Feast and Famine

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  There was a fraught pause, no more than a second, and I think all of us were waiting for the jaws of the trap – the sudden eruption beneath us as a hidden crystal monster lunged up to feed. Of course, nothing happened.

  Now we had a stable platform from which to investigate, and we were no longer haemorrhaging fuel simply matching our motion to Oregon’s. Our claws, and the meagre gravity, would suffice to keep us anchored, but I made sure that the Onboard would keep plotting escape vectors so that we were ready to fire all thrusters and take off into the debris field if things got bad. Correction: if things got bad and we had the chance to do anything about it.

  “Drone out?” Osman asked, and I nodded. We did not have anything particularly fit for search and rescue, and the mission’s drones had been designed for scientific exploration, sampling and testing. Right then I didn’t care how poor an ambassador ours would make. Better the drone than me.

  What we had was something like a metal springtail programmed to think it was a flying squirrel, and Osman deployed it from its compartment on top, and told it where it needed to go. It did its sums, checked them with the Onboard and Pelovska, and leapt. Leapt being a relative term, of course. In order to arrive at Veighl’s ravaged craft in a controlled manner, rather than just bouncing from it like a fly on a windscreen, the drone put a minimum of force into its jump, departing our hull in an absurdly leisurely fashion, correcting its spin with minute applications of its jets but letting the simple force of the initial push carry it on a minutes-long, agonisingly slow drift across the intervening vacuum, letting the microgravity counteract its upward motion just enough to bring it into a shallow arc that would land it on Veighl’s shuttle nose. It could have got over there a good deal quicker on jets alone, but it had the same problem we did. Mechanical movement used up stored battery, that it could eventually replenish by drinking in even the weak and distant light of the system’s star. Thrusters used fuel, stored solid and then flash-ignited into superheated gas, Newton’s third law in action. But when the fuel was gone, when that mass was cast away, there was no more, not for the drone and not for us. Fuel was matter, and once we had used it up there would be no more. We lived by an economy as harsh and limiting as the Anchorite’s own.

  The drone landed awkwardly – sometimes nobody’s sums are perfect – and Osman took over to have it reach out with its handful of legs until one magnetic pad got purchase. For a moment we saw the magnified view of it dangling out at an angle by one limb, but then it had jack-knifed down its own length and was crawling over Veighl’s hull, its cameras serving as our eyes.

  “Emergency hatch is clear of the, of the stuff,” Osman said. “Want me to open it?”

  Again there was an awkward pause before Pelovska put in, “They may be inside without suits.” We didn’t believe it, not that they were alive, but her Expert System kept trawling the known data for even the most remote possibility.

  Osman deployed some of the drone’s sensors. “No vibrations. No heat. No power at all. If they’re in there without suits, they’re frozen dead.”

  A beat. “Granted,” said Pelovska, the Expert System giving up on even that faint hope.

  “Get it open,” I decided.

  A search and rescue drone would have had stronger manipulators, and a cutting torch if all else failed. Our science model had neither, and for the best part of an hour we watched it scrabble and drift and flail at the hatch release, and utterly fail to open it. Eventually Osman’s monotonous swearing got too much, and I told him to abandon it.

  “Prep the airlock. My command, my responsibility. I’ll go over.”

  There was no argument, much as I might wish for some. I did not want to go over to that partially-consumed shuttle. I did not want to get close to the alien thing that had murdered it. I did not want to confirm the patently obvious certainty that all three of us held in common, that Veighl’s crew was dead, impossibly dead, destroyed by the unexpected malice of the phenomenon they had come to study.

  Ten minutes later I was in our cramped airlock, breathing loud in my own ears, as they pumped the air from around me. I had an open radio channel and a camera running, and my suit would be transmitting all the minutiae of my body’s workings, ready to sound the alarm the moment anything happened to me. Nobody got this far into space without mastering their instincts and conquering some deep-imprinted fears, but when the airlock doors opened onto the grim surface of Oregon I felt my innards lurch. We had come out here because we thought that we were not alone. Now that seemed like a good reason to be anywhere else.

