“There should be seventeen.”
“What?”
“There should be seventeen of the specimens. I count only sixteen. Where is the last?”
I shrugged. “This is what we found.”
“I will tear your ship apart if I have to—”
“Do whatever you want, Captain, but I’m telling you this is what we found. Even wearing suits, we didn’t want to touch them to take the samples—there’s no way I’m letting one of those onto the Terrapin. I am not riding all the way back to Chang’e with one of them on board. Hell, I don’t even like having them here, on this ship. Seriously—I want you to take them the hell away. We have the genescans—why would we need a body?”
“We will search this vessel,” she said.
“You do what you want.”
She gave me another killing look, but shut up again. Two of her goons headed out, and the rest of us went back to standing around.
Finally, she informed us, “We will start transferring the specimens to our ship.” She looked at me expectantly.
“Hell, no! I told you I’m not getting near them!”
She gave me yet another dirty look but didn’t press the issue. We stood by and watched as she and her crew put those things in the isosuits I’d found earlier and moved them out to the airlock. Her two detectives returned eventually, empty-handed, and pitched in. They also double-checked the pile of junk and all the ship’s data banks for anything important that might have been missed.
When they were at last ready to go, we opened the airlock and they moved out.
“This vessel is yours,” the Captain said icily. “We are clear, are we not, that the continued secrecy of this encounter is the only reason you are leaving here alive?”
I did my best to keep the venom out of my smile as I said sweetly, “Oh, of course.”
“Because if even a hint of what you’ve seen here ever reaches the public, I will personally find each and every one of you and kill you as slowly and painfully as I can.”
She turned and jetted off to her own ship without looking back—which was good, because it probably just would have made her more upset if she’d seen me rolling her eyes. At least I hadn’t burst out laughing when she turned into Captain Cliché.
They fled. We watched them go until they were just another starpoint, and then returned our attentions to securing our prize for the trip home. There was no need to work during the journey back—the new ship would bring far more whole than broken—so we spent our time one-upping each other with the extravagances we planned with our bounty.
It’s been fun, but privately I’ve begun to think of a future far less outrageous. Retirement—a sprawling house on hectares of land under a soaring and breathable sky. In time, maybe even a family. We’ve done what every breaker dreams of—we made our Big Score—and I intend to take full advantage of it. After all, if I’m going to change my identity, I might as well change everything else about my life.
We all know we’ll have to disappear because the Captain was right—there were seventeen of those things. And we have the missing man.
Once we get back and sell the ship—and the Terrapin—we’ll divvy up the common fund and go our separate ways. We’ll sell off the ships, and our special salvage goes into special storage—but not for insurance.
The Captain said secrecy was the only thing keeping us alive. But, once we’re all new people, the crew of the Terrapin will be dead, essentially. So eventually, when we’re all settled into our new lives, we can break the story anyway. We’ll sell the news—and the evidence—to the highest bidder, of course.
It’s a dangerous life, but that’s how breakers always do it.
Inchoate
By Tab Earley
Our first warning was the probe that hurtled through the atmosphere, burning with white heat. We found it in the midst of a crater a mile wide. Pieces of it littered the plain where it landed, shrapnel with scorched skin. We didn’t understand what it was, not at first. We didn’t understand until the second probe came through the atmosphere—intact, unlike the first. It landed as it was intended to land. It trundled along through the sand on rubber wheels and turned its cameras to take pictures of everything.
We hid from it because we didn’t know what it was. If we had known then what was in store for us, we would have destroyed it and all the others that followed … but we didn’t know. I can’t explain now how we were before. Our minds have been changed—our perceptions have been changed. I just know that we were different then.
More probes came. We couldn’t decide if they were intelligent life forms in their own right—we’d never seen anything like them. The technology was far beyond anything we could have or would have created. They rolled around and scooped up samples of soil. They chipped off rock and recorded everything. We didn’t understand at the time what they were doing. It took time for our intuitive grasp of the universe to adjust, for us to figure it out. We had been here for thousands of years, perhaps millions. Time had no real meaning for us.
When the first ship prepared to land, we sensed that things were about to change for the worse. We sensed, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know what they were capable of. We didn’t know what we were capable of. There had only ever been us and our understanding of each other. Had we known, we would have interfered and made that first ship ignite in the atmosphere. We would have killed everyone on board, but we would have saved ourselves. I wonder now, though, how many of them we would have had to kill to keep them away.
They buzzed and droned just like their ships did. When the first one stepped out of the ship, some of us wanted to destroy it. Just like a meteor entering the atmosphere, it would have gone up in flames for no apparent reason. We could hear the screams even as we refused to do it. We told ourselves we had no reason to fear while a shadow fell over us. The second ship, the third, and all the others after, blotting out the light as they landed among us.
