Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 247
With the alien robot disabled, the crew approached. Ko Tor slapped some space tape over what appeared to be its cameras.
Amber wrapped a space blanket around it; it would have to power down whatever it was using as a power supply or overheat, she thought. Besides, the space blanket had a conductive layer; it made a good Faraday cage.
“That was way too easy,” she said. “We need to get out of here before its buddies show up. They all glommed onto their captive and hit their jets, trusting their interlinked computers to get them to the hatch with zero delta-v left.
About fifty meters from the surface, Tony sent, “Here comes the posse. I’d say a couple hundred of them. We should get to the hatch on time, but not with a moment to spare.”
“Send one of the robots ahead to open the hatch,” Katella sent. “When it’s open, have the Niki get its lasers ready.”
What was on the other side of that hatch, now? Amber thought. How much did whatever was controlling the sphere know? The response should still be local, she reasoned; it had only been about eight minutes since they’d captured the robot; even at lightspeed, news of it could have only gotten about the distance from the Earth to the Sun where they were. About one AU. The circumference of the Red Rubber Ball was over six times that. No, half that distance, round trip. How smart was a half-AU patch of this thing? Was there a central brain? Was it near here? Events were happening too fast. She needed to think. She needed more information.
“We’re not going to the hatch,” she sent. “Off to the side, two kilometers longitude, with the hatch as the zero meridian and the star’s equatorial plane as zero latitude.”
“What are you doing?” Katella said, “We’ll get caught inside.”
“No, I understand,” Ko Tor said. “Caught outside we could be!”
“We should stick an antenna through,” Ga Tan said, “and contact our spacecraft to see what the situation is.”
“Dr. Cloud, we should head for the hatch. It isn’t that smart. No response to our queries . . .”
“It doesn’t have to be smart, Tony,” Amber sent, “just experienced. Think white blood cells. And no more queries.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Tony!” Katella shouted.
“Not my call,” he replied. “Radio silence.”
Amber, the two remaining robots, and the Kleth changed their thrust vectors, as did Tony a couple of seconds late. Katella, apparently realizing she couldn’t out-tug the five of them, did likewise.
Perhaps a kilometer away from the hatch, they reached and clung to the underside, a millimeter or two of alien composite away from the surface. Any wrong decision could get them all killed, she thought. Not doing anything would almost certainly get them killed.
“Do we risk contacting the ship now?” Tony asked Amber, helmet to helmet.
“Yes. We need to put a tiny hole through, enough for an antenna, but maybe not enough to trigger maintenance concerns.”
Amber wished she had a needle. In a sewing kit? In the emergency medical supplies! She pulled it off the upper arm of her suit, irrationally worried that the zipping sound of the geckro would alert some alien menace. That didn’t happen, and when she opened it, there was indeed a needle inside.
Ko Tor and Tony set it up. A robot claw held one end of the needle. They got ready to flee if something bad happened when the needle poked through; but nothing did. They found a frequency the ship used that was quiet around the Red Rubber Ball and got their link.
Niki sent a disturbing video of a cluster of menacing, laser-equipped maintenance robots over the hatch, but which ignored, so far, the immobile shuttle just a few meters away.
“They would notice the rocket exhaust if it moved,” Ga Tan said.
“How else can we move it?” Katella said, clearly impatient.
Amber imagined the shuttle gliding over to their location without rockets, somehow.
“I do bad it doesn’t have legs,” Tony said.
“It does!” Ga Tan exclaimed. “It has robot legs—the legs of the robots inside it. They can carry it in this gravity. If they do it slowly and don’t harm anything, maybe the movement won’t be noticed.”
Amber nodded. “We’ll move it very slowly and unthreateningly. First we sacrifice another robot, however. We’ll move it toward the group at the hatch, slowly first then more rapidly until they do something. Then we’ll know the threshold.”
She told Niki what to do. It printed and deployed a sacrificial robot, which was vaporized when its speed reached half a meter per second.
Using a hatch on the other side of the shuttle from the mob of mechanical menaces, a trio of robots slowly emerged and gently worked their way beneath the aerospacecraft, one under each delta wing, and one under the nose. There was no reaction from the Red Rubber Ball’s robots.
Niki’s bots slowly lifted the shuttle. Then, with infinite patience they began carrying the shuttle toward the explorer’s location at a slow walk.
The Red Rubber Ball’s robots stayed guarding the port.
“They must be like frogs,” Tony said. “If something stays roughly in the same place they ignore it. I bet the maintenance bots would react differently. This is like an ant colony, or a beehive. No intelligent central direction, but every worker and drone knows what to do.”
“Maybe.” Amber didn’t know how much she trusted that model, but it seemed to be working so far.
“We’ll have to break something to get out,” Tony said. “It may not like that. We should close it up quickly after we go out. But how?”
Amber nodded. They could laser a hole and get into the shuttle in probably less than a minute. But then what would happen? If the shuttle were recognized as hostile, it would likely be vaporized. There would be no getting away; “out of range” did not apply to Dyson spheres.
