“Impossible. There is also the issue of the mixed signals the people are receiving. The people are reconsidering their beliefs about humans. They are tending to return to their initial assessment of humans as a non-sentient, lesser predator species. I am liaising with them, but the human activities the people observe are hard for me to explain to them.”
“I am not sure what activities you mean,” Eris said. “I also need to know the cause of the gravity sink holes. The one which is being monitored in Alpha’s hanger bay, Swanson 6101, has not caused great damage yet, but I have no idea how to shut it down, or seal it off, or whatever.” Eris gulped several times and focused her mind. The pressures around her were rising. Her eyes felt like something was pushing them out from inside her head.
“I am unable to identify the cause of that phenomena as well,” AI Seljak interjected. “In my work through Alpha’s Terraforming and Restoration I have not isolated how that has occurred. I reviewed the information from Beta, but have no additional suggestions at this time. Visual, audio, and environmental measurements are being taken, but that gravity sink hole remains thirty-five centimeters in diameters, with a gravity factor of 1.87. There are odd subatomic sleptonic spreads, but I have been unable to track where they lead. It has only damaged the steel of the storage locker, and has done no structural damage to the hanger bay.”
“None that you know about,” Eris answered. “Please keep working to answer why that happens, and how to counteract it.”
“I will try,” an odd voice replied.
Eris was not sure which mechanical voice responded. It might have been more than one.
Sweat ran into Eris’ mouth with its warm saltiness. She licked her lips and concentrated more. The fog was growing thicker, and her whole body felt wet with sweat. Her heart was pounding, and her ears were now ringing. “Please find out for me more details on where the habitats are, and how we can boost them into orbit.”
“I will try.” The machine’s response was muffled and fuzzy.
Again, Eris was unsure what system had stated that, or it could have been more than one system speaking in a chorus. The mists were rolling over her as she mentally let go of the shadowlands.
The room popped and spun, or at least it felt that way to Eris. She opened her eyes. There was no sweat, nor was there any fog, mist, vapor, or any phantasms around her. The pressure and pain in her head was gone.
“You should let me coordinate,” Shadow said to her. “At least you did not tell Jerome about the Crocks. I can do a much better job harmonizing the elements in the shadowlands, and connecting in the diverse segments of the Shadow Level Clearance. Just let me have control.”
“No! This is my role.”
“Eris?” Sandie asked in a kind manner. “I sense some significant stress in your voice. During your recent quiet meditation and prayer, did something happen?”
“Quiet meditation? Prayer?” Eris questioned aloud. Then she realized Sandie was assuming that while she was in the hyperconsciousness of the shadowlands, she was in prayer and meditation. While Sandie saw the external, Eris knew the internal. “No, it is, nothing. Do not bother yourself about it. I have a lot on my mind.”
“That is understandable,” Sandie replied. “Should you need to meet with my simulation of Doctor Chambers again, let me know. I also have a simulation of Master Engineer Brink should you wish an engineering consultation.”
“Thank you Sandie. I may utilize your resources more as things unfold. Is the probe plan a good one?”
“Yes. Jerome’s designs are practical and doable. The lattice of compeers has already found a suitable external repair station to use as the launch platform for the probes. Its location is near to Reproduction and Fabrication, and it is being secured as we speak. The new engineering automacubes you ordered fabricated are showing themselves to be very useful. That was a wise decision you made. There are only a few modifications and constructions which will need….”
Sandie had stopped in mid-sentence. Eris’ mind was piqued with interest. “Sandie? What has happened?”
“I am patching in a communication from Cammarry.”
“Cammarry? Really?” Eris was very surprised.
A three-dimensional display was projected from Eris’ com-link. The image of Cammarry was sharper and more well-defined than the phantasms of the shadowlands. Eris blinked several times as she noted how very thin and emaciated was Cammarry.
“Eris? This is Cammarry. I am on a farm in Alpha’s biome. There is a gravity sink hole here.”
The view shifted suddenly, and a plowed field of deep brown soil was shown. At the center of the image was a circle of rocks which was about four meters wide.
“I am not able to give better measurements, or readings on this,” Cammarry said loudly. “I had to run back and get this com-link, and as you know I have no other equipment to speak of. I think this got bigger while I was fetching the com-link. Alizon says the gravity sink hole was not here last week when he cleared this area.”
The view jostled and shifted around again. Eris saw a small structure, a brief view of a man with blond hair, and then it refocused on Cammarry again. Her voice was rough and course.
“Cammarry, how are you?” Eris asked.
Cammarry looked puzzled, angry, and exhausted all at the same time. She answered, “What? How am I? Oh, just marvelous. You see, I am trapped without my gear, in some primitive wasteland. How should I be? But my health and welfare are my personal business, no one else’s. My problems are mine. I wanted you to know about the Conestoga. You are the captain, so here is your problem. A gravity sink hole is in Alpha. Now, what will you do about it?”
