Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 1

by Eric Flint

  If he opened his harmonic disruptor to as much water as it could gulp, Melba would give a good fight, but in the end she'd lose against that monster and her winches. She'd just tear herself apart trying to save him.

  Men raced along the rails of the trawler.

  Bo directed the action from the surface alongside.

  Ron waved the gun at Lou. "You're going out first."

  "Give me the gun," she said. "Bo might let you live."

  "Go."

  Lou zipped up her cleavage and climbed out of the second seat. She headed for the ladder to the hatch. From Melba's console, Ron popped the lock bolts. Lou opened the hatch. Before she was out, he was up the ladder with his face almost up her rear. He fired a shot up out of the hatch.

  Men jumped away.

  Shoulder to her butt, he shoved Lou up as hard as he could, launching her into the air, past surprised deck hands, and into the sea.

  Fast, Ron pulled the hatch shut and locked her down.

  He jumped from the ladder, dropped the gun in the pouch behind his seat, and hit the con chair. "Come on, Melba, baby. I got a plan, and we got work to do."

  Lou and Bo thrashed in the green water beyond the bubble.

  Ron waved, smiled, and put on Merle. He blew the emergency release on the tow lines and set the skins free so he and Melba could be little quicker.

  Outside Melba's bubble, Lou had managed get a hold on Bo's neck. With her free hand, she flipped Ron off. The rage in the man's eyes made it clear he wished he had his hands on Ron's neck.

  Merle sang, and Ron and Melba dove to twenty meters. "Don't worry, Melba," he said, "This won't hurt much."

  Moving full-tilt-boogie and hoping for momentum, he opened up the disruptor box to the ocean and jettisoned it.

  He figured that little Craiger would try to eat the whole ocean for about a minute before it choked to death.

  Sure as Merle can sing, the little harmonic disrupter started splitting up molecules, putting hydrogen over here and oxygen over there.

  Of course, here and there was open ocean under an aging trawler.

  The ocean exploded into a boiling storm of hydrogen foam and oxygen froth. Water turned white for fifty meters in every direction.

  The trawler, no longer supported by liquid, dropped into the white hole in the ocean.

  For a glorious moment, tangled in white clouds and splashes of green water, Ron saw the trawler tumbling, the skins twisting, and Lou, her crew, and her Bo all scrambling to get clear of a losing proposition.

  Merle sang.

  Ron crowed.

  Melba tumbled and sank like everything else caught in the foam storm.

  The deep is silent and dark, and it stayed that way for the lost trawler Stolen Springs.

  Melba, however, with empty ballast tanks and no disrupter, was a bubble. To the sweet voice of Merle, she danced her way to the surface and popped up into the light of day.

  Ron leaned back in his con chair and smiled at blue skies. Not far away, a twenty-five-mil-gal skin of glacial pure bobbed to the surface— a black, rubber whale too buoyant to stay trapped on the ocean floor. The skin was all tangled in torn up netting, and strapped up on its side was a struggling man wearing a bright red suit and dipping himself in and out of the swells and sputtering up foam every time he came up. Clinging to nets on the skin a little higher up was Lou and a few of her deep-dunked mess of dipped-ratfinks.

  Now there was a sight and a blessing. L.A. would pay some fine coin for a crew of pirates.

  Ron tapped Melba's console to fire up his own S.O.S.— the real deal, this time.

  The other twenty-four skins stayed down, likely still tangled in the trawler's lines, and that was fine. Ron knew where they were, and they were salvage now. For that matter, so was that whole pirate trawler. The good Lord only knew what was onboard that scow tucked away in cargo containers and holds.

  He patted Melba's console. "Good, girl," he said.

  Pretty much like he figured, L.A. had missed its water and got its screws torqued up. His S.O.S. brought them to him. Low and black and all bristly with guns, the nasty little coasty boat came looking for him pretty quick. It took them just long enough for him and the skin to drift a bit and accidentally lose the coordinates of the wreck.

  Melba's radio cackled a bit, then a fine-sounding, smooth female voice came across. "Ron, that you and Melba's bubble?"

  He had to smile a bit. "Shanna, my dear," he said, "Your voice is finer than whale song and sweeter than Merle."

  "Sweet talk isn't going to get you far. I don't see my water."

  "I have a present for you and yours. Water pirates all wrapped in nets on a bladder. Train your saucy little eyes about twenty degrees off your starboard."

  The radio crackled for a few breaths, then she was back. "Aw, Ron. I underestimated you. You do know how to make a girl all giggly and weak in the knees."

  He laughed. He guessed he did at that.

  Insurance would cover the loss. Shanna would spin his part real pretty for the suits in L.A.. Everybody would be happy.

  Him and Melba would go back to work. With the salvage on the trawler and the glacial pure, he'd pay off Melba's new drive. And hey, while Melba was having her nip-and-tuck spa days in dry dock, well, there was some time to kill. He was thinking maybe it'd do him good to engage in a little police investigation.

