T'aafhal Legacy 1: Ghosts of Orion

by Doug L. Hoffman

“But why?”

  “Because they might be dangerous, now come...”

  Showing considerable grace and agility for a pair of multiton boulders, the two friends slithered over to a nearby opening and disappeared into the moon's tunnel riddled interior.

  The River near New Mecca, Paradise

  It had taken much longer than either Dorri or Shadi expected to move the flock of sheep down to the river. Once they reached the bank they had to move a considerable distance along the shore until they found a bend in the river that created a still pool. Sheep are naturally skittish animals and refuse to drink from a running stream. Having finally located a site that met with the sheep's approval, the girls sat on a small rise above the flock and rested.

  “I didn't think the river was so far away,” complained Dorri.

  “This is a big world, everything is farther away than it seems. The sheep being so fussy didn't help any either.”

  “At least they are drinking, and none of them ran away on the trip down here.”

  “You know what?” asked Shadi, “I can't see the settlement from here.”

  “You need to go back to the top of the rise to see the buildings. Wouldn't it be nice if the village just went away? It would be just us and the sheep.”

  “It would be great, until we got hungry. What I meant was that if we can't see the village they can't see us.”

  “Yes, so?”

  “I don't know about you, but I haven't had a decent bath since we left the ship. That's more than two weeks ago and I positively reek.”

  “Yeah, I stink too, and our clothes are pretty smelly as well.”

  “So if they can't see what we are doing out here why don't we take off our clothes and take a dip in the river? We can wash off and rinse out our clothes at the same time.”

  “If someone came up on us we would get in big trouble, Shadi.”

  “Not if we do it in turns. You go down to the bank and clean up; I will go to the top of the rise and keep a watch for anyone coming from the village. The land is so flat, and we are kilometers from the settlement, we should get plenty of warning if someone decides to come check up on us.”

  “That's the best idea I've heard in ages,” Dorri exclaimed standing up and taking off her headscarf. “Yell if someone comes!”

  With that the younger girl raced down the bank and, stripping off her remaining garments, splashed into the river.

  “Stay close to the shore, and upstream of the sheep!” Shadi shouted, thinking to herself, if the men in the village saw you like this, little sister, they would have no doubt that you have become a woman. Sooner or later we will both be given as wives to men from the Imam's band. Until then, let us enjoy what little freedom we have.

  Shadi scanned the horizon in all directions from the top of the rise, paying special attention to the gently rolling grassland leading back to the settlement. She turned around just in time to see Dorri wave from the middle of the river. An instant later, Dorri was pulled beneath the surface and disappeared.

  “Dorri!” Shadi screamed, running down the bank to the river. But there was no sign of her sister beneath the swirling eddies of flowing water.

  Chapter 12

  The River near New Mecca, Paradise

  Shadi ran along the river's bank in a blind panic. She had not seen what dragged her sister under the water, but there was no sign of Dorri. The current in the middle of the stream was swift, flowing faster than Shadi could run. She ran down stream anyway and after about a half a kilometer the river widened and the water slowed.

  Out in the river there was a splash. And then another, as Dorri fought her way to the surface, coughing water and thrashing with her arms.

  On the bank Shadi striped off her headscarf and long outer robe, kicked off her sandals and plunged into the water. Both girls knew how to swim because their home in Teheran had its own swimming pool—being well off did have advantages beyond just nice clothes and jewelry.

  With strong overhand strokes, Shadi closed on her sister, who was splashing about in panic. Grabbing Dorri's arm, Shadi quickly maneuvered her into a position where she could get her arm across the younger girl's chest. Doing the side stroke while keeping her sister's head above the water, Shadi headed for the shore.

  Sensing that she wasn't drowning, Dorri relaxed and stopped fighting her sister's efforts. As they neared the bank, she shouted rather shakily, “it's OK, I'm OK now!”

  Shadi's stroking arm touched the sandy bottom and she realized they were in only a few feet of water. Standing up, she lifted her sister until Dorri stood on her own.