At the time, we didn’t understand what they wanted. The planet was arid, mostly sand and rock. Now we know that they wanted the minerals beneath the sand. They wanted the heavy metals beneath that. I remember the buzzing voice of one of them calling the planet a gold mine. “We’re going to be the richest bastards in the galaxy.” We didn’t understand what it meant. They scorched, gouged, and drilled. The landscape we’d known for an age changed so fast that we hardly recognized it. Where there had been hills and mountains, there were gaping holes in the ground. They filled our canyons with the soil.
Then they came for us. We thought if we hid from them, we would survive. Our planet was hostile to them. They wouldn’t stay. They would take what they wanted and leave. But they found us.
Pring rubbed at her eyes and blinked. She looked at the clock on the instrument panel and saw that it was 5 am GMT, Earth time. She’d been studying her subjects for nearly 12 hours with only one break. At least, she was reasonably sure she’d been studying all day—she was losing time lately. For long periods, she found herself staring into space, transfixed, and only when she snapped out of it did she realize that she’d been doing it for an hour, sometimes two hours. It made her wonder what was happening to her mind.
Three weeks ago, the three-person crew of Team Seven had discovered them, buried in the sand of a planet that they had all thought was devoid of life. Alpha 1B was a desert, blasted like Mars. Its surface was sand and stone. The preliminary probes had revealed nothing but some primitive bacteria. No significant life forms. No one could explain why the probes had failed to detect the creatures, or why every instrument also failed to detect them. The technicians had checked and rechecked the systems. There were no faults. Somehow the probes, all sixteen of them, had simply not found the life forms. Pring found that intriguing.
The pennae, as Pring had named them, didn’t do much except reproduce. They fed on the planet’s bacteria and performed a kind of photosynthesis. They had no limbs, and no discernible heads or tails. There was only a lateral fold on the undersi
de filled with tiny hairs that served for propulsion, such as it was. Pring had discovered the first one, nearly tripped over it, and she’d spent the last three weeks doing intensive research into the creatures and the hidden ecology of Alpha 1B.
W&M Industries, who were funding most of the mission, were more concerned with the minerals that planet Alpha 1B had to offer and less so with a creature that had no obvious commercial value. The International Scientific Coalition, which gave the expedition a veneer of altruism, wanted to know about the creatures’ potential use as a food source. A food animal that could live in deserts could potentially adapt to the growing wastelands on Earth.
The problem was that only so many freighters would go between Earth and Alpha 1B, with only so much cargo space. W&M argued that if they didn’t find the resources to allow transportation and communication to continue at their present rate, everything on Earth would grind to a halt—including food production. The Coalition argued that if there was no food to produce, it didn’t matter anyway. The situation on Earth was grim—grim enough for Pring to wonder if any of them would make it back and whether there would be anything left if they did.
She looked down at the one she’d been preparing to dissect. It rippled faintly with color, almost iridescent. Pring stared down at it and blinked slowly. It was almost as if there was a pattern. Almost.
“What are you?” she murmured.
She thought she saw a response in the play of colors in its flesh. The creature’s skin tones mimicked the movement of sand across the dunes, the play of wind and light from the sun. They even did it indoors, which Pring found odd. Put them together in the large tank that dominated the lab and the undulating patterns of red, purple, and orange spanned the entire group.
She asked the question again, but this time there was no change. She had theorized that the colors were a form of camouflage although, as far as they knew, there was nothing on the planet that preyed on the pennae. There was also the possibility that it was a form of communication similar to the color changes of octopus and squid. Pring didn’t know, and she suspected that the Directors didn’t care.
There were twenty or so pennae in the tank of varying size, but all the same basic shape. Colors rippled across their collective bodies as if they were one. Pring often found herself watching their collective color movement for long periods of time. It soothed her, like staring at the waves on the sea.
She folded her arms and rested her chin on them, staring into the tank as she did nearly every day. She wondered briefly how many hours she’d lost to it, and shook it off. “And what do we do with you?” she murmured.
“Pring?”
She sat up and turned around. Bev stood in the doorway with an eyebrow raised.
“Pring, are you … talking to them?”
Her face flushed. She’d forgotten the cameras in the ship, and she wondered if Bev had been watching her watch the pennae.
“No, I’m just thinking aloud. It helps me focus my thoughts.”
Bev hesitated.
“You’ve been a little weird lately. You spend more time with these things than with people.”
She had nothing to say. Things had been tense within the team for a while now. Nordstrom had been the linchpin in the group, not just the ranking officer but the pillar of their team structure. Now he was gone, and Pring wasn’t sure whether Bev was concerned about her teammate or herself.
“I’m finding people a little annoying lately,” Pring said. “I know all the Directors care about is the mining, but there’s more to this planet than that now.”
“You mean the Velveeta Shells and Cheese?” Bev asked.
“I mean the pennae. This is an important scientific discovery, and it’s being sidelined to make way for the gaping maw of consumption.”
“You sound like one of the hippies back on Earth,” Bev said. “Look, I know these things are important, but it’s not like they’re E.T. They’re not intelligent, they’re not sophisticated—they’re not anything, really. You remember how that press conference went where they announced the discovery? No one cared. If they don’t sing and dance, they don’t matter. I know it’s shitty, but that’s how people are.”