  * * *

  Thin Ice

  Written by Dave Freer

  Illustrated by Adam Burch

  "ARI, it's not going away. I'm stuck on a ledge on this crater-wall, like a fly in a closed pantry window. In about two hours the sunlight is going to come over that edge, and I'm going to fry. If my air holds out that long."

  I took a deep, ragged breath, trying-and failing-to conserve my air. "And there isn't even a sign of Simmo and Lucy. They're . . . just gone. Into the damned thing."

  "Describe the organism." ARI's voice showed no sign of emotion. They'd done a lot with AIs, but not solved that one.

  " Dammit, ARI! I told you— "

  "Repeat it. Try to add more details. Remain calm. You will use less oxygen that way. Your respiration rate is unnecessarily high."

  I took another breath, just as deep and ragged as the last. If I got out of here, back to Earth, I would smash the silicon-hearted box to pieces. Little, little, tiny pieces. With a good, old-fashioned four-pound hammer. And I would never, ever go off-world again. And certainly never come within a hundred light-years of this hot-cold death trap.

  "Okay. Look, it's about seven meters across. About as wide right now, but when it was chasing me it sort of elongated. Almost like, well, when I was a kid, somebody brought a blob of mercury to school. It moved like that . . . except more fluidly. No limbs or anything, or not that I can see. Not even eyes."

  "Describe the color."

  "Like polished chrome. That's how come we spotted it down here. I told you. Lucy's headlight caught it and the reflection was . . . We thought it must be an artifact. A piece of an alien ship or something. That's why we climbed down into this hellhole!"

  We'd struggled to find a way down. Whatever had caused this terrible tear in the poor one-face planet's battered skin must have been massive. It had taken us a cautious hour in our cold-suits to get down there. The suits might be made of the toughest fabric known to humankind, but still, you had to be careful.

  True, they weren't the damned "Michelin man" suits the first explorers had had to put up with. You could actually do pretty fine work in these gloves, and you didn't have to worry about rips and tears. However, even a garment woven from fibrous ceramic-fullerene wouldn't save the soft bits inside it from a quarter klick fall. And they hadn't saved Simmo and Lucy from . . .

  I shuddered.

  "Tell me as much as possible about the contact incident."

  "You were listening. You heard it!"

  "There is some confusion. Attempt to clarify the following: Why did the creature suddenly begin to pursue you? You had been observing it for some
three minutes and twenty-two seconds, when Captain Colvine said 'It's coming towards us. We'd better get out of here.'"

  ARI had, in true computer fashion, just patched Lucy's rich contralto voice straight into his dialogue. I blinked and swallowed. My voice felt tight.

  "I don't really know, ARI. When we found it, and you know how we'd battled, it was just slowly edging along that fissure. It took us about half a minute to work out it was moving at all."

  "Seventeen seconds until Mr. Ougo commented on it. Yes. Continue."

  "We'd nearly missed seeing the thing in that side-gully. It was nowhere near where he had spotted it from the top. And it is so dark down here."

  Hell, without an atmosphere it was dark everywhere, even now, with less than two short hours before the "dawn." Hades was a one-face world, but even so there was an axial wobble zone. Every thirty hours the sun would rise here, on edge between light and darkness. Then, less than four hours later, it would set.

  I wouldn't need four hours. Ten minutes of that sunlight would fry me, in this suit.

  "There is a point eight-five probability that this is not the same organism."

  I nearly fell of my ledge, my precious seven hundred square centimeters of refuge. "You're kidding! You mean there are more of them? If I get away from this one there are likely to be more?"

  "That is highly probable. Continue."

  "Oh, mother. It doesn't seem worth it."

  "I am recording."

  If I ever get out of here, I'll find the son of a bitch who programmed ARI's psychology ROM. I'm going to have his brain looked at. Won't be hard. I'll pull it out of his nose with hooks so it's good and visible. I know I'm going to die. And now I can't even feel sorry for myself loudly because ARI will take my weeping and wailing home. Hell, why should I care? I'll be dead. But Sanji and the kids won't be . . .

  I sighed. "It snuffled along until it came to the end of the fissure. Then it headed out, back into the main crater."

  "It was, in fact, between you and the way you had followed down?"

  "Yeah, look, we were nearly past it when I shone my head-torch up that gully and spotted the damned thing. We'd moved on a bit so we could see it properly. The thing was moving so slowly that it didn't seem any kind of threat. It didn't matter that it was between us and the way we'd come down. Your grandmother could outwalk it. Anyway, it didn't seem interested in us. Didn't even seem to notice us, when we shone our torches on it."

  "I do not have a grandmother, but I think I understand. What happened to make the creature begin moving rapidly?"

  " I don't know, damn you! One minute, it was cutting across the trail, and the next it accelerated like a juggernaut at Lucy and Simmo. Just a blue flash and they were gone. Into it! I was off to the side getting another pic of the two them and the thing. It all happened so damn fast. They didn't even get a chance to run!"

  "In fact, Captain Colvine's last order to you was to run. I gather you successfully obeyed."

