by Ben Bova
“Hey, in there,” Waltz called from back at the platform. “You want to let us in on what you found?”
“We’ll let you know when we figure it out,” Vito chortled, then he and Mike approached it slowly, holding the spotlights out ahead of them, while Lan walked a few meters to their right to get a clear shot of it with his helmet camera.
There was a sudden sparking at the ankle joint of Mike’s left leg, and a scream of pain vibrated through the tiny helmet speakers.
“What happened?” Adela started to move forward, but Hannah stepped in front of her.
“Mike! Come back now, all of you!” she bellowed, then turned to her and Brendan. “The rest of you, back through the rocks!”
Adela wanted to turn and go, but she felt frozen where she stood.
Mike tried to spin around toward them, but she lost her balance and stumbled to her knees, her forward momentum carrying her another half meter closer to the structure. As she fell, the servo motors in both shoulders exploded, followed by the units in each of her elbows. She pitched forward in dreadful slow motion and hit the ground, the force of the impact sending a severed arm spinning toward Vito and Heathseven, blood splattering across the chest and visor of their suits. She lay there, then, silent and unmoving. No sound at all came from her helmet pickup.
“Mike!” Vito dropped his spotlight and started moving to his left.
Hannah shoved at Brendan, trying to get him into the breakdown. “Stop! Don’t go near her!”
“What’s happening in there? Hannah?” Waltz paused, then, “We’re coming in!”
“No! Stay there!”
Vito made it to Mike’s side in two bounds, but as he leaned down to her body his right shoulder exploded, followed by his left, sending him tumbling to the ground, where his spinning body blew apart at the knees, hips and ankles.
Adela pushed Hannah aside and tried to run to them, but in the unaccustomed gravity she lost her balance in the first few steps and fell to the ground far short of the two bodies.
“Grandmother!” Brendan got to her at once, grabbing her solidly by the arm to help her up and, at the same time, prevent her from running into whatever it was that had just killed the others.
Heathseven stood there dumbly, helmet camera pointing at the mangled bodies, unable to move either forward or back. “Mike?” The single word was a paragraph. In her helmet speaker, Adela thought she could hear the man sobbing.
At that moment, from a point somewhere atop the structure, a bright light glowed that illuminated the cavern as brightly as the Sun.
27
CONTACT
There was no apparent source of the light, just a steady, bright radiance emanating from the top of the cylinder that, considering they had just spent the last two hours in darkness, was almost blinding in its intensity.
Nothing moved. There was no sign that they had been attacked.
“What’s happening in there!”
“Waltz! You’re not helping; stay off the open channel!” Hannah took a few steps closer, stopping about three meters from the grisly sight of her two friends. Like Adela, she could plainly hear the sobbing on the open channel. “Lan? Are you all right? Are you injured in any way?”
“Wha—what?” The hard suit did not move, but the cavern was so bright now that they could easily see his features as he turned to the xenoguide. His face was pale, and tears welled up in eyes that were round and unblinking from shock.
Adela took a step toward him, Brendan still at her side. “Lan, are you hurt?”
“Hurt … ?” His brow furrowed in confusion as he concentrated on the question, and he sniffed loudly. “Uh, no. No, I don’t think so.”
“Listen to me carefully, Lan,” Hannah said softly. “Do not move any closer to the structure. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“We need your help, all right? Can you help us?”
“I don’t know. What can I …”
“We need you to use some of the systems in the worksuit. Is it functioning?”
He sniffed loudly again, the simple conversation taking his mind a bit away from the shock. “Let me see … .” The hard suit moved slightly as he wriggled his arms out of the sleeves and into the torso. “Yeah … it all seems to be working.”
“Very good, Lan. I need for you to scan everything within a twenty-meter circle around you. Look for weaponry—complex alloys, electronic components, trip wires, anything at all.”
“There’s nothing solid, but …” He sniffed again, wiping at his face with the back of his hand. As he spoke, his voice was still agitated over what had happened, but the edge of shock that was there a few minutes earlier was beginning to diminish. “I’m getting … a power-field reading that runs like … like a curtain from wall to wall across this side of the cavern nearest the mouth of the tunnel. I can’t get a reading on what it is, but it doesn’t really seem to be defensive; more of a sensor field, I think. It’s about two meters in front of me. Vito and Mike …” He hesitated, nearly choking on her name. “They … They’re lying on the other side of it.”
“Don’t go near it.”
“Lan,” Brendan put in. “Can you get a power reading from the servo motors in … in the hard suits?”
A moment’s pause, then, “There’s nothing there. I’m not even reading the chemical composition of the power chips anymore.”
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s what did it. It’s not a defensive field.”
Adela motioned for Brendan to stay where he was and strode forward, slowing as she neared the bodies, then picked up the makeshift spotlight Vito had dropped and held it out to Heathseven. “The power chips in these magnaflares are the same kind as in the suit servo motors, aren’t they?” No answer. He was still staring at Mike’s body. “Lan?”
“Uh, yeah. Or almost the same anyway. Power consumption rates and voltage are different, but they’re the same composition and circuitry.”
