Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  “Talk won’t solve nothing,” Karry said. “There’s only one way to find out what’s down there: dig it out and take a look.”

  “Yup,” Stem said.

  Parson pressed his lips together. “How about the rest of you?”

  “We have to,” Genner said. “We owe it to humanity to find out what there is to be learned.”

  “We’ve spent the last four hours arguing about what you think,” the captain muttered. “Rada? Yed?”

  Yed glanced at Rada. “I’m in.”

  “Rada?”

  “I bet my life every time I hop in a cart,” she said. “At least this gives us a shot to never have to take that risk again.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.” Parson turned to the screen. Weak blue light glimmered from the frost and rocks. “Let’s go to work.”

  -o0o-

  Four days later, from the surface, it looked like they’d hardly made any progress. A single hole, twenty feet across, sunk into the ice a quarter mile from the dig. The ice around the entrance was dirtied with churned-up rock and refrozen sludge. That was it.

  Below the surface, it was a completely different story.

  The mole had cleared a vast cavern above the ship. As it pulverized the ice and rock, the team had loaded the detritus into the carts that Rada drove to the designated slag pile. They were now too close to the ship for the mole to continue operations. This was a double-edged sword: work would slow as more delicate machines took over the dig. On the other hand, with so much of the ice extracted, Genner had been able to take more detailed scans.

  Seeing them, Rada now had no doubt the ship was of alien make. It was a squat cylinder, ribbed and segmented, like a stack of tires or sea urchins. Insect-like arrays projected from its radial design. Many appeared to be broken, or missing altogether; the site showed indications the ship had crashed, leaving a trail of debris behind it. The impact had been low-speed, however. Either that, or the ship was incredibly tough—as far as they could tell, its hull was intact.

  It was the hull that hit her eye most oddly of all. It didn’t resemble any class of ship she’d ever seen. It looked like it belonged underwater. Like it had been built by coral or crabs.

  Like it had been built by Swimmers.

  The next few days were tough ones. Not that there was too much to do: just the opposite. The machines scraped the ice down to within inches of the vessel, then withdrew, replaced by a second set of machines tasked with melting the final layers without doing damage to the ship. The crew was left with little to do but prepare for entry.

  Stem was their all-purpose grunt. An obvious choice for the breach team. Yed, as their expert on hostile environments, was the second. To her own surprise, Rada found herself raising her hand to volunteer.

  “No way,” Stem said. “I’m not letting you go in there.”

  She raised both brows at him. “Who says you get a say?”

  “It’s way too dangerous, Rada! I can’t let you go.”

  “If it’s that dangerous, then maybe I can’t let you go.”

  He laughed. “That’s ridiculous. This is what I do.”

  “And I know more about the history of spacefaring vessels than anyone here.”

  “Then I won’t touch anything.” He gestured at her torso. “Besides, you’re…”

  She bunched her fist. “A woman?”

  “Enough!” Parson hollered. “Rada’s in. Anyone has a problem with that, and no one goes in. I don’t know why we’re not handling everything with drones anyway.”

  “Once upon a time, they almost wiped us out,” Rada said. “A human should be there to see this.”

  “That does not convince me in the slightest.”

  “We’ll start with drones,” Genner said. “But there are some things that look different in person. Besides, someone has to go inside it at some point.”

  “There’s nothing to say it has to be one of us.” Parson rubbed his temples with one hand. “You people will be the death of me, I swear.”

  While the machines neared the hull, she prepared with Stem and Yed. Discussing protocols. Plans. Although the ship must have been frozen for a thousand years, Stem insisted on bringing a gun. Rada rolled her eyes.

  “All hands to the bridge.” Genner’s voice piped through the ship’s speakers, unusually animated. “Unless you want to miss being the first humans to see inside an alien ship since Weirdness.”

  Rada bolted from her chair and sprinted to the bridge, Stem and Yed on her heels. Karry was the last to arrive, unhurried as always. The main screen showed a dark, featureless chamber, small and roughly cubical. The doors at the far end were parted halfway, but the drone’s light didn’t extend far past the room.

