by B. V. Larson
I sensed another gliding presence behind me, and whirled, bringing up my bloody hands defensively.
“What’s that you’ve got there, sir?” Kwon asked.
His hulking form filled the tube to the point where I couldn’t see beyond him.
I shook my head. “I don’t have a clue. Let’s take it to medical.”
On a modern Star Force ship, the people in medical had training no human beings in ships of the past had ever received. Healing the sick was only part of their jobs—and a rather small part since we rarely were injured so badly it took more than nanites to repair our bodies. But they had other missions which were just as critical. One of them was analysis and containment of newly discovered alien life.
Doctor Kate Swanson was in medical at the time. Her ship and her medical bay aboard Gatre had been abandoned, so she’d been backing up the staff on this ship. When Kwon and I arrived carrying the monstrosity from the tubes, I quickly pronounced her to be our new chief of xenology.
“Here Kate,” I said, tossing the remains on a table, “see what you can figure out about that thing.”
She didn’t move, but the table did. A dozen black tentacles extended from the base and probed the still form.
“Restraints!” Kate said.
The table instantly obeyed, clamping no less than six steel hands onto the thing.
“Was this the alien on the hull?” she asked.
“I believe so. It found a hatch and slipped inside. Not sure how it did that. Not sure how it even functions, or what it is. That’s why we brought it here.”
Dr. Swanson’s eyes were very serious. She walked around it, not getting too close. I approved of her caution. We’d had things like this self-destruct before. I frowned at that memory.
“You’d better do a complete scan. Maybe its mission is a suicidal one.”
She nodded and began the procedure. She kept her distance, and brought over more tentacles from a neighboring table to help clamp down everything that looked like it could move on the body.
I shook my hands and sent a splatter of blood flying.
“Sorry,” I said. “My hands are stinging and going numb at the same time. Like I slept on them or something.”
She glanced at me and Kwon appraisingly. She waved for a nurse, who came over to us nervously. I noticed that none of the other medical people had gathered enough courage to approach.
“Get on that table please, Colonel. We’ll do some quick patch-up work.”
“Not necessary,” I said.
Sure, my injuries burned, but I knew the nanites would fix me up within hours. She looked at me squarely in the eye. Her gaze was stern.
“Are we in a combat situation?” she asked.
“Not at the moment.”
“Then get on that table. Do you know your scalp is open and dangling? It will take a regrow if we don’t reattach that quickly.”
I lifted a torn-up hand and gingerly probed my head. Sure enough, a tatter piece of flesh was hanging there.
“I thought something was wrong,” I admitted. “It’s hanging by a thread, isn’t it? Keeps tickling my neck.”
“I thought you liked it like that, sir,” chuckled Kwon. “Other people have big earrings hanging down—you cut out the middle man!”
Kwon went off into a gale of laughter at his own joke. I politely joined in, fumbling to pat my scalp into place with damaged fingers.
“I’m experiencing some numbness,” I admitted. “Probably nerve damage.”
Dr. Swanson turned away from her alien monstrosity and came to me quickly. She probed my hands and face, frowning fiercely.
“Venom,” she pronounced. “On the table.”
I finally obeyed her. She went to work with quick hands. “Those spines—they’re wet, and not just with your blood. You took a grim chance tangling with that thing. What if it had been pumped full of chemical agents tailor-designed to take out our kind, like that girl and her tooth—what was her name?”
“Alexa?” I asked. “Is that what you’re talking about? And for the record, I didn’t have any choice about engaging the creature. It came after me in close quarters.”
“There’s always an excuse with you. Why didn’t you just shoot it?”
I felt like arguing, but my will to do so was fading. Lying down seemed to accelerate the progress of the venom.
“Did you drug me?” I asked. My voice sounded odd…weak.
“No, the intruder did. I need two personnel over here, now. Prep him for a full blood transfusion. Let’s go, people!”
“Shit,” I mumbled, then the numb sensation reached my vitals and I lost consciousness.
-16-
I’ve been drugged before, and I’ve awakened with more than my share of hangovers. Still, even by my standards the next few hours were rough. I puked, raved and caused a few new injuries to appear on myself and the medical staff that tried to help me.
When I was myself again, I opened one eye. The nurses around me flinched, and one skittered away like a kicked dog.
I sat up, grunting. “Did I cause some trouble?” I asked the wary group.
They stared at me and the nearest nurse licked her lips. Her hands were up, as if to defend herself.
“Are you feeling better, Colonel?” she asked.
I looked around, rubbed my temples and did a little swearing. They all watched me silently, worriedly.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “did I hurt someone? I was out. This is the first moment I remember clearly, and I’ve got a monster headache. Anyone have an aspirin?”
“We don’t normally allow blood thinners after surgery…”
“Where’s Dr. Swanson?”
Someone ran out to get her. When she came in, she looked me over and pronounced me cured.
“The venom might have killed a lesser man,” she said. “It was nasty stuff, like a stiff dose of botulism. The nanites and the microbes in your bloodstream must have cleared most of it out. We had to give you back some of your own blood after filtration. It’s…unique.”
