by Mel Keegan
To Marin it was uncomfortably familiar. The armordoors locked and he stood with Travers as salt water washed up around their legs, but in memory he was back in the airlock capsule belonging to the dive boat Cailenne Drifter, suited up, waiting to dive the wreck of the Beluga, off the coast not far south of Westminster. He was seventeen years old – his conscription notice had been posted and he had already downloaded his travel orders. He was expected at the Fleet office, with a hundred other draftees, in three days’ time – from there, it was a shuttle to the transit terminal in orbit, and then a courier to some training ship. It might be five years before he saw Jagreth again, if he lived that long –
The jump bay hatch opened without a sound, and in Marin’s helmet display the navigational data had already begun to run. His heart gave a lurch as four gundrones took point, forty weapons between them panning over every centimeter ahead. They could have torn the platform apart, but nothing was moving and sensors reported not so much as a flicker of energy or heat to betray a gun, a sniper, a mine. Humans and Resalq moved out into the 40 meter, semi-rigid tunnel of the boarding tube, and at once the drones scudded ahead. In seconds they were aboard the platform itself, and setting a perimeter.
To human eyes, the Zunshu structure’s ambient light was cold, blue-gray with a tint of green. Irregularly spaced panels on every surface, including the floor, were alive with brilliant bioluminescence, but the compartment into which the party moved out was so vast, the overall light level remained low. In the rounded corners of the six-sided enclosure, tall, wide plants the color of red wine clung to the walls, waving slender vines through the water. Each branch was frilled with meter-long tendrils which could only be filtering the water, cleaning it, freshening it for life forms which had fled.
It seemed a blue twilight had settled over an area the size of a gunship hangar. Marin turned a three-sixty, trying to pick out detail as they made their way cautiously with the gundrones ranged around them. He saw apertures that might have been hatchways or doors, but rather than being at floor level they were at any height above the deck, set apparently at random and without purpose.
“Damnit, look at this,” Jazinsky said quietly. “It’s like … Hangar 4 aboard the Wastrel, but with everything stripped out, three out of four lights turned off, and a lot of something like bull kelp growing everywhere. There’s doorways … counting nine of them – two are in the ceiling. Do you call it a door, if it’s in the ceiling?”
“Take the left-side ‘door’ in the ceiling,” Rusch said levelly.
“We’re looking at the same nav plot,” Shapiro told her. “Nothing big is moving, just a few tiny shapes darting about, maybe 20 meters away, off to the right, but they’re – well, they look alive, not like any drone I’d recognize. Or weapons.”
“They look,” Marin added, “like fish, or maybe tiny cuttlefish. Lai’a, could they be intelligent?”
“Or could they just be lunch?” Vidal asked sourly. “What do we do, Mark – extend the hand of friendship and say, “Salutations from the peoples of the Deep Sky, we come in peace,” to something that’s going to be laid out on a green salad come dinnertime?”
“That,” Mark said soberly, “is a very good question indeed.” He panned his helmet sensors in the direction of a school of the tiny creatures which swooped and dove in elaborate formation. “See the way they move … Lai’a, is it possible they’re trying to communicate with movement?”
“This is feasible,” Lai’a allowed. “I have tasked the gundrones to collect video of the creatures. If information is encoded in their observable performance, I will identify discrete, repeating patterns in a few moments. However, translation will depend on a cipher. A key. Some point of reference is necessary.”
Marin took a long deep breath. “I wonder if they realize that?”
“If they cracked transspace physics,” Dario said harshly, “they’re smart. They know by now, they can’t understand a syllable we’re saying. If we’re all so damn’ smart, we can hash out a common language. Lai’a!”
Almost to Marin’s relief the AI said, “The creatures are schooling in the pattern of convection currents generated by pulsing bladders in the kelp-like filter trees in the near corners. Their movement is consistent with the ‘chorus line’ effect observed in flocking birds. No information is coded into it.”
“Thank gods,” Vidal muttered. “I’d have felt a prize idiot, making first contact with a shrimp cocktail.” He tilted back his helmet to view the ceiling. “The door is this way.”