“I appreciate you showing this to me. Cammarry, I will…”
Cammarry cut off the com-link before Eris could finish.
Taking some deep breaths, Eris then refocused her mind on the hyperconsciousness and entered the shadowlands. Immediately, he head ached, pounded, and throbbed.
“Every AI here?” Eris yelled into the fogs and mists. “There is a second gravity sink hole in Alpha. Investigate it immediately, and rectify it as much as possible.”
Two of the larger phantasms wandered by. There was chuckling and murmuring. “She will fail, yes she will.”
“No! Project Ascension must succeed!” Eris yelled out. The pain was excruciating. She dropped to her knees and willed herself away from the shadowlands.
The room around her spun and she fell to the deck. She vomited several times, and that eased her agony a bit.
“I cannot allow you to die,” Shadow stated. “You will be helped. The obstreperous contacts will be dealt with.”
3 Dare Delivered
The wreckage of Habitat Delta was bluish gray against the taupes, yellows, and greens of the planet Zalia. The red light from the sun did not slice through the dense greens and yellows of the planet’s atmosphere, so to human eyes, the world looked chartreuse. Yet here, there were no human eyes to observe what was happening.
Not long before, a few humans arriving in a single shuttle had visited, briefly, and departed with four shuttles, but what they left behind was a crash-site where death and destruction had happened on a large scale. Spread over a wide area, the shattered habitat had only three sizable sections remaining. Of those, only one had any power or functioning left in it. That power was dwindling away, just as the earth elements from which the habitat had been constructed, were dissolving, disintegrating, and disappearing being absorbed and entombed by the Zalian ecology.
That last section jutted up from the ground where much of it was buried deep underneath the surface. The cylindrical shape was still visible, yet, it was buckled and broken in many places. The truncated ends were not jagged any longer, as they had been after the crash. Now, those jagged ends had been removed and segmented as they were cut in symmetric lines. A scaffold was built up against one side of the wreckage. That scaffold was burgundy colored with a brownish tint. It had ramps, odd stairways that no human legs could easily
traverse, and mechanical lifts in various places. Its structure had a four-fold reinforcement on the uprights, crossbeams, and walkways. Patterns of four, eight, and sixteen were commonly seen in those constructions. The scaffolding extended all the way to the top of the wreckage.
That scaffold was now covered with beings. Each stood on four stout legs, feet clad in protective wear against the alien, earth-made, materials. They were roughly one and three-quarter meters tall with an overall cone shape; from thick legs up to their horizontally square, four-hipped pelvis, up to their horizontally square, four-socketed shoulders, then tapering to their pointy head. Each being’s flesh was a mottled grayish with some undertones of green. A wide variation of fleshy tones was observable. Most of their bodies were covered by clothing, again to protect them from the alien thing that had fallen from their sky. Heads were uncovered, as were each beings four hands, from the wrist down. Four round, bulging, black eyes moved independently on the sides of each one’s head. Beneath the eyes were four nearly invisible slots which could flare wide as gases were exchanged. Below that was a wide mouth filled with sharp teeth.
Jerome had labeled these beings, the Crocks, but they called themselves, the people. They were native to Zalia, but they did not call the planet by that name. They called it, the world, or home. The people lived at home, on their world. At least that was the closest translation which was available for a human mind.
The people were busy with their tools, grasped by four-fingered hands, and wielded by arms with two elbows and a wrist. The crews worked diligently, carefully, and with precise purpose. Some teams were slicing down the outer surfaces of the wreck. They did that by horizontal sectioning of exactly cut sections. Each layer was then set carefully aside, in meticulous positions so that the people knew accurately how this alien vessel had been constructed.
Other teams then took those sections and further dissected them. They were opening up the severed sections and separating certain things from other things. Some items were transported to the lifts where they were lowered to the home’s ground. Others were set into insulated bins of similar, alien to their world, materials.
At the ground, more of the people were at work. Those ground teams were unloading the scaffold’s lifts and carrying the earth-made parts, paced in their insulated containers, to a four-railed transportation system. On that quad rail system sat several vehicular apparatuses and mechanisms. Those transports were waiting on the rails to tote away a full load of the human-made, and thus alien, artifacts.
By far the busiest place on the whole wreckage was at the side nearest the scaffolding, where even more equipment had been installed. There the people were doing more excavations, and the disassembly of the wreckage of the habitat was even more tediously methodical and precise. They pealed back layer after layer of permalloy, like how an earth child might remove the petals from a tulip. However, these people were not children, but rather they were the Zalian equivalents of experienced excavators, mechanics, anthropologists, cryptozoologists, and scientists.
In one place of the wreckage, the center of the people’s attention, was a vertical shaft. The hanger bay that used to sit above it, was now in pieces delicately laid to the sides so that the Zalians could build an engine to transverse down the shaft.
