"Morbius is getting soft?" a surprised Kalinin asked. "You had a date?" It was a very old joke, not actually true.
"The date was way before I made Phoenix Guard, way way before," she answered. "Very way before. Proceeding on your path. Extremely way before."
Another maze of corridors brought her to a bulkhead. Servots were busily erecting a pressure frame. "Routine search and rescue," announced MacPherson. "For the case: passenger without skintights trapped in a pressurized compartment, vacuum outside. We tried sonar. There's something moving in there, but it's small, size of a dog."
"Pet? Officer's child?" Sandra stiffened. "The FEU keeps children way out of combat, don't they?"
"No data. We think those plaques are encrypted door signs. Can't crack the code." MacPherson said. "But there are moving objects."
"How's my signal?" she asked.
"Loud and clear. We've dropped some repeaters. Main corridor is still locked up. I've got a mechbot at the outer door. We're trying to drill that bulkhead. Hardened steel. Cuts a bit slowly. We have a five minute procedures tape for you -- never thought we'd have you doing this, didn't think to show you how a pressure cage works. But we've got the cage, and a servot with a big pressurized volume for whatever is inside."
"Isandlwana?" Sandra asked. "Just occurred to me. I haven't seen even one houseplant here. Did your search find any?"
"Checking," MacPherson answered. "Don't remember any. Give the training tape a whirl while we get the frame finished."
Ten minutes later Sandra stood to one side of the bulkhead. A high-power cutter was working its way through the door. .
"We're running a small hole now. Checking pressure. OK, they're at 1.2 atmospheres. Ready on your suit?" MacPherson asked.
"Need to vary air composition. Ready." She yawned deeply. It was easier to run up a few psi than to demand suit tensegrity. Her ears popped.
"Pressure has matched. Mix inside is -- interesting. 5% Argon. CO2 level is up there, too, close to 1%. 4 psi O2. We're going to match composition, except for the argon." Sandra glanced at her chronometer. She had over 4 hours to go. She clenched her left hand, ramping up again from alert to combat mode.
"OK. We have an optical fiber in," MacPherson reported. "Huge room. Mostly empty. Very low tables scattered about. An array of boxes. Looking for motion. Here's the image for your HUD. Don't see anyone in there. Look sharp. Someone may be in ambush mode. Cutter is going to open the door. Now,"
The servot pushed the door slab forward and sideways. Bright, thought Sandra, that room was definitely bright. And white, or slightly green. No sign of a surviving crew member. She let her servile drone its call for surrender, repeating in English, Parisian, German, and Muscovite.
Sandra pushed into the room. No one had been visible through the optical fiber. No one appeared on the omniview, either. "The sonar track," she asked. "Where do we think the moving object is?" She very much did not like this. Giant prawns were bad enough. Invisible giant prawns with small sonar cross-sections were significantly worse .
"HUD overlay ready," answered MacPherson.
Sandra triggered the data link. Near the back of the room, said the display. Behind those child-height tables. The black lumps in the right places looked like antique beanbag chairs. Where? She pushed forward. The chairs unfolded. The closer reared up, four rear legs spread in an X, two middle legs holding a hassock, two top legs folded toward the body. The rear lump split in two, two smaller creatures skittering many-legged toward a distant corner.
The two smaller creatures clung to each other. The larger one stayed in front, positioning itself between Sandra and the smaller ones. What were they? She wondered. The body structure was vaguely spiderlike, but they were covered with coarse fur. And those were purses, or the like, belted to their bodies.
"Translate: Do you understand me?" she said to her servile. "EU and other languages. Stop if there's a response." Several minutes went by, the servile wandering from Berliner to Tagalog to LogLan. "Pause. Let's try a holo display. I'd like this ship in battle, the current hulk, a blow-in showing where we are, and what's left of the rest of the ship. "
"I've got that," MacPherson said. "And a still shot, this ship before we wrecked it. With cartoon insert, making clear that current location is inside this ship. Displaying."
The display got the rapt attention of the three creatures. Sandra realized that there was a distant high-pitched whistle fluttering around her. A query to her suit servile revealed a source. The spiders chirped, with most power in the ultrasonic.
