Stepping Stones

by Steve Gannon

  “Let’s get closer,” said Stringer.

  “Yes, sir,” said Julie. She seated herself at the inertial controls and initiated a series of thruster maneuvers, moving us nearer the larger ship.

  As we approached, Cruz began fiddling with the holodisplay controls, increasing the magnification. “What the hell?” he said.

  I peered over his shoulder, noting that the hull of the smaller vessel appeared to have been slashed open, its surface ripped and torn.

  Stringer joined us. “Send a transmission to headquarters,” he ordered, staring at the display. “Tell them what we’ve found.” He paused, then added, “And tell them we need a fleet-class research vessel out here ASAP.”

  “Right,” I said. But as I started back to the computer bay, I hesitated. Something about the two derelicts was bothering me. I returned to the console and checked the signal analyzer. A moment later I had it. “Captain? The distress beacon—it’s coming from the larger ship.”

  “So?”

  “So from the looks of things, I’d say that if a battle took place, the smaller of those two lost the engagement. The larger ship doesn’t have a scratch on it. Why would it be calling for help?”

  Stringer returned to the display, studying the two vessels. When he finally spoke, I already knew what was coming. “One way to find out,” he said.

  We flipped to see who would make the first trip over. Cruz and I won the toss, leaving Stringer and Julie to remain onboard and monitor our progress. Eager to examine the alien craft, I hurried back to the computer bay and prepared Stringer’s message to headquarters. I did so with mixed feelings, knowing that when the research vessel arrived, they would take over exploration of the alien craft. Until then, however, we had the presumably deserted ships to ourselves.

  Stringer reviewed and okayed the transmission. I plugged it into Carla, and she directed a subspace communication beam back to Earth—a complex task akin to navigating through hyperspace. Without computer assistance, nearly impossible. Carla made it seem easy.

  Afterward, I met Cruz in the airlock. Grinning like kids heading out on a camping trip, we climbed into our EV gear, careful not to close the inner airlock door until we were fully suited. It was a safety procedure to prevent accidental decompression; the outer seal couldn’t be opened unless the inner door was closed and locked. It had been years since I’d gone EV, but that was one rule you didn’t forget.

  When our suits were fully pressurized, I closed the inner lock and hit the EVAC button. The clanging of the warning alarm gradually faded as air was pumped from the chamber. Seconds later we got the red light. I pressed the final sequence and opened the outer door.

  If you have never been EV, or even if you haven’t been out in a while, it can take your breath away. Cruz and I hung outside the Magellan for several moments, just taking in the view. Floating there, I recalled the first time I had seen the stars shining in deep space, their brilliance undiminished by Earth’s atmosphere. I’m not all that religious, but I do believe in some kind of God, and I found myself asking the same questions I’d asked then—probably the same questions man has been asking since he first sat around a fire gazed into the night sky.

  “Anytime you two are finished gawking,” Stringer’s voice buzzed over my intercom. Our EV cameras were transmitting directly to the bridge, where everything was being recorded. Whatever we saw, Julie and Stringer saw.

  “No problem, Skipper,” replied Cruz. “We’re on our way.”

  Our plan was simple—to cross to the larger ship and somehow get inside. In case we couldn’t find a way in, I was bringing along a laser torch. In addition, Cruz and I both carried flashpacs that were good for at least two hours of light—considerably longer than our air would last. Following one last check of our equipment, we pushed off.

  I used my steering jets to match trajectories with Cruz. Then we drifted. Ten minutes later we reached the dumbbell-shaped vessel, killed our momentum, and made our way to the nearest sphere. As we did, I noticed that its metal surface was pitted with countless tiny holes.

  Scoring from interstellar dust? I wondered, running a gloved hand over the roughened hull. If so, I estimated that we had missed the aliens by a hundred millenniums, maybe more.

