by Tim Pratt
“No visible one, anyway,” Uzoma said. “Someone in there can control inertia well enough to make our ship decelerate rapidly from a tenth of the speed of light to a full stop without doing any damage to us in the process. If they can accomplish that, drawing us near would be trivial.”
Sebastien stepped closer to Elena. She was profoundly aware of his presence, which was ridiculous in their current circumstances, but bodies and brains reacted strangely to stress sometimes, and hers was clearly urging her to try and reproduce before she died. Stupid bodies. “I guess our faction wins,” he said. “Exploration it is. I never expected to meet aliens. I wonder what they’re like?”
“An aperture is opening in the structure.” Uzoma’s tone was as matter-of-fact as always. Just reporting data.
They all looked at the screen. An irregular, roughly oval hole was opening up in the side of one of the skyscraper-sized portions of the structure, right down at the end of a branch, on the edge of the vastness. “It looks like the metal is flowing away, not like a door opening,” Elena said.
Hans scowled. “No reason to believe it’s metal at all. Our sensors can’t tell us a damn thing about it. We’ve got a nose full of surveying equipment, and as far as it’s concerned, that thing out there is basically invisible. It absorbs everything we throw at it.”
There was no perceptible sense of movement, but the aperture got bigger and bigger on the screen, until the edges vanished entirely and the screen went black. Robin flicked through various external camera views, but they all showed darkness.
Hans consulted his handheld tablet, presumably full of useless sensor data. He was the ship’s chief engineer and fixer-of-broken-things. “We’re inside the structure, whatever it is. The sensors think there’s a lot of empty space and a few solid objects in here with us. Let there be light.” He swiped at the screen and the ship’s external lights came on, shining into the darkness.
They all looked at the view on Robin’s screen, but even the lights revealed little beyond some lattice-like structures that could have been metal struts or girders. Hans hmmed. “Are those cranes and gantries, maybe? Could this be some kind of ship-building facility?”
There was a thump as the ship settled down on some kind of surface – and then another thump as they all dropped the short distance to the floor. Uzoma made a noise that was almost a whimper. “There is gravity. I… cannot explain why there is gravity.”
Sebastien bounced up and down on his heels. “A little less than one G, I think. This big anthill isn’t spinning, and it’s hard to imagine something this size could accelerate fast enough for this to be thrust gravity already, though if they can control inertia, who knows? Artificial gravity. That’s interesting.”
“We should look around,” Elena said.
Robin gave a definitive nod. “All right. Let’s assess the situation. Ibn, you and Hans are with me.”
“I will comply,” Ibn said, “but why have I been selected?”
“You’re a surveyor,” Robin said. “We’re surveying.”
“I am primarily a geologist.”
“Then keep your eyes open for interesting rocks. I’m also taking you because you know how to shoot. Hans, I guess you get to open that stupid weapons locker after all.” They had a small cache of weapons in case they landed on a planet with hostile wildlife, though they’d considered the odds of that drastically low. It was far more likely they would die from hostile microorganisms or equipment failure. “Let’s suit up and see what’s happening out there. Sebastien, Uzoma, and Elena, you stay on board. We’ll keep in radio contact.”
“I’d like to go outside to play, please,” Sebastien said.
“You’re my second in command, Sebastien. If whatever we find out there proves unfriendly, and we don’t come back, you’re in charge.”
“Heavy lies the head that wears the crown,” he murmured.
“Uzoma, see if you can send a transmission through the walls of… whatever this place is. Let Earth know we found something.”
Uzoma nodded and left the room at a brisk walk, which was as close to frantic as Elena had ever seen them.
“What about me?” Elena said.
“I’m sticking with the members of the crew who have military experience for this first foray. If it seems safe, you can come out soon, and if we encounter anything that seems alive, we’ll definitely want your assessment.”
Elena didn’t pout, because that would be unprofessional, but she couldn’t stop herself from sighing. “All right. Please keep your helmet cams on and streaming.”
