Boundary b-1

by Eric Flint

  The suits were as well shielded as such mobile objects could reasonably be. The helmets were light and felt open, rather than cramped and claustrophobic as prior models had been. In addition, the suits incorporated an integrated exterior weave of electroactive pigments which varied the reflectivity of the exterior to assist in heating and cooling. Another layer of piezoelectrically-active fibers was able to stiffen the suit against detected impacts, distributing the force across the entire body of the wearer instead of permitting blunt trauma to be done to one area.

  With the toughness of the suits a given, Joe and the rest of Nike's crew were better able to concentrate on their jobs. It might not be quite as easy as working on something back home, given microgravity and other factors. Still, it was orders of magnitude easier than it would have been a couple of decades earlier.

  Locked back in, Harry nodded to Joe and the two began working on getting the door to open wider.

  "Hey, did anybody figure out why these doors got locked up?" Harry asked to the invisible audience at large. "I mean, it can't just have been the power loss-only idiots would design doors that couldn't be opened in case of power failure, at least for most of their base. And we've found things that look like manual opening mechanisms."

  "Well," A.J. answered, "it's impossible to be sure until we find out exactly what caused the disaster. But based on models Dr. Sakai and some of the other people in the astrogeological specialties have done… you remember the lines on the side of Phobos?"

  "Yeah," Joe said, adjusting the grip of the lever arms. "Fracture zones, right?"

  "Yep. No one was sure how far down those things went, or how intact-or not intact-Phobos was. The moonlet might have been just a ball of stone fragments that hadn't quite broken up. As it turns out the fracture zones aren't nearly that bad, but they are significant. If what happened to them involved a big explosion, or an impact, it might have shifted the geometry of the caverns slightly, changing angles just enough to cause the doors to lock up in their tracks."

  "Makes sense," Joe said. "And with the seals shrinking through outgassing over the years, that would have given them enough space to move again. Okay, we're ready. Harry, let's open this thing up wide."

  The door protested stubbornly, occasionally allowing the two to hear its dissatisfaction by transmitting a vibration through the equipment that sounded like a groan inside the suits. But, in a few minutes, the door was open wide enough for them to enter.

  "Captain, we're going in now. And I think it's something new."

  "Be careful."

  "We will be. But, look, this place is dead. There's nothing dangerous here, aside from vacuum."

  "That's what we think. Let's not assume."

  "Right."

  Joe drifted into the room cautiously after shining his own light around. The room was about average-sized, from what they'd seen so far. It was a bit over two meters at maximum height, which was too low for human comfort but still easy to move through. Fifteen meters long and about ten to twelve meters wide, the room's interior was clad in the metal-composite material they'd come to expect, with varicolored circles and lines on the walls that seemed to be a common theme.

  Despite the similarities, though, it wasn't like anything they'd seen thus far. First, this room's long axis lay parallel to the corridor. They'd entered at one end, from the side. At the other end of the room was another door. That seemed to indicate a room bordering that side of the corridor but which had no direct entrance or exit in that wall, as they knew there weren't any other doors for quite some distance.

  Secondly, the room was divided roughly in half down the center, by a low wall with a wide, flat top separating the two halves. On one end, the wall had a set of hinges of some sort. Behind this area was another set of doors and a small tripartite control panel similar to those found in the large control room and in a few other places.

  A Bemmius mummy lay in that area, arms curled across each other and outward in what Helen currently considered a possibly instinctive defensive posture. "By doing that they protect the mouth, eye, and brain areas, and have those long, sharp hooklike structures pointing out towards any possible threat," she'd said. "This is rather like us throwing our arms up to protect our faces, or covering our heads with our arms in a falling rock area."

  Judging by the number of Bemmius mummies found in that pose-which did not accord well with models of how a relaxed or a random death pose would look after mummification-it might well be that this was the equivalent of a person realizing he was doomed and ending up cowering in the corner.

  "Look at his hands."

