by R J Murray
“We’ve been working together for almost a month now and the little buggers have always asked. Asi has provided lots of diagrams and explanations with help from Betty. Nothing bad has happened and the systems are tuned to perfection. The converter has twenty eight percent greater efficiency, the drives, normal and FTL are better, faster, more efficient. Everything has gotten a bit better including the communications. Our star charts have twenty two inhabitable planets now. That alone makes this worth the risk.”
“Not inhabitable. Inhabited. By them.” Phil motioned a thumb in the general direction of Astangii.
“At one time. They could be dead. Ten thousand years is a long time for a civilization to exist and there was a war. Both sides could have been blasted back to the stone age for all we know.” Horace said. “How long do these guys expect us to wait before we go find out?”
“Takes a few days for the shock to settle down. Four days, five days, something like that. Then they talk for two or three days before asking someone higher up what they think. Could be today or tomorrow but next week is possible. I’m speaking from experience here.” Eric sipped his bourbon and smiled. “We could just go and not tell them. Closest planet is only fifty three light years from here.”
“Any info about this war or the other side?” Phil asked. “Might be important.”
“I asked. Asi apologized but said that such information was classified until he could be sure about us and the outcome. He isn’t sharing anything about the weapons they used in that battle either. We saved a copy of the battle and you really can’t tell much from it except that there were fourteen ships in all. Eight like our friend across the way and six smaller ships, maybe half again as big as the Pathfinder. It appeared that three of the smaller ships took a lot of damage and ran toward the end.”
“Outnumbered but still took out five ships like Astangii before they were blown away.” Phil said.
“Literally. The last two were surrounded and destroyed even though they appeared to be drifting. No chance of surrender.” Eric added. “I wonder if they chose to die fighting or if our new friends just don’t take prisoners.”
“You come up with some scary thoughts. Maybe we should go and check it out. Any chance of tracking one of the other smaller ships from the data you collected?” Horace asked, parting his large deep black beard to pick a crumb out of it.
“Doesn’t that interfere with your helmet controls?” Eric asked.
“Hair net. Can you track one of the other ships?” he repeated.
“Maybe. Betty, you listening?” Eric asked.
“Affirmative. I have estimated three possible locations for the intact ships. If the Astangii did not pursue and destroy them, we should be able to reach the closest coordinates in two weeks. The Ryu is much closer. With a minor adjustment to her course, she could be at the first ship within three days.”
“How do we contact them while they’re FTL?” Phil asked.
“I have modified our transmitter based on the design of the Astangii. We should have no difficulty reaching them.” Betty said.
“Humph. Your computer sounds a bit smug, doesn’t she?” Horace grinned.
“She can contact a ship in FLT, so maybe she should sound that way.” Eric grinned back. The other captains had modified their computers to suit their personalities, just as Eric had. All had chosen female voices, given that the crews were all male.
“Ryu is carrying your crew too Eric. They were a bit crowded at launch and still are. Lee may not be too excited about any delay in off loading them.” Phil suggested.
“Are you kidding. He gets to explore an entire alien ship by himself, the first on the scene. Why would he not want to take a little side trip?” Eric asked.
~~~~~~
“Are you crazy? How did you contact us in FTL? What ship?” Lee seemed to be a little disheveled.
“You don’t look so good. Everything alright?” Eric asked.
“I have twice as many people as the ship was designed to carry. That may not mean much to you but the fresheners, the water system and the air handlers are at their limits. We are not talking about discomfort. We are talking about not being alive when we reach your position.” Lee seemed serious yet not as excited as Eric thought he would be under the circumstances. “The designers grossly overestimated the capability of the recycling system and it stopped working about a week ago. We’ve managed to patch it several times to get some functionality out of it and jury-rig a few other systems to help handle the overload, but we are at our limits. Dropping out of FTL to answer you may finish us off, but it sounded urgent and I was desperate for help.”
The recycling plant cleaned the air of carbon dioxide, waste gasses produced by any animal, including humans, and added enough oxygen to keep it at breathable levels. It also maintained humidity and controlled the temperature in the ship. A ship and crew generated a lot of heat and only a small fraction was carried away by radiation through the hull. Vacuum was a wonderful insulator after all. Water was filtered as was human waste and cleaned for drinking and bathing. Solid waste was stripped of moisture, sterilized and either used as fertilizer in the hydroponics section or fed as mass to the converters. The ships could never carry enough air or water to supply the crews for more than a few weeks of months. Without the recycling units, a crew was dead eventually, unless they could get back to Earth or find refuge.
“I’ll meet you at the coordinates. You could have called me at any time to get a rendezvous.” Eric responded. “Betty, send the specs on the com link so they can modify their units.”
“Affirmative.”
“Alright. That will help, but I will need to transfer most of my crew and all of yours to the Pathfinder. We won’t make it home otherwise. Most of both crews are asleep but we are running through our pharmaceuticals faster than I ever thought possible. We may end up knocking heads together to keep them unconscious.” Lee seemed to be relieved to hear Eric was coming to help. He hesitated before he spoke again. “Control suggested I was on my own out here. They suggested I not attempt to contact you directly. Since the three of you were already together when my little problem started, I was not allowed to call anyone except control.”
