by Dan Davis
“By Captain Cassidy?” Ram asked, casually. “You two don’t get along?”
“Ha,” Ensign Tseng said. “As if you didn’t know.”
Ram was about to argue that he did not, in fact, know about it but Sifa was making cutting gestures with her hand and she twisted her fingers over her faceplate where her mouth was, as if buttoning her lips. Ram was pleased to see that some of the old Sifa was in there after all.
Milena. She was a prisoner, and Ram was doing nothing.
Not doing nothing. He had a plan. Spend a few hours doing what he was told, obeying every order, presenting no outward resistance to the chain of command. At the same time, he would do everything he could to obtain his custom firearm, and whatever other equipment he could obtain. Then, when night fell, he would steal a vehicle and make a run for the alien base. Fight his way inside, find Milena, and escape.
The only problem was that he had almost none of the detail worked out. That, and the fact that the civilian and Marine commanders would be expecting him to pull something like that.
I’ll just be cool. Play at being obedient and dutiful until sunset.
The sun was already getting lower in the sky.
The sun. Not our Sun.
Instead, a strange star that looked so much like Sol, hanging in that strange sky, a sky like a tropical sea churned by a storm.
Soon, he would go into those hills, and kill more wheelers. As many as it took. All he had to do was play it cool for a few hours.
But he could not stop his mind working in a particular direction and he could not hold his tongue for long.
“Listen, guys,” Ram said on the team channel as the ETAT stopped by the next body. “What did you think about Zuma and Cassidy’s order to not go after the six who were taken?”
“Oh, no you don’t,” Cooper said. “You ain’t mixing me up in anything. I’m in enough trouble.”
“Hey, no,” Ram started to object as he realized what a stupid thing it was to say. “I’m not going to do—”
“It doesn’t matter what any of us think,” Ensign Tseng said. “Orders are orders. And you would do well to remember that.”
“I remember the threats well enough,” Ram said, speaking lightly and he bent to lift up a wheeler body all by himself. Sifa leaned on the ETAT, watching him. “Funny, how they have to threaten me, isn’t it? Until you remember that I never signed up. I never volunteered for the mission. I never joined the Marines. I’m just here. So, what do I care about following orders?”
Cooper and Harris laughed, heartily, but Ram did not know why.
“Well, we did join up,” Tseng said. “And did volunteer. In fact, we fought to be here. So we won’t listen to any more of your seditious comments. Get on with your work.”
“I’m working, aren’t I?” Ram said, dumping the body on the flatbed, irritated by the junior officer’s tone. “And if you guys are all such committed Marines, how come our brave and brilliant Captain Cassidy keeps giving this team all the shit jobs? How come all the other Marines ignore you? Other than the times they say nasty shit to you on private channels. What did you guys do?”
“We didn’t do anything,” Harris said.
“Don’t tell this bastard nothing,” Sergeant Stirling said. He was the biggest man on the planet, other than Ram, and he had a mean look about him. “None of you.”
The Marines fell silent. Even Ensign Tseng was suddenly disinclined to debate.
“Hey,” Sifa said to Ram on a one-to-one needlecast, “I have to tell you something. About what they did to you while you were—”
“Listen up,” Ensign Tseng shouted on the team channel. “New orders just in. The xenobio guys need a new alien to slice up, stat. Rama, you will take this one here. Doesn’t look too badly shot up, right? It’s only a little one. Sifa, you will carry on working here. Sergeant Stirling and Corporal Fury will assist you, using the ropes and winch where necessary.”
“Wait a second,” Ram said. “I can’t lug this thing all the way back to the outpost.”
“You could if you had to,” Tseng said. “But they’re sending the other ETAT. There it is now.”
It raced from around the damaged outpost walls and bounced toward them, a Marine driving with a civilian in the passenger seat. It slid to a stop in a shower of stones that pinged off everyone and covered them in dust.
