The Belt Loop _Book One

by Robert B. Jones

  “Affirm, skipper. Any ideas?” Davi Yorn’s voice said through the comm speakers.

  “Mister Washoe, how’s that thing moving?”

  “Ahh. I can’t say for sure, captain, but it looks like those undulations along the hull are some kind of propulsion system. Very slow, but moving nonetheless.” Washoe said.

  “I need a better answer than that, Lieutenant Washoe.”

  Cain Washoe screwed up his face and said, “Maybe the thing’s venting something from the ass end, captain. Giving it a push of some kind.”

  A few mild chuckles around the bridge. Captain Haad cut the snickering off when he said, “Maybe you should go down to the waste tubes and stick your ass out in space and see if one of your farts can move a ship of this size, lieutentant. If you can’t think of a better explanation than that, perhaps you should stow your remarks.”

  “Sorry, sir, I was just —”

  “Stow it, mister,” Haad shot back, never taking his eyes off the display blister. “Mister Hoge, get the Higgs Field extended to include that ship. I want that motion damped,” he said.

  The young weapons ranking acknowledged the order and the lighting on the bridge dimmed for a second or two and from somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship heavy electric generators spooled up a notch.

  “Field in place,” Hoge said. The Higgs Field was an electromagnetic field that surrounded the Christi and kept its relative proper motion oriented to the plane of the galaxy and supplied the ship with local gravity when at rest. Extending the field to the derelict was a way to magnetically anchor it and cancel its proper motion.

  “Now, Mister Washoe, suppose you tell me how that thing was moving. Give me a plot back from its trajectory and see if there are any planets along that line.”

  “Aye, Captain Haad,” Cain Washoe said, a tinge of annoyance in his voice. He knew the captain was not really a hard person to work for but at times, Haad showed his rank and made it clear that this was not the time to proffer non-mission-related quips. He sucked in his breath and went to work.

  * * *

  Davi Yorn braced for the field. He had told his troops to secure their gear and get ready for gravity. They were in a small vestibule of some kind and had just made the interior of the derelict when the Higgs Field engulfed them. Now, he too wondered about the motion of the ship. It was moving too slowly to even notice, and he put finding the source of the slow-motion propulsion system on his things to find list.

  The vestibule they were in was a circular tube about two meters in diameter. The walls were coated in some kind of hardened glass that was smooth to the touch. Through his gloves he imagined the surface to be free of defects and he felt small undulations as he moved his hands back and forth. He had Gunny Ryon blow a plastic web over the removed hatch and waited for the epoxy to solidify. Gilroy had sent over a tube and as soon as Yorn gave the word he would begin pumping atmosphere into the makeshift air lock they had just created. This space would be entered into the suit position indicators and would serve as a haven should the group need to escape something on the other side of that inner hatch.

  Ryon stepped away from the outer hull and said, “One minute on the resin, sir.”

  Yorn nodded and looked around the glass tube he was in. Nothing stood out as remarkable but he did notice that the glass was covering a lot of detail on the curved bulkheads underneath. Markings and lines, small round pipes and troughs, intricate panels of unknown purpose dotted the vestibule at various heights. He surmised that this was an alien airlock of unknown design and, as he had found out at the outer hull, one that should be easy to understand and manipulate.

  The Higgs Field kicked in at that point and the S&R team settled to the bottom of the corridor. Several equipment bags fell from hands and straps and bounced back and forth for a few beats. “Secure that gear,” Yorn ordered and watched as his troops grabbed their loose wares.