  Joe nodded. The "hands," the complexly-divided portions of the quasi-tentacles that allowed Bemmius to use tools, showed signs of tremendous abuse. Some of the "fingers" were torn off and others were twisted and bent, showing that the internal structural plates were damaged or misaligned. Like others they had examined in the sealed rooms, this Bemmius had apparently tried to force the door open in a panic. A close examination showed that he had beaten and clawed at all three doors in the room, at some point during his imprisonment here.

  "So, which door now?"

  "Let's see what's behind the far door there. Until now, we haven't found any room that adjoins the corridor that doesn't have a door to it. I'm wondering why this one doesn't."

  "Right." Joe floated back, gathered up the door opener that Gupta had designed while they were en route, and made his way back. He was careful in the microgravity not to let the heavy metal and composite structure get moving too fast. There might be almost no gravity, but the tool's mass was still the same.

  "Have you seen the complaints from Earth about our exploration techniques?"

  "Hey, they have a point," Harry said, floating at ease as he waited for Joe to get the opener in position. "If we were using these methods on, say, Egyptian tombs, we'd be lynched."

  "Still, it's not like we're going to be letting in air to cause decay."

  "No. But the proper archaeological-or paleontological, for that matter-approach would be to spend weeks slowly working away at methods to open them, recording each and every movement, and so on." He caught the door opener as it approached and gave Joe time to get set up to position the framework.

  "Yeah," A.J. commented from whatever remote area he was working in, "but if the ancient Egyptian tombs had actually been built by space aliens, like some nutcases thought, and if we thought we might discover their tech inside, you can bet we'd be out there with backhoes and bulldozers and the namby-pamby archaeologists would be taking the back seat."

  "No doubt," Joe concurred, "although I'd recommend you be a lot more diplomatic in the way you said that, if you were talking to Helen. I worked with her in the field for several summers, don't forget. And I can tell you that hell hath no fury like a bonedigger scorned."

  A few minutes of setup and they were able to force this second door open, with a great deal of grunting.

  "This one was a lot tougher," Joe finally gasped, relaxing in the restraint straps and waiting for his breathing to slow.

  "Sure was," Harry said, almost as winded. "I wonder if-"

  He did his unstrap-and-swing-around stunt again. "Well, that's interesting. This door's almost twice as thick as all the others."

  A.J.'s voice broke in, pitched unnaturally low. "That leaves the question… was it so thick to keep something from breaking in-or is it that thick to prevent something from getting out?"

  "Shut up, A.J.," Joe grumbled. "Being in these rooms with giant alien mummies is creepy enough without you tossing in B-movie paranoia."

  "Fine, fine. Just don't go looking at any eggs in there, okay?"

  "Thank you so much for reminding me of that image. Get off the friggin' channel if you don't have anything useful to add."

  Harry, ignoring the byplay, had unstrapped and was already into the next room. "Hey, now this is new."

  Joe drew himself across the threshold and stopped to survey the new area. "Holy… You aren't kidding!"


  The room was huge. Not quite the size of the monstrous room that had held the vast supplies of mud and water which the aliens had apparently favored, but still immense. The part that shared a wall with the corridor was a hundred meters long, and the room extended out from that wall twice as far. The ceiling height was about three meters-tall enough that Joe didn't feel his usual impulse to stoop. A sort of clear lane or corridor, about three meters wide, ran from the door they'd just entered across the entire width of the room. At intervals of a bit less than every three meters there were…

  Booths, Joe guessed. Each booth had a low desk or something like it on the sides, with holes or depressions in it and other structures they'd already deduced were for holding things down in microgravity. These were pretty much universally present throughout the base, although in a number of areas it had seemed they were in positions indicating they weren't used much. That had led some eternal optimists in the crew to suggest that Bemmius had some form of artificial gravity. Joe doubted it; but, hey, nothing wrong with hoping.

