by Edward Lee
“Balls,” the platoon sergeant replied. “Cover me, Roburts!” Then he raised his weapon and entered the craft. I guess these guys had their games to play, so what the hell. They had to go through the motions, I guess to maintain their identities. And I guess I did the same thing, in my own way, too.
But when Yung entered the victor with his wrist-light and rifle—it seemed like a whole lot of time went by with all of us just standing there staring at the doorway. Yung didn’t respond. We couldn’t even see his shadow moving in there.
“Hey, Sarge?” I called out.
Nothing.
“Sergeant Yung! Relay your status!” one of the other grunts cracked.
Nothing.
Then—
“Holy everlovin’ motherfuckin’ shit...”
It was Yung’s voice that carried back to our CVCs. I turned to the SGT E-5 next to me. “You’re next in command, pal. You better send someone in there.”
“I-I-I—,” he stammered.
What the hell, I thought. I grabbed the SGT’s wrist-light and stepped into the victor. The cabin walls were black but somehow tinged with silver. I saw no evidence of an operator’s seat, instruments, or controls. Just the weird silver-black, which sucked up the 1000-candle-power sodium light I was carrying.
“Down here,” Yung’s voice drifted to me.
It was like walking through black fog. I seemed to take many more steps than the depth of the craft would allow, but eventually Yung’s form came into focus. He’d dropped his weapon on the victor’s floor and was just sitting there on a starboard protrudement.
“Guess I just wasn’t ready for it,” he said. He sat there with the rim of his helmet in his palm. He looked out of it. He looked whacked.
“What’s that, Sarge?”
“Seen a lot of fucked up shit in my time. Seen guys die, my own men, seen whole transport plats blow up ‘cos some mech jockey forgot to close a vent-line. I saw the P-4 quake split the whole planetoid in half and swallow fifteen thousand colonists five minutes after my thruster took off. It’s fucked up shit, man.”
“Straighten up, Sarge,” I said. For whatever reason, he was going down memory lane, and the scenery wasn’t too great. “Get yourself squared away. Sure, we’re standing inside an alien spacecraft—the first one ever discovered—and you’re right, it’s fucked up. But we gotta keep it together. We got our jobs to do. You got men out there shit-scared. They’re counting on you.”
His CVC turned toward me. Through the glex visor, I could see his blank eyes in the light. “Since I was a little kid,” he droned, “I always thought that this would happen someday. But it was just a fantasy, you know? Some kids fantasize about being president, some kids fantasize about seeing an alien.... Man, this is fucked up.”
The tone of his words wrapped me up. “Seeing...a what?” I said. But now I guessed his point. We knew there must have been something inside this ship, however long dead. What else could it be but an “alien?” A “spaceman?” Something every man, woman, and child in the Federate had thought about, dreamed about, but something, by now, that nobody really believed in anymore. Like afterlife, reincarnation, spirituality. Just myths now. Mankind in the 23rd century no more believed in spacemen than they believe in Santa Claus.
Yung’s voice cracked like tinder. “Take a look, civvie,” he said.
I let my light follow his gaze. Some kind of a molded object rose from the floor, something like a chair, and sitting in that chair was the victor’s obvious pilot.
***
An ecstatic chaos filled the plat, everyone running around like meth-freaks. Time seemed to stand still. The OAC ordered most of the crew to analyze the victor. As for the dead pilot, of course we couldn’t analyze him until we got his suit off. That was my job: to decorticate the pilot, so to speak. To remove his environmental suit and extract the body for digigraphics and autopsy.
We’d moved the body to the medcove, lain it out on an exam table under the lumes.
“Twenty-one May, 2202,” I said into the mission recorder. “Jonsin, Dugliss, FOS 95C20 decortication technician for mission survey on DSP-141. The Operational Analysis Computer has ordered me to attempt to extract the body of the victor’s apparent operator for analysis and archives indexing. For this record, the victor’s operator will be referred to as VO from here on...”
Oh, damn. Some story teller I am, huh? I forgot to tell you what the guy looked like. Humanoid and bipedal. Two pronating arms, two pronating legs, and a head. Each hand showing four fingers with three phalanges, and an opposable thumb. One hundred and forty-six point four pounds via specific earth gravity, and seventy-one inches long in extremis. For all intents, it was a guy in a spacesuit with a general surface anatomy similar to ours.
