Strange New Worlds

by Kevin McLaughlin

“I tend to view strange coincidences as probable enemy action until proven otherwise,” Martelle drawled. “It’s part of why I’ve lived as long as I have.”

  “Noted. Colonel, I suggest we dig in here. If the Inde is delayed at all, we might be glad to have some defenses,” Charline said.

  “The mobile lab has a big fabricator in the next room,” Linda interjected.

  Charline glanced up at her. She’d been staring off into space while she talked with Martelle. For the first time since Charline entered the room, Linda was looking directly at her. Her face flushed under Charline’s gaze.

  Before she could duck her head away again, Charline flashed her a smile.

  “Thanks! That’s an excellent idea,” Charline told her. Then she returned to the radio conversation. “Colonel, Dr. Paris tells me there’s a big 3D printer here in the lab.”

  “Can you do a little computer magic and whip up a little fort for us?” Martelle asked.

  Her reputation with the damned things was probably overblown. In the wake of Charline’s return from Dust, wild rumors flew about how she’d managed to program the 3D printer they had on-site to build a robot army that took out an entire army of Bugs. Then supposedly, she’d designed and constructed a dreadnought-class starship and whomped her way through the Bug fleet before finally capturing a wormhole-capable vessel to return home.

  The truth was much less dramatic, and she hadn’t even done most of the work. A mechanic named Roger Halcomb had been brilliant in his design of the upgrades to a simple cargo-carrying suit that turned the thing into full-fledged battle armor. Sure, she’d helped and inspired the original idea. But she couldn’t have done it without him.

  He died saving her and the rest of the team. Worse, he took her place, sacrificing himself instead of allowing her to die. Charline promised herself that his memory would go on, and it had. The Armor in which he’d been killed was burned, melted, and half-fused together. Now it stood at her new training camp as a memorial to their dead and inspiration to their new recruits.

  “Maybe not a fort, Colonel, but I think I can come up with something,” Charline said. Her mind was already whirling with ideas. She’d need to see what they had available for raw materials, but a big fabricator could 3D print just about anything she could design.

  “Get to it. I’ll have my men do what they can to dig in out here while you work. Ping me as soon as you have anything. I don’t know much time we’re going to have,” Martelle said.

  Charline heard the urgency in his voice and felt it raise her adrenaline level a notch. He might be right. If the Independence had been intentionally lured away, they might be attacked at any moment. Best case, they were scrambling around for nothing. Worst case?

  “I’ll get right on it,” Charline replied. She cut the connection and turned back to Linda. “Where’s the printer? And thanks! That was an awesome idea.”

  “You’re welcome. Out that door,” Linda replied, pointing. She was already nose-down in her work again.

  A frown creased Charline’s face. They needed to have a conversation. Why was Linda so distant toward her? She didn’t understand. But there wasn’t time to ask what Linda was feeling. It would have to be later.

  She turned away, walking toward the door Linda pointed out. Charline opened it and glanced back toward the other woman, opening her mouth to say something, but she closed it again. What could she say in a few seconds that would make any difference? Nothing came to mind. She stepped into the fabrication room and shut the door behind her.

  Fourteen

  Linda watched her friend go. She wanted to call out and say something, but the words turned to ashes in her mouth. How could she explain? What could she say after what she’d done?

  It was forever before she felt up to traveling back into space again. Linda thought she’d been ready. Oh, was she ever wrong. She might have been prepared to face the vagaries of space travel and strange worlds again. But seeing Charline again brought all the old memories boiling back to the surface of her thoughts. It was all she could do to keep her composure with the other woman in the room.

  “Hey, I’m going to head back to the bunk unit and get some rest,” Dr. Lawrence said. “You OK solo here for a bit?”

  “Sure,” Linda replied, her thoughts elsewhere.

  “OK. See you in a few hours,” Lawrence replied before stepping out.

  If only they’d pulled another field commander for the Armor team. Then she wouldn’t have to deal with seeing Charline. But who else would they send for a mission of this importance? Of course, the best would come. She should have known Charline would be there.

  Linda still remembered every second of the brief span where she’d been controlled by the Cyanauts. Small, grublike telepathic beings, they lived in symbiotic relationships with the fish analogs on their homeworld. The Naga used the creatures as translations devices, effectively enslaving the race.

  When the Satori’s crew discovered that, they came up with a possible fix. But rather than letting her responsibly test the solution, rogue elements of the Cyanaut population attacked. They were able to collectively take over her mind and force her to hand over her bacterium. Then they’d tried to make her commit suicide by walking out into the ocean.

  Charline had barely saved her from that fate. When Linda woke, she was horrified. That her mind was controlled was little help. She still recalled doing each of the things she’d done, including her slow walk out into the waves with no intention of stopping. Theft of her free will was the most profound form of violation Linda had ever encountered.

  It left her feeling broken. Therapy helped, some. But at long last, her therapist told her that the best way to heal the rest of her mind would be to get back out there in the field. She needed to rebuild her confidence and restore faith in herself.

