There are some sounds in this universe that are intrinsically terrifying to humans. The snapping of twigs on the forest floor at night, as a predator approaches your campsite. The dry rustling of a snake slithering through dead leaves. Or the hissing of a snake. Or the buzzing of a rattlesnake’s tail when you just stepped on something in thick underbrush but you can’t see the snake so you don’t know which way to jump. Ok, so you get the idea, I hate snakes. Not all snakes; we had black snakes in our barn and they ate rats so I had no problem with them. The kind of snakes I hate are the ones I encounter suddenly. Which is most snakes.
Anyway, to the list of sounds that are always terrifying regardless of context, you can add an asshole shiny beer can nervously saying ‘heh heh’.
“Potential? Crap, is that Sentinel waking up?”
“Huh? No, dumdum, I told you, that thing is dead. The new problem is the Guardians are increasingly frantic about our Condor approaching that Sentinel fragment. They have been urging me away, and now they are sort of warning me of dire consequences.”
“Warning? Dire consequences like what?”
“Warning like, they will be forced to tear our Condor in half if we continue on course. I don’t think I can fix this problem, the Guardians have base programming I can’t alter in my current condition, and part of that base programming appears to be keeping non-Elder spacecraft from approaching that dead Sentinel.”
“How much closer can we get before they act?”
“Not much. I suggest we, uh, heh heh, alter course soon. Like, now.”
“Wu!” I shouted into the cockpit through the open door. “Initiate a one-gee burn to starboard, now!”
“Aye aye,” she acknowledged as I tugged my safety straps tight. In less than ten seconds, Wu had the main engines warmed up, and a steady pressure began pushing me back into my seat, building up to Earth normal apparent gravity.
“Skippy, how far do we have to go?”
“Wait a minute, wait. Ok, this is good, the Guardians are backing off.”
“Do we have to keep moving away, or could we hold position this far from the Sentinel?”
“I think we could maintain this distance, Joe. I’m kind of guessing. We could try it, and I’ll tell you how the Guardians react. Just be ready to skedaddle out of here pronto.”
“I will have my emergency skedaddler ready. Lieutenant Wu! Change course again, hold our position at this distance from the Sentinel. You can push it to three Gees if needed.”
She did need three Gees, or she made a judgement call that temporary discomfort for the crew was worth the advantage of completing the maneuver quickly. With the engines burning hard, the six of us needed to endure the pressure of acceleration for less than seven minutes before Wu was able to cut thrust and declare “We are stationary in relation to the Sentinel, Colonel. Range one hundred twenty seven thousand kilometers.”
For some reason, it flashed through my mind that was approximately a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Useless trivia, but it gave my poor little monkey brain some context. “Skippy? Are the Guardians Ok with us staying here?”
“They are uneasy about it, however they are no longer threatening to rip the Condor apart.”
“Great,” I gave a sigh of relief. “No, not great. Not great at all. We need to get close to that thing, right?”
“Very close. Same as before, I can’t do this remotely. The footprint occupied in local spacetime by a conduit is small, really it is an unintended but unavoidable effect of the- well, I won’t bore you with the details.”
“Probably a good idea. We need to get you over there.”
“Joe, if you have some idiot idea that you can fling me into the Sentinel attached to a missile, you can forget about it. I can’t tell exactly where a conduit would be located inside-”
“No, Skippy,” I shook my head. “I think we need to get the band back together.”
“Huh? I’m not following you, Joe. I could certainly be the singer in a band, but you have no discernable musical talent.”
“Not music, I was using an expression. I’m talking about you, me and a suit for a long-range spacedive.”
“Oh, cool! Wait. I just did the math, and a jetpack will take way too long to get us there, assuming we need to conserve fuel for a return journey.”
“I figured that. Run the math again, this time assume we back the dropship away and use it to accelerate us toward the Sentinel, then we only need to use a jetpack to slow us down to rendezvous with the Sentinel.”
