“Fascinating,” Kazuo said. “We’re ready to seal up here.”
Sal packed the faulty circuit board away and then lifted the steel panel up. “It was the Quazlpacti who left the Nazca Lines on Earth, you know.”
“To warn us against the dreaded gas monkeys of Jupiter, right?”
“Nope. Just graffiti. The Quazlpacti were jerks.”
Kazuo stood and turned to give her a hand with the panel, but stopped and put his hands on his hips instead. His posture positively radiated frustration, and Sal was once again amazed at how much subtle body language made it through the bulk of the powered suits.
“You’re holding that panel up by yourself? You weren’t going to experiment on production units anymore, damn it.”
She laughed. “I wasn’t experimenting. It’s just a little performance tweak.”
“Tweak my ass,” Kazuo said. “The suit’s only rated to lift half that weight.”
She walked past him and lowered the panel over the exposed compartment, then punched the pressure seals into place. “I wrote the spec, thanks. No need to quote it to me.”
“That’s not the point. It’s not safe, Sal. What if your ‘tweaks’ fail and five hundred kilos of steel come tumbling down on you? What then?”
“Then my stalwart yet officious partner digs me out and carries me back to the airlock.” She gave Kazuo a nudge in the ribs, which he certainly didn’t feel. “Those are the dangers of frontier engineering, soldier boy. Better get used to it.”
With the panel sealed up, they both marched back toward the eastern airlock at a pace much slower than their suits were capable of. After a long silence, Kazuo said, “You’re really aggravating, you know that?”
“Of course I know it,” Sal replied. “It’s why you like me so dang much.”
Kazuo groaned, and Sal took it as a sign of affection. Kazuo wasn’t the kind to let his positive emotions bubble up to the surface, but it meant they burned twice as bright deep down inside. At least, that’s what Sal told herself while she continued to dig around for them.
By the time they reached the airlock, the sandstorm was still brewing in the distance, and hadn’t made much progress. Sal would’ve been delighted if it never bothered to come together at all. The sound of stones battering the colony’s outer shell always ruined her concentration in the lab.
The airlock doors closed behind them and the chamber began to pressurize, a process made agonizingly slow by obsolete, decrepit airlock hardware. The old tech did its job, though, and just well enough that Sal’s requests for replacements from Earth were ignored. Since they were all mission critical systems, she wasn’t even allowed to experiment on them. Not the slightest little bit.
“Tell me something interesting about Mars,” Kazuo said, looking to kill time.
Sal’s mind was still on those annoying, tiny little rocks. “Did you know that ninety percent of the rocks currently on Mars were brought here by the original colonists?”
“Is that so?” Kazuo asked.
“Absolute fact. The Martian landscape, as originally seen by the Viking probes, was mind numbingly boring, so the colonists brought rocks with them to liven up the scenery. A quarter of the colonists were landscapers by profession, and they spent the first three years carefully arranging them, like some kind of giant Zen garden.”
“Incredible,” he said. “What about the sandstorms?”
“Ruined all of their hard work over and over again, until they finally gave up trying.”
The pressure was half-way there.
“Tell me something interesting about Earth,” she said.
He took a moment to think. Kazuo wasn’t the imaginative type, so he tended to answer with actual, interesting facts. Or things he thought were interesting, but often times weren’t. “Did you know…” he droned out as he tried to think of something, “that when Yuri Gagarin first orbited Earth, the Great Wall of China was the only man-made structure visible from space.”
“I did know that.”
“Oh.”
“And it’s not true.”
“Damn.”
An uncomfortable silence persisted until the green pressure light came on and the internal doors parted, revealing the mission readiness bay. The oblong room was filled with standard GAF pressure suits hanging on racks, as well as a half-dozen of Sal’s MASPEC powered suits, which faced the wall with their backs open.
Sal and Kazuo marched inside and each stepped up to a mechanical docking clamp, which held MASPECs while their pilots climbed out. A person wasn’t strong enough to remain upright once the suit powered down, and attempts to escape were quite comical when they didn’t result in serious injury.
Sal pulled herself out of the back of her suit and retrieved the faulty circuit board from its hip-pack while Kazuo was still going step-by-step through the power-down procedure. As usual, she found his tenacious grip on procedure endearing in a ridiculous sort of way.
Her comm headset rang. “Yeah?”
“Hey Sal, it’s Rachael. Are you back yet?”
That was Rachael Peretz, a communications operator who—like Sal—had come to Mars as a child with the first wave. Sal had babysat her once upon a time, and they were close friends now. She silently hoped this wasn’t another gab session about the cute sounding boy on the Shackleton Expedition. She didn’t think she’d survive another one of those.
“Just climbed out of my suit. What’s up?”
“Something weird. Can you come to the Comm Center and give me a hand?”
A technical mystery. Sal considered it a minor blessing. “I’ll be there in five. Saladin out.”
She snatched the duty jacket from her locker and took off on an Ares sprint. With gravity only a third of Earth’s, the Martian colonists had learned to run upwards of forty kilometers an hour, and jump several times their own height. It was one of the skills that separated long time colonists like Sal from more recent transplants like Kazuo, who’d dislocated his shoulder several times trying.
