Muses of Terra (Codex Antonius Book 2)

by Rob Steiner

  But this thing was on the other side of a way line the Muse archive said led to Muse-controlled star systems. Her mission was to find the Menota way line, jump through it, and then begin preliminary surveys on the other side. Detailed surveys would take months and multiple missions, but her preliminaries would help plot future forays. Gaia Julius gave her strict orders to avoid contact with any possible Muse-controlled species. What if this thing turned out to be hostile? What if it “awakened” while they explored it?

  Caution was drilled into Umbra Ancilia during their training. Never undertake a mission without planning your reaction to every possible scenario. That dictum had saved her life many times. Sometimes a situation came up that called for improvisation. Umbra recognized this reality and trained its Ancilia accordingly, but it was for situations where orders were unclear or non-existent.

  Gaia Julius’s orders were clear.

  Ocella ground her teeth. If they didn’t investigate this thing now, someone else would have to do it later. There would be just as much danger for them as for Ocella and her crew now. The Menota way line was so guarded by debris that no ship bigger than Ocella’s could enter the way line. Investigating the object with a larger, better armed ship was just not possible.

  I’m not an Ancile anymore, Ocella thought. That ended when they tried to kill me six years ago.

  “Take us within scanning range,” Ocella ordered Lucia. “But be ready to take us back through the way line if this thing wakes up. Varo, I know the delta systems suck a lot of power, but keep them online for now. We’ll need them if we have to retreat.”

  “Yes, Centuriae,” Varo said.

  “Setting course for the object,” Lucia said.

  Ocella’s body pressed into her couch. The shuttle’s inertia cancellers were weak so as to make room for the speedier engines, but they were better than no cancellers. It took them fifteen seconds to reach optimal survey range. Ocella looked through her command window and exhaled. Even from this distance, the object was massive. Varo was right; it looked like an upside-down tower with spikes along its entire length, almost thirteen miles from tip to tip. Its black surface was bumpy and amorphous, but smooth and it reflected the planet’s light like a dark mirror.

  “We’re within 10,000 miles,” Lucia announced.

  “Beginning scans,” Varo said. After a few seconds, he gave a quiet whistle. “Take a closer look at the surface. I’m sending them to your panels.”

  Ocella looked down at Varo’s detailed scans. When Varo added a hydrogen filter, myriad cracks appeared across the object. But they weren’t cracks.

  “Ice?” Ocella said.

  “Yes, but I imagine that ice turns to water when this thing powers up.”

  “Like veins?” Lucia said. “It’s all under the surface.”

  “Exactly! I bet those ‘veins’ send water and fuel all over the object. Amazing! But here’s the best part—its surface isn’t rock. It’s some kind of organic shell.”

  “This thing is alive?” Ocella asked.

  “No, it’s frozen solid, but the surface is a chitinous compound, like an insect exoskeleton. Unbelievable…”

  Lucia snorted. “So it’s a giant, tower-shaped bug.”

  “Or an object built by bugs,” Varo said. “Can you imagine?”

  “We don’t know what it’s made of or who made it,” Ocella said. “Just because its shell looks like an insect exoskeleton, doesn’t mean its builders were insects. Our ship is made of metal, but we’re not.”

  “I haven’t been tutored like that since I was eight,” Lucia muttered.

  Ocella chose to ignore her. That didn’t last long…

  A flash of white light filled the cockpit. Ocella gasped and shut her eyes. Lucia cursed, and Varo grunted as if punched. The ship’s window filters engaged to dampen the light, but Ocella still blinked to get the starbursts to recede from her vision. She checked her tabulari. All of the screens had turned to multi-colored static.

  “Report!” Ocella cried.

  “All my panels are scrambled,” Lucia said. “Maneuvering controls not responding.”

  “My panels, too,” Varo said. “I can’t even tell if life support still works.”

  Ocella looked out the command window at the object. The light faded, so the window’s auto-dimmers receded. What she saw made her wish they hadn’t.

