“Surface temperature climbing. Oh.” Pakerson gasped. “A power source just activated inside the cube. Maybe twenty volts. Chemical battery maybe.”
“What chemicals are active at these temperatures?” Jinx mused back.
“What do you mean wet?” Alder asked. “It’s 100 degrees below freezing in there.”
“I’m going to get closer.” Martin’s cameras bobbed and weaved as he made his way through the strange gravity. “It may just be the optics but the surface looked dry a minute ago and now it looks wet.”
“Be careful.” Alder said, pointlessly.
Martin grunted as he struggled through the lumpy gravity to get closer to the nearest point of the cube.
“Is there any water?” He asked.
“No.” Came Pakerson’s tense reply. “But the Oxygen level is rising. Also, some other trace gasses. Surface temperature is up 10k from initial readings.”
Martin’s lights were playing up and down the surface of the cube from about a meter away. “It really looks wet you guys. Are you seeing this?”
Alder grunted. “Yes. The reflectivity has changed. Look around. Are there any other changes in the cube?”
“Hey yeah.” Martin’s lights moved down to the finely formed point of the cube. “There’s a drop forming here.”
As Alder watched, a single drop, black in Martin’s lights, fell off the point of the cube and drifted lazily down to the surface of the sphere below where it vanished in the glare.
“This is tunneling.” Pakerson announced.
Several half remembered papers on low temperature chemistry bustled into Alder’s mind. “Tunneling? Are you sure?”
“It has to be. There are several processes happening here one of which is chlorination of ammonia.”
“It is waking up.” Alder muttered to himself.
“Uh guys?”
“Okay Pakerson, I need this data. Can you ask the sensor array to pass data to your suit? That should get the data sent here.”
“Guys!” Martin’s voice interrupted.
Glancing up, Alder gasped. Thousands of kilometers away but seemingly right before him, Martin’s left hand was in the lights. A tiny dot of the black liquid was hissing and writhing on his fingertip like water on hot grease. Images flashed before Alder’s mind; the incident on solar comet 2196 A. A University of Mars researcher’s self replicating nanobots had gone amok and replicated the entire comet out of existence in a matter of hours.
“Martin, get that off your finger now! You’re boiling it with your lights!” It was too late. With a hiss and a squeal, the nanobots ate through the outer layer of Martin’s suit.
“What the hell man?”
“Don’t hold your breath!” Pakerson shouted. “Let the suit adjust to the pressure loss.”
“Get it off your finger!” Alder shouted. “You’re too hot.”
“I’m too hot? What?”
“Just do it!”
Martin cursed, flung himself down, and began scraping his hand back and forth furiously on the floor of the sphere.
“Turn everything on his suit off.” Alder ordered Pakerson and Jinx who were clumsily bounding up behind Martin.
“Why?” Jinx asked.
“Those are self-replicating nanobots. The hotter they get, the faster they eat.” Cool him off.
The squeal from Martin’s suit was growing and he grunted in pain. “My ears.”
“Just don’t hold your breath.” Pakerson demanded, trying to grab his swinging arm. “Let the suit adjust.”
“I’ve got an emergency bubble.” Jinx offered, pulling at the belt on his spacesuit. “Get him to hold still.”
“Forget the emergency bubble.” Alder barked. “We’ve got to get it off of him first.”
“It hurts.” Martin complained.
“Just keep breathing. Your ears will adjust.”
“No.” Martin protested. “My finger. My finger hurts.”
Pakerson held Martin’s hand up into the light. The drop was gone, replaced by a hissing hole in the index finger of the suit. As they watched, a thin stream of red, frozen instantly by the extreme cold, began jetting out with the gas from inside.
“Hold him still.” Jinx demanded.
“No!” Alder yelled. He swung his head to the right. “Computer! Priority voice authorization. Alder Samuel C. Respond.”
“Lieutenant Commander Alder Samuel C, priority authorized.” The computer responded emotionlessly.
