“You’re twenty-eight, Moses.”
“Old enough to know what I want and young enough to get it.” I wiped the sweat off my cheek. At least, I hoped it was just sweat. “Why wouldn’t you let me shoot it?”
“Because we don’t need a hole in the ship. You were aiming at an outer wall.”
Now that he said it, I felt stupid for not thinking of that.
Clark heaved a clearing sigh and shrugged off the morning’s unsavory action. “Nice way to start the day. Atmosphere scratch and a wild bat chase, all before breakfast. We get a pass for the rest of the month. Everything easy from now on.”
I eyed him in a way we both recognized. “You don’t know my mother. This isn’t Maid Marian we’re talking about.”
He waved a hand. “Like it or not, tomorrow we’ll be on our way back to Earth, with your mom and all her people tucked safely away in our ride-alongs.”
“Give her a hobby. Put the bat in with her.”
“Come with me.”
He led the way through the bay hatch into the ship’s wide-mouthed hangar bay. The bay—I’d been told on my orientation tour—was an open area built to carry shipping containers of almost any configuration. The ship was thick-bodied, massive, and utilitarian, with length almost proportional to its height. Folding bulkheads could be arranged to accommodate different kinds of cargo. I’d seen it done, and what a sight it was to watch a bay the size of a football field suddenly reconfigure itself at the push of a button.
There was no artistry in the bay, as in some passenger parts of the ship that indulged the aesthetics. Nothing here appealed to the eye, except to the trained industrial eye which might appreciate it. I think the crew appreciated it plenty. Everything was black, gray, and white, metallic colors, except for brightly painted rotating gantry cranes which were encoded red, yellow, green, blue, or purple for quick identification. Those looked like a kids’ swingset. During the two months before cryo, I’d mostly followed Pocket around the ship and helped him, just to keep busy and not give anybody the idea that I was just watching. At first I’d followed Clark around while he did his captain stuff, but I always felt like an odd sock. When I followed Pocket, there were things I could do. I’m a great stooge. Bosuns always needed stooges. I could hold the ends of things, flip switches, ratchet something up, drive something, carry the other end, open hatches and close boxes, run and get things, and watch in admiration. Pocket and I seemed to be mutually useful; he was a loner who didn’t like to ask for help but was glad to have it. We didn’t chit-chat, yet we communicated great. I had a knack for anticipating what he needed, and I knew when to “stand by.” When other crewmen came past us, doing their crewy work or driving the body-hugging loaders, I would be “working” too—either actually doing, holding, or ratcheting, or I would be “standing by” for Pocket. What the hell, half of success is identity, right?
Wishing I could be with Pocket instead, I followed Clark along the centerline bulkhead, a wall that ran the whole length of the bay. Around us the crew climbed, crawled, and rappelled around the stacked cargo containers. Clark hurried through without a glance at his crew. Perhaps that was a practiced habit, to keep them concentrating on their work and not on his watching them do their work.
We hurried along in the man-made pathway between stacked yellow containers, each as big as a garage and marked with the PlanCom logo, the silhouette of a cowboy on his mustang, lassoing a planet. I almost had to jog to keep up with him. He was serious about keeping to that tight schedule. His boots made a deliberate skup-skup-skup sound on the deck coated with recycled hard rubber, all the way to the engine room, where he finally stopped. The engine room housed the magnetic field propulsion units and the plasma reaction chambers. I only remembered that because the door said, “MAG FIELD PROP/P.R. CHAMBER—CREW ONLY” and I had to walk past it to get to the aft head. I wasn’t crew, so I never went in there.
Never? Sounded like I’d been aboard a year. Actually, I’d spent a whole two months awake and fifteen months asleep.
Clark gazed up at the massive containers. “These boxes make me nervous just walking by. The idea of malfunctions and all. Nobody’s perfect—and no automated system is foolproof. If the containment’s security system went bad, we’d all be eradicated in about eighty seconds.”