Amber looked at the suture kit. Was there enough thread to sew it up after they cut through? Would they have time? What else did they have?
“The vacuum tent doors are big enough, and self sealing,” Ga Tan offered, obviously thinking along the same lines. “If we can relocate them.”
“Space glue we have,” his mate added. “One door to the inside surface of the sphere we glue. Into the tent we go, that door seal, through the shell cut, through the cut go, and let the door close up after us like an air lock. A maintenance problem it would be, but not an ongoing one it would seem. Worker bots rather than soldier bots would respond.”
“That’s a good theory,” Amber said. She didn’t have to say they would probably be dead if it was wrong.
After an extended discussion, however, nobody came up with a better idea. Go slow and don’t upset the natives seemed to work.
It took them less than an hour to rig their ersatz exit lock. It took perhaps another hour of talk to plan and replan their “escape” from the Red Rubber Ball; once in the shuttle, they would slow-walk away from the cold hill and float well away with cold-gas jets, then ascend at minimum acceleration and rendezvous with the Niki. Then the starship would ascend magnetically as far as it could before using its engines. They could only hope that the starship’s fusion engines, ignited at a distance, wouldn’t elicit a response. There had been no response coming in.
That left eight hours, approximately, before the shuttle had walked to their position.
“I think we can take a rest now,” Amber said. “The shuttle won’t be here for a few hours. I want to be alone for a while.” Then she put her com on auto, clambered a couple dozen meters away from the group, clipped herself to a strut, and hung there. She exhaled in a great gasp and then began shaking involuntarily. She tried chanting nam yoho renge kyo and let the stress of dealing with people and situations ebb away. Gradually, her shaking subsided and her breathing became more regular. How much of that her crew saw, she wasn’t sure. Nam yoho renge kyo. The universe gives us the power to choose our destiny, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, word-fame is the one thing that lasts forever. . . .
She woke to a gentle touch on her shoulder.
“Dr. Cloud?”
It was Tony. She groaned and shook herself awake.
“I’m here.”
“The shuttle is almost here, and there’s been a development.”
She followed him over to their soon-to-be exit, where the data rate was better. Soon, she looked down on their cold hill through the Nicolas Lacaille’s eyes.
It had taken the better part of a day for the shuttle to glide its way over to them. As it did, a collection of “warrior robots” had formed over every potential exit on their cold hill. Only by good luck, they were nowhere near one. There were thousands of them. Were they being produced locally? If the Red Rubber Ball didn’t have a laser array now, it could develop one rather quickly, she realized.
“We can depressurize the cabin and use the nose-wheel maintenance entrance,” Ga Tan said. “We place the nose wheel just ahead of the slit and the doors will impede views from the side. We can lower the back of the shuttle to impede the view from that direction.”
They’d done some additional planning to counter the increased number of warrior robots. Amber nodded her approval. “Let’s get in the lock.”
They crowded in and sealed the door behind them.
“I’ve got a boarding order,” Katella announced. “Ga Tan should go first as he’s the pilot. Then Dr. Cloud, myself, Tony, and Ko Tor with the robots, in case there’s some rear guard action.”
There was silence. Amber couldn’t read Kleth body language in space suits, but she didn’t have to.
“One doesn’t separate a Kleth pair in these circumstances, Katella,” Amber said.
“Don’t lecture me,” Katella snapped. Tony put a hand on her arm, but she shrugged it off. “What?”
“Kleth mate for life,” he said. “Literally. If one dies, the other dies as well.”
“Huh? If we don’t all get in, we all die.”
“Ko Tor will follow Ga Tan,” Amber said. “I will stay with the robots until you are all aboard.”
“We greatly appreciate that,” Ko Tor said.
“It’s not optimum,” Katella protested, “and everyone’s lives are at stake. We should at least discuss it longer, Dr. Cloud. You shouldn’t just be making arbitrary decisions.”
Nobody answered her, but Tony put his helmet against Katella’s so they could speak in private with the radios off. She pushed him away.
They did not have time for this, Amber thought; they had to get aboard the shuttle. The Kleth, at least, should not have to pay for this human comedy with their lives. Katella had followed the last time. She would again, by force if necessary.
There was a surgical knife in the medical kit—hardly bigger than a penknife, but enough to cut through the alien fabric. Before uncertainty could grip her, she plunged the knife into the skin of the Red Rubber Ball behind the gap and pulled the blade steadily down along it. The fabric pulled aside quickly, and, under a surprising amount of tension, formed a nearly circular hole.
“Ga Tan, Ko Tor, now!”
The Kleth complied without a word.
“Bastard!” Katella said.
“Tony,” Amber said.
“Who are you married to, her or me?” Katella yelled, the volume muted by the comm software.
“We have to go, Katella. Now.” Tony said calmly and quietly. Then he turned and followed Ko Tor through the opening.
Amber queried their robots about any sign of reaction from the Red Rubber Ball. Maintenance robots were on the move but no sign of warrior robots yet. Amber motioned for Katella to move through the opening. The other woman just hung onto a strap near the tent entrance and did nothing.
