by Diane Carey
Riding the diamond-flyers, they flew in single file to the next room—there were no real corridors in the ship, they were to discover, just interlinked rooms—and found the door opened for them as easily as a supermarket entrance. They passed through into a chamber just as big but with different functions, judging from the enormous columnar metal pipes passing through it, floor to ceiling, interconnected by snaking horizontal tubes, and gratelike catwalks weaving overhead which were knobbed in places with enigmatic clusters of crystal penetrated with metal rods; the catwalks opening onto railless balconies, probably for the diamond-flyers to land on.
A blue mist clung to the ceiling, blurring it; moisture had collected in dented places in the deck. From somewhere came a mournful sighing that rose and fell—a mechanical sound, Corgan decided. There were only two visible workstations on the walls, but there were other fixtures glowing in the mist, higher up—altogether the room was intriguing, but he forced himself to leave it to the other team and took his group to the farther chamber…
Corgan’s team had drifted on their diamond-flyers to the next chamber and Reynolds was gliding slowly, slowly, behind Dorea Rondell and Immanuel Cruz, aware that they were already, the two of them, moving ahead together, consciously or unconsciously separating from him, willfully excluding him; they were drifting along side by side through the room on the flyers, wending between the vast columnar pipes. He could hear them talking animatedly in low tones, Cruz speculating about the big metal columns, the crystalline knobs overhead.
Exclude me, then, Reynolds thought, exclude me as usual, and see what it gets you. Or better, what it gets me.
He dropped back, letting them go in without him, and then moved off behind one of the big columns, about ten meters in diameter. It should block the sound well enough. He opened the zippered pocket on his spacesuit, took out the signal drone—it was shaped like a penlight, deliberately, so that it could be mistaken for one—and pressed the activation stud. He raised the little wand to his lips and spoke into its receiver. “This is Outsider. We have found the craft and it is penetrable. It is everything we’d hoped for. Trace the drone’s course back… End of message.”
He twisted a ring at the center of the drone, then pressed its activator again—and it flew from his hands, like a magic wand, using the same principle as the hoverboxes—and whipped away between the columns. It would head for the nearest way out. He followed it—he had to get it through the intervening doors, and airlocks, out to the “navel” that had led down to the anomaly’s entrance.
No one noticed his going—they were glad he had dropped back, assuming he was preoccupied with studies of his own…
He flew along on the diamond-shaped plate, and guided the drone through the doorways to the airlock, putting his helmet on as he went, after switching off its camera. He entered the airlock, it closed and decompressed, and passed through to the vacuum outside the door. He watched as the signal drone zipped up toward the stars—quite visible from down here, away from the glare of Saturn. It would find its way to the CANC ship—the EMP devices would have run through their batteries by now…
One of those stars, he knew, was not a star at all—it was the planet Earth, visible from Saturn as a small white dot. It looked like all the other white dots in the blackness of space. Millions and millions of them. Earth was smaller than many. Revealed, from here, as tiny, insignificant.
A man could lose his perspective and then contemplate that little white dot… and realize he was even less than a white dot on the black of space. He was a crawling speck on a white dot…
He shuddered, watched the signal drone vanish into space, feeling strange and not sure why—then he turned and went back into the gigantic metal egg of the alien ship…
4
This room, Corgan decided, was even bigger than the previous two. But it also seemed cluttered, complex, almost impossible to take in all at once. It was at the front, if front it was, of the egg-shaped alien craft, the end of the egg that was facing in the direction the ship was orbiting. There were enormous pipes here, too, but they went horizontally from the front of the chamber toward the back, taking up two-thirds of the space in the room. Several of them twisted into inexplicable knots, partway back. There were panels on platforms emerging from many of the pipes, perhaps for adjusting the levels of whatever flowed through them. The concavely curving interior wall was etched with panels and devices as enigmatic as they were intricate.
The team flew slowly through the room toward the theoretical front—where there was indeed a wide diamond-shaped viewport, and what seemed to be the captain’s bridge, elevated on its own platform about ten meters above the floor.
