by Luke Norris
“That is not impossible for a moon.”
“Mmm, I’m going to take a look anyway, once I get out of the med chamber.”
“Rieka, why do you insist on going personally in your condition? You have an entire fleet of drones for this.”
“There are some things I prefer not to look at through the eyes of drones, Tin.”
Suddenly Rieka’s small vessel was cast into shadow. The stars above her winked out. She could see the mothership gunwales looming overhead, as they sailed underneath. They had arrived already? She’d been delirious for half of the flight, so hadn’t noticed how much time had passed. As they connected to the docking port, she could see her fleet of drones, returning from the planet. They moved with the rapid, erratic, movements, only possible for objects not subject to biology, and the effects of G-forces. They zipped through several entry ports on the side of the smooth ship.
As far as ships went, Tin was small, only a fraction the size of some of these antiquated E.T. juggernauts they went up against. But size wasn’t everything, and nobody knew it better than early-traders. This vessel struck fear into their hearts. It represented the pinnacle of U.W.F. technology. Her relationship with the minister meant she got the latest from Research and Development, but she had a distinct feeling sometimes the tech was so new, they used her and Tin as test dummies.
She was almost incoherent as drones lifted her out of the landing craft and carried her to the med chamber. “You know, there are such thing as third-stagers, Tin!” she insisted drowsily. “How else do you suppose we encounter life, human life, in every other star system?” She was slurring her speech,
Drones whizzed her through the passageway, to the surgery room. “I’m increasing your dosage now, in preparation for the operation,” Tin told her.
The med chamber walls had the forest simulation on. Rieka liked forests. Forests and waterfalls. She vaguely felt tugging as several drones replaced the tourniquet and removed her combat suit before all went black.
12
MOON
The sound of chirping birds and running water lulled Rieka back to consciousness. It took a moment to get her bearings. The ship was home for her, but it still took some time to clear the head and figure out that she lay in her room. She went to rub her head, but something was wrong.
“I have paralyzed the shoulder,” Tin explained, “to stop you using the arm prematurely. The nerves need time to heal.”
“If you say so, Doc,” Rieka grunted, looking down at her arm. It looked almost identical to her old arm. Only upon close inspection, she could see that the skin tones were duller. There was something hard to replicate about organic tissue, with real blood pumping through it. “How thoughtful, you gave it skin and everything,” she observed.
“I determined,” Tin said, “with your irrational attachment to your organic body, a similar looking arm will let your brain accept the new appendage quicker. I also ran the electrics directly to your brain, rather than peripheral nerves. This will mean you can use the arm sooner. I had specific instructions from Terras regarding these new bionics, Rieka. We have a roster of specialized physiotherapy sessions scheduled for… Rieka, where do you think you're going?”
Dud arm or not, she wanted to get out and take a look at that moon. Something didn’t seem right about it. She relied on her intuition just as much as one of her limbs. Her selection officers had joked that her instincts verged on clairvoyance, and she’d learned to follow her gut over the years. What’s more, once the arm healed she wouldn’t get the chance. She’d have to leave this system, and go into slow-time sleep for decades to follow the pirates they had been tracking. “I’m going to the landing craft, Tin. We are going to do a reconnaissance mission to that small moon we saw!”
U.W.F. did not consider collecting rock samples to be in Rieka’s job mandate, but they didn’t understand or hadn’t thought it through completely. As far as she was concerned, if there really was another, more advanced, civilization out there it was her duty to find out about it. This was directly the role of a protector. An absolute imperative. At least, to determine if there is any kind of threat.
The first time the crystals had been discovered, they were not disguised as natural objects, they were debris, just floating in space, exposed, as if in the aftermath of some calamity. After analysis by Terrasian scientists, it was proposed that these strange crystals were not simply some newly discovered natural geological formation, but rather some kind of technology. Perhaps from an ancient civilization, long since crumbled and vanished many millennia ago. Since then, more discoveries had been reported—findings of similar technology on first-stage planets.
Rieka had seen enough of the galaxy to know, it was not pure chance humans had evolved on all these different planets. Including even Terrasian society. It was the general consensus that the galaxy had been seeded. But by what? By whom? Whoever they were, they must have been far more advanced than Terras. That was hard to imagine.
There was a reluctance among many academics to admit there may be such a thing as ‘third-stage’. It would mean acknowledging Terrasian second-stage society was not the most advanced one in the galaxy—textbooks would need to be rewritten. People had built their life’s work claiming Terras was the pinnacle. But their resistance was successful, they’d managed to push the idea of ‘third-stage’ to the realm of conspiracy theory.
Scholars could be damned! It was easy to sit in an office in Terras and make judgments about the outer spiral. She was out here on the fringes, and not in some Terrasian archive. There was nobody else, the buck stopped with Rieka and other protectors. If there was a potential threat to second-stagers or first-stagers for that matter, her job was to find out about it.
One of Rieka’s cleanups had been indeed strange and hatched a suspicion that perhaps this ‘ancient’ society, was not so ancient… and not so vanished. Yep, she was in the group of conspiracy theorists.