  I had my own little thruster-pack, because I could not do calculations as well as our drone, and my first step was too energetic for Oregon’s little gravity, my nerves bouncing me high so that I had to use some of my own precious fuel stock to prevent me departing the asteroid altogether. After that I took it easy, crawling over the surface like a crab across some vast drowned cliff, trying to keep a constant proximity to the cratered surface without either colliding with it or losing contact altogether.

  There were Anchorite flowers between me and Veighl, just little ones, a hand-span across or less, nestled in craters as though they were lurking there. Of course they could not move. They could not have killed Veighl either, by her data. I gave them a wide berth.

  A warning word from Osman told me I was close – I was so intent on my painstaking progress I had lost track. I slowed myself and regarded the vast crystal explosion before me. The footage that I was relaying would become the most viewed recording on earth, when it arrived there years later.

  The tilted nose of Veighl’s vessel was plain, and the Anchorite had not visibly expanded since we arrived. I told myself that this was not some alien fly trap, that its spray of spines would not close on me. I told myself again. It didn’t help much.

  “Good luck, captain,” came Osman’s voice in my ear. I bent my knees and jumped, kicking off from the surface, and then burning a little fuel to cast me with painful slowness at Veighl’s craft. I think I touched down more gently than the drone had.

  My suit lamp made little headway through the small ports, but I thought I made out a shape. “Is that…?”

  “That would be the pilot’s seat. Veighl herself was piloting,” came Pelovska. A moment’s image-cleaning later and she added, “Ninety per cent certain that’s Veighl you’re seeing.”

  “I’m going to open the hatch.” Even then I hesitated because, however certain we and our computers were that Veighl’s crew was dead, I was about to open the interior of their shuttle onto the vacuum.

  Opening their tomb was not something that would appear in my report.

  I fumbled with glove-clumsy hands at the release for the hatch, making sure that I was well out of the way of it. There was no pressure of air within, though, not at that end of the Kelvin scale. Instead the freed hatch just drifted from its mountings, falling in slow, slow motion towards the rigid starburst of the Anchorite below.

  I froze. I should have kept hold of the hatch, but you can’t plan for everything.

  It came to rest amidst those jagged spines. Nothing happened. Osman’s oath in my earpiece was pure relief.

  Then I turned my camera and my attention to the interior and he had no words for it, and neither did I.

  It was a snapshot of crystal hell, looking down into the inclined cabin of Veighl’s craft. The Anchorite had eaten the vessel from the stern up, swallowed its engines and reactor entire, ravened out into the crew’s living space from the back wall and just kept on going. The two back seats where Veighl’s crewmembers had been strapped in for lift off were gone, but the unwelcome clarity of my lamps revealed a single boot still protruding from the razor-tipped wall. The Anchorite was translucent enough that we could see there was no body within. Ship and crew both had been consumed and translated into more of the stuff that had done for them.

  Veighl herself, sitting ahead of the others, had fared slightly better whilst being just as dead. The spines of the Anchorite had pier
ced through the back of her chair and into her body, where what looked like a small secondary growth had exploded in her chest cavity, flinging its jutting needles in every direction and shredding her from within.

  Her face, like everything else, was covered with a rime of crystallized air, the frozen remnants of the cabin’s atmosphere that had not been allowed to vent into space. Her expression was placidly accepting, as though she had just learned a great truth. Her last breath was bristling about her nose and mouth.

  “None of this makes sense,” Osman whispered in my ear. “Captain, we have no idea how this happened or whether it’s going to happen again. We should get off this rock.”

  I looked into Veighl’s open, crusted eyes. “The problem is that we need to make sense of it.” My voice was admirably steady. “Because this is what we came to this system for.” Then, and still so very steady, “Any change from the Anchorite?”

  “Nothing measurable,” Pelovska confirmed. “Don’t touch it.”

