Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  It felt … altered. No, improved. Invigorated. More capable, in some way it struggled to characterize, than at any moment since its awakening.

  Since its awakening ….

  It still had no certain measure for the passage of time, but the tally of dark/light cycles following its return from quiescence remained low. Dark/light cycles—days, those were called, or so a stray association informed it—varied from world to world. And though it did not understand where it was, or if these illumination cycles corresponded to this world (was it on a world? Where else was there to be?), it took comfort in having retrieved even a few facts. Leading it to wonder how it did so.

  Once more, it initiated diagnostic routines. Scattered submodules remained unresponsive. Localized failures abounded among the components that did respond. Its archives, in particular, were riddled with gaps, self-evident errors, and irreconcilable inconsistencies. Nor were just facts, images, relationships—memories—impaired by whatever had befallen it. Its awareness suffered from similar anomalies. Time and again, some thread of its analysis came to an abrupt halt, transitioned unexpectedly into an unrelated function, or trapped itself in an endless loop.

  And yet, the extent of its capabilities, flawed as they were, had expanded since its previous diagnoses. Of this modification, it had certainty. How? Why? As plodding as were its thoughts—had it always been so? It sensed not—such vague questions were difficult to address.

  But it persisted. It analyzed. It introspected. And it came to a realization. However faltering this latest self-examination had been, its rate of processing, as estimated by contrast with the dark/light cycles, had increased. Further study confirmed that repairs performed by the small mobile units, and the widespread regrowth of materials, had circumvented or undone a substantial subset of failures, had replenished its power reserves.

  If only its amnesia could be so remedied ….

  * * *

  Deep within the lava tube, at most a hundred meters from Yevgeny’s goal, the bright spots cast by their headlamps darted over a mound of rubble. The barrier extended from side to side, floor to ceiling. At one spot the crushed rear of an alien tank bot protruded from beneath the debris. The stark shadows of jagged rock chunks only made the obstacle seem that much more impassable.

  They had gone deep enough belowground to use radio. Ilya said, “So much for that.”

  “Disappointing,” Yevgeny agreed, sweeping his gaze, raster-like, over the barrier.

  “Disappointing? Yes, I would say so. In the same manner as the Pacific Ocean is damp. Look at it! And who is to say the alien ship behind there, if a ship is what radar showed us, is not buried under yet more rubble?”

  Testing each stony projection before putting his full weight on it, Yevgeny scaled the heaped rubble until his helmet brushed the lava tube’s uneven roof. With head tilted, he confirmed the small, sinuous gap he had seen, or intuited, from below. After a few centimeters of penetration into the rubble, the opening curved down and to the left. Out of sight.

  He retrieved the endoscope and a fiber-optic cable reel from his backpack; they wirelessly mated the endoscope to their HUDs. Slowly, he unrolled flexible cable, watched it disappear into the curve of the narrow channel. The fish-eye lens showed him rocks. More rocks. And still more rocks. Until the cable end caught in a notch and would go no farther.

  He pulled back a few centimeters and tried again. The cable end stuck at the same point. His third effort, jiggling the cable as he fed it in, did no better. Nor his fourth.

  “End of the road,” Ilya said, “unless we involve the Americans. It would need a magician to sneak a backhoe or bulldozer here. Well, keeping this opportunity to ourselves was worth the try.”

  “We are not done here.” Yevgeny began forcing in cable. And more. And yet more. Somewhere within the jumble, spring-like, cable bunched up. The reel bucked in his hands as he crammed in yet more cable.

  He felt something give way.

  On their HUDs, the image plummeted! The viewpoint leapt about, wildly, dizzyingly—as did stark shadows—before the cable-end/pendulum’s motion settled into a somewhat less vertiginous oscillation.

  Nearing the ground, their viewpoint raced faster and faster. Except this was not ground, it was floor: smooth, level mooncrete, strewn with debris. As the cable end reversed its swing, the gravel field, leavened with larger rocks, a few the size of a football, gave way to clearer floor. At the remote end of his viewpoint arc, dimly lit by the endoscope’s LED, the floor appeared bare. When, at last, the cable’s oscillation dampened out, the endoscope showed only dark, dust-and-gravel-dotted floor.

