After what they had been through, why would something just be hiding out there, waiting, when it could have sprung at them long ago? Unless they had set some kind of machinery in motion, some kind of robotic guards....
A loud crack rolled through Jason's helmet. The sound came in a sudden pop and a high thrumming, as if something had smacked against his helmet. The sound went on and on, a lightning of white-noise that rattled through his head, roaring like a tangible force over the coatings of his suit. His heads-up displays swirled colors and meaningless numbers across the viewing area of his faceplate.
Somewhere in the suit radio, he heard Erika scream, drowned out by a high shriek of static. He felt everything growing blacker around him, cutting off every thought in his head.
The Daedalus construction was sending its own transmission across the Galaxy, back to the builders' home world.
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CHAPTER 43
THE DAEDALUS CONSTRUCTION
Jason could barely hear himself speak. "Erika?" His voice sounded far away, as if his helmet were filled with old socks. The suit radio crackled and hummed with static.
No answer.
"Erika? Can you hear me?" He had a sudden thought that the suit transmitter was dead. His heads-up display confirmed that he had blown two solid-state fuses in the control pack, but everything should be up and working. He had a spare if necessary. Good thing the life supports hadn't fried from the pounding of the alien signal. But what if Erika's suit --
"What was that?" Erika's voice sounded as if it had been transmitted through a layer of cotton.
"A signal," Jason answered after fumbling to reroute the radio fuses to their backups. "A new alien base declaring itself ready." It was the only thing that made sense.
"My God, what would have happened if we had been in the chamber? At least here we were shielded -- "
Jason worked his jaw and tried to pop his ears until the muffled feeling faded. "The relay station we left up top was probably knocked into orbit."
"Do you think Cyndi and Bryan are all right? If they were in the hopper waiting for us..." her voice trailed off.
Jason felt his stomach muscles knot. "Let's just hope they had some warning and got to shelter. Maybe they're asking the same questions about us right now."
Erika turned away. She panned the light over the alien construction, pausing at the building from which they had exited. Neither of them knew what to say.
Jason could see strange architectural shapes rising from the floor.
Some looked grotesque in the shadows; others seemed frail and spindly, as if they were designed on a planet with gravity much lower than Earth's.
"None of this makes any sense to me yet," Jason finally said. "There's a whole city down here and no ... adults. Where are the builders? Why aren't they here? Where did those embryos come from? Is there some sort of a ship or projectile we haven't found yet?"
Behind her faceplate, Erika shook her head. "No, Jase. No macro-sized projectile. If the theory is right, the builders fired off automata across the cosmos like shotgun pellets. Swarms of them. You can accelerate nanomachines near to the speed of light. No macroscopic projectile could accelerate that fast without damaging itself, without hauling tons of fuel behind it. That doesn't seem to be the way the alien builders think. The nanocritters did all the work for them here."
"So how did the embryos get to the Moon?" he asked. "They had to come from somewhere. Are you suggesting that nanocritters built them, too?" He paused, shocked at his own suggestion. "It seems like black magic to me, Erika
-- nanotechnology assembling things on a molecular level. Bridges, transmitter dishes, or power plants is one thing -- I can do that, given the proper materials and equipment. But living, breathing organisms with functional cells? DNA information is a billion times more complicated."
Jason watched her as she swung the light around. From the back he couldn't decipher her body language, insulated by the suit. She took a few steps away from the incubator building and toward a series of towers.
The floor of the grand chamber was scattered with a plethora of objects that seemed to have no purpose or order. Wispy crystalline gardens, mechanical trees, half-formed arches that stopped in mid-plunge to dangle in the air.
They walked among shapes that grew out of the ground. Solid triangles tipped on their sides, large spheres crowning slender poles, and panels that jutted out at crazy angles from the main structures.
Erika finally stopped before a tall trapezoidal arch flared with bright red arcs. It led into another gallery that seemed to go on forever. After hesitating, she stepped through the arch.
Inside the gallery they roamed along a parkway of columns built of the same diamond-hard material, stretching as far as their light could reach. It reminded Jason of the ancient Parthenon.
Erika pointed at what appeared to be many-sided datacubes protruding from each tall column. Jason touched one of the fist-sized objects and it detached easily. He turned it over in his glove. "Buckyball, I think.
Buckminster Fullerene, a humongous carbon molecule. Our biggest ones are barely large enough to see under magnification. Look at this sucker." Jason stuffed the object in his suit's sample pouch. "Used for information storage, maybe? I wonder if this place is a library."
Jason no longer felt the fear that had grabbed at them just before the radio burst. There was a sense of serenity now ... of knowing that whatever happened next, they couldn't be overwhelmed by events. Not after what they had already seen.
They poked into other buildings, always finding the self-dilating opening on one wall. In one structure they discovered what appeared to be exercise equipment. An assembly hall? A classroom?
Finally Erika spoke. "I'm not sure we can even guess what the purpose is. But it looks like those embryos have absolutely everything ready-made for them when they grow up."
From beyond the rim of the crater, Cyndi Salito sighed into the hopper's radio link as Bryan Zed replaced another fuse. She had been right in the middle of an argument with Bernard Chu when the last fuse had blown, but now they should be all fixed.
"Dr. Salito, are you there again?" Chu's voice crackled back at her.
Zimmerman hadn't even tried to restore the video circuits yet.
"Look, Bernard -- we're going to go in after them, no matter what you say, right, Zed?"
"Right."
"So why don't you just give us your blessing? If we have to defy your orders in front of everybody, you're going to look pretty stupid."