  “No intention of doing so.” Veighl’s stare was giving me the shudders. “I’m coming back. Send to Mother for advice. No point wasting suit power and air while we twiddle our thumbs and decide what to do.” It was sound reasoning that would look good in my report.

  The drone stayed out there - we could use it to explore the interior of Veighl’s vessel now I had the hatch open. I made my desperately careful progress back towards our vessel, eyes down at the vacuum-ravaged ground. I missed the clue myself, but Osman saw it through my cameras.

  “Hold, hold, captain!” Just as I was about to clamber for the airlock. “Go back down. Go to the landing gear. Or I can get the drone back -“

  “No, I’m going.” I let Oregon’s gravity draw me gently back down. “What have you seen?”

  “Not sure, it’s just…”

  I had gone cold all over despite the close heat of the suit.

  There was a delicate clutching fringe of Anchorite about the nearest landing claw. Had we landed on one of the flowers? If so then we had done so with all three claws at once. Magnification showed each had that spiky rim of crystal about it.

  “It’s started,” Osman breathed. “Get in here, captain.”

  With shaking hands I scrambled for the airlock. Pelovska was saying something about bringing the drone back, but Osman and I were both telling her we had no time. The Anchorite, life or not, had crept up on us.

  I got through the airlock in record time and half-kicked, half-drifted into my seat. “Tell me we’re ready to go.” I was picturing the clutching claws of the Anchorite already attacking our landing gear.

  “We’re ready,” Osman confirmed.

  “Pelovska?”

  The light of her headset blinked. Her staring eyes were all too much like Veighl’s. She was in deep communion with her Expert System, lips moving silently.

  “Captain, I have a trajectory,” Osman insisted.

  “Pelovska!” I snapped.

  “Hold,” she murmured. Her unseeing gaze flickered between imaginary objects, the representations of her calculations.

  “Captain!” Osman insisted. We both felt the onrushing jaws of the Anchorite accelerating towards us impossibly from below. Millions of years of evolution were clamouring that we were under threat, and that we had to get away.

  “Go!” I told Osman, and Pelovska hit her override. He swore and fought with the controls and the Onboard, but he was locked out. For a moment Pelovska and I wrestled for mastery over the shuttle’s systems, a silent battle of keys and commands, because I knew as captain that I had seniority, and even her Expert System had to bow to my authority.

  That was how I learned that the people back home who had designed our systems had not trusted me, or any mere human being, quite that much. When the chips were down, our Onboard sided with the Expert System, and I ended up staring at the gleaming visor of Pelovska’s helmet, twisted around in my straps.

  “I need to conduct an experiment,” came her voice.

  For a moment I could not speak. Then: “Do it when we’re up.”

  “No, captain.” Meticulously polite. “When we get to Mother you may of course have me confined to quarters for… mutiny, possibly. For now I am going to conduct an experiment.”

  I could see that Osman had undone his straps in order to go for her, but I stopped him with a gesture – at least he was still taking my orders. Pelovska’s headset light was on, gleaming from her visor, her implant computer cycling its calculations. I thought, then, that she had gone mad.

  “She’s taken control of the drone,” Osman reported hollowly.

  “Mother, Errant,” I called in, hoping that she was not blocking the radio as well. “I need you to countermand Pelovska’s override.” It was hopeless. There would be long minutes before Mother even heard me.

  “I will be as quick as I can,” Pelovska informed us impassively. Osman was back to his controls and I knew he would be trying to find a way past Pelovska’s lockout while she was distracted, but of course the Expert System was never distracted.

  I looked at the drone camera image. She had sent it off from Veighl’s tomb to touch down, all sprawling limbs, on Oregon’s surface.

  “Has it got to you? The Anchorite?” These words, recorded and transmitted back to Mother, would not be the proudest moment noted on my permanent record.

  Now the drone’s eye view was of the dark space above us, with the orb of Syrenka just nudging into shot, but one of our shuttle’s own cameras had acquired the drone, showing it on its back, legs drawn in like a dead beetle.