Sergeant Stirling marched to the ETAT driver. “Watch it, you fucking idiot.,” he roared. “Are you trying to get yourself on this burial detail, is that it? Let me explain to you this thing we call good manners. Seeing how your jinxhead mother was too much of a dumbfuck to teach you herself. Get your ass out of that chair while I’m talking to you, what do you think you are, a fucking rear admiral, you useless excuse for a Marine.”
While the Sergeant continued to educate the Marine, Ram turned to Sifa.
“What were you saying?” he asked. “About what they did to me.”
“I shouldn’t say anything,” Sifa said. “But you have a right to—”
“Transfer that body, Mr. Seti,” Ensign Tseng shouted. “You can converse on your own time.”
“It’s all my own time,” Ram said but he bent to pick up the alien all the same. “Talk to you after our watch,” he said to Sifa. “When we eat.”
“Alright, I’d like that,” Sifa said, a hint of white teeth flashing on her beautiful, dark face.
“No, no, no!” the civilian jumped out of the ETAT passenger seat and stomped toward Ram. “Not that one, not that one.” He jabbed a finger repeatedly at the wheeler that Ram was gathering in his arms. “I don’t want a small one. We have a small one already. I want a big one. I want the biggest one we can find.”
Ram dropped the wheeler corpse back on the flatbed and straightened slowly, his aching back cracking as he did so.
“Of course you do.”
***
“Can I watch?” Ram asked as the xenobiology team began cutting away the wheeler suit.
They had retrieved a large specimen and brought it back to the special laboratory. The other half of the room had a table with the remains of the last wheeler they had dissected. That previous body had five of the six legs removed and one of the two arms and the hub was peeled back in triangular sections. The massive gelatinous organs from inside now sat in jars or were draped in steel bowls.
“You want to watch?” the team leader, Dr. Rothbard said, irritated. “Why?”
“Well, I spent months learning how to best kill one but it was largely guess work. I want to see how I can best kill one for real. And, you know, I was kind of the first person to dissect one anyway, right? Dissection with a vengeance, you might say.”
“Yes, very droll. Alright, seeing as you are the savior of all humanity and so on and so forth. You may stand in that corner,” he pointed with a scalpel, “and you may stay as long as you do not move and you do not speak to me or my colleagues. Do you agree to my terms?”
“Sure,” Ram said. “Let me know if you need any of my professional advice.”
The doctor snorted in derision and Ram took his assigned place. Being as tall as the ceiling did have some advantages and afforded him a clear view of the proceedings. The small team worked quickly, efficiently. The pieces of tissues that they cut away from the skin went into separate areas to be recorded and analyzed by members of the team. Cameras captured video while Dr. Rothbard worked. If the EVA suit bothered him, it didn’t show, as the man worked deftly, slicing away slithers of skin or sawing out great chunks. He narrated into his suit microphone, quietly. Ram could not make out most of what he said but every now and then the doctor would exclaim that something was fascinating or astonishing.
“Remarkable,” he muttered, for the fifth time.
“What is remarkable about it, Doctor?” Ram asked.
“I thought we agreed that you would not speak?”
“We did agree that but I’m untrustworthy and have no self-control. The skin is extremely thick, isn’t it, even as a proportion of the mass of the cr
eature. And it looks to me to be striated, with different, distinct layers from the outside to the inside. Are the bumps and protuberances on the outside actually sense organs, like it was originally hypothesized?”
Dr. Rothbard half turned and grunted. “See all that from up there, did you? Or are you just parroting back my narration to me?”
“Can’t really hear what you’re saying, Doctor but I read all your briefings back when I was training for the Orb. I remember that you thought it might sense the electricity in my muscles, like a shark does with fish. And maybe that it comes from a world covered in volcanic smoke and that’s why it has no eyes but it might sense infrared and other, non-visual sprectra.”
The doctor sighed. “It is remarkable how the untrained will focus on the wilder speculation in those reports.”
