Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles)

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  /// Am I—

  causing you difficulty? ///

  Sarcasm? he thought. But no, it wouldn't understand human sarcasm, would it? It was alien. He let his breath hiss out, not knowing how to answer. "What exactly...did you say you were?" he asked suddenly, speaking aloud.

  The answer felt muted, almost tentative.

  /// Quarx. ///

  "Quarx." He swallowed. /Quarx./ He felt like pacing. He paced mentally, framing his words. /We...we always wondered... who you were. We just knew you were...here before us. Here on Triton. A long time ago. Quarx, you say./

  /// Yes. ///

  /I...there's a lot I...should ask you. That I want to ask you./ He felt clumsy and stupid. What should he be asking?

  /// There will be time enough

  for all of that. ///

  He shook his head. /No, I—I mean I—look, tell me please—/ He drew a breath and asked, almost plaintively, /How the hell did you get into my mind like this?/

  The voice seemed to stumble.

  /// Well, I...

  it would be difficult to explain physically.

  It was the translator that did it. ///

  The translator. He sensed that the voice was referring to the machine in front of him. /This thing?/ He felt an affirmative response. /Is this thing a part of you? Are you a part of it?/ he asked, groping for understanding.

  /// No.

  The translator is...a machine.

  I was...occupying its space-time, before.

  Now I am...living...with you. ///

  With you.

  Living.

  Bandicut shivered. /I—/ He'd thought he had understood before; he'd thought he could...an alien mem-res...an enhancement program, like the neurolink; he'd thought he could accept that all right. It was terrifying, yes, but exciting. An alien program. Information. Datapoints. Not...

  Living.

  In my mind.

  /// I am alive, yes. ///

  He felt himself beginning to hyperventilate again. He couldn't make himself stop. His faceplate began to fog up. He heard the voice whisper,

  /// I've been waiting such a LONG time. ///

  and somehow that stopped his hyperventilation short. He felt a strange rustling sensation, as if someone were riffling through the pages of his mind, trying to find a connection that was missing. He recalled that he needed to be getting out of this cavern, but the outside world seemed a million miles away now.

  /// I'm sorry if this is...

  startling to you. ///

  He erupted with a cackle of near-hysterical laughter. /Startling? No...no...not at all./ He gulped. /You aren't...living with me to stay, are you?/ He clenched his fists, closing his eyes, swallowing, trying not to scream, WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME?

  /// I—

  for a while, yes. ///

  Bandicut reeled silently.

  // What do I want?

  I—to get to know you better—

  to begin with. ///

  /Get to know me,/ he whispered. /Get to know me? Would you mind...telling me what the hell you are—?/

  /// Quarx. ///

  /Quarx,/ he repeated. /WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?/

  The alien device suddenly flickered, and something appeared in the air off to one side. It looked almost like a hologram—but that wasn't quite right. It was more like a pocket of darkness, and within the darkness, something bright and coruscating and very hard to look at. It was ghostly and frightening, like a glimpse into the heart of a nuclear reaction. He stared at it dumbly for a second, then blinked and yelled, "Suit!"

  Beep.

  "Analyze the image in front of me."

  Boop. "Specify image."

  "The one right in front of me, damn it! Record it—full spectrum!" At that moment, the image vanished. Whatever it was, he had scared it away.

  Beep. "Recording. Analysis indicates nitrogen and methane ice at a distance of four and one-half meters."

  "Not the wall! Didn't you get that other thing, that—"

  The quarx interrupted him.

  /// That's the best I can— ///

  He shifted his attention angrily to the interior of his mind. /What?/ If it had really been the datanet, he would have issued a freeze command, so that he could get a grip on what was happening.

  /// You asked...what I was.

  I tried...

  I exist in a partial,

  you might say...

  a fractal displacement

  from your physical continuum.

  But I require an anchor point

  a merger

  in this space-time

  for coherent survival— ///

  /What the hell are you talking about?/ Bandicut whispered, incomprehensible images flickering in his mind.

  The voice became more subdued.

  /// Sorry.

  It is difficult—

  the words.

  I was trying to show you—

  not clear. ///

  He struggled to follow, but the images were lost now. Too much was happening, too much all at once. Maybe if you don't think of it as an alien, he thought desperately; think of it as a mem-res, and you'll be able to handle it.

  The quarx reacted to his thought.

  /// Don't think that I'm just... ///

  and it hesitated for a moment, apparently sensing his unease.

  /// Still...

  if it helps... ///

  Bandicut hesitated. What the hell was he supposed to do now, or think? He might have made humanity's first contact with a living alien, but that didn't mean he wanted a goddamn alien living in his mind. At least not for very long. On the other hand, it was an inner voice again, even if it was different from the neuro. Perhaps while it was here it would help keep the silence-fugue at bay.

  /// I'll try.

  I am aware of your...difficulty. ///

  His thoughts were spinning onward; he didn't respond to that. There was, of course, the discovery of the alien machine, which he had to report...

