Melchior's Fire tk-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  Still, she welcomed the respite, and she certainly could use the shower, she thought. At least they didn’t seem to think that this complex was in any danger. Otherwise, the whole thing would have lifted off the moment they were all safely docked.

  Still, as she made her way to her quarters, she couldn’t help but wonder how safe those colonists had felt where they were, apparently until the very last minutes.

  Maybe, she thought, I’m not going to be able to sleep all that well after all…

  Later, a bit refreshed, having eaten something, sitting there with a cup of coffee and under some powerful muscle relaxers from the dispensary, she was better prepared to at least join with the rest of the team in deciding what came next.

  The entire ground party was there, which was most of the salvage crew. There was Jerry, smoking one of those foul things he liked without regard for who else had to breathe it; Achmed, eating a pastry; and Sark, looking like he’d just climbed out of his suit and with a three-day growth of beard, slumped in a big oval chair with his eyes closed. Lucky Cross had on nothing more than a robe and sandals and was drinking very strong-looking stuff. Cross was the only person Queson had ever known who mixed powerful alcoholic drinks by color. This one was a pastel blue. It was in a beer mug, and she wasn’t exactly sipping it when she drank, either.

  Five people in the whole ground salvage crew, but this five was all that was needed to handle even a major demolition and recovery like the colony back over the desert and against the cliffs. Once these big machines went to work, you only had to make sure they were doing what they were told to do.

  Randi looked over at Cross. “Okay, Lucky, did you see what Jerry thinks he might have seen but won’t tell us about?”

  “Nope. Too busy battling those fucking winds to pay much attention to suit monitors. What did he think he saw, anyway?”

  “As I said, he wouldn’t tell me. There’s no playback here?”

  “Nope. It’s all up top at that moment. So, Jerry, you want to tell us about it or keep us in suspense?”

  “Yeah, Nagel,” Achmed rumbled. “What the devil could scare you, anyway?”

  Nagel reached over, picked up his beer, and swigged it, downing maybe half a liter before he paused. Then he gave a loud, ugly belch.

  “Oh, Jerry! If you can’t mind your manners go outside and play!” Randi told him, not really grossed out but knowing that Jerry was putting on a performance, either to deflect questions or to show he wasn’t as frightened as she’d seen him. She wondered about that most of all. Was it unusual, or had she simply seen him for the first time with his guard down? It sure wasn’t down now.

  “All right, Jerry, if that’s how comfortable you are, want to tell me what you saw when I was being lifted off?” she asked him.

  He shrugged. “I still want to see the video, considering the situation and the visibility,” he replied, “but, if you must know, I thought I saw a kind of man climbing up the last part of that ladder.”

  “A man? And that scared you?”

  “Well, it didn’t make me feel great,” he told them. “I said it was a kind of man. All I saw was an arm and a head, but it had the usual requirements. Except that it wasn’t right. You remember the texture of that worm thing, whatever it was? Kind of an icky translucent character, like clear glues?”

  “Yes. You mean—”

  He nodded. “Yep. It was a man made out of that stuff. Not covered by it, made of it. Kind of like a man sculpted out of stiff water or fluid ice.”

  The ship-to-surface intercom opened at that. “Hello, everybody,” An Li’s voice came to them. “I just overheard the description and it’s basically what we saw and what he said in the debriefing. Take a look. First, real time. Look real sharp!”

  The holographic projector over the table in the center of the room showed some static, then suddenly became a three-dimensional replay, without sound, of those last awful moments on the roof, all from Jerry’s point of view. He was watching the shape of the shuttle emerge from the storm, then helping Randi position herself to grab the first cable. At that moment he seemed to hear or sense something and turned, and he looked back at the ladder. A right hand, then more of an arm came up as something was climbing the last rungs of the ladder. Then, quickly, there was a figure partially visible, and then Jerry turned and took a running leap and grabbed the second cable even though he wasn’t fully in position for it.