  Perhaps worst of all, during the first few moments of contact with the Cyanaut minds, before they had complete control, their efforts released her inhibitions and self-control. The casual attraction she’d felt toward Charline since their first meeting came bubbling up to the surface, magnified a thousand times over.

  The kiss they’d shared wasn’t just the Cyanauts forcing her into action. It was their influence, releasing her own emotional controls. Charline saving her life made those feelings more intense, not less.

  Every time she looked at the Charline, all she could think about was how she’d felt in that moment and the uncontrollable passion the Cyanaut telepathy had shown her.

  Charline thought the kiss was part of the Cyanauts’ attempt to gain control, and that was true, after a fashion. But they hadn’t forced her to do it. They’d just shown her what she already wanted to do.

  How was she supposed to work with Charline after that?

  The thought made her grip the branch too hard. It shifted, slipping inside her gloved hand. The saw bit more deeply than she’d intended, buzzing and then freezing up as it encountered something too hard to slice through. Linda’s eyebrows drew together, her worries of a few moments before lost in the curiosity that enveloped her. What was this?

  She’d been slicing into one of the leaf-balls, the curled-up balls of armored leaf which covered the branches after it reacted to movement. But unlike all the other balls on the branch, this one didn’t unfurl again as the tree relaxed. It looked damaged, maybe even dead, so it seemed like a good target for her saw. What was different about this pod?

  She pulled one hand free from the case and tapped her tablet to turn on dictation. “Dr. Linda Paris, recording a sample of unknown plant life. I’ve been cutting into one pod, and my saw stuck on something inside. Is it a seed? Something new that we haven’t seen yet?”

  Linda reached out and withdrew her saw. The small blade was bent, the teeth badly damaged. Whatever it hit was made of remarkable material! She put down the branch to replace the blade with a fresh one, but before she could go back to cutting, she noticed the branch rocking. It made a few small, jerking motions. What was going on?

&n
bsp; “A new type of motion seen. Not the previous furling and unfurling. This is different,” Linda said. It reminded her of something. Like the ‘jumping beans’ of Earth. Was it possible she’d found some sort of animal life, hidden inside the dead-looking pod?

  Cutting it was risky. She could kill whatever was inside if she wasn’t careful enough. But there seemed no other way to extract it. As slowly as she could, with painstaking care, Linda sliced away at the pod. She scored it deeply on all sides, working to split it down the middle so she could simply lift off the top side of the globe.

  She’d just finished slicing around the entire circumference when Linda heard a popping noise from the pod. She jerked away from it, worried she’d damaged whatever was inside. If she had, it didn’t seem to be too badly hurt. The pod was rocking and shaking with ever more violent motions. Another pop and a crack ran along the edge near where she’d made her cut.

  It was breaking out! Linda pulled one arm out of the tank and brought a magnifying lens in front of her face so she could see the object more clearly. There was definitely movement inside the pod. There were enough little gaps in the shell to see flickers of motion. Another cracking sound, and the top of the pod broke away entirely. It tumbled off the branch.

  Inside was a small, crablike creature with four legs. It seemed to be made entirely from metal. That explained why her saw had been damaged! Linda spotted one leg that looked scraped up.

  What was it? Was it a living creature, or some sort of robot? “Pod opened. My attempts seem to have revived the object inside, which broke itself the rest of the way out.”

  She eyed the thing again before going on. “I’m unsure if the thing contained within is alive or not. It is motionless now. Made of metal, approximately two inches in total diameter, including the legs.”

  It looked something like a large spider, a thought that made her shiver. Not that she hated bugs. It was hard to hate any form of life in her line of work. But the resemblance made her uneasy.

  She set the saw down and picked up a probe, then reached out to tap the object. It had been moving a lot just a minute before. Why did it stop? Would it move again if prodded? She touched it very gently on one side.

  The metal creature burst into motion, launching itself out of the pod toward her face.

  Fifteen

  “You will absolutely not blow this hatch, too,” Beth said. She tried to make her voice sound sharp, but she was having a hard time holding back a laugh. That made her words have less effect than she’d wanted.

  “But I have all these charges, just begging to be used,” Ayala said.

  She shook her head. “You’re incorrigible. No, seriously. I think I can get this one open without blowing it to bits.”

  Beth pulled out tools and went to work on the panel beside the hatch. She hadn’t been able to crack the first one, so she’d been forced to allow Ayala to blast it open. That felt like failure to her, and it still grated on her nerves. The place felt like a vast tomb, and blowing their way through it didn’t seem respectful to her.

  Plus, there was no telling if it was actually a tomb. If the place still had any active defenses left, it would be bad to trigger them. Just because she had a security team with her didn’t mean she wanted to get in a firefight.

  The place was old, she could tell that much already. How old, she couldn’t even guess, but it had to date back at least as far as the original ship they’d rebuilt into the Satori. The handheld instruments couldn’t date the materials well enough, so she’d pocketed a sliver of the hatch Ayala blew up for analysis later.

  Despite being really ancient and horribly damaged, the ship had power running through it. Not a ton, but there was the faintest of vibrations running through the walls. The thing was built to last.

