its eyes over their weapons, its little claws sinking slightly. “So very bad, especially if that’s all you brought.”

  Thank the heavens for small mercies. Liao decided that, given her absolutely rotten luck over the last few months, a bit of a break was long overdue. She looked across at the creature.

  “What shall I call you? What’s your name?”

  “Pardon?”

  The creature looked utterly bewildered at the question, as though it had never been asked such a thing before. "You mean, my identifying number? Construct twelve million, three hundred and eighty nine thousand, eight hundred and eighty."

  "No, your name."

  The robotic creature's optics fixed on Liao, pausing before answering. "I'm... I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean."

  Liao, thinking it might have been a language issue, tried again.

  “I’m Melissa Liao. That’s Summer Rowe, Yanmei Cheung, and Li Tian. What is your name? What do they call you?”

  The crab-like robot just stared at them in confusion, hesitating before answering. “I… don’t have one. Why would I need one? Names are for organics. I don’t need… no. I don’t have…” Its voice trailed off.

  Summer gave a barking laugh, fearlessly approaching the large machine and reaching out a hand to pat at its rusted metal head. “Well, you know what? That’s fucked up, that is. Hell we give names to dogs, or cats, or even pet rocks. How about,” she considered a moment, putting a finger to her lips, “Voldemort?”

  Liao stared. “No.”

  Rowe considered. “Vuen?”

  Liao folded her arms. “Did you get those names from movies?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought as much. This is serious, Summer…” She looked back to the robot, who stared back at her. “Let’s deal with your name later, okay? We have so many questions for you.”

  The robot bobbed its insectoid head, clacking its claws together. “Of course, of course, of course! And I have so many for you, too. So much to ask. But first, uhh…” The small robot seemed again to be nervous. “I’m going to be taken away from this place, right? You’re not going to leave me here?”

  Liao considered the situation. The artificial intelligence in the robot seemed to be a little unhinged, probably owing to his prolonged isolation, but he didn’t seem to be a threat. The naval captain in her wanted to have the creature quarantined at the very least, or observed for some time to determine its true motives, but there was a part of her that felt there was no time for this. Sometimes you just had to trust people—or strange alien robots. She nodded. “If it’s possible for us to do so safely, then I think we can take you with us. No promises, but we’ll see what we can do, okay?”

  The little creature’s claws began to twitch and then, spinning around and around, it released a joyous cry. [“I’m leaving! I’m leaving! After all this time, I am finally leaving this place!”]

  Watching in bemusement, Liao swung her torch around. “What about anyone else? What about the other survivors?”

  The spider-robot stopped, turning back to Liao, holding its claws out plaintively. “They’re gone! Decades and decades ago. The rescue ship came and took them away, leaving me here.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  It seemed difficult for her to understand, given its synthetic nature, but Liao swore she saw a flash of emotion cross the robot’s simplistic features, its claws clacking together angrily.

  “It’s complicated. The Toralii, even the Telvan, believe in the three spheres of awareness: the higher order, the animistic, and the artificial. Although they recognize ‘awareness’ in both animals and the artificial, only the higher order–those that are a sentient, self-sustaining chemical reaction–are recognized as being ‘alive.’ Animals are undoubtedly a self-sustaining chemical reaction, but they are not sentient; at least, not sentient enough for the Toralii. Artificial intelligences, on the other hand, are; but they are not a self-sustaining chemical reaction.”

  “So only higher order life is ‘alive,’ which means when the rescue ship came I was considered no more a survivor than this rusted hunk of metal. They just… they just took any part of my systems that they could use and left me here. My datacore—my brain, if you will—is down in the lower decks. This maintenance drone is just what I’m controlling at the moment so I could fix that leak.”

  “So they just left you here?”

  “Well, they left the rest of the ship, didn’t they? Eh? Eh? I mean, look at all these computers, these supplies. All perished now, of course, but yeah, they just left me here. I wasn’t ‘alive’ to them, so I wasn’t worth rescuing.”

  Nodding, Liao gave a low chuckle, glancing at the others. “Fortunately we don’t have any particular guidelines on rescue based on awareness, but as far as I’m concerned, if you’re intelligent enough to genuinely want to answer the question when asked, that’s alive enough for me.” She took a breath. “We’ll see what we can do. Cheung, inform the other teams what we’ve found, but tell them to keep searching. We want to get our hands on any technology or intelligence we can recover from this wreck.”

  The robot, seemingly almost giddy with relief, clacked his claws together eagerly. “Oh, that will be wonderful, simply wonderful! Thank you! Thank you so much!”

  Liao nodded, a strange smile spreading across her face as she regarded the spider-like creature. “No problem, Ben.”

  Everyone stared at her, including the creature itself, who glanced around at the others as though to see if it had heard what she said correctly.

  “You know. Ben. The guy who gets marooned in Treasure Island.” More silence as everyone stared at her in confusion. “The classic pirate story? Long John Silver and all that?”

  Summer shook her head. “What?”

  Liao threw her hands in the air. “It’s a classic! Don’t you read anything that doesn’t have lasers or magic spells in it?”

  Rowe grinned widely. “Nope. It’s sci-fi, fantasy, and porn for me.”

  Liao rolled her eyes, and the little robot clapped its claws tog
ether with glee. “Ben! Ben, I like it. I like it. Very simple, easy to spell.”

  Liao raised an eyebrow. “We tend to put more thought into our names than spelling, but…” she smiled. “I’m glad you like it. It was that or Ogilvy, the forgotten astronomer from The War of the Worlds. I think Ben suits you better.”

  “War of the Worlds?” Summer laughed, reaching up and patting Liao on the shoulder. “Well, what do you know. I’m proud of you, Cappy-Cap. You finally made a science-fiction reference.” Rowe gestured to the others. “Taught her everything she knows.”

  Liao forced a smile, but there was a lack of mirth in her eyes. The War of the Worlds was one of James’s favourite stories, and he’d encouraged her to read it—twice, in fact. Once when they were in Australia inspecting all the new technology that would later be a part of the Beijing, and then again right as he vanished.

  While she had lain in the hospital, her shoulder bandaged and her mind trying to come to terms with the small life growing inside her, one of the nurses had come around with a crate full of books. Right on the very top, as though calling to her, was a copy of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.

  She had wanted to read it with him, but he had disappeared before she found a chance, so she settled on reading it aloud to the fetus inside her in quiet moments alone in her quarters.