Boundary

by Eric Flint

  A.J. was barely aware of the tension in his own arms. His hands were literally white-knuckled as he gripped the console, lifting and pulling in sympathetic unison with his own creations.

  Titania suddenly fired its chemical thrusters.

  A.J. hissed. That was an attempt to utilize leverage and inertia to drastically increase the force on the door, for a brief moment. But he'd programmed that maneuver as a last-ditch effort, and the reason Titania had used it now wasn't immediately obvious to him.

  The downward thrust pushed on the temporary structure formed by the Faeries in such a way as to use it as a fulcrum. Manipulator arms bowed alarmingly under the pressure.

  Suddenly, the view from Rane spun crazily. The others followed suit, the emulation showing that something had broken and the three Faeries were trying to recover. Telltales blinked on.

  "Damn! Lessee . . . Rane's broken both manipulators, must've gotten twisted around . . . One of Titania's still works . . . Oh, fu— farging hell, something banged into Tinkerbell's left lens!"

  Rane's images steadied and she turned her cameras back. A piece of manipulator arm bounced lazily across the field of view. But the image also showed a yawning dark patch at the base of the door, fully two feet high. Large enough for a Faerie to pass through.

  "Oh, yeah!" A.J.'s momentary annoyance and concern vanished. It would have been worth the loss of at least two Faeries to get that door open, in his view, and he hadn't actually lost any of them. All three were damaged, but none of them in a way that would render them useless or even tremendously impaired in their main function.

  "Well, let's hope there's something in there worth looking at. I sure can't pull off that trick again. Knowing how these things go, we've probably just succeeded in breaking into the alien equivalent of the broom closet."

  Rane was not able to retract or fold the remainder of its manipulator arms, meaning that it was much more likely to snag itself going through narrow spaces. Tinkerbell's loss of an imaging unit made it less effective for surveying.

  That left Titania. Fortunately, the status indicators and a visual survey by the other ISMs showed that the nonfunctional arm was in fact completely missing—it had broken cleanly off at the joint connecting it to the Faerie's main body. There was nothing to prevent Titania from surveying the now-accessible room.

  Nothing, that was, except the inevitable verification and programming delay engendered by the many millions of miles between Earth and Phobos. After Prybar had concluded, the change in the ISMs' status had been more than sufficient to require them to wait for instructions from A.J. on what to do next.

  "Take a break, people," A.J. said, absently. "I'm going to be designating new instruction sets and getting the Faeries redistributed to maximize the bandwidth feed when I send in Titania. This intermission will probably run you about two and a half hours. If someone would like to thank me for producing this Oscar-winning film, they could grab me a couple of hotdogs with mustard and relish and a large OJ in an hour or so."

  Two hours and forty-seven minutes later, A.J. sat back down at his workstation, having taken a quick bathroom break. He noticed a large number of new people had arrived to watch what was happening—some of the new scientists added to the project recently, and Madeline Fathom.

  "The show should be starting any minute now, ladies and gentlemen. In . . . five, four, three, two, one . . . action!"

  There was now only a single viewpoint, that of Titania, as the little ISM carefully maneuvered itself down and through the gap. It eased through and then activated its full-power lights.

  There were faint gasps of indrawn breath throughout the room.

  A.J. could not quite restrain another whoop of triumph. "Not a broom closet!"

  "Closet, hell," Hathaway said in quiet awe. "That's a control room."

  The large oval room was a study in curves and ramps and triangled paneling. Even though constructed by completely inhuman minds and manipulative members, the layout was something hauntingly familiar. A sort of dais, with scalloped indentations at the edge that must correspond to seating arrangements, was located in the center. Around the perimeter of the room, on the side opposite the door, there were a series of tripartite panels. They were clearly separated yet related in groups of three, each with what appeared to be some kind of display panel or viewing screen above the central of the three subpanels.

  Other dark, indefinable shapes were barely visible, sharp-edged but confusing, casting eerie shadows on the walls behind them. Titania began its preprogrammed survey of the room, in a counterclockwise direction from the entrance—which, naturally, took the other shapes out of view.

  "Damn! I flip a coin and it chooses the wrong direction."

  "We'll get to that area eventually," Jackie pointed out reassuringly. "How long?"

  "You can't survey the room too quickly, especially if you don't want to hit anything. I'd say it's another half hour before we get our second look. Getting other data in now and . . . Yes, it's what I thought. There's something in those walls that was messing with the readings earlier. They're all much clearer now."

  A.J. was still not paying a great deal of attention to the other data. Like everyone else, he was watching the slow revelations of Titania as she carefully surveyed the great control room.

