by I. O. Adler
Barrett stood nearby and watched, a grave expression on his face.
The drones lifted Jenna and placed her slowly into the tank.
“Be careful.”
But the little floating bots did their job and set Jenna down gently. They then moved out of the way and the lid began to close.
Carmen stopped the lid. “Wait. That’s it? You seal her up in a metal tube?”
She Who Waits moved next to her. “I was allowed access to the medical bay interface by the designate biologist. The Cordice device will sustain her life while a machine is assembled which can perform surgery on her bioform. Please step aside.”
The lid snapped in place. There came the sound of flowing liquid. Carmen placed a hand on the cylinder and it felt ice cold.
A further section of the bay grew brighter. A new cylinder pushed away from the wall, borne along by a thin articulated lift that appeared to be another robot. It pushed its load to the opposite wall and began to take the cylinder apart. It moved quickly. Components were removed and rearranged. Inside Jenna’s cylinder the pouring liquid sound stopped as the nearby disassembly and construction continued.
Barrett moved to examine Jenna’s cylinder and then took a closer look at a patch of yellow moss on the nearest wall. “Is that stuff harmful to humans?”
The colors began to shift beneath She Who Waits’ shell. “I will make an inquiry.”
“Then inquire about fixing my hand. Will I have to climb into a tank like that? Don’t they have something they can give me for the pain?”
Carmen wished he would shut up and not distract She Who Waits but was too tired to say anything. She remained at Jenna’s side. Hand pressed on the cylinder, she fought back tears. With the increasing racket of the bot at work, she didn’t notice the medical bay door slide open until it was too late.
The caretaker stood on its rear two legs. It wobbled like a toddler, its one lame arm dangling. It remained in place for a moment before dropping to its single functioning foreleg and cutting loose with a piercing CHIRP!
Chapter Twenty-Four
The matted russet mold hung in clumps off the caretaker’s robotic frame. The sight conjured the image of a wolf wearing a stolen skin. It vaulted forward and slammed into Agent Barrett, knocking him to the floor and straddling him. Its head pivoted back as its brilliant eye considered both She Who Waits and Carmen.
CHIRP!
Carmen ducked behind Jenna’s cylinder. “We’re friends! We’re not here to hurt anyone!”
The red cone of light in front of She Who Waits flashed and emitted a high-pitched peep. The caretaker reacted by jumping and colliding with the translator, bowling her over. Then it was on top of her and punching her shell over and over with savage force.
CHIRP! CHIRP! CHIRP!
Carmen grabbed a detached wall panel and ran forward, smashing it against the caretaker. The bot stumbled off She Who Waits and spun. She wound up for the next blow and swung again, knocking the bot across the head. The head righted itself and the caretaker sprang at her. It struck like a speeding car. Pain exploded through her skull and chest as the bot landed on her and knocked her to the floor.
She swatted at it with a fist and only succeeded in hurting her hand. She clawed at the face but it was hard metal and she couldn’t find a purchase. The caretaker hovered over her and once again trembled. She screamed as she tore at the moss that dangled down around its head like a shroud.
Its front claw had clamped down on her shoulder. She couldn’t budge it. Its face had Jenna’s blood spattered across it. She kicked, shoved, and tried to knee it. After a moment of struggle, she could only scream.
The caretaker remained in place on top of her. But it wasn’t moving, wasn’t making a sound.
“Get it off!”
Barrett struggled to get up. He kicked the thing. It almost fell but corrected itself by pressing harder down on her shoulder.
“Do something!” Carmen cried.
He ran the length of the bay and came back empty-handed. “There’re no tools in this place.”
She tried again to push with her legs. But the pain shooting down her shoulder was too much. The bot didn’t budge. Barrett shoved at the caretaker and fought with the claw squeezing her but couldn’t get it to release. Pulling on the arm only succeeded in causing the bot to grip tighter.
She Who Waits tilted upright as if pulled by unseen hands. She hovered closer. Her shell looked cracked. Tentacles erupted from the sands within. Barrett stumbled over himself trying to back away. The tentacles gripped the claw pinning Carmen and began to probe the caretaker’s head. A few of the appendages found openings and wormed under the metal casing. With a shudder the caretaker relaxed, the grip on Carmen’s shoulder easing. She Who Waits pushed the bot over.
Carmen got up on her feet and kicked it. “Is it dead?”
“It has been deactivated,” She Who Waits said. “A consensus was reached by the Cordice. I was given permission to act against it as it was ascertained that designate caretaker was no longer in control.”
“What do you mean? This thing was running around trying to kill us on autopilot?”
“The host robotic unit you see is no longer the caretaker. He fell ill and perished. The growths we see around their ship are indicative of a disorder the Cordice couldn’t fight.”
She massaged her shoulder. “This mossy stuff is a disease?”
“Not exactly. Their bioforms are made up of eukaryotic cell colonies. But due to a breakdown in their environmental systems over the past decades, the colonies began to adapt. An epigenetic shift in their basic cell makeup allowed for a hardier generation better adapted to the change. The subsequent colony shed its energy-hungry intelligence in favor of efficiency.”