“Not to be overly psychological about all this,” Sebastien said, “but if you go out there with guns, prepared for hostility, you might find just that.”
“I’m aware of the risks,” Robin said. “But I’m not about to explore a possibly alien space station with nothing but flashlights.” She handed Elena the tablet. “We’ll stream our video here.” She left the cargo hold, followed by Hans and Ibn, who gave them a grave nod farewell as he passed.
Sebastien sat down on a crate. “Shall we sit back and enjoy the show?”
“How can you be so calm?”
“Like you said, our odds of survival were always low. I didn’t really expect to wake up again after I went into cryosleep, and then I did, to do my days of solo duty on the ship, but every time I went back into cold storage I expected it to be the last time. All this is just bonus existence, as far as I’m concerned. Besides, it’s interesting. This place, this station, this object, whatever it is… I’ve always been fascinated by projects on such huge scales. The coordination and organization and effort involved always dazzles me.”
Elena snorted, looking into the dim view on the screen. “It’s definitely dazzling.”
He patted the crate beside him, and she sat. They looked at the screen together as the others suited up and their helmet feeds came online. Hans was handing out some surprisingly low-tech guns: a pistol for Robin, a shotgun for himself, and an automatic rifle for Ibn, who’d been a sniper in the water wars.
Elena said, “You’d think we’d have fancy lasers or plasma blasters or something. The future is a disappointment.”
“Simple ballistic guns are easy to repair and service, and it’s not even hard to cast extra ammunition, with the fabricators we have. Plasma is notoriously hard to make from scratch.”
“All right, can you hear us?” Robin said.
“We can indeed,” Sebastien said.
“We were ready to explore unknown and dangerous terrain, but we didn’t expect to start with the inside of a giant anthill, so we’ll see how this goes.”
Hans was uncharacteristically silent as they opened the airlock, and Ibn characteristically so. The screen was divided into quadrants: three squares for the helmet feeds, and one rotating through the ship’s external cameras. Three figures in environment suits appeared on that fourth screen, moving in close formation, and Sebastien stabbed the quadrant with his forefinger to keep it from rotating away from that view. The suits had lights on their helmets and on the arms, and the crew shone them around in various directions, moving with military precision and grace. The views through their helmet cams were just indistinct washes of brightness, and darkness, and shapes.
“Looks like some kind of hangar,” Robin said. “Lots of big equipment. Cranes, hooks, nozzles… no sign of anything moving, though–”
The ship abruptly shuddered, clattering against the hangar floor, and Sebastien and Elena exchanged a glance. The ship rose into the air rapidly, the external camera feed showing the figures receding below, the helmet feeds showing the ship receding above. Hans cursed, and Ibn muttered a prayer, and Robin shouted, “Sebastien, are you all right?”
“Apart from being dragged into the sky? Yes.” His voice betrayed either fear or excitement or both.
“It looks like some kind of claw grabbed the Anjou and… Wait, there’s light, are those sparks?”
Elena leaned toward the screen, frowning at the view from the
helmet cams far below. It was hard to see through such distant cameras, but it looked like the Anjou had been pulled up into some kind of docking cradle, and now robotic arms were sliding and ratcheting around… and tearing chunks off the ship, and cutting at the hull with white-hot torches, showering sparks. The distant squeal and shriek of metal made Elena and Sebastien huddle closer together.
“Who the hell’s doing that?” Robin said. “Where’s the control center?”
“Might not be one,” Hans said. “It could be some kind of automatic repair system.”
“I– ” Robin said, and then the hangar flooded with light, and they all saw the alien.
Chapter Seven
“Oh, shit.” Sebastien and Elena hunched over the screen.
The three helmet feeds all converged on the thing – creature? organism? – moving through the vast hangar. The thing was almost as large as the Anjou, and its physical structure was so strange that Elena was only able to focus on parts of it at a time. The synchronized undulation of its dozens of spidery legs. The waving of – cilia? pseudopods? – all over its body. The body itself, which resembled a sea cucumber the size of a killer whale, all covered in bumps and nodules. Was that thickest pseudopod a neck, or a tail, and what was that immense flower-like bud on the end? How did something so big move on legs so seemingly spindly in gravity this strong?