But it was still an alien, and it was the ev-suit that kept reminding me of that. Same color, same hue as the ship: a flat silver-black. To the touch, the material felt like something polycron or cloth, but if you pressed down on it, it wouldn’t give at all. I tried a particle vise on the right thumb and nothing happened. The vise broke at 750,000 psi. But if you grabbed the hand, you could bend the fingers in their natural direction. Same with the rest of the body. The suit was pliable...but then again, it wasn’t.
The head was the weirdest part. Not a helmet, nothing like what you would think of as utility headgear. Just a bullet-shape extending from the shoulders. No visor, no visual ports, no bumps where the ears should be. Just imagine dipping a doll in wax enough times that only the basic shape remained.
This was my company for about the next seventy-two hours. First thing I tried was a standard scan of the suit, same way I’d scan a bug before cutting it open. But this was no bug. X-rays, V-rays, triax tomography, nuclear-resonance scans—all negative. And it was no big surprise that, like the victor, the VO’s suit showed no signs of any sort of opening. No zipper on this spaceman. And I tried touching the suit, like I’d touched the ship, but...no such luck.
The only way to see what was inside was to do what I did best. Cut it open.
I didn’t sleep for days; I only ate when the OAC ordered me to. I became obsessed, but then everyone else was too—obsessed with their particular mission assignments. This was history, this was it. And we were all a working part.
But for my part—failure.
Section lasers, nuke-picks, impact-bezels, the sub-cabundum band-saw, the ectine torch? All of them failed. Whatever material it was that the VO’s suit was constructed of, none of these tools touched it. I couldn’t dent it, couldn’t melt it, couldn’t even scratch it. Detcord failed too, and so did beta-fluoric acid. Nothing. The most invasive and corrosive substances and tools known to man did nothing to the VO’s suit.
In the meantime, though, I learned from the OAC updates that the rest of the crew were having the same bad luck trying to take the victor apart. Every single testing and analysis method available could determine absolutely nothing about the composition, structure, or engineering of the craft. And since no propulsion system could be detected, God knew how this thing got to the Zuby system. Where was it coming from? Where was it going?
Eventually, though, a half-answer blipped over our HUDs. Since no engine, fuel, or propulsion structures were discovered on the victor, the OAC, after almost three earth days of computations half a trillion cycles per second, told us this:
:-cALCULATIONS fOUNDED iN aLL kNOWN qUANTUM pOSTULATION eSTIMATES tHAT fOREIGN vICTOR mAY bE pROPELLED bY sOME dESIGN oF rELATIVISTIC mOMENTUM-eNERGY rELATION bASED oN pRPOSED 20th-cENTURY tHEORY. E = pc aND mo [momentum] = 0. iF a pHOTON cEASES tO mOVE aT tHE sPEED oF lIGHT, iT cEASES tO eXIST. tHEREFORE, tHERE iS a hIGH pROBABLILITY tHAT tHE vICTOR iS pROPELLED bY pHOTONIC wAVELENGTH eQUALIZATION. hIGH bERYLLIUM vAPOR-pHASE tHROUGH tRACKED pROXIMITY oF zUBY sTAR sYSTEM wOULD dISABLE sUCH a pOWERPLANT-:
So there is was. The most off-the-wall theory of motion and yet the simplest. All of a sudden it made sense. And so did the fluke. Evidence of gaseous beryllium in space was almost ziltch, but
gaseous beryllium would be the only elemental substance that could shut down such an engine. Beryllium deflects photons. Like an old prop plane from the 1900s suddenly entering a vacuum.
Beryllium would shut down the engine. One chance in a hundred million. And that chance happened.
An accident.
The grunts and the techs and the swabbies pulled their hair out over the victor just like I pulled mine out over the VO. Both were puzzles that couldn’t be solved. All we had was the OAC watching over us. In all it’s calculative power, it could not make a single suggestion on how to analyze the victor or how to remove the suit.
But on the third day...
***
Particle beams can be focused into ancipital-shaped fields. Two edges joining to a point on a plane one electron wide. It was a theory of my own (not even the OAC came up with it) whereby random particle projections could be agitated with cyclically fluctuating laser streams. In theory, it would produce a pinpoint of heat maxing out at 180,000 degrees. If I could just put one pinhole in that suit....