  "Look at that," one of the newcomers whispered. "More symbols on those keyboard-type things."

  "How do you know they're keyboards?" challenged another.

  "I don't know. But if we assume this is a control room, then it stands to reason that these things are very likely to be something like a keyboard."

  "Size argues that they must have been using a phonetic alphabet rather than one oriented to meaning, like ideograms," someone else put in.

  "Unless they had developed a symbology that included a method of representing meaning."

  "Well, it could be mathematical . . . But look there, that one. I think some of those symbols are the same ones on a couple of the plaques we've located in the corridors."

  "Not just mathematical, then. Unless they discussed hallway-style directions in mathematical terms."

  "The hallway signs don't have to be directions. They may have known directions instinctively. Perhaps they were reminders of significant equations . . ."

  The discussion continued in low tones with the participants examining in detail the specific frames in question. The rest of the spectators continued to be glued to the new images flowing in from Phobos.

  "There, that station, it's bigger," Jackie said. "And the ramp that leads up to it flattens out into almost a platform. It's got more than one of those display-type screens above it, too. A captain's station?"

  "Could be," A.J. allowed. "Or chief researcher or engineer."

  After a pause, he added: "Okay, people, here we go. We're getting back to a FOV that ought to show us those whatever-they-weres towards the far side."

  The darkness lightened. The mysterious shapes began to clarify again. Something like a small, black-brown bush with a thick, jagged stem drifted by the imager.

  "What the heck is that?" Diane wondered aloud.

  Suddenly, sliding into view almost as though it had lunged from the left-hand side, a far larger shape loomed on the screen. Three long, sinuous projections extended towards Titania, with the glittering of something smooth and whitish showing between them. Behind these projections bulked a massive body extending several meters back into the darkness, shadows and light playing on it and hinting at more detail.

  As Titania continued onward, the shape emerged more clearly, coming into profile: an almost sluglike body, three stout projections on the far end mirroring the longer ones at the front.

  "Holy mother of—" A.J. began.

  "That's—" Jackie said.

  "Bemmie!" they both finished simultaneously.

  "Bemmie?" Hathaway repeated. "What the hell's a bemmie?"

  Madeline Fathom looked just as puzzled as Hathaway. A.J. and Jackie turned to both of them, started talk
ing at once, and went through several cycles of "Okay, you tell them, no, you, no, go ahead, you say it, no . . ." before A.J. finally claimed the floor.

  "Colonel, I think we have a new crew member for you. Because,"

  A.J. said with a wicked grin, "we know someone who's already spent two years studying our aliens."

  Chapter 20

  Helen Sutter stared around her in confusion. Now that she saw the buildings in front of her, she knew where she was. At various times, Jackie had sent her postcards with pictures of the installation—that part of it, at least, that wasn't restricted for security reasons. But it wasn't a location she'd ever really expected to be at, and she still had no idea of what she was doing here.

  "Now that we've arrived," she said to the Marine next to her as they entered the NASA complex, "is someone finally going to tell me what the hell is going on?"

  "The general will brief you very shortly, ma'am," the sergeant replied. "I'm not cleared to say anything about the situation at this time."

  "Brief me?" she repeated incredulously.

  This was surreal. The whole thing was like some kind of bad thriller script. She'd been sitting out at the dig, cataloging some of the fossils found in the past few days, when all of a sudden a huge military helicopter had come whup-whup-whupping over the ridge and landed so close to the camp that it damn near blew over the tents. From it had emerged an Air Force captain and this sergeant— Sergeant Ney—along with several other soldiers.

  They'd told her they were there to pick her up, and made noises about national security. After she scanned their papers—which all looked very official, but weren't warrants and thus as far as she was concerned meant they had no hold on her whatsoever—she'd called Director Bonds. The museum director had informed her that he also had been contacted, that as far as he knew she wasn't in any trouble, but someone wanted to talk with her very, very badly and was apparently willing to pay for any inconvenience on anyone's part. She'd also gotten the impression that there was probably an implied, genteel threat on the other hand—that if she didn't go, the government might make things sticky for the museum.

  So she'd gone, finding herself bundled politely into the chopper and flown out with Sergeant Ney—while the captain and the rest of the soldiers stayed behind, apparently to prevent anyone from calling out about her semi-abduction!

  Sergeant Ney had been completely uncommunicative throughout the entire trip down here to New Mexico. And now here she was, at NASA of all places!

  The sergeant stopped at a large door and gestured for her to enter. "The general is just inside, ma'am."

