Wasteland of flint ittotss-1

by Thomas Harlan

  "Doctor McCue has suggested that we isolate the artifact and send it back to the Company labs for more extensive examination, but I believe it is safer and more prudent for us to make an initial survey here, aboard the ship." The voice settled, becoming pedantic and measured.

  "She suggests the object may be dangerous, but if so, would it not be wiser to examine the artifact here — far from inhabited space? Any violent event would then affect only this one ship, and of course, myself. A loss, to be sure, but far better than losing Mars or Novoya Rossiya!"

  Gretchen shook her head in amazement at the man's ego. She could feel him thinking, even through the distance of the recording, and he was so, so eager to see what was inside the cylinder. Any real thought of caution or wariness was entirely disregarded.

  "Luckily," the voice continued, "the limestone matrix does not interfere with most of our sensors here in the lab. I am going to try a low-power microwave scan first, just to see what the exterior really looks like…"

  A succession of images unfolded — the cylinder's crusted surface was mapped, showing each ridge and bump and crevice in the stone — then the cylinder itself, a smooth metal tube, closed seamlessly at each end. There were no markings or signs on the outside of the metal, or at least none shown by the initial scans.

  "I am initiating a low power intrusive scan, to see if the surface is permeable to x-ray."

  Gretchen forced herself not to flinch as an emitter ring descended and began a pass along the length of the cylinder. At her side, she felt Maggie stiffen, and Bandao mutter: "Idiot — what if it's a booby trap, or a bomb?"

  The image of the cylinder on the v-pane did not react, and a second image replaced the first. A murky picture showing the outlines of the limestone matrix, a metallic shell — very thin — and then a cavity within.

  "Odd," echoed the voice from the past. "Half of the tube is solid, half empty. Wait — perhaps the solid half is only very dense…"

  The image zoomed, focusing in, and zoomed again, revealing a dense, interlocking system of membranes and fluted, intertwined protrusions.

  "Looks like a lung," Bandao said, staring sideways at the display.

  "Some kind of structure," the voice continued, "very, very dense. The separations between the alveoli-like structures are barely measurable. Yet they exist. Hmmm…an information storage structure? Could this be a book?"

  Gretchen had to suppress a start; the hard, dry voice of Green Hummingbird was whispering in her memory. A book? Or some other storage media? The man's voice started to trend upward, filling with a rush of excitement.

  "It must be a book," greed dripped into his voice. "Or a visual storage mechanism. Ah, what a prize that would be! But how is it accessed?" The image shifted to focus on the empty half of the cylinder. "And what is this space for? Why use only half of the container? Hmmm…perhaps the empty half is not exactly empty?"

  A glyph appeared in one corner of the recording, showing the visual feed was switching to a different sensor. Gretchen squinted at the icon, but didn't recognize the symbol. "What's that?" she asked.

  "Super-shortwave sensor," Bandao answered with a slight hesitation, face tense. "It interpolates to sub-x-ray definition for medical use — but he's a fool to use a high power probe on this thing."

  "…beginning scan," the recording announced. The image tightened, flashed blank, then focused again. The "empty" half of the tube was momentarily revealed as a murky soup of tiny spinning particles, then the image jerked, the tube split in half and there was a warning whoop of sound from the recording. Then everything went black and the panel beeped quietly, indicating the end of the image file.

  "Well," Gretchen said after a moment. "I guess you should have been here, Mister Bandao."

  The gunner shook his head, his face a tight mask. "I'm not disappointed to come late. If I had been here before, I would have put the bastard down."

  With that, Bandao left, swinging angrily out of the lab and bounding off up the ring toward the main accessway. Gretchen watched him go, but said nothing, and did not call him back. Instead, she turned to Maggie and said: "Can you make this panel play back the last part frame by frame?"

  The Hesht coughed in amusement, her claws dancing across the display controls.

  Sighing with relief, Gretchen thumbed the release mechanisms for her helmet and heard a sharp click as they retracted. Fresh, chill air bathed her face. The ship would be cold for hours yet, until hot air streaming from the heaters permeated all compartments. Then it would be too hot until the environmentals adjusted themselves. She sat down — in something like real gravity — and tugged the helmet free from the z-suit. Parker, sitting across the table in the crew common area, slid a cup of fresh, hot coffee to her.

