by Ian Douglas
The local gravity field, he noted, was 890 centimeters per second squared . . . about nine-tenths of a G. Good. There’d been some concern going in that they might find the aliens’ artificial gravity, if they had such a thing, set to something appropriate for Jupiter—two or three Gs, say. That would have made getting around difficult.
Even in near-Earth gravity, though, the VBSS pod wouldn’t serve as an aircraft. Designed to get a boarding team onto an enemy vessel, it possessed a small gravitic drive, but delicate maneuvering—hovering, for example—just wasn’t possible. It could move forward with a fair acceleration, but was not designed as a lifting body, and its dorsal grav thrusters were for changing attitude, not resisting a steady .9-G pull. Archie Lamb was keeping the pod airborne at low speed, but the craft was starting to fall.
What, Garrison wondered, were the options? The pod was intended to deposit its payload of combat boarders on the interior decks of an enemy ship . . . but this thing didn’t have internal decks other than the featureless and gently curving spherical wall of this kilometer-wide inner chamber. He studied the alien for a moment longer. Although attaching emotion or rational meaning to something that alien was problematical, to say the least, it truly appeared to be anxious about the bulkhead surface area damaged by the pod’s entry, and didn’t even seem to be aware of the pod itself. He thought about it. A human might be aware of it when a portion of a large flatscreen monitor a few centimeters across went dead . . . but he probably would not notice an ant crawling across the sofa he was sitting on, not unless he was looking for it.
As he watched, the black area of the inner surface lit once more, a seamless part of the surrounding vista of cloud-cliffs and sky. The alien, like some unimaginably vast medusoid jelly in Earth’s seas, began rising again, rotating slowly in the clear, crystalline air.
Garrison was using the pod’s optical sensors, zooming in on the alien. The surface of the thing seemed smooth from a distance, but under high magnification, much of it appeared rough, even convoluted.
In his mind, using the in-head display he was sharing with the others, he indicated a portion of the enormous being’s anatomy. “There,” he said. “Take us there.”
The pod accelerated toward the H’rulka giant.
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Sol System
2302 hours, TFT
“This is incredible,” Dr. Wilkerson said. “Absolutely amazing!”
Koenig smiled. Wilkerson had patched into Koenig’s link with the SEALS on board the alien ship, and he seemed to be drunk with excitement. “Are you talking about the alien, Doctor? Or the way Chief Garrison is carrying out his mission?”
“Oh, your SEALS are obviously remarkable individuals,” Wilkerson said. “But I was referring to that . . . that life form. That is a H’rulka?”
“We think it must be,” Koenig told him. “It seems to fit what the Agletsch told us about them twelve years ago. Hot-hydrogen floaters, very large . . . though I didn’t expect them to be this large!”
“How big is it?”
Koenig glanced at the telemetry being transmitted from the SEALS. “Just over 280 meters across the top. The gas bag is two hundred meters high . . . and the tentacles hang about a hundred meters below that.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever get over just how inventive life is. Do you know . . . there was actually a time, back before we’d made contact with other species, when we assumed that anything we met out among the stars would be more or less like us?”
“I guess the Agletsch were a bit of a shock, then.”
“I guess they were.”
Garrison was taking the pod directly toward the H’rulka’s underbelly. The other H’rulka in the image, the huge swarm of them far off, appeared to be part of the background projection. That, Koenig reasoned, might be a clue to the aliens’ psychology. The illusion of wide-open, cloud-walled spaces must be there to remind the ship’s crew of home. They might well be claustrophobic if they couldn’t see clouds and open sky . . . which would be a serious disadvantage for any star-faring race.
And if that drifting herd of gas bags visible in the far distance was any indication, individual H’rulka might get nervous or depressed if they couldn’t see other members of their own species. There apparently was only one real H’rulka on this ship . . . or in this chamber, at any rate.
It occurred to Koenig that this ten-kilometer-long vessel might be the H’rulka equivalent of a single-seat fighter.