“Sam, what are you doing?” Pilton’s voice jumped on the line.
Alder ignored him. “Computer. This is a level one biological emergency. Subject Martin, Caleb A. is infected with a pathogen type seven, type three, possibly type nine. Confirm.”
The computer began reciting the information back but Alder spoke over it. “Officers Pakerson and Jinx, subject Martin, Caleb A is a level one biological threat as is your environment.” Red lights began flashing around the science bay.” You are to exit the area immediately. Repeat evacuate immediately.”
“What? and just leave him?” Jinx asked.
“Fuck that.” Came Pakerson’s reply.
“What the hell Sam?” Martin asked, his voice squealing as the suit struggled to keep up with growing gas leak.
“I’m…I’m sorry. Pakerson and Jinx you are ordered to leave now.”
“No way. I’m not leaving him.” Jinx knelt over Martin, the plastic emergency bubble in his hands.
“Carol.” Alder, plead to Pakerson. “Carol, you need to look up now.”
As Pakerson turned, her lights moved up into the nightmare Alder knew she would see. The surface of the cube had dissolved, turning in only a few seconds into a writhing, swirling cloud.
“What the...?” She gasped. “What is it?”
“Just run!” Alder ordered. “Just run!”
“Maelstrom Rising”
Alder sat at the conference room table just off the bridge with his head in his hands staring at the desktop. Eighteen hours? Had it been eighteen hours? More like three years and eighteen hours maybe since the cube had woken, Martin had been killed, and Lance One had fallen silent. Surely the agonizing eternity that Alder had spent in the exo-science bay, pouring over radio channels, searching for any sign that Pakerson and Jinx were still alive had been more than eighteen hours. Of course the hours wouldn’t have been so long if he didn’t secretly already know the truth. His battery of sensors told him the real story. Something amazing was happening in the core of Mass 17. What had been a hard blip deep inside the structure was now a ball, a diffuse and growing ball. From this range and with the electrically charged ropes of gas and dust between them, there were as many questions as answers but one thing was clear; the nanobots didn’t just eat a hole in Martin’s suit, and they didn’t just eat everything in the sphere. The cloud itself was being consumed, transformed into something new. The acidic ball in his gut reassured him that some small part of that something new was made from the remains of Martin, Pakerson, and Jinx.
“So how long are we without contact?” Captain Pilton asked.
“Seventeen hours and twelve minutes.”
Alder gritted his teeth. No not three years, not even eighteen hours yet. He hated himself. Eighteen hours was the Oxygen capacity left in Pakerson and Jinx’ suits when contact was lost. He hated himself because he was waiting for the others to realize that in twenty-eight minutes they could all relax.
“And we’re sure they never reboarded the Lance?” Pilton had lost crew before. If this was hitting him as hard as it was hitting Alder, he wasn’t going to show it here.
“No.” Com Tech. Reilly, who had been asked to join the meeting answered. “We’re not sure. The last data that the Duster transmitted indicated that it was still in contact with Pakerson’s suit. She was about twenty meters from the ship at that time...” Her voice drifted off. She and Pakerson were good friends who had served together for many years on research teams.
“And she was still alive and moving toward
the ship?”
“We can’t tell if she was moving, but yes you can hear her...respiring...on the recording.” She didn’t mention that the breathing she heard was the ragged gasps of her good friend, half mad with terror fleeing for her life.
“Where was Jinx?”
“He was still in the area around Martin. We lost contact with him about three minutes before last transmission.” Reilly paused again.
Lieutenant Commander Mbaka, Alder’s equivalent from engineering picked up. “The information we got from his suit is consistent with catastrophic decompression.”
The inside of Alder’s head felt fluttery like there was a small bird flying around in it. ‘Catastrophic decompression?’ How was that better than saying ‘eaten alive through a thousand pinholes in your spacesuit?’
Pilton eyed Mass 17 through the viewing plate as if the last eighteen...seventeen hours and thirteen minutes hadn’t happened. “So, at last contact we have one survivor within twenty meters of safety, but no contact since.”