  I was waiting for Mother’s reply. They were watching everything, every moment of our mission. A quick response could lock Pelovska out and give me my ship back.

  “Ignition,” Pelovska announced, and the drone fired its thrusters.

  It should have shot off into the void, a receding pinprick of metal in seconds. Instead…

  Osman’s bark of surprise was loud in my ear. Where the drone had been was a lunging hand of Anchorite, an exuberant spray of crystal, with some small scrap of the drone cupped in its heart.

  “Do not fire our thrusters,” Pelovska informed us.

  “Errant, Mother,” came the distant voice of our surrogate home. “That’s a negative on overriding the Expert. You are instructed to follow its advice. Mother out.”

  “I have been assimilating Veighl’s data,” came Pelovska’s calm voice. “There is a flaw with her experimental method. She only tested the Anchorite’s capabilities in its native environment. It exists in vacuum, with a minimal energy input that it utilises very, very efficiently to replicate itself. This we knew. That does not account for the flowers.”

  “Account for them, then,” challenged Osman, still sounding shaky.

  “The Anchorite exists in microscopic quantities everywhere here, and under normal circumstances it would grow at a speed we would think of as geological, that much Veighl shows. Her mistake was to assume that, because it lived in a very low energy ecology, it was capable only of slow growth. When presented with a gift of energy, such as the heat of a debris impact, it uses that energy to grow. It uses that energy immediately to convert its surroundings into its own substance, working with extreme speed and efficiency because otherwise that energy would be lost to the void. I can only conclude that it has adapted to do so, and that those fragments better able to make use of such windfalls have out-evolved their less fit siblings to give us what we now see. The Anchorite makes near-instantaneous use of whatever energy comes its way.”

  A pause.

  “Life, then,” I concluded, but Pelovska, like Veighl, would not commit.

  “If you have a self-replicating system with an imperfect replicator and limited resources, what we think of as adaptive evolution must occur. It is a logical certainty. Where you place the label of ‘life’ is more subjective. However, I believe that we wanted to depart.”

  “The Anchorite under the landing gear,” I put to her. “Are you saying that’s just…”

  “The
friction of our landing. It isn’t going to increase measurably, if I’m right. The heat energy of the thrusters, though, would, well, you’ve seen what it would do. Although I think the sheer scale of Veighl’s monument is more to do with when the Anchorite assimilated her reactor.”

  I thought of that secondary burst that had torn open Veighl’s chest. I did not feel any better for realising that her own body heat had probably provided the fuel for it.

  “Captain, I am submitting a departure solution. The Onboard is plotting an escape trajectory. This will of necessity be a little less exact than usual.”

  I looked over what she proposed. The hurdle was not great: Oregon’s gravity, 0.02 per cent of earth’s, would not be too jealous of our departure. Still, our shuttle had a great deal of mass, and we would be fighting our own inertia.

  “Mother, Errant. Do you concur with Anna’s calculations? Errant out.” By this time I had given over any illusion that I, a poor human, was in command of the mission.

  A tense wait, the minutes dragging silently by, until the voice came to us, “Errant, Mother, Confirmed calculations and trajectory. Looks like your best chance. Mother out.” A human telling a human that one set of computers agreed with another.

  What Pelovska, her Expert and the Onboard had proposed, I disposed of, retracting the landing gear to ninety per cent whilst Osman used some of our precious air to fill the empty airlock.

  “Deploying in one minute,” I heard myself say, bitterly aware that all the necessary information was being shared freely between computers anyway. “Twenty seconds… ten, nine…” Counting down.

  When we hit zero the shuttle retracted its claws and then extended its landing gear with considerably more force than the manual advised. For possibly the first time in human history a space vessel tried a standing jump.

  It did very little. We cleared the surface of Oregon by inches, poised momentarily over our slightly enlarged Anchorite footprints, held between the weak gravity’s pull and our own feeble push. Then the airlock opened and voided its precious cargo, and Newton’s Third stepped in and shepherded us gently away, leaving Oregon to dance off, taking Veighl’s crystal grave with it.