by Dietmar Wehr
"At least we don't have to do this at night," said the pilot. Turning to Kelly he asked, "Where do you want me to set her down?"
"Before I decide that, I'd like us to orbit the colony slowly at low altitude. Can do?"
"Can do," he answered. "I have the controls, Iruku."
As the shuttle dropped lower and slowed, they were able to make out more detail on the screen. The settlement was a mess. Fires were still burning here and there from the aftereffects of the fighting. Not a single building was intact. There were no bodies or at least nothing recognizable as humanoid bodies. Not that Kelly was looking for them. She was looking for a bug body and so far hadn't found one.
"Is that it?" asked the co-pilot as he pointed to a black dot on the screen.
"We're still too far away to tell," said Kelly.
"I'll bring her around. Iruku, see if you can zoom the image in once I get her lined up," said the pilot. With the shuttle now pointed in the direction of the mysterious dot, the co-pilot played with the controls and the image zoomed in.
"Is that thing moving?" asked the co-pilot. Kelly frowned. There did seem to be something moving. It soon became obvious what that something was.
"It's just birds. Some kind of local scavenger I would guess." Turning to the pilot Kelly said, "Can you hover about 100 meters over it?"
The pilot shrugged. "Sure I can. I can hover a lot lower than that if you want." He brought the shuttle down to where they could easily see the bug corpse with their own eyes through the shuttle windscreen. The lift engines were making enough noise to frighten off the scavengers. Even at this distance, Kelly found the Bug frightening. When the shuttle was in place, the pilot looked at Kelly. "Okay, now what?"
Kelly looked at him with an amused expression. He should have said 'now what, SIR?' but she decided to overlook his borderline insubordination. She was certain that he wasn't trying to be insubordinate. He was just being a cheeky bastard like most other shuttle pilots.
"Okay, put us down about ten meters from the bug," she said. While the shuttle was gently dropping to the ground, she went back and nodded to the marines. They unbuckled and gathered their gear. While they were getting ready, Kelly unbuckled Wolfman's brain case from the seat and carried it over to the mobile ground unit that Wolfman would use to move around in. When the shuttle touched down, the marines went through the decontamination chamber that also functioned as an airlock, keeping out the local atmosphere and any harmful organisms it might contain. Wolfman's mobile unit went next, with Kelly exiting last.
As she slowly walked over to the corpse, she heard one of the marines say, "Damn, this thing smells awful. I think I'll stand upwind of it." He's right too, she thought. The bio-filters don't block the smell, and this thing stinks to high heaven!
She tried to ignore the smell while she took a close look at the corpse. Like its much smaller Earth cousins, the Insectoid had three segments to its body. The middle section was the biggest and contained the six legs and two arms. It was obvious that the arms weren't just another pair of legs used to hold things. They were attached to the body higher up and forward. Unlike the legs, which ended in what Kelly could only describe as hooves, the arms ended with four digits that Kelly would have described as two fingers with two opposing thumbs. The section at the back looked like it might be some kind of stinger. Kelly shivered with fear at the thought of being stung by this thing.
It was the head that shocked her the most. The generally ovoid shape was covered with either hair or fur but it wasn't a dense covering. Unlike Earth ants, which had two compound eyes, the Insectoid had multiple individual eyes that allowed it to look forward, to either side and above all at the same time. She guessed there would normally be eight eyes but couldn’t be sure because part of the front had a hole, presumably caused by whatever killed this Bug. From the position of the other eyes, Kelly surmised that one of its eyes had been where the hole was now. Lower down she could see that the mouth was partially open. Bending over to get a better look inside, she saw what looked like very large, pointed teeth that reminded her of sharks' teeth.
"Commander, take a look at this," said one of the marines.
He was pointing to the back of the bug's head with his flechette gun. Kelly stepped over to get a better view and saw something metallic at the base of the head where a short thick neck connected the head to the body. It wasn't something the bug was wearing. The metal seemed to be surgically attached to the head. In spite of her revulsion for this thing, she carefully bent down and moved her head to within a few centimeters of the metal object. She could now see what appeared to be smaller components. The metal object wasn't just a solid piece of metal but rather a device of some kind. She had a hunch this was something important.
Turning to the marine nearest to her, she said, "Marine, I need to use your knife."
After the briefest of hesitations, the marine reached carefully behind him. Pulling out a knife with a very shiny blade, he carefully held it out to her.
"Careful how you handle that, Commander. The edge on this knife is sharp enough and hard enough to cut your hand off before you even realize you've accidentally done it."