I nodded, unsurprised. I was a party of one when it came to medical matters.
“How long was I out?”
“Long enough for six of our ships to get attacked the way ours did. All of them were carriers.”
“Hmm,” I said, rubbing ridged flesh. It was scabbing and scarring—but that would fade in a day or so. “Something hit us, but what? Could they have come from Phobos?”
Kate shook her head. “I don’t think so. We found this on every invader’s back.”
I looked at the tablet she showed me, which was displaying a photo. I raised eyebrows in surprised.
“The stylized eagle emblem of Crow the Magnificent,” I said. “I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. The bastard didn’t leave mines out here for us, he left these invaders.”
She nodded. “I would have to agree. I’ve had some time to evaluate the cyborg.”
“Cyborg? Is that what it is?”
“Part human, part robot. It can survive in space for prolonged periods. It has blood and flesh inside, but a metal shell and metal bones. The brain seems to be made of nanites. We found the box inside the core of the thorax, here.”
She probed the limp form on the table with a long instrument. At no time did she come within reach of those deadly limbs.
“You’re showing the monster respect, I approve. That thing is quite deadly. How many men did we lose?”
“Twelve, including you. Seven of them are dead already. You’re the only man who is back on his feet.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. An army of things like this—they could give us real trouble. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to have an army. They were probably difficult to make. They looked like sophisticated hybrid technology.
“Crow’s nerds have been working overtime,” I said. “I didn’t really expect new tech from them so soon after getting waxed by the Macros. Let’s hope that they’re giving Tolerance hell on Phobos, too.”
&nb
sp; Kate shrugged. “I think the technological effort on the part of Earth is admirable. Hardship often motivates people to do their best.”
“Hmm. Too bad they’re on the wrong side.”
“They’re on the side of Earth trying to stop the machines. These creatures weren’t built to kill Star Force personnel. I think they were designed to stop any kind of enemy fleet that sailed through this ring.”
I thought about it, and I had to admit to myself the Imperial weapons were ingenious. They were harder to detect than mines since they weren’t radioactive and had less metal in them than a motorcycle. Space wasn’t entirely empty, especially after we’d fought many battles in and around the rings. Lots of asteroids and floating debris would showed up on our sensors all the time. In general, anything small and anomalous was ignored.
These cyborgs would look like a dead man in a vac suit to our scanners. They could survive for a long time in space, apparently in some kind of capsule. When the time was right, they could come down on any target, probably after pinpointing it with passive sensors. Operating like my marines assaulting a ship, they could do a lot of damage.
But then I had dark thought: how had these aberrations been constructed? “What’s your opinion, Doctor? Did they use a human in the construction of this hybrid?”
“Yes, almost certainly. A living one, or one freshly killed.”
I got up, and after a few unsteady seconds I was able to walk under my own power.
“I would tell you to get back on the table,” she said, “but I know you wouldn’t listen.”
“Thank you for sparing me the attempt. I like a woman who instinctively knows her limitations.”
She huffed at me, but accompanied me to a strange hulk on a nearby table. The cyborg was a mess, as she’d apparently begun a dissection. She showed me around the functional parts, which were an odd mix of electronic, mechanical and biological. There were even Nano elements. I was impressed all over again by the technological blend.
“It’s an evil thing. Only the Empire could build it, because I wouldn’t let my people serve this way, not even if they consented to being cut up and used for spare parts. Would you do the operation if I ordered you to?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then we’re agreed. It’s an abomination. But you know, Marvin would love this thing. In fact, I want you to stop working on it.”
“Why?”
“Put the shell back on. Let’s get it back into as natural a state as possible. Then I’ll take a few tantalizing shots of the beast and send them to Marvin.”
“You’re going to ask him to dissect it?”
“No. I don’t want to be so direct, so obvious. He’ll suspect what’s coming if I do. I’ll just show it to him and tell him we don’t know what to make of it. That we’re baffled and mystified by this new find. Then he’ll beg to come running back to check it out.”
Kate squinted at me for a few seconds, then smiled and shook her head. “The relationship you have with that machine—it’s stranger than this thing on the table.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess it is.”
* * *
My play to lure Marvin back into his cage worked. Once he’d guided Gatre into the Centauri system, I sent him the pics with a note: “Isn’t this cool? We’re clueless”. The message didn’t go out with any orders or requests. That was part of the key to enticing any creature. You had to pretend like you didn’t even care what they did.
Marvin couldn’t jump off Gatre fast enough. He started blasting his way after us about ninety seconds after receiving the message. I grinned, knowing he’d taken the bait. Messing around with the molecular structures of a crushed engine room looked dull when compared to the opportunity to investigate an unknown alien monster.
I was startled as I traced his progress.
“Captain Sarin? Is this reading right? How can that robot have that kind of acceleration?”
