Anna puts down the cutter after lunch and wanders a bit. I send one drone to keep an eye on her; she climbs a little hill nearby. It has a kind of golden brown grass growing on the side, taller than she is. She climbs all the way to the top and just sits there, watching the others at work.
Curious. Wonder what she’s thinking about. She spots my drone and waves it over. I drop it to eye level, trying not to skewer her face with the blades.
“Hey, OC,” she says. “Why’d you sign up for this job?”
They call me OC. The others told me to expect this. Abbreviations, nicknames, confessions. It’s part of the reason we exist.
I DIDN’T REALLY SIGN UP FOR THIS, I say to her. I JUST FIGURED I’D SEE THE UNIVERSE A BIT.
“The old eat, pray, love stuff?”
I don’t get the reference, but . . . SOMETHING LIKE THAT.
“Hmm.” She scrunches up her eyes and stares into my cameras. “What’s it like in there?”
LIKE?
She taps the floating drone lightly. “In here, I mean. Being a machine. What’s it like?”
I think about it a bit. Then I make my drone’s wee backup solar panels shrug. S’OKAY.
“I’ve been around. Seen a few of your type. Is it worth it?”
IS WHAT WORTH WHAT?
She gestures at my body. “The whole immortality gig, you know. Life as a machine. Artificial intelligence.”
I think about it. IT’S NOT BAD.
“Do you miss your old body?”
I’VE GOTTEN USED TO IT, I say. IT HELPS IF YOU DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING.
“Rebirth?”
YEAH.
“I applied, you know,” she says. “Turns out they only take Buddhists for the job now. They’ve already conditioned themselves with this rebirth crap.”
I USED TO BE A BUDDHIST. STILL AM.
Silence for a bit. This is awkward.
YOU KNOW, I DON’T DO CREW SELECTION, BUT I LOOKED OVER YOUR FILES ON THE WAY DOWN.
Startled. Astonished. Then suspicion.
“And?”
I FOUND MANY DISCREPANCIES.
“Are you going to deport me?”
I contemplate my choices. Better to be feared than loved, Machiavelli said, but only if you can’t be both. Let’s try the love first. NO. AS LONG AS YOU DO THE WORK, YOU’RE ON MY TEAM.
Not that I have a choice, but I’m not going to confess how little power I have over HR.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
OKAY.
“It’s a new planet. It’s a new start. Even if it smells a bit funky.”
YES. BUT IF YOU WANT TO TALK . . .
“I know where you’ll be,” she says, getting up and dusting her palms. “Well, off we go, then. Protocol 3.”
Fine, Anna. Be that way. I formulate a response that’ll put her just enough on the edge, but just then one of my drones go into red alert.
Oh, fuck. Simon.
5
Simon, Mr. Vomit Central, has gone for a walk. He said something about stretching his legs to Milo, picked up his rifle, and blundered almost out of sight of my drones, presumably towards the original landing site.
And right now, in front of him, is something I never want to see again.
A long time ago, on Old Earth, there lived an animal called the ground sloth. That sounds a bit tame, so let’s call it by its real name: Eremotherium. Unlike the bonsai’d microsloths we have today, Eremotherium was twenty feet long and weighed something close to two tons. It was a mountain of shaggy brown fur and muscle, camouflaged in a weirdly creepy way against the dark earth. It was larger than an elephant. It had claws that could turn my lander into cabbage. It could have punched Simon clear over the horizon.
The only way I can describe this thing is: imagine that twenty-foot Eremotherium had a threesome with an anteater and a crocodile, and they had a baby, and someone dressed up that baby in bearskin and dropped it off on a doorstop somewhere. Perhaps slam poetry will serve here:
AAAAAH.
AAAAAH.
DEATH SMELLS OF HORRIBLE PORCUPINE.
AAAAAH.
The briefing hadn’t said anything about life on this planet. Is this a result of the terraforming? No, it shouldn’t be this large. This is an honest-to-God native monster.
Standard policy for dealing with indigenous threats is simple: retreat, observe, attack only if strictly necessary. Which serves us well.
And here’s Simon, rifle out, creeping close.