  "There's some creamer, but no milk," he said.

  "Thank you. Black is fine." The cup was very warm in her hands. Three sugar packets from a pocket of her z-suit disappeared into the oily black liquid. She took a long swallow, feeling warmth flood her chest. "Better," she said after finishing the cup. "Better. Are the Lieutenant and Flores still down in Engineering?"

  Magdalena nodded, her attention focused on sucking pale red fluid and chunks of raw meat from a mealbag.

  Gretchen studiously kept her eyes away from the Hesht dinner. "Mister Parker, do we have flight control and comm up?"

  "Sort of," the pilot said, putting down his cup. "Attitude controls are mostly working, though there are still miles of conduit to replace for the main engines. Luckily, the fine control jets use compressed air and need only on/off signals to operate. They work fine — since they're mechanical. Navigation is up, and we have lost some planetary altitude, so when we do have engines live again I need to make an adjustment burn to put us back in the proper orbital. We have spin in this hab ring, but not the others. Main comp is up, so you have shipboard comm and info retrieval — if you can find a working display."

  He turned toward Magdalena, who was squeezing the mealbag in one paw, making thick goo ooze into her open mouth. Parker jerked back toward Gretchen. "Ah…we've found the experimental transmitter, which is on its own fuel cell system, but I haven't messed with it. The cat can do that later, I guess. The main comm array is down until we rebuild power, but we're close enough to the Cornuelle that our suit radios still work."

  "Unless you're in the labs," Gretchen commented, "which are shielded."

  "What did you find down there?" Parker stole a glance at Bandao, who was sitting with his own cup in his hands, content to say nothing. The two Marines were equally quiet and unobtrusive, sitting back from the edge of the table. Out of his combat suit, Fitzsimmons was of medium height, very fit, with broad shoulders and curly blue-black hair. Deckard was thinner, with a lanky build and a ruddy complexion. Carlos, still looking miserable, sat beside Parker, slowly chewing on his thumb. "Did you find the…weapon?"

  "Yes." Gretchen drained her cup and set it down on the spotlessly clean tabletop. "One of the scientists working on the planet — a geologist named Russovsky — found some stone cylinders in one of the canyons on the big mountain range. She brought an artifact back to base camp and showed her find to Doctor McCue, the dig supervisor. I think — not from anything said in record, but hearing between the lines — the lead archaeologist, a man named Clarkson, then took the cylinder from McCue and returned to the ship."

  Gretchen looked down at the table, finding a ring of coffee-colored condensation where her warm cup had stood on the cold metal. She squeaked her finger through the liquid, drawing a line down the middle of the circle.

  "Clarkson tried to see what was inside the cylinder with a high-powered sensor. Half of the tube seemed to be empty — but it wasn't, not really. Half seemed to be filled with a tightly packed membrane, like the filaments lining a human lung. The lab's isotope decay analysis estimates the cylinder is almost three million years old." A sharp, short laugh escaped her. "Clarkson was pretty sure the device wasn't working anymore, or if it was, it was a kind of book or information s
torage device, like a 3v pack. Well, he was right, in a way."

  Her finger slashed across the circle of moisture.

  "His probe injected enough energy into the empty chamber to make a sort of gas of very, very small particles expand violently. A thin wall between the two chambers broke down and the gas flooded into the membranes within a fraction of a second. They mixed, violently, and the cylinder broke open."

  "A binary round," grunted Fitzsimmons, his brown eyes gleaming in the darkness. "But not the usual sort of explosion, I suppose."

  "No." Gretchen shook her head ruefully. "The gaslike particles, I think, were some kind of tiny nanomachines. They dissolved the membranes — destroyed them — but at the same time they learned a pattern from the arrangement of the filaments. In less than a second, they were trained and they acquired enough raw material to duplicate themselves. Pressure expanded…"

  Three fingers stabbed into the circle and swirled the last fragments of moisture out into an unsightly blotch on the tabletop.