It was on one of her earlier cleanups that had spawned the first shadow of doubt for her. Something had delayed the E.T’s from wreaking havoc as quickly as they could have. The pirates laced the water supply, but the drugs’ chemical structure had been altered, rendering them ineffectual. Not just localized, but across large geographic areas. The planet’s inhabitants had still suffered, but the damage had been mitigated in comparison to some planets Rieka had seen. How? Did the first-stage inhabitants unwittingly have help?
Now, when Rieka saw things that didn’t add up, this crazy idea about a third-stage society came to mind. Even the slightest possibility of an unknown threat was justification for her to take whatever precautions she damn well felt to be necessary. No matter how far fetched.
“Tin, bring up data on the latest crystals that were found!” The hologram appeared in front of her and moved as she made her way to the suit-up room. “Will you look at this example, Tin! The crystal structure is as big as a building.” The image had a small person next to it for reference.
The walls in the ship were set to transparent, and Rieka could see the colossal green planet rolling lethargically on its axis. Tin was in a geostationary orbit so she could see the dark crescent shadow slowly approaching. They would soon enter nighttime on the planet.
“Tin, how can I get my suit on if I can’t raise my arm?”
“That is probably a good indication that you should not be trying to put on a combat suit three hours after having a bionic arm attached.”
Using her good arm, she awkwardly placed the numb bionic limb in the suit receptor, leaned into the back half of the suit, and commanded: “Suit up!” Tin brought the front half of the suit down, a rigid receptacle, and pressed it against Rieka’s naked body. It adhered to the back half of the suit, and it lost its rigidity, compressing instantly to form a skin-tight fit. She took the helmet from Tin’s drone, and it snapped in place. The transparent visor closed across her face. “One of these days, soon, I’ll have enough robot parts that I won’t even need a space suit anymore.”
“You woul
d still require a suit, Rieka,” Tin said, “the pressure and temperature would…”
“Tin!”
“Ah sorry. Humor.” Tin apologized. “Sarcasm?”
Rieka ignored his quib. “I want twenty drones… and some with drilling equipment.”
“They’re already on their way,” Tin confirmed. “I’ll have several accompany the landing craft too.”
The chances of there being any enemies still active here were almost zero. There were other U.W.F. ships in orbit now, and all early-traders were either destroyed or in custody. Nevertheless, she always took an escort. It had saved her arse, on more than one occasion. A door behind her opened, and she stepped into the small pod. As soon as the door snapped closed, she felt the little craft detach, and float free of the mothership. “Drive please, Tin.” The small ship shot away upon her command, heading into the shadow of the planet.
The small moon became visible. Small was an understatement. “The retrograde orbit is uncommon,” Rieka said. “Do an analysis for me, Tin! Tell me how that happened.”
“The planet is three point eight billion years old,” Tin said, “and the two larger moons are slightly younger. However, if the satellite in question had also been there at the inception of the planet, my calculations say, it should long since have spiraled away. Yet it is there. This would indicate that it attained its orbit much more recently. I cannot derive a scenario where this moon negotiated, of its own accord, its current diacritic positioning with the planet's gravity.”
“Speak in Terrasian Tin!”
“The moon is not acting naturally.”
“Hell, I could’ve told you that,” Rieka said. “I’m taking the bike down!”
Instantly the pressure in the cabin dropped to zero, matching the space outside. Her flight seat changed shape underneath her, morphing into the space bike, so her legs straddled the sides. She leaned forward taking the handlebars with her left arm. The seat dropped out the bottom of the landing craft, and she steered the bike toward the approaching moon.
“Play ‘Groovin’, Tin!” A favorite song from Earth, she’d gotten after the cleanup there. The artist had recorded chirping of birds. There was something about birdsong that raised her spirits in the loneliness of space.
“Young Rascals, coming up.” The easy tempo and smooth harmonies played into her in-ear implants.
Rieka didn’t notice as twenty of her drones protectively assumed their default combat positions around her, and mimicked her every maneuver to the millimeter. She zipped away in immaculate, practiced, battle formation.
“Gravity?” she asked, as the moon approached.
“A ninth Terras standard,” Tin replied. “If you jump hard enough from the surface, you probably won’t land.”
When she was a few hundred meters above the surface, she leaped from the bike and let herself glide in freefall. Drones flanked her on either side, as she descended like some celestial being. Craters, and other markings, typical of any natural planetary satellite, pocked the surface. She was approaching fast. At the last minute, a drone sailed under her feet and slowed her acceleration seamlessly. She stepped gracefully onto the moon’s dust-coated surface.
Rieka’s boots had the heaviest soles in her wardrobe attached, and she could still feel how slowly her feet were pulled to the ground after each step.
“How deep is the regolith here?” She kicked some dust near the base of the bike.
“It is strange,” Tin said, “the regolith is not deeper than a meter, but then it changes in composition dramatically. My scans are not giving me enough to be able to interpret the nature of the substratum. I can’t detect more without having a physical sample, Rieka.”