Sal flew through one corridor after the next, and then started braking by leaning back and scraping her feet along floor. The motion was rather like skidding down a long hill. She came to a perfect stop in front of the Comm Center door, and it slid open in front of her.
“Hey, what’s going on, Rache?”
Rachael waved her over, and Sal stepped up to her friend’s workstation. The screen showed a graph of a waveform drawn in sharp right angles. It was a digital signal. “Alright. What am I looking at?”
“It all started two days ago. The infra-red receiver blacked out, and at first, we thought it might be solar flare interference, but then it started to happen regularly. Each blackout lasted forty-five minutes, followed by the receiver returning to normal operation for forty-five.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah, I thought so too. Some of us thought it might be a software problem, or a piece of equipment faulting out.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“Nope. Turns out, we’re being hit by an infra-red laser that’s overloading the photodiode. And get this… it’s coming from Earth.”
Earth. No one was talking about it anymore. They hadn’t heard anything from home for more than two months. At first they assumed it was some minor technical problem, or a bout of nasty solar weather. Then, as the silence stretched on, theories of all sorts started to fly, from a nuclear war to some kind of global communications collapse caused by terrorists. Then the conversation just died. There was no way to know what was going on, so they stopped trying to guess.
“Once we tuned down the receiver’s sensitivity, I started analyzing the beam, and I found this signal embedded inside.” She pointed to the screen.
“And you think someone’s trying to talk to us?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I haven’t been able to decode it, though. I was hoping you’d take a look.”
Sal realized her jaw was hanging open. She closed her mouth and stared at the screen for a moment, and tried
not to imagine what it could mean. “Yeah. I’ll do that,” she said. “Add me to the comms working group, and I’ll take a crack at it.”
“Thanks,” Rachael said, “and until we know what’s going on, let’s keep this quiet, alright? No need to panic anyone.”
“Sure thing,” Sal said, and she stayed for several long minutes, watching the peaks and troughs of the signal stretch across the screen.
Chapter 20:
A Call to Arms
Marcus Donovan was deep inside Legacy’s secondary hull, her factory complex. From the observation platform where he stood, he looked out over a cavernous chamber lit in blue-green and filled everywhere with activity. The Shackleton Explorer was there, docked inside a series of orange constructor rings whose countless biomechanical arms twitched about and inspected the vessel. Legacy wanted to know more about human technology, and they both agreed the most direct route was to take a closer look. Faulkland was against it at first, but after six weeks of constant badgering, he finally caved and reluctantly allowed his boat to be brought inside.
The last of Shackleton’s crew moved to more comfortable quarters aboard Legacy, although the engineering team maintained a presence on the Shackleton to monitor its nuclear reactor. The chief engineer, Olli Enqvist, insisted the reactor was perfectly safe and could operate itself, but he preferred to err on the side of caution. Marcus smelled subtext.
All the while, Legacy was in a state of transformation. She had been quiet and despondent when she woke up, but the crew’s presence raised her spirits. Marcus didn’t completely understand it, but humans invigorated her somehow. She had been incomplete without them; now she was filled with purpose and an eagerness to please.
Legacy’s factory especially had become a constant hub of activity. She quickly constructed a small fleet of utility vessels shaped like pill-bugs, which the miners called tugs and adopted as their own. With the miners as their pilots, the tugs swarmed out to assay and retrieve asteroids, feeding them to the factory complex which hungrily digested tonne after tonne of ore. This led to the construction of yet more tugs, some of which joined in acquiring minerals, while others went about repairing Legacy’s hull.
Repairs across Legacy were moving faster than anyone expected, thanks primarily to the efforts of Juliette St. Martin, whose insights into the alien technology were unmatched by any of the engineers. Legacy’s internal systems more closely resembled biological structures than they did machines, and healing her was more like medicine than car-repair. Being an exceptional physician with plenty of experience and a keen interest in alien biology, Juliette was the perfect woman for the job.
Marcus suspected Juliette and Legacy were bonding in ways he never could, and the ship all but confirmed it. She was in fact growing quite fond of the doctor, and Marcus felt a twinge of jealousy which he realized was utterly absurd. The most confounding part was that he couldn’t figure out which of the two he was more jealous of.
The rest of the team were busy adapting their equipment to Legacy by trial and error. Mostly error. The ship learned to produce compatible electrical outlets after a bit of practice, so power wasn’t an issue, but all attempts to mate their computers to her information network failed. They were forced instead to setup their systems in tandem with hers, including a comm system which she essentially ferried signals to and from. Rao likened it to visiting a cutting edge radio-telescope and then being forced to use one’s own Victorian spyglass.
As Marcus stood there in the factory watching the machines do their work, Legacy repeated a request which she’d made a dozen times already. She explained that whole swaths of her memory had faded during her eons-long slumber, and she needed new patterns to fill in the gaps. Specifically, she wanted to dismantle the Shackleton and analyze its construction. She was sure she could interface with the crew more easily if she could better mimic their technology.