She looked it over, frowning. “There’s nothing wrong with the instruments, Colonel. He’ll catch up with us in a few hours. Looking at this, I believe he must have more thrust than a fighter engine could generate. Either he’s redesigned the engine for higher output, or he’s built additional propulsion systems onto himself.”
I nodded in agreement. “I’d be pissed off about this, but I know he’s coming home without a fight and once here it will be easy to disconnect his engines. Hell, he won’t even be able to get into Medical without editing himself down to size. He wouldn’t fit.”
Captain Sarin gave me a flat look. I knew she thought I was too soft on Marvin. Everyone did. Before Sandra had died, she told me she thought he was dangerous. That he might decide to make a million copies of himself and kick us off the evolutionary tree one day. She had a point—they all did. But what they often overlooked was Marvin’s usefulness. He was like other great inventions in history in that he was a game-changer. You couldn’t very well invent the combustion engine, or electric lights, or the atomic bomb and expect to uninvent it later. It didn’t work that way, at least not without the civilization dropping into some kind of dark age first.
“I know you don’t trust Marvin,” I told her. “But we can’t operate without him. We can’t afford to play it safe, to take our time. We’re going to win or lose this within a month—probably within a few days. Every asset I have is going into the effort, including my crazy pet robot.”
“I never suggested anything else.”
“I know you didn’t. But I also know you well enough to sense what you’re really thinking.”
Jasmine shrugged and went back to her screens. I looked down and watched them with her. About fifteen minutes later, we were both tapping and frowning. I’d seen something shift. It was as if Phobos had shrunken then grown again in a rippling pulse. Dust rose up in eddies here and there, disturbed.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “The surface of Phobos has changed.”
“That’ the external weapon again—that gravity thing that crushes small objects. I believe Tolerance just activated it.”
I frowned at the extreme range optics, trying to zoom in tightly while maintaining focus and perspective.
The screen shifted, warped and blurred. I cursed.
“Let me try,” Jasmine said.
I crossed my arms as her fine fingers worked the screen. The difference was pronounced. She managed to get the effect I was looking for: a clear view of the surface. Phobos now filled the entire screen. Still, it was hard to make out any details.
“Why would the Blue fire his defensive weapon?” I asked no one. “We’re not doing anything. Did you register any more impacts? Anything like that little invader that hit us?”
She shook her head. Others were gathering now, and a few offered suggestions:
“Maybe it’s an automated mechanism to prevent stealth attacks,” said one.
“It could be meteors or debris hitting the front of the craft. We can’t see the face of Phobos from this angle.”
I frowned fiercely at the screen. Several times now there had been odd events in this star system and I wanted to know what was causing them.
“I want a full analysis team working out what is happening on Phobos. Figure this one out, people. Being in the dark in the middle of an invasion campaign is completely unacceptable. I want answers and I want them in the next ten minutes. If you don’t have what it takes, give me the names of some new people you think can do your jobs better—because after fifteen minutes you’re all relieved.”
This announcement changed the drifting, baffled looks on everyone’s face. They were suddenly focused and engaged. It was no longer a “do you think it will rain tomorrow?” sort of situation. With their jobs on the line, they all began crunching. One team of three went to another table to play the vid files in slow motion of each of these odd events. The rest stood around with their elbows on the table, staring fiercely at the current images Jasmine was zooming in on in real time.
I turned my attention back to Jas
mine. “Captain? Do you have a solution?”
“I think Phobos is under attack,” she said.
“Logical. What kind of attack? Who is doing it?”
“There have been three efforts to stop the ship so far. First we hit it with missiles and fighters. Then the Worms attacked with more missiles from us. Most recently, I believe these cyborgs have landed on the surface.”
“One of those three then? Well, we can forget about our people being behind it. We know where they are and what they’re doing. We’ve been pretty ineffectual so far. That leaves us with the Worms and the cyborgs. I’m leaning toward the cyborgs as the Worms appeared to be wiped out.”
“They appear to be,” Jasmine echoed, “but the truth is that we don’t really know how their attack went.”
“I know an easy way to confirm some of our suspicions.”
She looked at me with expectant eyebrows. It was a very pretty look for her, and I found myself distracted momentarily. I looked back down at the screens to focus my thoughts.
“Open a channel to Tolerance. I want to talk to him.”
“What are you going to say, Colonel?”
I grinned. “I’m going to gloat.”
-17-
I waited until Marvin arrived to attempt communicating with Tolerance. I wanted my star translator available for the job.
When he did finally come aboard, I had to smile. He’d trimmed himself to the extreme. He had only one grav plate, which wasn’t enough to lift his full bulk and left him skidding over the deckplates. He barely had enough tentacles left to drag himself from one place to the next.
The moment I saw him, I knew what he was doing. He wanted to show me he’d fully complied with my requirements to return home in a flightless condition. In fact, he’d just about butchered himself.
“Marvin?”
“What is it, Colonel Riggs?”
“I think you need a second grav plate. If only to balance yourself.”
“I just wanted to—”
“I know what you wanted. But I’m already tired of hearing that metal-on-metal scraping sound.”
