She was interrupted by the other
occupant of the shuttle. “I am familiar
with the Terran genus Balaenoptera,”
NuRikPo interjected with patronizing reproach, “As well as the myths about
being consumed by them.”
“Shows what you know,” Katy shot back,
not looking up from her study, “Seeing as how the Zig killed off their large
sea life, you couldn’t be expected to understand our stories. There were documented cases of Humans
swallowed by whales.”
“But this is not a whale, so your analogy
is irrelevant.” The Zig’s refusal to
banter properly was only one of his qualities that irritated Katy. His toxic anatomy was another. With Human patients, you only had to worry
about pathogens crossing over from contact with tissues or fluids. With Zig, you had to get chelation treatments
after prolonged contact, to flush out the heavy metals.
Katy
had heard stories about humans in sexual contact with Zig. She wished she could consider them myths. Contracting a sexually transmitted disease might be preferable to
risking hair loss and nerve damage. What
could be so fascinating about the aliens to stimulate attraction in the face of
such obvious incompatibility? They were
practically insects, emotionally speaking.
The
inaccuracy of this comparison made it especially annoying to the Zig, so of
course, Katy made use of it. “So get to
work, bug eyes, and tell me what it is.”
NuRikPo
took the demand literally and turned to his own bank of monitors, examining the
same data stream as Katy but with a different focus and perspective.
“The
surroundings appear to be a composite of various metals, ceramics, and
plastics. Initial soundings and
spectrographs suggest complex layering of materials. Magnetic imaging is uncertain… radiography
blocked… ah, hull material impervious to electromagnetic influences, obviously,
but why on the inner surfaces? Actual
structure will need to wait for closer inspection. There are gaps internally: joins between
differing strata which can be exploited.
Yes… definitely a metallic frame superstructure beneath.”
Though
motivated more by a competitive urge to avoid being outdone, Katy still fell
into a complementary rhythm with her nemesis.
“No visible artifacts… no storage, controls, or labels in this
chamber. Strictly utilitarian. Atmosphere is being introduced now: eight
parts nitrogen to two oxygen… and that’s all, totally clean. That’s better filtration than we manage. No organics in the mix, at all. If there’s any carbon out there, it’s bound
tightly. Nothing toxic. Pressure is reaching 100 kilopascals… already
high and climbing.”
Her
analysis was interrupted by a signal indicating motion nearby. Both researchers switched to the forward
camera and saw what had triggered the alert.
“Look,
another sphincter,” Katy summarized.
“As
you already stated, this environment is non-organic. Applying biological analogies is
counter-productive…”
“It’s
a general descriptive term, like calling you a person.”
While
they sniped, the orifice in question continued to expand from a half-meter
across to a diameter of nearly two meters.
It appeared in the opposite wall from the ‘mouth’ they had originally entered,
opening in the far side of the ‘shuttle deck’.
The entire chamber was about three times the volume of the shuttle
itself, with a manageable if not comfortable amount of clearance. Before that opening appeared, the only
illumination in the space had been the shuttle’s own spotlights. Now, a steady but dim red-orange glow poured
into the room from the revealed passage beyond.
It gave the dull, dark metallic grey substance of the walls a disturbingly
bloody cast.
The
opening stopped expanding, but the motion detector still continued to
blip. A separate object of approximately
half Human volume was steadily approaching through the adjacent passage. The two observers continued to watch the
forward view screen in anticipation.
What
appeared was not immediately recognizable.
It appeared to be a reflective lump of matter, the same dark grey as the
walls but polished to a mirror sheen.
The motile matter crawled like an energetic slug, rolling itself forward
in peristaltic waves. When it had passed
the opening and entered the shuttle deck, it stopped. The thing lifted itself upward into a rounded
conical shape and extruded two blunt pseudopods, which waved in seemingly
random circles around its upper mass.
This
motion was accompanied by sound. Even
without the acoustic pickups, they could feel resonances bouncing through the
material of the shuttle. NuRikPo
belatedly switched on the audio sensors soon as they realized the thing was
vibrating the atmosphere. Their visitor
was loud. It was also projecting on very low
frequencies carrying considerable kinetic energy.
The
sound, when damped and filtered to comfortable audible parameters, was still
unpleasant and indecipherable. It
sounded like the thump and rumble of poorly tuned machinery. Portions might have been pleasantly musical
or almost rhythmic, if not interrupted by pops and grinding segments. Spectrum analysis showed that there were more
sub-audible than audible components to the sound, so they were still missing
much of the signal even after displacing its frequencies upward.