  “I said I'm OK,” she said, but she still clung to her sister's arm. Together, they helped each other to dry land. Stripping off her remaining undergarments, Shadi spread them on the ground to dry. Sitting on the sandy bank, naked and dripping wet, she began to tremble—an after effect of the panic and adrenalin rush.

  “I'm sorry,” Dorri said, starting to cry. “I went out too far and got sucked down by an undertow. I'm sorry, I'm sorry!” Now it was her turn to wrap her arms around her sister. Shadi took a deep, shaky breath.

  “It's OK, little star, we are both OK.”

  Holding each other, they sat on the bank. The warm breeze and hot sun soon dried their naked bodies. It took several minutes before they both calmed down enough to talk. Shadi spoke first.

  “Come, we have to go find our clothes. There is no way we could explain to the other women if we get sunburned in places the sun is not supposed to shine.”

  “You're right! I just hope we can find everything.”

  Dorri laughed as they sprinted back along the shore, looking for their discarded clothes and sandals. As they reached the river bend they saw the sheep, placidly munching grass as though nothing had happened.

  Shuttle One, The Metal Moon

  As astronomical objects went, the metal moon was a small one, though it dwarfed the Earthlings' armored shuttle as it approached. After completing a slow circuit around the moon, Bobby brought the craft to a hover over a crater nearly ten kilometers across. Within it were a multitude of other craters of varying sizes, turning the crater floor into a complex topography of holes and spires. Spotlights from the shuttle cast long shadows, further adding to the jumbled confusion.

  “Well, I think that this disproves my alternate theory,” remarked Bobby, his hands resting lightly on the flight controls while his eyes constantly darted from the cockpit's instruments to the scene outside and back.

  “What theory is that, Bobby?” asked Mizuki, who had claimed seniority to secure the copilot's seat for herself. “I thought you were pushing the mined asteroid theory.”

  “I still am, but there was also the possibility that this was a ship. Maybe a multigeneration ship meant to travel the stars in normal space—a spaceship built out of an asteroid.”

  “You mean like the alien invaders' ship, only much larger?” The alien ship that had bombarded Earth with giant asteroids was a tube many kilometers long made from rubble that could have come from asteroids.

  “From what I read about that ship it came through alter-space. Its interior was a skeleton of pressurized enclosures and support scaffolding, wrapped with a hull of asteroid material to provide some protection. But this baby is much bigger, on a grander scale altogether. You said it's fifty percent hollow?”

  “Yes, if it is mostly nickel-iron it would have to be half empty space to have such a low overall density.”

  “So imagine you are an alien civilization without any knowledge of alter-space, but you want to go explore the galaxy. Maybe you are really long lived, like the triads, or you don't mind committing your offspring to spending many generations trapped aboard a ship. You could hollow out a big metal asteroid and build living space inside. Give the whole thing a modest spin to provide a bit of artificial gravity and stabilize the ship in flight. Add a fusion generator to power ion engines, provide light and heat for the interior, and you could head off across interstellar space. The thick metal hull w
ould protect the ship against most objects, and, hopefully, the ship could maneuver to avoid anything large enough to do real damage.”

  “But it could take thousands of years to reach another star system without alter-space transit or wormholes.”

  “Yep, it's life in the slow lane where Einstein rules.”

  “I never thought of doing something like that. I always expected that we would invent a warp drive like in Star Trek.”

  “That's why it is important to read the classics! A lot of old time science fiction writers came up with the slow ship idea years ago. I keep telling you to go back and read Heinlein, Aldiss, and Clarke. Unfortunately, this doesn't look like the hull of a space ship from up close. If it is, it's badly damaged and must have been abandoned a long time ago.”

  “I would agree, it is not spinning to create artificial gravity, it is tidally locked to the gas giant. That means it has been in orbit for a long time. The best way to find out if it has a hollow interior is to send reconnaissance drones down some of the tunnel shafts.”