"I've got another display. It shows the biosculpts getting into the servot, and being transferred to our ship. We'll follow that with what happens to the hulk when it hits the orbital defense screen," said MacPherson. The whistle was far louder.
Slowly, the larger creature set down its chair. It waved its limbs at the smaller creatures, gestured at the large collection of boxes in one corner, gestured at the waiting cargo servot. Then it walked slowly up to Sandra. Walked? In zero gee? Carpet, she noted, the floor is a shag carpet, and the creature hangs on to shag loops with its fingernails. It had set aside its weapon, not that it was much of a weapon. How did you judge body language in someone so radically biosculpted? The three biosculpts came across as more frightened than aggressive.
The biosculpt stood slowly up on hindmost legs, extended its finest front legs toward her. Her heart hammered. Poison? Or outreach? Was it a pet? Or a person? When it had been waving the chair, those legs were folded up against the body. Guess those parts are fragile and get protected, she decided. Sandra racked her assault rifle and extended her own hands, telling herself that she had armor, superior reach, and superior weight. It hadn't behaved like a warrior, and had no more appendages than a MinuteBoy in date-grope mode. Finger and thumb, ever so gently, met fingerparts.
The creature backed away, gestured at the stack of boxes, gestured at her, gestured at the cargo servot. The two smaller creatures were running between the stack and the cargo servot, carrying a few boxes each time. Luggage? Cargo? Valuables? Sandra decided she couldn't tell.
"Miller, this is Kalinin," the Grand Commodore's voice intruded. "Let's help them bring everything along. We'll move you to a cutter, so we aren't risking the Isandhlwana. See if they aren't too frightened of servots. FEU folks are, but these aren't exactly typical of our European opponents." Sandra stepped behind the boxes, most of which were wrapped in a mesh. She pushed against the floor, then against the wall, setting the mass of boxes drifting forward. A pair of handler servots grabbed other corners of the mesh. The three creatures began packing other bits of furniture. Cooperation, thought Sandra. They seem to understand cooperation.
"We're going to strip this compartment bare," Ter-Minasian announced, "As soon as your find is on its way. Oh, we depressurized the XYZ intersection. There are lots of body parts, fried, steam heated, parbroiled, scorched... But both large Europeans are dead."
"Commodore," Miller answered, "If I may make a suggestion?" Morbius was extremely emphatic about what his aides could do in situations like this. She was there to listen, not to claim to represent his opinions.
"Proceed." Kalinin, Sandra thought, didn't sound impatient.
"Perhaps someone should reconsider? Is this an FEU ship? I haven't seen a single humaniform. No plants. No FEU seal on anything, nor a word in European. Layout resembles nothing I've read about. FEU is horrified of biosculpt, even invisible patches. This ship was built for those prawns; look at the corridor size and the grab rails," she answered.
"Did you wish to propose an alternative owner?" Kalinin asked patiently. "Other nations with hyperships fly at FEU tolerance, and never large warships, to our knowledge. Besides: Japan, Java, Canton, Saudi Arabia such as is left of it...they use biosculpt to make people look more like each other."
"Agreed. Is it easier to believe the FEU has rejected all their weird ideas? Or is it easier to suppose they have another ally flying starships? This ship could have escaped from Star Comma
ndo Jill. One of the weird episodes," she answered.
"The Cumin Arc," Kaliin responded. "My sons both watched it, replayed it, gamed it, dissected it."
HUD marked an Isandhlwana officer looking to enter the conversation. "Weren't the Cumins the starting point of silliness?" Wolfe asked. "The invaders from another planet, or something totally idiotic like that?"
"The probable having been eliminated," Kalinin misquoted, "the impossible demands reconsideration. However, I can't do that. The War Committee would be distressed if I wasted their money defending against something so outre."
"I'll raise the question back home," Sandra said dutifully. She whispered a few words to her suit servile. It seemed to be terribly well known that `we can't handle that' translated as `please ask Morbius to tell us the answer'. What would they do if he didn't? What had ever happened to the MinuteGirl dogma: clear conscience, clear sight, clear deeds, no hesitation? The Grand Commodore sounded...political. Of course, this was the idea she was already investigating, and now she appeared to have some material evidence.