“Damn,” Wilkerson said. “What the hell are those SEALS trying to do?”
The VBT–80 was close enough to the H’rulka now that the thing’s body blotted out the entire view forward—a red-brown-yellow-black forest of feathery tentacles and things like trailing vines hanging down around the upward-drifting balloon. The pod brushed across a number of tentacles, which had the appearance of an enormous and complex tangle of tree roots, but the touch didn’t seem to elicit a reaction from the titanic being. The pod was angling over now, flying level instead of up. It emerged above the twisting mass of tentacles, and seemed to be moving toward a kind of ledge or organic platform running around the creature just above the base of the gas bag.
“I think Chief Garrison has found a place to land,” Koenig said.
“Base, Black One,” Garrison’s voice said. “Any ideas for talking with this thing?”
“Can you patch me through to him?” Wilkerson asked Koenig.
“You’re on.”
“Yes, actually,” Wilkerson told the SEALS. “I understand you have a PRC–2020 SMRS?”
“The Prick–2020, yeah.”
“Uh . . . yes. If you can get that onto the creature, we might have a chance.”
“Listen,” Garrison said, “we’re getting a lot of background radio noise in here. Some of it seems to be coming from our big friend, the rest from the surrounding bulkheads.”
“Modulated radio signals, yes. We think that is the H’rulka speaking.”
“Yeah? Who’s he talking to?”
“His ship.”
The VBT–80 pod grounded on the ivory-white platform, a frilly, pasty white horizontal surface extending out from the swell of the gas bag by a good ten or fifteen meters, and apparently running all away around the body of the thing. The tentacle mass rose slightly above the layer of the platform from underneath, looking a little like a wall of dense jungle vegetation, but moving with a slow, writhing agitation.
“End of the line!” Garrison called. The walls of the boarding pod split wide, and six Navy SEALS spilled out onto the fleshy platform. Each man was wearing highly specialized combat armor, form hugging, with myoplas musculature that responded to his movements and amplified his strength. Their surfaces were coated with nanoflage that absorbed and re-emitted light of appropriate wavelengths, creating . . . not invisibility, quite, but a hazy blur that rendered each man indistinct against his surroundings.
Three of them carried laser rifles, three packed man-portable plasma weapons. Garrison hauled a large backpack out of the open pod, which he dragged toward the vertical surface of the gas bag close by.
“Now I know how a fuckin’ flea feels,” one of the SEALS said.
Koenig was seeing the SEALS’ surroundings through the eyes of Chief Garrison, and so could only see what the chief was looking at. The glimpses he got of the interior of the sphere were of spectacular vistas of cloud and sky, of an incredible beauty awesome in both its intricate detail and its scale. Unfortunately, the chief was more focused on the job at hand, and had no time for sightseeing. Setting the satchel against the gas bag wall, he opened the pack and exposed the control panel for the PRC–2020. His glove was inset with a mesh of gold and copper threads matching the implant in his palm; he brought that down on the contact pad and opened the primary channels.
“We have data flow,” Wilkerson said. “Good signal. . . .”
The unit included a powerful linguistic computer coupled with a broadband receiver and spectrum analyzer. The Agletsch, according to the records, had said that the H’rulka used radio for communications both with others and with their own kind. The Turusch colony on Luna that Wilkerson had been working with had confirmed this. The H’rulka talked with one another by radio . . . and evidently communicated with their machines in the same way. The PRC–2020 would analyze the radio environment inside the H’rulka ship and transmit its findings to the XS teams outside by means of the fiber-optic relays the SEALS had embedded in the alien ship’s hull.
“Shit,” one of the SEALS said. “What the fuck is that?”
Koenig’s point of view whipped around to the left. There was . . . something on the wall of jungle a few meters away.
Black Recon One
H’rulka Ship
Sol System
2307 hours, TFT
Garrison’s eyes opened wide. What was that thing?