  “This is the airlock.” Genner grinned, rapt beneath the screens. “Had to cut our way in.”

  “Was there pressure?” Rada said.

  “No atmosphere of any kind. Don’t worry, Rada, the monsters are dead.”

  “Permission to proceed,” Parson said.

  Hands on the controls, Genner ordered the drone toward the gap in the doors. It floated smoothly into a long, straight tunnel. From the drone’s low perspective, it was hard to get a feel for the exact size of the hall, but the proportions were wider than human ships. A waste of space—unless you needed to accommodate an umbrella-like spread of claws, tentacles, and limbs.

  Sealed doors lined both sides of the tunnel. These too were wider than standard. The drone came to a T-shaped intersection. The floor was marred with black streaks.

  “What’s that?” Parson peered at the screen. “Scorch marks?”

  “Irregular. Must have had gravity.” Genner nosed the dirigible-like drone forward, hesitating at the intersection, then swung it to the right. Its light swept over a tangle of sticks and lumps.

  Genner screamed.

  “Holy shit!” Stem said. “Is that—?”

  Bulbous, fist-sized eyes gazed up at the drone. Unwinking. Frozen. Yet so lifelike Rada could barely bring herself to gaze back.

  The alien’s head was long and vaguely oval, pointy toward one end, like a stretched-out egg. A thin neck connected it to a tapered body. Its gray, mottled skin was shark-like. Thick yellow liquid lay in a frozen pool beneath its tangle of claws and tentacles. Yed thrashed toward the bulkhead, pulled open the recycler, and vomited.

  “Moons save us,” Parson said, strained. “That’s a Swimmer.”

  -o0o-

  Over the next few hours, the drone mapped out most of the ship. It was a sizable vessel, corvettesque, but to Rada, it felt too small to have made it from another star on its own. Its insides were still, silent, frozen. The drone had located seventeen Swimmers so far. Each one bore severe wounds, as if the crash had been abrupt and unexpected. Some were nearly cut in half. Scorch marks spangled the interior, but the fires had been too brief to cause structural damage.

  There was no sign of anything resembling a dedicated medical research lab, nor of anything that looked like an obvious container for lethal viruses. Not that any such things were likely to have survived nine-plus centuries near absolute zero. Even so, as Rada suited up to breach the ship, she couldn’t help feeling like she was doing something incredibly stupid.

  Yed triple-checked their suits’ levels and seals. “Remember, if anything happens to your suit, don’t panic. It will close off the breach. If the hole’s small enough, it will repair itself. If the hole’s too big to self-repair, the suit will warn you to take other measures.”

  “I know,” Rada said.

  “I know you know.” Behind his mask, he met her eyes. “But if something happens, I want to make sure you remember.”

  They took devices, sampling kits, a small fold-out handcart. Stem had his gun, a big white pistol with a long grip to hold more of its caseless ammo. Parson, Kerry, and Genner descended to cargo to watch them go.

  “Go slow and be careful,” Parson said. “If you don’t know what it is, don’t touch it. In fact, don’t touch anything at all.�
��

  Genner looked up from her screens. “Besides the Swimmers.”

  Rada rolled her eyes. “This thing has been dead since the days of Walt Lawson. Besides, you’ll be watching through our vids. Shout if something’s creeping up on us.”

  Parson chuckled. “I don’t care if you get eaten by space lobsters. All I care about is making sure you don’t break anything.”

  They climbed in the cart, drove into the airlock, and waited for it to cycle. The autopilot would have driven them fine, but Rada took over the controls, guiding them out into the bleak and shining ice.

  “We’re sure this is a good idea?” Stem tried to grin, but she knew the tautness around his eyes.

  She guided the cart around a black fin of rock. “Not too late to turn back.”

  “Is this as fast as this thing goes? Punch it.”

