by ASF
The Satellite War changed all that. You had all these spacers stuck in orbit, all the solar power in the universe, and as soon as the crabbers started hauling in moop, plenty of good quality building material. Snag it, haul it to the Lagranges and dump it, and there it stood out of harm’s way and ready for some tinkerer to start building away. A couple of old crabbers who’d had one close call too many built a smelter, started inflating big aluminum balloons, and quicker than you could say “shore leave,” you had Dutch, the crabbers paradise, named after the old Aleutian port, of course.
They called it the squid ’cuz that’s what it looked like: a torpedo-shaped cylinder with fifteen wriggly arms that unrolled five meters long after Sheila dumped it out of the cage with a bunch of other moop onto the sorting belt. The body wasn’t more than two meters, if that, clean and shiny and not pitted like it would have been if it had been in space for longer than a decade. Pretty much everything in orbit had been up there at least a decade, and the squid should have been pockmarked or sandblasted from millions of micrometeors—only it hadn’t.
Ain’t aright for damn sure.
Sven pulled the squid off the belt into a bin. Ian and Todd had to swim over to Sven and keep the belt moving. Moop stuck to it, little teeth around the half-round pipe moving stuff along. Sheila dumped the last pot and the three of them finished the sorting—nothing more of consequence, just lots and lots of dull gray fragments—all the time eyeing that squid. Sven had sorted a few shinys, nice clean pieces of steel, but that squid held their attention, for all sorts of dang reasons.
Ian ran through the list in his head:
A) It was intact.
B) It didn’t look like anything in space they’d ever seen, and all they hadn’t, courtesy of endless watches browsing Gilbert’s Catalogue of 100,000 Satellites and Other Orbital Debris.
C) And, oh yeah, it was intact.
“What you dickheads starin’ at?” Cap yelled over the loud hail.
Ian looked over at the observation deck. Cap, nice and comfy behind thick Lexan, saw him standing there, hands on hips. “Got us an anomaly, Captain,” he said. You never said Cap to his face.
“Anomaly?” Cap asked. He moved a camera on a boom arm out over the salvage bin, scanned it up and down. “Bring it in,” he said.
“Uh, Captain . . .” Sheila started to say.
“Bring it in.”
She glanced over at Ian, and he nodded. He was deck boss, he’d take the grief.
“Captain, Nations protocol calls for an anomaly to be quarantined,” Ian said. That meant tagged and bagged and left on deck for some Nations investigator to handle. Good idea, Ian thought.
“Bring it in,” Cap said.
“I’m gonna have to log a protest,” Ian said. That was the union rule, too. If your captain made a bad decision, you covered your ass by making a protest.
“So logged. And Deck Boss?” Captain banged the thick port. “Bring it in.”
That would be the second dumb thing they did: bringing in the squid. The first dumb thing had been catching it in the first place, or not dumping it once they realized what they had. But, you know, it looked all shiny, they’d say later. That was the thing about crabbing: you saw so much dull gray junk that the shiny stuff made you want to reach down and pick it up, like bright blue sea-glass on a white beach.
Idiots. They brought it in.
Cap had the sense to keep the squid sealed in the big garage lock, strapped at six points, those weird tentacles flopping loose in zero gee. The crew floated in through the little airlock in the tunnel running along the spine of the ship. They looked out at the squid through a nice thick viewport, still in their suits, Sheila standing by at the panic button, ready to slam shut the port shutters should anything get hinky.
We’re way beyond hinky already, Ian thought. Light-years.
Sheila ran a scanner on a little boom arm over the squid, the scanner’s big camera recording away down to macro, mapping every pit, scratch, dit, and dot. It ran into the hot spectrums, too, temperature and radiation, all that stuff.
“We’ll blow it if it’s at all hot,” Cap swore, the first sensible thing he’d said since “bring it in.” Only sensible thing so far.