  The room inside was a good-sized office, which had hastily been made over into the unnamed general's headquarters. It looked as if it had been used by a senior researcher up until maybe a few days or a week ago.

  As she entered, the uniformed man behind the desk stood up and crossed the distance between them with a few quick strides.

  "General Martin Deiderichs," he said, shaking her hand. "Welcome to NASA, Dr. Sutter. I apologize for the extremely urgent and I'm sure inconvenient way in which you were brought here. But once you see the situation, I think you'll understand."

  She returned the handshake mechanically, but managed a reasonable smile. There was no point in being impolite. "Well, that will probably depend on the situation, General."

  "No doubt, Doctor. You were brought in at the suggestion of some of the people currently on this project. The situation is . . ."

  He seemed to be at a loss for words, for a moment. "I think it's probably just best to show you. Please, follow me."

  Helen shrugged and did as he asked. At least it seemed as if this was neither a practical joke nor the result of some kind of terrible mistake she'd made. Though what would an Air Force general care about her mistakes at a paleontological dig, anyway?

  After a short walk down a hallway, they entered a far larger room, one whose layout she recognized from many images: space mission control. At a centrally located screen ahead of her, she also recognized a tall, elegantly-dressed figure with slightly tousled salt-and-pepper hair.

  She slowed involuntarily, then stepped forward. "Dr. Glendale!"

  Nicholas Glendale almost jumped. His attention had been so riveted on the screen that he hadn't heard their approach. "Dr. Sutter— Helen, you've made it here. I arrived myself just two hours ago. Fortunately, I was in California when I got the summons."

  "What, exactly, have I made it to?" she demanded. "And why in God's name is NASA summoning paleontologists in the first—"

  Glendale stepped aside and around her, and with gentle pressure guided her to a seat before the console. "Please, Helen. Just take a look."

  She looked.

  She needed no one to tell her what the central object in the image was. She had done so many reconstructions, sketches, and 3-D models that no possible method of displaying it would have slowed her down for a moment.

  "Bemmie?" she whispered.

  No one said anything. Slowly, she became aware of the background to the image. Sharp-edged shadows falling across distorted-looking panels, everything oriented at odd angles as though a clumsy amateur photographer had been trying to take artistic pictures and failed. The viewpoint progressed around, staying focused on Bemmie, but revealing other things in the process. Walls of some kind of metal and rock. Those weird highlights and shadows on Bemmie and the background—they weren't like anything she'd ever visualized. Well, except . . .

  A chill ran down her spine. She saw gooseflesh literally spring out across her forearms. This couldn't be a practical joke. But if it wasn't, then the only thing that could possibly, conceivably connect her, NASA, Bemmius secordii, and these images in front of her was—

  "This is Phobos!" she blurted out.

  "Correct, Dr. Sutter." Deiderichs' voice carried a pleased tone. She got the impression he appreciated people who were quick on the uptake.

  "I hadn't heard from A.J. in a while, but I knew . . ." She looked up at the general. "His Faeries found this inside the moon, didn't they?"

  Deiderichs nodded. "Mr. Baker recognized Bemmie immediately, the moment he saw the thing. So did Ms. Secord."

  She stared at the screen. It was still too much to grasp. "Bemmie . . . came from Phobos?"

  "From somewhere in space, certainly," Nicholas Glendale said. "It couldn't possibly have evolved on Phobos itself, of course."

  She turned to look at him, to find the famous grin even wider than normal.

  "Helen, if I recall correctly I said that I'd have to change my position if you'd found a fossilized repeating shotgun. Instead, you had your friend go and find an entire base, complete with a second fossil. Not even that—a mummified body." He gave her a very old-fashioned little bow. "You were entirely, completely, and inarguably right in every particular. I cannot imagine the vindication you must feel— or will feel, when you finally grasp it all."

  He turned to Deiderichs. "I am immensely honored that your people thought of bringing me on board. But I'm a bit old to be considering space travel. And in any event"—he pointed to Helen—"I really think Dr. Sutter is the only reasonable choice. She can now claim, with perfect accuracy, to be the world's first—and only— qualified xenopaleontologist."

  He flashed the grin at Helen again. "Besides, I have a large helping of crow to consume, and a great deal of catching up to do on the work Helen did already."

  "Space travel?" Helen repeated inanely.

  General Deiderichs cleared his throat. "Yes, Dr. Sutter. We will want someone on the expedition which we are currently planning who can conduct what amount to autopsies and studies on bodies mummified for millions of years. And with your training and background, you may have other insights into things such as base designs and so on."