Strange New Worlds

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “Next time, I’ll listen without complaint,” Rodriguez said.

  Perkins laughed in response.

  Another alarm chimed. Rodriguez glanced over his radar and saw new enemy contacts rising from the planetoid. But they weren’t headed out toward him and Perkins this time. And there were a lot more of them.

  “They must’ve figured out the Satori fired those shots. They’ve identified her as a threat,” Rodriguez said.

  “Looks like there’s an awful lot of them,” Perkins replied. “What do you say we go return the favor and help her out this time?”

  Rodriguez was already plotting the course correction required for them to bring their fighters in close and assist the Satori. At least this time, they were already vectoring in roughly the right direction. This jaunt wouldn’t require all that much acceleration.

  “Sending you the new course now,” Rodriguez said. “Let’s motor!”

  He tapped his thrusters to life, stars spinning in front of his screen as his fighter pivoted toward the new heading. Then he poured power into the main drive, and the tiny ship shot forward toward the battle. He just hoped they would be in time to help.

  Twenty-One

  The ground heaved underfoot, almost throwing Charline from her feet. She grabbed on to the lab table in an effort to stay upright. This was no minor earthquake! Either the gravity perturbations from that rogue planetoid were far more severe than expected, or this was something else entirely. Charline was betting on the latter.

  “It’s not safe here,” Charline said to Linda. “Get to one of the shuttles. You should be more secure in there.”

  If things got bad enough, nowhere would be safe. But the lab was compromised. The hole on the floor and multiple entrance points made it impossible to defend. The shuttles were a better bet.

  “What about you?” Linda asked.

  Charline glanced at her, confused by the question at first. “I’m going to my Armor.”

  “Good luck out there,” Linda said. “Be safe.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Charline said. Even as she spoke the words, she knew it was a lie. It wasn’t that she wanted to die. Far from it. But she saw it as her job to defend the others around her. The soldiers under her command, the scientists like Linda, Martelle and his Marines, all of them.

  It was ridiculous, and she knew it. No one person was actually responsible for all that. Knowing it didn’t change the way she felt. Charline had survived so many times when others had died. She felt that weight every day. It was her job to preserve the lives of others now, even if it did finally cost her own someday.

  She hurried to her Armor unit. Sure, the shuttle might be relatively safe. But Charline would feel better when she had a couple inches of steel between her and whatever was going on out there. Two quick steps and she was into the cockpit, buckling straps around herself. She tapped the button to lower her canopy as she ran through the startup sequence as quickly as she could.

  “Somebody give me a situation report. Do we have enemy contact?” Charline asked over the radio.

  “Negative, Colonel. Just the shaking. No signs of any action,” Arjun said.

  Nothing yet, anyway. Charline wasn’t counting on that to last. Sure, it was possible that the high-tech alien spider-bot escaping and the massive earthquakes which occurred right afterward were entirely coincidental. If that were the case, she’d eat her hat, cute military insignia and all. No, something was up. Something bad.

  Charline rushed the startup process, probably more than she should have. If she didn’t know that their maintenance teams were the absolute best at their jobs, she might have had to take more time. No sense blowing herself up in a rush to get out to the front line and get blown up! But her techs really were that good, so Charline felt confident enough to take the risk. This time, it paid off. Her Armor purred to life without problems. She engaged the controls and stalked forward.

  “All right, I’m up and moving,” Charline said. “Spread out. Eyes open, stay sharp. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Oh, shit. The last time you said that…” Arjun started to say.

  “Don’t finish that thought,” Charline said.

  “… You got eaten by a shark!” Arjun finished.

  “It wasn’t a shark,” Tessa corrected. “It was a whale.”

  “Shark sounds better,” Arjun protested. “Space shark, even!”

  Tessa laughed. “Better than a giant alien whale?”

  It was lousy radio protocol, but Charline let them have their banter. As soon as things heated up, they would lock it down, just like they always had. Letting out some of the tension before a fight was good for them. Without chatter, it was easy to feel awfully alone inside their armored shells, like each pilot was the last person left on the battlefield. Nothing could be further from the truth. They would all have each other’s backs throughout whatever was coming.

  “Got something over here,” Arjun said. “The ground’s shaking.”

  “Yeah, we noticed. The ground is shaking everywhere!” Tessa said.

  Arjun came back on the radio. This time he sounded worried. “No, this is different. Not like the quake. It looks like sand being sifted through a sieve.”

  Charline spotted a place where the ground almost looked like it was shimmering. She took a few steps toward it and sure enough, it was the same effect Arjun described. The sandy soil shook back and forth, like flour being sifted.

  The sand wasn’t moving around by itself. Something was making it shift that way. Something below it. Or maybe something was coming up through it! Her gut said they were about to be attacked. She heeded the warning.

  There wasn’t a moment to waste. Charline opened a radio channel to every Armor unit. “I want every unit within range of one of those shifting sand spots to open fire on them immediately. Give it everything you’ve got. We have incoming. The enemy is underground.”