Superficially, it resembled a terrestrial octopus, but possessed only three arms. It was a bright, glossy blue in color, and something like a single round eye with a three-branched pupil was staring at Garrison from the center. Like an octopus, it had lines of suckers down each slender tentacle, but it didn’t seem to be using them to hold on. It was hanging, gibbon-like, from two looping, vine-like tentacles stretched above it,
A second blue creature swung up beside the first . . . followed by a third. Those cyclopean stares were unnerving.
“Hold your fire,” Garrison’s voice said. “I think they’re harmless. . . .”
But how did you know whether something this alien was harmless or not? Koenig noticed that several of the larger suckers close to the base of the creatures’ arms were, in fact, openings ringed by bony plates, and pulsing as if in time to breathing or heartbeat. If those were mouths, they could do considerable damage . . . though probably not to SEALS armor. As he watched, one of the creatures wrapped all three arms around a tentacle the size of a man’s thigh, its central body everting somehow so that the eye remained visible, staring at the humans a few meters away. Garrison had the impression that it was feeding on the H’rulka’s tentacle.
Or . . . was he seeing something else, and simply not understanding it? For a scary moment, he wondered if the blue three-armed octopi were the real H’rulka, the huge floater simply the alien forest in which the octopi lived.
But . . . no. He’d seen the jellyfish-like floater reacting to the damage to the ship’s inner hull with apparent intelligence . . . and these blue things didn’t have much room in those bodies for brains. It was far more likely, he thought, that . . . just as humans were infested with skin mites, chiggers, and other parasites so small they were literally beneath the notice of their hosts, so, too, there might be entire alien ecosystems living in and on the bodies of these enormous beings, tiny by comparison . . . but in this case as large as a small dog.
“Chief!” Lamb yelled. “Watch out!”
The pale flesh underfoot had been trembling slightly all along, Garrison had noticed, but now it gave a convulsive jerk as a meter-wide slit opened up in the organic ground just a short distance away, and something flashed out into the open. Garrison had a blurred impression of something like an enormous segmented worm, pale yellow and brown and covered in chitinous armor. Each segment had three curved spines, like legs, spaced equidistant around the body, giving it the look of an enormous centipede with extra legs running down the back. The head was a nightmare of tentacles spreading out around a gaping mouth full of sharp, bony plates.
The thing exploded from the slit, towering above the startled SEALS for a moment, the upper end of its body swaying back and forth as though it was undecided. The thing was at least three meters long, and not all of its body had emerged as yet. Lamb raised his plasma weapon, but Garrison slapped his armored pauldron with a gloved hand. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled. “No one shoot! No one move! I don’t think—”
With blinding speed, the swaying monstrosity whipped around and slashed at one of the blue octopi nearby, its own tentacles closing around the alien parasite and dragging it off the H’rulka giant’s looped tentacles. Garrison saw a ripple pass down the length of the thing’s body as it swallowed . . . and then it rippled across the platform and out over the mass of tentacles curling up just beyond. As the barbed and hooked tail of the thing emerged and vanished over the side, Garrison estimated that the creature was something more than ten meters long.
The three-armed octopi, the ones that hadn’t been eaten, had vanished. The severed tips of two slender blue tentacles remained curled about a larger tentacle, showing where the one had been hanging when it was devoured.
“What the hell was that?” Lamb demanded. “Pest control?”
“Something like it,” Garrison said. He was remembering an old, humorous poem he’d heard somewhere.
Big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite ’em.
And little bugs have lesser bugs, and so ad infinitum.
Curious, he thoughtclicked for a quick search of America’s e-Net. The lines had been written by Jonathan Swift.
“Admiral Koenig?” he said.
“Go ahead, Black One.”
“Is everything flowing okay?”
“We have solid telemetry,” Dr. Wilkerson’s voice said. “What we’re going to be able to do with it, I don’t know.”
“Permission to exfiltrate, sir,” Garrison said. “It just occurred to me that this critter might have other symbiotic defenses in place . . . something with a taste for Navy SEALS.”