  I hung my head, and didn't answer. Shame burned at my vitals. I hadn't even heard her say that. I'd already been running. Blindly. So fast I'd have won the ice-speed-trials in Oslo with ease, never mind any mere slow land sprint races. I still wouldn't have escaped if it had started after me straight away. And then I'd run into the same dead-end gully the thing had just left. When I'd hit the back wall I'd climbed it until I reached this ledge. Then I'd been forced to stop.

  I was maybe six meters up. Above me stretched blankness. A long smooth slab. Recently a huge flake must have fractured off here. Fractured cleanly when the sun-lash whipped the space-cold rocks. There were not even the tiny handholds that had brought me up the overhanging wall to the ledge. The ledge bore the cluttered remains of the rock-burst. I'd nearly fallen, clutching one of broken fragments when I'd pulled up onto it. Below, but not very far below, the silver blob waited. Occasionally it s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d towards me. I'd tried flinging pieces of rock from the ledge at it. They impacted as into an over-soft mattress and then gradually disappeared, sank away into it. They certainly had not chased the damned thing away.

  "Extrapolating from the limited data it would appear that the creature only became aware of your presence when it crossed the trail. Logic suggests that it must be able to follow that trail."

  "Like a bloodhound," I said bitterly. "It hurtled in here. Hit the blank piece of cliff that I ran to first, in exactly the same place. Then it zipped along until it came to where I started to climb. Now it's sitting like a guard-dog straight below me."

  "It cannot have followed you in the fashion of a bloodhound. In the absence of an atmosphere we must discount a sense of smell."

  That was AIs for you. Nobody had yet managed to program them to be anything other than literal. "The degree of heat-loss through your boots is minuscule. The heat-loss directly from the suit is considerably greater. Why should the creature track an infinitesimal heat-trace along the ground when it could have homed in on the heat-leakage from your suit? Therefore it must have followed something else. The earlier behavior of the creature investigating the fissure is consistent with a quest for minerals or metals."

  "ARI, for God's sake, this is Hades, not some biologist's paradise. It wasn't looking for mice. Of course the damn thing is a mineral feeder! It must eat rocks, because there isn't anything else."

  ARI continued as if I hadn't interrupted. "Hades is a high-density world, with pools of molten metal on the dayside. Analysis of spectroscopic data show no such surface deposits on the nightside. Geomagnetic data indicate considerable subsurface deposits. This is statistically improbable. Therefore, I deduce your creature is a nightside metalovore."

  I ground my teeth. We were a geological survey team, sure, but . . .

  "ARI. I'm stuck on a ledge. The damn thing is just below me. It . . . engulfed the rest of your crew. It couldn't have broken down suit-polymer. Nothing, but nothing, damages suit polymer. If what it wants is metals I've got nothing for it. And neither had Simmo or Lucy."

  "The paucity of surface metals suggests the creatures may be very effective at tracking metal elements in minuscule quantities. I suspect the creature is foraging here to collect the tiny quantities of metal vapor condensate that will occur here."

  "And how does that get me off the ledge? Why did it eat the others?"

  "For the metal cleats on their boots. Which I am sure is how it followed you, by the metal abrasions off those cleats. It would also of course have consumed any other exposed metals, including their suit antennae. And their headlights."

  "What about the blue flash?"

  "Electrostatic signal distortion suggests that you are in the presence of a fairly powerful electromagnetic source. I suspect this to be the biological organism you refer to as 'the creature.' I am having considerable difficulty in filtering your signal. The blue flash may have been caused by ionization, possibly caused by dust or breakdown of some of the metal elements outside the suit."

  "But their suits should have insulated them, surely . . ."

  "We are dealing with an alien life-form. There is insufficient data. Anyway, should they have been ingested, and then rejected after the metal had been stripped from their suits, they would have no lights or radio contact. It would be difficult for them to find you, or their own way out of the crater, before the light arrives."

  Right. I'd have light soon. Excellent light. With plenty of X and Gamma rays too.

  "So how do I get out of here? I know more about this creature than I want to, and I'm still stuck."

  "Remove the cleats. Traverse sideways and then walk away. The creature should not follow you."

  "I can't. I'm a geophysicist and an ice-skater, ARI. Even for the best damned rock-climber in human space there is no up, and no sideways from here. I'm stuck, ARI. Come and get me."

  I knew he couldn't. He was bolted to the wall of the ship.

  But AIs don't understand sarcasm. "I have raised ship. I am surveying for an adequate set-down area near you. I have also set search paramete
rs for creatures with similar characteristics."

  "The crater-margin's a mess, ARI. You'll never be able to set down near here."

  "I am surveying." It was what ARI did best.

  "I have identified forty-two highly reflective bodies of varying sizes. Ultra-spectroscopy of those specific areas reveals principally helium 4 and quantities of oxygen, calcium, iron, copper, antimony, barium, lanthanum, yttrium and thallium. I have also detected three traces on infrared scan. There is a high probability that they are yourself, Captain Colvine and Mr. Ougo."