  Around her the evening air lit up with bursts of gunfire as her people followed the order. Charline did so as well, targeting the pile of shifting dirt in front of her with both arm-mounted guns and then opening up. Rounds from her weapons tore into the soil. Then they hit what was hiding just beneath.

  Robot spiders just like the one that had been the lab earlier boiled out of the ground. There were dozens of them, no… Scores, maybe hundreds. Far too many to fight, but Charline kept up a steady stream of gunfire as she slowly backed away from the swarm. Every second more of the little robots swelled up from beneath the soil. Holding them off with her guns was like trying to fend off the ocean. Charline would halt them in one spot, but more would swarm forward toward her from other directions instead.

  “Retreat toward the center of camp,” Charline said. They needed to be close to one another if they were to have any prayer of defending themselves. Interlocking fields of fire would keep the robots from approaching their blind sides. They had to pull back and get close enough to lend each other support.

  The Armor unit to Charline’s left went down, suddenly swarmed over by dozens of little robots. She tried to go to the pilot’s aid, but his collapse had opened a gap in their already ragged defensive line. Spiders poured through the hole and rushed toward Charline.

  She blazed away with everything she had, firing guns and missiles alike into the oncoming mass of enemies. But Charline had been in enough battles to know even that wouldn’t be enough. She took one step back, and then another, intent on taking as many enemies down with her as possible. If she could buy the others even a few extra moments, it might make a difference.

  All at once gunfire erupted on either side of Charline’s Armor. Glancing down, she saw that her position had been reinforced with a squad of Marines. She called over the radio to them, irritated and relieved at the same time. “I ordered everyone back toward the center!”

  “You look like you could use a hand,” Martelle drawled. “Or should I just leave you to deal with this target-rich environment by yourself?”

  Charline fou
nd herself laughing despite the desperate nature of the situation. Trust a Marine to refer to this mess as a ‘target-rich environment’! “Sure, you and your boys can stay. Just be careful not to get my way. I don’t want to squish anyone!”

  “Squishiness noted, ma’am. We’ll try to stay out from underfoot,” Martelle said. “Bounding back by teams! Bravo Team first, move!”

  The Marines on Charline’s left beat a hasty retreat while those on her right continue firing on the spider robots. Once Martelle’s Bravo Team had retreated about ten meters, they opened up fire again while Alpha Team bounded backward. Charline held the line until Alpha had begun their retreat, then rushed back to join Bravo’s firing line.

  It was working. Together, their fire was effective enough to keep the robots at bay while they made their escape. Charline watched as their gunfire blasted one approaching spider after another into shrapnel. Most of the robots didn’t seem to be getting back up again, either. That surprised her. The one in the lab had been remarkably resilient, able to repair itself. Maybe doing enough damage all at once was enough to somehow overwhelm the robot’s ability to self-repair?

  With the Marine support, it didn’t take her long to retreat to the center of their camp. Charline glanced around. Most of the armor units had made it back, but she was missing a couple. She cursed under her breath. She should have somehow seen the attack coming sooner. Found a way to prepare people better.

  But at least most of them were alive, and most of the Marines as well. They stood their ground in a large circle around the lab building and shuttles. Charline was about to order a retreat onto the shuttles when she realized the patter of gunfire around her was slowing.

  The robots weren’t rushing in as much. They’d mostly pulled back, in fact, forming a circle of their own about a hundred meters away from the human defensive line. A few straggling robots still ran in, but they were picked off quickly. The rest stood there, motionless. Like they were waiting for something. But for what?

  Twenty-Two

  Beth clanked her way forward, acutely conscious of how much noise her magnetic boots were making against the metal deck plates of the alien ship. She wanted to creep along, but that was impossible. Besides, she figured that since they were dealing with robots and nanites that even her best efforts at avoiding detection were probably useless. The spider robot they’d run into seemed to ignore them. It had to have known they were there, but it hadn’t paid them any attention.

  Beth’s best guess was that she and her team hadn’t been perceived as a threat. The robot was programmed to do repairs and possibly even to deal with hostile intruders. If they went out of their way to avoid damaging anything, Beth had high hopes they would continue to be unmolested by whatever defenses this place had.

  She rounded the corner and, as if to punctuate her thoughts, ran headlong into another of the spider robots. Beth froze in place. For a nervous moment, she thought the robot was sizing her up. Examining her. Then she saw that two of its legs were moving randomly. The motion looked uncoordinated and uncontrolled. What was going on?

  “Is it malfunctioning?” Ayala asked. He peered over her shoulder at the robot.

  “I don’t know,” Beth replied. That was what looked like, though. Like a machine left on its own for too long, the robot was still trying to do whatever it was supposed to be doing. But it had long since lost the ability to carry out its programming.

  She approached it with caution. The robot still didn’t react, even when she was near enough that it could have reached out and touched her. Beth took another step. She stretched out a hand toward the thing, curious.

  “Don’t!” Ayala hissed at her.

  Beth glanced over her shoulder at him and waved him back. No sense anyone else getting hurt if the thing reacted badly to her touch. Then she reached out and ran her fingers along one of the spiderlike legs.