No one answered.
“Let’s go get her.” Pilton went on. “I want both remaining scouts deployed in the cloud with any instruments that might be able to detect Lance One. Let’s commit the radar probes and the passive electronics. I want Guadalupe Gibson to pilot one of the scouts. She did the modifications of the passive gear. Also...”
“She’s not there.” Alder grumbled at the table top. No one heard him.
“Get Vorhees out of the lab. I want him on the other scout. He’s piloted in adverse conditions before.”
“She’s not there.”
“I want preprogrammed paths for all the probes. I don’t want our scouts to get in there and then waste a lot of time looking for...”
“She’s not in there!” Alder shouted, banging both fists on the table.
Everyone jumped.
“Why do you say that?” Security chief Tallen asked, his already dour face pinched with anger.
“She can’t be.” Alder explained, aware of Reilly’s eyes on him. “Look. We don’t know who programmed the nanobots or why. But we do know they’re self-replicating and we know that they...”
“How do we know that they’re self-replicating?” Tallen asked.
“That’s what that was on Martin’s suit. You saw it, the way it ate in. Whatever those bots need to replicate, our suits have a lot of. You saw how quickly...”
“I think it was an attack.” Tallen leaned forward, he was a tall man and even seated at the table his lean was imposing. “I think the cube detected the radar Pakerson was using, thought it was a threat and attacked. I think there’s a good chance she survived if she got to the ship.”
“That’s not how nanobots work”
“Suddenly you seem to know a lot about a technology we just met?” Tallen’s statement sounded like a question.
“It’s nanobots. They are really simple machines. They have to be because they’re too small to do any advanced programming. You build one to fuse Carbon to Lithium. You build another to snare water molecules. Self-replicators grab the same elements they’re made out of and make more of themselves, sort of like wandering DNA. Those nanobots came out of that cube pre-built to eat something that there was a lot of in Martin’s suit. It happened fast because they were designed to work in cold space and Martin’s suit was white hot by comparison.”
“Why does that mean Carol is dead?” Reilly asked. “She could have made it to the ship.”
“Yes, but the ship’s hull is made of almost exactly the same material as the outer layer of the suits. If those little...” He searched for the right word, “Technoprey ate through our spacesuits in a matter of a few seconds, getting on the ship didn’t help Pakerson.” He found he had stood up while speaking. He had been awake for almost twenty hours before the incident and found he was swaying on his feet. “Sorry.” He said to Reilly.
“Thank you.” Pilton said coldly. “I think we understand the danger but we don’t leave crew behind.”
“She’s not there! And even if she was, you couldn’t help her.” Alder punched frantically at the console in front of him, well aware that his voice was sounding hysterical. A round holograph of Mass 17 rose up from the table. “This is how the object looked when we first scanned it. It’s a physical impossibility but you can clearly see that the density of the object remains fairly consistent until you reach the small point in the middle; the sphere Martin landed on. This,” he touched his monitor, “is what the mass looks like now. There is no sign of the hard central mass. It has been replaced by growing bands of some other, electrically charged material.”
“So?” It was Tallen.
“So. Those are the nanobots. The static electricity in the cloud is being used by the nanobots to turn the gas and dust into more nanobots and God knows what else.” His voice was rising steadily. Seventeen hours and fifteen minutes.
“So?”
“So. Going in there is a suicide mission! Suicide! If even one of those things gets on the hull of the scout it’s just a matter of time till...” The words ‘catastrophic decompression’ and the sound of Martin’s last, squeaking pleas for help as Jinx struggled with the bubble crashed in his head and nothing came out. His mouth opened and closed. Hot tears rose in his stinging eyes.
Pilton spoke over the stunned silence of Alder’s tears. “Thank you for that observation Lieutenant Commander. You are relieved of duty.”
Alder sank into his chair and let black grief roll over him as Dr. Thomas rose from his seat and came around to help him.
