by Rick Partlow
He felt Shannon shudder as she came up beside him, and he slipped an arm around her, realizing the memories this place would hold.
“I’ll be okay.” She gave him a grateful hug, and then they stepped through the door of the dome hut and into the welcome respite of climate control.
“Afternoon, sir, ma’am.” A straight-backed, dark-haired young Marine officer came off his chair and saluted them.
“Hey, Ari,” Jason said, returning the salute. “Having fun out here?”
“Oh, loads, sir,” Lieutenant Shamir, leader of the Patton’s Marine Reaction Force, replied, shaking his head ruefully. “And don’t think I’m not counting the hours till my team and I switch with Gunny Lambert and the troops at the orbital base.”
Shamir had taken command of Gunny Lambert’s Reaction Force when their numbers had been filled out back on Earth. Lambert had been worried that he would be stuck with some wet-behind-the-ears butterbar, but Shamir was an good man, who had seen plenty of combat as an enlisted man before going to OCS.
Once the Patton had arrived insystem almost two weeks ago, she’d immediately dropped a prefab laboratory into a high orbit, and the Marines had been divided into two teams, one assigned to guard the ground base against any of Huerta’s group that might still bear a grudge, and the other to the orbital lab to serve mostly as gophers for the scientists. Jason and Shannon had spent their time shuttling between the two labs, waiting for answers, while Vinnie, Jock and Tom were busy assisting in relief efforts for the colonists.
“Captain McKay!” Rhajiv Mandila, the team’s chief pathologist, looked up from a bank of instruments and noticed their entrance. “I’m glad you’ve come—I’ve been leaving messages for you on the orbital lab for days now!” The researcher was a homely, horse-faced man with the shoulders of a dockworker, but one of the best minds the Republic had to offer.
“Sorry, Doc,” Jason explained. “Between getting the investigation teams set up and coordinating supply drops for the surviving colonists, we haven’t had a lot of spare time.”
“Well, you need to make time for this.” He waved a hand at the bank of instruments behind him. “I’ve got the results back from the DNA analysis on the tissue samples of the Invader biomechs.”
“‘Biomechs?’” Shannon repeated, brows furling.
“It’s a term we’ve come up with to describe the things,” Mandila explained.
“Are they machines?” Jason shook his head. His gaze wandered to the back of the laboratory, where one of the Invader corpses lay in a clear plastic coffin, suspended in chemical preservatives. He winced involuntarily at the sight of those shark-black eyes, looking no more lifeless in death than they had in life.
“It’s difficult to explain,” Mandila sighed.
Ari laughed. “Yeah, he’s been trying to explain it to me for three days now.”
“They’re not mechanical in the sense you’re probably thinking of,” the pathologist told them, “with circuits and servomotors, but they’re just as much the product of an assembly line as that pistol you’re wearing.” He nodded at Jason’s sidearm. “I don’t know if either of you are familiar with current cloning technology…”
“Assume we’re not,” Jason sighed, getting impatient with the man.
“Well,” Mandila said, raising a finger didactically, “as of about fifty years ago, we’ve had the ability to clone individual human tissues in a lab—we can grow muscle, nerve, even brain tissues in a vat and transplant them back to the donor. But this,” he waved back at the preserved corpse, “is a level of sophistication above that—at least fifty to a hundred years beyond what we can do now.”
“So they’re clones,” Jason deduced.
“Not like the ones you might have seen in science fiction movies.” The pathologist shook his head, a look of professional disapproval on his face. “That fantastic nonsense about taking a DNA sample and producing a full-grown life-form. No, someone or something cloned each tissue individually and assembled them like a biological robot—I’d venture to guess they must have used some extensive nanotechnological manufacturing technique.”
“That’s pretty damned advanced compared to their weapons technology,” Shannon observed.
“Especially when you consider that the biomechs aren’t a hundred percent biological—most of their skeletal structure has been reinforced with artificial material, but nothing as sophisticated as what you might expect from the biological part of their construction.” He hunted around on a line of sample trays and came up with a swatch of shiny metal. “Nothing more advanced than corrugated aluminum.”