  The robot continued its monotonous twitching, to all appearances oblivious that she was there at all. Beth stepped in closer still, scrutinizing it. Engineering was her first love and passion. Captaining a ship was new to her. But understanding machines and how they worked? That was her thing.

  She gave it a once over, looking for signs of external damage. There were none. That meant it probably hadn’t been damaged by whatever cataclysm had shattered the ship so severely. Why did it break, then? Given the nanites flowing through everything around them, Beth thought such malfunctions shouldn’t be possible. Or rather, they could happen. But when they did, nanites should step in and either repair the damaged machine or break it down into its component parts to build a new one. Something was very wrong in this place.

  Beth backed away from the machine and waved forward the rest of the team. “Looks like it’s safe to go on.”

  Ayala pinged her over a private channel. “That was reckless.”

  “A calculated risk,” Beth replied.

  “I’m not sure you understand just how important you are. To the mission and the ship. And its crew, to be honest,” Ayala said.

  “Nonsense. You’d all do okay without me,” Beth said.

  “Would we?” Ayala replied. “I’m not so sure. Would Majel? You’re one of her oldest and most trusted friends, Beth. If I lost you, I think she’d space me!”

  The thought made Beth chuckle. “She might, at that.”

  The funny thing was, Beth wasn’t sure if either of them were joking or not. Sure, Majel was a trusted member of the crew. But the AI had suffered losses before and not responded well to it. There was so much they didn’t know about Majel, and far more they still had to learn. Did Beth trust her? Absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt.

  But sometimes the AI’s method of thinking seemed almost human, while at other times she felt utterly alien.

  Which was a lot like the planetoid itself, now that Beth was thinking about it. On the surface, it looked a lot like a human ship despite its enormous size. They were hallways, doorways, and panels set into the walls filled with electronics. Sure, the type of wiring was wildly different. But the concept was the same.

  And yet, there were notable differences as well. Small bits of nuance which set everything off and made the place seem weirder and more alien than her perceptions told her that that was.

  But look back over her shoulder at Ayala. “Am I imagining it, or is there a geometry to this place?”

  She’d sensed something along those lines for a while. Each hallway brought them to another branching point with more tubes. There weren’t many rooms. Most of the place was just long corridors all connected to one another. Recalling the spider-like drone they’d encountered earlier, Beth couldn’t help thinking that what she saw around her resembled a spiderweb.

  “I’ve been tracking our progress and trying to extrapolate what the unexplored areas might look like,” Ayala said. “Take a look. I have it mapped out on my tablet.”

  He handed the device to Beth. She peered at the image displayed there, trying to make sense of it. The whole thing looked like a jumbled mess. It took her a minute to realize what was wrong.

  “This is a flat map,” Beth said.

  Ayala nodded. “Yes.”

  Beth gestured around her. “But these hallways all intersect at angles to one another. Even the ones ascending toward the surface, or descending toward the center. It’s not flat. The map should be three-dimensional.”

  Beth fiddled with the tablet’s controls, struggling to get it to render the map the way she wanted to see it. The way it actually was. She wished that she was back on the Satori where she could access a holotank, but for the moment would have to make do with what she had. At last she got the render to display more or less the way she wanted it.

  Swiping her finger right or left now pivoted the image around a central axis. Sliding a finger up or down did the same, turning the map around so she could see it from the top or bottom. As Beth swung the map image around, viewing it from all different angles, the true shape of the place became immediately apparent. It wasn’
t a web all. In fact, it didn’t look like anything she’d seen before. The whole thing was a tangled mess, confusing passages and tubes all interconnected in seemingly random ways.

  “Okay, I can’t make head or tail of this. Take a look,” Beth asked.

  She handed the tablet over to Ayala, who nodded appreciatively as he swiped his finger across the screen to pivot the image. “Nice job.”

  “Thanks. What do you make of it?” Beth asked.

  “I’m more of an astrophysics guy. Engineering is your thing,” Ayala said, shaking his head. “Although, to be honest, this doesn’t really look like something that was built. It almost looks biological instead of mechanical.”

  “Let me see that again,” Beth said. This time it was easy to see what Ayala was talking about. It was all those weird tubes connecting at odd angles. The lack of uniformity and structure in the overall design. The map looked like something designed by a blind madman. Or like something that hadn’t been designed at all. Like something that had grown that way.

  “Neurons,” Beth said.

  “Come again?” Ayala asked.

  This time it was Beth’s turn to shake her head. “Not even vaguely my specialty. But, I mean, just look at it!”

  Now that she’d seen it, she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. Every time she looked at the map, she saw something strikingly similar to images of neurons interlinking inside of a human brain. She’d seen the pictures back in college and hadn’t thought about them for years. But the memories came back now. And she couldn’t deny the similarity.

  “What kind of place is this?” Ayala asked. He saw it too, now. Beth could see it in his eyes. There was that same vague sense of awe she was feeling.

  “I wish I knew,” Beth said.

  She was starting to wonder if the planetoid was a ship after all. The alternative suggested by the evidence was even stranger: that this place wasn’t a vessel at all, but rather a body. The body of some impossible new life form.