Pring shook her head, her lips drawn into a line. She turned back around and pretended to do something with the control panel in front of her until she heard Bev walk away. She glanced over her shoulder, and then she sank down again to watch the pennae in their tank.
Time passed which might have been minutes and might have been hours. She was determined to figure out just what the purpose of the color patterns was, to nail down a distinct stimulus and reaction connection. She’d performed every test she could imagine and nothing had emerged. So, she simply watched and waited.
Bree poked his head in.
“Captain says you need a break from your pets,” he said.
She didn’t move but went on looking into the tank. She spoke with her back to him.
“I like that you say ‘captain says’ as if you’re not the captain.”
There was a moment of silence, and then she heard him walk up behind her.
“Seriously, you’ve been in here for three hours. I know they’re important, and I know you’re angry about what the Directors said. But you’ve got to relax. If you keep winding yourself up so tight, you’ll start imagining the slugs are talking to you.”
She sat up and looked sharply at him.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Bree’s demeanor was too much like Bev’s, too hesitant and apologetic. It made Pring feel like slamming her fist on the metal table and shaking the instruments.
“Well … you talk to them,” he said.
Pring sighed.
“I think aloud. How many times do I have to say this?”
She didn’t mention the lost time to him. There was no need to give him any more reason to worry. They were all on edge already between the mission, losing Nordstrom, and the various demands being placed on them from above.
The inevitable loneliness of being in space for so long, knowing that her only companions were people cherry-picked for their ability to work together, wore on her. There were twenty-four teams scattered over an area the size of Texas. Most still had all four team members. A few, like her own, had lost someone. All the psychological and physical testing in the world could still miss things. So it had been with Nordstrom.
The Coalition had warned them all about the potential for mental disruptions. All four of them had undergone rigorous psychological testing to determine their suitability for space travel and their compatibility with other people in a team. The four of them—Pring, Bree, Bev, and Nordstrom—had been trained together. Each of them had strengths that complemented the others. No massive personality conflicts, no mutinous feelings: just a smoothly-running team that could make it to Alpha 1B and back without killing each other. They had done all their simulations and their training as a team, and by the time they left they shared a close bond.
The problem with the Coalition’s surefire team construction was that if the team lost a member, things became unbalanced. The mission could still continue, but the finely-tuned harmony would be off. There was no reason to think that any of the teams would lose a member. All of the pilots, scientists, and technicians were in excellent health, physically fit, and the safety measures for takeoff, space flight, and landing were impeccable. There were fail-safes upon fail-safes. There could be no mistakes.
There had been no mistakes, regardless of what Bree and Bev might tell themselves. Nordstrom didn’t make mistakes. He had gone into the ventilation shafts claiming that he needed to investigate a minor electrical fault. Nothing important, he had assured her—just a little thing that might become a big thing if he let it go.
“A lot of pieces on this tin can,” he said. “You let one shell go, and—shell? Where did that come from?”
He laughed and shook it off. Pring frowned.
“Are you okay, Nordstrom? You don’t look s
o good. Do you have a fever?”
She placed a hand on his forehead, and he rolled his eyes. He took her hand and held it a beat longer than was strictly professional. Her heart thumped, and then he let go.
“I don’t have a fever,” he said. “Stop worrying.”
He gave her a smile over his shoulder and climbed up. She thought about it—maybe he’d just been thinking of the endpoint. Alpha 1B was a desert. Desert, sand, beach, shell: a weird little mental digression, but understandable. The peculiar, off-kilter look in his eyes was just her imagination. Maybe he was stressed; as captain, he pretty much had to be.
When the hatch to the outer hull opened and the alarm sounded, Pring’s stomach bottomed out. It wasn’t the raw panic of imminent death, just the sudden intuitive knowledge that Nordstrom had not gone to fix a fault. She knew even before they climbed up past the living quarters to the shaft that he was gone. The hatch had closed automatically in response to an unauthorized opening. The hull was secure. There were no leaks, and Pring knew then that there had been no electrical fault.
She couldn’t bring herself to check the cameras fore and aft. She didn’t need to see Nordstrom’s frozen corpse drifting behind them as the ship continued on its pre-programmed course … although she imagined it. Usually at night, as she tried to sleep.
She remembered the moment by the groan Bev let out, by the silent, open-mouthed shock on Bree’s face, and the sudden feeling she had that they were all doomed. Moving through a fog, she checked and rechecked the pressure levels, the electrical diagnostics, and hull integrity. Everything was as it should have been. Everything apart from Nordstrom.
Three people could land the rocket. All three of them were trained as pilots, although none of them had Nordstrom’s skill. None of them had his cool-headed command of any situation. In his absence, Bree became captain automatically, although it took him an hour of staring blankly at the control panel before he pulled himself together enough to contact the Coalition and inform them of the accident.
Therefore I Am - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 2 Page 8
