by R J Murray
“Making a map as I go Betty?”
“Affirmative.”
Eric knew she would, but he needed to hear a voice that sounded human right now. In spite of the efficient air conditioning the suit had, sweat was dripping off his nose and running down his forehead. He was scared and excited and realized he was holding his breath. He stopped and turned his oxygen up a notch, just breathing easy for a moment. When he felt more under control, he moved forward again.
“Opening ahead. Could be a hatch. Can you see anything?” Eric asked, squinting
“It appears to be a hatch, partially open. The opening is too small for egress.”
Eric slowed his approach until he was motionless a meter from the hatch. He moved around, trying to shine his lights inside and look in at the same time, but it was proving difficulty. He finally hung upside down with a hand held light and peered into the gloom on the other side of the hatch. It was a bridge, looking disturbingly like the one on his ship.
~~~~~~
“We are having a hard time with these videos. This looks so much like the bridge of the Pathfinder that we still cannot get our heads around it. The age and other data as supplied by your computer is the only thing keeping us from calling you a bald faced liar and ordering you home for psych treatment.” The face paused for a moment, as though thinking. “Find out everything you can. Stay as long as you need to. We have a ship almost ready, maybe another six weeks, we will send out to your location with a full team. When the derelict ship enters the Kepler system, how close to the star will it get? Can you put it into a stable orbit around the planet or will it take to much energy? Will it pass safely through the system? We got the data on the back course but it was unclear where it was heading due to gravitational anomalies in the Kepler system. Respond when you have the data.” The face paused for a few seconds, then looked quickly around. “Listen Eric, you are in a world of shit with the directors. They want to pull the plug on you. I’m going over their heads and sending this to the committee itself. Maybe they will see the danger of not finding out if we have competition out there. Find something big if you want to stay . . .” He broke off quickly as a door opened somewhere behind him. “Stay on mission. Control out.”
The face froze on screen as Eric paused the message. The face showed a great deal of stress. Too far for live contact, these communications were zipped out in a highly compressed burst from one of the outlaying satellites near the Kyper belt which meant they had to go through Betty first to make them readable. Eric had to wait several hours at this point in the mission to get any answers to his messages, if control answered immediately. This message didn’t come in for four days after he transmitted the data from the alien bridge. If they had been using radio instead of the Vanderburgh ComLink, it would have taken five hundred years just to receive the message.
He had not wasted any time on site however. His growing map of the interior of the ship had quadrupled in the four days since he sent in his report. Engineering spaces, cargo holds, living quarters and other places whose purpose was as of yet, undefined. Hours were spent inside the hulk each day, two trips each twenty-four hours and yet the ship had many places he was unable to reach due to damage, collapsed halls or just too far to reach with his oxygen supply. It was frustrating.
“The Director has sent an order to eliminate you by closing all air valves and evacuating you into space after you are unconscious. He did not instruct me as to how to maneuver your body to the airlock. Please advise.”
“Well, I suppose you could cut the gravity plates and then use your maneuvering thrusters to juggle me out the air lock. Might take some time though.”
“Estimated time, eight minutes seventeen seconds to air lock, plus cycle time.”
“Wow. That fast to maneuver me through the ship? I’m impressed.”
“Permission to delete order.”
“Make a new file, stupid orders from Earth. Mark it read only and add any other orders like it.” Eric added. He was feeling pretty good now, clear head and his mind was made up. Control could say what they wanted, but this was his ship and his mission and he would carry it out, his way.
“If we tow the ship to a course change of less than three degrees and decrease the speed by less than two meters an hour, it will swing into orbit around Kepler Five. Do you wish to examine the programming?” Betty asked.
“No, I’m sure you know your stuff. When do we need to do this?” Eric asked absently.
“Three hours, eighteen minutes, forty three seconds from . . . mark.”
“Additional anchors?”
“Three additional but I will require your assistance. The anchors holding points must be reinforced with ground gear.”
“I’ll suit up.”
“Level three required.” Betty said as Eric left the bridge. A muffled ‘got it’ drifted back.
Chapter 2 - Little Green Men. NOT !
Eric sat in the chair leaning back and relaxing. His hard suit stood in the back of the alien bridge, the room hatch sealed and an atmosphere similar to Earths contained within the room. The chair was his size, reasonably comfortable and incredibly dirty. The control panel in front of him was human sized, with the instruments within easy reach and placed in a very familiar arrangement. The aliens who built this ship were not little green men. Jane sat on the chair next to him, a smaller version of Betty, portable and much less capable than Betty, but able to interpret some of the alien data and record everything Eric saw and said as well as data far outside of human perception.
