by F P Adriani
“Got it,” Simmons said, nodding his dark head as he worked at his silver pilot’s panel.
Spaceships that clocked a lot of time in space usually encountered natural or artificial debris fields at some point, and all Space Force ships were equipped with extra capabilities to help crews out-maneuver in those situations, especially if the debris fields were a result of hostile interactions in unstable human-populated areas….
Jerry clicked his intercom to broadcast ship-wide. “This is Captain Jones. Everyone strap in. We’ve reached near to an anomalous debris field. We seem to be observing effects we can’t identify causes for yet; nor can we investigate them fully without suiting up and physically going out there, which would be too dangerous because of the radiation profile here. If anyone has any suggestions, share them now.”
Apparently, no one had any suggestions because no one spoke. Jerry could feel his face reddening. His fingers jerked on his panel without actually doing anything. He suddenly realized full-force that there was no real script for the situation he was now in; most of his duties in his SF career had been ordinary, but now he’d encountered something unordinary, and he was supposed to do something about it—what though? Well, first, he would send a message to a lead SF ship—
He didn’t get to finish his thought because something had clearly changed on the viewscreen: toward the back of the debris field, there was a new spot, a dot really, of blurry teal. The dot was floating between two pieces of debris, and the bluish glow of the dot began to spread….
“Any data on what that is now?” Jerry said fast. “The blue ball that’s a meter wide and growing?”
Beth spoke up. “I’m reading spikes in the cosmic-radiation profile; then some spikes are quickly fizzling out, but apparently into electromagnetic radiation. Can you confirm, Gail—Matt?”
“Yes,” Matt said. “Maybe the cosmic rays are what did in all of these ships.”
“The rays tore them apart?” Jerry said.
“Well,” Matt replied, his voice wavering now, “I meant that, years ago, ship shielding wasn’t quite as foolproof as it is today. Imagine if there had been even more massive sudden radiation increases—some of the electronics could have been destroyed in those ships.”
“It’s still a concern for us too,” Beth said, and her trembling voice was quicker now.
Jerry turned to her. “Suggestions?”
She glanced his way, her long fingers carefully pushing buttons on her wide panel. “Maybe strengthen the shields to maximum but oscillate them to a lower energy state at a very low frequency, to preserve some of our energy on here. We used up quite a bit of Evan hydrocarbon on the double curon bubble, when we were already supposed to be refueling the Evan at Torrence Station in a few hours….”
Jerry was both nodding and frowning, but his mind was also drifting—to the scene out in space. “It feels like a graveyard right here, like the named debris are headstones. It’s a good thing for us we don’t have to rescue anyone; it’s a bad thing for them, whoever they were.”
“As far as I can tell, the ships I’ve been able to identify were all private ships,” Gail said.
“I’m thinking about the Carver message,” Andreyev added in a carefully modulated voice now. “How could it be broadcasting after all this time? Transmitter chips will last for maybe ten years—maximum.”
Jerry and his two crewmembers all glanced at each other, as if waiting for each other to respond, probably because none of them really wanted to respond: they had all missed something.
Jerry turned around in his chair, his eyes falling right on Andreyev, who was now strapped into the white chair behind the silver panel-table. “That’s a good point, Admiral. We need to come up with an explanation.” He turned back to the viewscreen; the teal ball had kept on growing as they had all been talking. His panel indicated that the ball was now almost three-meters wide and over three-meters tall, and, on the viewscreen, there seemed to be brighter spots of teal darting across the ball, like fine lightning bolts. “Something’s going on there—what?” Jerry said. “Any explanations on how the message could still be broadcasting if the ship’s been gone for so long?”
Simmons’s head briefly turned toward both Jerry and Andreyev. Then Simmons lifted his hands from his panel and pointed toward the viewscreen as he said, “It might be the emergency transmitter is still active because, back then, the models often incorporated radiation-absorbing components in their circuitry—the exposed transmitter here could be getting jolted when the cosmic radiation spikes high, which might only be occasional; that would explain why others haven’t heard the message in all these years. Though I guess some ships could have heard the signal—then ignored it.”