Plumbing for reassurance, I commented, “Well, sometimes you just have to put your life in somebody else’s hands, right?”
He didn’t respond. He drew a breath and sighed it out, then stepped to the nearest giant green container, gazed the fourteen feet up to the top, then back to the high-security lock patch. First, both his thumbs were required for a print scan. At first the small screen showed a red light of activation and warning. Any further tampering could result in a sharp electrical stun if the patch didn’t recognize the person doing the decoding of its program.
I sidled back, hoping I was out of range, but not far enough to let him know I was nervous. At least he’d had the guts to admit he was scared. Kinda made me ashamed.
The red light turned orange, with a green chevron in the middle. Clark leaned forward and presented his left eye for a retinal identification. The light turned yellow. The green chevron remained. Clark pulled out the MRI remote and pressed it to his left temple. A brain scan completed the security code. The yellow lights went away and the green chevron began to flash, overlaid with the word CAUTION.
Caution . . . caution . . . caution . . .
The giant loading door panels on the container began to repeal themselves, panel by panel, starting in the middle. The container was opening. Now nothing stood between the two of us and the nightmare inside.
I took another step back.
2
The massive door panels clunked one under the other, like curtain blinds moving slowly apart to reveal the sunrise. I bumped backward against the container behind me and spread my arms. “God a’mighty . . . ”
There was no sunrise inside the giant container. Nothing so encouraging. We stood together, Clark a little taller and bulkier than myself, yet we were both suddenly very small. My chest tightened, my heart thudding as I looked up at a gleaming phalanx of robots. Like the Confederate line at Seminary Ridge, the mechanized regiment bristled with spines and explosive-tipped barbs, thousand-eyed sensors and all the things any human kid recognizes as “do not touch.” Each of dozens just in this box alone, was shaped like a bullet cartridge with a round helmet. The helmet was embedded with spines, barbs, and feelers. There was no front, back, or sides, and each had six folded legs, usable in any combination. They could move in any direction. And they fired those poison-filled darts by sensors. The darts were supersonic. Once targeted, there was no getting out of the way. I’d seen smaller versions for urban warfare, but nothing this bulky and over-armed. Even standing there in repose, the machines broadcast aggression. They were scary as hell.
“They’re something, aren’t they?” Clark scanned the dangerous rank. The lights of the cargo bay reflected from the gleaming bodies of the robot soldiers, fell back upon his all-too-human face and changed his eyes to metallic disks. “Every one of them could kill a small town. They’re loaded with sensors programmed to seek out any life form whose DNA doesn’t match the planet. Those barbs are actually percussion hypodermics. Their bodies are canisters loaded with poison deadly to anything that’s not native here. All you have to do is get too close, and jab. If I don’t do this right, we’ll kill ourselves and all those geeks out there. The poison-packers only have two targets—the aliens that have hijacked this planet, and us. Everything else on the planet will be spared.”
I dredged up my voice. “How . . . how . . . many . . . ”
Lost it again.
Clark also was subdued. “There are five hundred in every container, and I’ve got ninety containers.”
His voice was laden with awe and responsibility. This was the most important thing Clark had ever done, or would ever do in his life, and it showed in his expression. His features, normally smo
oth, rosy, and carefree, were lined, hardened, and gray. We stood together in a profound hush.
My whole body snapped when something moved beside me. The first mate, Theo, had come up on me from the side. The kind of person who doesn’t miss much and spends his life chasing details while understanding big pictures, Theo stared up at the poison-packers.
“Damn us all,” he murmured. “So that’s what they look like . . . ”
Only then did I realize they hadn’t surveyed their cargo before this. Probably the containers had been delivered fully loaded and secure from the security company contracted by PlanCom. Made sense—what if there were some kind of mistake? Something as simple as a bat loose on the planet had almost caused a crash. Had imaginings of deadly errors chiseled away at the crew’s consciences? Or were they just doing a job? I didn’t really know them well enough to say. I knew Clark would have found some way to justify the progress, to take this supertechnology and put it to use he saw as good. Bonnie might worry about little animals that got in the way. Gaylord would probably hide till it was over.