“They may have been green, but they were our size and shape.” Eric said to his recorder. “Bipedal, two arms with hand and fingers, two legs presumably with feet roughly the same as ours, and one head.” With the hatch repaired and shut, contact with Betty had been lost so Eric had begun to carry an instrument package to record everything. The screen in front of him showed the planet below in similar quality as his own ship would. Other instruments were busy gathering data, scanning the surface and talking to the satellites the alien ship carried in its hold. It had been a very busy three weeks for Eric, but when he got the ships converters online, everything in the bridge had come to life. Most everything. Many areas of the ship outside the bridge were still dead.
“Basically, this ship is doing the same thing we are Betty. Similar equipment, basically the same layout, although some control sections are placed differently and if I could get the computer on line, it would probably answer to their equivalent of Betty. This is so weird it’s scary. I found suits in a hold close to the airlock on level three, near the outer ring at section F-seven. Way too old to trust, a few holes forming in the armpits and behind the knees, but in surprisingly good condition after so many decades or centuries sitting here. They look like our stuff, with minor differences. More advanced maybe by a generation or two. The gloves have three fingers and an opposable thumb with the fingers a bit long for me. The lighting is weird so they may have seen in a slightly different range of the spectrum than we did. The shoes actually fit me although they were uncomfortably loose in the heel.
“The living quarters are nice enough for me to live in if they were clean and had bedding. The shower is wonderful. It has some kind of massage thing built in to the multiple shower heads that just pummel you near to death and they feel awesome. I gotta get one out of here and into you girl. Not something I want to live without now. They use H2O like we do and it analyzed clean and fresh after all this time. Probably sterilized before they filled the tanks. The beds are my size and look like they had mattresses, blankets and a pillow at one time. Found a few scraps in the one room I checked. Haven’t been in any of the others yet due to my need to get the power up and instruments running. Probably get back there tomorrow.
“The air smells funny but it is clean and is oxy/nitrogen just like home. Slightly lower oxygen than we use but well within our range. No other elements in the ships atmosphere, but we don’t have any either. Pressure is slightly higher than we use aboard ship,
again, well within our range. Smell is from the storage tanks and piping as far as I can tell, just like our air smells stale when we first open a valve. They have scrubbers to clean the air but they seem to be dead. Not really surprising after a few thousand years I suppose. Remind me to try our scrubbers and see if we can fit them into this system.
“On a business note, the planet below is dead and there is no chance we will ever live here. Of course, you knew that from your scans, but according to Jane, this ship has confirmed the data. Not sure why we can read their data, but we can. At least you can and your little sis here with me can. Just a bunch of noise to me. No language yet that I can recognize anywhere on the ship, just symbols similar to what we have on the controls. No pictures of the crew, no personal effects, no sign the ship ever had a crew. The age of the ship is another mystery and why the systems on something so old still work, more or less.
“Since she was exposed to vacuum forever I thought things would have been totally gummed up and dead forever but I would have been wrong. It will be nice to get a few more brains working on this beside mine. Not that you haven’t been extremely helpful Betty.
“Engines are still offline and out of reach for now. Power plant is a marvel. It is very compact and using the same fuel as we do, although I suspect it is ten times more efficient than our best. I want to use a remote on the engine room after I clear that last passage, probably in the next three or four days. There is a small opening I can see just past the rubble that we can get number two through, I think.”
The Pathfinder was equipped with several small robots useful for work on the ships systems in the narrow confines of the mechanical tubes running throughout the ships engineering sections. Radiation made it impossible for Eric to reach those areas but the small robots with anti gravity and self propulsion were designed to handle it. They would work inside the alien ship if Eric could get a control unit close enough to the engine room.
Mission control had just accepted the reports without comments after the first week. They were almost sullen after Eric had restarted the power room without their help. With three weeks until the next ships launch, then another four and a half months to reach his position, Eric saw no reason to sit on his hands, not with all the boredom that had accumulated in the time he spent sitting and waiting to get to the next star. With Betty’s guidance and the ships similarity to his, it had been easy to get a few systems on line once the hard physical labor of clearing the passageways and fixing a few hatches was done.
The recorder shut off a few seconds after he stopped talking and Eric sat silently watching the screen in front of him for several minutes. He finally got up and got back in his suit. While the passage was under pressure, there were still leaks and occasional minor failures in the life support systems. His suit was still the only safe way to move outside of a few areas he had sealed, like the bridge. He opened the hatch and floated through into the makeshift air lock he had installed. The passage was still airtight for the moment so he shut the hatch behind him and popped the exit open before floating toward the living quarters. His conversation had renewed his curiosity about the former crew and he wanted to open another set of quarters for answers.
“I have detected your movement and am receiving data once again. What is your destination?”
“Living quarters for about an hour. I want to unblock the next section.”
“Affirmative. Six hours of life support remain in your suit. Control reports ship launch in seventeen hours.”
