by B. V. Larson
I watched as the sensor-nubs self-modulated and scanned their environment. The final verdict was a yellow bar—not great, but much better than nothing. We would no longer be flying blind if I could get this signal down to the command post.
I flipped a valve open. A trail of gleaming nanites, looking like a mercury spill of deadly proportions, slipped out of the opening and snaked toward the nearest exit on their own initiative. Like a trail of ants, I knew they would find their way back home to the command brick. The nanite stream thinned until it was almost unnoticeable, no thicker than a human vein.
I stood up, pressing my back against the low ceiling. I followed the shiny nanite strand with my eyes until it disappeared. This place was oppressive, and I felt an urge to get back to the command brick. I turned my helmet right and left, looking up and down the remote tunnel. I’d only seen a few of the Macros, and they had been much further down, closer to the level of the hold itself. I bared my teeth, debating my next move. My mouth suddenly felt dry.
In the end I figured, why the hell not? When else was I going to get the chance to roam on an alien ship while it was in full operation?
I didn’t follow the winding stream of nanites back to safety. Instead, I turned and crawled farther toward the stern, deeper into the Macro ship. The recorders were still on, and there was plenty of storage space on my suit’s data-meter. I figured I might as well take the opportunity to do a little spying.
I picked my way toward the stern, heading in the direction of the engines and whatever passed for the crew quarters on a Macro ship. It was the opposite direction from the one the nanites had taken. I was moving farther from the hold and the rest of the humans on this ship. In my head, I could see Sandra gritting her teeth and asking me if I was insane. Fortunately, she wasn’t around.
-40-
Much of the ship was repetitive. I hadn’t been expecting a Van Gogh on every wall, but this was positively boring. Then I reached the central nexus of the ship.
As best I could figure, I was behind the hold, between the engines and the big empty space that contained my comrades in their stacked, steel, coffin-like bricks. This was where the Macros lived, so to speak. There were many strange rooms with no obvious propose. There were machines that churned and clunked independently, making air, weapons or replacement Macros—I wasn’t sure which.
But when I found the laboratory, I knew what it was. There were tech Macros in there, workers with a dozen mandibles that moved with motions so fast they could not be followed by the human eye—like a hundred flashing knives being juggled at once. I knew the type: they had built the nukes that had annihilated the domes back in Argentina and taken a lot of my men with them.
It was the thing on the table that made me forget all about the Macro techs. It was a living creature—a big one. It was long, and definitely worm-like. It had legs, however, about fifty of them. I wasn’t sure if it was a centipede, or a snake with a lot of legs. It spotted me with a jewel-like black eye. The creature opened its mouth and sort of yawned in my direction. I heard a high-pitched, singing sound. Was it trying to communicate?
The techs had it clamped down to a table with seven thick, metal hoops. Blood-like fluids ran down the sides of the creature from a hundred wounds. Suction tubes gargled and slurped up the fluids that ran from the wounds. The tech Macros’ knives flashed, sliced and diced. They were sampling the creature, working it over with their fine instruments. I suspected they were dissecting it—alive.
I should have just turned around and walked away. I knew that, but somehow, I couldn’t. I lifted a boot and placed it into the laboratory. The Macro techs reacted as if I’d touched one of their steel feet with a hot wire. They turned and the flashing mandibles froze in place.
I touched a button on my wrist. It was something we’d come up with for moments like this. A small nanite brainbox was located in my suit, like a CPU, monitoring pressures and the like. We’d allowed our larger nanite minds to teach them to speak a little of the primitive binary language of the Macros. They couldn’t give speeches, but they could translate a few words for us.
I held the button down now, which would cause the system to transmit my speech in binary. “Identify,” I said, pointing to the monster on the table.
The Macros stared at me for about three seconds. It was long enough for me to start sweating. Suddenly, under their cold inspection, my suit felt hot inside. Were they calling a combat squad with beamers? I had no way of knowing.
One of the techs extended a multi-jointed, bright-metal arm and stuck the spike at its tip into the side of the creature on the table.
“Enemy,” it transmitted back to me. The tiny brainbox in my suit did the translation. I had the feeling he’d said more, but that was all my system could translate. It was enough.
I’ve often been accused of impulsiveness. I can understand how people might see things that way—but I preferred to think of myself as an opportunist. I lifted a thin beam-pistol and burned a dime-sized hole into the spiny oval that served the monster on the table for a head. I held down the trigger for about two solid seconds, long enough for the beam to hiss out the far side of the creature and burn a tiny dark dot on the far wall of the laboratory behind it. The struggling monster immediately stilled. I slipped the gun out of sight.
Mandibles moved in what I thought was a confused, surprised pattern. Could they be gesturing? Were they asking one another: Who the hell does he think he is? …or some Macro equivalent?
“Enemy,” I said, holding down the translation button again. I pointed at the mess on the table. A wisp of steam looped up toward the ventilation grilles from both ends of the creature—from both the entry and exit wounds my beamer had created. I hoped the worm wouldn’t ignite and start a fire… I’d given it quite a jolt.