“You’re kidding,” Jason muttered.
“You might think so,” Mandila acknowledged, obviously pleased with his little presentation. “Also, there’s a microcomputer built into the communication centers of the things’ brains—we think as a method of remote control. Now, I’m about the furthest thing from a computer expert on this expedition, but I sent one of the units up to our technical crew, and they tell me the technology is at least fifty years behind what we have.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.” Shannon rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Maybe that backs up your idea,” she told Jason, “about them being short on supplies. Maybe they’ve been scavenging whatever they could, no matter what level of technology it represented.”
“That’s one possibility,” Mandila said. “But that’s not the end of it. I was trying to tell you when you came in; we’ve completed our analysis of the biomech’s DNA—or rather, the DNA which was used to produce the creatures’ living tissue.” He hesitated dramatically, looking each of them in the eye in turn. “It’s human. Human right down to the last chromosome.”
* * *
“Oh, Captain McKay! Captain McKay!” Jason looked back and groaned inwardly as he saw the squat, hefty bulk of Dr. Andre Kovalev waddling down the corridor, his movements absurdly exaggerated in the half-gravity of the spinning tin can that was their temporary research base. The physicist was a pleasant enough man, but his penchant for long-windedness was as well-known among the mission’s staff as his love for loud, tasteless shirts.
“Hi, Dr. Kovalev.” McKay forced a smile. “What can I do for you?”
“Captain McKay, I have been looking for you since I heard you’d come back up from planetside,” Kovalev said, clapping his hands with delight. “I trust you found your visit with Rhajiv’s staff fruitful?”
McKay nodded. “Actually, Doc, I came back up because the Space team found something in orbit—I’m on my way to the docking bay right now, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, wonderful, I’ll come with you!” Kovalev enthused. “I’ve been hoping we’d have some time to talk.”
Jason winced. He’d really wanted to use the walk to the bay to think—Mandila’s revelation had given him a lot to digest—and he couldn’t do much thinking if he had to engage in a tete-a-tete with the loquacious Dr. Kovalev. Only one thing to do, much as he hated the idea.
“So, Doc,” Jason said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you—could you explain to me one more time just how exactly the Eysselink drive works? I’ve never been too clear about it and I think a better understanding of it might help me figure out how our ships are being pirated.”
“Oh, certainly, certainly,” Kovalev assented cheerfully. More than anything else, the physicist loved to lecture—and getting him started on a monologue would give Jason time to think. “It’s an old idea, really—originated back in the 1980’s as a piece of scientific speculation called the ‘Alcubierre Spacetime Inflation Warp Drive.’ The original idea was to use strong, exotic fields with negative energy density to inflate the space behind a starship and deflate the space at its front…”
Jason let the man’s voice fade into a background drone as his thoughts travelled back to the conversation he’d had with Shannon on the way back to the city.
“You don’t really believe him, do you?” she’d asked him, a troubled look on her face.
He shook his head, gl
ancing away from the dirt track for a moment. “Who? Dr. Mandila?”
“No,” she sighed. “Senator O’Keefe.”
“Oh.” He’d had the same troubling thoughts. “Well, there are other possibilities. If they are scavengers—well, a couple colony vessels were among the ships that disappeared. That could have afforded them access to human DNA.”
“But we don’t know that they’re scavengers,” she pointed out. “We don’t know that they’re behind the ship disappearances. All we know is that they, whoever they are, made those things out of human DNA.”
“Well, what other explanation is there?” He shrugged helplessly. “Even if I were to assume some rogue elements of our government were behind this, how would they have technology that our best biologist says is still at least fifty years away?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “All I’m saying is, we shouldn’t rule out anything at this point.”