  Entering the alien ship had not been a big ordeal. Once he had come alongside Mister Ryon, Yorn ran his hands around the circular hatchway and looked carefully at a small control panel at the nine o’clock position. It was decorated with glyphs and he peered in close, his visor only a centimeter away from the surface of the panel. He pushed at the edges of the panel and used a small rubber hammer to tap at the edges in several places. The parting line was covered with a very thin layer of ice. He used the hammer to crack the thin coating of permafrost away from the panel and then pushed logically at the edges. He was rewarded with a slow motion movement of the lower part of the panel. Like a fuel-filler door on a ground speeder, the little round panel eased up and out, connected to the main hull with articulated metal arms. He looked inside and told Ryon to have a look. They both peered into the little cavity and nodded their heads at the same time. Yes. Yorn pushed the round red pad of metal and waited. A similar panel door opened about a meter away, above Yorn and to his right. He crawled up and looked inside. It was a similar opening with a small pad of red metal inside. He pushed it with the handle of his hammer. The main hatch slowly opened, recessing into the alien ship slightly and once fully inside the opening it slid silently upward and out of sight.

  * * *

  Admiral Harold Hansen calculated that he would need at least two, maybe three days’ rations to make the trip to the upper decks. Let’s see, cereal bars, chocolate powder, water, vitamin supplements, and a couple of MREs should do it, he thought. After three years in the hold of the Corpus Christi he was confident in his ability to survive on his own. His mother didn’t know that he had already explored almost every inch of the lower decks; he had promised her that he would stay in his hideaway container until she told him it was safe to wander around. But that was an order she never gave. She was content to let him rot away down here below decks and he resented it, stowaway or not.

  So he had decided after Max went up to her berth on the officer’s deck that he would do a little extended exploring of his own. A secret recon mission befitting a person of his high rank and mental abilities. He just had to see the alien armada for himself. His imagination was running wild as he thought of space aliens blasting holes in the side of the ship and coming in to take all the pretty ratings he had seen. He could have none of that. It was simply not acceptable. Not for a Fleet Admiral such as himself. No way, no how.

  He gathered what he could fit into his small backpack that he had lifted from the assorted crates he had been able to plunder over the last three years. He produced his little penknife and cut off a square of tarpaulin to wrap his canned goods in so they wouldn’t rattle around as he made his way through the air ducts. Next he grabbed his portable reading tablet and slid that in his pack next to his stash of food.

  Looking around his cramped lair, his eyes settled on a pile of assorted junk on his makeshift cot: a pair of scissors, a few bungee cords, a roll of clear tape and a bottle of liquid glue. He had forgotten what kind of project he was working on at the time he’d retrieved all of this stuff out of its crate. Wanting to be prepared for anything, he stuffed the junk into his backpack as well, keeping out a few centimeters of tape for the note he was going to write.

  Har wrote the note with a crayon, taped it to the inside of his special lair, gathered his gear, closed the hatch on his container home and headed out.

  Chapter 8

  Captain Haad was still on his feet in front of the main blister. One of the mess stewards had fetched him coffee from the galley and he still had the empty cup in his hand as he stared at the image of the alien ship. The last twenty minutes had been a flurry of activity on the bridge and reports were coming in at a frenetic pace from ship’s systems, engineering, science, medical, and so forth. He responded when necessary, kept silent when practical. So far, the questions had been many, the answers few. Yorn and his team had penetrated deeper into the derelict and had nothing cogent to add to the mystery: round tunnels and tubes, no deck structure to speak of, no motion or activity to report.

  Cain Washoe had found several pores ringing the d
erelict and suggested that they were spewing spores into space, at random intervals, and perhaps that could account for the slow movement of the ship. His search of the assumed trajectory of the ship proved fruitless: nothing on the azimuth reaching back 500 light years.

  Haad decided that as soon as the lifeboat was back he would send a courier boat to Fleet on Elber and at least let them know what was developing. That was an essential part of his command: keeping the brass informed.

  Now he just watched and waited, almost mesmerized by the streaming images from Yorn’s suit cam. At the rate the search and rescue team was progressing, they would take several more investigative hours before they covered ten percent of the worm.

  “Captain, the plot suggests that the ship’s trajectory is not linear. I’m solving parabolic equations now,” Washoe reported.

  “Are you saying that the course was ballistic? Put that plot on screen.”

  “What I’m saying, sir, is the assumed trajectory is curvilinear with a fixed focus. . .”

  Haad looked at the plot. “Projection?”

  Washoe touched controls on his console. “Ahh, sir, at present course it would be headed directly for Sol. Looks like the ship was headed for Earth, captain.”