“I kill enemies,” I transmitted.
I left them there, twitching their flashing metal mandibles. Out in the corridor, I allowed myself a smirk. The Macros weren’t the only ones who were literal-minded and who might have translation-based misunderstandings.
I made it back to the portal over the hold quickly. There was some excitement going on in the corridors. A few Macro warrior-types scuttled by. I hoped they were on some kind of drill—but I suspected they weren’t.
When I appeared before the four guards, I had a scare. They stood their ground and leveled their weapons at me. I held down the translation button with excessive force.
“I’m Kyle Riggs,” I said.
They appeared unimpressed.
“My mission has been accomplished. I will now prepare my invasion forces.”
Several long seconds ticked by. I was now in net-range of the command module’s smarter translation boxes, and when the response came from the Macros the translation was more complete.
“Biotics are no longer permitted outside the hold,” came the translation-box voice.
I grunted. They stepped aside, breaking their formation. I vaulted through and did a dive toward the command brick. A dozen of my men stood among the bricks, watching me. My helmet buzzed with calls as the word went out that I’d returned.
“How’d it go, sir?” asked Major Robinson, using his officer’s override to cut out the lower-ranked calls.
“Just fine,” I said, “but I think I need a drink.”
“A drink? Are you dehydrated, sir?”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
I reached the command post, broke the nanite seals around my neck with a combination clicking-ripping sound and pulled off my hood. Two people handed me a squeeze bottle of water. Sandra was there, third in line. I took what she offered. It was a squeeze bottle of beer.
“Thanks,” I said.
Sandra gave me a suspicious look that I tried to ignore. She could tell I’d had more of an adventure than I wanted to let on to the others. Maybe it was all the sweat cooling on my forehead and neck.
I briefed them slowly, waiting until Sandra had gone back into my office to tell them about the lab
, the creature on the table—and my rude intervention. They all looked shocked when I got to the part about my mercy-killing of the creature on the table.
“Do you think that thing was one of the enemies we are supposed to fight against?” asked Captain Sarin.
“Yes. I believe that’s exactly what it was.”
“Killing their prisoner was a dangerous move, sir,” said Major Robinson. “It could have been misinterpreted.”
“No, I think they got the message,” I said.
“Sir, the nanite chain is complete. The sensor array is active,” said one of the techs, interrupting. His name was Lieutenant Raphim Shrestha. He was a thin, quiet man. Now he sounded happy—as the sensor guy, he’d had precious little to do so far on this trip. For days, we’d kept the man sitting at a board in the darkest corner of the command center. Now he finally had something to do.
“Do we have video, Raphim?” I asked.
“No sir,” he said. “just spatial relationships calculated from gravity-pulls and radiation sources. But we’ve pinpointed a number of bodies around us.”
“Put it up on the big table,” I said.
The first elements of the star system we occupied came up in the form of two large spheres on the computer table. I looked at it, and I frowned. The longer I looked the more I frowned.
“What are those?” Captain Sarin asked.
“Stars,” I said.
“Where’s the blue giant?”
I shook my head. “We’re in a different system.”
“Could we have jumped again and not felt it?” asked Major Robinson.
“I doubt it,” I said. “Even if it happened when most of us were asleep, someone had to be on watch. Everyone knows the sensation now, someone would have reported it.”
I stared. There were two stars in the center of the system, both about the same size and orbiting one another very closely. There weren’t any planets around. This didn’t surprise me. Most star systems had multiple stars, and those that did were less likely to have planets. The uneven gravitational pulls from the star tended to pull planets into the stars themselves or tear them apart over the many long years it took a star system to form. As I watched, a smaller body showed itself, very far out from the two stars.
“Is that a gas giant?” I asked, pointing at it.
“Too much mass,” said Captain Sarin. “I think it’s a third star. A small one.”
I looked at the system and slowly, it dawned on me. “This might be Alpha Centauri. It’s a three-star system. The configuration looks right. I’ll bet that small star out there is Proxima Centauri.”
The staff agreed in a murmur.
“But then what happened to the system with the blue giant?” asked Captain Sarin. There was a hint of fear in her voice. Up until now we’d all believed we were traveling through the same star system I’d scouted months earlier. But now it was sinking in that we’d been dead wrong.
“We don’t really know how the rings work,” said Major Robinson. “Maybe the Macros can set them to transport a vessel to different receiving rings.”
“Or maybe we didn’t go through the Venus ring at all,” I said. “Maybe we went through the other one, the one out in the Oort cloud.”
Robinson brought up a calculator app and pecked at it. “That would explain why there was no turbulence or vibration when we went through the ring. We should have felt some kind of effect after flying through Venus’ thick atmosphere. I’m doing some calculations, sir…. The speed the Macros must have reached in order to get out to the Oort cloud in just a few days is alarming.”
I nodded in agreement. “But with good gravity-controlling stabilizers, we would never have felt most of the acceleration. The Oort cloud ring is about six light-hours out from earth—maybe sixty AU. I’m sure our small Nano ships couldn’t produce that kind of thrust. It seems like the Macro technology is in some ways superior to the Nanos. At least, they can build bigger engines.”