And up 200 meters, Marin knew, to a gallery the size of an aeroball stadium, opening off the spiral of a passageway which looped back on itself, coiled, twisted without reason. Or, without any reason a human would perceive. He and Travers were right behind the lead gundrone; Vidal and Kulich brought up the rear with the Sherratts and Shapiro between them.
The compartment measured at least 100 meters across; the ceiling aperture was just off-center, and 50 meters from the boarding tube Marin felt so naked, the hackles prickled erect on the back of his neck. Still, the drones and Lai’a reported nothing save the jetting performance of schools of tiny creatures riding currents, the stately, waving tendrils of filtering ‘trees,’ the minute pulsations of the millions of krill-sized, bioluminescent molluscs which clung like limpets to their panels, filter-feeding and giving off their cold, brilliant light.
The ‘door’ was four meters wide and angled off toward the heart of the platform. Three drones went up first; humans and Resalq hung back until sensors reported nothing moving through a hundred meters. Suit repulsion whined, vibrating through the bones as it sent them up like the drones, and Marin found his hands going instinctively to his weapons.
The same blue-green twilight lit the passage. Human eyesight quickly became accustomed to it. He could see comfortably without need of the floodlights, and as they rose into the stadium-sized enclosure he caught his breath. Everywhere, he saw shapes like shells, aeroshells, cornucopia and spirals, some half a meter high, some ten meters high, in pale blue and green and pink, shot through with striations of red, green, brown.
This compartment was busy with the objects, some standing, some littered across the deck. Its light rippled with the random movement of floating colonies of the bioluminescent creatures, each two or three meters in diameter and drifting with the currents generated by ‘trees’ much more massive than those in the compartment below. Underfoot, as they followed the drones across the wide area beneath a fluted 30 meter ceiling, were objects that might have been tools or toys. Marin recognized none of them, though he knew what they must be.
“Possessions,” he said into the loop. “There were people here when we arrived. They took off too fast to take their stuff with them.”
“And look, here.” Vidal had bobbed up on repulsion to peer through an aperture in a shell-like structure ten meters high and twenty in diameter. The ‘door’ was high in the curved side of the shell, and the inside surface shimmered brightly with bioluminescence.
Travers bobbed up beside him to look; his vidfeed streamed in realtime, and it was Jazinsky who said, “Is that a – a house?”
Inside were segments, curved, inclined, each with a scatter of objects, tools, toys, abstract art – to human and Resalq the shapes meant nothing. A house? Marin wondered. “If it’s a house, then this –” he panned his helmet camera across the vast chamber “– is a town.”
“Shells,” Rusch observed. “Everything I’m seeing reminds me of those shells they sell in the hotel gift stores in Santorini and Moresby. Tropical seashells.”
She was right. Marin leaned closer to the wall before him, for a better view of the material. “Like mother-of-pearl,” he said softly as one gauntleted hand closed around an edge and applied pressure. The material snapped readily and he turned it to the light.
“Calcium carbonate,” Mark read off the chemical analysis, “with particulate copper and iron oxide … and it looks,” he added, “extruded.”
“E
xtruded?” Jazinsky was examining the same vidfeed. “It looks spun.”
“Everything I’m seeing appears similar.” Dario panned his helmet sensors at floor, walls, the ceiling far above. “A lot of this is very close to simple calcium carbonate, but infused with enough particulate metals that … damn it, Mark, you see this? Look at the floor, the deck, whatever you want to call it. Could you call this steel?”
“You mean, is it an alloy of iron and carbon?” Mark mused, hushed as he examined not the material but its structure. “It’s almost a philosophical question. I’ve never seen anything like this. Yes, it’s steel – but it isn’t. It’s iron and carbon, traces of nickel and chromium, but it’s been compounded from microscopic particles, as if…”
“As if,” Jazinsky went on, “they have a system of filtering the upwelling currents from the super-hot, deep ocean, taking the metals they want in particulate form, extruding whatever shapes they need. If they need steel – much stronger than the common building material of metal-dense limestone – they might use calcium carbonate like a mold, infuse iron, carbon, chromium, according a strict formula … drop the construct back into the furnace-heat of the deep atmosphere to ‘forge’ it, float it to the upper atmosphere to cool it, ship the finished object here for use. It’s far from impossible. It’s just that humans and Resalq never used the method.”