  The "booths" weren't enclosed, though. They were more like security gates at airports, Joe decided-two walls and a roof, giving you a semienclosed space about three or four meters long. That was much longer than any security gate a human being would need, of course. But, adjusting for their greater size and the fact that their major axis was horizontal rather than vertical, just about right for a Bemmie.

  You could just walk straight through from this side, down the long axis of the room to the far side. It was hard to make out details on that distant wall, but looking through the booth he thought he could see something on or against the wall directly aligned with the booth's opening. He checked a couple of others; yes, it seemed that there was something directly in line with each of the booths, way over on the far side of the room.

  "Well, what have we found here?" Harry finally asked aloud.

  "Looks like a bowling alley." That was Helen's voice. She must have tuned in to take a look. Joe gave silent thanks that she hadn't tuned in earlier, to hear "And I'll deal with you later, Mr. Baker. Conan the Barbarian, ha. You ever try using a bulldozer on one of my digs, you'll go out Conan the Castrati. As for you, Dr. Buckley, you ought to know by now that hell hath no fury like a bonedigger called a bonedigger."

  Joe winced. Hastily, he focused on Helen's substantive remark. "Well, yeah, I suppose looked at from one way it does resemble a bowling alley. Sort of. But without any gravity worth talking about, you're not doing any bowling here."

  "Close, and yet so far away." Hathaway's voice now broke in, clearly amused. "It's obvious y'all are civilians."

  "What do you mean?" Joe and Helen asked, almost simultaneously.

  Hathaway snorted. "People, that is a target range."

  As soon as Hathaway said it, Joe felt like smacking his forehead. Probably would have, if he hadn't been wearing the suit.

  "Of course. That desk up front is where you'd go and pick up your gun for practice. The thicker door-and I'll bet this wall's a lot thicker too-keeps you from accidentally shooting through."

  "Which means," Hathaway continued, his voice drawling speculatively, "that through the other door there might be an armory."

  "Maybe. Well, yeah, certainly, in some sense, if the weapons are still there. But probably not military arms. I mean, you guys don't stock missiles and tank killers at the target range, right?"

  "No, we don't. Still, it'd be interesting to see what they've got. I'd guess a variety of small arms, probably their equivalent of pistols, shotguns, and rifles."

  Joe checked his telltales. "We've got plenty of air, and I don't feel a need to find a bathroom yet. How about it, Harry? You want to check?"

  "You have to ask? This is the fun part of the expedition, like unwrapping presents at Christmas. Afterwards is when we get to the part where some assembly is required and we discover that batteries weren't included."

  Harry started moving the opener toward the rear door. "We'll have to take a look at what they use as targets, too. We may be able to get a lot of used rounds out of there, which will give us ways to verify the characteristics of the weapons."

  "Glendale was right," A.J. put in. "A bunch of peace nuts aren't going to have a training area like this-especially on a base where every resource had to be brought in from outside, and where most rooms had to be carved out of solid rock. Look at the size of the place. They could have had more than thirty people practicing at once, even as big as they were. That's a lot of people slinging lead-or whatever they used-and a hell of a lot of lead to sling. Lots of resources. These were not peaceful people."

  Now Jackie's voice broke in. "That's at least one too many assumptions. They might have been peaceful enough, intrinsically- but had to deal with somebody or something else that wasn't. There's a difference between aggression and self-defense."

  "Okay, guys, quiet down, let us work a bit here." Tough suits or not, Joe didn't want to be distracted by chatter while exerting a lot of force on small areas.

  This door, however, refused to budge. After five minutes of trying, Joe and Harry sagged back in the harnesses. Or, at least, tried to-microgravity did not lend itself well to looking exhausted, whether you really were or not.

  "Sorry, Captain, I be givin' her everything we got!" Joe said, in a fake Scots accent.

  "Ken, I think we'll have to break out the cutters," A.J. suggested. "I've been going over their suits' sensor signals, and while they're nothing like as good as the Faeries', I can get some pretty good info from them. I think the armory door's locked, which makes sense. Would you leave it open all the time? And if the power died, our friend there couldn't have unlocked the doors."