“Can we be sure we flew through the second ring, Colonel?” Captain Sarin asked me.
“No. It’s just a theory. We’ve got very little to go on. Possibly, there is a third ring we didn’t even know about hidden somewhere in our system.”
“But sir,” Captain Sarin said. She looked at me strangely with wide, dark eyes. “If we don’t even know how we got here—how are we ever going to get home?”
I shrugged and turned back to the big screen. She had me there.
-41-
For about a week we sailed across what we presumed to be the Alpha Centauri system. Some people whispered that perhaps we’d traveled here in some other fashion—that perhaps the Macros could jump between star systems at will. But I didn’t buy any of those rumors. If they could do that, they would have brought their big battlefleet to Earth faster. They were using the rings, I felt sure. That meant it took time to fly from star to star, but it could be accomplished in days or weeks rather than years. Most of the travel time was taken up flying from one of these rings of collapsed matter to the next. Going through the ring itself to another system seemed to be instantaneous.
The team of lab coat-types we’d brought along to figure out just such phenomena were as baffled as the rest of us. Oh, they talked a good game—theorizing about hyperspace, stable wormholes and the like, but they really didn’t have a clue. I didn’t try to figure it out myself. I’d only taken two physics courses in my undergrad years, and I’d gotten a ‘B’ in both of them. I resigned myself to using alien technology without fully understanding it—probably for the rest of my days. Like every monkey we’d ever sent on a rocket ride in the fifties, I was only interested in when the damned thing was going to land.
On the second day, I decided I couldn’t stay in the command brick forever, waiting for something to happen. I figured it was about time to participate in the training I’d ordered for the entire unit—high-gravity training.
I didn’t tell Sandra about it, but the second I entered the airlock to exit the command brick she appeared. She pressed her way in, past the stuttering airlock doors, which wanted to close on her like a hungry elevator.
Sandra slipped into the airlock with me—a tight fit, I was happy to note. I pressed up against her freely.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” she said.
“I’m just happy to see you. How did you know I was leaving the brick?”
“I put a bell on you.”
I frowned. A bell was tech slang for a tracking device. Most of the personnel carried them. They were small, and if you were tagged with a tiny transmitter you could be tracked by anyone with access to a computer. I reached up to my neck, but nothing hung there.
Sandra smiled and dug into my pockets, and I smiled back. I reached around her to return the favor, but she lightly slapped my hands away from her shapely hindquarters. She pulled something out of my front pocket. It was my portable com-link.
I looked at the com-link. It had a ring through it and she dangled the ring from one of her fine fingers.
“I get it…” I said. “You traced my com-link. That’s a violation. I’m your superior officer.”
“I’m not a marine.”
I reached for her again, but the airlock dinged and kicked us out. It had long ago equalized the pressure, and now it had reached some timing limit and lost patience. It opened the exit door without being touched. A maintenance man in coveralls eyed us in surprise. We disengaged and struggled to get out of the tight squeeze with dignity. We failed.
Sandra followed me past the smirking maintenance man to one of the target-practice bricks. We waited for a fireteam to finish, then took a turn inside. The interior of the brick was dimly lit. We were issued two practice hand-beamers at the entrance by the duty sergeant. I thanked him and handed one to Sandra, who hefted it experimentally.
“You want to team up?” I asked. “I’m dialing an honor-level run.”
“I’ve done this before.”
“Not with the system set for one-point-eight Gs.”
She frowned slightly. “I didn’t know we could do that.”
“I had a few Nano gravity stabilizers installed in these training bricks. Normally, their function is to lessen the effects of acceleration G-forces to allow for greater acceleration. We simply reversed the principle and had the Nano factories build us one that increased the gravitational effects. You still want to do it?”
She nodded.
“Just don’t shoot me in the butt,” I told her.
We stepped inside. Immediately, I felt compressed. It was hard to breathe, hard to move, hard to think. It wasn’t exactly like carrying a heavy pack on one’s back—it was worse than that. The very blood in my veins was heavier. My heart had to work harder to pump liquid up to my brain. Fortunately, the nanite-enhancements including a heart capable of pumping harder than normal human hearts. I could feel my heart rate and blood pressure increase. I took gulping breaths. I could tell right away that a double-gravity world was going to suck in combat.
We started the simulation, firing at nanite-generated targets that danced into and out of visibility. The lighting strobed like an electrical storm. The targets were all computer simulations, but the obstacles were real enough. After we’d cleaned out the first three sets there was a pause, then the lights went out entirely. I tripped over a simulated boulder and went sprawling. Falling in high-G is very different than falling on Earth. The floor came up with incredible speed and smashing force. My reflexes and strength kept me from dashing my brains out on the floor, but I did see a new set of stars in my head.
Sandra knelt over me, firing at the targets that took the opportunity to rush us. Using what intel we had on the enemy, we’d programmed the attackers to look like giant bugs. They fired back, screeched, chittered and rushed in. I didn’t have time to get up off the floor, there was only time to aim and shoot.