  Earth! The Corpus Christi was roughly 810 light years from Earth patrolling the void between Alnitak and Mintaka, two huge suns that were more than 100,000 times more luminous than our Sun. Yet here was a vessel, if Mister Washoe was reading the algorithms correctly, heading right for the dim star that birthed the Human race. Captain Haad shook his head. Was such a thing actually possible?

  “Double check your figures, Mister Washoe,” Haad said.

  “Astrogation confirmed, sir. At her present speed and course, she would have made Earth in, ahh, six point six billion years.”

  Thin laughter rippled across the bridge. “Good thing we came along, captain,” Ensign Hoge said.

  “Should I alert all commands, sir?” from No-no Gant.

  Haad had to laugh out loud. “That’s going to be the highlight of my Threat Assessment Report: incoming alien warship at the speed of snail. Power up the defensive shields, the planet is in peril. . .”

  Finally some of the edge came off the blade and the bridge was relaxed again. Haad considered what he had just been told. The alien ship was on a course that would have taken it into the home system but was moving so slowly that more than likely the Sun would probably not even be there when she arrived. Kick this can down the road? Not on your life. As long as that ship was capable of moving, as long as she showed any kind of life at all, a potential threat existed. Even now, with Yorn’s team probing the inside of the derelict, they could accidentally trigger some kind of defense mechanism, some kind of intruder alert protocol that would bring the worm out of its hibernation. Maybe even activate some version of a star drive engine that would be powerful enough to burn it out of the confining Higgs Field and propel it on its original course. As unlikely as those scenarios seemed, Haad had to put the bantering on pause and get his crew back on mission. Slow or not, the worm was still active.

  “What does exobiology have to say?” Haad asked into the air.

  “Lieutenant Commander Gertz here, sir,” a reedy female voice crackled from the comm stack, “and I think we have some information for you.”

  “I’m all ears, commander,” Haad replied.

  Gertz continued, “It seems that your worm analogy was partially correct, sir. At UV freqs we make out a ring of pores on the tenth and eleventh segments, this is counting from what I will assume is the bow of the vessel. Also there are pores on segments thirteen and fourteen that appear to be releasing spores into vacuum. Couple that with the double rows of pores the entire length of the ship, we’re thinking the vessel’s design was based on some genus of boring earthworm.”

  Haad turned and looked around the bridge. Every head was suddenly busy doing duties known only to themselves. “An earthworm, you say?”

  “Sir, that’s the best guess we have right now. A night crawler would serve as a good model,” Gertz offered.

  “Tell me about the spores, commander. Insights?”

  She hitched for a second and said, “Right now, I think it’s trying to mate, captain. That’s what worms do most of their lives. Those pores are spewing egg and sperm cells into the void. I think it’s just enough push on the hull of the ship to give it that proper motion, and it would surely account for the pulsating vibrations along the fuselage. Since there’s nothing out here for those hooks to grab onto, the ship extends itself about one centimeter every twenty seconds or so, pushes out its cells and then contracts forward. The next cycle repeats the process.”

  “Yet, that ship is not organic. Are you suggesting it’s biomechanical?”

  “Affirm, captain. I would suggest the search and rescue team try to make its way forward, toward the bow. . . toward the mouth.”

  “Commander Yorn, are you copying this?” Haad wanted to know.

  “Away team getting her five by five, captain. Is what she’s saying possible, sir?”

  Gertz interrupted. “Not only is it possible, Davi, the data carries a 97.62% probability. I know, it sounds strange, but whatever designed that vessel based it on a segmented worm and inbued it with the means to last for centuries. I suspect that once you enter the bow of the ship, you should find the operations center just below the control sections, and what would be a multi-chambered heart of some fashion if the comparison holds.”

  “What about those legs protruding from the keel of the ship, Milli?” the captain interjected.

  “Well, if it was designed with a worm in mind, those are mechanical setae, or feet, that can pull it along an earthen surface or propel it through a bored tunnel,” the exobiologist said. “Worms attach the front legs to an object then compress their bodies forward; when maximum compression is attained, the rear legs are attached and the front ones let go. This rhythm is repeated and the worm has achieved locomotion.”