"Oh, while it's likely been handled. There was one dead body, combatant, not seriously disfigured. Azores Convention says it's our duty to give it back."
"Thank you for the reminder," Kalinin said. "That Article of Azores is not near the top of my memory. Actually, we've found a half-dozen bodies in good condition, and will recover them. And as many other parts as we can.
CUTTER FLASHMAN
LINCOLN HIGH ORBIT
July 4, 2176, 3:05 PM FNT
Sandra snapped to disoriented awareness. Her heart pounded. She took a convulsive breath. Her hands clenched, snatching for pistol, nanites ramping her pulse and respiration to combat mode. Where was she?
Memory returned. You're sleeping in your combat suit, she thought, Captain's cabin on the Flashman. You're quarantined, until we figure out if the guests are an FEU bioweapon vector or prisoners of war, and how we can decontaminate your suit safely. You're in the suit, because the space around you is potentially contaminated. And you're having a panic attack because you just had the most godawful grelking nightmare about being eaten alive by really big lobsters, which was certainly downhill from the dream of sitting on a porch overlooking the Pacific playing City of Steel with....
"Miss Miller?" Swenson's voice rang through her helmet. "Is something the matter? Your suit reports you've ramped to combat metabolic levels, but I can't find a threat."
"Awake and ready! Sir!" she answered. "Ummh, ma'am. Just a nightmare. The prawns getting theirs back, me as main course." When she thought about it that way, the dream was almost funny. She clenched her fingers again, ramping down the nanites. "Suit. Nanite combat ramp. Deactivate." Sleeping in power armor, zero-gee body implants in place, was not high on her list of pleasant ways to spend a morning. She'd been active until 0830, helping shift the FEU prisoners and their luggage into the cutter. More than once, the larger prisoner appeared to have had difficulties with the smaller ones. Finally, everything had been shifted.
In the end, the Isandlhwana's crew presented the larger prisoner with a set of environmental controls, managed to get across how they worked, and allowed him to select his own conditions. 60 F was brisk for a human, but the prisoners were furry. The two smaller prisoners had at first been baffled by a bed and pillows, then rolled themselves into a quilt and become immobile. The prisoner had led Sandra out of the compartment, darkened it, and played games with boxes, trying to involve her in games that left a distinctly sleepy Sandra baffled.
"We're doing a detailed analysis of our guests and the goods they brought with them, “Kalinin said as he entered the conversation. “ 'Biosculpt' does not begin to describe how systematically they've been altered. If that's their diet, we'll have to synthesize it from scratch. We're testing if they're carriers for biowarfare. Are you holding up?"
"My powersuit is my home," she said blandly. It was a fine MinuteGirl aphorism, and it certainly made it easier not to think about where she was or who she would not be seeing in the near future. The latter almost paralyzed her. It was very sad. She'd missed him again by doing the right thing at the right time.
"We made some progress in interpreting what the larger prisoner -- we've named her 'Alpha', and the two smaller ones 'One' and 'Two' -- was doing last night," Swenson said. "We think Alpha was trying to teach you French. Or what passes for French when your vocal cords have trouble getting as deep as 20,000 Steinmetz. The listening devices caught everything, but her voice does pitch up to 75,000 CPS."
"She?" Sandra asked.
"The NMR scans appear to indicate that," Swenson said. "At least, there are parts that may let her bear young or lay large eggs. We can't tell which. We can't read her genetic code. The biosculpt started by changing which bases she uses, not to mention the amino acids they code for. Markovian says we can't imagine how the EU put her together and got her to work. They must have complete control over computing protein folding."
"The box games last night were arithmetic," Swenson continued. "So we have the integers and more. They're coded. We can't find the code. Simple substitution: a trivial code for 'four' and 'five', something you could easily drive in the biology, gives two words starting with the same sound. Maybe not 'eff', but the same. The words she used for four and five are unrelated. Not even the same number of syllables. And she's using base 13 arithmetic for counting. We think. So far it's been impossible to decrypt her trills into good French. We're also trying to decode the three-way conversations she had with One and Two, also no luck. We can't even match utterances with grammatical structures that we know French uses."