“Why would they do that? Why would you listen to them? What if you all died out here without help? Just get to the site and I will meet you there with help, extra air and water. We will make repairs when we meet.” Eric answered.
“Repairs? Good luck with that.”
“Don’t need luck. We have nanobots.” Eric said.
“You have what?”
“Call me when you get your transmitter modified and get to the site. Pathfinder out.”
“What was that about not contacting you?” Horace asked, puzzled.
“Who knows. The government has always been a bit paranoid about new things and meeting an alien race is a new thing to them. I’ll worry about it later, after the Ryu’s crew is safe.” Eric answered.
“What do you think the Astangii will think of your side trip?” Phil asked, standing with Horace to get back to their ships.
“Tell him it’s an emergency. It’s the truth after all and if he objects, we blast him out of orbit.” Eric joked.
“Blast him with what? A harsh look? We aren’t armed, you may remember.” Horace pointed out, missing Eric’s grin and attempt at humor.
“And he is, heavily armed. More like a battleship than an exploration craft.” Phil added.
“There was a war going on. We might want to ask for guns or missiles or something next time we get home.”
Phil and Horace looked at each other and laughed. “Never happen.” Phil answered. “We are a peaceful group of space explorers looking for a new home. Guns, other than a few side arms for officers, are forbidden aboard any vessel in the fleet.”
“Well, what if the other guys are not peaceful? They ever think of that?” Eric asked, already knowing the answer from the debates back on Earth before he launched. “Don’t bother answering. You gu
ys take care of my alien ship, Okay.”
“Your alien ship?” The airlock closed and the two men moved back into the Asgard’s connecting tube. Eric watched on the screen as the tube disconnected from the Pathfinder.
“Betty, crank her up. Head for the coordinates to rendezvous with the Ryu.”
“Affirmative. Releasing anchors and moving away from the Astangii. Astangii has inquired as to our intentions.”
“Tell him we have a ship in trouble and we are going to its aid. The other two ships will remain in the system and continue to work with him.”
“He says ‘good luck’.” Betty said after a moment.
“How nice of him. When can we go to FTL?”
“Ten minutes till we clear the three ships. Do we wish to avoid stopping in the ice belt?”
“Can we?” Eric wondered what other changes the ship had undergone while he was attached to the Astangii. They had always needed to pass through the belts using the reaction drive. “Negative. We need to restock on water and air for the Ryu.”
“Affirmative.” Betty responded.
~~~~~~
The trip out was faster than the trip in had been. With the FTL drive fine tuned by the nanobots Eric shaved a week in travel time from the one hundred and twenty six light years. It was still fourteen days to the rendezvous so he was back to sitting and twiddling his thumbs.
“Your recordings indicate you found a device aboard the Astangii. Did you bring it aboard?” Betty asked.
“Oh, yeah. I forgot with all the other stuff that happened. I’ll grab it for you.” It took almost an hour before Eric remembered what he did with the device and the flash drives, then a bit longer to get them from his suit. When he had everything, he returned to the bridge.
“Flash drives may hold data or maybe some guys music collection. Check them carefully. I don’t need an alien virus rewriting you any more than the nanobots already have.” Eric plugged five of the drives into the console.
“I have not been rewritten, only slightly modified hardware to make me more efficient. I have checked all my parameters very carefully and isolated my mainframe software from all nanobots contact. The first drive seems to be a training device for an electrician. The second teaches basic navigation. The third is encoded and I cannot read it. The fourth and fifth are the same. All are incomplete due to degradation over time.”
Eric hooked the device up through Betty’s sensors and let her scan the drives through the machine. Eric went and ate, showered and dressed before Betty spoke again.
“I can read parts of the drives using the device, but interpretation will take several days for each of the encoded drives. Should I ask Asi for assistance?”
“”He would probably not be happy about this so keep it to yourself. Let me know when you have a few of them complete.”
“Affirmative.”
Eric left the bridge with a bad feeling about the nanobots and Betty. Not that there was anything he could do about it, even if she had been rewritten.
~~~~~~
“Ryu please respond. This is Pathfinder.”
“Pathfinder, good to see you. What is this thing?”
This thing was on the screen, what was left of it. A good quarter of the globe ship was gone, much of the rest a twisted chunk of junk.
“Let’s dock first and chat later. I am coming in on your port side, locking on to your West Bay One.”
“West is full. Use North Bay One. That’s the living quarters for your crew anyway.” Lee answered.
“Hold on for a bump.” The ships came together gently, the bump almost unnoticeable. With Betty flying the ship, Eric waited by the air lock for the green light of a good seal and a lock before he opened the hatch. The smell hit him with an almost physical presence. A group of worried yet hopefully eager faces watched him for a moment. “Wow. Talk about your unwashed masses . . . Come on aboard guys. We can grab your stuff later.”