  “Are you telling me that thing could attach itself to our ship?” Captain Haad asked incredulously.

  “I’m just saying, sir, if that derelict is based on worm life, it could absolutely do that.”

  Haad shook his head and waved one of his arms as if he was suddenly surrounded by dense smoke. “Understood, Commander Gertz. I have only one more question for you. . .”

  There was a ten-second pause and the only sound on the bridge was the steady hum of huge power consumption.

  “Sir?”

  “What the hell is that thing trying to mate with? There’s no one out here but us.”

  Gertz coughed out a thin chuckle. “I don’t have an answer for that, captain, but if you notice that raised band of material around segments thirty-one through thirty-seven? That’s called the clitellum. When worms mate they go at it head to toe, secreting eggs and sperm cells from those pores along the front. Then the clitellum covers both worms with mucus and it forms another ring that slides forward so that eventually the unfertilized spores come into contact with the sperm.”

  “That might be too much information, Milli,” Davi Yorn said over the comm stack.

  “Then that new mucus ring slips off the worm and seals itself into a cocoon,” Gertz explained, not missing a beat.

  “So this thing is trying to seed space with little worms? Am I missing something here?” Haad said.

  Gertz took a breath and said, “Most families of Lumbricina are hermaphrodites, captain, carrying both sperm and eggs.The actual copulation could have already taken place eons ago, judging by the slow motion of the ship. Or, in the worst case, there could be a mate on the way. Following the trail of spores that thing is ejecting. We just don’t know yet.”

  “Understood, Mister Gertz. Send what you have to my console. Keep at it and find some answers for us.”

  “Affirm, captain. Davi, get your team forward. I’ll flash you a typical worm cross-section so you can compare the standard model with what you find,” she said.

  The
three of them exchanged a few more thoughts before ending the conversation. Haad was of the opinion that the exobiologist might be wrong in her assessment, but, hey, he only ran the ship and right now he had a shitload of information to process and no time for a protracted debate.

  Commander Yorn gathered his team and made his way toward the bow of the worm.

  They drew their weapons instinctively.

  Chapter 9

  Har Hansen, recently self-promoted to the rank of Fleet Admiral, paused at the air duct vent overlooking the biology lab. His eyes lit up when he heard the conversation between Lieutenant Commander Gertz and Captain Haad. Wow, he thought, alien space worms. Just what the doctor ordered. He fumbled his portable reader out of his back pack and typed the name he had just heard on the little keyboard. It took him several tries before he got the spelling correct and when the earthworm pages streamed across the screen he was fascinated. There must have been thousands of different kinds. He eased himself down on his elbows and started to read. After a minute or two he retrieved one of his snacks. It was shaping up into a long morning.

  * * *

  Maxine Hansen dried her hair and cleaned her teeth before settling down with a reader. Her quarters were cramped and spartan, but at least she had them all to herself. That made her life so much easier since she frequently had to negotiate the companionways and ladders getting back and forth from the cargo holds. She didn’t need the complication of a bunkmate to question her comings and goings.

  Her mind drifted before she voiced on the reader. She was getting to the point she was starting to fret the fact she had smuggled her son aboard a navy warship three years ago. How could she have been so stupid! One part of her wanted to request a private meeting with the captain and tell him the truth about what she had done even if it meant spending the rest of her cruise in solitary confinement. The Colonial Navy had very draconian rules when it came to officer conduct and discipline. She knew that fact when she’d knee-bumped Har’s duffel bag up the departure ramp. But she had no choice. There was no way she would have let the child welfare people send her only son to Earth; 800 light years was just too far. At first she thought of trying to convince a family on Elber Prime to take him in but could find no one willing to take care of her son for six years. Elber was a harsh world with just enough resources for the citizens and military families ensconced there. Taking on an extra mouth was just too daunting an undertaking for her limited acquaintances. Another part of her wanted to maintain the status quo and rein in Har the best way she could.