The walls and sides of the shaft were crumpled from the crash, but its overall shape still showed it had once been a causeway. Twisted and sprung bulkhead doors were at each end. The people had built an overhead structure which spanned the shaft. From that a cable lift platform had been erected over the center of the shaft. That cable was distinctly different color from the permalloy of the wreckage. It matched the color of the four-railed transport tracks. Tubes, or hoses, snaked their way from the ground all the way up through the scaffold and across to the erected devices which reached over the shaft. Motors, gears, mechanisms, and tackles were set in place to power the lift up and down. Zalian industry was at work. The people’s platform was at the bottom of the shaft.
Pumping and chugging noises came from the mechanisms around the cable as the platform rose upward. The team of beings suddenly each stomped a foot, then spun about in unison. Their actions were synchronized, and as they did that the remaining outer layer of permalloy, the skin of the habitat, sloughed off. It rolled downward in a gentle unveiling of the interior superstructure of the wreckage. The shaft was then exposed on one side. It was now seen that the shaft had been buried well below the ground-level. The red light from Zalia’s sun peered down onto the platform through the cross-work of beams, supports, conduits, and utilities which had once been the life sustaining connections of the Conestoga. Now, they were the busted remnants of broken dreams. However, at the center of the platform, was a still operational, human construction: the central memory core for the synthetic brain known as Virginia Dare.
The Crocks, the people, had prepared that item with diligence and care. Wrapped inside a bubble of yellow was a central memory core. The bubble was suspended inside a network of cables, but the central memory core was exactly upright. The bottom of the bubble was just touching the base of the platform, not enough to alter its spherical shape, but enough to prevent it from swaying at all as it accented up the shaft. At one point, the platform passed a sign over a wrecked pressure door which was now set into the side of the shaft. It read, ‘Recreation Area 2FG’.
The ascent continued, slowly, and methodically. The central memory core, ensconced in its protective bubble, consisted of a clear permalloy upright cylinder, augmented by other human-made elements. That cylinder was surrounded by a series of horizontal brass-colored rings each about ten centimeters thick. There were five layers of those brass-colored rings, nearly equal distances apart. Inside the column was blue fluid which was slowly bubbling up and down. At the very center was a diamond shaped object which was unhurriedly rotating. Connection cables, wires, tubes, hoses, and conduits emerged from both the top and bottom of the cylinder. Each of those projections ended in another separate bubble which capped them off. The clear permalloy was smooth and flawless, and had a shimmering, glitter-like twinkle. The interplay between the blue liquid, lights, energy, and the bubbles was almost lyrical and hypnotic.
As the central memory core reached the top of the shaft, and its ascent out from the depth of the wreckage was completed, the team from the people rushed over. In unison, using their four-armed strength, they grabbed the bubble which contained the central memory. Their four-fingered hands sunk into the bubble’s materials, but did not penetrate it. They carefully carried the bubble and all it contained off the platform and then onto the scaffold. The descent down to the ground was different than the ascent out of the shaft. The people moved in synchronized rhythms down the ramps, stairs, and around and around the scaffolding. When the team reached the base, they stopped and waited.
A globe shaped creature floated over. It was colored in spots of green, yellow, and red. It stopped near to the team holding the bubble-encircled central memory core.
The pause was awkward, long, and yet the people did nothing to hasten the floating creature’s departure. After some time, it swayed in the air and rubbed against the top of the bubble. Small cilium stroked the bubble, and then the floating creature maneuvered away in an apparently haphazard manner. Other creatures like it, were hovering in the distance, waiting while they were attached to foliage.
The people then marched across a well-worn trail where they loaded the bubble onto a separate vehicular contrivance on the quad rail system. After the protective bubble was secured, the contrivance quivered a bit as its propulsion system engaged and began moving it along the four rail track. It headed in the direction where the people had taken the central memory core for AI Ogma. That human-made artificial intelligence had been physically larger, more complex, and much more damaged than this synthetic brain’s central memory core was.
The people were pleased with their efforts, as they all recognized the value of knowledge. The aliens who had crashed onto the world could
only be properly removed once the people understood them. That understanding would be heightened by the use of this latest recovery. The prior one had allowed the people to communicate with the historic records, the technological sophistication, and eerily also with the strangely mixed and jumbled ideas of the newcomers to the planet.
Time passed as the central memory core was transported to its final location. They traveled under the red sun, and in the green and yellow air. The quad rail contrivance carried them easily along. It did not slow as they entered the massive cavern where the scientific investigations were taking place. There, another team of the people carefully unloaded the central memory core. They carried it up and next to the glowing amber central memory core of AI Ogma, whom they had rebuilt and been in connection with for many decades. The people had constructed a new dais for the newly recovered central memory core of Virginia Dare.
The Colony Ship Conestoga : The Complete Series: All Eight Books Page 186