  Beth had already begun thinking of it as a ship rather than a planet. Sure, it was as big as a planet, but it didn’t seem like any part of it was naturally formed. The place was built. That made it a ship, as far as she was concerned, no matter how big it was. She tried to avoid thinking about its size. The scale of the place was daunting. Who could build such a thing? Why would they create it?

  So many questions. The scale of the ship was such that they could be years trying to discover all the answers. On the flip side, the technology the ship represented was far more advanced than anything Earth had. It was at least on parity with the Bugs. Maybe even further along. The things they could learn by studying this vessel were beyond imagination.

  The panel came loose. What lay on the other side was a tangled mess of something that looked vaguely like conduits for power of some sort. Electricity? Something else? She ran a scanner over the stuff and wasn’t getting any electromagnetic signature from it, so what was it?

  “Um. Might need those explosives after all,” Beth said without looking up from her work.

  “Ready when you are,” Ayala replied. But he didn’t move closer, continuing to give her room to work the problem.

  There was gravity, but it was a fraction of what it would have been on Earth. Mag boots were keeping her feet locked to the lower surface, but whoever built the ship had understood how the lower gravity would allow them to operate. Instead of hallways, the place was full of tubes. In fact, they resembled the smaller tubules she’d found inside the wall. Darned near the same thing.

  “I’m going to try something,” Beth said. “Might want to stand back.”

  The rest of the team backed away a few more steps. Beth slid herself off to one side and brought a wire-cutter up to one of the tubes. If she was wrong and there was a charge of some sort running through it, she might be about to get a nasty shock. It was a gamble, but she felt pretty confident about her hunch.

  Snip. The cutters sliced through the tubing without trouble. There was no blast, no rush of energy or power. Beth heaved out a laugh. “Ha!”

  But her eyes got wide as she looked over the split conduit. Her wire cutters were coming apart, the tip breaking down before her eyes. She dropped the tool before whatever was destroying it reached her hand. It floated slowly toward the floor, continuing to dissolve.

  “What’s wrong?” Ayala asked.

  “Stay back,” Beth warned. She stepped further away from the conduit herself, careful to also stay clear of the others. Her spacesuit glove remained intact — so far, at least. But there was no way to tell if it had been hit with whatever was wrecking her cutters.

  Ayala came up beside her. “Captain?”

  “Back off. I cut one of the tubes. It spilled out something that’s doing that,” Beth said, pointing to the tool. It’s cutting tip was already gone.

  “Did whatever it was get on you?” Ayala asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Beth said.

  She kept eying the glove like it might begin coming apart at any moment. Beth wanted to run for the Satori, but she couldn’t risk that, either. Not without knowing what they’d come in contact with. She held her scanner back up with her other hand. This time she was detecting small traces of electricity around the conduit she’d cut. Just trace amounts, and it was diffuse, like it was a little cloud of electric motes…

  “I think we’ve got nanites,” Beth said. “Probably trying to repair the damage I did.”

  Ayala peered at her scanner. “That sounds reasonable. Look! They’re repairing the tube.”

  A glance at the cut conduit told her the same thing. The slice she’d made was being knit back together again. The repaired area had the distinct sheen of stainless steel. The ship was using materials from her tool to fix itself.

  “Wild. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Beth said.

  Some of the Bug ships had drones capable of performing repairs, but they were full-size robots. Human beings had done some experimentation with nanites. Medical nanites helped people heal serious injuries in much the same way this ship was healing itself.

  “I think you’re safe. Look, the repair is done, and the nanites didn’t even use up half of your cutters,” Ayala said. �
�On the other hand, we probably ought to avoid doing a lot more damage if we can help it.”

  Beth thought about the damage an explosion would have caused in the hallway. How much material would the ship have needed to restore itself from a large blast? She looked around at her team, all of them wearing suits made mostly from components that could easily be used in such a repair. They had no protection against microscopic robots intent on breaking their protective gear down into small parts. The nanites might not stop with inorganic material, too.

  “Whoever built this must have had a way to travel through these doors,” Beth said, frustrated.

  “Yes. But that method might have been specific to their species,” Ayala said. “If you can figure it out, that’s one thing. But I don’t think we should be blowing any more holes in the ship.”

  “Why didn’t it heal the first breach we made, the one in the outer hull?” Beth asked,

  Ayala shrugged. “I don’t know. Why didn’t it heal the massive hole in its outer shell? Maybe the area around the cratered section is considered too damaged to bother fixing, and the hole I blasted was close enough to be inside that exclusion zone?”

  “You’re saying that as we went deeper, we passed into the areas the ship is willing to spend resources repairing?” Beth asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “That implies a fairly complex intelligence guiding the ship,” Beth said. It didn’t feel wrong, though.

  “Not necessarily. It could easily be a pre-programmed protocol. If resources are finite, it makes sense to focus repairs on the places most easily fixed,” Ayala said.

  A clanking sound on the other side of the closed hatch got their attention. They both turned to stare at it and were rewarded by a few more pings of sound, like metal tapping on metal.

  Beth unslung her rifle. Taking their cue from her, the security guards stepped forward and joined her, their own weapons also leveled at the door. Ayala paused, then followed their example.