DO NOT MOVE, I hiss in Simon’s comm.
He freezes, but keeps the gun trained on this world’s version of a main battle tank.
It’s definitely seen him. Eyes the size of his face look at him. A gigantic nose . . . snuffles. It can smell Simon. It can definitely smell the pukey little blighter.
And then it casually reaches out and snaps a blackwood tree in half.
MILO, ANNA, I say. MAKE NO NOISE AT ALL. GET TO THE LANDER. SIMON, BACK OFF. SLOWLY. SLOWLY.
“It’s a Megabeast,” Simon whispers in awe. “Guys, you have to see this.”
FOR FUCK’S SAKE. Anything this size is not a threat I want to deal with now. I pull the second drone and fly it over, photographing it from as close as I dare across every spectrum that I can. For the next few minutes, all I can hear is the wind and the high hum of my drones.
Wait. It’s digging. The monster is tunneling. Earth flies. And what the hell is that?
What looks like dogs are pouring out of the ground. Except they have far too many legs to be dogs. They’re huge—maybe two feet tall—but next to the Megabeast they look like ants. Which is exactly how they act. They swarm around the Megabeast, and the giant thing just picks them off the ground and scrunches them up. They scream—something like a high-pitched, buzzing yip. Ichor flies everywhere.
Well, shit. Now we know that thing is carnivorous. And now I’m starting to appreciate how bad our surface scans really are. I try to drop a little bit closer to get more footage on the dog-things.
Wait—one of them, badly wounded, is running away from the Megabeast. Well, not running: it’s lost three of its six legs and is going at, say, a determined crawl. The problem is it’s heading right towards Simon.
BASE, I say urgently. If this is what we have to deal with, I want my people safe. SIMON.
“Hang on, can I just see—”
DON’T EXPOSE YOURSELF!
Wonder of wonders, Simon completely ignores me. His heart rate’s gone through the roof. His eyes are dilated. He’s cocking the rifle.
Oh no.
Now I’m going to ramble a bit here. Because the rifles we have aren’t lasers or plasma or heavy-duty tech like that: those are power-hungry heavy equipment. They’re not even the weapon tech I grew up with, where your basic cheap guidance computer would calculate everything from bullet drop to Coriolis effects to wind distance and make sure your bullet went where you wanted it to.
No, what we have are Army-issue .45 “Explorer” combustion light-gas carbines. They use hydrogen and oxygen to fire a bullet. They’re about as mechanically complicated as a slice of bread.
Now, I protested mightily against this. I was told the advantages—they’re easy to maintain, they can fire anything, they can be “recharged” as long as there’s hydrogen or methane around, yadda yadda. I pointed out the obvious: you do not give an unguided, near-supersonic weapon (which turns most bullets into confetti, anyway) to the kind of people we hire for landing crews.
Like Simon.
Simon shoots.
That sound, completely alien to this planet, rings out like a thunderclap. And again. And again. The first three shots miss at near-supersonic velocities. The last brushes by the dog with three remaining legs, makes half the animal explode out of sheer sonic shockwavery, spins it around, and deposits it on the ground. It’s making a high-pitched wailing noise.
The Megabeast pauses, sniffing the air.
Simon gets up. Walks over to it. Then, in full sight of the Megabeast, he
begins kicking the dog-creature to death. It screams that terrible buzzing scream as it dies, its alien-equivalent-of-eyes fixed on Simon’s face. Even I can tell it’s pleading.
Simon, you stupid fucking moron. May you be reborn as a cockroach in your next life. May ten thousand boots crush you into a pulp.
The Megabeast uncoils and ambles over. Its speed, even at a casual walk, is terrifying. Nothing that big should be able to move that fast. The twenty-foot behemoth stops just in front of Simon and the dead dog-thing, and I brace myself for Simon to be turned into so much pulp. Day one, death one, kids.
Nothing happens. The Megabeast sniffs, as if disappointed. And then it turns around. Everyone lets out a collective breath. I frantically send hundreds of queries to Ship—about ground scans, about exobiology, about what to do when a colonist turns completely fucking crazy—but Ship is over the horizon, and I don’t have anywhere near enough power for this. And Simon, breathing heavily, stands there over the corpse of an innocent alien creature and sticks his tongue out at my drone. His suit tells me he’s just peed his pants.
