Minutegirls

by George Phillies

  "What's this?" she asked. "Cluster of lights, about halfway up - guessing I'm upside up -- the wall. I'll close on them. Four lights, three bright, one dim. Funny colors. A slightly green yellow. A slightly red orange, copper color. Royal blue. Dim, a really deep violet. A dozen stalk switches, with labels." She paused. "Servile can't translate the labels," she announced. "You're getting downloads. I thought I had a complete linguistic package.

  "Your signal is loud and clear," MacPherson confirmed. "Ship library is not translating. And our package is complete."

  “Perhaps it's European Art," Sandra suggested. "Looks odd. Makes no sense. I'm entering the corridor. My doppler radar came up. Tons of echoes. If I stop, there are no doppler shifts, nothing moving on side corridors. Let me know when you've got the echoes unscrambled."

  Sandra drifted into the corridor, eyes glancing from left to right. A gentle pressure on one wrist was the sensor readout from combat nanites, keeping her pulse and blood pressure from skyrocketing. "Corridor is clean," she reported. "Peculiar things sticking from the floor. Like a ladder, but way too big, too far apart."

  "Zero-gee grab bars," MacPherson observed. "You used to see them on ships likely to fly with no working grav plates. The motion is like swimming on the bottom of a pool, pulling yourself along."

  "Coming up on a cross-corridor," Sandra said. "I've got picture feed from the lead servot. More featureless corridor. I'm looking for corridor nameplates, frame numbers, that sort of thing. Way up -- or down -- on the wall." She gestured with a light pen. Servots rose to examine the markings. "No translation here, either," she announced. "Could it be like those old fashioned European roadsigns?" she asked. "No words, just icons."

  "Say again?" Wolf queried.

  “Pre-Incursion road signs copied Europe. Across the ocean, they had a continent full of illiterates, so everyone memorized picture icons for "stop", "no turn", whatever, all black squiggles and red squares, something like that," Sandra answered.

  She resumed describing her movements. "I'm continuing along the corridor. Just a moment while I blank the servot lights...There are rows of really dim lights along the floor and ceiling, under the grab bars. They're that copper color again. Just a second...switched to polyspectral, false colors. There's a near infrared glow behind the wall art. And that violet -- there's another set of lamps on the next sliding door -- that violet is as bright as the others. But it's narrow band, peaked in the ultraviolet."

  "I've got a microservot with wide-band polychrome cameras," MacPherson said. "It's passing your 11 o'clock forwards. Nothing beyond what you've spotted. Walls are really warm -- close to 120 Fahrenheit."

  "Walls are the ugliest color scheme I've ever seen, too. Let's advance," Sandra said. "It's another 200 feet linear to the interesting rooms. Are signals clear?"

  "Like a bell," MacPherson said. "We're getting a little clutter from multiple signal paths, nothing digital filters can't handle."

  "OK. I'm making yet another zig and zag. You know, not only do these corridors pop up, down, and sideways, they corkscrew. Those grab bars have spiralled half-way around, from bottom to top," she reported.

  "They seem to keep doing it," MacPherson said.

  "And tons of emergency lights," Sandra said. "More than night on the Bellerophon. Are you sure this ship is dead?"

  "Xrasers fried it good," MacPherson reminded. "It's an FEU ship. They overdo emergency lights. You think they have a sense of the value of money?"

  "They don't have money," Sandra reminded. "Do they?"

  "Please stop!" Swenson shouted.

  "Holding." Sandra clung to a grab bar.

  "Doppler array is getting shifted signals. No, it's stopped. Faint. Hard to interpret. And a large burst of venting gas. A compartment must have lost integrity. Echo times implied, oh, moving objects were ten foot cubes. We must have been seeing your cargo servots," she finally answered, "through a shaky long path. Nothing else is vaguely that big. Go ahead."

  "Advancing. Coming up on the XYZ intersection," Sandra said. "The scan was right. It's three perpendicular corridors, and an open space. Makes no sense. You walked through a 90 degree bend from straight ahead to straight down. OK, these grab bars show how you were supposed to navigate it. Spiral around the edge. I'm following. Cross-corridor lights are out -- must have just illuminated the main corridor."

