Blue Defender

by Sean Monaghan

  Matti-Jay put the lasagna into the little cooker slot just between the door to the shower-toilet and the locker. Everything was just jammed up against everything else.

  In moments the food was ready, and the smell was surprisingly good. Rich and tomato-ish.

  She ate it sitting back in the main cockpit seat, watching over the displays. The microbots continued their work on the strut, but it was slow going. They’d barely made any headway yet. It was going to take hours. Days, even.

  The lasagna was good. Perhaps partly because she was pretty hungry. She ate it pretty quickly. Rinsed with plain water from a bottle. She polished off the cheesecake fast as well. Too sweet, but that was kind of welcome.

  Night had fallen. The rain continued and she could see the tall animal-robot stepping around at the edge of the waves. It had lights shining down at the sand. The lights made beams in the hazy rain.

  The robot walked on and on and soon vanished from sight.

  Matti-Jay watched the rain for a while longer. Maybe it would have eased up by morning.

  She shut down the displays and brushed her teeth and configured the cockpit seat to lie right back and smooth out into a bed. It took up the whole length of the cabin, from the back wall by the lockers, to the footwell under the consoles.

  The other seat was beginning to look distressed. Parts of it sagged where the microbots had removed sections of the seat’s interior. The dark mesh upholstery was still intact, as if they didn’t need to use anything from that.

  Matti-Jay stretched out and draped herself in a blanket from the locker. She stared at the cabin’s ceiling. Some of the panels there were out of alignment. Damage from everything that had happened. Cosmetic really. It could wait.

  Staring up, she felt so far from everyone. From everything. Would she ever even be able to get to sleep at all?

  The answer came almost right away as she woke with sunlight streaming through the cockpit window.

  And, staring in at her, two of the animal-robot things.

  Chapter Thirty

  The sunlight was bright, but little of its warmth made it into the Blue Defender’s cockpit. The craft was very well insulated. Heat didn’t get in or out easily.

  Matti-Jay sat up on her bed and peered out the cockpit window at the two robotic things peering back at her. As she leaned forward, the two heads each made a slight movement. Toward each other and back toward her. As if they were sharing a glance. Just to make sure the other had noticed that the occupant had woken. A very human kind of gesture.

  “What do you want?” she said. She would be frightened except that one of them had helped her.

  The two just kept staring.

  Matti-Jay got off the bed. The other seat was still upright, but barely. It sagged like the beanbag seat she’d had as a kid. As if she could sit and it would rustle and mold comfortably to her shape. It smelled oily and metallic. Drifting residues from the work the microbots were doing.

  She pulled the blanket from the other seat and waved at the console controls to get the seat to reconfigure from a bed to a pilot’s seat. She would have to be careful that she didn’t get enthusiastic with her little microbot army. She didn’t want them disassembling this last seat. Nor anything else useful and vital.

  The seat creaked as it folded back up ready for her to sit. She tossed the blanket by the lockers and sat.

  The two robots continued to look at her.

  Out over the ocean, distant storm clouds rose. Far off, and possibly just rolling north.

  She checked on the progress of the microbots. The antenna was looking good. The displays showed it being erected to lead from the tip of the Blue Defender’s tail right the way to just above the cockpit. They wouldn’t be able to fly with the antenna in place, but then, it might be days, even weeks, before she was flying anywhere.

  She tried the radio again. Nothing but static.

  The robots pulled back from her view. They strode away.

  Using the remaining external sensors, Matti-Jay worked on getting imagery of the area surrounding the downed vessel. Were the cats still around? Hopefully they had lost interest overnight and gone off in search of actual prey.

  The images were patchy–not all of the external cameras and other sensors were still working. No surprise really. Not after what the little vessel had been through.

  But Matti-Jay was able to cobble together a good enough picture to get a feel for the location. The dunes a hundred or so meters back, the low sandy beach stretching out to the waves. The two tall robots striding around. Both looking at the Blue Defender.

  No sign of the cats.

  Not to say that they weren’t there. Just not at the moment.

  Matti-Jay put on her boots. She got a soil probe from the locker. The probe was a half-meter long aluminum tube, with a fat scoop on one end, and a T handle on the other. Designed for gathering soil samples. It was the closest thing to a weapon she had.

  She dressed, pulling on a jacket from the supplies. It was heavy and warm. The day might be clear and rain-free at the moment, but the console indicated that the morning air was chilly.

  She wasn’t going off into the dunes this time. That would take more planning and more equipment. But she did want to get a look around the Blue Defender’s hull and wings. Just to get a feel for what kind of shape she was in.

  The onboard sensors had given Matti-Jay a very good rundown on all the issues, but that was quite different from looking with your own eyes. It might not be very exact, but if she was going to get the vessel up and flying, she needed a good sense of things.

  It was hard to define. Almost like the way that flying the vessel was both an art and a science. There were those very exact parameters of airspeed and lift and so on, but there was also the feel of the yoke in your hand and the slight vibrations through the seat back.

  She would comprehend the vessel’s state better if she looked her over.