Thing was, the squid whistled clean, no radiation and cool as space, just like pretty much any hunk of moop short of an old satellite nuclear reactor. Well, nothing above background. As Sheila ran the scanner over the squid proximal and distal, dorsal and ventral, her hands moving the robocam along like she was petting the thing, a display showed the topography of the damn squid. Little tiny laser beams bounced back and forth, mapping its texture down to nanos.
“Nothing,” Sheila said.
They glanced up at the display. Anything out in space more than a month would have micropits from all that dust slamming into it—steel, metal, plastic, you name it. Flying through space was like glass shooting through a sandblaster, and with the big orbital bang, there was a heck of a lot of sand to blast.
“What do you mean, nothing?” Cap asked.
“I mean, nothing. Whatever the hell that thing is made of, it’s polished smooth down to the molecular level,” she said.
“Huh,” Cap grunted.
They all looked at each other. When Cap grunted, it usually meant he was about to do something stupid.
“Blast it,” he said.
“What?” Sheila asked.
“Shoot it. The plasma cannon?” He waved his hand up at the smooth-bore plasma cannon all crabbers carried. They had one fore and aft, on gimbals, and one in the hold. Idea was if a big chunk of moop was going to get personal with the Anna Marie, you’d blast your way through it. Same idea if something came into the hold too fast: blast it back out.
Sheila didn’t even have to look at Ian for him to say it. “Captain, with all due respect. . . ,” he said.
“Oh, hell, you pansies. So logged. I’ll do it myself,” Cap said.
He stepped over to the cannon rig, strapped himself in, and gripped the two pistol handles. The cannon swiveled around out there in the hold, business-end turning down, and Cap pulled the triggers.
Was that the second or third dumb thing Cap did? Ian thought. He was losing track.
The plasma cannon really didn’t shoot plasma. It used plasma to shoot moop, random bits of shredded crap like shotgun pellets, an old-fashioned kinetic gun. Kaboom. The bolt of pulverized metal and hot gas roared down in a nice little narrow cone toward the squid. Anything else it would have blown to bits, or at least dented severely.
Only, well, the blast bounced off the squid, a nice billiard shot, out and away at the same angle it had hit, which was a good thing, because the shot had come from fore and got reflected aft, right at the outside docking bay doors.
Sven lost his newbie stripes right then for what he did, and if they made it to Dutch, the crew definitely was going to buy him a night’s drinks. Damn kid slammed his hand fast on the panic button that blew the aft door open, irising away in little metal leaves like an old-fashioned camera shutter. He’d later say it was just damn luck he hit the green button and not the red.
And Sheila, even though her hand hovered over the port shutters, never even touched the button. She was going to buy the first round, Ian thought. Second and third, too.
The blast still nicked the inside edge of the door as it opened up out of the way, but the door panels had a little give and could be pressured up enough to compensate. If the door had blown, they would have been hosed. No docking garage, no big airlock. No airlock, no way to haul in moop. No moop hauled in, what was the point? They’d have to limp back to Dutch, get repairs, and then go back out and reset their pots.
“As I was saying, Cap,” Ian said.
Cap gave him a hard look, but shut up. Guy knew when not to push it—you could give him credit for that.
Still, it was data, Ian thought. Now they knew why nothing pitted it, why however long it had been in space nothing had dented, scratched, or marred its pristine surface.
“Fucker has a damn force field,” Todd said.
“Ya know,” Cap said. “I think it would be a good idea to quarantine the squid.”
But it was too late for that.
Later, at the tribunal, after they’d all been hauled up one by one to make their depositions, and then one by one again to go through any discrepancies between testimony, they all agreed on only one thing: The squid came alive. What happened after that none of them could agree. It might have helped if the radiation blast hadn’t blown the camera, too.
Sheila said she saw the squid roll over, open wide those fifteen tentacles, cut them loose and leave them behind like a lizard’s tail, and then jet away through the open hatch.
Todd said he saw the squid just squirt out, vanishing in a puff of plasma or something, “like a big stinky fart,” he said.