Barrett tapped the caretaker with his foot. “This moss all over it is the Cordice?”
“No, but rather their children. They have all uploaded into their simulation. What you see growing is part of what they used to be.”
Carmen needed to sit. But first she inspected Jenna’s cylinder. The caretaker hadn’t struck it. Next she walked warily around the broken caretaker.
“Get rid of it.”
She Who Waits was retracting her tentacles. “It is deactivated. The bot cannot move.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to hear about another accident or some new moss breed starting it up again. It tried to hurt us and almost killed Jenna. They have to have a room where we can lock it up. And I don’t want to wait for you to have to ask the Cordice if you can fight back against this thing when it recovers.”
“I have a solution.”
The two drones picked up the limp robot body and took it to another cylinder. Once they placed it inside they sealed it. Seeing how strong the caretaker had been made the cylinder feel flimsy. But it would do for the moment, at least until…what?
Now that she could catch her breath, she realized that they were stuck on board the Cordice home ship. They had come this far and she wasn’t prepared to leave without her mother. And now Jenna was critically injured and inside a metal tube receiving god knows what kind of treatment.
It was all a nightmare growing stranger.
Carmen found herself chewing her thumb and realized she should probably wash her hands. Her shoulder ached but she tested it and it was working.
She Who Waits summoned the red light and appeared to once again be engaged in silent communication.
Carmen touched the cracks on the alien’s shell. “Are you hurt?”
She Who Waits didn’t answer. The diamonds returned.
Looming behind her, Barrett was pacing. “This is crazy. That thing almost killed us because of some algae? And we had to ask permission to stop it?”
“That’s not exactly what she said.”
“I heard everything. She Who Waits is restricted by protocol. Whatever or wherever these Cordice are now, they’re not inside their real bodies because they’re sick. So who’s in charge of their ship? Why did they even wan
t their harvester back if they can’t control their own home?”
“Don’t yell at me. I don’t know.”
He raised his good hand. “I’m sorry. But now you see that we need to get out of this place before we wake something else up that doesn’t want us to be here.”
Tuning him out was as easy as looking away. A newly panicked Barrett was the last thing she needed.
She Who Waits appeared to be functioning. But did she feel pain? The fractured surface of her suit might be superficial or life-threatening. Whatever negotiations were happening also involved her now. The caretaker had attacked all of them.
Carmen considered the red light. Was it part of She Who Waits or a function of her suit? One had appeared in the first sphere, so it had to connect to the communication network her mom had originally used. She needed to speak with the ones who owned the ship they had boarded and was tired of waiting, protocol be damned.
“Is anyone there? This is Carmen Vincent. I’d like to talk to the Cordice. We’ve come to bring back what was taken. But it looks like you have problems of your own. What can I do to help?”
Barrett walked around her and glared. “What are you doing?”
She ignored him. “I know you’re fixing my sister. You saved my mom Sylvia and Hamish Townes. So tell us what we can do for you.”
He swatted at the light and stepped through it. “Stop it,” he hissed. “Don’t offer things you can’t deliver on. You don’t know anything about the Cordice. They had to debate whether to let us be killed. So don’t go assuming you understand anything.”
The red light vanished. The ship fell quiet. Whatever work the assembly bot was doing on the machine that was supposed to help Jenna appeared to have finished. Automated arms detached themselves and sank into the floor, leaving a frame of metal that looked like a four-poster bed. Smaller bots the size of hermit crabs scurried about the vertical and horizontal braces.
Vapor began to rise from the surface of Jenna’s cylinder. Carmen’s finger momentarily stuck to its surface when she touched it. It felt like ice.
The sand beneath She Who Waits’ shell did something Carmen hadn’t seen before. It slowed and went dark.
Carmen touched her. “Are you okay?”
The red light winked to life. “The negotiations are finished.”
“And what? What’s their decision?”
“They haven’t decided. They need to deliberate some more. It is their way. Be patient, Carmen Vincent. For now we wait.”
Agent Barrett found a moss-free spot on the floor where he sat with his head down and eyes closed.
Carmen wanted to do the same. But she remained too keyed up. At any moment the Cordice may want to talk. But as the minutes stretched, she realized it might be a long wait. She walked the length of the bay.
Whatever medical bed the skittering bots were building was taking shape. At the moment it looked like a high-tech dunk tank from an old-timey carnival. But like the boxy machines they had seen in the first ring, it lacked any visible displays or controls.
She stayed out of the way and didn’t touch anything. She inspected the other cylinders, including the one that held the caretaker.
Were her mom and Hamish in any of them?
“I’m going to look around.”
She Who Waits remained dark and the communication light was gone. Barrett didn’t stir.
Carmen walked the curving hall, opening door after door and peering inside. The rooms beyond were in relatively good order, stacked with racks of box machines of varying size. Where were the living spaces, the rec rooms, the kitchen, or the bridge?
Perhaps they didn’t need any of it if the controls were virtual like the harvester’s.