  "Miss Miller," came MacPherson'c voice. "Could you illuminate the cross-corridors? The microservot concentrated a bit too much on your intended path -- destination is just around the next bend -- and forgot to check sideways."

  "One at a time," she announced. "Right -- open door and a bend. Down -- open door and that Y split you see on the map. Neutrino tomography has been fine so far. Left -- scratch that. Scan showed that door as closed. It's open. And I'm finally getting an atmosphere trace. Low, but more than outgassing. Mostly water vapor and organics." She forced herself to yawn. Totally dead ship or no, the strangeness of the hulk still jangled her imagination. If there were clever tactics for exploring something so odd, she had missed all of them.

  "Think ice cream," said Swenson. "There's a mass spec on one of the servots. That's what the analysis looks like. Lipids. Sugars. Complex molecules. Someone was having desert, went to battle stations, and dropped it."

  "OK," answered Sandra. "Hold a moment. I don't have line of sight to up. I'm going to do a slow leap straight across that drop, give you illumination straight up on the way by." She shifted the flashlight to her right hand, grabbed a bar, and very gently pushed off with her left. Her suit AI corrected her grip so her pushoff gave her no spin. "On my..."

  "DOPPLER ALERT! DOPPLER ALERT!" screamed her suit servile. "INCOMING ZENITHWARDS! INCOMING..."

  Sandra's left hand snapped to her pistol. A clench of fingers inverted function on her combat nanites. Her pulse ramped. Adrenaline surged. The suit switched her air to combat emergency feed -- 1% CO2; 50% O2.

  "Nothing in sight!" She was at the center of the intersection, drifting in space. "Noth..." The motion up the corridor was a very large object. A very very large object, not that close. "Eat radiant death, Frenchie!" she screamed, suddenly happy for regularly practicing off-hand aiming. A plasma bolt cut at their waists... No, it was a miss, the Frenchman's legs all came off the floor... Her right hand released the flashlight, reached sidewise. How many legs? Weren't Frenchmen bipedal? Combat frame swung her assault rifle into position. Left hand corrected aim, fired at torso. There were a whole stack of them, all in a bunch, too dark to see clearly, and here came a second fire team, right behind the first, all again in a tight bunch.

  Hit! Plasma pistol hit something. She was totally out in open, and they hadn't shot back yet...idiots, they were, and...Assault Rifle came up, thumb snapped off safety, set fire to Full Automatic.

  "WEAPONS FAILURE. TAYLOR SUPPRESSION FIELD," warned the AI HeadsUp Display. "Plasma Pistol Inoperative. Please reconfigure Assault Rifle to chemical munitions mode."

  "Grelk!" she cursed. The Lincoln folks had reset her rifle to Gauss firing mode to match fleet doctrine, meaning its power packs were down, too. "Reconfigure! Reconfigure!" She dropped her pistol. Grenades when you didn't have cover were not optimal. She reached for her melee sword. Fortunately the power armor EVA pack had big batteries. Her right arm snapped back, waiting for the combat frame to recover the rifle. The pistol's lanyard was powered and would do its recovery automatically. A combat frame was a bit slower.

  The Frenchman -- there were two of them, huge, and how many grelking legs did a Frenchman have, anyhow? -- were leaping at her. Sword came to guard position. Lights behind her flared bright. Someone was trying to dazzle them with servot headlamps.

  The light also meant that she could see her opponents clearly. Now, she decided, was too late to remember the rampable night vision option on her suit. Why hadn't it ramped? The suit servile was supposed to handle that automatically. She'd interpreted the dark corridors as 'really really dark'.

  For all their size and number of legs, the
y were not that fast. When you were the size of a small elephant, slow took on a different meaning. Of course, she noted, in zero gee speed was not exactly the advantage it was on earth. She slipped back into center. Giant crayfish, head of a star mole, tentacles and all, was how she would describe them. So much for the grelking lie FEUs didn't do exotic biosculpts. She was vaguely aware of a cacophony of voices screaming in her ear. All thirty-eight people on Isandhlwana must be trying to tell her something different at one time.