“Never had to,” Marin suggested, “or – never had the opportunity. We mine, smelt, forge … we live in an oxygen atmosphere where fire burns. Try that underwater!” He actually chuckled. “This is beautiful.”
“Alien,” Vidal added.
“Very.” Mark stirred with an effort. “And we still have a long way to go, and not too much safe time to do it in. Lai’a – report on activity in the outer system.”
“I am aware of no activity, Doctor,” Lai’a assured him. “The transspace drive remains on station keeping. Captain Vaurien appears to be responding to therapy. Cardiac function has stabilized; his left lung collapsed 35 minutes ago; it is being restored. Bone welding is complete; neural grafting is complete. Hepatic and renal function continue to be depressed. Doctor Grant has designed further nano therapy.” It paused. “Recommend you quicken your pace.”
“Why?” Shapiro barked the question. “What do you see?”
“I see nothing, General,” Lai’a said mildly, “which might, in itself, be cause for concern. I can detect no threat, but the longer your party lingers in Zunshu territory, the more likely you are to encounter it. The computer core is 750 meters from your current position.”
“It’s right.” Vidal growled. “We’re not on a sightseeing tour – and we’re inviting trouble – hustle!”
Without a word Marin turned in the wake of the gundrones on point. His hackles continued to prickle but he knew the discomfort stemmed from his awareness of the distance, the maze, stretching behind them, back to the boarding tunnel and Lai’a. Passages followed chambers, vessels and bubbles opened into pearlescent light with schools of tiny, jetting creatures of every color, and groves of ‘trees,’ every size, shape and hue, among which larger life forms clambered, grazed, swam in lazy, unconcerned arcs.
Here and there a creature turned toward them, paused long enough to afford clear images, and Travers swore softly. “What is that?”
“A shell-less cephalopod,” Mark told him. “Maybe 20 kilos, by the looks of it … and it’s a gill breather … vegetarian. I’d say it’s a grazing animal, lives on the ‘trees’ … colored golden-brown and deep red for camouflage. It has quite good eyes – six of them, there around the front end, call it the snout. It’s looking at us.”
“It’s probably an algae grazer,” Jazinsky mused. “I have a good, clear image of its mouth parts. I’m seeing a big, flat, sharp scraper of a tongue. It could take your arm right off with that.”
“Intelligent?” Vidal hazarded.
“I’d have to guess not.” Mark held out his hand to the creature, took a step toward it. “If it was intelligent, it would have taken off with the rest of the local folk, when we started to cut our way in. I’d guess they grabbed their children, pets and valuables and ran … which means this fellow is more than likely a domestic animal. And this,” he added with a nod at the grove of ‘trees,’ “appears to be a paddock.” He took one more step toward the cephalopod before the creature flushed brilliant scarlet, blew a cloud of blue-black ink and jetted into the cover of the grove with astonishing speed.
“Muscles spasm to pump water through a valve system running through the center of the body,” Rusch observed. “No wonder they’re fast. If they’re a food animal, they’d be tough to catch.”
For a moment Marin struggled to put his finger on the real gist of what she had said. It was Vidal who placed it. “Hunters,” he said hoarsely. “Zunshu are the intelligent species here, and they evolved in an oceanic environment as hunters. You’ve seen the prey animal. The rest of them might have hightailed it away when they saw us coming, but they’re hunters. We knew they had to be.”
“But they’re not hunting now,” Shapiro said sourly. “They’re hiding.”
“Which demonstrates good sense,” Rusch added into the loop.
“And you,” Dario said in acid tones, “wanted a fight.”
“Expected a fight,” Shapiro allowed.
“Wanted,” Dario snorted. “We all did. We wanted a stand-up knife-fight, and we’d hammer them into submission, make ’em shut up, sit down and listen while we read the bastards terms, told ’em how it was going to happen, what they owed us.”