  She maintained speed. The carts had worn a trail to the entrance and she followed the ruts. The tunnel through the ice swallowed them up, banded and pale like an intestine. It spat them into the cavern overlooking the ship and she followed the ramp maintained around the space’s edge. Below, the Swimmer vessel stretched across the floor like a chubby geometric worm. The hairs on her neck stood up like she’d been brushed with an ice cube.

  She parked the cart to the side of the ship. Her skin continued to prickle, the sensation flowing up and down her limbs and spine like kelp in the tides. They got out and made for the airlock. The gravity was so light the slightest spring sent her bounding.

  They reached the airlock and her magnetic soles snapped to the floor. It felt like she was being drawn in, beguiled.

  Stem drew his big white pistol and checked its readings. “I’m point. Rada, you take the middle. Yed, you got rear.”

  “The drone already cleared it,” Rada said.

  “If we trusted the machines to do everything, why are we going inside?”

  She laughed hollowly. “I’ll take the middle.”

  The ship was pitch black. Their helmet lights slashed across the airlock. Stem advanced slowly, pistol held before him. Rada followed, splitting her attention between the way ahead and the readouts on the device on her suit’s forearm. In the long tunnel, the air smelled briny, but she knew it was her imagination—the only air was inside her suit.

  “How’s it going in there?” Parson said. At the sound of his voice, Rada jumped, one foot coming unstuck from the floor.

  “Fine until you piped up,” Stem said. “Now you’re gonna have to convince Yed to hose out my suit.”

  “Convince? Isn’t that his job?”

  “Scrubbing Stem’s undies is definitely not in my contract,” Yed said.

  Rada laughed vaguely. Her light swept over the seam where the wall of the tunnel met the floor. Blue, spongy material grew along the crease. “You seeing this?”

  “Looks organic,” Genner said. “Grab a sample?”

  Rada stooped. The substance looked porous, but her scraper bounced off the rock-hard matter. She peeled pieces into her container and stood. Stem tried three of the doors, but there was no obvious handle.

  He reached the T-intersection, swinging his pistol down one hall, then the other. “Clear!”

  “Thanks.” Rada moved past him down the right-hand tunnel. The dead alien rested against the wall, collapsed amid its jumble of limbs. She avoided its gaze as she scraped out a sample of its yellow blood, then its pebbled carapace.

  “Oh man,” Yed said. “If that thing so much as twitches, I’m going to explode. There won’t be anything left of me but red spray and teeth.”

  “It’s -450 degrees in here. This thing wouldn’t move if you hit it with a hammer.”

  “Hey,” Stem said. “Did you hear that?”

  Rada dug her chisel into the alien’s flank. “The only thing I hear is you two. Anyway, there’s no atmo in here.”

  “I mean, did you feel it?”

  His voice sounded wrong. She sat back. Behind her in the intersection, Stem pointed his light up at the ceiling, sweeping the nooks.

  “Feel what?” she said.

  “Vibes. In the floor.”

  “Is the ice shifting? Genner, anything on scans?”

  “Nothing,” Genner said over comms.

  “I’m telling you,” Stem said. “There it is—!”

  A blue light flashed from the intersection. Stem screamed and toppled to the floor.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Stem!” Rada burst to her feet hard enough to send herself flying. Her magnetic soles held her fast, yanking at her knees. She started toward the intersection.

  Yed grabbed her arm. “Stop it!”

  The blue light flashed again. A straight line ran between the ceiling and Stem’s prone body. Smoke expanded into the air. The light flashed off, leaving its reverse image blaring on Rada’s retinas. She turned and ran down the hall, remembering the drone had passed an open door during its reconnoiter.

  “What’s going on in there?” Parson said over their comm.

  “The ship’s defenses!” Rada found the doorway and piled into the dark room. “They just kicked in!”

  “That’s not possible,” Genner said. “It’s been frozen for centuries.”

  As Yed neared, Rada snaked an arm into the hallway and yanked him inside. “We just watched Stem get cut down. By a laser.”

  “I saw the light.” Parson’s voice shook. “We’re not seeing anything on our sensors. From here, the ship looks completely cold.”