“Fall back!” Robin shouted.
“To where?” Hans said, but they retreated as the thing moved toward them with alarming speed. One of the helmet feeds abruptly spun, and Ibn shouted in alarm.
On Robin’s feed, they saw that one of the creature’s vinelike pseudopods had whipped out, wrapped around Ibn’s body, and lifted him into the air. For a moment Ibn hung there upside-down, looking at the bizarre creature that had towered over him, and now filled the space beneath him. The neck, with its closed-flower-bud head (Elena was aware those terms were wildly inaccurate, but approximations were all she could manage) moved directly beneath him, and the petals began to unfurl.
Ibn shrieked and fired his rifle at the bud, but to no particular effect. Either he missed, or it just didn’t do any significant damage. The pseudopod gave him a shake and the gun bounced out of his hands, though it stayed against his body, dangling from its strap. The bud opened wider, the pseudopod loosened, and Ibn dropped into the center of the flower-like opening, down into some sort of tube or chute. He screamed as he fell.
Elena covered her face, and looked away, but the screaming went on and then trailed off. “I’m alive.” Ibn’s voice was full of wonder. His feed showed rushing, organic-looking walls zipping past him. “It’s like some kind of a slide–” He grunted. “I’ve hit bottom. It’s soft… spongy, even…” His light shone around. “Am I in its stomach or–”
His feed abruptly went dark, and Sebastien groaned.
Hans screamed and ran forward, shotgun held at the ready, and when he got close to the creature, Elena realized the thing’s legs weren’t spindly at all: they were so big she wouldn’t have been able to wrap her arms around one of them.
“Stop!” Robin shouted, but it was pointless: Hans was in a frenzy, and who could blame him? That thing had eaten Ibn. Maybe. Or maybe it had put him into some kind of body cavity for storage. Maybe the creature wasn’t even alive. Perhaps it was some kind of biomechanical construct–
A pseudopod picked up Hans and dropped him into the flower-tube. He screamed and fired his shotgun as he slid down, but without doing any noticeable damage. He howled more loudly: “Fuck, my suit is holed, I got hit with my own ricochet, damn it–”
His feed cut off, too. The immense creature, if it was a creature, stood still, its cilia gently undulating, its flower-like head swaying.
Robin was crouched beside a stacked pile of irregularly shaped metal plates, trying to hide. “Elena, do you see any weak points on that thing? Is any part of it worth shooting?”
“We don’t know for sure that it’s hostile,” Sebastien said. “It didn’t swallow Ibn until he shot it, and Hans attacked it too–”
“Don’t give me that,” Robin said. “It doesn’t matter who started the fight now. We’ve officially started an interstellar incident. This isn’t the way I wanted to go down in history, but it’s the situation we’re in.” Robin looked up. The shape of the ship was changing radically, Elena saw: the Anjou had sprouted fins, wings, spines, various bits of strange metal grafted on, and now the robot arms were doing something to the engines.
“Well, Elena? Where should I aim?”
“I barely understand what I’m looking at, Robin. It has some elements that remind me of sea life back on Earth, but parts of it also seem plant-like, and other parts are like nothing I’ve seen before at all… but something that big? I don’t think your pistol will make much of an impression.”
“Understood. Uzoma? Can you detonate the propulsion system on the Anjou?”
Elena sucked in a breath.
“I could,” Uzoma said after a moment. “It would be equivalent to setting off several atomic bombs, because that is, essentially, what I would be doing.”