She tapped her fingers on the control panel. When Chu finally responded, she could almost see his livid expression. "One hour, maximum. Keep in constant contact. One of you remain with the hopper while the other goes down. Follow the fiberoptic cable as far as you can. And be sure you listen for another movement of the antenna, just in case it decides to transmit a second signal. You might not be so lucky next time." Then his voice sounded calmer. "We all hope you find them."
"Gotcha." Cyndi turned to Zimmerman. "So who goes in? Do you have a coin to toss?"
He merely grunted. Cyndi grinned. Any other answer would have told her something was wrong.
Jason was startled to hear Cyndi Salito's voice over the radio when she had descended far enough into the catacombs. Her suit radio waves must have reflected through the tunnel to where the alien city. Together, he and Erika worked their way back to the force field trapping the atmosphere inside the main chamber. Cyndi had followed the fiberoptic line along the main catacombs past the matter-antimatter reactors until she reached them.
Cyndi's eyes were wide when Jason pulled her through the field into the self-contained environment of the builders' outpost. "We didn't get any images once you dropped your line," she said. "Wait until Columbus sees this!"
"It's just the beginning," said Jason. "Wait until you see this."
Erika led Cyndi over to the incubator building, talking quickly, her voice sparkling with excitement. "We couldn't understand why an ent
ire city would have been built without the aliens. Who was going to live in it? There's everything here, ready to occupy -- a library, classrooms, powerplants, communication facilities -- "
"At least we think that's what most of the stuff is for," Jason interrupted.
"If the nanocritters were building this complex because another civilization wanted to colonize the Moon, then where are the aliens? Are they traveling by slow ship? If so, why would the nanomachines be programmed to build the entire complex right away, rather than just the transmitter to report back to the alien home world and ask for further instructions? I mean, the nanocritters could finish up any sort of construction long before aliens ever got here in person. So why do everything now?"
"Did a ship get here first and set off all this stuff?" asked Cyndi.
Jason led Cyndi down one of the sweeping arched corridors. "You told us yourself that another signal was broadcast from Mars, so we have to assume the nanocritters got there, too, and built the same sort of construction. Not very discriminating, are they? How would they know if their 'accidental colony' was in a good location or not? They don't even seem to care."
Cyndi laughed. "My mind is spinning as much from these crazy ideas as it is from these crazy artifacts!"
Jason gripped her suited arm as they turned toward the incubator building. The soft door dilated and poured open, revealing the brighter purple light inside. "Now it's time for you to meet the aliens."
"What!"
Inside the chamber with rows of bubble-boxes, Cyndi was speechless, peering through the walls at the slowly squirming alien infants protected in their incubators. They appeared soft and gelatinous, with changing details across their skin. Jason tried to imagine what an adult might look like.
"But how did they get here? You said there wasn't any ship. And how could little organisms like this have survived such a long trip? Cosmic rays alone would have destroyed most of them. Even if they had been frozen, they wouldn't have survived the impact."
"Nanocritters again," said Jason.
"We figured it out, I think," Erika continued. "With all those regolith samples I took back to Sim-Mars, I always found a 'species' of nanomachine that didn't seem to have a purpose. It just sat there waiting, while all the others did the disassembly, assembly, controlling, reprogramming.
"Now, I believe those tiny machines were the genetic carriers. Their entire memories were filled with instructions of how to assemble alien DNA, atom by atom. Building a complete organism would be impossible, I think -- and then how do you make it come alive? No, but with a single strand of DNA, checked and doublechecked by quality control nanomachines, they could effectively grow clones of whatever alien individuals provided the genetic blueprint."
Cyndi was breathing hard. "This is getting too tough for my brain to handle all at once."
Jason pointed to the incubator machinery. "Look at this equipment! It's built to nurture the growing clones. Look how far they have come in only the few months this complex has been available. The datacubes, the buildings, the living facilities here -- it's a complete colony, ready made."
Erika kept turning around, shining her light on the bubble-boxes. "Once the whole complex was completed and the embryos started growing successfully, the necessary systems determined that this place could indeed support the alien life. So they transmitted a signal back to the home planet, informing them the colony was completed. Even if the aliens only come by slow ship, they already have a skeleton colony here -- buildings, facilities, and more importantly some of their own kind, brought up by machines, to help populate the place."
"But why would they want their children here alone, just waiting for them?" asked Cyndi.
Erika sounded grim. "Maybe this first wave of clones was considered disposable. Maybe they're being brought up as slaves for when the real builders get here."
They were all silent for a moment.
"So that means whenever the signal is received by those aliens, we can expect some visitors -- coming to our solar system to colonize?" Salito whispered.
"There's plenty of room in our solar system for a lot of things," Jason said.
"Not if those aliens are shotgunning out colonies this way. I must admit, it's a nifty way to populate the Galaxy, but we still don't know what they're like," Salito said. "How are we ever going to find out enough, in time?"
Jason drew in a breath and looked around. "They can teach us themselves. If all this equipment is to instruct the embryos, then we can be here to listen in, maybe even befriend these clones, influence them to be sympathetic to us poor Earthlings when the rest of the gang comes along."
"Reminds me of Tarzan," Salito said. "Raised by apes, he was more sympathetic to the jungle than he was to humans.
"Remember, there's another pristine colony on Mars," Erika said.
"Judging by that first signal."
"At least we'll have some time to study their culture before the parent aliens arrive," Jason said. "The only question is, how long do we have?"
-- END --
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