“Watch yourself, everybody.” With that, she backed up a few steps and tossed the magnaflare spotlight in a high arc toward the mysterious structure. The light exploded, the pieces sailing on until they peppered the floor of the cavern some distance ahead.
“It’s not a defensive field,” she said firmly. “I’m sure of it.” Not that it does Mike and Vito any good, she added silently. She gazed over at their bodies, and tried to think of them as empty, discarded suits, and not the two people she had come to know and respect.
“Waltz!” Hannah called, deciding that they were in no imminent danger. “Inform Captain Anmoore that we have taken two casualties. We would like to retrieve their bodies, and need a bit more time.”
“All right.” The man’s voice was downcast. “Tell Lan … Tell Lan I’m sorry.” The two back at the platform had heard everything, of course, but it was Hannah’s confirmation that filled in what gaps remained and made it all real for them. There was a pause as Waltz relayed her request to Anmoore. No one moved; not a word was uttered as they waited for a reply. “Sorry, Hannah; Captain says no, leave them there for now. He’s says to get out of there immediately.”
Hannah cursed, the first time Adela had heard her do so, and looked ruefully at the two battered hard suits. “You heard him, everyone. Let’s go.”
Adela couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You can’t just leave them here.”
“We’ll come back for them, Dr. Montgarde,” she said. “Later; I will insist on it.” She held up three fingers, and Adela switched hurriedly to the side channel. “He is right, Doctor. We have to get you and the academician out of here; and Lan, too. There’s nothing we can do here right now. Please take Lan’s arm—I am worried about him—and escort him back to the path.” Her signal clicked off on the last word as she went back to the open channel and turned away, ushering Brendan toward the opening in the breakdown.
Adela turned away from the massive structure and put a gloved hand on Lan’s shoulder. They stood face-to-face, the brightness in the cavern mak
ing it easy to see him inside the roomy, carapace-like torso. Although the suit still stood facing the field he’d detected, his head was turned away from her as he continued to stare at Mike’s body.
“Come on, Lan.”
He bit at his lip as he stared, his eyes unblinking. His arms were still out of their sleeves and he rubbed his face with his hands. “I should have been scanning for defenses as soon as we walked in here.”
“This chamber is ancient,” she said softly. “There’s no one here; there hasn’t been in hundreds of years. It wasn’t even a defensive field. Lan, we’ll come back, with more people and equipment, and we’ll figure it all out.”
He shook his head remorsefully, and began to slip his arms back inside the sleeves. Adela waited, watching him carefully for signs that he might be going into shock. It was then that she noticed the moving reflection in his blood-spattered visor.
“Adela …” Brendan said incredulously, his voice a whisper. “Look behind you.”
A perfect silvery sphere floated there a meter or two over the floor of the cavern, about halfway between them and the structure, moving slowly, smoothly toward them. It looked like solid metal, its featureless surface so delicately polished that had it been motionless, it would have reflected the dull, gray rock-face stone around them in such a way as to be nearly invisible. Only its forward movement, which sent the reflected stone walls bending around its surface, gave it away.
They looked past it and saw that more spheres were coming from the dark depressions in the tanklike structure, dozens of them in all. Some came immediately toward them on exiting, while others reentered other depressions elsewhere on the outside of the structure. Their surfaces caught the light as they flew about, the color of the metal ranging from deep copper on some, to silver like the one nearest them, to bronze and golden on others.
“Do not move,” Hannah warned unnecessarily as it came to a halt ten meters away. “Do nothing threatening.”
One of the golden spheres peeled away from the structure and sped in their direction mere centimeters above the floor before arcing up and coming to rest next to the silver. Then another gold one, and another, followed by a crowd of others that flew in a loose formation across the floor to join those already holding position in front of them. There were fifteen altogether now hovering before them, all slightly less than a meter in diameter and virtually identical in every way. While still more of the floating spheres literally poured in and out of the openings, moving in every conceivable direction—hovering, circling each other, rising to near the ceiling and back—no more came to take up position with the others.
“Hello?” Brendan asked tentatively. There was no response or indication that he had even been heard, much less understood. Adela chinned the comm bar, trying the same thing on each of the hard suit channels, but with the same results.
“What are they?” she asked of the others. “Lan, can you get any kind of reading on them?”
The vac tech pulled his arms inside again, and looked intently at the instrumentation in the torso of his suit. “Let’s see … . No, nothing there.” He tried a number of settings with little luck, then, slipping an arm back into its sleeve, pulled a sensor node from its mounting on the worksuit and held it in their direction with one hand while he fiddled inside the torso with the other. “Let me try to—”
The spheres surged instantly forward, and as each passed through where they had estimated the sensor field to be, its surface shimmered and rippled as if the thing were a single, enormous drop of liquid gold. They all converged on him in seconds, milling and bobbing in a flowing metal cloud around him, swirling in wide circles on every side like so many bees around a hive.
“Hold still!” Adela shouted.
He turned off whatever instrument he’d activated and the whirling mass slowed instantly. All but one—the silver one that had first appeared before them—retreated to the same position they had held previously on the other side of the sensor field. Where they had hovered motionless earlier, however, now they undulated like a tight cloud of swirling balls.