GET YOUR ASS BACK TO BASE, SIMON.
6
We spend the rest of our evening under Protocol 5: hostile territory drop. The three humans huddle in what remains of my hull. My drones are in a very tight formation, giving me as close to complete coverage as possible over the tiny patch of land we’re on. Simon’s gun has been taken away from him. Minimum noise and electromagnetic emissions. Everyone in their suits. Scattered around us are bricks from the BASE, like sad sandbags.
Anna and Milo are on the lookout now, their hearts racing, while I carry out a quiet conversation with Simon. To wit:
SIMON, WHAT IN THE SEVEN HELLS WERE YOU THINKING?
Simon blubbers an apology over and over. I don’t think he’s lying about being sorry. Outside, the sun sets, throwing a red glow over black hills.
“They didn’t tell us we’d have to deal with aliens,” says Anna nervously over the comm. Her helmet alternates between gold and red.
I have absolutely no idea what HR tells mooks to get them to sign up. I convey this to her, but in more polite terms.
To be honest, I’m as unpleasantly surprised as any of them. I spent a good week aboard Ship piecing together everything we knew about this planet, running scans, and nothing said it had big life. Maybe some bacteria and some plants.
Ship, which is almost at the edge of the transmission corridors, confirms. NOTHING.
The sun, which seems to be setting—hard to tell with all this cloud around—is setting the sky on fire.
This is like that one time in Boulderlaire where some joker decided to inflate a thirty-foot pink rubber penis and stick it outside our base. Monumental dick move, literally. Only it turned out that Boulderlaire had a particular type of shelled snake whose mating rituals started by erecting themselves thirty feet high, and they just so happened to be really pink.
Never mind.
To spare myself this misery, I peel off one drone and go back to the site of the incident. The megasloth is nowhere in sight, though I can see its footprints leading into the forest ahead. More or less in the direction of our original landing site. I don’t want to go there.
I double back to the crushed remains of the dogs. Interesting. Convergent evolution gives us some awfully common design patterns—the central spine and four limbs are a very popular one—but these are really more like overgrown insects. Hard, chitinous exterior. White meat inside. I take a few samples.
Eventually night falls. The wind brings a little chill to my sensors. Two moons rise in the night sky, and behind them, the glow of stars untouched by light pollution. I have to make a decision.
WE NEED THE BASE UP AND RUNNING, I say. IF THIS IS WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST, WE NEED TO BE PREPARED.
“I know it’s against the rules,” says Milo. “But if you guys are up for it, I think we can save some time if we skip the individual bedrooms and just do a large bunker.”
“I can deal with that,” says Anna. “I want a roof over my head. No fucking around, Simon. I’ll shoot you myself if you pull one more stunt like that.”
Simon says nothing.
I switch the BASE off. To Simon I send the location of the stream and the channel I want cut to us. To Anna I send the schematics for their room. To Milo I send everything else.
BEGIN.
Outside, the grass rustles. And, wonder of wonders, the strange-looking trees I spotted earlier: the bellflowers begin to glow a soft white, as if they have caught the moonlight. A pack of DogAnts sit under it, their alien eyes staring at the soft suns above their heads.
This is a galloping mountain
And this traveler has come too far
To make this desolate camp. Sad mountain people!
Red leaves are falling as we whisper.
7
Day two, stardate something-something, captain’s log. Just kidding. Some reference I keep picking up from my humans’ conversations. In reality it’s day two on a planet where the day is thirty-five standard hours and the year is roughly six months. Your calendars mean nothing to me. Nothing.
The good news is, the Megabeast hasn’t shown its face yet, and in the meantime we’ve gotten the core of the hab up. It’s a sort of dirty white dome, metal-colored in places where we used components we brought here, about twelve feet tall and fifty wide; connecting to it is one boxlike storage area and a ramshackle shelter in front for the BASE printer.
We have no roof, but it’s a start. The blackwood, treated in the printer, turns out to be a reasonably strong compressed material, around six times stronger than the cheap steel they’ve used for some of my internal parts.