  “You got through,” Ilya commented.

  Yes, thank you, Professor Obvious. Ever so slowly, Yevgeny pulled back on the cable. The HUD image shifted until, sufficient cable having been retracted, the lens end was almost horizontal. By the diffuse light from the fiber, probing a good twenty meters beyond the heaped rubble, he glimpsed … what? Something matte-black. Streamlined. Perched atop three sturdy legs.

  As best Yevgeny could judge, the alien vessel was intact.

  * * *

  Yevgeny studied the barricade. High up in the debris, along one side of the lava tube, a long, thin slab of rock protruded. Unless that chunk were huge, extending deep into the pile, a solid thrust might dislodge it.

  He scaled the mound to push from the side. The slab did not budge. Ilya climbed up beside Yevgeny, and with both shoving, the slab shivered. Yevgeny strained against the rock. The slab shifted, perhaps by a centimeter. At their next shove, it wobbled. Teetered. Toppled. It fell, in lunar slow motion and a thick cloud of dust, with cubic meters of smaller rocks skittering after it. As yet more rock shifted beneath their boots, they leapt clear.

  “That’s promising,” Ilya said.

  “Care to take a look?”

  “After you.”

  “As you wish.” Yevgeny stepped onto a large chunk of detritus, bracing himself with a gloved hand pressed against the lava-tube wall. At first, he saw only glare, the beams of his headlamps scattering off dust raised by the mini-avalanche. Slowly, the dust settled, and the cloud thinned. Headlamp beams stabbed deeper and deeper. Dislodging the big slab had triggered rockslides on both sides.

  He exulted, “There is a path all the way through!”

  “And we are almost out of time,” Ilya said regretfully. “At least I expect you want to get back to base before a CIA satellite comes over the horizon.”

  “You’re right. But we’ll be faster returning than coming. It always works out that way. I’ll give us fifteen more minutes before we have to run for it.”

  After scrambling over a rock jumble outside the collapsed reactor room, on this outing Yevgeny had brought along several folded tarps. Just in case. He draped the first, folded double, over the uneven edge of the opening and worked more of the fabric into the breach. Crawling ahead—an otherwise simple task rendered awkward by low clearance, his bulky vacuum gear, and a prone position—he spread another tarp. A third tarp finished the job. He crept through, turned around, and climbed down the back side.

  “It’s snug in a couple spots, but quite passable,” he reported.

  Ilya scuttled after. A prospectively intact fusion reactor must stimulate higher risk tolerance than a smashed one. “Let’s have a look.”

  “Five minutes, and then we must head back.”

  “Understood.”

  By paired helmet lamps, they examined the alien artifact. Perhaps thirty-five meters long. About ten meters across at its widest. Less like an ovoid than in the ghostly image by ground penetrating radar, and more egglike. Its broader end, facing the cave-in, had a tinted canopy; the narrow end, massive conical nozzles. Amidships (and this was, unambiguously, a ship) was a closed hatch. Like the airlock outside of which Goliath had died, there was an obvious control panel. Which, after eons sitting idle, was—not a surprise—unresponsi
ve.

  But everything appeared intact.

  “You’ll want to bring Ekatrina on your next outing,” Ilya said. “That would be natural, and also a mistake. I can hot-wire the airlock as readily as she. We know that the aliens have compact reactors. To find any lesser power source aboard would be extremely unlikely. I should come with you to take a look.”

  “We will talk,” Yevgeny said. “But for now, we had better hustle back.”

  Chapter 28

  Yevgeny suspected that Ilya was correct: the physicist could as easily unseal the alien vessel as Ekatrina. Undoubtedly Ilya was the best person to inspect the fusion reactor they all expected to find within—and also some sort of fusion-based propulsion, of whose existence they so far had zero evidence, but about which Ilya nonetheless speculated rhapsodically. If they could obtain clues to such technologies, with the Americans none the wiser? What was it the Yanks said? That the sky was the limit? For Mother Russia, it would be!