"Perhaps it's not French?" Sandra asked. "They do speak other languages in Europe. I think. Don't they? Or do they?"
"Indeed. A tee govoreesh po-russkki?" Markovian's goateed face appeared on Sandra's HUD display. "But our guests not only aren't speaking French, they don't understand French, either in a normal voice or frequency upshifted."
"And the analysis is being repeated across Lincoln for hundreds of foreign languages. For a while we thought they were encoding Hungarian, but that appears to have been a statistical fluke. We also guessed they were block encoding sentences -- the first letter of each spoken word spells the first word of the sentence, that sort of thing. That's hard to support -- we can identify two dozen words as words. We did clear up the color issue.
"Colors?" a slightly groggy Sandra asked. Seven hours of sleep had been a bit minimal.
"You thought they were sorting things by color. Last night. Except they weren't consistent. Except with the tunable laser illuminator. You had it all down, actually, down to the different purples," Markovian said.
"I did?" What had she done last night? It sounded as wild as a Gowist Party, except those you enjoyed remembering the next day. It had been very confusing.
"We got to look closely at a display on her computer screen. It uses four phosphors -- red-yellow-green-violet. Not the same four colors as the ship, by the way. Her language matches. It has words for the inbetween frequencies, like orange is between red and yellow. But for us the two phosphors red plus blue -- colors from opposite ends of the spectrum -- are another color -- purple. With her red plus green and yellow plus violet are two more purples." His face was replaced by a polychrome graphic.
"Why?" Sandra asked. "No, not 'why do her color words match what she sees'. Why did someone rebuild her color vision? It sounds hard. What does it get you? Why did the FEU spend the money?" Money, she told herself, is something they're short of, for all that their tech is well ahead of ours. What did it get her guests?
"That is something they may explain," Ter-Minasian said, "when we learn to converse. Which I hope you can help with. Soon."
"Always ready, sir," Sandra answered. But more ready to sleep. "Perhaps I try going with the flow, let her say what she wants. Wait. They have a comptablet. Can't we...?" She let her voice trail off. There must be some way to use it.
"No interface," Markovian said. "It's self-contained.
It uses its own alphabet, God only knows why. Actually, the two smaller ones have comptablets, too. We can't even get her to page through screens while we capture images."
"I'll start on it," she said. "Is there any support? I'm not even a decent soprano -- I can't make their sounds."
"Through the roof," Swenson said. "Your boss -- Morbius -- said this will be your Core Project for him. The, The Holy Order of Gow, the party people, made a bonded computer and technical support commitment -- they've appointed a manager for procurement approval -- that's larger than the SLPSDF technical intelligence budget. That's our entire tech intell budget, not our project intell budget. Every SpyCorp I've ever heard of is on-line -- actually, your large supporters have formed a steering committee run by--you seem to have a lot of friends in very high places; the Lord of the Hexagon is Committee Chair and prime contact says 'Hi!'--so they don't fall over each other."
"Analysis of ship components, whatever we recovered? Anything I should know?" she asked. At least she would regularly hear his voice. "And please transmit 'Hi!' back."
"That's ongoing," Kalinin said. "After we got you out, someone had the right right idea -- use needle-diameter xraser fire to slice the hulk to pieces, light enough for drive fields to capture. We recovered a bunch. They're really strange. Oh, the door to the cabin, where you recovered your guests. It had mechanical locks. You could only open it from one side. The out side. Alpha, One, and Two were in the brig."
"And now?" she asked. Sharing sleeping accommodations with potential felons was less comforting. "Just as well whoever had the xraser idea later. These folks with me would have gotten fried." She had said folks. They did appear to be intelligent, and not friends of the FEU.
"They awoke an hour ago. We had a humaniform servot display the sanitary facilities. At some time in the distant past, the wardroom had gained a hot tub and jacuzzi-- which they used for bathing. Human arrangements -- well, they're not the right shape."
"Shape? Try bathing in power armor," Sandra said. "If they're receiving company, I'm ready to start again. We need to find their sleep schedules, so I can get one. Preferably soon."
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