“Huh? What?”
“Think of it, doll. We’re gonna have’ta use the emergency supplies to repressurize the interior or we’re gonna kill you when you open the door. Any environment safe enough to risk you in is an environment safe enough for any bits of that thing that are left to survive in as well. That’s not to say that there’s any of it left—I don’t think Achmed knew enough about the engineering behind the base quarters to do anything, and this thing’s not space savvy, but a risk’s a risk. You understand that?”
She let out a deep breath. “Yeah. So either I get safely into a suit and out of here or I get absorbed or liquefied or whatever and you burn me.”
“That’s about the size of it. I’ll be coming through with a torch. Sark and I will cover each other’s back. There’s no airlock to use into the base command center, so there’s no easy way to do this. You ready?”
“No, but if we don’t do this I’m never going to get out of here.”
“Not to mention the captain won’t allow us to dock with the Stanley. Okay, we’ll start repressurization in, oh, ten minutes, just to give Lucky’s paranoia a chance to get going. Then we’re coming down through the airlock from here. It’s still gonna be pretty damned cold, but it’ll only be for a few seconds if we’re lucky, and it won’t be absolute zero, anyway. You stand by and wait for instructions, but when I want you to act, you have to act, and fast. Still, we’re gonna take your pressure down during this period so breathe easy but don’t move around a lot. If anything of this thing’s left, the cold and low pressure might just make it slow and sick.”
“I’m ready,” she told him, but she wondered if she really was. Maybe it hadn’t been so smart to actually speak to that thing. Was this really Jerry? Was everything true or not? They were up there; she could see them, but she couldn’t see inside the very place where she was. Could this thing somehow anticipate and survive what had been done if it was as she’d heard? Even if Jerry and Sark came down, might they be taken on the way? How fast did it take to absorb a human and sort and classify and make use of his memories? There had been an awful lot of people in that colony, and they hadn’t had a prayer.
But she couldn’t stay here forever, either. The captain and An Li would rather they all died than not recover this huge and complex unit, but they were not about to let it dock with the Stanley nor anybody else to board, either, unless they were sure it was safe. To be sure, she’d have to be out of there.
She had to risk it. She knew that. And if some of that thing got to her, then Jerry or Sark would just have to take her out completely as quickly as possible.
“Stand by,” Jerry Nagel told her. “We’re repressurizing to a three-kilometer height, which is what we have you down to. Breathing all right?”
“It’s a little hard, but it’s tough to say if it’s the pressure or my nerves.”
“Good girl. We’re almost to you. Okay, we’re repressurizing the airlock to shuttle norm. All seals on the suits check out. Opening the hatch.”
There was a sudden terrible sound like a great wind, then a thump.
“Jerry? What was that?”
“Relax. We opened the hatch and Sark let a blast loose in there to take care of any surprises, even though there shouldn’t have been any. We’re okay now, let’s see if we did anything.”
He opened the airlock hatch full now and stepped inside. She could hear him and Sark breathing.
“Looks good. No sign of goop. A little ash where we burned the area before docking, nothing serious. Okay, closing lock, depressurizing to three klicks. Lights on full inside. Jeez! I feel like I’m breaking into my own house here! Ooookay… Guns charged, opening inner lock on green now.”
There was the sound of heavier double breathing, then Sark said, “Inner hatch closed and sealed, pressure back to normal inside. Nothing’s getting outta here through there unless it’s with us. Jeez! What a mess! Home Sweet Fridge!”
“Nothing useful in the lounge,” Jerry noted. “Want to burn it?”
“Maybe. If anything’s alive it’s gonna be against that bulkhead, though, or along the ceiling seams. I’ll settle for that.”
There was the same whooshing sound, longer this time, and then it cut off as Nagel yelled “Hold it! Hold it! We don’t want to start a fire! The cure would be worse than the disease at this temperature!”
“Doc, you still with us?” Sark called.
“Yes, I’m here. Let me get up and get to the— ungh! Suddenly I can’t move! I—oh, shit! Forget it.”
“What’s the matter, Randi?” Jerry Nagel called, uncharacteristically using her first name.
“I’m embarrassed. I had myself strapped in, right? Forgot to remove all the straps. Felt like somebody was pinning me down!”
“Just relax. Go up to the door panel. If you press the control on the right of the identipad you’ll be able to see through the door somewhat and that should give you a look at us. Don’t mind the look of the place, though. It’s a real mess.”
I never knew you could do that with this door, she thought to herself, but she tried it and discovered that he was right. So long as you kept your palm on the plate for more than ten seconds, a kind of see-through window opened in the door. Clever, and useful for the kinds of emergencies this room was really designed for.
She gasped when she saw the outer room, even though she’d been warned about it and even though the view “through” the door was less than ideal. The room had been a common meeting place, a place to relax, to plan, to just joke around. Kind of a living room for this communal base unit, really. Now it was all discolored, much of the furniture and wall decorations were oddly misshapen, and half the lights were either out or cocked at odd angles. Debris was all over the floor from the rapid decompression, and some very solid things had shattered from the cold.