“Use your best judgment, son,” Koenig’s voice came back. “If the prick is secure and nothing’s trying to eat it, I’d say there’s no reason for you to stay there.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Garrison turned to the other SEALS. “Gentlemen, I think it’s time for us to get the hell out of Dodge.”
H’rulka Warship 442
Sol System
2330 hours, TFT
Swift Pouncer wondered if it was going mad. It was beginning to hear voices.
The nuclear detonations had left Ship 442 adrift, with no hope of rescue. The faster-than-light drive was out, communications were out, weapons were out, even the ability to see outside was gone, and the rest of the H’rulka ship-group would by now have dropped into metaspace and be out of reach. Swift Pouncer felt trapped within the too-small confines of its ship. Some 123 vu ago, a tiny portion of the ship’s interior display had failed, and Swift Pouncer had nearly discorporated with shock and fear. The thought that the reassuring vista of cloud, sky, and other All of Us adrift in the distance might fail, that Swift Pouncer would find itself in a close, tight, and utterly lightless and claustrophobic enclosure was terrifying.
So when it began hearing voices—or, at least, unintelligible noises—on its primary communications wavelengths, it could only imagine that the awareness of its confinement had begun causing it to hallucinate.
There was always a hiss and buzz of radio static in the background, of course. The homeworld, as did most real planets, continually broadcast radio noise which was . . . simply there, without meaning, and part of Swift Pouncer’s illusory surroundings were recordings of that comforting crackling hiss.
This, however, was different: sharply voiced and modulated spikes of radio noise that had the pacing and timbre of speech . . . but which it couldn’t understand.
Swift Pouncer considered the possibility that the vermin outside were attempting to communicate at radio wavelengths, but discarded the thought. Warship 442’s communications suite was disabled, the external antennae burned away by nuclear explosions, and radio waves simply could not penetrate the ship’s hull structure otherwise.
Odd. If someone outside of Warship 442 had been trying to communicate, the message would have come through the ship’s comm suite, broadcast to Swift Pouncer’s organic receivers from the
hull of the ship. These . . . noises, however, appeared to be originating from Swift Pouncer’s body itself, almost as though one of the colony components of the H’rulka floater were trying to speak to the others.
Which, of course, was flatly impossible. Only a few of the individual colony organisms that made up an adult H’rulka were self-aware, and those possessed very little individual sentience and had no way of communicating with the rest of the body on anything more than a purely biochemical level. Intelligence, for the H’rulka, was an emergent phenomenon arising from the cooperation of several different brains.
Madness! . . . Confinement is destroying my sanity!. . .
And then the seemingly random noises dropped several distinct and comprehensible words into Swift Pouncer’s awareness, and, somehow, that was worse.
Speech . . .
Understand . . .
You . . .
But the words were in a language Swift Pouncer recognized. They weren’t the speech of fellow H’rulka, and with no audio component, the words were flat and completely without an emotional dimension, but they sounded like a computer-generated language that Swift Pouncer thought of as something that might be translated as “Agletsch Trade Pidgin.”
The Agletsch—the Masters called them Nu-Grah-Grah-Es Trafhyedrefschladreh, or “1,449-carbon-oxygen-water”—were a vermin species widespread among the stars, best known, perhaps, for their far-reaching information trade network. The All of Us had first met the Agletsch shortly after the Starborn had given them the freedom of space and other worlds. The aliens had presented All of Us with a simplified and artificial language that allowed communications with the Masters, with the Agletsch themselves, and with other species with which the Agletsch were in contact.
Where H’rulka radio speech carried information in the timing of distinct pulses, however, the Masters/Agletsch language conveyed meaning through modulation of pitch, tone, and frequency. These strange signals appeared to be like that, like audio speech, in other words. They carried meaning in the same way as the spoken words that normally served as a kind of modifying, secondary language superimposed over the usual radio speech.