Corgan’s heart was thudding. He was excited—but part of him was wishing he could find a dark corner and sit down somewhere with his head in his hands and just zone out. He was feeling overwhelmed partly by the discovery, partly by the images he’d seen in the alien workstation holograms. The responsibility for this discovery was incalculable and he could feel it like the gravitational pull of Saturn. And the risk to his crew! The risk was…
It was impossible to guess at the risks, at this point. But his mind’s eye kept returning to that examining table. To the alien—looking all too human in certain ways—with its bulging chest erupting with some hybrid of a fetus and a thing from nightmares. And that creeping xenomorph, its extendible inner jaw, dripping fluids… Clearly the two images were related.
His diamond-flyer landed on the platform supporting the alien ship’s bridge; the controls—probable controls— looked almost like the curving, stacked keyboards of a big church organ, only the keys were fused together. Beresford and Ashley arrived next, both of them stepping off the diamond-flyers onto the platform, gazing out the viewport. Saturn loomed golden-blue on the left, arcing through part of the port. Iapetus, with its equatorial ridge, was curving gray-white across the screen at the lower right.
Was it a screen—or was it a window? He couldn’t be sure, the resolution might be perfect. He thought he saw a faint flicker cross the image—there it was again. So it was a screen. It was surprising how well the ship’s electronics still operated. Did that mean the engines did too? Could this alien spaceship be flown by human beings?
Might he himself be the first human being to fly an alien spacecraft?
Tempting—but dangerous. For just one thing, he might be the first human being to crash an alien spacecraft.
“Hey,” he said loudly, as Collindale joined them. “Nobody gets near those controls… nobody tries to activate them! If they still work you could end up crashing us into the moon there—or Saturn. Or tearing the ship up…”
“No big radiation readings so far, just for the record,” Beresford put in, looking at his hand scanners. “Less than on our own ship.”
The field around the Hornblower that deflected small meteors—intensifying in their paths when it sensed them— also sluiced away solar and planetary radiation. Without that field they’d soon be fried, traveling between planets.
Corgan walked up and down the bridge’s control panels—they were ten meters wide, two high—and his fingers itched to try them. But he just looked. The translucent panels, subtly pulsing with green and violet energies, might be made up of reactive surfaces.
He looked at Collindale, who was running an alloy-analysis scanner. “Picking up anything we even recognize?”
The exogeologist nodded. “Sure, titanium, variants on steel, something that looks like a fusion of plastics and steel at a level that almost makes them indistinguishable… and alloys the scanner doesn’t recognize.”
“I’m getting gamma rays,” Beresford said. “Just indications of them—not the rays themselves,” he added, at the look of alarm on the faces of his fellow explorers. “But it could be related to the drive. And there’s some kind of specialized field projector below this deck… I’m getting a very low-grade field, the kind that’s used to keep a given volume reaction-ready, for when they switch it on full. It�
��d be just set that way… endlessly. So if this thing’s been here centuries, millennia, it’s got a big-ass power source.”
“Field projector,” Ashley said. “Maybe some variant of the Heim field.”
“Probably,” Corgan agreed. “That’d likely be the basic method for getting around in the universe, star to star. Only, theirs will be better than ours—the way a Ferrari is more efficient than a Model T.”
“Kind of overwhelming isn’t it?” Ashley said softly, walking up beside him. “I just keep thinking about CANC… if they get this.”
Corgan nodded grimly. “They’ll kill us for it if they can, to get at something like this. To hell with treaties.”
“And…” She lowered her voice. “I can’t get over what we saw on that computer. That… what’d you call it, a Giff? It’s chest… that thing…”
“I know. Me too. But they’re long gone, whatever they were.”
* * *
“What’s the structural sonar telling you, Cruz?” Dorea asked, as Reynolds drifted up to them on the diamond-flyer. His helmet was once more removed, just as if he’d been on the other side of the room and not outside the spacecraft.