The men hurried through the hatch, breathing deeply as they did. Lee was in the middle of the crowd.
“I’m glad to see you. I need to bring them all over for a few, rotating my crew in groups of ten, if it’s alright with you.” Lee asked.
“Yeah, that will work. North Bay One and South Bay One are both empty by the way. North is set up as rec room and living quarters and showers are in South so feel free. Laundry is in South also.” Eric pointed as he talked, the crew members nodding and a fellow with stripes on his sleeve started directing bodies. He had decided to do some work on the way, figuring the crews would need more than the three small showers currently on board. Before he moved out of range he asked Asi if the nanobots could help with the plumbing, adding features like the showers on the alien ship. Asi was quite happy to agree and sent the programs needed to Betty.
“Showers. Good. You have enough water?” Lee asked.
“Reloaded at the ice belt when I went through so all tanks are full and my recycling system works just fine. Pulled a few extra chunks aboard and left them frozen, crammed into East Bay Two. Nothing but frozen food in there anyway so it wouldn’t hurt anything.”
“So tell me about this alien ship you found. I got some of the material you sent in and the crew and I have been going over it. The last I received was over two months ago. Anything new?”
Eric told Lee about the alien computer. Crew members carrying packages, boxes and crates passed them by, all trying to hear as much as they could.
“Astangii. Is that the ship or the race?” Lee asked.
“Ship we think. We haven’t found any indication of what the race was called. Since there was a war going on when the ship was last active, he is a little quiet on several subjects. Programmed to keep secrets from aliens like us.” Lee seemed to be calm and a little cold to him, but it could just be due to the situation or that they were strangers.
“Is this ship one of theirs or the other guys?” Lee asked, nodding his head in the general direction of the dead ship.
“This is the other guys. Their ships were smaller in the one battle we recorded before Asi woke up. We aren’t sure who the good guys are so this ship, if we can get anything out of it, may help us decide how much we can trust Asi. First, we get you straightened out. Let me introduce you to my mechanical engineers, the nanobots.” Eric grinned. They were going to get in the other ship no matter what he did so he may as well use them.
“Nano what?”
~~~~~~
Lee shook his head. He had showered, eaten and slept, then done it all again as the nanobots did emergency work on his ship. His crew and Eric’s had done the same for the last four days. Today Lee and the crew seemed more human, more alert and friendlier than before. Eric chalked it up to stress and let it go since he was too busy to care about much else. He had found he needed to input what he wanted the nanobots to repair into a file Betty had. She told him that these were very stupid machines that could not work without instructions. While everyone else napped and took their ease, Eric worked his fingers until they were numb.
He also discovered that these little idiots could not reproduce themselves. Betty informed him that there was a device in the Astangii power room that built and recycled nanobots as needed for the job. All they had were general repair units for maintenance and a few plumbing specialists.
On the screen in the bridge were blowups of the nanobots working on the Ryu. “This is why they didn’t want me to contact you. They are worried about contamination and your unusually erratic behavior. How did they get aboard in the first place?”
Eric told him about his activating the converter and a few surviving nanobots starting the process of repair and reproduction. “By the time we knew about them it was too late to stop them short of blowing up the ship. Then we saw how beneficial they were and when you called us, I could not see any way to fix the problem without them. The Astangii is operational now. We believe that includes enough firepower to take out all four of our ships without a single drop of sweat.”
“Scaa-ry!”
“Why are you so calm about this?” They overheard one of the crewmembers asked. “It scares the piss out of me.”
Lee and Eric stopped and waited to hear the response.
“You ever think that this could be one of the reasons you are still a grunt and not the Captain? You don’t see him breaking into a sweat just because we’ve discovered an advance alien slaughterhouse, do you? Besides, what can we do about it? Run home with our tail between our legs? Never leave Earth again?”
“We don’t even have any weapons! Why would they send us out like this, unarmed and helpless?” the first man spoke again.
“I know just what you need to do. Go take a walk outside for a few minutes. It will help clear your head.” The second man responded.
“The vacuum will kill me!”
“Save the aliens time though, won’t it?” Everyone else laughed.
Lee smiled and walked around the corner into North Bay One, with Eric following. It was one of the first normal conversations he heard among the crew.
“Attention on deck.” Everyone, including the gripper snapped to attention.
“At ease. I want to introduce you to your Captain, the man who discovered the alien ship. Captain Eric Maddwell. Captain, this is your first officer, Lieutenant Samuel Reed, engineering officer Lieutenant JG Joshua Shapiro, navigation warrant officer Ashton Cherenkov . . .”
Eric greeted each man and shook his hand. It took several hours after that to get the officers into quarters and the crew set up in North Bay One. By the time this was done, the recycling plant on the Ryu was in repaired enough to go into operation cleaning the air once more. It took a while longer before the rest of the ship was cleaned up and the systems fully functional, but the nanobots never stopped.