“I want core samples drilled on different locations, including one from the other side!” Upon uttering the words, five larger drones, with mining equipment, sped away as quick as an eye blink. One stayed and touched down next to her. The drone unfurled a tall contraption above itself, containing the laser drilling technology. It was boring the hole. Once it had reached the desired depth, it would then send nanobots down the deep borehole to retrieve rock samples at different depths. On such a small moon there would be only minor temperature differences, and no tectonic activity to complicate the job.
The planet above her was in darkness, and she could even see faint lights from some human settlements. The moon, however, was in direct sunlight where she stood. Her visor darkened accordingly, but it was difficult to distinguish shades of her suit with the ground around her. It must be incredibly bright.
“It would be good to get a look at the substratum here,” Rieka said. “I want to see it in the flesh, not just from core sample analysis. Thirty Four Ex!” she called the unique identifier of the excavation drone next to her. “My arms!” she ordered, commandeering the drone’s arm. Her bionic eye received the camera perspective of the drone, and the drone’s left arm moved in concert with hers. The right arm would have done the same if Tin had not rendered it inert. She reached out in front of her and slid her hand back towards herself. The excavation arm mimicked her except instead of being in thin air it cleared a large track of regolith, half a meter deep.
She continued until, after several large scoops, she felt resistance. Something more solid was preventing her going deeper. It was hard to see because the dust had a viscous nature, and kept pouring back in the hole.
She had almost cleared out enough to get a glimpse of the bedrock.
“Rieka,” Tin said, in his affable tone. “We have a problem with drone five.”
“What is it Tin?” she said, climbing into the hole and brushing away the dust.
“It has disappeared.”
Rieka waited, but Tin offered no more explanation. That was very unlike him. A battle equipped drone doesn’t simply disappear.
“What does the last footage show? Come on Tin, must I go through each step?”
“I have examined footage several times. There was no precursor and nothing hostile in the vicinity. It is no longer there.”
“Send the nearest drone to its last location and then let me know.”
It was strange. Drones had been destroyed in battle before, but a pure malfunction of this nature had never happened. Those things were self-repairing, but compounding this anomaly was not being able to identify its cause. She cleared away another pile of dust and caught a glint of something before it was covered back over by dust falling back in.
“Rieka,” Tin paused as if computing a complex problem. “the drone I sent to do reconnaissance…”
“Yes?”
“Has disappeared.”
Suddenly she felt a sense of foreboding. The hairs on her neck stood up. Drones were her lifeline. They were extensions of herself. This kind of communication issue could be disastrous. She stood up in the grave-like hole she had dug.
“Play footage of drone five!” she requested. Her bionic eye played back the last minutes of footage, before the drone’s disappearance. She closed her other eye to focus. It was on the dark side of the moon, the night vision compensated for the lack of light, but she could still tell it was the dark. She rotated three sixty but saw no threats, nothing near the drone.
“Five seconds until disappearance,” Tin commentated.
She spun in all directions, trying to see if something external was the cause, but there was nothing. The recording went dark.
“Play drone four, Tin!”
This drone was moving quickly, flying across the crater-covered surface, towards the disappeared drone. Numbers in the corner of her eye, coordinates, were counting down fast. They slowed and reached zero as the drone stopped. This was the spot where it went missing, but there was nothing here. Rieka looked down at her feet and could see the small borehole from the laser. Yes, this was where drone five had been drilling moments earlier. It was nowhere in sight. This wasn’t a communication error. The drone itself was not there. No debris. No sign of, well, anything.
“Five seconds until drone four’s di
sappearance,” Tin commented on the recording.
Rieka scanned the sky and the ground around drone four. Nothing. Just moon dust, and space. How was this happening? The image went black. Blazing hydrons!
Those were state of the art drones, designed to repel an assault from almost anything.
Rieka was nervous. She never felt nervous. Her insecurities were an indication of how much she’d come to rely on the technology around her. She never used to be so dependent, had she? In early cleanups, she’d taken on early-trading pirates without assistance from drones. But the E.T.’s had become more cunning with time, and she’d boosted her arsenal accordingly.
“Rieka,” Tin’s voice interrupted her thoughts, “drone three has disappeared.”
Drone three? That was not on the other side of the moon like the other two… it was much closer by. She would face down any threat, but one she could not see terrified her. Something beyond her understanding was happening. Her instincts screamed at her to get out.
“Time to push void, Tin.” She leaped from the hole, low gravity letting her soar high above the surface. A ward drone flew underneath her feet, lifting her on the same trajectory towards the bike. Defenders flanked her either side. “Pull all drones out right now, Tin!” We need to get away from this place.
The moment she was on the bike she hit the throttle and shot away. Tin was so far from her position, he resembled a bright star on the planet’s curved blue horizon. Even at full thrust, with the G-forces pulling the skin tight around her cheeks, she felt as if some unknown presence was right on her tail. She switched view with her bionic eye so she could see through the bike’s rear camera. Nothing. Just the small moon, inert, and diminishing in size. Yeah right! That satellite was not as innocent as it looked.
“Tin, did we get any sample data?” she asked.
“Drone one and two were able to transmit data from substratum samples,” Tin replied. “They are from near the surface though, not very deep. Both are in possession of physical micro samples.”