  "The weapon was released from its container and into the atmosphere." Gretchen sighed. "Clarkson had failed to evacuate the examination chamber, which ordinarily would not have been a problem, but in this case the waste gases in the unit atmosphere were fuel for more nanomachines. I'm pretty sure the machines ignore plain atomic components — O and N and so on — but they chew up CO2 for lunch, and any kind of long-chain molecule in their attack pattern for dinner. Pressure built in the chamber, and the eaters reached the pressure seals.

  "If the Company had not purchased second rate containment pods," Gretchen continued, "the eaters would have been contained. Their programming did not happen to include the stainless steel forming most of the pod walls. Unfortunately, a flexible sealant forming the join between the instrument package and the main unit was composed of long-chain polymers which were on the 'menu.'

  "They escaped into the power and data conduit above the containment unit. The sheathing of the power cables gave them more food, allowing them to reproduce at an exceptionally rapid rate. I would guess, from the cut-off time of the recording unit, that they dropped power in the lab ring within sixty seconds of escape, and had penetrated into the starboard side of the ship within two minutes. Less than ten meters away is the starboard power coupling beside the boat bay. As the wave front propagated, power collapsed, and the engineering team — who had no idea, I imagine, that Doctor Clarkson was even aboard — started an emergency shutdown of the grid.

  "Within five minutes, everyone on the starboard side of the ship was dead. The engineers, who had suited up on the run, will have run right through the weapon cloud without even noticing anything. Then, by the time they reached the boat bay, the eaters would have reproduced inside their suits…and you saw the result."

  "Wait a moment." Fitzsimmons leaned forward, his tanned forehead creased in thought. "What happened to the eaters after they filled the ship?"

  "They ate themselves." Gretchen looked around for something to clean up the puddle, then grimaced. No rags. There are no rags. "The last of their programming broke them apart when there was nothing left to consume. All they left was a cloud of component elements."

  "And what happened to that?" Fitzsimmons looked mildly disgusted.

  Gretchen nodded toward the rear of the ship. "Most of it will have been circulated into the air purification system, which continued to run on backup power while it detected impurities in the air supply. But when the cloud was processed, there was nothing but pure air left, and the system shut down automatically. The rest will have collected here and there, as grainy white dust — "

  Parker suddenly snorted, coughing and spraying coffee across the conference table. He made a horrible face as he turned to Gretchen. "You mean this isn't nondairy creamer?"

  Her ears covered with a thick cap of New Aberdeen cashmere, z-suit helmet parked on the display panel, Gretchen leaned back in a chair reduced to metal strips in the lab ring control cube. Curving hallways lined with hatches stretched up to her left and right. Light from the lab holding the broken cylinder spilled out into the hall. It was still very cold — the heaters in the lab spaces had failed to turn on with the rest — and Gretchen's breath puffed white as she hummed to herself.

  On the display — only half of which was working — v-panes were running, speeding through the day of the accident. A crewman wandered through one feed, eating pine nuts from a bag, then out of one frame and into another. Mostly she watched empty rooms and quiet machinery idling in standby. All of the scientists were down on the planet, working at the main camp. Gretchen sighed, bored, and speeded up the replay.

  Almost immediately, blurred figures appeared and she dialed back ten minutes. "Finally!"

  A tall, lean man with a neat beard and field jacket swung down from the hab access tube, landing heavily in the partial gravity. His hair was silvered, with a few streaks of black remaining, and he was wearing a heavy pair of sunglasses. A battered, grimy fieldpack, bulging with a heavy weight burdened narrow shoulders.

  "Doctor Clarkson — coming home with his prize," Gretchen murmured, keenly interested, watching the man hurry into the number one isolation lab. A moment later, a woman entered the lab ring by the same tube. Her tied-back hair was long, orange-red and very curly. She was also dressed in field kit, with a pocket-covered vest, sunglasses perched on her forehead and linen pants tucked into her boots. "And our mathematician in residence, Doctor McCue."

  Gretchen felt a pang, seeing such familiar-looking people. She'd never met either of them, though the faces matched the briefing materials provided by the Company. But they felt so much like her friends on Ugarit, or the other graduate students and professors at the university. And now they're gone, rendered down for Parker's nondairy creamer.