  /// NO!!! ///

  He felt a barrier slam down in his mind, as he envisioned reporting his find. He growled indignantly, "Why shouldn't I report it?"

  /// Because—

  of what we have to do. ///

  Bandicut's thoughts narrowed. "We—?"

  /// For your world, yes.

  It's...critically important.

  I need time to explain to you.

  Please. ///

  Bandicut grunted. Critically important? He wondered what that was supposed to mean. At the moment, he seemed to have no choice, anyway. He hesitated. /Do you have a name?/ he muttered. /Besides "quarx"?/

  The alien seemed to want to say something.

  /Well?/

  A low, rising squeal began in the front of his head. The sound shot backward, reverberating in his skull. Abruptly, it rose to a horrifying shriek, like the sound of a transmission belt shredding. His teeth vibrated. He could not breathe, or think, or cry out for it to stop. He could only endure. And suddenly it ceased, leaving him shuddering in silence. /What... the hell...was that?/ he gasped, barely able to form the words.

  The voice sounded puzzled.

  /// My name.

  Do you wish to hear it again? ///

  /Christ, no!/ He shuddered one more time. Before he could recover, he felt a renewed riffling sensation in his mind.

  /// You could call me..."Charrleeee." ///

  "Charlie!" he grunted aloud. Jesus. He snapped inwardly: /Are you making fun of me now?/

  /// Fun?

  It's the closest...approximation I could find.

  That you could pronounce. ///

  "Great," he whispered. "Charlie. Right?"

  /// Charrleeee. ///

  He sighed. It could be worse. Better than that horrible shriek. He turned around, clumping in his awkward boots. Hadn't this...Charlie...told him that it could help him get out of here? They had better get moving, if he was to get out alive.

  /// You mean,

  if WE ar
e to get out alive. ///

  He froze. Yes, he supposed that was what he meant. He blinked suddenly, realizing that something had just changed in his headlight beam. The walls were no longer revolving around him. There was a strange sensation of stillness about the cavern, and he stepped toward the wall for a better look. Maybe now he could try to climb out. Or jump. He might be able to jump high enough in this gravity to reach a handhold near the ceiling.

  /// You don't want to do that.

  Too risky. ///

  /I have to get out of here, damn it!/

  /// Yes, but wait. ///

  /For what?/

  /// A better way. ///

  /What's that supposed to mean?/

  There was no immediate answer. But something made him turn back to the alien device, and his heart thumped. The thing was glowing, and the movement of the spherical sections had become quicker and more frantic, or erratic. He felt a chill of uncertainty. /Is that thing going to blow? Christ, I do have to get out of here!/

  /// Wait. ///

  /But I—/

  Before he could complete his thought, he felt a sudden rush of warmth and light, and a spinning wooziness. Then his vision went cottony and white, and he floated up into a dreamy unconsciousness.

  Chapter 3

  Beginnings

  Remembering the flight out...

  In the crystal clarity of the neuro, the planet Neptune floated in deep space with the kind of majesty that only heavenly bodies seemed to possess. She was ghostly and beautiful, a pale blue orb streaked with white storm systems and ringed with faint circles of dust that glinted into visibility only when his thoughts stroked the augmentation driver and brightened the scene to an astral glow. He recalled how the planet looked through the unamped porthole of the ship, cerulean and dim, almost sepulchral, floating like a phantom against the stars; and he felt a powerful rush of gratitude for the vision of the neuro, for the union with the ship's AI that let him experience the approaching planet as a vision of beauty, of wonder.

  Bandicut was practically the only person on the shuttle who'd actually enjoyed the long haul out from Ceres Base. While everyone else counted the weeks and months, slowly going stir-crazy as they crossed the endless billions of kilometers, Bandicut had spent hours viewing the approaching planet through neuro-enhanced imagery, and exploring various threads of related information from the datanet.

  At this point, near the end of the flight, they were starting to get fairly clear realtime images of their actual destination—the moon Triton, in its crazy, backwards, interloper's orbit around Neptune, well outside the ring system. By fiddling with the image mag, he could enlarge Triton from the small disk that the naked eye saw to a full-sized, three-dimensional body. It was about the same size as Earth's Moon, but there the resemblance ended. Triton was covered with a brownish pink coloration from the darkened methane that coated much of its surface ice. Its countenance bore the scars and craters of a face with a complexion problem. Bandicut could not yet resolve the MINEXFO encampment in the realtime imaging, but he'd glimpsed a few puffs of haze above the areas where he knew the great mining lasers were vaporizing swaths of the surface, exposing veins of metals that lay beneath...veins of alien metals, exotic alloys that had melted and refrozen eons ago.

  It was an exciting prize, those alien alloys that offered the promise of revolutionizing everything from nano-optronics to armored weaponry. And that of course was why human miners were here, at vast expense, with the multinational/multiworld consortium of the Mining Expeditionary Force. Triton had once been a wandering orphan, possibly originating in the solar system, but more likely straying in from the interstellar void. Uncounted millions of years ago, it had passed close to the gas giant Neptune and been captured for eternity. Triton was a moon with an obscure history, but one thing was known for certain: it had hosted a nonhuman civilization at some point in its past. And even if no live aliens (or even dead aliens) had been found, it nevertheless bore a treasure lode of metallic compounds that to date had confounded the ability of human science to reproduce.