  “Oooowee! Superman!” Cross noted approvingly. “That’s one hell of a leap, there!”

  The video cut out at that point. “Any more and you’d get very dizzy very fast,” An Li warned them. “Did you see it?”

  “Yeah, we all saw it,” Sark commented. “Not much to see, though. So fast I dunno if I was seeing what I thought or what he told me to look for.”

  “Okay, here we go again, only this time we’ll hold each frame for one second.”

  At sixty frames a second, that gave them a good five minutes to look at the very short video, more than enough. In fact, it was almost maddening waiting for that hand to appear, then slowly, ever so slowly, advance, exposing a little more of the person or thing behind it as it climbed the ladder. Jerry had been a good observer, though. It was a very human hand and arm made of something no human had ever been made of.

  Now, with agonizing slowness, the head began to emerge, and Randi Queson was suddenly aware that it had become so quiet in the room she could hear her own breathing.

  The picture was grainy; the sandstorm wasn’t the best environment for clear pictures, but it wasn’t so bad that the details couldn’t be made out, particularly when isolated and enlarged as An Li had done.

  You could see the hair almost to individual strands in some frames, yet there was one thing about it that was very unusual.

  “That hair’s fixed, like a sculpture,” Randi noted, breaking the silence.

  “Yeah, or more like gelatin, some kind of clear gelatin,” Lucky Cross added. “Weird, ’cause the figure’s animated just like a human. Look at how the hand grabs and the muscles implied on the arm flex.”

  The living sculpture, as they began to think of it, continued to slowly emerge, until they finally saw the full face and part of a shoulder. The other hand was just about to come up to grab the other side of the ladder nearer the top; you could tell that by the very natural climbing motion it was making, much like any of them would look climbing a ladder.

  The face was also a living sculpture; the eyes were made of the same stuff, but did give some odd sense of looking around, and the lips parted a bit, revealing some teeth. But that was all they got before it suddenly ended.

  Everybody sat back in their chairs. Sark looked over at Cross, grabbed the glass with some of the pastel blue stuff, and took a swig.

  “Back home, my people would have considered that a demonic being,” Achmed said. “Although I am a rational and logical man and well traveled, at the moment I can think of no other explanation myself.”

  “Well?” An Li prompted. “It’s not like we can take samples and do analysis of this. We need some input, people!”

  Jerry shrugged. “Nice to see I’m not nuts or given to panicky hallucinations. I have to assume that if the whole thing climbed up on the roof it would be a copy of a human being in full, probably including his dick and pubic hair. That’s what it is, though. There was no muscle inside that stuff. It just knew exactly what a man looked like and was copying everything but the coloration. Since there was more than one, I’m sure of that, we got to assume that the second one was either below or climbing up behind him. I have to admit that it was the teeth that shook me. I mean, why bother?”

  “Because whatever it is knew precisely how the human body worked and should look,” Randi said, thinking. “I think whatever is required for consistency simply is made, maybe faster than the eye can see, as required. Did you notice the features on him?”

  Nagel nodded. “Yeah. Kind of east Indian or South Asian, like the people who built this place. It was copyi
ng one of them for sure, as close as it could, but it just doesn’t have any pigment. Or, at least, it doesn’t have any way to color the various parts of people.”

  “Okay, so they’re alien organisms who can mimic humans,” Randi said. “So the next question is, why?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why mimic us if you can’t fool us? They’re absolutely related to that worm or whatever. Extensions of it, maybe, or offspring, or maybe just smaller relatives.”

  “Yeah, but, if they can do that, how come the scenes all over the colony?” An Li put in. “How come they couldn’t get through any inorganic substances before and now they know how to throw the switches and force doors open?”