Katy
identified the creature first, “It’s a Ningyo!
Or rather, an artificial Ningyo… with no suit. In this atmosphere and pressure, a real Ning’
would burst. That must be what their
actual language sounds like. Ha! It thinks we’re related to its friends from
the Black Humor. No… that makes no sense, otherwise it would
use their atmosphere settings instead.
They must have advised it what environment to set for us. The temperature is even nice and warm.”
“If
I might be allowed to theorize as well, the Ningyo may not have given this ship’s AI much data at all. Our atmospheric preferences could be obtained
by analysis of this shuttle: its technology and expelled traces. We are not as impermeable as this ship. I suspect the AI is basing its behavior on
whatever information it can glean on its own.”
“If
that’s the case, it’s learning more about us than we are about it. It even has artificial gravity set to
point-nine gee, same as this shuttle.
Our host is being just about as hospitable as possible without offering
refreshments.” Katy’s assessment carried
an undertone of concern, which NuRikPo picked up.
“While
we are limited to the range of our instruments.
Unless we accept its welcome, we will learn little about the rest of
this ship. It seems necessary to trust
this ‘host’ for the present. I suppose
we’re no worse off out there than in here, should there be a threat. Really, the time for prudence would have been
before entering at all.”
“Or
before getting on board the Scape Grace,”
Katy muttered, not sure if she meant the comment seriously or not. She had voluntarily stepped into more
dangerous situations, some with even less forewarning about the dangers she
might expect. But in those cases, she
had generally been in comprehensible environments, working against sapients
with familiar anatomy and psychology.
Even if a problem caught her off-guard, she could have confidence that
her skill and instincts would find a way out.
Here,
dealing with a completely foreign culture in a ship built using unfamiliar
technology, she faced a challenge of unknown dimensions. When captain Lerner mentioned an alien ship,
she had imagined a more familiar design, albeit with differing scale, aesthetics,
and control schemes, probably labeled with strange writing. From the outside, this ship might have been
mistaken for any of a half-dozen freighter ship models used by the
Collective.
That
was before they docked. Since then, the
foreign ship had been revealed as something quite different. It was round where it should be squared, dark
and cramped where there should be light and room. The texture of the walls was, as NuRikPo had
described it, “complex”, regularly patterned at any one location but shifting
in pattern from surface to surface. The
mock Ningyo did nothing to relieve this sense of oddity. Katy was disturbed, her senses just as
offended as they had been at the unpleasant color of NuRikPo’s bowels or the fungus
that dulled their Vislin gunner Tklth’s scales. It was wrong. This wasn’t even a proper spaceship.
Just
then, Katy realized why the “ghost ship” bothered her the same way alien
anatomy did. They were within the anatomy of an organism. It might not have any organic compounds, but
the curve of the ‘shuttle bay’ and the texture of its walls very much suggested
a cellular structure. The appearance of
the outer and inner orifices was not some artifact of alien design but the
necessary movement pattern of a biological structure.
“’Po…
my first thought wasn’t far off. We are inside an organism.”
“No,
there are no organics. So far, I’m not
even seeing silicate analogs. I’m familiar
with the Corromi, if you’re thinking in that direction.” NuRikPo’s response was dismissive, his voice
conveying Zig irritation by treating Katy’s hypothesis as already falsified. His reference to the Corromi, the first
silicon-based sapient life form known to the Collective, was a deliberate
insult. Any first-year xenobiology
student would be familiar with such a unique exception to the carbon-based
norm.
“Not
organic, organism. As in, a
self-contained living system. A system
with cells… and probably organs.”
Now
NuRikPo replied with interest, meaning challenge: “On what do you base this
assertion?”
“The
texture you’re picking up, the layering, the shape of this room, the shape and
movement of those openings… I’d know more, immediately, if we could get a
sample of that floor material.”
“Unfortunately,
with this gravity, the shuttle isn’t oriented properly to employ a cutting tool
strong enough to damage this material.
We’ll have to step outside to get your… biopsy.”
“Okay,
then, let’s go meet the welcome slug.
I’ll just keep hoping my analogy isn’t perfect. If this thing starts to chew or swallow,
we’re in trouble.”
No comments:
Post a Comment