“Good idea. Done. It’s still not practical, Joe. The problem is we also need the jetpack to get us back to the Condor. The trip back and forth is too long, you would run out of oxygen.”
“Those jetpacks can be fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks, right? What if we did that?”
“Ok, Ok, another good idea. Hmmm, that might work. Assuming we need six hours at the Sentinel to locate a conduit and for me to gain access to it, your oxygen supply is going to be marginal, Joe.”
“Will six hours be enough time?”
“I do not know, Joe. Truly, I don’t. We can’t get good scans of the Sentinel’s interior structure from here. I said six hours because my thinking is, if we can’t get the job done in six hours, more time isn’t going to help.”
“That makes sense.” I unstrapped from my seat and floated through the door to the rear compartment of the Condor, where we stored Kristang spacesuits and jetpacks. Rapping my knuckles on the hard shell of a suit, I considered the problem. “The problem is mass? The less mass we have to move to the Sentinel and back, the faster the jetpack can move us with the same amount of fuel.”
“Correct, Captain Obvious.”
Ignoring him, I examined the suit closely. “The Kristang built these suit for dual purposes. They protect the user from the vacuum of space, or from toxic environments like planets with a methane atmosphere. Because we got these from a troopship, these are also armored mech suits. For this trip, I don’t need the armor.”
“Ah, I see where you’re going with this, Joe. Good thinking. Much of the armor is integral to the suit, but there are panels which can be removed, and those panels carry a lot of mass,” Skippy observed, warming to the idea. “We could also dump the reservoirs of self-repair nano, they are heavy and we won’t need them. We will keep enough nano to plug leaks in the suit, unless you plan to pee in your pants again?”
“Let’s avoid that,” I gave Lt. Reed the side-eye in case she hadn’t heard about that embarrassing little incident on my second mission. “There’s also a bunch of gear we can strip off a jetpack. The stealth field generator, the comm and navigation modules; you can handle comms and navigation for us-”
Six hours later, we had a suit and jetpack stripped of everything that was not absolutely essential, and I was in an open airlock with Skippy secured in a padded bag on my right side. Desai had backed the Condor away, then punched the throttle hard to accelerate us toward the Sentinel again. I gutted out the three-Gee burn in my suit, hooked up to oxygen and power from the Condor to conserve my own supplies. Exactly in time with the countdown clock in my helmet visor, Desai cut thrust, and my stomach did flip flops as we were suddenly in zero gravity again. “Right on the mark, Colonel. We need to burn again in two minutes thirty seconds,” she warned.
“Got it,” I replied. Lt Reed helped me manually disconnect from the lines for oxygen and power, released the clamps holding me, and I floated free. With a gentle push from Reed, I drifted out the airlock door. She stood in the doorway, illuminated by the harsh light of the distant star, and gave me a solemn salute. “This isn’t a funeral, Reed,” I complained. “I plan to be back.”
“Yes, Sir,” she made a smile I could barely see in the glare, and snapped a crisp salute to me. “I’ll hold you to that.”
I returned a crisp salute. “The Air Force says ‘Aim High’, Reed? In space, there’s no up or down, so how do I aim high?”
The Guardians did not object to me approaching t
he Sentinel in a spacesuit and jetpack, or Skippy was able to persuade them to leave us alone. Or the Guardians were screaming a final warning at Skippy and he was letting me blissfully ignore my last moments of existence. There was no way for me to know, so I chose the blissful ignorance option.
I highly recommend it.
The Sentinel loomed in my visor, the view artificially magnified due to the distance involved. Damn, it was creepy. It made my skin crawl to look at it. And it was huge. I knew from the Condor’s sensor data that this broken piece of a Sentinel was seventy eight kilometers across its long axis and almost thirty kilometers front to back. It was black, and it looked like a spider. No, like a cluster of spider legs, or the tentacles of an octopus; a really, really creepy scary octopus. “Damn. Why does this thing look so creepy? The Elders designed it to look like spiders?”