  “I think you're right. Let me tell the Peggy Sue what we're going to do and then we can send out the probes.”

  * * * * *

  In the shuttle's passenger section, the members of the shore party were watching the approach on heads-up displays built into their suits. The concerns of the two armored petty officers and their Marine counterparts were a bit more practical than their officers.

  “So do you think this sucker was mined like Cmdr. Danner said?” asked Jacobs.

  “Sure looks like it to me,” replied Kato. “It's riddled with holes. I never seen an asteroid that dug a tunnel through a moon before.”

  “So now you're an asteroid expert, Kwan?” teased Vinny.

  “I've seen more moons than you, DeSilva.”

  “Maybe in the shower, astroid-boy.”

  Hitch ignored the Marines' banter. “If it has been mined, I just hope there's something left for us.”

  “Why do you say that, Stevie?”

  “The first trillionaire will be the person who mines an asteroid, Matt.”

  “Is that your opinion or did someone who counts come up with it?” asked Rosey.

  “Neil deGrasse Tyson, that astronomy guy from TV,” replied Hitch.

  “The guy who did the remake of Cosmos?”

  “Yeah, he was a student of that Sagan guy and even ran his own planetarium.”

  “So what do you think we will find, other than a lot of metal?” asked Bosco. “I do not think hauling iron from distant star systems makes a lot of economic sense.”

  “So says our communist economist,” retorted Hitch.

  “I was never a communist, I have always been capitalist. Why else would I sign up for this voyage?”

  “We are all in this for the money, but Bosco's right, we ain't getting rich on iron,” said DeSilva.

  “Well maybe they were after rarer metals, Vinny. Like gold or platinum.”

  “That actually makes sense, Stevie. If they were after iron they could have slagged the whole moon, instead of turning it into Swiss cheese.”

  “Look, there go the recon bots,” said Rosey. “Look alive, Marines; if they don't run into trouble we'll be next.”

  “And if they do run into trouble?” asked Bosco.

  “We'll be next sooner.”

  CIC, Peggy Sue

  The display table in the center of the CIC traced the tracks of the recon drones in three dimensions, a growing map of the metal moon's interior. On the forward bulkhead, side-by-side displays showed video of the bots' descent. There were twists and turns, and enough intersecting passageways to make the live feeds look like an amusement park ride or video from a computer game. Colorful annotations helped mark the path ahead as the drones flew deeper into the maze. Then the center probe emerged into a large void and paused.

  “OK, I see no way that an asteroid strike could create large interior spaces in a body like that,” Billy Ray commented. The chamber's walls looked like they had been scooped out with a large ice cream dipper; intersecting concaved furrows and individual hollows dimpled the surrounding metal.

  “I'm beginning to think that Bobby was right,” added Beth, “this place does look like it was mined, or home to a colony of space-termites.”

  “Now that would be really exciting,” said Will Krenshaw. The biologists were left on the ship for this mission, since their skills were unlikely to be needed on site. From the corner of the CIC Ahnah snorted. The she-bear, though only half the size of Umky, was still sizable and was trying to stay out of the smaller humans' way.

  “Metal eating termites that can live in vacuum would certainly be a notable find,” the ursine biologist agreed. The drone drifted across the sizable open space and started down another tunnel on the far wall. As it exited the chamber there was a chirp from its motion detector.

  “What was that?”

  “Something moving behind the probe in the big chamber,” Billy Ray replied. “Shuttle One, Peggy Sue. Did you catch the motion sensor alarm on probe two?”

  “Roger that, Peggy Sue. I just told it to reverse course and re-enter the chamber slowly.”

  As they watched, the view from the drone spun wildly and came to rest pointing back the way it had come. It eased ahead slowly, reemerging from the tunnel. The drone's camera panned from left to right, then up and down, but there was no further indication of movement from its sensors.

  “I wonder if that drone has a wonky motion sensor?” said Beth.