Seventeen hours and sixteen minutes.
“Maelstrom”
Polyfiber...Fibrous...Thick...Alder’s mouth felt thick and pasty...and cottony, that was the word...cottony. He smacked his lips and swallowed as consciousness slowly rolled back into his head. He made a guttural sound. The bed seemed very deep and warm.
“Hey. There you are.” Elana’s voice came from across the room.
Alder’s arms felt heavy like fat sausages. “What happened?” He asked as her head came into view.
“Dr. Thomas gave a little bit of a sedative.” She said, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
“A little bit?” Alder asked, forcing his unwieldy body to roll over onto its side.
Elana brushed her hand across his forehead. Her touch was as soft as it had been when he first felt it sixteen years ago during a crew training drill that had left the two of them alone in an escape pod for about an hour too long. “You had a really hard day the other day. He just wanted to make sure you were going to sleep.”
A scowl crossed Alder’s face as awareness tried to force its way back in between his ears. “The other day? How long? Did they...” He struggled to grasp what had happened.
“Shhhh. Shhhh.” You have been specifically forbidden to worry about the ship for at least twenty-four more hours.” She smiled softly. The lights in their cabin were low and yellow. “I have been authorized to tell you that, at your insistence, no humans were allowed back into the cloud and that we did, as you predicted, lose all probes that went too deep.”
“So Carol is gone.”
Elana waited a long second. “Come on Sam. Let’s get you a shower and some hot food.”
Although he felt like rolling back into the bed and the blackness of sleep, he let her put her hand behind his elbow and help him to a sitting position. Her role as Dr. Alder, ship’s psychologist, made her soft suggestions about his care something like an order.
“I need coffee.”
“Hmmm. A shower and some real food first.”
Thirty minutes in the shower, two eggs, five sausage links, about a quarter kilo of hash browns, and three merciful cups of coffee brought new life to Alder. He and Elana left their cabin in the lower crew section with no particular destination in mind.
The ship was quiet but busy as they wound their way around the outside hallway of level seven of the habitation dome. Even in a crew of seven hundred plus the deaths of three crew members hit hard. No
doubt there would be a lot of grumbling again about turning the ship for home. Maybe, with only two communication ponies left to ferry messages back to human space, the deaths of Martin, Jinx, and Pakerson would finally bring Pilton around to the idea that he’d seen enough.
The few crew members in the hall nodded politely as they passed but didn’t stop to chat and the small cafeteria that served as level seven’s lounge was empty except for a few knots of crew wrapped up in their own conversations. While required to wear uniforms while on duty, long years in space along with advanced printing technology, had led to off duty gear that was as unpredictable as it was colorful. The periodic fashion shows hosted in public areas had somehow stayed fashionable and there was even a bit of competition between crew members who had proven to have an eye for designing the interesting or at least improbable. One of the women sitting in the break area was wearing a dress that appeared to be covered in goose heads. The man with her was in a kilt. The lounge itself was double duty, it served both as a cafeteria and a garden. The apparently ornamental plants were all edible and the fish in the small, ornamental pond were a custom engineered relative of the perch that thrived in confined spaces and produced a flakey, protein rich meat. They were all, humans included, part of a vast, sprawling ecosystem that kept the crew healthy and productive year after year.
They were silent as they boarded the lift to the main ring. Since the Duster was not designed for planetary landing, its space frame was open and built in sections. One of the quirks of space travel using the framing drive was that any mass within a sphere slightly larger than the main ring would travel with the ship when the engine was engaged. The designers had taken advantage of that fact, spacing the different modules of the ship out on great lattices of wire and tubing. In part this was to give the crew as much separation from the insanity crystal that hung in the center of the ship and its occasional bursts of radiation as possible and partly to give the crew some much needed space from each other. While virtual tanks were handy for a quick break, their overuse tended to lead to psychosis and so real space and real variety were built into the ship whenever possible.
Alder's World Part One: Mass 17 Page 2