  The airlock let her cycle through, without any trouble this time. Matti-Jay dropped out to the sand. The air was cooler. The sand squeaked underfoot

  All around there were tiny black holes. Spaced out about a meter or so from each other. Not quite a regular pattern, but close. Some of the holes had little bubbles by them, and they all had tiny beads of sand piled up in a spiraling trail that led away from the hole.

  Something like crabs? Tiny ones.

  Technically she should get a sample. The back of the runabout’s lockers contained a full sample kit, with spoons and spatulas and cotton tips, as well as a variety of bags and capped vials.

  That could wait. She would be here for days. Plenty of time to gather samples.

  She walked away from the airlock hatch. She stepped carefully between the crab holes and around to the port wing. It was partly buried in sand, so she could walk right up onto the wing. She looked around, and moved across to the fuselage, careful to avoid the sections of the wing marked No Step. There were parts that could support a person’s weight, for maintenance, but other parts that were more delicate.

  The dragon’s tooth scars on the hull were obvious. Some almost a meter long. The solidified repair gel had weird swirls inside its translucent bulk.

  Exactly how it should look, most likely. Matti-Jay used the set of foot and handholds that ran up the side just astern of the airlock hatch. She clambered onto the upper hull. Something creaked.

  She examined the repairs, kneeling. It was amazing that the vessel hadn’t depressurized. Catastrophically. Yet here she was.

  She put her hand on the solidified gel. It was cold and solid. Rock, but slickly smooth. A little charred from the re-entry heat. Whoever had come up with the system deserved a medal. A very clever combination of chemical and mechanical processes.

  It had saved her life.

  The gel was serviceable for flight, but it would be better to have the microbots cut it away and reinstate the hull sections. Of course, that would add days to the repairs. She needed to get things up and running as quickly as pos
sible.

  Matti-Jay stood and looked around. A wind blustered through the dunes, throwing plumes of sand from exposed edges. There was no sign of the cats. And only one of the robot-animals was visible.

  Matti-Jay turned toward the shore. She jumped, startled by the other one running in at her. She stumbled and crouched quickly to keep her balance.

  Before she could get to the footholds to make her way down, the thing had reached the runabout.

  Chapter Thirty One

  Matti-Jay stood, bracing herself as well as she could on the runabout’s upper hull. Feet wide apart. Knees bent.

  Out in the bay a seabird furled its wings. It dove straight into the water. A white plume splash left behind. Wind carried the spray away.

  The big robot was close. The bristly oblong head inclined to look at her as the robot came to a stop. It smelled of fish and brine. No surprise there. It had been wading in the shallows.

  Matti-Jay held up the soil sampler. As if it would do any good.

  The robot moved its head. Kind of like it was staring at the sampler.

  “Well,” Matti-Jay said, “I guess this won’t discourage you much.” She waved the sampler. It had a good heft to it. Enough to shove away one of those cats. If it was attacking.

  The robot issued a quiet peeping sound, similar to the sounds the cats had made. This sound wasn’t worrying at all. More soothing than anything.

  “You’re kind of friendly, aren’t you?” Matti-Jay said.

  The robot leaned closer and a slot opened in the front. A blade whipped out. Right at her. Matti-Jay stumbled again

  The blade didn’t touch her.

  Instead, it grabbed the soil sampler. The blade had some kind of webbing on it that gripped the sampler. Tight.

  The blade reeled back, taking the sampler with it. The blade and sampler vanished into the slot. The robot stepped back.

  “Great,” Matti-Jay said, regaining her footing. “You’re real friendly there. You know that was my defense against those cats?” She looked around, wondering if they were about to appear.

  The robot hadn’t felt threatening. Still didn’t, in a way. Even with stealing her weapon, she felt okay with the thing. It was more like a leftover from the civilization that had been here.

  Oh. That was a key right there. The civilization had gone. All those buildings and layouts were artifacts.

  The dragon too. Left behind.

  Automatons. Machines still doing their jobs long after the civilization had gone. There were so many questions.

  Where had they gone? Why had they gone? And when? Those signals that had attracted the attention of Matti-Jay’s parents had taken fifty years to cross the void.

  All those questions that would have been answered if the mission had proceeded in an orderly fashion. If the missing civilization’s space defenses–which was what that dragon had to have been–hadn’t intervened.

  Should have thought of that. Should have been more prepared for aggression.

  Her parents had been against that. A show of military strength, they thought, was not the way to start out when making contact with an alien civilization. Best just to be inquisitive scientists.

  But maybe if the Donner had had better defenses they wouldn’t be in this situation now. Forced to use soil samplers for personal defense.

  Matti-Jay focused back on the robot that had stolen her sampler. The robot had stepped away.

  “Are you going to protect me?” she said. “From the cats? Because, you know, you’ve got my stick. It wasn’t a very big stick, but it was all I had.”

  What was the point? The thing wasn’t listening.

  Matti-Jay walked along the Blue Defender’s spine toward the tail. Dark streaks marred the tail’s surface. Remnants from the descent.