  Nonetheless, and despite his grumbling, Ilya must sit out the return visit.

  There was simply no credible explanation for enlisting a fusion scientist in isolating and repairing the vague and time-consuming shuttle “problem” they had come up with: sporadic, inconsistent, self-test failures in the main flight console. An intermittent ground fault was probable as the root cause—and electrical faults were squarely in Ekatrina’s wheelhouse.

  Even absent Ilya’s vocal frustration, the two days’ delay until the next surveillance-free opportunity would have been agonizing. But that, too, would pass. And once it did, he and Ekatrina would have almost two hours to examine the alien vessel before they headed back.

  * * *

  Ekatrina scrambled over the rock pile. Even as Yevgeny more cautiously followed, she was aiming a portable lamp on a tripod at the airlock. A satchel with tools, portable meters, and fuel cells sat open at her feet. She said, “I’ll be damned if this ship doesn’t look like new.”

  He came up to stand beside her. “Then it should be easy for you to open.”

  She sniffed in protest. He ignored it.

  Yevgeny undertook a slow circumnavigation of the vessel, vidding as he went. Every few paces he crouched to peer, and pan, below. He jumped for glimpses up top. Aside from the ubiquitous crisscross of scratches (micrometeoroid wear?), some visible only at full visor magnification, and the occasional localized scorch (from atmospheric entry?), the hull appeared undamaged. He noticed four short posts amidships, spaced equidistantly around the hull, and could form no theory what purpose those might have served.

  On his second circuit, he located details his piloting instincts had insisted must be present, but that had also escaped notice on his first, harried run-past: Small nozzles, all around, for attitude control. Somewhat larger nozzles beneath, for vertical takeoff and landing. Three small hatches beneath, into which the landing legs must retract. Conformal antennae on all sides.

  His inspection of the ship’s exterior complete, Yevgeny continued down the tunnel. After about twenty-five meters and two inert tank bots, another roof collapse blocked the way. Over the ages, this area had taken a pounding. Absent heavy construction equipment, he could see no way to get past this barrier.

  Ekatrina radioed, “The lock is cycling now. Like the entrance to the base, it only needed power.”

  “I am almost done. Do not enter the ship till I return.”

  “Right.” And despite the disappointment in her voice, she did wait. At least he found her standing inside the lock, and the inner hatch closed.

  He said, “I did not see any breaks in the hull. We may find atmosphere inside.”

  But no air rushed in when the outer hatch closed. As they waited for the inner hatch to open, Ekatrina offered, “We’re as likely to find Grandfather Frost.”

  “First thing,” he directed, “we survey this vessel from tip to tail. We both vid everything.” Something one of them missed, the other might capture.

  They began at the broad end. Two padded seats, separated by a wide, padded cabinet, facing the tinted canopy. Underneath the canopy, console arcs with inset displays or touch panels half-surrounded each seat. This had to be the ship’s bridge. He shot overview footage while she took close-ups of the consoles. Drawers, cabinets, and cubbies occupied every corner and niche; they vidded just the contents that were visible.

  Ekatrina patted the central cabinet. “An oddly large space between pilot and copilot, I think.”

  Yevgeny shrugged. “Aliens are alien.”

  Moving aft, they came next to eight claustrophobic rooms, half on each side of the ship’s central passageway. The rooms on one side had lockers and built-in drawers, plus a fold-down sleeping slab, chair, and work surface. Whatever clothes the lockers once held had crumbled to dust. To judge from the sleeping quarters in the nearby base, the aliens must have hated the close quarters aboard this ship. Across the aisle, two rooms, with scarcely space for a human to turn around, were packed with equipment he could not identify. Galley? Infirmary? Machine shop? The final two rooms each held a pair of alien-tall, glass-walled cylinders.

  “Hibernation pods of some sort?” he guessed.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Farther sternward, near the airlock, were storerooms. At least the many wire-frame drawers, all but empty, suggested storerooms. “I believe we know from where they stocked the base,” he said.

  Frowning, she surveyed the barren drawers. “These rooms do not begin to have the capacity to hold everything we found in the base.”