Kelly had heard about this kind of knife and took it from him VERY carefully. Once she had it firmly in her right hand, she leaned forward and attempted to cut the organic matter around the device so that she could pry the object loose. She felt almost no resistance as the knife did its work. A quick look around confirmed that Wolfman was almost finished setting up the RTC that had been attached to his mobile unit. The RTC was on a tripod right in front of the head. Getting back to the job at hand, she tried to pry the object loose, and to her surprise it was not that easy. After some more digging with the pointed end of the knife, the object dropped to the ground. With her gloved hand, she picked it up and looked at it. The side that had been hidden inside the head had lots of very fine wires protruding from it. She suspected that those wires were connected directly to this thing's brain. Is this how these things communicate?
Standing up and stepping back, she carefully returned the knife. The marine looked at the black liquid dripping from the blade with disgust. Kelly wondered how he would clean it without hurting himself and decided not to watch him do it.
Turning to Wolfman's mobile unit, she said, "Are you ready to begin, Wolfman?"
"Affirmative, Commander. I'm activating the device now. This may take some time." While he was doing that, there was something else that needed to be done.
"Kelly to shuttle pilot."
"Go ahead, Commander."
"Patch my implant link up to Resolute, please," she said.
After several seconds she heard him say, "Link to Resolute established, Commander."
"Gunslinger here, Commander Kelly. May I assume that you wish to contact the Friendlies?"
"That's correct. I'll record a message to be transmitted."
"Understood. Begin your message, Commander."
Kelly took a deep breath and said, "Commander Kelly to Friendly ship. We have found an insectoid corpse. Do you wish to bring your equipment down here, or should we attempt to bring part of the body to you? Our shuttle does not have enough room to hold the entire body. Please advise us of your wishes. We'll listen to your reply on this frequency. End of message."
"Ready to transmit to the agreed upon coordinates, Commander."
"Okay, send it, Gunslinger."
"Message has been transmitted, Commander."
"How long until we can expect a reply?"
"The minimum interval is eight point nine minutes, Commander."
Kelly sighed. She was eager to get back to the ship. This place gave her the creeps, and a cold wind was starting to blow. The reply took almost 12 minutes to come back. The message could not have been more terse.
[Bring us the head]
Kelly nodded. They were prepared for this kind of contingency. She turned to the marine sergeant.
"Sergeant, we need to detach this head from the rest of th
e body and take it back with us. There's a container in the shuttle cargo hold that I think will be big enough. If you send two of your men to get it while the third cuts the head loose, that will save time."
The marine sergeant's voice was carefully neutral. "Yes, Ma'am. Kawasaki, since your knife is already covered with crap, you might as well use it to cut the head loose. Tooley, you and Hopkins get the container and make it snappy. No sense hanging around here any longer than we have too."
Kelly smiled. I think this place is getting to you too, Sergeant. She stepped over to Wolfman's mobile unit but said nothing. She knew that Wolfman could see her via the unit's external video opticals.
"I don't have any estimate of how much longer this will take, Commander," said Wolfman without any prompting from her.
"Will the decapitation affect the results?"
"No," was the unusually curt reply. Before she could say anything else, Wolfman suddenly said, "No further analysis is possible, Commander. I have all the data that can be obtained from this specimen."
Kelly was surprised by the unexpected termination but decided to wait until they were back on Resolute before asking why. She heard a sound like ripping cloth, and when she looked at the source, she saw the bug head fall to the ground. The marine with the knife looked at it and then very carefully wiped it on the fur covering the head. When he was satisfied that it was as clean as he could make it, he laid the flat of the blade against his forearm and very slowly gave it one final wipe against his uniform.
By this time the other two marines were back with the container. The head was big and awkward enough to require all four marines to lift it into the container. Once inside, the container handles made it possible for two marines to carry it back to the shuttle. Wolfman's mobile unit, with the RTC packed away, was followed by Kelly and the remaining two marines.
Once safely decontaminated, the six of them moved into the shuttle's forward section and buckled themselves in as the shuttle took off to head back to Resolute. The carrier was already lined up for the micro-jump needed to get to the rendezvous coordinates for the transfer to the Friendlies. The transfer itself went off without a hitch. Once at the rendezvous, the shuttle launched again, flew over to the Friendly ship and entered its Hangar Bay. There the marines wearing their bio-suits again took the container out and handed it over to Friendlies who were also wearing their bio-suit equivalent. With the transfer complete, the shuttle went back to Resolute where Kelly, Wolfman and the marines were finally able to disembark. By this time, and to no one's surprise, the Friendly ship had jumped away. If the Friendlies intended to keep their word about informing humans of what they found, it would have to be at a later point.
With Wolfman back in his fighter, Kelly hurried to her cabin in order to question him about his data. She really wanted to take a shower first to get rid of the foul smell that seemed to cling to her uniform, but her curiosity won out. A quick chat with Falkenberg to make sure that Resolute was on its way back home, and then Gunslinger switched her over to Wolfman.
