Solaris Rising 2

by Ian Whates

  Gliese 876 had been the second extrasolar system reached by human technology. The supposed ‘earth-like planet’ present had been a bust, but the probe, programmed for pattern-recognition, had sent back one picture, just one, that sparked a furore back home. Passing through this very debris field within the shadow of Syrenka (then just Gliese 876f) – and minutes before becoming several billion dollars of metal pizza that must exist still on the side of some moonlet somewhere – it sent out an image very similar to what we were seeing now. There were plenty of them, in fact, throughout the debris ring and on some of the smaller moons – geometrically irregular crystal formations like sea-urchins clinging on in the vacuum of space. Life! had gone the cry, back home – the first indication that we might not be alone, and life within reach, just about, for a team that was willing to be severed from the planet of their genesis for decades. We liked to think that everyone back there hung on our every years-old word. Possibly nobody cared.

  The Anchorite was a phenomenon that existed throughout the ring in quantities from the microscopic to the sunburst array that Osman had pointed out. Veighl reported the largest known such specimen at two metres ninety centimetres diameter, and one metre eighty-eight projection from its substrate. Veighl, who had qualifications in geology and biology, had failed to get off the fence and come to any premature conclusion – a scientist to the end.

  Pelovska summarised: “Veighl’s data shows that the Anchorite is a carbon-rich crystal lattice, the structure of which appears homogenous no matter how large or small the sample. Veighl’s data further shows that the Anchorite is capable of breaking down the material upon which, or within which, it is embedded and converting it into more Anchorite. It replicates. Does that alone make it life? If we are looking at an ecology, we’re looking at one with incredibly low levels of energy: whatever tidal heating you can squeeze from an elliptical orbit around Syrenka, plus the background radiation and what pittance of light you can get this far out.” The system’s star was a cold, pale lamp far off in the alien heavens. You’d get more of a tan on Mars. “Still, Veighl took samples and treated them to the same intensity of illumination, and her results suggest that a day of that was enough for molecular-level conversion of asteroidal material into Anchorite.” Pelovska had come down heavily on the ‘geology’ side of the argument long before. Efficient geology, though, which took the faint light and heat of its surroundings and grew like lichen, converting its substrate into its substance so resourcefully that there was no waste, as close to thumbing its nose at the laws of thermodynamics as anything we had ever seen.

  Our shuttle had been decelerating smoothly for some time and now Osman reported needlessly, “Oregon ahead.”

  Just as there was no current need for our pilot to actually fly the vessel, as captain there was no need for me to give orders. A conclave of computers had already worked out the best approach, and our vessel ran through its paces nimbly as the state-sized asteroid grew and grew before us, until it filled our universe, until the naked eye could make out the sparse blue pinpricks of Anchorite, each in its crater. That was another observation of Veighl’s. The stuff seemed to grow best at impact sites, if ‘grow’ is the word. That was why she had set down on Oregon in the first place.

  Pelovska’s headset light was on, which told us she was communing with her Expert System implant, that was in turn taking advice from our Onboard. The light itself served no function beside the social – letting Osman and I know that her attention was away with the electronic fairies. In this case she was supervising our sensor arrays, bouncing signals off Oregon’s nearest neighbours to try for any sign of Veighl. By that time, our craft had matched velocity and rotation with the asteroid – so that we seemed, to our primate eyes, to be magically suspended above a stationary wasteland.

  “Ping,” she announced, deadpan. “Captain?”

  There was a moment’s silence before I was ready to catch that ball, because it was confirmation of what we had known all along, that Veighl had never left Oregon. I tried to form the words “rescue mission” in my head, but they wouldn’t come. “Let’s get them past the horizon and see what we’ve got. Generate a solution for coming down nearby if we want to – but not right on them.” Human social instinct prompted me to ask all sorts of other questions, to seek confirmation from her of what my own instruments could tell me just as easily. Principally: no signals, no signs of life. No surprises, therefore.

  Then Veighl’s craft was hauled over the shallow horizon, and Osman swore, and we simply coasted in silence for some time while the Onboard, devoid of either wonder or horror, made the necessary adjustments to stabilise the motion of the rock beneath us.

  Doctor Veighl had dodged the “is it life?” issue in her cursory report – and we would never hear the detailed one that she would have prepared back on Mother after processing her data. Veighl had talked about the life/not-life boundary, and whether we even had valid criteria to make the call – at what point self-replicating chemistry could be said to make the jump into something more akin to us than rocks. Her data showed her painstaking experimentation on the Anchorite, taking samples and watching its glacial growth.

  My first thought, unprofessional and yet unavoidable, was that the Anchorite had got its revenge.

  There was a crystal flower there, but it was a jagged crown of thorns nineteen metres across and at its heart was some of Veighl’s shuttle, embedded, part-metabolised, like a fly in a sundew. Everything from midway back towards the thrusters was either buried or just gone. Only six metres of nose, canted at a slight angle, stood proud of the hungry mass.