“Did you get any reading on them?” Brendan wanted to know. “Did you have time to get anything?”
“I got something,” he replied, keeping a cautious eye on the remaining sphere, which moved slowly up and down in front of him as if examining his every feature. “It looked like an energy signature similar to that of the sensor field up ahead.”
“So they’re mechanical, then? Controlled objects?”
“I don’t … I can’t say for sure.”
The silver ball zipped away to the other group, stopping at the nearest of the gold spheres. The two touched briefly, joining with a slight lurch like two soap bubbles as they formed a protracted hourglass shape. They stayed that way for a second, revolving around one another, then stretched apart with a snap that sent a series of ripples through each of them. They both then darted back to Lan. As the silver orb hovered and “supervised,” the gold sphere rammed itself onto Lan’s handheld sensor node, flowing like a shiny silver glob of glue up past his elbow.
“It’s pulling me!” He jerked forward, stumbled, and yanked back hard against the pull of the sphere, managing to stop his forward motion. He held his own but a moment, however, as the sphere stretched out and tugged at him again. Unable to keep his balance, he flopped onto his stomach and was dragged along steadily by one arm, his boots digging little trenches that trailed behind him in the sandy floor. “Unnnh! My arm!” The sudden cry was filled with pain.
Adela was closest and lumbered at him, trying to throw herself across his legs, but missed him and floundered onto the ground, where she struggled with little success to get back up. She just didn’t have the strength or size to get the hard suit to maneuver into an upright position.
Hannah and Brendan, meanwhile, were also running for Lan, but the xenoguide—more accustomed to low-g conditions and using the suits—was on top of him first. She dove for him and tackled his rear legs as they kicked helplessly, throwing her arms as tightly around them as she could, but it didn’t help. Between his own frantic struggling and the dragging motion, she let him slip out of her grasp and tumbled to the side.
Brendan never even made it close as Lan approached the sensor field. “Pull your arm out of the sleeve!”
There was a flash of light from his elbow as his body started through the field, then an explosion that ripped the arm off and shattered the gold sphere into a shower of metallic globules that rained down all around them. Lan, still tugging against the sphere when the arm blew, jerked back instantaneously and rolled away from he field as fast as he could.
“I’m okay!” He rolled neatly into a sitting position, a gaping hole in the right shoulder of the worksuit. As he bumped along the floor, there were more sharp groans of pain. “I—My arm’s broken,” he said through gritted teeth. “I managed to get it out of the sleeve in time, though, and the skin-shield’s snapped on. But I’m all right.”
The silver sphere hovered over them a moment as if surveying what had happened, then swooped back to the others, where it again touched and separated with the nearest of the gold orbs. This time, however, that sphere touched one of the others, separated, and each touched a different one in turn until all had joined with at least one of the others, whereupon all of the gold spheres flew to wherever a piece of the destroyed sphere had landed on the sandy floor. They each dipped down to a shimmering fragment and blotted it into itself like a sponge soaking up water droplets on a tabletop. Every visible scrap retrieved, they retreated to the cylinder, and began another touching-separating-touching sequence that was repeated over and over among every sphere in the vicinity. The silver sphere stayed behind, floating slowly over to take a position safely above their heads. Once there, it merely hovered in place, for all the world seeming like it had decided to just watch them all from a safe distance.
Brendan and Hannah assisted Adela to her feet; then the three of them helped Lan to stand upright in the damaged w
orksuit.
“Mother of God …” It was Waltz’s voice.
They spun about to find the hover platform sailing over the breakdown, the security man at the controls. Towsen hung tightly to the railing. “Academician! Are you all right?”
Waltz lowered the platform to the ground as smoothly as Hannah had. “Get on!”
They helped Lan to his feet, careful not to jostle him too much, then climbed up through the opening in the railing and held on tightly as he powered the unit immediately off the cavern floor, and out into the darkness of the sloping tunnel.
As Waltz piloted, the rest of them looked somberly back at the two bodies they were forced to leave behind. The silver sphere hovered above the bloody, broken hard suits until they disappeared over the edge of the breakdown, then popped up over the rocks and followed at a discreet distance as they made their way out of the fissure.
Hannah made a full report to Anmoore as they flew steadily on, but other than that they said little to one another. None of them spoke of Mike or Vito, and none were able to take their eyes off the sphere as it followed them.
Looking behind them as they were, they were taken by surprise when the platform emerged into the sunlight again. The platform sailed on to the hopper without incident, landed smoothly in the dusty regolith near the open hatch, and the six of them filed back into the vessel.
An hour later, hard suits removed, vacuumed and stowed, and Lan’s arm treated and splinted, all six of them—along with Anmoore and the copilot—packed into the darkened flight deck and gazed out on the surface, where the silver sphere floated a few meters above the platform parked in front of the hatch on the side of the hopper. From time to time it would sweep across the surface to examine one feature or another, then zip back to the platform.
“What now?” Adela asked.
Anmoore sighed heavily, shaking his head. “I’ve already called the Blanca—called them at the first sign of trouble, in fact. And I’ve given a full report to Commander Wood. They’re sending another ship, a big lander.”