Jerry was thinking he probably should have done the same damn thing instead of trying to impress Andreyev. He shifted around in his seat uneasily; the teal ball was still growing, and now he thought that maybe he should just be going.
He was about to order his crew to do just that when he glanced at his panel and noticed a very sharp spike in the exterior’s radiation—and then a moment later, the ball shot up in size to over thirty-meters tall.
“Shit!” he said as the ball quickly changed shape into something not-ball, and shot up another thirty meters. “Full reverse-now!” he shouted, his eyes on the two very-long, bright-teal extensions sprouting from within the center of the ball and bursting through the ball’s boundaries as if the extensions were bursting out of an electrified egg. A body followed the arms—a massive body that hung forward over three thick stumps—legs apparently, and now those legs shifted forward into the black of space as if they were lightning skating on ice. Both the arms and the legs ended in sharply hooked, single, huge claws. And what seemed to be a mouth in the creature’s large face had the same kind of hooks—as teeth.
“Holy shit!” Matt shouted from engineering, and Jerry heard more shouting coming from behind Matt’s voice. Matt spoke in an even more alarmed voice now: “Captain—we can’t go full reverse; we can’t reverse at all. We’re being pulled toward the debris. Sensors are showing an interlocking field of radiation blocking all the nozzles except the aft ones; the forward weapons ports are blocked too, but the computer says they should still be usable if we send a cleaning charge-stream through the ports before firing. But the biggest problem now is we’re getting a drain on the exterior shields—I’m boosting power from other areas to there, including from any possible thrusting.”
“Keep doing that—crap,” Jerry said. “The thing’s not moving very fast, but it’s coming right this way.” Options raced through his head, but none of them seemed feasible. Maybe he could have tried moving away from the creature vertically or laterally by using the small, auxiliary nozzles on the top, bottom, port and starboard sides of the ship, but on his panel he saw that those nozzles were indeed just as blocked as the forward nozzles. Forward was the only direction the ship could move in now, and there was no way he would do that because of what going forward currently meant.
“I don’t want to hurt the damn thing,” Jerry said. “That’s not what we do, especially in the Space Force. Any ideas on what our options are on our next move?”
“Jerry,” Beth said, a frown in her voice and slowly growing on her face. “I’m looking at the data so far on the creature and on the interlocking radiation field. Radiation seems to be powering the creature, or maybe it’s made of radiation—I’m not sure. But, I don’t think anyone could hurt it. It would probably just recharge from the space environment. The thing’s probably indestructible.”
“Then why the hell is it so defensive?” Jerry asked.
“Maybe it’s guarding something that can be hurt,” Beth replied, her brown eyes swinging toward Jerry now.
“Captain,” Matt interrupted, “that interlocking field and the patterns of the lightning bursts—I’ve done a quick computer analysis on the data, and it’s far too regular. You’re not gonna believe this, but the highest probability is that the creature’s been designed—it’s a
machine.”
Jerry’s eyes widened at the viewscreen, where the thing was still glowing and growing and closing the gap with the Spacebender.
“Maybe someone designed it to look scary to creatures like us,” Simmons said suddenly, his gaze on the screen.
Jerry nodded in his direction, his heart pounding painfully hard now. His eyes jerked back to the viewscreen. “It’ll get here in a few minutes. We’ve got no choice but to defend ourselves. Do we have enough power to clean the weapons ports, and charge the pulse cannons and the weapons clusters?”
“Just enough,” said Gail in a quick stressed way.
“Do it,” Jerry said. He could see the weapons and a few other systems firing up on his panel; he could also see the uselessness of what they were doing. The machine-creature was almost right on the ship—
A sharp crash against the starboard side of hull; the electronic panels on the bridge flickered, and everyone inside was jerked around in their chairs.
“What does the fucking thing want?” Jerry shouted.
“Captain, there’s slight crushing damage to the bottom of the hull, starboard-side,” Matt said fast, “but there’s no exterior fracturing: the hull’s still intact.”