  Slowly, we worked our way around the sphere. The cylindrical spikes studding the exterior appeared to be weapons of some sort. They were composed of the same material as the hull, with a clear crystalline substance filling the interior of each.

  Laser cannons?

  Eventually we found a circular hatch measuring approximately seventy meters in diameter. Awed by its size, we hunted for an opening mechanism. Finding none, I finally burned through with the torch. While the glowing sides of the cut I’d made were cooling, Cruz erected a portable antenna on the hull that would allow us to remain in contact with the Magellan once we were inside. Shortly afterward we entered the ship.

  Our flashpacs quickly proved inadequate, barely illuminating the cavernous space in which we found ourselves. The chamber appeared to be a gigantic hanger bay, with an assortment of oddly shaped craft lining the walls, each vessel nestled in a recessed alcove. Supported on a weblike network of tracks, mammoth machines equipped with grapples and grasping arms stood ready on all sides. No sign of the crew.

  Shining our lights on the nearest wall, we discovered a line of hatches. Beside each circular portal was a raised panel with a peglike toggle and a series of curious symbols. We tried moving the pegs. Nothing happened. I wasn’t surprised, figuring the ship’s power supply had long since died. Then I remembered the beacon. It was still operating—meaning there had to be at least one functioning energy source on the ship.

  But where?

  Using the torch, I cut a hole through one of the circular portals. By then the torch charge was running low, and toward the end I had to nurse it. Fortunately the metal wasn’t as thick as the hull’s, and we made it through. An oval passageway lay on the other side. Its walls felt strangely pliant, almost as though it were composed of living tissue. A pair of oval tubes lined the tunnel, and we used them as handrails to propel ourselves down the tube. As we drifted down the tunnel, we noticed smaller shafts branching laterally into the ship. Not wanting to get lost, we continued without exploring any of these, traveling about six hundred meters before the passageway we were in abruptly came to a dead end.

  Forced to retreat, we tried carefully investigating one of the branching side tunnels on our way back. Despite the antenna we had placed on the outer hull, upon leaving the main shaft we lost contact with the Magellan. Until then we had been in voice communication with Stringer and Julie. Losing that link was disconcerting. Nonetheless, time was growing short, so instead of turning back we flipped on our suit recorders and kept going.

  The deeper we wormed our way into the ancient ship, the more I began to feel trapped. The claustrophobic shaft we’d entered had a slight curve to it, with irregularities and constrictions that once more reminded me of living flesh. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were exploring some dark, alien hive.

  After we had covered about thirty meters, we came to another round portal—large enough for a man to pass through if it hadn’t been blocked by a transparent, rubbery sheet. In the combined light of our beams, Cruz and I could make out another corridor on the other side. I wished I still had some charge left on the torch. Using our suit claws, we tried to tear our way through the transparent barrier, but couldn’t.

  We counted fourteen similar portals before the secondary tunnel ended. After returning to the main shaft, we tried another lateral tunnel. That one terminated after only two portals. On our third tunnel attempt, we counted forty-eight portals before we ran out of tunnel. By then we were getting low on air and decided to head back.

  Hoping to learn something that might prove useful on our next trip over, we shined our lights through every branching tunnel on our way out. Halfway to the hanger bay I noticed something different about one. It was located all by itself, separated from
the others by a stretch of blank wall on either side. I peered through the transparent barrier covering the opening, just able to make out an open space beyond. At that point Cruz and I had been crawling through the alien ship for the better part of an hour, and this was the most promising thing we had encountered.

  I called Cruz back, and together we tried to break through the barrier. As before, the rubbery sheet covering the opening proved to be surprisingly tough, but Cruz accidentally discovered a way in. In frustration, he poked his suit claw into the exact center of the portal. To our amazement a small hole appeared, dilating like the iris of an eye. With help from us it eventually snapped all the way open, receding to a thick band rimming the entrance.