“General shape I’m getting is about ten big rooms of varying sizes organized around a central shaft…”
Reynolds listened to them. He had always felt alienated from the others on the Hornblower but now, in his mind, it was almost as if he was in another room, listening in on them through a surveillance device—he felt separated from them by that much, now, though in actual fact he was standing right there and they were all aware of one another. He had crossed the Rubicon, in signaling his silent partners, and it was lonely on this side.
“But that central shaft doesn’t seem to be a corridor,” Cruz continued, staring into the small screen of the hand-held device. “More like a power conduit.”
They were in the farthest, rearmost corner of the room with the big vertical pipes cutting through it, the catwalks and crystalline nodes. “What’d you think of those lumps of crystal up there?” Cruz asked her. “Some kind of… of debris?”
“No—they’re intentional,” Dorea said. “If that’s the kind of crystal I think it is, I suspect they’re for catching energy leaks from those pipes—and they recirculate the energy back into the ship. Like—radiation recycling.”
She looked at Reynolds, as if noticing him fully for the first time.
“Um—Dr. Reynolds… did you find anything out there? I mean—more clues to the exobio side of things?”
“It’s all the exobiological side of things,” Reynolds pointed out. “The ship is designed by extraterrestrials, after all. And the entire ship is a biological adaptation to space. The life support—well, it’s obvious.” He shrugged dismissively. “I am interested in finding what’s left of their food stores and…”
His voice trailed off as he looked where Dorea was pointing. All three of them stared, gaping. Dorea said hoarsely, “… and of what’s left of them?”
The thing drifting toward them, near the floor, was a Giff alien—or what was left of one. Mummified by time and the lack of microorganisms on the ship, the body was nevertheless desiccated; it was now little more than an alien animal-hide, shriveled inwardly, truncated outwardly, so dried up that it was feather light and in the low gravity it floated near the floor. But they could recognize that it was what was left of a Giff.
“Looks like old roadkill on Earth,” Dorea remarked.
But it was roadkill with an intelligent being’s face; sunken in, like a flattened jack-o’-lantern, turned brown, but a face.
“Where’d it come from?” Cruz wondered, as Reynolds knelt near it, his eyes shining at this, his first tissue sample of an intelligent alien being. “I mean… we were in this part of the room before…”
“The atmosphere in here,” Dorea suggested. “Remember, it was vacuum before we got here. Then it repressurrized. Things got stirred up, churned around…”
“I can get a DNA sample!” Reynolds said, tears in his eyes. “Oh my God…”
He was already fumbling his sampler out of his belt pack, snipping away at the corpse at the least discolored places, putting samples in sterile bio-containers. Cruz bent over the corpse—and then pointed. “Look at that! The head!”
The flattened head was turned to one side, and they could see that the back of the head had been smashed through, as if someone had taken a pickax to it.
“Oh shit…” Dorea muttered. Reynolds supposed she was remembering, as he was, the way the xenomorph in the holo had ripped into the skull of the Giff in the smaller spacecraft.
“Look at this!” Cruz said excitedly, taking a small instrument from a crumbling strap on the withered body. “Some kind of… I don’t know…” He impulsively pressed the button on the side of the oval instrument, tipped with a glass tube—and it gave out a high-pitched whining sound, so high-pitched it was barely audible…
And, in response, a hole opened up in the floor.
The hole was two meters square, and they’d seen no doorway, no seams or edges, it was simply a vacancy in the floor that had formed in the deck. Had the material of the deck disintegrated to make the shape of a square hole?
“Immy,” Dorea said urgently. “Don’t press it again—”
But he already was. And in response the hole in the floor closed up. Watching the process they could see that it was almost as if it had “healed”—material from the surrounding floor had, in an instant, stretched out, spread over the hole, making the deck seamlessly whole again. He looked at Dorea, she at him—then he pressed it once more.
And once more the shaft in the floor opened. A faintly echoing whisper of air rose to them from the hole in the deck.