“…but none of this would have been possible,” Kovalev’s voice crept through his reverie once again as they boarded a lift car, “without Adam Eysselink’s discovery of the gravimetic wavelength of energy, which made possible the use of gravimetic fields to produce the spacetime inflation effect. His detection of hyperphotonic particles in antimatter reactions back in ’41 was the true breakthrough…”
The lift car lurched upward, toward the station’s central core and his thoughts returned to Shannon’s words, and to the worry that gnawed unceasingly at his gut. What if O’Keefe were right? What if the government were behind all of this? Or the multicorporations? Certainly the multicorps had enough of a stake in the continued production of military hardware, and the big ones, like Republic Transportation, were almost part of the government.
Yet his logical mind rebelled at the idea of some vast government conspiracy. He’d heard so many of those cock-and-bull stories in the barracks from the Waco Cultists and the Elvis Worshippers, about how the government was controlled by socialist alien homosexuals, that he couldn’t buy it anymore. He knew Shannon didn’t seriously believe it, either, but she’d been unusually quiet during the drive back to Kennedy. They hadn’t quite made it back to the city when they’d gotten the call from Gunny Lambert, on the orbital research station. He hadn’t given them too many details, just told them the Space team had found something interesting in orbit and they might want to come up and take a look.
They’d docked in the station’s north lock and Shannon had gone on immediately to the bay at the opposite pole. He’d stayed back in the station’s control room long enough to contact the Patton and given Captain Patel an update on Mandila’s discovery, which had delayed him just enough to fall prey to Dr. Kovalev and his atomic mouth.
“…of course,” the physicist went on, his voice breaking slightly as the liftcar passed into zero gravity and the tip of his beard bounced playfully against his chest, “it took the work of Constance Decatur with the concept of electromagnetic lensing technology to focus the hyperphotons off the antimatter reaction into the drive field. Which left the problem of the tidal forces inherent in this kind of warping of the fabric of spacetime. While we can shape the Eysselink field to reduce these forces, we have not, as yet, been able to eliminate them altogether—the best we have been able to accomplish is to focus this tidal disruption into a straight-line acceleration analog proportional to the energy being pumped into the field. This necessitates the unfortunate inconvenience of the g-tanks, which I personally find…”
“Hey, here we are,” McKay interrupted, feeling the car come to a halt. “Thanks for the explanation, Doc, I really appreciate it. Maybe we can talk more later.”
“It was my pleasure, Captain,” the man assured him, beaming, as they kicked out of the lift and floated into the station’s auxiliary docking bay.
Shannon, he saw, was there already, along with Gunny Lambert and two of the orbital station’s department heads: Sandra Cerrano, a senior investigator for the Spaceflight Safety Commission, and Dr. Kwane Munfimi, the expedition’s chief xenobiologist—all gathered around a massive, dingy-white object, its semi-ovoid shape somehow familiar to McKay, but its outline oddly lumpy and irregular. It took Jason a moment to realize what the thing was: an unopened Invader drop-pod.
“Holy shit,” he murmured, slowly floating forward. “Where the hell did you find this thing?”
“Floating in high orbit,” Cerrano answered him. She was an unassuming, mousey young woman with black hair cut severely short. “There used to be a small rocket pack attached to the ass-end of the pod to kick it into the atmosphere; it apparently failed to ignite.”
“So the… biomechs are still in there?” McKay eyed the pod uncomfortably.
“We’re about to find out,” Lambert told him. He pointed to a series of wires running from the pod’s diameter to a small control box held by Sandra Cerrano. “She’s about to pop the sucker open.”
“I would advise everyone,” Cerrano said, raising the control box, “to move back against the wall.”
They’d hardly had time to attempt to follow her direction when she hit the control and the explosive bolts that ringed the pod ignited with a series of sharp bangs that made Jason’s ears pop. A hiss of carbon dioxide escaped from the pod’s innards as it split down the middle like a coconut, the halves floating apart until they came up against the netting that was stretched over the opposite sides of the bay.