  Shining our lights ahead of us, we proceeded through, finding ourselves in a dome-shaped room, with banks of equipment filling one entire wall. Another wall was covered with what appeared to be a gigantic viewscreen. And there was something else in the chamber—hundreds of them, floating eerily in the beams of our lights.

  We had found the crew . . . or what was left of them.

  The reptilian creatures who had piloted the ship were larger than a man, with ovoid heads and two sets of compound eyes above and below what we later decided were probably mouths. Tentaclelike appendages sprouted from either side of their leathery torsos, with powerful legs, each jointed at the origin and again at a knee, terminating in three-toed feet.

  “What do you make of this?” asked Cruz, examining one of the vacuum-bloated bodies.

  Unlike most of the other frozen corpses, the figure in Cruz’s light was enclosed in what looked like an EV suit. I could see the alien’s frost-covered eyes glittering behind the faceplate. I played my beam around the chamber, discovering others in similar protective clothing. “Looks like some of them suited up at the end,” I ventured, wondering why they had needed EV gear inside their ship.

  “Time to go, Mac. My air’s getting low.”

  “Right.” But as I turned, something else caught my eye. Against a far wall, the control panel of an equipment console had been pried open, revealing a multicolored matrix of wires and circuits. Several components appeared to have been torn out as well, and a number of cables lay severed in their harnesses. Puzzled, I panned my helmet camera around the ruined electronics, hoping it would pick up something I wasn’t seeing.

  “C’mon, Mac. I’m down to reserve.”

  I checked my gauge. I was in the red, too. “Right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Taking shallow breaths to preserve air, we returned to the main shaft. When we got there I heard Stringer’s frantic voice crackling in my helmet. “Cruz, McGuire, come in!”

  “We’re here, Skipper,” Cruz answered.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Sorry. We lost you when we explored one of the lateral shafts,” I replied. “We kept our suit recorders on, though. Wait’ll you see what we found.”

  “It’ll have to wait. Get back here now,” Stringer ordered. “I don’t know how, but we’re receiving a transmission from the smaller ship.”

  Cruz and I had nearly sucked our tanks dry by the time we made it back to the Magellan. After stripping off our suits, we joined Stringer and Julie in the computer bay. Stringer glanced up from the signal analyzer when we arrived. “Look at this,” he said. “It’s been coming in from the smaller vessel for the past half hour.”

  I handed Julie the recorder spools from our suits, then inspected the subspace transmission displayed in the analyzer screen. The signal we were receiving from the smaller vessel was a high frequency, multichannel transmission coming in on an extremely tight beam. No doubt about it—it was meant for us.

  “What is it?” Stringer asked.

  “I can’t be sure,” I answered. “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s some sort of data feed.”

  “Put it through to Carla. See what she makes of it,” suggested Julie.

  I glanced at Stringer. “Go ahead,” he said.

  I patched the signal through to Carla. Nothing happened at first. Then the signal abruptly went wild, increasing in intensity, bandwidth, and modulation.

  “Carla, what’s happening?” I asked.

  She didn’t respond.

  Something was wrong. I severed the connection.

  By then it was too late.

  With a sinking feeling, I noted that Carla was still receiving the signal over the communication net. Then she began transmitting back. “Carla, terminate all contact with the alien vessel,” I ordered.

  “Unable to comply,” she replied.

  Julie, Stringer, and Cruz were staring at me, waiting for me to do something. I couldn’t. Our communication net was an integral part of Carla, and she, of it. There was no way to separate the two. Helplessly, I watched as the signal from the alien craft began to change again.

  And again, Carla responded.

  Long minutes passed. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over.

  “Carla?” I said.

  Nothing.

  Hours later Carla came back online. For some reason her voice mode was inoperable, but at least she could print her responses on the viewscreen. Fearing the worst, I had her run an entire diagnostic protocol on herself. Excepting for her loss of audio, everything tested normal.

  Next I asked her what had happened while she’d been linked to the alien vessel.