Marcus had done his best to put the decision off, but she was becoming more insistent. The honest truth was that the decision wasn’t his to make, though; the Shackleton wasn’t his ship. And even though he was now a permanent resident aboard Legacy, he doubted the rest of the crew were so enthusiastic about the idea. Dismantling the Shackleton would mean total commitment, and there could be no turning back.
“Alright, I’ll ask him,” Marcus said. He closed his eyes, looked around for Faulkland’s position, and received a picture of the Commander seated in one of the recreation facilities. They were like indoor parks, complete with simulated sun, wind and sky, and the crew had become enamored with them. The ship was also working on artificial grass, and by all reports was getting damned good at it.
Marcus spoke, and the ship echoed his voice at the Commander’s location. “Donovan to Faulkland, please meet me in the Shackleton’s docking bay.”
Then he leaned over the railing and waited, watching the constructor rings’ arms gingerly probe the Shackleton’s surface. Less than a minute later he heard the whoosh of the transit tube, followed by the dull clack of Faulkland’s boots on the hard floor.
“What’s on your mind, Marc?”
Faulkland was a straight shooter, and Marcus figured it best to come straight out. “She wants to dismantle the Shackleton.”
“Hell no.”
“Fair enough. I told her you’d say that, but she still wanted me to ask. She wants to improve how she interacts with us, and she thinks the most direct way would be to tear the Shackleton down and replicate its interfaces.”
Faulkland leaned over the railing next to Marcus, and he too watched the small insectoid arms examine his ship’s hull. “Do you know how long I had to waited to get my own explorer? I ran freight to the moon and back for ten years, Marc, then Mars for another three just to get my name on the list. This ship’s the only thing I ever wanted.”
“I know,” Marcus said, “and she’s a beauty. Best we ever built.”
“Don’t exaggerate. Seed I… now that was a piece of work. Brought a whole dang colony to Mars. I know it only had to do its job once, but man I woulda liked to be there to see it. Still amazed that it worked at all.”
“You and me both. How about the best I ever built then?”
Faulkland laughed. “See, that’s just it, Doc. The Shackleton’s just another project to you, another toy for you to fix, wind-up and send along its merry way. You don’t understand that she’s my ship. She’s my purpose.”
For the first time in his life, Marcus was in a place to understand what that meant. He had no intention of moving on ever again, because he’d found his purpose and he was ready to spend the rest of his life aboard her. “This may surprise you, Commander, but I get it. I’m understanding it better every day.”
Legacy understood, too. She considered the bond between ship and crew to be sacred. A crew was her purpose, her reason for being. A way to solve both of their problems occurred to her, and she passed it along to Marcus.
“She’s wants to offer you something in return,” Marcus said.
“I can’t imagine what would make me change my mind.”
Marcus turned towards him with an earnest look in his eyes. “How about a new a ship?”
“Come again?”
A number of faint memories flew through Marcus’ head, different ships of different types. “Once Legacy has adapted her systems for our use, she’s promised to build you a new Eireki cruiser. No more primitive fission reactor or spinner section. We’re talking about a hollow-drive powered, trans-atmospheric living ship with artificial gravity, able to make the trip from Earth to Mars in eight minutes flat.”
Faulkland was silent for a long time while he looked at his ship and considered. “Eight minutes to Mars?” he asked.
“Eight minutes.”
He turned to Marcus and motioned to his own temple. “I don’t need one of those things, do I?”
The neural interface on Marcus’ head had grown during the two months since it was attached, and the sight of it still disturbed the crew. He could hardly blame the
m. “No neural interface. That’s the point of pulling the Shackleton apart, right?”
“Good. I want to bond with a ship, but I don’t really want to ‘bond’ with a ship, if you catch my drift. I don’t need anyone else in my head.”
“So that’s a yes?” Marcus asked with a tentative smile.
“Yeah… just do it before I change my mind. I get input on the new ship’s design, too.”
“Of course,” Marcus said. “She wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Faulkland tapped his comm headset. “Faulkland to Enqvist, are you aboard the Shackleton?”
Marcus heard the transmission echo through his interface. “Yes, sir,” Enqvist said.
“Shut the reactor down, and then join us on Legacy.”
“Sir?”
“We’re scuttling the ship.”
“Roger. Does the big beast know how to deal with a hot reactor, sir?”
Faulkland looked to Marcus who nodded.
“Donovan claims she does. I’m inclined to believe him.”
“Aye aye, sir. Inserting control rods now. I’ll be out in five. Over and out.”
The Shackleton’s running lights went out and true to his word, Enqvist came out four-and-a-half minutes later. He waved up at the platform, and the constructor rings’ arms immediately began pulling the ship apart and examining each component. Faulkland grimaced, but didn’t look away. “It’s like watching a spider eat a fly.”
Legacy checked Marcus’ memory for images of spiders and was slightly offended at the comparison. Marcus didn’t feel the need to pass that along.
Both men watched the carnage for several moments more, until an incoming message interrupted them. “Shen to Faulkland and Donovan. We’ve just received a priority encrypted transmission from Ares Colony with your names on it.”
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