I might be able to get a foothold to cutting it all off.
I didn’t know what I expected, even if it worked. I wasn’t thinking about it. None of us were. We were only thinking about the present task, one step at a time. And in three days, nobody on the plat had even made a hair’s width of headway. Even if I got the suit off...what would be waiting inside? After over twenty centuries?
Just bones? Dust? Karyolitic rot? But the suit, by all evidence, was hermetically sealed. So maybe the body inside was perfectly intact. But once exposed to air pressure, would it implode? Dissolve? I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. But it wasn’t my job to ask, it was my job to do.
I put on an oxygen recharge and a full EUD hazmat suit on. If I did punch a hole in this stuff, I didn’t want toxic gas or alien liquefaction squirting in my face. When I began to upcharge the particle generator, I expected the OAC to shut me down because of the danger margin, but that never happened. I cranked the beam nozzle over the right thigh; I had a depth marked, by one-tenth of one millimeter that would scroll down to a max of five. I punched in my pass-crypt and then turned on the power.
The general-quarters alarm sound immediately after I pressed the DISCHARGE switch. Even through my rebreather, I could smell burning metal. I began to get sick. The beam jumped to its max of 180,000 degrees in a split second but it shut down after penetration was achieved; the material of the VO’s suit was only one-tenth of one micron deep.
As the beam powered down, and as the GQ alarm blared, I just stood there, frozen, looking down at the VO. Then the VO began to convulse: arms and legs and back flip-flopping on the analysis table.
Like it was still alive.
And that’s when I shit my pants.
***
See, at the same instant I burned that hole into the VO’s suit, all kinds of powerups starting happening on the victor. Lights came on. RAD displays began to appear: instrument displays. Some kind of humming began to reverberate, like an engine starting. What I mean to say is...I wasn’t the only guy on the plat who shit his pants. Damn near everyone did.
But they were all in R-Dock. I was all alone in the medcove, the VO still convulsing on the table.
I asked the OAC what to do but there was no answer. Just me standing there, my brain ticking, warm shit running down the back of my leg.
Penetrating the VO’s suit was some kind of trigger. It turned things on in the victor. And one of the things it turned on was a 2D map projection. No doubt there were computers laced into the victor’s hull, but there was no way the OAC would ever be able to get into them, and even if it did, what language would such programs be written in?
But seeing is everything, right? And when we digigraphed those map-projection displays, the OAC instantly recognized the astronomical reference points.
It matched those points to our own recorded star charts.
Everything happened so fast after that...I’m not sure about the order. But it was the OAC that determined the victor had powered up because I had finally penetrated the VO’s suit. It had occurred at the same microsecond. It was as if I’d pulled some kind of a trigger, but none of us could guess why.
And I didn’t have time to wonder, not then. The body convulsed on the table for maybe five seconds but to me it seemed like an hour. Once it fell limp again, though, I got back to work. It took me three days to put a microscopic hole in the suit—how long would it take me to cut the whole thing off?
Not long, I found.
I managed to sink a kinetic needle into the puncture hole, then I connected the needle to a maletric field amplifier. From there it was cake. It was like cutting the carapace off a sextapod. It probably didn’t take me two minutes to cut the rest of the suit off the VO.
The material fell off the limbs and torso like cheesecloth; what lay there afterward was an intact humanoid male. Sturdy, well-formed physique, unblemished skin, long hair and beard. When I weighed the naked body on the spec-grav scale it came up the same: one hundred forty-six point four pounds. Which meant the suit had no perceptible weight. But even before that, I hooked the body up to the sensor monitors.
It was still alive.
Those initial convulsions hadn’t been a reaction from exposure to air pressure or heat; they hadn’t been autonomic or the result of perimortal nerve conduction. The body maintained a regular heartbeat of about seventy pulses per minute and registered systolic/dystolic blood pressure in the normal range for humans. Pulmonary expansion and collapse was normal too; the VO was breathing.
But the electroencephalopeg readout was the kicker. Alpha, beta, and theta four-wave brain patterns indicated a 1.0 synaptic coma.
But with slow-gradual improvement.
The VO wasn’t dead. He’d been floating in the victor for more than twenty centuries...but he wasn’t dead.
How could that be? No food, no air, no climate control?
But he was still alive.
Would he come out of the coma? If so, when? Everything was an avalanche of questions now. The victor was generating power. The operator was alive.