  We hung there above it, our stationary orbit re-established, and I numbly checked that our cameras were getting it all. Something terrible and sudden had happened here, that made a nonsense of all Veighl’s data, and I would keep transmitting a visual record of our mission in case terrible, sudden events came in twos. Still, I could not shake off the feeling that it would not help. Veighl had been in mid-transmission when this happened, cut off with no time to give a warning or to cry for help.

  “At least it was quick.” Until the others looked at me, I hadn’t realised that I had said this aloud.

  “Depending on how long life support lasted, or if it’s still active, there is a possibility that the crew may be alive, maybe in their suits,” Pelovska stated. In the stunned silence that followed I guessed that this thought had been given her by her Expert System, following its best guidance for the furtherance of the mission. It would be my decision, but the computers had already cast their vote.

  “There’s no sign of anything: no signals, no emissions, no heat at all,” Osman reported. Then, more quietly, “It killed them.”

  “No speculation,” I stated.

  “Wasn’t aware that counted as speculation. So, am I putting us down?”

  “Everyone suit up,” I decided, which entailed nothing more than securing our helmets. They were uncomfortable, restricted our vision, made our breathing stale, and nobody argued with me. The space around us, the asteroid below, now thronged with invisible dangers.

  I ran some checks of Oregon’s surface, bouncing waves off it and cross-referencing with Veighl’s data, particularly the signature of Anchorite. The echo from the great spiked star of crystal matched its smaller brethren, and the balance of the asteroid showed nothing more than rock and the expected dusting of microscopic Anchorite flecks.

  The Onboard tallied the cost of a stationary orbit over Oregon, not only the fuel and the constant adjustments to stay clear of the rest of the debris field, but the disruption to the asteroid’s course as Oregon, in turn, would be marginally influenced by our mass. The rock’s tiny gravity was giving us very little help, and the projected adjustments we would have to make over the course of an hour were falling foul of fuel conservation. The entire mission was on a penurious fuel budget, and our little trip hadn’t been catered for in the projections.

  The alternative was setting down, which would conserve fuel and
fool with Oregon less, making any danger from other debris that much more foreseeable.

  “Anna’s right,” I said reluctantly. “We need to be sure.” Meaning that we would be pilloried if we simply got the jitters and left. “Bring us down at least two hundred metres away and be ready for a quick exit if we need one.”

  Osman swore again, and he and Pelovska put their heads together with the Onboard to come up with a landing solution, ran the result through some quick simulations, and pronounced it good. Oregon gravity was something in the region of two per cent of earth standard, a great deal for an asteroid, barely enough for us to notice. It made me think of all those people back in the Beaver State, whether they felt that little extra patriotic pull as part of Earth’s grounding.

  We had already matched Oregon’s speed and rotation, and now we were allowed to drift closer and closer into the weak, weak hands of Oregon’s gravity, so much in tandem with the asteroid that human senses saw only a very gentle approach to a stationary surface, when in reality we and Oregon were gyring our manic way through the cluttered ring of broken moons that belted Syrenka. Decelerating with our thrusters would have spoiled that close harmony, bouncing us back from the pull of that feeble gravity, and so the computers allowed us to drift, dream-like, until our craft’s extended feet were brushing the ancient, vacuum-corroded stone. All we felt, when the claws were deployed, was the faintest of grinding shudders. If we had been asleep, it would not have woken us. Except for Pelovska, of course. Her implant would update her moment to moment, so that she spent her life being immaculately well-informed and, I suspect, lonely.

  There was a fraught pause, no more than a second, and I think all of us were waiting for the jaws of the trap – the sudden eruption beneath us as a hidden crystal monster lunged up to feed. Of course, nothing happened.

  Now we had a stable platform from which to investigate, and we were no longer haemorrhaging fuel simply matching our motion to Oregon’s. Our claws, and the meagre gravity, would suffice to keep us anchored, but I made sure that the Onboard would keep plotting escape vectors so that we were ready to fire all thrusters and take off into the debris field if things got bad. Correction: if things got bad and we had the chance to do anything about it.

  “Drone out?” Osman asked, and I nodded. We did not have anything particularly fit for search and rescue, and the mission’s drones had been designed for scientific exploration, sampling and testing. Right then I didn’t care how poor an ambassador ours would make. Better the drone than me.

  What we had was something like a metal springtail programmed to think it was a flying squirrel. Osman deployed the drone from a compartment on top of the ship and gave it directions. The drone did the sums, checked them with the Onboard and Pelovska, and leapt. Leapt being a relative term, of course. In order to arrive at Veighl’s ravaged craft in a controlled manner, rather than just bouncing from it like a fly on a windscreen, the drone put a minimum of force into the jump, departing our hull in an absurdly leisurely fashion, correcting its spin with minute applications of its jets but letting the simple force of the initial push carry it on a minutes-long, agonisingly slow drift across the intervening vacuum, letting the microgravity counteract upward motion just enough to bring it into a shallow arc that would end on Veighl’s shuttle’s nose. It could have got over there a good deal quicker on jets alone, but had the same problem we did. Mechanical movement used up stored battery, that could be replenished eventually by drinking in even the weak and distant light of the system’s star. Thrusters used fuel, stored solid and then flash-ignited into superheated gas, Newton’s third law in action. But when the fuel was gone, when that mass was cast away, there was no more, not for the drone and not for us. Fuel was matter, and once we had used it up there would be no more. We lived by an economy as harsh and limiting as the Anchorite’s own.