  Rada turned for a look at the room they’d holed up in. It was about sixteen feet deep and thirty feet wide, festooned with metal furniture that resembled medieval torture devices or plumbing as art. She believed she was looking at exercise equipment. An alien gym.

  “What is happening?” Yed pressed himself against the wall, arms spread wide, gazing in horror at the ceiling fixtures. “Are we safe in here? Why didn’t it shoot when the drone was here?”

  “It must be keyed to biologicals.” Genner’s tone was confused, musing. “But how has it stayed active so long?”

  Rada kept both eyes on the ceiling, wary of movement. “Stem had the gun. The cart, too—all the supplies. How do we get out of here?”

  “We could cut our way in,” Parson said. “But it would be through the hull, not an airlock. Could take hours.”

  She checked the device on her suit’s arm. “We’ve got about five hours of air. Is there another way out of this ship?”

  “There’s another airlock on the starboard side. But it’s under about twenty feet of ice.”

  “And we’ll have to cross half the ship to get there. Could be more defenses along the way.” Rada moved to wipe her eyes, but her glove bounced against her faceplate. “Better start cutting a new way in. As close to us as possible. In the meantime, we’ll work on finding a way past the intersection.”

  Yed swung to face her. “How do you propose we get past a laser? Run really, really fast?”

  “If you don’t want to help, you can go first.”

  “We’ll get the machines on the move,” Parson said. “Sit tight, okay? We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Copy.” She wasn’t so sure about that. Her readout had already adjusted its estimate downward by nearly an hour to account for the extra oxygen she was burning with her heavy breathing. She forced herself to inhale through her nose and exhale gently from her mouth. “Think. Did Stem do anything to trigger the defense?”

  Yed gazed blankly at the ceiling. “He was just standing there. Maybe it took a minute to warm up.”

  “Or maybe it only activates after multiple targets have passed through.”

  He laughed harshly. “Testing that theory sounds like Plan Z.”

  With nothing better to do, she searched the room and found a bin of fist-sized balls nestled in a foam crate. She went to the door and lobbed them down the hall one at a time toward the intersection. The laser didn’t fire once.

  “Great,” Yed said once she ran out. “So it’s not firing on them for the same reason it didn
’t fire on the drone.”

  Within half an hour, Parson had the machines down in the pit. Rada couldn’t hear or feel them go to work on the hull.

  “Okay,” Parson said twenty minutes later. “I’m not going to sugarcoat this. You’re going to run out of air before we get inside.”

  “What are you talking about?” Yed bolted to his feet, gaping up at the ceiling, as if Parson were watching from above. “I thought we had top-end gear!”

  “That equipment is designed to handle rock. Ice. Not the hardened hull of a spacecraft.”

  “So try something else! Use the mole!”

  “We don’t have the strength to punch our way in. We have to slice out a hole. Unless you can find more oxygen, you won’t have time.”

  “Where are we going to get more air?” Yed’s voice was nearing a screech. “Should we take it from the guy who was just cut in half by a sentry laser?”

  “I don’t have a solution,” Parson said calmly. “I’m defining the problem. We can find an answer together.”

  “Easy,” Rada said. “Send in a drone with more supplies.”

  “Damn, you’re good,” the captain laughed. “We’ll get right on that.”

  She killed time wandering around the room, poking at the walls. The lower halves of them were covered in an inches-thick, mat-like orange substance. Its surface was pebbled like the skin of a toad. In places, it had peeled from the wall when it froze, leaving it free-standing.

  “Sending in drone,” Genner said.

  Rada moved to the doorway, standing just inside it. A minute ticked by.

  “Approaching intersection,” Genner said. “Entering. Crossing—”

  Blue flashed down the hallway. Rada shut her eyes. A second burst followed, pure white.

  “Shit.” Genner’s voice was clipped.

  “What was that?” Rada said. “Did it just shoot the drone?”

  “Drone’s dead.”

  “Why? How did the first one get through?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe the system hadn’t warmed up yet.”

  Rada pressed herself to the doorframe, willing herself to look around the corner. “What about the balls I threw down there? Why not shoot them?”