“Well, you wrote it, Doc.”
“They demanded hypotheses!” he cried. “Never mind telling them you just do not have the data. If you do not speculate, they informed me, we will just have to find someone who will. It is a crime against the scientific method.”
“So, you don’t believe it?”
“I have no opinion,” he said, sniffing. “These creatures are just astonishing. Just remarkable.”
“In your reports from before, I remember you were hoping to examine the one I killed in the arena. In the unlikely event that I was successful.”
“Is that how I phrased it? Well, yes but it was very badly damaged.”
Ram shrugged. “I’m sorry about that.”
“It is fine, you did what you had to do, I suppose. And we have made a good start on examining the remains that we collected from Orb Station Zero.”
“That’s great. So, how come you’re so impressed by dissecting this one? This is your third wheeler corpse, right?”
The doctor shook his head slowly, demonstrating just how astonished he was by Ram’s ignorance. “Do you know that there shall be hundreds of PhD’s written on these creatures? An entire generation of biologists will study these animals and nothing else, their whole lives and still there will be more to discover for the generation to follow. And yet our dear Director Zuma and darling Captain Cassidy expect me to tell them how they work. How they work! By God, the ignorance. It is astounding.”
“Okay, Dr. Rothbard, I understand. I’m sorry I interrupted.”
The doctor paused. “As well you should be. Nevertheless, you did remark upon the uniqueness of the skin, did you not? And that is all I can think of myself. So much tissue and so many organs inside the central hub and the structure of the bone material is crying out for study. The structure of the foot must be analyzed also. But the skin of these things may well be the most astonishing of it all. Think about this. We have discovered no mouths and no anuses.”
“Okay. I am thinking about it and I don’t like what I’m thinking.”
“The skin of these creatures is as complicated as a lifeform in itself. A whole ecosystem, perhaps. When I was a young man I studied microbial mats in tidal and evaporating pools in Mexico. Layer upon layer of microbes, each layer a new species, often unrelated to the ones above and below but each performing a function required by the whole. This animal here is a single creature but the layers appear to be just as variated and complex as those colony lifeforms. The outer surface is hard, as you know, but flexible. And the pores allow it to respirate. Other pores, I believe, allow it to absorb nutrients and other pores are for excretion.”
“You mean it shits all over itself?” Ram said.
“What? Oh, for goodness sake, Mr. Seti. Are you a man or a child? What do you call sweating? You leak spittle and urine and semen out of your specialized organs, do you not”
“I don’t think I do, Dr. Rothbard. Only at the appropriate times.”
The doctor sighed dramatically. “Of course, and so would this creature. I doubt that it would excrete while feeding any more than you would.”
Ram started to tell the doctor that he had eaten on the toilet many times back when he was morbidly obese but he thought it would not go down too well.
“I’m sorry, please tell me more.”
“The structures all over the outer layer of skin do appear to have specialized functions. At least, from our initial examinations over the course of the last few months. We believe there are least sixteen separate varieties of these bulbous, protuberances. These ones possibly sense electrical signals in the atmosphere. These may respond to thermal changes. These ones, and these, and these, all produce electromagnetic emissions.”
“That’s how they communicate with each other?”
“It certainly appears that way. They are also able to generate sounds, as you know. Information can be encoded in many formats. We’re experimenting on the live specimen now.”
“It’s true, then?” Ram said. “One of them survived?”
“It seems to be recovering its strength, as far as we can tell. Which is not very far, unfortunately. We have no way of knowing where to begin with regards to treatment for trauma. All the other wounded individuals died within three hours but they all had penetration injuries from projectiles and corresponding suit ruptures. Our friend in the next room was possibly incapacitated by the blast damage of an explosion occurring in close proximity. In all likelihood. It is my sincere hope that we can in some way communicate with the creature.”