  An odd kind of line led forward from the tail’s upper tip. The new antenna. Growing slowly. A dark fuzz of microbots swarmed over the antenna, like ants stripping a tree branch. It was strange to see them. Mostly they were tucked away in the innards of the vessel. Kind of how she’d seen the second cockpit seat deflate, in a way, from all the activity inside, but hadn’t seen any of the microbots at all.

  Of course being out would be good for them. Their tiny power packs would absorb heat and light from the star and recharge their little batteries. Like insects, the microbots used sugar and other nutrients for energy. The designers had borrowed the idea from nature. Matti-Jay couldn’t pretend to understand it, but it seemed pretty clever to her.

  The microbots could even reproduce. They could build replacement copies of themselves from raw materials.

  Maybe she should instruct them to do that. It would be good to have more of them. Dedicating some of the workforce to build replicas would slow things down, but overall it would speed the repairs up.

  Surely the Blue Defender’s computer could work out the optimum level to exploit the raw materials, the repairs and the timing.

  A gust of wind from the ocean flipped her hair around. The salty scent was refreshing. The other robot was crouching at the dunes. It looked odd, with its front legs splayed sideways and its back legs bent. The sand in front of its body was moving.

  Matti-Jay put her hand up to shield her eyes to see better. The sand was moving because the robot had some kind of appendages digging into it. Scoops.

  It was scooping sand into its body. Was that how it fed? How it powered itself? That would be some interesting kind of reactor, able to generate power from sand.

  Of course, who knew what aliens and their robots were capable of. She just hoped that they didn’t get aggressive before she was able to fly off.

  Matti-Jay surveyed her craft again, just noting anything that might be wrong. The panels were all slightly rippled and some had separated. The repair gel marred the blue and white parts.

  The microbots had a long haul ahead of them. She was going to need to manage this well.

  It was time to have another attempt at getting in contact with Charlie and the others. Even without the new antenna working yet, it was worth a try. After all, she had heard from them when she’d first set down.

  The sand-gobbling robot had stood back upright again now. And the weapon-stealer had stepped back from the wreck.

  “You have names now,” she called out. “I’m going to call you S.G. and W.S. for short.” Sand Gobbler and Weapon Stealer. Esgee and Double-U Ess. Well, however you pronounced that. It would do them.

  Matti-Jay used the footholds to get down to the wing, and she returned to the Blue Defender’s interior.

  Sitting back at the consoles, she checked the progress. Ten percent on the antenna. Less than one percent on the wing strut.

  And those were only the first of the things that needed repairing. This was a big job.

  Having this only take days was ambitious. Weeks might just roll on into months.

  Stuck here on the beach.

  The microbots were good, but being so tiny, the work was slow.

  What she was going to do was divide out some of the microbot army and get them building more of themselves. Then they could work faster. With some waves into the console command systems, she worked on the microbot control systems.

  It was all very intuitive. There was a simple section to allow for reproduction. Matti-Jay dedicated ten percent of their numbers to the job of building new ones. The system gave her a timeline estimate that it would take three and a half hours to replenish. It took her a moment to figure that out.

  It meant that in that time the ten percent would have replaced themselves. The army would be back to full strength.

  And that ten percent could keep building. Another three and a half hours and she would be ten percent up. She could leave those ones building more and more and just keep ramping up the repair speed.

  The display flashed her a reminder warning. Each microbot was programmed to only build one copy. After that, system checks prevented it from building more. It was a safety system. To stop the microbots from going haywire and co
nsuming all the resources in an effort to build more and more.

  Still she could send that first ten percent back to repairs and have the replacements they’d built build copies of themselves. One each, before they would head into the repairs.

  She could increase the size of the army, but not exponentially. That was all right. Any increase in numbers would speed up the repairs.

  Something moved out through the cockpit window.

  One of the big robots. Double-U Ess. It moved its antenna head in closer. Peering in at her again. Matti-Jay waved. Silly really. Strange, though; the two big robots were like company. Like something she could count on to be around.

  “I’m going to call you Dub,” Matti-Jay said.

  Beyond, the sky was darkening. Those storms rolling in again.

  The big robot tipped its head back. The slot opened in the body again and out came her soil sampler, held by the webby blade.

  “Are you trying to give that back?” Matti-Jay said. The thing couldn’t hear her through the cockpit window anyway.

  But then the robot did something odd. It produced another soil sampler. Identical to the first, and held out on another blade.

  Matti-Jay smiled. “All right,” she said. “You got my attention.”

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Back outside the airlock, Matti-Jay stepped across the sand. It felt odd underfoot. Almost alive.

  The wind was cooler and that rain was on its way in again. It couldn’t rain here all the time, could it? Was it just seasonal?

  Ludelle did have seasons, though not as pronounced as on Earth. Ludelle took almost five hundred days–Earth days–to orbit the star. The planet’s axial tilt was a shade under fifteen degrees.

  Earth’s was closer to twenty-three degrees. That gave it some extremes of seasons. Places where it was scorching hot in summer and it also snowed in winter.

  Unlikely that anywhere here would experience anything like that. Maybe her location just received rain every day. Stormy rain at that.