  It had the claws of a lobster, she noted, with the crusher claw converging on her midriff. Leg came up to block the lower claw. Sword swung at the upper, its strange-matter blade slicing through exoskeleton and flesh like a serving knife through blueberry-orange marmalade. There was a shock of impact. Arms and shoulders held off the upper claw. The sword was jammed, buried up to the hilt. Her right leg was driven up, knee almost into stomach. She straightened convulsively, forcing apart the claws. Left hand braced, elbow locked, pushing against the pad on the upper claw, letting her pull the sword out.

  Tentacles looped across the space around her -- it was trying to grab her and drag her into its mandibles. The Frenchman tried hard to close its claws and crush her flat. She planted both legs on the lower claw and pushed back. Despite its size, she was stronger than it was. She wove the sword defensively against the tentacles. Two sliced apart. The rest withdrew very quickly. The strain of holding the claw open tested the limits of her strength. On battery emergency reserves, power armor was no help. She hacked at the claw, once and again, gouging out large sections. The space around her was filling with a violet cloud. Was it bleeding? Blue blood?

  Sandra stretched ahead, targeting the joint, her right arm's hardest blow behind the swing. The joint parted. The upper claw floated into space. The lower claw jerked away, then swung back, very, very fast. Her X-block caught most of the blow. The rest took her hard in the stomach. Ceramic armour insets or not, the blow winded her, sending her flying back up the corridor.

  Now the suit servile recognized the hazard, stiffening the armor, locking her into place so the impact spread across her entire body. What could have been a bonebreaking shock was instead only jarring. She reached for a grab-bar. Forcing herself to ignore a need to breathe, she pulled herself up, wedging her legs against a stanchion. Her opponents skittered sideways as they moved ahead. That spiral in the grab-bars matched their run.

  The rear creature flung things at her. What were they? Somewhat like throwing stars, but larger than dinner plates. She moved with the flow of her suit, the suit servile helping her to block object after object with her melee sword.

  Now they were chasing her again. When was her rifle coming up? The suit HUD display counted paralytically toward zero. Meleeing a pair of elephant prawns sounded lots less fun than shooting them. She pushed backwards down the corridor, snatching the finally-reconfigured assault rifle from her combat frame. Her turn put her feet behind her so she landed on the further corridor wall, feet and knees bringing her almost to a standstill.

  Shot selector went again to full automatic. The lead prawn -- Frenchman seemed a stretch; were these shipboard food animals, escaped from the galley? -- took a burst without substantial apparent damage. It also hadn't slowed down, not that it was fast to begin with. She switched the rifle to its grenade launcher function. The first two rounds were modified shotgun shells. Rounds 3-6 were incendiary. Shotgun blasts tore at the softer external parts. Time delay let grenades penetrate the integument, so grenades detonated inside the creatures, illuminating their innards. The array of body parts would have been fascinating if most of them hadn't been dedicated to having her for lunch. She followed with a full clip of rifle autofire. The elephant prawns were still closing.

  This appeared to be satchel charge time, she decided, unless she wanted to close to hand-to-hand combat with a really big lobster. She could always do that later. Very soon, hand-to-hand might be her one option. Her armor would officially stop the fragmentation components; in vacuum, she could think of safer bets. She jumped back into cover. Before she reached it, the forward prawn blew apart. Steam explosion? she wondered. It had certainly been heated enough, all the way inside, with lines of flaming lithium/oxidizer under its shell.

  Almost instantly, the sliding portal across the corridor slid shut. Four inches thick! she thought. That sliding panel had to be four inches thick, and it slammed so hard she could feel the wall vibrate. Even if there were safety interlocks, you really didn't want to stand in the way of one of those doors.

  "Night vision!" she shouted. A 360 degree sweep of the room appeared on her HUD, bright as day, empty of giant prawns. Her Doppler radar wasn't showing any motion, either line of sight or around corners. "Isandhlwana," she said, "Data on the biosculpts. Anything? They were doing space naked, no vacuum suits. Please advise." There was silence. "Isandhlwana, do you hear me?" she asked.

  "Loss of carrier," her suit's servile responded. "Main signal path is blocked by corridor bulkheads."

  Now what? she asked herself. "Servots in range?" she asked.