As he spoke they were moving again – quickly now, keenly aware of the passage of time. The longer they tarried in an alien milieu that was as fascinating as it was incomprehensible, the more likely they were to walk into disaster. Marin fell into step at Travers’s side, every moment now panning his sensors and weapons in every direction as if his instincts could not trust the gundrones.
“Relax, we’re covered,” Travers said, just audible over the loop.
“Tell that to my nerves.” Marin mocked himself with a note of acid humor. “There’s a Neanderthal hunter inside me, and he’s dead certain there’s a sabre-tooth tiger breathing right down the back of his neck!” He raised his voice. “Lai’a, how far is the computer core?”
“Turn left at the aperture set 15 meters above you, enter the passage,” the AI told him, “and a cluster of apparatus is 120 meters ahead of you. The apparatus is sealed inside a bubble of inert gas, approximately seven meters in diameter. Do not flood the chamber. Machinery within is susceptible to –”
Movement at the extreme left of the field of view allowed by the helmet camera made Marin’s heart jump. He spun as fast as the armor would permit – the gundrones were faster, and before he could level a weapon on the creature it was covered by forty others. The drones were configured to fire only if they detected live weapons systems, and though guns were primed, they waited.
Listening to the pulse drumming in his ears, Marin blinked at the creature, eyes racing over it, only one word in his mind – Zunshu. It hovered in what a human might have called a doorway; the chamber beyond was dim, almost dark.
Zunshu. Smaller than human dimensions, he saw – perhaps a meter and a half from end to end, green-russet-gold in color, like an ambush predator designed by evolution to blend into its environment. Elongated, feathery gill structures in its sides beat much faster than his own pulse. Six big, dark eyes clustered around and above a bush of cilia which undulated constantly, tasting, sniffing. The eyes blinked in odd patterns, bottom lid to top, and never two eyes at the same time. He saw nothing he would have identified as a mouth, but 30 centimeters below the gesticulating cilia was the slit-like opening of what seemed to be a pouch, served by four thick members, more like paddles than tentacles. The paddles were supple, dextrous, restless, patting the pouch nervously, tracing the line of its opening – exactly like a human wringing his hands and patting his lips in anxiety.
The creature had no legs, Marin saw; a fin sh
ape extended down and back like a rudder. What use would legs be to a creature that evolved in liquid? It had no arms, but six slender members, each almost meter long, clustered to left and right of the sensor-rich snout, coiling, uncoiling, with boneless, rapid, jerky movements as if the creature were terrified. Fang-like spines peeped out from the ends of the longest two of these ‘arms’ and were retracted again like cat claws, in a quick rhythm of instinct, or fright, or both.
The body was as wide as the torso of an adolescent human, skirted by graceful, rippling flanges of muscle giving it tremendous precision of movement. The muscles flushed from color to color, perhaps reflecting the creature’s mood – in which case, purple and green were its hues of fear, Marin guessed.
But its defining feature was the fluted spiral of the gorgeous, white-gold shell which it wore like a parasol. Part of the body extended back into the shell, and chambers inside were certainly filled with gas – the creature was positively buoyant. As Marin looked closer he saw that glands on its flanks effervesced, emitting froths of tiny bubbles – adjusting the pressure in the shell?
Was this individual male, female, young, old, startled, curious? Humans and Resalq saw no clue, but he could guess this one had been left behind in the rush to get away. It might be an infant, an invalid, an imbecile, or simply an individual who had been caught unawares.
The limb-like members around the sensor-rich snout … the face? Marin could see no face, but he knew no other word … spread, gestured, flushed with color. The creature blinked three of its eyes rhythmically, which almost looked as if it were winking, while its flanks effervesced.
“Mark … is it signing?” Rusch whispered, as if she thought she must murmur though she was back in the makeshift Ops room, experiencing threedee telepresence. “Barb?”
“The colors, the gestures,” Jazinsky agreed. “It could be talking to us right now.”
“And we wouldn’t know how to respond or reply,” Shapiro said in a tone of profound frustration. “Lai’a, record everything you can. If there’s any way to interpret what it’s saying … if it’s actually saying anything –”