  “I don't know, but there's nothing moving in there now,” replied Billy Ray.

  “I think maybe we are all a bit jumpy,” said Will, as the recon drone once again reversed its course and resumed its journey toward the moon's center. As it disappeared into the tunnel, a pair of boulders that hadn't been in the chamber on the drone's first visit silently moved off through a different side tunnel.

  Interior, The Metal Moon

  The spherical, basketball sized drones possessed enough machine intelligence to navigate autonomously, requiring only general direction from their human masters. They were propelled by gravitonic repulsors on all three axes, making them highly maneuverable and well suited to flying down the twisty, maze like tunnels that riddled the moon's interior. On the front of each drone were a number of lenses and protruding sensors, lending the drones a comical, clown-like look.

  Even when not careening down enclosed metal tunnels, the drones had a habit of weaving about when they moved. Given their staggering movement and mirth inducing appearance, the human crew had taken to calling them clown bots, or just clowns for short. The inhabitants of the moon saw them a bit differently.

  “That was close, it almost saw us,” Gx!pk said.

  “Saw you, you mean,” Kq*zt replied, following behind the younger creature.

  “Come on! It's like playing hide and seek, or tag, when I was younger. There's no thrill if you don't take some chances.”

  “I'm beginning to think I do not understand the younger generation.”

  “You're closer to my age than to Qz@px's,” Gx!pk said in a peevish tone.

  “Qz@px said we were to keep track of the stranger, not play games with it. Like I said before, it might be dangerous, particularly if you startle it.”

  “Do you really think that is one of the aliens from the ship?”

  “We both saw it and two others emerge from the small ship that entered the crater on the planet facing side. They seem to be heading toward the center of our moon, while shouting loudly to each other and their ship.”

  “I don't know, it doesn't seem very smart. If they can build starships you'd think they'd be smarter.”

  “Maybe they use young, expendable individuals as scouts. People nobody would miss if something went wrong.”

  “You mean like the elders sending us to keep watch on the aliens?”

  “Now you are wising up. You don't see any of the old ones running through tunnels hither and yon, chasing after interloping aliens, do you?”
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  “No, but that may be because the elders aren't as spry as they used to be, and some of them have trouble remembering where all the tunnels intersect.”

  The two friends laughed loudly at that remark and almost burst into the next chamber where the alien they were following was floating motionless, evidently trying to decide on which tunnel to take next.

  Shuttle One

  “Which way now?” asked Bobby.

  “I don't know,” Mizuki replied, glancing at the other two drones' live feeds. They were still descending along the tunnels they were sent into. “Take the biggest tunnel that heads down.”

  “Down isn't much around here, there is almost no gravity.”

  “0.00017 m/sec2,” the astrophysicist responded automatically. “Roughly two thousandths of a percent of Earth normal.”

  “Like I said, almost no gravity. I bet you could jump right off the thing and drift away into space.”

  “Yes, escape velocity is about 26 kph. But then you would go into orbit around the gas planet. It would probably be a lonely way to die.”

  “Remind me not to jump.” A flashing light on the overhead instrument panel caught Bobby's attention. “Did you see that? There was a burst of RF radiation just before the drone exited the chamber.”

  “Just reflected signals from the drone or its repeaters?”

  “Frequency is all wrong and it registered as pink noise.”

  “That's weird.”

  On the center display panel, recon drone two resumed its twisting journey to the moon's core. It had gone about ten kilometers into the moon when it emerged into a third, even larger open space. Slowing to a hover, the drone's camera panned around the chamber. Just as the camera's motion detection software triggered an alarm, something that looked like a large boulder collided with the drone and its video transmission abruptly ended.

  Large Chamber, The Metal Moon

  “Oh no!” exclaimed Kq*zt. “Did you see that? Zz#tx just squished the alien!”

  “Worse, I think he's going to eat it,” Gx!pk replied, “the senile old fool!”