  The suit servile displayed a list. "Servots ran through the intersection while you were in combat," it explained. "Everything came through except two of the cargo haulers."

  Sandra called a map display. This was one of the interesting rooms, but what was it? Giant metallic mushroom stalks, six feet tall or more, rose at random from various walls. Their tops were covered with masses of lights and few-inch-long rods. This was not a dead-end corridor; there were several other routes out of the ship. "Why aren't we getting signals from Isandlwana," she asked, "down some of the other corridors?" She gestured at the projected hologram of the map.

  "Signals propagating along these paths are received," the suit servile. "They are cancelled per servile autoexec menu as arbitrary noise, to optimize signal quality down the primary path."

  "There is no primary path!" Sandra said. What did the servile think it was doing? "Let me hear the loudest secondary. Now!"

  "...your situation. I repeat again, please report your situation," MacPherson asked. "We are getting datalinks but not voice. Can you hear me, Sandra? We are getting..."

  "Miller here," she answered. "Isandhlwana, do you read? This is Miller. There was some servile interface error on my radio; please make a patch. Radio should be up now."

  "MacPherson answering," his voice came through clearly . "Bulkheads on main corridor closed on both sides of the EU crew you encountered. We don't know why. We're doing a new neutrino scan. What is the status of the EU combatants?"

  "I think they're dead," she reported. "They'd better be. They each had an incendiary grenade detonate inside their chests. Where did they come from?" she asked.

  "There all along," MacPherson answered. "We ID'd a closed compartment on the neutrino scan. Almost all compartments show as open to vacuum, but there had been a sealed one off the intersection. It's now open."

  "Are there many more of these compartments?" she asked.

  "We're evaluating. We have a servot patch. It'll let the servots do a systematic sweep of the hulk, without teleoperation. Full search takes ten minutes."

  "OK. Servots are picking up loose bits and pieces?" she asked.

  "Correct. We'd like one of those mushrooms, but don't see mounting brackets," he answered.

  "One moment,"she answered. Assault rifle went back to its frame. Melee sword dropped into both hands. "Yieee!" she screamed as she swung. Her wrists took the shock as the blade swept through the support pylon. "Not attached any more," she announced.

  "Thank you...oops. Check seven!" MacPherson interrupted himself.

  She pivoted and stared. What did he see?

  Ghostly tentacles now flapped loosely from behind a large cabinet. Doppler radar wasn't picking them up; they were just too small. Assault rifle again in her arms, she pushed herself sideways. Was it another prawn? Alive?

  "Surface temperature is way below the others," announced MacPherson. "No doppler for heart beat. No response to being
prodded by a servot. Dead, I think. Servots have checked the rest of the room. Don't see another one. We'll stuff it in a cargo frame, get it out here."

  "Sounds good to me," she announced. "Is that clothing it's wearing?"

  "Straps. Lots of straps. Leather or plastic. Things hanging from straps. Not clothing unless you've got old-fashioned tastes," answered MacPherson.

  "Old-fashioned or gnerdly," she answered. "Any activity at XYZ?"

  "Negative. We've got a small servot inside. We've got a lousy signal, are getting slow image scans. Can't see much. Radar seems to show slow-drifting lumps, no sign of rapid motion," MacPherson reported.

  "I'm doing a look-see at the top of these mushroom stalks," she reported. "Funny color lights. Control wands. Funny spacing."

  "Support proposes they were tentacle-operated," said MacPherson.

  "That matches the height," she agreed. "How is the search going? And how did you manage to get the servots to search by themselves?"

  "Proceeding," he reported. "Some guy on the ground had Fire Department building search software -- for when you didn't know the warehouse layout, and the layout was 3-D -- and got our attention on it."

  "My thanks to him. Big thanks. Are we finding things?" she said.

  "Lots of empty rooms. Very few personal effects -- or what might be personal effects. Spiral grab bars everywhere -- looks like those creatures were crew, not housepets. We have one pressurized room." A map came up before her, path from here to there being labeled.

  "OK, I'll start moving. Can you try again on servot flank and rear coverage? I know the servots can't do anything, but I’d rather not be surprised, and the prawns are even uglier than my last blind date," she said.