“It’s a key!” Cruz blurted. “Like, a sonic key! It opens and closes a door, right? Probably for maintenance… Amazing it still has power! We’ve got to figure out their energy storage…” They moved cautiously closer to the hole, and looked down. It was more dimly lit down there but they could see that it descended to a cross shaft. “That shaft looks like it’s something permanent—I got just a glimpse of them from the structural sonar… So when you’re near them, and you press the key, they open.”
“But how do the Giff know when they’re near them?” Dorea said. “It wasn’t marked! Do they memorize it or…”
“Their eyes,” Reynolds put in, gazing raptly down the shaft, “are different from ours. There probably is a mark on the deck here, quite possibly visible in the ultraviolet. It’s possible that they could see it and we can’t. The right goggles and we might see many markings here we didn’t see before…”
“So—do we or don’t we?” Cruz said. “I mean—explore down the shaft, without Corgan.”
“Do as you like,” Reynolds said. “I’m going down…”
Dorea had raised Corgan on the radio. “Yeah,” Corgan was saying, “go ahead, just don’t go far if the radio won’t reach us—if it does reach us, give me frequent reports. I want to hear from you every five minutes, that’s an order.”
“Copy that,” Dorea said.
“Say ‘yes sir!’” He wasn’t seriously upbraiding her—but he was reminding her this was a serious matter.
She grinned. “Yes sir! And over!”
Her grin widened, along with her eyes, as she turned to Cruz. “You musta been thinking what I’m thinking—we’re gonna be media stars back home, man! We’re gonna get to do endorsements! We’re gonna get to buy a big house!”
“I’m gonna buy a house in Antarctica,” Cruz said, returning her grin as he stepped onto his diamond plate. Post global warming, there were a good many high-tone housing projects on Antarctica.
He activated the lift and rode it toward the hole, licking his lips nervously as he hovered over it. The air wafted upward, lifting his hair slightly. Then he activated the descent, and the diamond-flyer dropped slowly into the hole, as if he were taking an elevator down.
Dorea and Reynolds followed him.
They desc
ended into dimness—but not darkness. And into a smell, an acrid, acidic smell, like nothing they’d encountered on the ship so far. Something about it made the hair prickle on Reynolds’s neck.
They descended about fifteen meters and came to a circular passageway, a tunnel about nine meters in diameter, mostly filled by a humming metal cylinder through the passage’s center—along what Reynolds thought was probably the axis of the ship. They had to crouch to fit in the circular passage—it was not intended to be a corridor—and they looked down one way, into the distance, and then the other, and saw only the cylinder, and the grotesque saclike growths that covered the curved interior of the passage, on both sides, as far as they could see.
A silvery mist trembled near the growths—each one of the organisms about a third of a meter high, if that much— and to Reynolds’s eye they seemed…
They looked…
Like they were still alive.
It was too good to be true. Was he really finding a complex living alien organism, in this passageway? Was he going to find a living alien being inside that sac? It could be that these things were egg cases of some kind. Despite their leathery appearance, the closed-blossom shape, something about them suggested eggs… or cocoons.
Could this be some odd sort of incubator, a nursery for the proto-offspring of the beings who’d built this ship? Would he find a fetal version of a Giff in one of those leathery sacs?
But as he looked at them—as he and Cruz and Dorea Rondell stared at them aghast and fascinated both—he felt sure that they didn’t actually belong in this passageway. If they were intended to be here, they’d be fed in some way— tubes or spray ducts, some kind of nursery technology would be visible. Instead the sacs had the look of something you find growing on your house, where it shouldn’t be. Like a wasp nest or—termites, that was it. Like finding termites inside the walls—but on a prodigious scale.
They had to be preserved. They were his discovery—his! They were his ticket to glory. All his life his career had been truncated by jealousy and pettiness from other people, people who seemed to dislike him, to exclude him for no reason at all. Well now he would get his Nobel Prize for biology. He would have his best selling e-book. He would have his chair at Harvard. And these things were going to get all that for him…