Sven said he didn’t see anything, that one moment the squid was there, the next it was gone, and who the fuck knew where it went?
Ian knew what he saw, though, because he was watching Cap. The squid opened wide its tentacles, sure. It dropped its tentacles and jetted away, Sheila had that right. Only when it opened up those long arms, its mouth, if that’s what you could call it, a row of fifteen teeth overlapping, that mouth opened up and out came a little silver sphere.
And Cap squeezed the trigger on the plasma cannon again. He’d deny it, said Ian had it all wrong, nothing like that had happened. It was what Sheila said and Todd said, the thing just disappeared.
No way, Ian thought. Cap fired, and the plasma cannon fired straight at the smooth silver orb. Maybe it had been a lucky shot. Maybe Cap knew exactly what he was doing, because when the plasma beam bounced off the orb, it bounced straight back toward the plasma cannon, all the energy coming at it meeting energy going back out, like two fire hoses blasting away at a soccer ball in between.
The orb fell back into the squid just as the squid slowly eased out of the docking bay, which was a good thing, a real good thing, because it blew up.
Not just blew up, though, like a big nuke or something going boom. It like vanished blew up, that’s what it did. One moment it was there and another moment it wasn’t.
Later, when he got really good and drunk, Ian puzzled it out. That silvery surface was like some sort of energy shell, nice and thin, he figured, surrounding whatever guts and mechanism worked away inside the squid. When the orb blew up, of course the energy inside got reflected back, the energy shell confining it, until all that energy got spent grinding up the squid’s inside, and the whole thing collapsed like a balloon. Ian swore he saw a little silvery dust where the squid had been, but maybe he hadn’t seen even that.
Years later, Ian ran into Cap at the crabber’s bar in Dutch, the Spacey Dawg.
“It was a bomber,” Cap told him after they’d finished most of a bottle of twenty-five-year Lagavulin single malt whiskey, and they were too drunk to care about talking about something they’d sworn never to speak about.
Nothing official had ever come out. There had been the tribunal, a lot of big Nations hoohahs reaming their asses out for not being so careful, especially Cap. Cap took all the blame, but he took it grinning, because he’d figured it out, figured out what he had done was awards time, except you didn’t give medals for things that no one acknowledged happened, even if it had saved earth from evil alien space monsters.
Funny thing was, even though the crew of the Anna Marie never crabbed again, what with bonus pay, a mysterious settlement that one day showed up in their accounts, and stuff like that, they did pretty well—well enough to afford bottles of single malt Scotch flown all the way up from Earth.
“Evil alien space monsters,” Cap said that night years later. “Think about it. If you were an alien race and you knew another intelligent race had become uppity with space-faring ships and stuff, you’d want to mine their home planet. Blow up satellites and ships, make the orbits hard to get through. Send in a bomber and keep mining the orbits until the other race gave up.”
“Yeah, right,” Ian said.
“Think about it,” Cap said again. “You know those arms the squid left behind? You ever think about what happened to them? No one ever told us, because the Nations don’t want anyone to know we’d been attacked by aliens. Cool stuff, those arms, that metal. Pretty tough, tough enough to make shields so ships can fly through moop now.”
“Huh,” Ian said, thinking about how clean that squid had been.
“Whatever,” Cap said. “It wasn’t Chinese. It wasn’t some supersecret terrorist group that blew the orbits the first time. It was aliens, some kind of probe that came into our solar system, saw what we were up to, and blew it all up. It would have blown us up, too, kept mining our orbits until we gave up and stayed on the planet. And we stopped it.”
“You really think so, Cap?” Ian asked him.
“Ah, what the hell do I know?” Cap said. "I’m just a dumb dingaling crabber. And I thought I told you never to call me ‘Cap.'"
“Sure thing, Captain,” Ian said, pouring out the last of the Lagavulin. “Buy you another bottle?”