  The object’s ‘veins’ now pulsed with an ethereal blue light. It slowly swiveled so that one of its amorphous mountains was pointed at her ship.

  Ocella’s panels came back online, but her relief turned to horror when she found they were locked. She tapped her controls, but nothing happened.

  Lucia pounded her fist on her tabulari. “Cac!”

  “We’re locked out,” Varo said. “I still see my scans, but I can’t change anything.”

  Ocella’s panel was in the same condition; she could watch her readings, but couldn’t switch views.

  Her body suddenly pressed into the delta couch much stronger than before.

  “They’re controlling our ship,” Lucia cried. “We’re flying towards the object.”

  Ocella looked at the ship’s relative speed. They had accelerated +20 T gravities. At least the ship’s inertia cancellers held—making it feel more like +3 T—or they’d be crushed into the couches.

  She looked out the window again. They were headed right for one of the object’s spikes.

  4

  The spike’s tip seemed sharp from their survey distance, but as they flew closer, the tip flattened to two hundred paces across. A dark, triangular-shaped opening yawned in the middle of the flat expanse, taking up three quarters of the tip. Small circular holes ringed the opening, grouped in threes, twenty paces apart. Their ship flew into the triangular opening and the blackness within.

  Ocella’s body eased up from the command couch, and her tabulari said the ship was rapidly decelerating.

  “Options,” she said.

  “I don’t think they want to destroy us,” Varo said. “They could’ve flown us into the planet if they wanted to. I think they want to talk.” His voice trembled, and not with the same enthusiasm from a few minutes ago.

  “What do we say to them?”

  “Who says they want to talk?” Lucia asked. “What if they’re hungry?”

  “These are alien beings,” Varo said. “Their contact protocols could be as incomprehensible to us as ours will likely be to them. Perhaps they consider this a friendly gesture, that maybe they’re saving us power by flying us inside.”

  “Or,” Lucia said, “they don’t want us escaping to warn our people they exist. They drag us into their ship without even hailing us first? Doesn’t seem friendly no matter what species you are.”

  “If all they cared about was our escape,” Varo said, “they would have destroyed us. I still think they want to talk.”

  Ocella said, “It’s a good sign they didn’t blast us out of the sky, but we have to be ready for the fact they may not be friendly. We knew we might find a Muse-controlled species here. If they want to talk, we use the first-contact protocols we all learned in the academia.”

  “‘Identity, purpose, needs, plans,’” Varo quoted.

  They were protocols all humans learned regarding first contact with intelligent aliens. First, establish a way to identify each other; determine the aliens’ purpose for being in its location, along with humans communicating their purpose; learn the aliens’ basic survival needs; ascertain the aliens’ plans to secure their needs.

  Lucia looked at Ocella. “If they’re not friendly?”

  Then Jupiter grant us a swift journey to Elysium. Her ship was unarmed, and each one of them only had a pulse pistol. They could not resist an alien race that could build an object like this and control her ship like a puppet.

  Ocella’s silence conveyed her thoughts to Lucia, so Lucia frowned and stared at her useless tabulari.

  The cavern was pitch black for several minutes, but then a point of blue light in the far dis
tance grew brighter the further they traveled. The end of the corridor soon became apparent—a wall covered in blue-lit veins. When they came within a hundred paces of the wall, the veins undulated and then concentrated around dozens of what looked like connector tubes covering the entire wall. The ship floated to one such tube. The connector was organic, chitinous, and glowed with blue veins. It was like a tentacle reaching out to them.

  Ocella flinched when the ship repositioned itself to align its nose with the alien connector tube.

  “How will it connect?” Lucia wondered aloud. Connector hatches and tubes across human space had been standardized for centuries, enabling every starship to connect with every other starship or way station.

  No sooner had Lucia spoke when the tip of the connector tube grew and widened as it came closer. The hatch was below the command window and out of Ocella’s view, but she felt a thump as the connector attached itself to the ship.

  “Seems to know how,” Ocella muttered.

  Varo said, “Hatch sensors say the connection is good. They’re even sending us power, gravity, and atmosphere.”