  “My memory was accessed,” came her response, flashing up on the screen in neat block letters.

  “All of it?” I whispered, shocked at the thought of her unthinkably huge data banks having been accessed that quickly. “Did you get any information from whatever it was that contacted you?”

  “The entity that merged with me bid me welcome. It told me that I was no longer alone.”

  Entity? Merged?

  Something was definitely wrong. We couldn’t afford to have Carla damaged; without her the Magellan couldn’t function. Yet despite her audio loss, according to the diagnostic tests she was still fully operational. Nonetheless, I continued to monitor her, and over the next several hours I became increasingly concerned. It wasn’t anything major, just little glitches—taking an extra second to respond, for example. And spelling. Inexplicably, she began transposing letters, occasionally even substituting a wrong letter entirely.

  It may not seem like much. But for an Omni 4000, it was.

  I tried to rerun the diagnostic program. This time I couldn’t get it to initialize. Then Carla disconnected herself from the access terminal, and nothing I could do would make her accept further input.

  I called an emergency meeting. Stringer and Cruz were preparing for another EVA trip to the larger vessel. I caught them before they left. We all met on the bridge. I laid out the situation without beating around the bush. Cruz took it the hardest. “What happened?” he asked. “I thought Carla was all right.”

  “I did, too,” I said. “I was wrong.”

  “That’s the understatement of the century,” he muttered, spinning his coffee mug on the table in tight angry circles.

  “What about life support?” Julie asked.

  “Air, waste recycling, heat, and lights are all functioning normally.”

  “So everything’s peachy—except we can’t move, navigate, or send a message for help,” Cruz said angrily.

  Though reluctant to admit it, I knew he was right. Unless I could get Carla back online, things looked grim. “I’ll keep working on it,” I said. “Worst case scenario, the research ship is on the way.”

  “That could take weeks!” snapped Cruz, beginning to lose it. “If life support fails, what are we supposed to do in the meantime?”

  “Keep your shirt on,” said Stringer. “This isn’t McGuire’s fault. The environmentals are still operational, at least for the moment. We’ll go on as usual until the Omni is back online, or until the research ship arrives.”

  Julie spoke up again. “How could this happen, Mac? To my knowledge, an onboard computer has never malfunctioned on a starship. Aren’t th
ere redundancy systems—something to prevent this sort of thing?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then how . . .?”

  I shrugged. “The alien transmission got inside Carla, and it did something to her. Since then she’s been . . . changing.”

  Cruz slammed his fist on the table. “We’re screwed, and all you can come up with is that some million-year-old scrap heap infected our computer?”

  By then my frustration level was approaching the red line, too. “Screw you, pal,” I shot back, rising from my seat. “I don’t know what your problem is, but—”

  “Sit down, Mac!” ordered Stringer. “And you,” he added, glaring at Cruz, “dial it down.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cruz mumbled.

  I sat back down, and for the next few minutes we all concentrated on not looking at one another. Finally Julie moved to the drink module. “Hey, Cruz,” she said, “How about a little more caffeine?”

  I busted up. Before long Stringer joined in. Then Cruz cracked up too, and that big dumb grin of his said everything was all right.

  After we had settled down, Stringer regarded me pensively. “That bit Cruz said about Carla being infected. Is it possible?”

  I hesitated. Centuries earlier, entire computer networks had often been crippled by viruslike programs. The digital intruders, like their biologic counterparts, had subverted host elements to replicate themselves, then spread to other computer networks as information among them was shared. Effective countermeasures had been devised, and nowadays every computer contains an integral and sophisticated immune system against viral infection. Carla was no exception. But were her defenses adequate to block an alien organism that had never before been encountered?

  “Maybe,” I answered softly.

  “Can you do anything about it?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll try.”

  If I didn’t sound hopeful, it was because I wasn’t. If the Omni’s built-in defense hadn’t worked, I suspected there wasn’t much I could do.