“No, Joe, they did not design it to look scary. The design template is based on fractal geometry, that’s all. Don’t be such a baby.”
“You’re a beer can. You never got frightened by a spider. Skippy, my species has a deep-seated instinctive fear of some things, and spiders are near the top of the list.”
“Oh, boo freakin’ hoo,” he tactfully expressed his sincere sympathy. “Don’t wimp out on me now, Joe.”
“Skippy, courage is facing a situation that scares the shit out of you, and doing it anyway. You won’t see me letting down the honor of the US Army.” That speech of bravado would have been more convincing if my mouth hadn’t been dry from fear. Taking a sip of water from the spout inside my helmet, I eyeclicked the image to increase magnification, but it didn’t do much good. The thing was so utterly black it was difficult to discern features on its surface. What I could see was miniature repeats of the larger structure; creepy fractals getting smaller and smaller. In the super-enhanced image, I could see part of the surface appeared to be a series of sharp, spiky spines? If so, then removing protective armor panels from my suit was a bad idea. One bad puncture or tear could doom me; the nano reservoir of the suit could only repair a small leak. Crap, I really had not thought this through very well. “Do you see a way in?”
“No. Don’t worry, I didn’t expect to. What you are seeing is the original exterior of the device in this spacetime, it is oriented to face the star. Solar wind likely turned it so the exposed back side faces away. Once we get around to the area that broke away, we should be able to see into the interior.”
“I hope you’re right about that. It still looks creepy.”
“Keep in mind, Joe, that’s not what a Sentinel is supposed to look like. They normally reside in another spacetime where the laws of physics are different. When they do have to act in local spacetime, they are protected by a bubble projected from other dimensions. This one is broken and dead, so it has no protection. Many of the exotic materials it was constructed from can’t exist here, so you’re only seeing a shell; its structure is severely damaged down to an atomic level. That’s how I know we are not in danger from that thing, it is deader than the proverbial doornail.”
“I hope you’re right about that too. Wait, its structure is damaged? Then how are we supposed to use a freakin’ conduit inside the thing?”
“Because, Joe,” he spoke softly and patiently to calm my rising fear, “conduits by nature must exist in multiple spacetimes. The portion of the conduit here was designed and constructed to be here. Trust me; there are a lot of dangers out here, but that Sentinel fragment isn’t one of them.”
I did not take the opportunity to remind him he had asked me to trust him about poking his nose into that dead AI canister we found on Newark. “Fine. Hang on, we need to begin decelerating.”
The jetpack brought us to a dead stop half a kilometer from one creepy tentacle of the Sentinel. While we hung there, Skippy did his best to scan the thing while I unstrapped myself from the jetpack. We had attached supplemental fuel canisters to the jetpack, now that they were empty, I needed to remove the canisters as they were useless mass we couldn’t afford to carry. They also added to the width of the jetpack, and I was concerned about tight spaces inside the Sentinel, if we could even get into the thing at all.
Removing the canisters took almost ten minutes because they weren’t really designed to be removed in flight, mostly I worked silently as there wasn’t much to say. After the discarded canisters were floating away and I was secured to the jetpack again, I sent a brief message to the Condor. In my visor, I saw Skippy had programmed a flightpath into the nav system. “Ready to see the back side of this thing?”
“I was born ready, Joe,” he chuckled, but his voice betrayed his own fears.
“Hang on.”
We burned five hours of our self-imposed six hour time limit before finding a way inside. I mean, a practical way inside. There were a lot of holes in the thing, but almost all of them were honeycombed with jagged fractal spikes or whatever they were. No way could I get in there without slicing my spacesuit to ribbons. Finally, my suit spotlights found a large, jagged hole and I cautiously flew in, keeping one eye on my oxygen supply. There was only a fifteen minute safety margin baked into our schedule, I was forcing myself to not consider that safety margin.
“Got one! A conduit!”