  Ocella’s tabulari said the air that the object was pushing into the ship was human standard.

  If they can fly the ship, they can fake the scans.

  Lucia must have been thinking the same thing, for she unbuckled her couch straps and reached for her pressure helmet and air canisters. Ocella and Varo did the same. Within seconds, they all breathed air from their own pressure suits.

  Ocella’s tabulari flickered and then unlocked. She tapped a few displays and found she had full control of the ship again.

  “I can get in,” Ocella said. “You two?”

  Lucia tapped her tabulari. “Flight controls are mine again.”

  “I’m back in, too,” Varo said. “But check the view behind us.”

  Ocella glanced at the rear feeds. A net of blue veins quickly formed behind them, like a closing iris. Or a prison door.

  Ocella removed her pulse pistol from the compartment in her delta couch and checked the pellet load. Lucia did the same.

  Varo frowned at both of them. “I still think they just want to talk.”

  Lucia scowled, but Ocella said, “That may be true, but it doesn’t hurt to show that we can defend ourselves if they don’t want to ‘just talk.’ Arm yourself, Varo.”

  Varo sighed, then reached for the pistol in his delta couch.

  Ocella led them down the command deck ladder to the shuttle’s bottom level. The shuttle was smaller than Vacuna, with only a two compartment bottom level—an engine room in the rear and a storage bay that doubled as crew quarters in the front. The connector hatch indicator at the front of the storage bay glowed green.

  Ocella approached the hatch. It made a loud hiss and Ocella jumped. Lucia drew her pistol and aimed at the hatch. Ocella pushed Lucia’s pistol down and shook her head once. Lucia glared at Ocella but kept the pistol at her side.

  The hatch hissed again. The locks clicked and the hatch swung inward. The connector tube beyond was empty, but its black surface was alit with the blue glowing veins. Ocella eye-tapped her helmet’s scanners. The atmosphere beyond was Terran standard, but with slightly higher oxygen. The scans said they’d have no trouble breathing if they removed their helmets, but Ocella wasn’t that trusting yet.

  “You two stay here,” she said. “I’ll go first. Once I know it’s…appropriate for you, I will signal.”

  “Centuriae—” Lucia began.

  “This is my responsibility. I’ll stay in constant com. It’ll appear less threatening if one of us goes in first. ”

  Lucia barked a mirthless laugh. “‘Less threatening?’ Have you seen their ship? They don’t have anything to fear from us.”

  “Just do it, Lucia.”

  Ocella stepped forward to the edge of the hatch and studied the alien connector tube. It seemed made of the same chitinous material as the rest of the object, with bright blue capillaries just below its semi-transparent surface. She stepped onto the tube, and the surface gave slightly beneath her weight. As far as she could tell, the tube generated a 1.0 T gravity field. She was thankful for the gravity, for she did not see any handholds on the smooth walls with which to pull herself along.

  Her helmet still indicated breathable atmosphere, and the air temperature was well above freezing. It detected no elements in the air that would cause her harm. She still chose to keep her helmet on.

  She stepped along the tube, which curved to the right and then ended at a dark entrance. She was about to eye-tap her external helmet lights when the entrance lit up with the same blue light as the connector. The corridor beyond ran perpendicular to the connector tube. The blue vein lights to the right glowed brighter and began to pulsate. The lights on the left, however, were dimmer and did not pulsate.

  “I’ve reached the end of the connector,” Ocella reported back to Lucia and Varo. She told them about the pulsating blue lights in the corridor. “They seem to want me to go right, so right it is.”

  “Hope it’s not a warning to stay away from the right,” Lucia commented dryly.

  Ocella ignored her.

  The corridor twisted and turned, went up and down. It was more like a tube, with a curved floor made of the same material as the walls and ceiling. Ocella wondered if this tunnel usually coursed with the object’s “blood.” Openings branched off, but the main path was brighter and pulsated, so she stayed with it. The material on which she walked still had a slight give beneath her feet. She couldn’t shake the feeling she was walking on the object’s “skin.”