She saw the two figures in the room, completely suited up. One was holding a heat rifle at the ready, the other had a similar weapon on its belt but was now fumbling with a standard e-suit.
“Got this one from the shuttle spares, so it should be okay,” Jerry told her. “Now comes the hard part. I’m coming right up to the door now, and I’ll turn on my internal light so you can see I’m not made of gelatin.” He came straight to the door, the light went on, and she was very relieved to see the old familiar face. Just to emphasize who was what, Jerry Nagel winked and stuck his tongue out at her.
“Satisfied?” he asked her.
“Yeah, okay, if it’s not you we’re all lost anyway. Now what?”
“This gets tricky. To unlock and unseal the door you’re going to have to do it manually and with the full palm authorization. The thing is, while we’ve got equalized pressure in here now with you, it’s still about forty below, and I’m not about to turn the heat on. The only way we can do this is for you to open the door, then get back and away from it as quickly as you can. It’ll still give you a real cold blast. I’ll toss in the suit and close the door again from this side. Turn on the suit’s internal heater from the outside and wait until you have something that won’t freeze at the touch, then get suited up fast, full seals—set it for ‘vacuum’ even though we’ve got air here—and make sure all the systems work. We’ll cover your exit here. Lucky’s gonna take this back down to a vacuum as soon as we’re all set, and that should do it. Then we go back up and ride the shuttle section in to Mother. Got that?”
“Yeah, I think so. Palm on, got a green, now I’m punching in the security code.”
There was a hiss as the very tight vacuum seal on the door let loose and pressure equalized.
“Okay,” she said, “Turning the latch now, then getting back!”
She turned the big security latch and could feel the cold creeping in even before the door opened. There was a frigid blast, and then the suit was tossed in and the door reclosed. She felt suddenly like she was trapped in a refrigerator, although the safety systems in the command and control center popped on blowing warm air back in.
She p
ulled the latch back down, worried that she might stick to it in the cold and relieved when she didn’t, even though her hand felt slightly frostbitten from just that little touch. Now she examined the suit, reached in, powered it up and turned on the internal heating. It wouldn’t be warm until she sealed it up with her inside, but it wouldn’t freeze her toes off, either.
For a moment she got the paranoia back. What if some of that stuff had gotten into the suit? When she got in and sealed it… But, no, she couldn’t think that way. If she did, she’d never get out of here.
Put it on, put it on, seal it up, check all systems… God it’s cold! Verify power and working heat, then verify she was at vacuum setting. She heard the seals go tight, knew she was now in a smaller biosphere but as isolated from the outside as anything in the C and C. It was starting to heat up, and the internal readings said she should be comfortable, but she just kept feeling the cold.
There was no longer a secure seal on the door, so she went over, unlatched it, and opened it. Jerry turned his helmet light back on and smiled, and she did the same so he could see that nothing had crept in at the last minute. They both turned and looked at Sark.
“You, too, Sark. Lights on,” Nagel told him. “This is nightmare city right now.”
Sark grumbled but turned on his internal light. Unless the thing had learned more nasty tricks, it was Sark, looking nervous and pissed.
“Okay, Lucky, decompress the unit, and, for good measure, we’ll do the C and C room now, too,” Nagel called to the pilot. “Just in case.”
“Got it, lover boy,” Cross responded. “Come on home to Big Sister and we’ll see if Mama will take in the prodigals…”
V: STANLEY NEEDS LIVINGSTONE
Before the Great Silence, what the Stanley crew had managed would have garnered applause, awards, instant fame and glory, and even poor Achmed would have gotten a statue at the very least. The Earth System Combine would then have dispatched a military unit including a battleship capable of turning a planet into dust to the system, and then if dialogue was irrelevant, and they couldn’t be talked out of it, the threat would be totally vaporized.
That was something governments on a wide colonial level were good for.
But there wasn’t such a government, hadn’t been such a government or colonial empire for almost two centuries now. There were still some massive naval vessels and even combat groups, but they were responsible only to themselves and their officers and, although they claimed to still police the spaceways, they were often hard to tell from the pirates and private armies that prowled the region. A report would be sent to the nearest naval group, of course, since it would no more want that creature to get out of its planetary prison than anyone else would, but whether or not it would be considered enough of a threat to waste precious energy on was problematical. They hadn’t been there.
At least no other salvagers would be tempted to try because of the potential profits. That was what Sark and Nagel had been doing while Achmed had sealed the cliff entrances. Planting and igniting enough thermite bombs to reduce all those greenhouses and all that potential salvage to bubbling, hissing primal goo.
They had reason to be proud of themselves, too. They’d stopped possibly the greatest threat to all humanity in its tracks and they’d done whatever they could to keep it there. A half dozen dirty old salvagers and a beaten-up old salvage ship. All that with the loss of just one of their number.
And they would have felt proud, if you could have spent proud, or gotten some reward for being noble. Instead, they were going back to Sepuchus, a dirty, smoky little planet that was the current headquarters of the Kajani Salvage Works, the company that had chartered the Stanley to go get that dead colony’s physical remains and bring them back to be recycled and remade into new things once again.