Copyright © 2010 Michael A. Armstrong
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Howl of the Seismologist
Carl Frederick
Alex rolled the flimsy plastic bishop between his fingers for a few seconds before placing it on king’s knight two. Then, while his opponent thought, he idly dropped his hand to scratch Wegener between the ears. After another ten minutes or so, the battle, heated yet silent, drew an observer—a...
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Novelettes
Howl of the Seismologist
The line between “researcher” and “research instrument” grows ever finer. . . .
Carl Frederick
Alex rolled the flimsy plastic bishop between his fingers for a few seconds before placing it on king’s knight two. Then, while his opponent thought, he idly dropped his hand to scratch Wegener between the ears.
After another ten minutes or so, the battle, heated yet silent, drew an observer—a youngish woman who by standing next to the picnic table shaded the board from the glare of the Sun.
Alex’s opponent, an Asian man of aristocratic mien, glanced up at her. “Guten Tag, Kätchen,” he said.
“Konnichi wa, Wakabayashi-sama,” she answered.
The man nodded, then returned his eyes to the chessboard.
Several moves later, the man shook his head almost imperceptibly. “A draw is offered.”
“A draw?” Alex thought he had a marginally better position but felt it would be impolite not to accept. “All right. Fine.”
The man leaned back. “One is new at the village?”
“One is.” Alex nodded. “I’ve just moved into an apartment here.” He extended his hand over the board. “I’m Alex Prendergast. Summer postdoc.”
The man shook the proffered hand through an arc of a few centimeters, then set up the pieces again. “Takeo Wakabayashi—on staff here—particle physics.”
Wegener scrambled to his feet and howled.
“Oh, no, Wegener,” said Alex. “Not another one!”
“Is something wrong?” said the woman.
“No,” said Alex, taking a little notebook from his pocket and logging the howl. “Probably not.”
“Probably?” The woman slid onto the picnic table’s bench. “And I’m Katerina Schneider.” She threw a glance off to the looming Wilson Hall. “I’m afraid I’m something of an alien here . . . being a neurobiologist.”
Alex laughed. “Then I’m an alien as well.” He pocketed his notebook. “I’m a seismologist.”
With a slow, deliberat
e motion, Takeo made his first move, then cupped his chin in his hands. Alex noticed that he had fingers pushing against his ears.
“What’s a seismologist doing at Fermilab?” said Katerina.
Alex made his move. “I applied for a grant to see if Fermilab laser micro-position detection technology might be applied to earthquake sensing.” He spoke softly out of consideration for Takeo. “The Large Hadron Collider has sucked up all the particle physics money. But there’s still earth science money to be had.”
Takeo made his second move—a book opening. Alex also stayed with the book. “Since the Tevatron will be obsolete when the LHC goes up,” he said, eyes on the board, “Fermilab is looking for other things to do.” He looked up from the board. “And since you brought it up, what’s a neurobiologist doing here?”
“I’m here on leave from The University of Berlin, researching the possible detection of cosmic ray burst particles by living organisms.”
“Interesting.”
Takeo made his move and Alex returned his attention to the game.
For the next ten minutes or so, no one spoke. Takeo had taken his fingers away from his ears. Then, as Takeo reached for a chess piece, the ground began to vibrate. A second or two later, a low rumble filled the air and the ground shook. Several of the chess pieces fell over.
“Ach Duheilige . . . ” Katerina grabbed on to the table.
Takeo sat frozen, holding his chess piece as if by having lifted it, he had caused the shaking.
“Not to worry,” said Alex, throwing a quick glance at his dog. “I think it’s only a minor quake. Should be over in a few seconds.”
They sat in silence until, about fifteen seconds later, the ground went still.
“Well, that was certainly fun,” said Katerina, releasing her death grip on the picnic table.
“I bet we’re close to the epicenter. The P and S waves felt as if they came almost on top of each other.” Alex reached into his pocket. “There’s never a seismograph when you need one.” He pulled out his cell phone. “I have the Lamont Observatory on rapid-dial.”