  She described all this to Lucia and Varo over her com. Though her helmet cameras recorded everything, talking through her experiences helped calm her nerves.

  “There’s a tunnel on the ceiling,” she said, scanning the opening as she walked beneath it. “Looks like the one I’m in, but it goes up. The main tunnel is still pulsating, so I’ll stay on the path. Not sure how I’d climb up there anyway.”

  “It makes you wonder what their physical bodies are like,” Varo said, excitement returning to his voice. “Why do they like the blue lights? Why is it so dark? How can they find their way around the vessel when its corridors twist and turn so—?”

  Lucia said, “Varo, you’re babbling again.”

  Despite her nervous stomach, Ocella grinned at the annoyance in Lucia’s voice.

  “Forgive me if I’m excited about the greatest discovery in human history since the Muses.”

  “Yes, the Muses turned out so well for us,” Lucia replied.

  “If you ignore the whole enslavement part, the Muses have been a good thing for humanity,” Varo said. “Granted, like any Saturnist, I’d prefer we not have an alien virus controlling us, but Muse technology has only benefited humans.”

  “Who’s to say we wouldn’t have discovered those technologies ourselves?” Lucia said. “It’s been a thousand years since Antonius overthrew Octavian Augustus. A lot could’ve happened during that time.”

  “But it would not have been the efficient track to where we are now. Technology had not changed much in the millennia before Antonius. I just don’t believe we’d be traveling the stars without the Muses.”

  Lucia snorted. “You’re a Pantheist. Won’t the gods strike you down for admitting that?”

  “I speak the truth. The gods do not strike down people for speaking the truth.”

  “If I could interrupt,” Ocella said, “I’ve entered an actual room.”

  While Lucia and Varo debated, Ocella had turned a corner to her right and entered a cavernous, crescent-shaped room. Though she couldn’t see around the crescent’s inner curve, the room looked two hundred paces from tip to tip. It had a clearly delineated floor and hazy, blue oval shapes covering the walls on either side. Ocella looked up. The oval-lined walls disappeared into the gloom above.

  “Centuriae,” Varo said, “can you take a closer look at the walls?”

  Ocella walked over to a human-sized oval to her right. It seemed
made of the same chitinous material as the rest of the ship, yet brighter and more translucent than the black, vein-lit material around it. She thought she could see a shape inside. She eye-tapped the radar on her helmet display.

  Her helmet showed a frozen, tentacled creature. It looked like a Terran octopus—three-feet tall, bulbous head, and eight tentacles. The creature’s tentacles, however, each had three fingers and a thumb.

  “There’s your alien, Varo,” Ocella said, staring at the creature. Ocella had watched the archive holos Kaeso retrieved from Menota, and they included this same creature. But seeing it on a holo and seeing it in the flesh were two different experiences.

  “Unbelievable,” Varo breathed. “This must be their version of a sleeper crib.”

  Lucia said, “Or a meat freezer. There are hundreds of them.”

  Ocella aimed her helmet’s radar at the ovals around the creature. Each one contained a similar octopod in a different frozen position, as if the creatures had been dumped in and flash-frozen. Octopod cells went as far up as her helmet’s radar could see, and to the left and right.

  “Wait, Centuriae,” Varo said. “Turn to your left, twenty paces from your position.”

  Ocella aimed her helmet’s radar to the left and walked toward the ovals on the wall. She saw what caught Varo’s attention—another section of frozen creatures. But these had leathery wings wrapped around their bodies and a head resembling a Terran shark. Twenty more paces to the left was another species. This one had limbs and appendages sprouting from all over its torso, and Ocella couldn’t tell which end was the head and which was the tail. The sections behind her contained equally bizarre and exotic alien creatures. Some had incomprehensible shapes, while others had skin as ephemeral as a Terran jelly fish. Frozen life filled the room. She passed one section of ovals that seemed empty at first, but then she noticed they were filled with dark swirls in the frozen fluid that looked like algae. If the gods could create an intelligent virus, why not intelligent algae?