For me, I was just intimidated. Seemed smart at the moment.
“It’s okay,” Clark said. “They’re deactivated right now. I have to arm them.”
He tapped a “warm up” code into the panel, which would start the download program, which was communicable to all the other containers.
“What activates them?” I choked out.
“I do,” Clark said. “There’s a series of fail-safes. Theo and I are the only ones who can deploy them. I know all the codes, Theo knows half. If I’m incapacitated, Theo has to activate his own series of fail-safes on the eyes-only computer in my cabin, then get the deployment fail-safes. It’s not like pushing a button.”
He pushed a button and the first bank of robots began to light and flash, their whirring scanners drawing energy. I stepped back more, and realized as I did that stepped back wouldn’t matter a whit to these things. They’d follow, they’d hunt, and they’d never give up.
“Once they’re deployed and out of the containers, there’s no turning back,” Clark said. “They can’t be recalled till they completely exhaust themselves and account for every square inch of the planet. They even go under water. Can you imagine the ocean floor haunted by these things?”
“Good day for a swim,” I managed. “What happens if you’re both incapacitated?”
“It gets harder after that,” Clark admitted. He shook himself free of the hypnotic effect. “Okay—let’s close this up for now. I don’t want the whole crew standing here staring like sheep at a corn show.”
He activated the controls and in a few moments the accordion doors were grinding shut one after the other, until they came together in the middle of the huge container. Finally the last two doors met, clacked, locked, and fell hauntingly silent. The poison-packers were locked away in their box once again, but we held in our minds the picture of their helmeted blue-gray bodies, standing there like twitching draft horses, waiting for the bell to summon them to pull their enormous load.
Clark caught sight of his first mate checking the auto-diagnostics of each container, and ordered, “Theo, call all hands.”
Theo clicked the shipwide com system on his personal comptech. “All hands, muster amidships.” His call echoed slightly through the big bay.
One by one, the crew began to appear through hatches in the deck and bulkheads, and on walkways above.
There was the pilot, Barry, and the coxun, Mark, who was also a mechanic of a fairly technical order. Gaylord, the magnetologist, and Wade, an electrical specialist. Clark, of course, and Bonnie, the medic. Soon Axell, the squirrely computer guy, appeared with Pocket, who was in charge of generally keeping the inside of the ship in order and the cargo secure. Loading and unloading, that sort of thing. And there was Theo, the first mate, who was also an engineer.
Finally Kip Singleton ducked his completely hairless head through the galley hatch. He was the cook who talked to himself and who practically ran the place. He shaved his head every day, because he had a paranoia about getting hair into the food. The crew liked to tease him about his eyebrows, and Pocket was taking bets about how soon it would get to Kip and the cook would shave them off.
I didn’t know them well and probably never would. We’d been fifteen months in cryosleep together, which gets you stiff legs and bizarre dreams, but nobody to stand at your wedding. Mostly I hung around Clark or Pocket and sometimes Bonnie, who liked to talk to me about my least favorite subject: my famous mother. I didn’t like that topic of conversation, but Bonnie was sweet and star-struck and I didn’t have the heart to brush her off. Or tell her the truth about my mother.
Everyone visibly stiffened when the Colonial Marine squad joined us. There were four men and one woman, specially trained for space missions, and they cut quite a swath through the mismatched ship’s crew. The soldiers wore crisp matching field uniforms with special body-hugging padding in a head-to-toe brick-red color. Red wasn’t the kind of color soldiers usually wore for field work on Earth, so they looked alien in their own way. Then again, they were entering an alien environment. This was my first clue that the planet’s surface out there must be red.
Soon they were all here, and Bonnie was the last to arrive, sans her moonstruck mouse.