  Randi Queson was thinking. “Maybe they didn’t know when they attacked the colony. Maybe they learned. Unless we can access the records from the control room we’ll probably never know for sure, but I’ve got a scenario in mind that fits. Maybe it’s all wrong, but it’s at least a working hypothesis.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Suppose those new greenhouses were just being put on line. Until then, this creature, whatever it was, was happy and dumb and living somewhere in that sea down there eating who knows what? Then they ramped up the reactor power to power up the new complex, and test things all out, and that was enough of a jolt or enough warmth that it got attracted to the core. Who knows if it was that big or lots of little ones or whatever? It probably bided its time. Maybe it ate one of the service supervisors in there, at a quiet time, night shift, or whatever, when it might be assumed that he or she fell in. Maybe somebody did fall in by accident. Anyway, it got a sample, and somehow this thing used that sample to adapt to consuming and converting our organic tissue. Little by little, it figured a way in. That buckling was probably some kind of structural mistake or sloppiness that developed over time, but the settlers hadn’t bothered to fix it because the radiation levels weren’t triggering any dangers and they had other things to do. Heck, replacing some of it might have caused a temporary shutdown, so the maintenance boys went against the political boys and you know who always wins those arguments.”

  “So far so good,” An Li replied.

  “Well, it used that to extrude into the control room. I think that, once it came out, it did it with as much speed as it could muster. It simply consumed everything and everybody who fit this new food model.”

  “You said ‘extrude,’ ” Cross noted. “You think it’s able to come through the keyhole?”

  “Probably, yes. It’s certainly a shape changer or it wouldn’t have that human copy ability. I don’t know what stiffens it, what powers it, or whatever, but I think it can flow almost like a thick liquid. Probably not a keyhole, but those buckled plates in the floor didn’t allow all that much room. But they didn’t have much time to do anything, and they had no real defense. I think we’re dealing with a big single organism, but one that can spin off parts of itself and, although unconnected, use them just like we use arms, legs, whatever.”

  “But how does it learn?” Sark wondered. “And where’s its brain since it does? And why did it take so long to learn stuff?”

  “Maybe it didn’t,” the anthropologist replied. “If it, and lots of extensions of it, wiped out this colony in a matter of a day or so, a colony that had no heavy defenses or even a lot of light arms, it had a ton of experiences and new knowledge. But think of how that must have been incredibly confusing to it, even bewildering. This thing adapts. It’s the most adaptable creature I’ve ever heard of, just judging from what we’ve seen. But ‘alien’ is a very good term to remember. We don’t know its evolution, we don’t know its composition, origins, or makeup. Does it reason or just copy?”

  “It figured out how to override the fire doors,” Nagel pointed out. “I’d call that some good measure of reasoning, particularly since the fire doors weren’t tripped in the first place. How could they have seen that? They had to figure it out.”

  “A point, but we don’t know how they did it. Still, I’m willing to admit to a level of reasoning here. They didn’t come for us when we were well in and exposed. They had to know that we were part of a larger group, and they held back and followed us. Only when it looked like we were on to them, or were going to get out fast and clean, did they try for us. That shows cunning. Also, we ran ferrets through every square millimeter of that place before we went down, yet they showed nothing organic, no life, and nothing moving. That meant that they were all within the control room area, maybe inside, where our instruments and ferrets wouldn’t be able to tell them from the residual radiation.”

  “Yeah, we didn’t send any ferrets into the core area because of the reception problems and the fact that it seemed normal,” An Li agreed. “So, it hid. It watched our little toys scramble around, then it watched you two without showing itself even after you found the main body of the thing. It’s smart and it’s sneaky. But if you look close at one side of the face, it also has problems with the sandstorm. Otherwise, it would just have gone out the side door and waited for you. It came through the fire door rather than going around, so we know it has weaknesses.”

  “The question is,” said Randi Queson, “did it learn what it did by observing and then over years digesting and correlating and meditating on all that it saw, or does it, somehow, have some or much of the knowledge of those it consumed? Even if the former this thing is one of the most dangerous organisms ever found. If the latter, it’s the most dangerous organism.”