That was what the crew had been hired to do, and that was what they most definitely had not done. The lease on the Stanley plus the time and the expendables was substantial. The crews were the least of the expenses, though; they drew no salaries, and worked for a percentage of the wholesale value of the salvage.
If the Kajani family could eat the expense, they would still take a huge hit on the expenses and the extensive base unit repairs and have little new to sell; if they couldn’t, then a venerable old company would be bankrupted and taken over by creditors. Either way, the crew of the Stanley would get absolutely nothing, and might well be black carded by the guilds, branding them unreliable and therefore unemployable. There were more crews than ships these days.
There would be no gold, no laurel wreaths down the metaphorical Appian Way for saving humanity. That hadn’t been their job, either.
“I really think that we made one and only one big mistake back there,” Jerry Nagel commented over coffee in the Stanley’s cozy lounge.
Randi Queson looked up from examining her scientific notes and responded, “Yes?”
“I think we should have just brought the damned worm back. Keep it in the base unit, all sealed up, and then drop it on the first bank that shows up.”
She sighed. “And you think that just because it would absorb the bank that it wouldn’t foreclose anyway?”
“You’ve got a point. Too much alike to begin with, banks and worms.”
“Have you thought what you might do?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “I’m an engineer without references at this point. Never had any big scores and now I’ve got a major blowout. Still, I’ll make do. The one thing that we’re always short of is people who know how to fix things. God! Who would have thought in the romantic days of interstellar colonies we’d be an economic basket case slowly breaking down? One of these days, or years, or decades, we won’t be able to fix it anymore. When the machines die and can no longer be fixed, people like me will still be around making do. Sark? He’s muscle. Even in the age of machines you need occasional muscle. He’ll make do as well, as somebody’s personal bodyguard or in some private army someplace. Lucky’ll wind up crop-dusting some dirtball, and people like An Li always seem to come out smelling like a rose sooner or later. What about you?”
She sighed. “Going over my notes here. I’ve got enough to keep them going in academia for a while here, from biology to philosophy. I’m the only known human being who ever had any sort of conversation with an alien intelligence, at least as far as we know. That should be good for a position in some minor department someplace, lecturing on the rights and wrongs of containment and whether or not it’s really true that you can’t have a dialogue with a unified intelligence. It’ll drive me nuts after a while, but it’ll be good for eating and sleeping money for a couple of years, anyway. At least it’s Li who’ll have to face the Kajanis, anyway. Better her than me, and she sure as hell deserves it. We’re just the hired help.”
Jerry Nagel nodded and looked up at the ship’s chronometer. “Well, it’s been nice working with you, anyway. It’s about two hours until we have to get out and walk.”
That wasn’t literally true, of course. In two hours they’d be in orbit, and then they’d have to wait until An Li went down and filed the official reports. The entire account of the mission would already be there by now, of course, downloaded as they’d come within range, but face-to-face reporting was the last of it. As team leader, Li would have to find them some kind of quarters and arrange for some sort of holding position until the crew could be taken to various civilized destinations. That wouldn’t take long; there were always ships, big and small, coming in and out of Sepuchus, shopping at one of the sector’s biggest salvage yards for whatever they needed.
The account would be part of the public record, as tradition dictated, so it would spread as well. That would both help and hurt them, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.
“You know, I’ve got a virgin fifth of bourbon, really good aged stuff, private label, in my cabin,” she commented. “I was saving it for a little celebration when we got back and could total up the shares. Not much I can do about that now,
but even coming back flat broke and a failure again it’s at least an occasion. Want to break a seal and have a few toasts?”
“Real alcoholic booze, huh? No funny pills, no virtual mindblasts, just good old-fashioned good-going-down-make-you-puke-later stuff? You know, you’re a real throwback, Doc.”
“Well, we may as well get used to it,” she responded. “Just in case this is an omen, the spare parts aren’t there anymore, and it’s sooner than we think, that time when you can’t fix things anymore…”
* * *
An Li was not a very happy person going down to the surface, nor was she much happier coming back. The chewing-out, screaming, cursing, and threats she expected; par for the course. The accusation that they’d failed to do the job because of cowardice was unacceptable. They’d seen the records and the data, the same that she’d looked at before okaying the abort. There was no way that those greenhouses could have been salvaged entirely by automation, and the loss of Achmed was proof that when you put people back into there, well, sooner or later they would be gotten. It was very easy to second-guess from afar, and long after the fact.
There were twenty-one vessels in orbit with the Stanley at the time she was getting her ass chewed. These included nine capital ships, three large military vessels, and several slick yachts clearly used to move purchasing agents to the wares they needed as quickly as possible, which meant that their employers were desperate and would pay through the nose.
The cost of repairs on the base and the consumables would be stiff, but she’d done the math, and they’d brought the ship and base back intact, when common sense had said to leave that base and smelter and disassembly unit behind. That loss might have broken the company, but not a simple failure to reclaim a site. She would almost wager that more than enough to cover the Stanley’s bills was being paid out just today by those various orbiting ships looking for vital parts to keep going.
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