  As a place to live and work, however, Triton was ranked near the bottom of the list for creature comforts, somewhere between Mercury and Arctic offshore oil platforms on Earth. Triton's surface was one of the coldest naturally occurring spots in the solar system, the mercury hovering at around two hundred forty below zero on the Celsius scale, at midday. The sun was four and a half billion kilometers away, and at its height during Triton's six-Earth-day diurnal period, cast a pallid glow about as bright as a moonlit night on Earth. From the Neptune neighborhood, Earth was over four hours away, even at the lightspeed of laser and maser transmission beams.

  Triton in short was a cold, dangerous, and lonely place to be. Bandicut already knew, even before he got there, that he was likely to be asking himself, repeatedly, over the next two years, what the hell he was doing in such a godforsaken corner of the solar system. At the moment, the answer was self evident, and he hoped he would remember it when the going got difficult. It was a job—and a good chance to use his piloting skills at a time when good spacing jobs were few and far between. Plus it was deep space, which held a special fascination for him, God knew why. And it was a chance, maybe one in a thousand but a chance nevertheless, to be the one to find a real artifact of alien technology, not just metallic slag, and maybe even make himself rich with the bonuses.

  One other thing he knew: he was going to save up a goodly pile of earnings between now and the year 2166. There weren't too many places to spend it on Triton. So confident was he of his accumulating earnings that he had arranged to channel a full third of it into a trust fund for his only living relative, his niece Dakota Bandicut—nine years old, an orphan, and his favorite person on Earth. The remainder of his earnings, if he lived to collect it, would give him more than enough money for any easily foreseeable needs of his own.

  It would be lonely on Triton. But unlike some of his grumbling shipmates, he didn't think he was going to mind the loneliness too much. He was pretty much of a loner anyway, and whenever he got fed up with the work, he could always just immerse himself in the neurolink, which was where he found most of his pleasure anyway....

  *

  Unfortunately, following his actual arrival on Triton, it hadn't quite worked out that way....

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  ...in the neuro, it was as though he had wings and could change pitch and yaw and roll just by thinking it, maneuvering like a bird with wondrous freedom. It was a skill he'd finely honed; it was the way he'd piloted back in-system, in the Mars and Luna jobs. It was flying the way he loved to fly. But there were certain differences in the equipment and the situation out here, and that was why he was working through the full simulations, to get problems straightened out while he was still on the Triton surface. Except the problems seemed to be getting worse, not better...

  It was a low, fast surface pass in a light survey ship, the ochre body of Triton filling his view to one side, the full piloting readout directly before him, the scanning-instrument readings to the other side, Neptune a blue reference point behind him at five o'clock. His altitude was reeling down, and he needed to make these course adjustments to a fine degree of accuracy...and every maneuver he made seemed to just miss, always a fraction of a second late, and now he had to fire his course outward again to keep from plowing a groove into the moon with his ship, and it was driving him crazy.

  /Krackey, is this image-cruncher lagging half a hiccup behind my movements?/

  /What's that, Bandie?/ The voice of his coworker and simulation instructor seemed to vibrate in his head, like a bad ac
oustic speaker. That wasn't right, either; it felt as if there was a bad connection in the neurolink.

  /I said, the image processor seems to be lagging. Is that lag going to to be real in the survey runs, or is the damn sim computer screwing up?/

  Krackey's voice rasped back, /Lagging, you say? Naw, it shouldn't be. Hang on a sec', I'll check. They had a system malfie yesterday, and maybe they didn't get it all flushed out./

  /Great./ Bandicut hesitated, half tempted to just dive into the moon. It was only a sim, after all. Still...

  /Hang on a sec' longer, Bandie—/

  He hung on, orbiting at a safe distance, thinking maybe he ought to just unplug from the thing until this was straightened out. The whole point of running the sim in neuro was to make it totally realistic, just like flying around the rock in realtime. The last thing he wanted to do was rehearse under misleading conditions and practice wrong habits. If they'd put these sims on the shuttle out, he wouldn't have had to be wasting everyone's time with it now that he was on Triton.

  There was a crackle of static in his head. He almost grabbed for the abort-cutoff, but then he heard Krackey's voice through the static, saying, /Bandie, the sim-ops guy is on it, he says for you to just hold tight for another minute or two. You want some muzak or something?/

  /Shit no, I don't want no muzak, I hate that—/

  And then the pain hit him, like a flash of fire across the top of his skull, like a blazing poker—

  /Bandie...you okaaaaay...?/

  —and he wanted to scream, but he couldn't even breathe—

  /Bandicooooot, what's wroooonng—?/

  —and then the voice fled, and Triton and all of the readouts with it, and the only escape from the pain was by diving into the silence and blackness of unconsciousness

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