“Can you do something—anything—to get us the hell out of here now?”
“I’m trying,” Matt said, and Jerry could hear the strain in Matt’s voice—and the nervousness.
Jerry’s heart was going crazy, and, for a long moment, he didn’t know what to say. Again, he could tell by his panel that the ship was in trouble; there were weakened spots in the most exterior of the triple exterior shields, thanks to the creature-machine’s having rammed the ship. Thankfully, the thing had pulled back for a moment, but Jerry had a feeling—
His feeling was correct: apparently, the creature had pulled back so it could slide at the ship harder; Jerry watched in horror as its glowing open mouth and hooked fangs grew larger on the viewscreen.
The ship was jerked around once again, but worse than last time, and too sharply for safety. Jerry knew this time was bad….
“Crap—we lost part of the exterior hull!” Gail shouted.
“No,” Jerry said, his heart hammering and his head coated with sweat. Was this it—were they all done for? Would they wind up in the same state as all the ships in the debris field? More of the Spacebender had now been yanked into the area; his panel indicated that even the aft nozzles were blocked into uselessness now.
“I’m compensating—” Gail said suddenly “—switching the interior hull layer to maximum shields. “We’re going to lose power on some areas of the ship—the shuttle bay—”
“Just do it,” Jerry said. He thought a moment, a too-long moment apparently. He was having trouble thinking really….
“Captain Jones?” came Beth’s alarmed voice.
He had zoned out, and now his face reddened at that realization, especially when he remembered Andreyev was behind him—yet that kind of urged him on: he had wanted to impress her all along; he’d thrown everything at that, but nothing had worked. Well, now he would throw everything at surviving—not because he gave damn about Andreyev’s opinion anymore. But because when you were so close to death, nothing was more important than surviving.
From the viewscreen he could see the creature-machine had the silvery hull piece of the Spacebender in its impossible half-lightning, half-fang mouth, and it was chomping on the extremely hard corascite composite as if it were an apple.
“Is it trying to eat us or just destroy us because it’s mad?” Simmons asked fast.
“Maybe both,” Jerry replied in a dry voice. “But, I think we should make this the most exciting meal it’s ever had. Let’s throw everything we’ve got at it—maybe that will push it back into its nest or charging station, or whatever the hell that round ball is that’s still floating out there. Use the weapons clusters and the pulse cannons—turned onto high EM pulses and electrified-particulate explosions. Maybe all of that will disrupt its radiation enough that we can book out of here, assuming we can even do that now—I’m worried about the hull breach; I guess that coupled with the Evan situation means curon bubbles are out, dammit.
“But—am I wrong?—it looks like the thing doesn’t seem able to move beyond a certain limit around the debris field. Maybe it’s being powered from something more specific around here? Or is it creating some type of field in the area—maybe that’s why the debris stayed close together for so long? We should have wondered about that sooner—”
“Captain,” Matt’s voice, “I’ve cleaned the weapons ports and they aren’t being blocked up again at the moment, so the weapons are ready to go.”
“Let them loose now—all at once!” Jerry said.
An instant later he felt the force of their discharge out the front shake the hull there. He saw the bright flashes in space on the viewscreen, and the teal, superelectrified form of the creature-machine suddenly seemed to be not so bright and to slide-stumble sideways, away from where the Spacebender was.
“There’s an opening again in the forward exhaust nozzles!” Matt yelled.
“Try full reverse now!” Jerry shouted back. And then he saw on his panel that the ship was finally jerking backwards. “Yes! Keep punching the engine, Matt. Gail, fire the weapons again—do we have enough power?”
“For the cannons or the clusters, not for both,” Gail said.
“Shit,” Jerry groaned. “Fire the clusters then—right now.”
She did fire them, and another reaction force shook the ship’s hull, but lighter than last time. However, the scene on the screen really intensified; the creature-machine’s arms were excitedly interacting with the bright, high-energy particulates surrounding it, but Jerry couldn’t tell if the creature was simply batting them away.