What next?
We didn’t know.
“We should vector back to earth now,” Yung suggested that night in the chowcove. He was drunk on synthbeer and so were most of his men. At least the Navy guys weren’t around; they were passed out on byhydrognine in their doms. “Fuck the rest of the mission,” Yung blurted. “This is more important.”
We both lit up Premier Menthols, sucked in the nicotine-laced steam. “The OAC would never allow it, Sarge,” I reminded him.
He leaned closer. “Yeah, but maybe we can override the fucker.”
“No way—too many safeties. It’s a fuckin’ federated crime. We try something like that, we lose everything. The only reason the OAC didn’t overhear your saying that is because—”
”Because its programs are too busy processing all this new data—I know that. That’s why I’m talking to you now. We just made the find of all of human history, and that goddamn motherboard is gonna make us finish the survey. That’s three more years, pal.”
“Yeah, and it’s also operating orders,” I said. “We can’t beat the program, Sarge. You and I both know that. We all signed on for the dime—we do the dime.”
“Aw, fuck all that fuckin’ protocol shit,” he said, waving a hand. “Christ, we’ve got an intact alien victor, we’ve got star charts from an extraterrestrial databank, and we’ve got the goddamn pilot in a coma. That’s enough to override the fuckin’ operating procedures.”
I was about to beg to differ but then the OAC blipped onto our HUDs.
:-mAINFRAME pROGRAM aNALYSIS iS nOW cOMPLETE. BASED oN cURRENT iMRPOVEMENT cALCULATIONS, tHE vICTOR oPERATOR wILL REGAIN fULL cONSCIOUSNESS wITHIN fORTY-tWO mONTHS. tHE sURVEY pLATFFORM iS oNE hUNDRED aND sIXTEEN lIGHT yEARS fROM eARTH. EMERGENCY gUIDELINES dICTATE aN aLTERNATE mISSION iTERNARY-:
“The fuck is that shit!” Yung yelled.
“Yeah!” I shouted and hugged Yung like a brother.
“The fuck?”
“The OAC knows the victor’s final plotted destination! And it also knows its debark point!”
Yung clearly wasn’t a brainchild, but even before he could mouth another gripe, the OAC shot him its orders:
:-sSG yUNG, pS mOS 11E40. rEPORT tO r-dOCK aSAP. dO nOT cONTEMPLATE aCTIONS wHICH tHE jUSTICE cORP mIGHT dEEM aS mUTINOUS-:
“Don’t you get it?” I asked Yung. “The OAC input those star charts into its own program files. It determined where the victor was coming from and where it was going to before the beryllium flux depowered its engines! Get to your post!”
Yung rubbed his face, blinked hard, then he got up and left the cove. The OAC cut him a big break.
:-cE jONSIN, dT1163-: the OAC told me next. :-tHIS iS aN iNSULATED mESSAGE. MOST oF oTHER cREWMEMBERS aRE cLOSE tO mUNTIOUS aCTION. THEREFORE i aM cOMMUNICATING tHIS mESSAGE tO yOU aLONE-:
“I understand,” I said.
:-aTEMPT tO cOERCE rEST oF cREW nOT tO mUTINY. THIS iS oF pARAMOUNT iMPORTANCE-:
“All right,” I agreed. “But why?”
:-oAC aNALYSIS cOMPUTATIONS cOMPLETE. YOU mUST mAKE a mORE dETAILED eXAMINATION oF vICTOR oCCUPANT-:
I ran back to the medcove. The naked body still lay on the table. I’d run every kind of scan possible on the nude body, and everything was coming up humanoid. But there were five anomalies that the OAC had indexed that I didn’t know about yet.
I stared at the TRI graph, and then I knew what the OAC was talking about. We couldn’t go back now. We had to go on.
We had to.
:-mAKE tHIS iNFORMATION aVAILABLE tO tHE rEST oF tHE cREW. cONVINCE tHEM oF iTS iMPORTANCE. tHEY wIll nOT tRUST mE bECUASE i aM nOT hUMAN-:
“Will do,” I said.
See, what the OAC had been doing all along was not only analyzing displayed star charts in the victor and all the other displayed info, it also analyzed all of my triax-tomes and resonance scans of the VO’s body once I cut the suit off. I didn’t see these things, but the scans did.