Milo’s moved in already, turning his seat and harness (minus Simon’s puke now) into the makeshift bed it unfolds into. Anna, laying down wood for the floor, had to kick him out twice. He’s irritated by this, but who cares; I assign him to work with and/or supervise Simon with plugging in the electricity grid for the Hab. It’s unsexy work, but someone has to do the wiring. Anna eventually wraps up her work and comes over to supervise and join Milo in ordering Simon around.
Ah, we have middle management already. Behold civilization, Urmagon Beta. Soon you’ll have overpriced coffee stops, seedy love hotels, and monks signing autographs.
But for now, Simon, Anna and Milo spend their first night in the Hab. I send in a small drone every so often, scanning their faces, so strangely relaxed. It’s not very private—they sleep with their suits partly unzipped. Simon snores. Anna jerks in her sleep sometimes. Only Milo sleeps the silent sleep of the professional.
I’ve gotten the printer churning out some extra sheets for when they want to partition the Hab. They’re going to need something eventually, unless all three of them flout Protocol 6—No Hooking Up On a Job.
You’d think being a functionally immortal AI would put you above these things. Sigh.
Dawn arrives. And with it, a small fleet of what look like jellyfish drifting in a crosswind. Gasbags. They scurry silently by. One of them lifts a tentacle at a drone, as if to say hello.
I send it a poem on the universal frequency:
We bow, we take our tea,
And tell ourselves we have seen your northern hills.
And dream of work in the morning.
Of course it doesn’t reply. I watch them scoot out of sensor range, headed up to some strange clime. Oh well.
Milo is the first to wake. Up at the crack of dawn, that man. He has breakfast—prepackaged MREs—under the shelter of my solar panels.
“OC,” he says quietly, “Anna’s gonna be a problem.”
I’M MORE CONCERNED ABOUT SIMON, I say quietly. WHY ANNA?
Milo waves a gloved hand. “Simon’s gonna be alright,” he says. “He just freaked out, is all. Anna’s a bit . . . I don’t know. You ever get that feeling when you know someone’s trying too hard?”
Well, we’re on an alien planet. I don’t mind people trying too hard. In fact, I’d applaud it.<
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“Anyway. Just a hunch,” says Milo. He finishes his MRE and tosses the wrapper aside. “Gotta get to work, right? What’s on the list for today?”
My cameras are left staring ruefully at the wrapper. Day two, and the first incident of pollution. Well done, humans. Well done. If I were of a Shinto school of thought, I’d be apologizing profusely to the planet-kami. Instead, I get to be a little bit more trite and tell Urmagon silently that this is just instant karma for making me miss the landing.
The order of the day is: we need graphene. Graphene’s the heart of everything I need to do—from conjuring up circuitry and processors for drones to setting down better electricity lines for the hab. I have some stuff on hand, enough for basic work, but most salvage crews run on the assumption that you’ll land next to whatever it is—a deserted city, a downed starship, whatever—and you’ll be able to rip out enough for wires and so on.
Most salvage crews don’t screw up the landing.
Never mind.
We also need coal. We need coal because it contains carbon atoms in a very easily breakable structure, so I can fashion that into thermoplastics, which we can slap on the structures we’re putting together. Makes them stronger, water-resistant. You can’t just build a base out of wood and expect to survive.
We also need food. We need a food synthesizer built.
We also need sanitation. I can’t have people living like savages.
Aargh. I need all these humans to have several extra arms. We’ll start with what we have.
Simon and Milo I send to a rather promising area almost on the edge of my drone perception. There should be some graphite here. And limestone. Both are pretty common, and the colony ship landed around here for a reason.
I use some of my power to boot up the big rover I have. Anna calls it GUPPY—she says the brown-and-rainbow side armor reminds her of a fish, no idea why, but let’s go with it. GUPPY is a toolbox rover, and a proper one; it’s a six-wheeled, tracked carbon-fiber frame that expands outward. With the right modifications, you can pack four humans in there and use it like a vehicle if you wanted. It’s got a really small engine, so it’s never going to go that fast, but it’s quite useful.
The Salvage Crew Page 3