“Where?” I asked excitedly, just as Skippy made my visor zoom in on the thing. It was in an awkward location behind a jagged spire projecting across the opening and other broken pieces partly filling the gap. I would need to fly carefully around multiple obstructions to get to the highlighted conduit, if that’s what it was. “Skippy, that thing does not look like a conduit.” The one we stole from Barsoom was a long cylinder with a dimpled surface like a stretched golf ball. The thing he called a conduit in the Sentinel was two beach balls attached to each other, and a smooth cylinder going through both spheres.
“It is a conduit, trust me. There are many types of conduits. The thing on Barsoom was designed for communications. The thing ahead of us is a, well, you would think of it as part of a weapon system. Hold a minute.”
It was one minute, twenty eight seconds before he spoke again. With my oxygen supply limited and dwindling, I was keeping very careful track of time passing.
“Yes!” He shouted loud enough to hurt my ears in the confines of my helmet. “Sorry,”
he said at a normal volume. “This is not only a conduit, it is active, Joe! It works! Glory halleluiah, we have come to the promised land!”
“That’s great, Skippy,” I tried to temper my own enthusiasm, having been burned by the unexpected too many times before. “Can you access it from here?”
“Nope. I tried that. It responded, that’s how I know it is active, but the effect is too weak from here. For this to work, I need to be close, like, real close. Fly over there and-”
“Skippy, we only have fifteen minutes left before we have to return to the Condor. How about we tag this location and come back later?”
“Uh, no can do, Joe.” There was a tone in his voice that I recognized as guilt.
“Why not?”
“Um, heh heh, I didn’t want to bother you, seeing as you were super busy flying around all the hazards in here, but as soon as we got inside the Sentinel, the Guardians freaked out. They went into full hissy fit mode.”
My mind immediately flashed to the five people I had brought into danger. “The Condor?”
“The Condor is fine, they’re not threatening it. Not yet. They want you to leave right now.”
“Shit. So, if I fly out of here, we can’t come back?”
“That’s the problem. We are protected by the structure of the Sentinel in here, the Guardians can’t get to us. Not unless they do something drastic.”
“Ok, Ok, we can’t waste time talking. I’m flying over to the conduit. This is going to be tricky so don’t distract me, unless the Guardians threaten to act against the Condor.”
By the time we got to the conduit, I had two minutes left on the six hours allotted before we needed to fly back. “Do your thing, Skippy. We don’t have
much time.”
“It’s not that easy. Joe, you’re not going to like this next part,” he warned.
“Right, because I have been super thrilled with what’s happened so far. How could this get any worse?”
“To establish a connection with the conduit, we need to jump start it.”
“Jump start? Oh, hell, couldn’t I just roll it down a hill and pop the clutch?”
“An Elder conduit is not a backwoods Maine junker car, Joe. The power supply we brought is not enough, we also need to connect the jetpack power supply to it. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, great.”
“And the power supply for your suit, Joe.”
“Fan-tast-ic! What a wonderful idea, Skippy. Let me see if I understand what you want to do. We are inside an incomprehensibly powerful killing machine that is asleep, but you want to plug the damned thing into a battery? The power supplies you want to use are the ones that will allow us to fly back to the Condor, and the one keeping me alive?”
“Yes, very perceptive, Joe.”
“And you don’t foresee any potential problems with this genius idea of yours?”
“Um shaybe. Let’s compare notes. What problems do you foresee?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about, if we drain all the power from my suit, my oxygen recycling will stop and I’ll die?”
“That isn’t actually a problem, Joe. We would also drain power from the jetpack, so you will have no way to get back to the Condor. You would suffocate anyway,” he announced cluelessly. “See? So it is one problem, not two.”
“There are two problems, Skippy. The big, stinking, gigantic problem sitting on my chest and burping in my face is that you want to wake up a Sentinel!”
“Don’t be such a drama queen, Joe,” he scolded. “We’re not going to wake it up. Well, not likely, anyway. Hmmm. I guess the possibility of us waking it up is not strictly zero. Still, the odds of that happening are super, super, super-duper small, Joe. Like teeny weeny.”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 43