“You’re talking to it?” Ram asked, wandering over to the door that Rothbard had indicated. “You’re keeping it in here?” There was a window in the top half of the door and Ram bent to peer inside. It was another lab, the same size as the room he was in, but a third of it had been caged off with floor to ceiling bars. Behind them, the dark mass of a wheelhunter. A Marine stood guard on the other side of the bars.
It seemed almost insane to bring one of those creatures inside the walls of the base. So insane that he had not fully believed the people who had told him the longest surviving wheeler had been locked behind hastily-welded bars. Ram had half a mind to go in there and run the beast through with his sword.
“Do not open that door,” Rothbard snapped.
“I wasn’t going to,” Ram said, taking his hand away from the handle. “So, how are you talking to it?”
Rothbard sighed. “As I have already explained to you, they produce and detect very precisely modulated emissions in a rather astonishingly wide band of the spectrum. So we will use an AI to systematically run through permutations until we get a response.”
“Can you ask it where its friends took our people?” Ram asked.
The scientist stared at him. “If we are ever able to communicate with the species, I predict it will take many months, if not years or even decades before we can carry on a conversation.”
“Shit. But you have an AI helping you.”
“They are not magical.” Rothbard scoffed. “Humans have to set their parameters and we are attempting to converse with a creature that speaks in radio frequencies.”
“Are the electromagnetic emissions what interferes with our sensors and suits and equipment when they get close?”
“Oh, no. Well, we don’t know. But it’s likely they can’t generate enough power for all that. No, much more likely to be technologically generated but it might be the same principle.”
“Perhaps these are how they communicate with each other. And perhaps they evolved to use disorienting battle cries and that became a kind of cultural convention that was translated into their military doctrine, using their technology to flood the spectrum to disorient the enemy.”
Dr. Rothbard stared for a moment before bursting out laughing. “Stick to what you’re good at, Mr. Seti. You can kill them. Leave the science to the professionals.”
“I think I’ll do just that. Thanks for your time, Doctor.”
On the way out, Ram stopped by two men at the far side of the lab. What caught his eye was the object of their study.
In a mount upon the bench was an alien pistol. What was more is they had a panel on the side removed and they w
ere tapping on a small cylinder inside the exposed workings. Seeing the weapon near normal sized men made it obvious just how huge the pistol was. A human would have to hold it with two hands and the shape of it was designed to fit in the bony claws
“Are you sure you should be doing that?” Ram asked.
Both men jumped.
One of them glared up at him. “Don’t sneak up on us, you madman!”
The other grinned. “It’s perfectly safe. We removed the power source and the ammunition.”
“What is the power source?” Ram said.
“A battery, what do you think,” the first man said.
“We don’t know,” the other admitted. “But yes, an energy storage unit, most likely. I mean, it could be generating energy through some exotic interaction with other dimensions but I find that highly unlikely.”
“Don’t bother us, please,” the first said. “We have important work to do.”
“I’m sure,” Ram said. “What is the ammunition? How does it work?”
While one of them gritted his teeth the other pointed out the features of the weapon. “It heats pulses of plasma in this chamber here and shoots them using electromagnetic fields in the barrel section down here. Like our own rail guns, only instead of a solid projectile they use this ionized, super high-density plasma. Remarkable, really.”
“We don’t know how it works yet,” the other one said. “And we need to focus, please. These things are dangerous and possibly unstable, so, if you don’t mind.”
“They’re not unstable. We’ve got fifty of the things back there,” the second guy said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “They’re totally safe unless you turn them on, charge them up. And you know it, Frederick.”
“I don’t, and neither do you, Norman.”
“What’s the bit you were tapping on with your screwdriver a minute ago?” Ram asked, pointing. “That thing there.”
“It’s a capacitor,” Norman said. “A truly remarkable one at that. The energy from the battery flows into the capacitor and it does it faster than anything we can build. More incredibly than that, is the fact that it can hold more energy than anything we can make, by an order of magnitude at least.”