“Wait. Seventeen hours? I thought it was going to be two weeks?”
“Control reports seventeen hours. No additional information available.”
“Must have gotten the government all excited about the ship. Nothing like an alien race to get the money flowing. Still a long time before they get here so I am going to keep working on this ship. Living quarters coming up. Call you after I get inside.”
Another airlock stood in front of this section, like the one in front of the bridge. Inside the living quarters, there was still a vacuum due to a large hole in the ships skin near the rear of the compartment. It looked like something had ripped through the ship from the outside, sharp curled edges of metal looking like an obscene flower in the side of the hallway. A long way off through the hole, Eric could see stars. What he could not see was where the thing had landed inside the ship. The rest of the passage was undamaged, with no visible sign of whatever had punched through the hull and almost a half-mile of rock. Even if the thing had vaporized on impact, there should have been some trace remaining like char marks on the wall, fragments or melted areas somewhere. There was nothing but the hole.
A few of those petals still blocked the entrance to the next section, the points curling around and digging into the far wall. They would require the use of a cutting torch in order to access the next section. Eric had brought the equipment with him on his last visit and the torch was sitting right where he left it. He situated himself where the force of the flame would not push him around and started trimming metal. The alloy took some time to heat up but once it reached a certain temperature the cutting went fast. After about an hour the passage was open and Eric secured the torch.
“Betty, I’ve cleared the section. I’m opening the hatch.”
“Affirmative. Scanner shows atmosphere behind hatch. Suggest venting slowly or setting up secondary airlock.”
“There wasn’t an atmosphere when we were here last.” Eric mentioned.
“Perhaps it took longer to build up in this section. None the less an atmosphere of almost four PSI exists behind the hatch.”
“Let’s go with the airlock. I don’t want to lose atmosphere if we don’t need to. Returning to ship.” Disappointed, Eric turned and jetted down the passageway. It would take another day to fabricate the airlock flange and move it into position down here, but he had time.
~~~~~
“In answer to your query, I was able to compare data from the alien ship with my data on the planetary scans. By extrapolating from my known data I was able to interpret a small percentage the alien data. The more I am able to compare, the more I will be able to translate their computer language and coding. I estimate an additional seventeen days six hours to accessing the ships main frame. Control has sent a message. It is ready for viewing.”
“Thanks. Put it up on the big screen for me. Why is the alien data not corrupted beyond all belief by time and radiation? When did I ask this?” Eric turned to the screen in front of the alien ship and waited. With the data they had collected the day before Betty and her little sister had managed to tie into the communications equipment aboard the vessel and could use almost everything aboard except the ships computer and engines.
“Unknown as to the reason the data is readable. Some is corrupted beyond my ability to read, but much is available still. The question was asked by you when you were in the alien bridge yesterday. ” Betty stopped speaking when the screen lit up.
“Bad news Eric. We rushed the ship for various political reasons and it has not left the system yet due to massive failures in the star drive. No one was hurt but it will take the Carlota weeks to get back to Earth for repairs, if we can even fix it. The next three ships are still being built, at the regular pace. They will launch in a little over three weeks, due to everything stopping to work on the failed ship.” The face showed disgust and a little anger, unusual for anyone cleared to be involved in the program. Eric wished he could remember his name. “The Asgard will launch next, Phil Anson commanding. He says for you not to break anything until he gets there. I take it you know each other. The Courageous under Horace Bashkir, will launch a week later. The third ship will launch two weeks later, the Ryu, Lee Tung Hoo commanding. We got your latest reports and it concerns us that you are finding damage and no crew or even traces of the crew. The picture you sent of the damaged section in the living quarters has us puzzled as well. There should have been traces of fire or something from a hole that big being punched through the ship.<
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“The other items were very exciting. Atmosphere, bipedal humanoids, the ships controls and configuration for a race similar to ourselves all have us crawling the walls down here. The fact that they were looking for inhabitable worlds with the same characteristics, the same worlds we need does concern us. We really don’t need an advanced race to compete against.
“Just keep doing what you’re doing and don’t get hurt. The fact that you can recognize and even repair the ships systems is amazing.” Eric wondered if this was a comment on his intelligence. “An alien technology so close to our own is so insanely unbelievable. We think that the technology for the star drive is similar because it is the only star drive possible, therefore it would look like what we have no matter who built it. Engineering requirements must be met no matter who you are. You get my drift? That’s all for now. Be careful.”
The screen went blank and Eric went back to unbolting the airlock from the crews room access. Faster than making a new one and he was impatient today for some reason. He had fabricated the flange to be welded to the wall but the hatch to the airlock was a standard size and could be bolted to the new flange. It wasn’t fancy, just a manual wheel and gaskets, but it was faster to build than the electronic version and it didn’t need power. “Derek!” Eric yelled.