The whole mission was only going to take a matter of hours, not days, then another fifteen months in cryo to get back to Earth. By the time we got back, babies would be toddlers, stocks would have surged and plunged, and the multiple-murder case I’d pursued for three years would’ve become history, along with me. The precinct had given me the time off and counted it only as two weeks vacation.
This wasn’t the kind of place where anybody in his right mind wanted to stay more than a few hours, and only if necessary. I’d seen the reports of the creatures we were here to destroy. I’d read the account, what few existed. Somehow these animals managed to take perfectly secure operations and skilled field personnel and turn them into shredded wheat in remarkably short time.
“Okay, this is the drill,” Clark began, falling easily into “captain” mode. He was a long-distance hauler and the long calm ride was his nature as well as his job. “We are now on the planet’s surface. Nobody leaves the ship without permission, you all know that. Permission can only be given by myself or Theo. Can I have a screen?”
Theo tapped his hand-held link to the ship’s systems, and a screen whined right down out of a slot in the structure of the walkway above us. I guess they were all over the place on a ship like this.
I hunched my shoulders, ready to see a dark and ugly landscape overrun by wickedness, creatures more malignancy than life, a whole new kind of black plague.
The screen activated, giving us a picture of the immediate area around the ship, outside on this remote planet called Rosamond. The ship’s scanners moved slowly across the land.
I squinted, looking for hazards and horrors.
Instead, around us was a peaceful alien landscape, with settled black pathways running between red pillars of various diameter that might be a forest, or might be a cathedral. Where was the pestilence? Where was the befoulment?
Clark stepped to the screen, which was as wide as his arm was long and gave us all a good view of whatever the Vinza’s visual trackers could see, based on line-of-sight.
“The scientists’ camp is inside the ship’s automatic protection perimeter. Here you can see it just down about a half-kilometer from where we’ve landed.”
He stood to the side of the screen and pointed at a humpy little village of pre-fab protective living quarters, the kind that deployed themselves, drilled themselves into the ground for anchorage, and had been tested in every possible land environment on Earth, including the Gobi desert and the Antarctic shelf. Shaped like upside-down bowls and ribbed with hyperflexion scissor-arches, they were as close to impervious to outside forces as was humanly possible to construct with current science. Once locked down, if the users were careful, no known animal cou
ld break in, including humans.
There was no one walking around out there, nobody coming out of the hyperflex huts to meet us. Pretty strange, after so many months in isolation. I’d have expected a welcoming committee. Not a soul came forward. “I don’t see any movement,” Theo commented. “No aliens . . . ”
“No anybody, it looks like,” Clark confirmed. “If there were aliens, the ship’s auto-defense would be firing right now. So we can assume it’s safe out there for an initial scouting.”
I noticed that the settlement huts were colored the same as the landscape—my anticipated brick-red with black and yellow horizontal streaks. So somebody had been thinking ahead, because all the huts were pre-fabricated on Earth.
“Our orders are, first, to remove and, second, to destroy,” Clark went on. “We stabilize our primary site, which means the ship and the immediate hundred yards in any direction, we do not have any more surprises—” The crew chuckled and rolled their eyes, still nerve-racked. “We probe out with our pre-assigned landing party, you know who you are, we collect these science geeks, Rory counts heads, and we secure them inside the Vinza. Rory has mug shots and I.D. codings for all these people and it’ll be up to us to help him account for them. The whole operation shouldn’t take more than maybe ten hours. Then we deploy the automated platoon of poison-packers and we fly back home while they do their job for the next eleven and a half months, but that’s somebody else’s problem, which makes me real happy.”
“Question,” Gaylord interrupted. “Are there forty-two or fifty-two of these people? I’m getting conflicting reports.”
“Rory, why don’t you answer that.”
I straightened up. I hadn’t expected any questions directed at me. “There are fifty-two of them, if they’re all still alive. They’re all science-oriented, specialists and interns, students, all hand-picked by my mother for this mission. They shouldn’t give us any resistance.”
“How can we evac fifty-two people and all their gear in ten hours?”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 24