  The drone landed awkwardly – sometimes nobody’s sums are perfect – and Osman took over, extending its handful of legs until one magnetic pad got purchase. For a moment we saw the magnified view of the drone dangling out at an angle by one limb, but then it had jack-knifed down its own length and was crawling over Veighl’s hull, its cameras serving as our eyes.

  “Emergency hatch is clear of the... of the stuff,” Osman said. “Want me to open it?”

  Again there was an awkward pause before Pelovska put in, “They may be inside without suits.” We didn’t believe it, not that they were alive, but her Expert System kept trawling the known data for even the most remote possibility.

  Osman deployed some of the drone’s sensors. “No vibrations. No heat. No power at all. If they’re in there without suits, they’re frozen dead.”

  A beat. “Granted,” said Pelovska, the Expert System giving up on even that faint hope.

  “Get it open,” I decided.

  A search and rescue drone would have had stronger manipulators, and a cutting torch if all else failed. Our science model had neither, and for the best part of an hour we watched it scrabble and drift and flail at the hatch release, and utterly fail to open it. Eventually Osman’s monotonous swearing got too much, and I told him to abandon the attempt.

  “Prep the airlock. My command, my responsibility. I’ll go over.”

  There was no argument, much as I might wish for some. I did not want to go over to that partially-consumed shuttle. I did not want to get close to the alien thing that had murdered it. I did not want to confirm the patently obvious certainty that all three of us held in common, that Veighl’s crew was dead, impossibly dead, destroyed by the unexpected malice of the phenomenon they had come to study.

  Ten minutes later I was in our cramped airlock, breathing loud in my own ears, as they pumped the air from around me. I had an open radio channel and a camera running, and my suit would be transmitting all the minutiae of my body’s workings, ready to sound the alarm the moment anything happened to me. Nobody got this far into space without mastering their instincts and conquering some deep-imprinted fears, but when the airlock doors opened onto the grim surface of Oregon I felt my innards lurch. We had come out here because we thought that we were not alone. Now that seemed a good reason to be anywhere else.

  I had my own little thruster-pack, because I could not do calculations as well as our drone, and my first step was too energetic for Oregon’s feeble gravity, my nerves bouncing me high so that I had to use some of my own precious fuel stock to prevent me departing the asteroid altogether. After that I took it easy, crawling over the surface like a crab across some vast drowned cliff, trying to keep a constant proximity to the cratered surface without either colliding with it or losing contact altogether.

  There were Anchorite flowers between me and Veighl, just little ones, a hand-span across or less, nestled in craters as though they were lurking there. Of course they could not move. They could not have killed Veighl either, according to her data. I gave them a wide berth.

  A warning word from Osman told me I was close – I was so intent on my painstaking progress I had lost track. I slowed and regarded the vast crystal explosion before me. The footage that I was relaying would become the most viewed recording on Earth, when it arrived there years later.

  The tilted nose of Veighl’s vessel was plain, and the Anchorite had not visibly expanded since we arrived. I told myself that this was not some alien fly trap, that its spray of spines would not close on me. I told myself again. It didn’t help much.

  “Good luck, Captain,” came Osman’s voice in my ear. I bent my knees and jumped, kicking off from the surface, and then burning a little fuel to cast me with painful slowness at Veighl’s craft. I think I touched down more gently than the drone had.

  My suit lamp made little headway through the small ports, but I thought I made out a shape. “Is that...?”

  “That would be the pilot’s seat. Veighl herself was piloting,” came Pelovska. A moment’s image-cleaning later and she added, “Ninety per cent certain that’s Veighl you’re seeing.”

  “I’m going to open
the hatch.” Even then I hesitated because, however certain we and our computers were that Veighl’s crew was dead, I was about to open the interior of their shuttle onto vacuum.

  Opening their tomb was not something that would appear in my report.

  I fumbled with glove-clumsy hands at the release for the hatch, making sure that I was well out of the way of it. There was no pressure of air within, though, not at that end of the Kelvin scale. Instead the freed hatch just drifted from its mountings, falling in slow, slow motion towards the rigid starburst of the Anchorite below.

  I froze. I should have kept hold of the hatch, but you can’t plan for everything.

  It came to rest amidst those jagged spines. Nothing happened. Osman’s oath in my earpiece was pure relief.

  Then I turned my camera and my attention to the interior and he had no words for it, and neither did I.

  It was a snapshot of crystal hell, looking down into the inclined cabin of Veighl’s craft. The Anchorite had eaten the vessel from the stern up, swallowed its engines and reactor entire, ravened out into the crew’s living space from the back wall and just kept on going. The two back seats where Veighl’s crewmembers had been strapped in for lift off were gone, but the unwelcome clarity of my lamps revealed a single boot still protruding from the razor-tipped wall. The Anchorite was translucent enough that we could see there was no body within. Ship and crew both had been consumed and translated into more of the stuff that had done for them.