McKay tensed as an armored shape drifted out of one of the hemispheres, but it hovered motionless between the pod halves, limp and lifeless. Cerrano and Munfimi moved eagerly toward the pod, joined a bit more hesitantly by the others. Munfimi, a slim, lanky man with eyes that seemed to be too large for his head, approached the ejected Invader trooper; while Cerrano inspected the inside of the pod.
“What’s the stuff covering the outside?” Jason asked the Spaceflight Safety investigator, trying not to come too close to the armored troop while Munfimi worked at the fastenings of its armor.
“Styrofoam, believe it or not,” the woman told him. “Simple and cheap, but very efficient—it’s nonreflective to radar or laser sensors. Unless you had a telescope trained on the thing, you’d never see it.”
“Another anomaly,” Shannon said, watching Munfimi pull the helmet off the biomech. The corpse was perfectly preserved, its black eyes staring into nothingness. “Aside from the genetic engineering used to produce the biomechs, every piece of technology we’ve seen so far is retro.”
“Especially the weapons,” Lambert commented, prying the assault rifle from the trooper’s harness and turning the bullpup-configuration firearm over in his hands. “I’ve shot a lot of antique pieces, but this…” He popped out the magazine and scowled at the brass-cased rounds within. “Jeez, brass cases, steel-core bullets—nobody’s used this shit for the last hundred years.”
“Everything we’ve seen is a century obsolete,” Shannon said emphatically. “Take that heavy-lift shuttle we blew at the spaceport: binary-propellent liquid chemical rockets, for God’s sake. We’ve been using solid-fuel particle-bed nuclear engines since the end of the last century. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that shuttle except in a museum…” She trailed off, a thoughtful look settling over her features. “A museum,” she repeated.
Jason turned from the edge of the pod, staring at her curiously.
“What is it?” he asked her.
“I have seen that shuttle in a museum,” she declared. “Or, rather, one almost identical to it. The National Air and Space Museum in the States. There was a scale model of a launch vehicle just like that shuttle—it was a Russian Protectorate spacecraft, one of the ones Antonov used to set up his Lunar base.”
“Those were heady times,” Kovalev said, his voice almost wistful. “My grandfather was an engineer for Premier Antonov’s space program—he escaped to the U.S. just days before the nuclear exchange. He used to put me and my brothers to bed at night with tales of the rise of the Protectorate.” He looked each of them in the eye. “I know that Antonov is seen as
a dictator nowadays, but at the time, he was seen by the poor and powerless of Eastern Europe as a savior, coming forward to lead Mother Russia back to her days of glory. And, for a time, he did. He got us back into space, reaching to the asteroid belt and bringing back precious mineral resources. Had he not become foolishly involved with the Chinese Conflict, history might have treated him much differently. Even today, among the survivors, the tales are told that Premier Antonov did not die in the bombardment, but escaped with his most loyal troops in the Protectorate’s remaining spaceships to hide somewhere in the asteroid belt.”
“That’s where I’ve seen this gun before.” Gunny Lambert looked up from the Invader rifle, only half-listening to Kovalev’s reminiscence. “I shot one of these puppies at Camp Perry—it’s an old Russian Kalashnikov AKL-99 automatic rifle…” He stopped in midsentence, suddenly aware of what he’d just said, and his head snapped up, eyes wide.
Shannon looked from him to Kovalev and back again, and Jason’s gaze danced back and forth between all three of them.
“Pardon me,” Sandra Cerrano spoke up from the drop pod, “but just what the hell are you talking about?”
“It adds up,” Shannon admitted. “The biomechs were created from human DNA by someone or something. They had to get the material somewhere. They obtained or copied their weapons and equipment from the same place they got the genetic material—from survivors of the Russian Protectorate who escaped to the Belt during the nuclear exchange.”
“But that’s just a rumor,” Kovalev protested. “A legend.”
“I think we have dramatic proof right here,” Shannon pointed out, “that it was based on fact.”
There was a moment of stunned silence as the impact of her statement sunk home.
Gunny Lambert finally chuckled, still looking at the rifle. “Well, the xenobiologists are sure gonna be pissed.”