“If that thing tries to get to the ship, to get you… blow up the Anjou. Do some damage before it can eat you. I’m going to look for a control panel, some way to release the ship, open the airlock, let you get away.” She sighed. “This is pointless. It’s not like I’ll find a big red button to press that says ‘Open.’ Maybe you should just blow up the ship now–”
Uzoma rushed into the cargo hold and slammed the button that sealed the door. They pressed their back against the wall, hard, then stared at Sebastien and Elena, eyes wild. “There’s something on the ship. It’s a machine, robotic, like a crab or a spider, but not. It tore open a panel in the control room and climbed inside–”
“Did you manage to send a message, Uzoma?” Robin’s voice was sharp, no-nonsense, and fully in charge.
“I did not. I was interrupted.” Being asked a question seemed to calm them down.
“Damn it. At this point, it’s down to damage control. I want you to blow the engines.”
“I cannot. The control room is compromised–”
“Find a way,” Robin snapped. “If that machine you saw is crawling around inside our control room, it could access all our systems, including our navigational data. They could find our system of origin – and they could follow our path back to Earth. I’m not as pessimistic as Hans is. I think there might still be a homeworld back there to protect.”
“No, thank you.” Uzoma’s expression was glassy and faraway. Elena realized what she’d taken for calm was something closer to shock.
“What do you mean?” Robin said.
“I cannot blow the engines without leaving this room, and I do not wish to do that. You did not see what I saw.”
“I’ll do it,” Sebastien said. “Uzoma? I’ll go out. Can you talk me through the process?” He snapped his fingers in front of their face.
Uzoma’s gaze drifted toward him. “What? Yes. No. I…” Uzoma rubbed the back of their head. “It touched me,” they said dreamily. “The machine.”
“Let me see.” Elena was the closest thing the ship had to a doctor; she was a xenobiologist who’d taken two years of classes in field medicine, anyway.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. A bloody scratch, maybe.
Instead she saw a round silver shape, the size of a saucer, clamped onto the back of Uzoma’s head with half a dozen clawlike appendages: it looked like an immense metal spider.
Elena flinched back as the spider’s legs moved, somehow lengthening, burrowing under the flesh of Uzoma’s scalp. Then one of the legs rose up and darted toward Elena’s hand instead, and she lurched backward and let out a wordless cry of horror.
Uzoma rose unsteadily and stumbled around the cargo hold. Their eyes had changed, filmed over, and their pupils glowed, as if someone had lit a candle inside their skull. Uzoma opened their mouth, and released a series of liquid gurgles. As if in answer, the beam of some kind of
plasma torch punched through the hull in front of them, and began cutting an opening from the outside.
Robin was shouting over the comms, but Sebastien tucked the tablet into his pocket and grabbed Elena’s arm. “I think we’d better go.”
“But… we have to help them.” Uzoma was gurgling at the wall now, watching as an archway appeared, drawn in lines of plasma. There was no sudden decompression, and no inrush of poisonous gas, which meant that the vast hangar was both pressurized and the air out there was breathable, which made no sense at all.
Manipulator arms lifted a thick section of the hull away, and another arm reached in and picked up Uzoma, almost gently, around the waist. Once they were pulled out through the hull, another manipulator reached in, its claw unfurling with dozens of intricately jointed digits, and immediate fear overcame stunned horror sufficiently for Elena to race after Sebastien as he slammed the door open and rushed into the corridor.
He stabbed the door-close button, and the claw clattered against it from the other side. “Come on. We have to get to the control room. Robin, do you know how to make the ship explode from there?”
“I can talk you through it. You should be able to set up a chain reaction and escape before it blows. I found some kind of access tunnel or duct or… I don’t know what. I’m in the walls. We might be safe here. It’s too small for that big bug thing to follow.”
Elena and Sebastien made their way to the control room. The panels had been ripped open, wiring exposed, and something was rooting around inside, audibly clattering. “What’s happening in there?”
“I don’t know–” Sebastien said, and then something dropped from the ceiling onto his head, driving him to the ground. Elena shouted in alarm and jumped back.
It was the crab-spider-thing Uzoma had described, its body no bigger than a dessert plate, but bristling with manipulators, one of which plunged into the back of Sebastien’s head.