If the caretaker had truly been in control, then the ship had been operated by a broken, mad pilot. And somehow her mom had stolen the harvester from under its nose.
One of the flying drones caught up with her. It zoomed before her and paused in midair.
“What’s going on?”
It remained motionless for a heartbeat before swerving around her and racing back in the direction of the medical bay. She had lost track of how far she had walked but guessed it would be faster to follow than to keep going around the ring. She knew a summons when she saw one.
She Who Waits had lit up again, her brown sands bright.
Jenna’s cylinder stood open and her sister was gone. She was now inside the bed contraption. Her clothes lay in shreds on the floor as if they had been cut from her body. Even smaller bots the size of cockroaches swarmed over her.
Carmen had to fight a wave of revulsion as she saw them crawling across her sister’s skin.
Jenna’s knee had a wrapping around it that looked like wound white thread or spiderweb. No blood seeped through. Mercifully, Jenna was asleep or unconscious. A clear barrier prevented Carmen from touching her sister.
Barrett stood at the foot of the bed. “It’s amazing. If this works, can you imagine what understanding something like this one machine could do for us?”
“Did Jenna wake up at all?”
“No. She’s been asleep, even when they moved her.”
Was she in pain? Did these robotic insects know what they were doing? What was to prevent any one of them from malfunctioning? She held her breath as she hugged herself.
“Any word from the Cordice?” she managed to ask.
“This might be a good time for you to stay with your sister. Let me talk to them.”
Carmen followed him down to the other end of the bay where She Who Waits stood. The red light remained in place. But when a voice spoke from the light, it was the last thing Carmen could have expected.
It was Jenna.
“Carmen, can you hear me?”
“Jen, I don’t understand. How are you talking to me?”
“It’s like being plugged into the ship.”
“So where are you?”
“It’s hard to explain. I saw what you mentioned. The destruction of the Cordice world and their whole civilization. There’s so many of them here. Some are angry about what happened with their harvester. But She Who Waits explained what we did. They’re not mad at us, at least not all of them. But there’s more. It’s Mom. Car, Mom is here and I’m looking right at her.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Carmen tried to gauge the tone of her sister’s voice. “Are you all right? Are you in pain?”
“I’m fine. If I try to think about my body, it’s just a tingly numbness. Don’t worry. But Car, Mom is right here. It’s really her.”
“Let me talk to her. Can you do that?”
Carmen waited for a reply. The medical bay had something going on beyond Jenna’s bed. Two bots were assembling a pair of new frames fed with wires. Before her eyes, the deft mechanical fingers shaped the frames into beds that were already beginning to look identical to the one where Jenna lay and the cockroaches continued to crawl.
After some delay Jenna’s voice spoke again through the red light. “The Cordice don’t want her to talk. She’s not allowed to have access to any external nodes or the communication channels.”
“How do you know it’s really Mom?”
“It looks like her and talks like her. We spoke, we hugged. It’s her, Car.”
“Where’s her body?”
Another pause. “She doesn’t know. But Lieutenant Townes is here too. They’re alive.”
Barrett leaned in as if the red light was a microphone. “Is Lieutenant Townes able to speak?”
“No. I think the Cordice have them both on restrictions. I don’t see him right now.”
“Then I want to meet whoever’s in charge. They have a leader or spokesperson? Is it their biologist?”
Throughout the exchange, She Who Waits remained perfectly still. The patterns had vanished and the sands of her suit once again concealed the tentacles.
“I don’t think it’s the biologist,” Jenna said. “They have a council. I haven’t figured out whether there’s a single
Cordice who speaks for them. At the moment they’re back to discussing us and two of them do most of the talking. But returning the harvester was the right thing to do. In fact, I’m going to try bringing it to the home ship.”
Barrett’s voice got low. “You’re still in control of the harvester?”
“Yes. Once I was placed into the recovery bed I could connect to both the harvester and their simulation. If I concentrate I can be in both places.”
Carmen had her own questions. Foremost among them was, why hadn’t the Cordice taken back the harvester either remotely or with one of the bots?
She placed a hand on Barrett’s shoulder. “Remember, this is a party line. Jen, can you return to your body?”
Jenna took a minute to reply. “I’m sorry, I’m busy. This isn’t as easy as I thought. I…”
Carmen leaned closer to the red light. “You still there?”
“Your sister has broken off from our discussion,” She Who Waits said.
Barrett appeared ready to jump out of his skin. “Are the Cordice listening? Have they heard everything we’ve said since coming aboard?”
“Unknown. It’s possible while designate Jenna Vincent was speaking that others were able to overhear. But none are connected with my interface within the simulation at the moment, as they continue to deliberate.”
The bots had the frames of the two new beds finished and got busy on the interiors.
“So you’re allowed inside their simulation?” Carmen asked the translator.
“Yes, when requested. I interface when needed when my task cannot be accomplished remotely, like when designates Sylvia Vincent and Hamish Townes first arrived. They’ve adapted their software since, allowing some exchange despite language and physical barriers. I’m regularly requested for anything in depth.”