  “You know, according to our charter, if this is a reasoning, sentient organism previously unknown we can’t disturb it, let alone hurt it, so long as it stays on its own planet,” An Li pointed out. “This can make salvage really sticky in a legal sense.”

  “Okay,” Achmed growled. “So how do we kill it?”

  III: SALVAGE OPERATION

  There wasn’t an awful lot of sentiment among the crew for respecting a new lifeform. There just wasn’t much love lost for a creature or creatures who had killed so many humans so wantonly and who had then tried to get at them. There were some, including Randi and Jerry, who wondered about the safety of continuing, and whether or not it was worth the potential cost even if doable, but the general sentiment was, if it could be done, let’s do it, and if this thing gets in the way, let’s deal with it.

  “I’m not at all sure what would kill it,” Randi Queson commented. “Something certainly can—if it eats, it can be gotten—but without a lot of experimentation on it who can tell? I doubt if shooting it with anything we have would do much. The industrial stuff, maybe, but not any sort of slicer and dicer. We’d simply make a big one into a few littler ones who’d recombine and be even angrier. We can probably incinerate it, if we’re sure we do it completely, or totally and completely disintegrate it, but if we do we’d better get all of it or it’ll just come back.”

  “Seems to me the best thing to do would be to poison it,” Sark suggested. “Get the whole damned thing at once. Let it gobble up its own doom.”

  “That’s great, except that it probably wouldn’t work. Any poison would probably be ingested by one of the smaller bits, and if it was very slow acting the thing would probably adapt to the new substance and either expel it or figure out a way to eat it. Fast and it’s not going to be able to infect all the pieces. As we said, if you miss even one, we’re potentially toast.”

  The problem was fed to the ship’s master computer, which came up with a compromise none of them had considered.

  The lifeforms all burned food for energy in a range that made them show up on sensors the same as people. That meant they could be located. Doing anything to the large mass in the core would be impractical, maybe impossible with what they had available, and would certainly take better lab work than they could do even if they could figure out how to safely get and contain a tissue sample of the creature or creatures. They also had mass, but couldn’t come through walls or floors or solid rock, and certainly they still had problems with inorganic substances overall.

  T
he obvious solution was to use the big industrial salvage lasers to sever the greenhouses from the main complex and then create a molten rock flow that would cover and seal in the cliffside complex, core and all. Then it would be a matter of sending in small disassembler robots with full torches and dealing with the small ones that might be left outside. From that point on, and with a constant watch on the cliffside to insure that there were no more holes and that there was no breakout by the main mass, they could methodically and safely disassemble the greenhouses. The profit would still be huge; it just wouldn’t be as huge as if they could have reclaimed the interior complex and the reactor. Humans would be placed in harm’s way only when absolutely necessary, always fully armed and fully suited up, and with cover.

  “The computer believes we could do this operation in six weeks or less, that the profit on the enterprise would still be in the millions, and that it’s the most likely compromise,” An Li told them. “Of course, it assumes that we can contain the thing and deal with any small ones left outside.”

  “And if we can’t?” the uncharacteristically nervous Jerry Nagel asked her.

  “Huh?”

  “If those things can’t be dealt with and or the big one figures a way out? What then?”

  “Then the only solution would be to abandon everything in place and use the shuttle to lift survivors to the ship if possible. If that happens, we will all be dead broke and unable to return home unless we find money for new equipment and a new salvage job. And if we just say goodbye right now, we’ve got no credit and nothing to trade, so even if we find something else, which probably wouldn’t be nearly this profitable, we couldn’t pay for maintenance and repairs, recharges, you name it. Cap says, though, that she can’t order this one since we’re safe up here. You got to decide down there.”

  “I can kill anything except my bills,” Achmed growled. “Let’s go do it.”

  “I say so long as I don’t face no thirty meters of morphing worm, let’s get the stuff that’s just lying there and get out of here,” Sark added. “The little ones, they got to burn.”