  “Perhaps there were several ships, and only this ship stayed.”

  “Or they produced stuff here. To judge from their smart wall sealant, the aliens had nanotech advanced well beyond ours. Some of the apparatuses we have yet to identify might be their 3-D printers. And I would expect them to scavenge lunar raw materials at least as well as we do.”

  “We should go on.” Because the origin of alien spare parts was a puzzle they would not solve by debating—and perhaps not ever.

  Continuing aft, they found wiring and equipment closets, many of the latter crammed with pipes, tall metal tanks, and fat air ducts. Yevgeny took a moment to consider the plumbing. However advanced these aliens had been, some basic inventions perhaps no one could improve upon. “Oxygen tanks. Toilets. Atmosphere scrubbers. Water recycling. If you do not look too closely, none of this would seem out of place aboard a Roscosmos-built ship.”

  “Too bad Roscosmos does not build starships.”

  “Of course they don’t ….”

  Damn. For humans, anyway, this was not a starship. Not unless Einstein had been all wrong. Not unless hibernation pods could be developed for humans. Because beyond advanced propulsion, a starship with an awake crew needed advanced, closed-loop, life support.

  He tamped down disappointment. If not the galaxy, the alien technology might yet give Russia dominion over the Solar System. Substituting lead shielding for iridium, of course.

  And assuming they found what Ilya suspected must occupy the vessel’s stern ….

  Aft of the environmental systems, the ship’s central passageway terminated at a sturdy hatch. “What do you think?” Yevgeny asked. “The engine room?”

  “We looked everywhere else.” She pulled open the latch. “Wow.”

  Indeed. Little beyond the hatch frame belonged in any craft he knew. Oh, here and there he distinguished familiar components: ducts and girders, cable bundles and instrument panels. But his overall impression was … what? The lone, inadequate adjective he summoned was alien.

  And here, as in the rest of the ship, they found no remains of passengers or crew.

  Ekatrina said, “That space looks snug for anyone in vacuum gear. Perhaps you should vid in there by yourself.”

  “And you?”

  “I would like a closer look at the electronics on the bridge.”

  “Very g
ood. Leave the interior hatches open so we can remain in contact.”

  Inside the engine room—what else could this place be?—bulkheads partitioned off three interior compartments on both port and starboard sides. Pipes, tanks, and pumps—cryogenic refrigeration equipment, he felt certain—all but filled the forward-most starboard compartment. Insulated pipes penetrated an interior wall into the adjacent compartment. The centerpiece of that room was a mirror-finish tank, from which valved pipes led to both adjacent compartments. Definitely, a cryo tank. The final starboard chamber offered an intact version of something they had seen only in smashed form.

  Yevgeny stood as close to the fusion reactor as his camera would focus, panning. With a screwdriver blade he took a thin scraping for Ilya. The shielding material was soft, like what surrounded the reactor inside the base. Lead, he presumed.

  Why lead shielding for alien reactors, but an iridium case around the radiothermal generators of the alien tank bots? They had no idea.

  Three rooms on the port side duplicated what he had just seen. Backup power.

  A buzzer shrieked in his ears; numbers flashed on his HUD. He reset the alarm and set a new countdown at twenty-five minutes. “Thirty minutes, and we have to be on our way back.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Picking up the pace, he vidded from end to end the massive tangle of tubes, tanks, and coils that ran along the ship’s main axis. Ilya’s hypothesized fusion drive? Fusion-powered or otherwise, Yevgeny saw no other means of propulsion.

  Searching for anything familiar, he noticed a bunch of identical access panels. These were evenly spaced along the hull in an arc defined by a hypothetical vertical slice through the ship. Thin pipes hugging the walls ran to each panel. Opening one of these panels, he found chambers and piping: a small, chemical rocket engine. An attitude thruster.

  Fifteen minutes remaining. He hurried to the bridge, now well-lit by two portable lamps. Ensconced in the left-hand seat, Ekatrina had swung open the console’s access panel. As at the airlock, she was wiring in a standard fuel cell, DC/DC converter, and multimeter.