  "I agree," Hathaway stated. "Let's do it-but I'm not sure Joe and Harry are the right ones for the job. Guys?"

  Joe, still panting a little, looked at Ingram. "What do you think, Harry?"

  Ingram looked longingly at the door. "I'd like to try, but we'd have to go back and get the stuff-and, being honest, I'm not trained in cutting tools for microgravity. Or even regular gravity. And stuff like that can cut our suits, so I don't think it'd be smart to play with it."

  Reluctantly, Joe nodded.

  "Don't give up quite yet, guys. If you can hang on for about ten minutes, I can have John Henry down there," A.J. offered.

  John Henry was one of the heavy-duty drones. "Wasn't he working on securing parts of Phobos Hab Three?"

  "His job's done for now. They won't need him for at least a few hours. Captain? How about it?"

  "Let me check, A.J."

  There was a pause while Hathaway verified with the work crews that the heavy-duty drone wouldn't be needed for a while. "Okay, go ahead. You've got a few hours at least."

  Technically, Captain Hathaway didn't have to be involved in everything at this level but-like most of the crew-he wanted to see and watch everything going on. It would probably be several weeks before anyone started seeing this as a routine job.

  "Shouldn't take too long. I get him down there and cut through the areas where the lock catches are engaged, maybe an hour or two tops, unless the stuff's a lot tougher than anything we've found so far. That might be true when we get to wherever they kept the big guns, if they had any. But I don't think it'll be the case here."

  Joe took advantage of the delay to sip a bit of water and take a nibble of what he called "granola paste." The stuff was a tasty, if rather ugly-looking, snack he'd devised during the voyage. The stuff NASA provided them had offended every gourmet bone in Joe's body, once he tried it. He'd been quite sure he could come up with something better.

  And so he had, with a little experimentation. His "granola paste" was just as easy to dispense from a tube as NASA's equivalent, yet had some real taste and even retained a little texture for chewing. People could eat it without feeling like they were eating baby food.

  A while later, bright lights at the doorway announced the arrival of the squat, squarish work drone. Using both small jets and its own manipulators to move
around, the remote was somewhat ominous in the way it made its entrance, seeming to climb through the doorway and drift forward.

  "Okay, guys, stay clear. Electron-beam cutting is not something you want to be anywhere near."

  "Roger that." Joe and Harry moved into the target range area. "Okay, we're plenty clear."

  "Firing her up. John Henry, start drivin' that steel. Or those electrons, anyway."

  A few minutes later, they heard A.J. grunt in what sounded a positive fashion.

  "How's it going?"

  "Cutting away. It's a little slow, but not too bad. You guys okay for another fifteen minutes or so? I think that'll do it for all the catches. This thing has three, near as I can tell."

  Harry nodded, the motion easily visible through the mostly transparent helmet.

  "We're both good, A.J. Go ahead."

  It was only a bit longer than A.J.'s estimate when he gave the all-clear. "Give it a try."

  After setting up the opener, the two looked at each other and then gave a pull. The door slid so suddenly that if they hadn't been strapped in, both would have been sent flying off through the nonexistent air.

  "That did it, all right! Slid back almost as though it was still actually working. We're clear to enter."

  As soon as the light flashed around the room's interior, Joe grinned.

  "Captain, looks like our Bemmies were as fond as we were of different makes and models. Some of these look like the one the alien in the control room carried, but some of them are pretty different, allowing for the fact they've all got arrangements for being held by a Bemmius."

  Joe drifted down the rows of racked weapons. One wall was devoted to rifle-style weapons. They had wider-flared bells at the ends, which Joe assumed were a three-"handed" grip and fire method.

  "Damn, I wouldn't have wanted to go up against these guys," Harry murmured, looking down the barrel of a rifle. "That must be a two-centimeter bore. Maybe closer to three."