"What have you found out about that Bug, Wolfman?" asked Kelly.
"As you know, Commander, the RTC can follow an object or person back in time by tracking the individual atoms that make up the target. That's why the target doesn't have to be alive. From the atomic point of view, there's no difference between life and death. Since some of the atoms in the body were also at some point part of the female that produced the egg, the RTC can actually trace those atoms back across multiple generations. The results can best be understood by showing the trajectory of the tracked atoms across space. I'm sending the data to your display now."
Kelly saw her display power up with a star map. One of stars was blinking red.
"The red star is Omega77. I'll now show where this particular mothership and predecessor ships came from." A yellow line moved away from the red star and connected with a series of stars in a trajectory that had a slight curve to it. As more and more stars were connected, the scale zoomed out to show more of the spiral arm of the galaxy. The line stopped at a star that flashed blue.
"The amount of mass being tracked declined significantly here, Commander. I conjecture that our Insectoid was created here by implantation into a host. That suggests that this system contained a life form that was large enough and populous enough to warrant exploitation by the Insectoids. From here, the trajectory deviates enough that it could suggest a different mothership. There are 5 more of these types of star systems where some kind of change occurred that could very well be the birth of a new generation of females. When I include all the available data, here is the overall configuration."
The display now showed a scale of distance so large that Kelly could make out the edge of the spiral arm that humans inhabited. And while the trajectory wasn't straight, the overall direction looked like the Insectoids were coming from the outer edge of the spiral arm and moving deeper into the galaxy. A horrible thought intruded on Kelly's consciousness.
"Wolfman, could the Insectoids have originated from outside our galaxy?"
"Not outside, no, but rather from a different spiral arm of our galaxy, Commander. By the time the tracking reached the vicinity of the edge of our spiral arm, there were too few atoms left together to be able to follow them."
"What kind of time frame are we looking at here?" asked Kelly.
"The point where I was no longer able to track the target was seventeen point three years ago."
"And does this data confirm that Insectoids did not evolve naturally in our spiral arm?"
"The data is not conclusive but it does strongly suggest that Insectoids are not native to this spiral arm. If they originated in another part of our galaxy, then they would not be in danger of extermination as a species even if we managed to destroy all of them in our spiral arm."
"Damn. I was hoping we'd get conclusive proof. I have a feeling that the Friendlies will give the Bugs the benefit of the doubt. But even if they originated in our arm, they still might not have evolved naturally. Isn't that so, Wolfman?"
"The probability that the Insectoids have evolved on their own is small but not zero. We do have two possible ways of attempting to confirm either the external origin or the artificial origin, Commander."
Kelly was confused. "Two? Valkyrie’s timeship is one but what's the other one?"
"We send a ship to the farthest point on this track to see what's there," said Wolfman.
Kelly felt a shiver go up her spine. With over 17 years to build motherships, that star system could be crawling with bug ships. Still, it was an intriguing idea.
"Just out of curiosity, how long would it take a ship to get there?" asked Kelly.
"The theoretically shortest time is 34 days, however, considering the difficulty in making a single jump accurately and allowing for the risks involved with extremely high pre-jump speeds, a more practical profile would take 89 days one way, Commander."
"Wow! That would be one hell of a mission."
"That it would, Commander," said Wolfman.
Kelly decided she had enough information for the time being. She had a lot to think about, and she did some of her best thinking in the shower.
"Thank you, Wolfman. I want to think more about this before I continue this discussion. Unless there's an emergency, I do not wish to be disturbed while I'm in the shower."
"Very well, Commander. I would like to say though that we AIs don't really understand the attraction that humans have for standing under falling water. Perhaps you could explain it to us sometime?"'
"Perhaps," said Kelly with a smile.
Chapter 13
Shiloh didn't know whether or not Gunslinger planned it that way, but Resolute arrived back in Earth orbit just in time for Kelly to come down to the ground and join him for dinner at the Flag Officers' Dining Room in the HQ building. Over dinner she told him what it was like standing next to a dead Bug and about Wolfman's results, along with her idea for a recon mission to the bug point of origin. That mission
intrigued Shiloh, but he wasn't sure if it was doable. Getting there and back would take more than half a year. That would require a lot of consumables, far more than either the light or heavy carriers were designed to carry, and they would have to sacrifice some of the hangar bay space for the extra cargo. Dreadnought, on the other hand, had enough spare cargo capacity. It also had the advantage that its very thick armor would protect it against impacts from interstellar dust while accelerating or decelerating at very high speeds. That was something that the light carriers couldn't do. They would have to travel at a slower speed, thereby lengthening the duration of the mission.