  She ignored Clarkson in his lab, following McCue from camera to camera as the woman wound her way through the maze of cubicles and rooms. The mathematician was pushing a g-box in front of her, a dented steel case with a built-in anti-grav, controlled by a hand unit. On the far side of the lab ring from the main control station, she stopped in front of a heavy reinforced hatchway.

  Gretchen sat up, puzzled. She'd walked through the whole ring…she hadn't noticed a security door. But McCue's image punched in a keycode and the heavy blast door swung up and away, revealing a specimen vault and a bit of a room filled with racks of bins and cargo crates stacked on the floor. Then the door closed, and she was left with a nice picture of the hatchway.

  "Well. What does Doctor McCue have in her box, which was so valuable it went straight to the vault?"

  She advanced the recording, flipping ahead ten minutes. No change. Then she blinked — a smoky haze swept down the corridor, flames leaping from empty air. The flooring blackened and warning lights began to flash. Lighting in the hallway flickered, then failed. Gretchen tasted bile, knowing what had to happen next.

  The hatchway cycled up, and Doctor McCue stepped out, alarm clear in her round, freckled face. She started to call out, raising her left arm — the shining band of a comm winked in the remaining light. Gretchen bit her lip, teeth clenched tight. A cloud of gray coalesced out of the air and McCue staggered, throwing up her hand uselessly. Her clothing vanished in sudden flame, burning away with frightening speed, then her flesh sloughed away into nothing, and there was a flash of bone and red meat.

  The gray-and-black cloud lingered for a moment, then dispersed in a drifting cloud of white dust and bits and pieces of metal scattered on the floor. The hatchway remained open for a moment, and Gretchen could see the edge of the g-box, then the door rumbled closed, cutting off the vault lights, plunging the hallway into darkness.

  Video replay ended with a ping and a motion-ceasing glyph.

  "That's a hard thing to watch," rumbled a voice at Gretchen's shoulder. Sergeant Fitzsimmons was standing beside her, his black Marine z-suit blending into the dimness of the room. He had a bundle in his hands. "Sorry to bother you, ma'am, but I thought you might need something for the cold." H
e grinned. "But that's a prettier hat than I had in my ruck. I like the…ah…reindeer?"

  "Oh." Gretchen touched the thick, felty plush of the cap on her head. "My mum makes them for all the kids," she said, tugging at the brightly-colored, shapeless mass. "Thank you for the thought, Sergeant. But Ugarit had its own bad weather, and Mars was bitterly cold. I've plenty of warm things."

  Gretchen managed a smile, thinking of trudging across the brittle, rocky permafrost to the Polaris site, stiff in a triply-insulated z-suit and respirator. The Marine had a gray-green service wool cap and a pair of gloves, also a foul olive color, in his hands. Good enough for our slowly heating ship, she thought with a hidden frown, but not good enough to keep your hands and ears attached on Mars.

  "Good," he said, stuffing the cap and gloves into a cargo pouch on the front of his suit. "Do you need help getting that vault door open?"

  Gretchen started to shake her head — she had a video of McCue's keycode — but then realized refusing the offer might be rude. Might need a big, brawny Marine sometime. She stood up, snugging the sherpa cap under her ears. "Thanks," she said, "I don't think there'll be any trouble, but you never know…"

  The vault door proved to be hidden behind a standard wall panel. Gretchen supposed the panel had slid down automatically during the power failure. Fitzsimmons's combat bar made a suitable lever to pop the panel free from the floor, and then he rolled it up with one hand. The vault hatch was closed, and Gretchen stepped in — lips pursed in concern — to find the keypad in ruins. All of the pressure surfaces had eroded away, leaving only a contact panel and some pitlike holes where wires, perhaps, had once run.

  "This is just fine!" Gretchen rapped the panel without result.

  "Ma'am, let me try," the Marine waited politely until Gretchen stepped away, then drew a v-pad from his belt, unfolded a set of waxy-looking stems from the back and — humming softly to himself — matched them up with the holes. After a moment the v-pad beeped and the schematic of a keypad appeared on its glassy face. "Try this," Fizsimmons said, suppressing a pleased grin.