Whatever was going on with the thing, Jerry knew that this was his shot. “Reverse again!” he said, and this second time, the ship’s backward momentum was enough to yank it from the field-boundary.
The creature had also begun gliding backwards, toward where that floating blue ball waited; the strangely electrified teal body-form kept shrinking as the Spacebender moved an increasing amount of distance in the opposite direction.
“We’re away!” Gail said in an excited voice.
“Yes,” Andreyev replied.
And when Jerry glanced over his shoulder this time, she was nodding at him faster than normal, and though her face wasn’t quite smiling, it wasn’t quite straight either.
*
Once the Spacebender had gotten far enough away that the ship’s instruments could no longer register evidence of the debris field, Jerry unstrapped from his chair and stood. “In all the excitement to survive, I forgot to contact Space Force. Do that now—Simmons, Beth?”
“No need,” Andreyev said. “I’ve already taken care of it.”
Jerry was surprised, but he only said, “Thank you,” in a quiet voice, his head bobbing a single nod at Andreyev.
He straightened up quite sharply and finally said, “Well, I’m going down to engineering—to check on the damages.”
*
“Sensors and cameras are showing only that crushing displacement on the one panel and then that missing piece of exterior shell—a jagged rectangle about ten-meters tall and fifteen-meters wide,” Matt said to Jerry ten-minutes later.
Jerry was standing by Matt’s computer station, staring around the massive, mostly gray engineering room. There were about forty other people in beige engineering overalls inside the room, and many of their faces looked flushed and sweaty, just like Jerry’s face must have looked. But his crew also had smiles on their faces: it was certainly good to be alive.
Jerry could hear the hum of one of the nearby engines; he could smell the antiseptic scent of a cleaner, the acid odor of vomit lacing it. The aura right around here was unpleasant, but, again, even smelling vomit was better than being dead. He sighed….
“Captain?” came Matt’s voice.
Jerry’s head
jerked back to Matt—to the perplexed frown on his pale brown face. Jerry quickly smiled a little now. “Sorry that I zoned out there, Matt. I’ve just been thinking that this was a close one—the closest we’ve ever had, huh?”
Gail suddenly walked by, rolling her dark eyes to the ceiling and groaning. “Yes! Let’s never get that close again.”
Jerry smiled at her. “We’re only taking easy jobs from now on, huh?”
Matt laughed. “That’s up to you, Captain.”
Jerry was nodding, but his mind was on what they’d witnessed, with the creature-machine. “What the hell did we just go through? Where the hell did that thing come from?”
Matt was on the short side, but he had quite broad shoulders, which he shrugged now in a surprised way. “Never saw anything like it—never even heard of anything like it. Maybe it really exists somewhere else most of the time—maybe it protects a living species there? It seems the machine was ‘sleeping’; we woke it; then we shot at it, so it went back into its blue bed—good! The others weren’t so lucky. Their weapons back then didn’t have as much power to affect such high levels and amounts of radiation.”
Jerry frowned, his eyes blindly staring at Matt. “I just had a scary thought: what if there are more of those angry machines in the universe, especially a lot more?”
Gail had come back their way, to lay a yellow clipboard on the black table beneath Matt’s computer. “This is the first reported incident of this in the hundreds of years we’ve been out of the solar system. And the thing’s range seemed relatively small—as far as I was able to tell, it really couldn’t leave the area of the debris field. I had the computer crunch the numbers—the rim of the radiation field that trapped us extended in a mostly spherical shape around the area of where the blue ball was.
“I’m just happy no one’s hurt on here, other than a few sick stomachs from the newer crewmembers…. So,” she said in a slower voice, “what now? I just did a quick inspection using all the sensors and cameras in the breach’s area, on both the exterior hull and on the inner hull. I’ve confirmed we can’t risk flying through a space flume because that would likely lead to more tearing along the breach’s edges. I know a Space Force repair carrier is on the way, but flumes are the only exits in this layer; they’ll have to make repairs here….”