“He’s yours if you go to him,” Amber said. “I don’t mate. But you must go to him or die here.”
After taking another few precious seconds, Katella let go and pushed herself over to the opening and up through it.
Amber motioned the robotic crew up and in with their captive first. They were essential, and she didn’t want to enter the shuttle in close proximity to Katella. Then she went through and commanded the tent door to seal behind her. It couldn’t; it appeared to be trying at the ends but the tension must be too great.
Amber pushed herself down to the gap and grabbed the two sides close to an end of the slit and pulled them together. With the stress relieved, the seal worked its way up toward her hands, almost like a zipper being pulled by an invisible hand. With as much strength as she could muster, Amber slid her suit-gloved hands up the gap without releasing the fabric and pulled it together again. The seal followed. She could see the far side of the tent bulge; maintenance robots or worse were there. She pulled the fabric together again, and the seal advanced to halfway.
A metallic arm rent the far door and protruded through, thrashing around.
Amber pulled one more time, and the sealing mechanism took over, now overpowering the tension of the now smaller gap. It closed with a snap she could feel through her suit.
Some loose Red Rubber Ball skin was left on either side of the tent seal. Remembering what got them there in the first place, Amber took the surgical knife, still in her leg pouch, and sliced off a ragged square. Then she pushed herself away from the Red Rubber ball and up into the shuttle’s wheel well.
She saw the surface glide away beneath her as the carrying robots began moving the shuttle, perhaps a little faster than when they took it here. That rate had some margin built into it, and now was the time to use that margin.
In a few minutes, maintenance robots converged to where the opening had been, but ignored the creeping spacecraft.
Amber entered the maintenance hatch and watched the nose wheel rise, very slowly, behind her. When the doors finished shutting slowly over it, she slammed the hatch door shut, sat down with her back against it and shook like a leaf while the shuttle repressurized. Nani yoho renge kyo.
Then, without saying anything to anyone, and not being asked anything by anyone, she went toward the rear of the shuttle, wriggled into one of the tiny shuttle bunks, and accordioned the side down behind her. Nani yoho renge kyo.
Through a trembling haze, she monitored the shuttle’s slow, hour-long walk to where the slope of the cold mountain began to get warm. Then the robots let go and clambered back aboard through the air lock as the shuttle took flight, hidden by the bulge of the dome, and began its slow climb up and away on its attitude control thrusters.
Enough self indulgence, she told herself. She was still the leader of this expedition, however flawed. She had duties. She replicated a half pint of beer in the bunk alcove’s tiny printer, chugged it, took another deep breath, raised the bunk side, and made her way to the front compartment. Katella had plunked herself down in the command seat, but that would mean nothing to Niki, so Amber chose to ignore it.
Amber supervised the rendezvous with the Niki from the shuttle pilot station. She filled her mind with the details of the operation to keep it off the people problems that she would have to deal with after they settled back into shipboard routine. The shuttle glided through the main ring nose first along the rotation axis of the starship, then matched its spin with its bottom aligned with the number three hull from which it had come. The hull’s shuttle bay doors opened, and the shuttle cradle rose up on telescoping supports and locked onto it. The starship compensated for the change in the hull’s mass and angular momentum by pumping fluids back to the other two hulls as the shuttle descended in the complex mechanical ballet that kept the spin center fixed.
The human crew exited the shuttle in silence and headed for their compartments. The Kleth headed for the sphere on dome to stretch their wings.
At dinnertime on the second deck of Sphere 3, Katella pointedly ignored Amber. Fortunately, Amber had a peace offering.
“Katella . . .”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Maybe I should go through her husband, Amber thought. No, that relationship seemed to be a problem for her. The Kleth? She had presumed of them too much already. It was hard to tell, but she thought she could detect the beginnings of an attitude of condescension beginning to work its way into their dealings with the humans. No, she would have to do this. Deep breath.
“It’s not about that,” she said, lying as pleasantly as she could. She reached into her flight suit pocket and pulled out a transparent envelope with a scrap of cloth in it. “I cut this out at the last instant. It was why we went there in the first place, as I recall.”
She held out the sample of the Red Rubber Ball’s skin to Katella. “It’s as light and strong as you might imagine; about five grams per square meter.”
Katella took the sample, eyes wide with interest. “Probably full of circuitry. It could tell us a lot, along with the robot . . .”
“I hope so.”
“Okay . . . thanks.” Katella turned and slid down the center pole to the lab area below.
Had she achieved a truce? Who knew? Amber sighed and ordered herself a beer. When it came, she ascended to the dome above and drank it alone, losing herself in the stars.
When they got back to the “Double M” habitat, they had woods, fields, and a small flock of sheep. Relationships got back to normal. In another couple of months, Amber had the sheep shorn and knitted sweaters for everyone; for the Kleth, that meant a kind of vest-like poncho arrangement with fasteners at the bottom. They expressed diplomatic appreciation.
In spare moments she tracked the progress of the antimatter-cargo spacecraft they’d seen depart from the Red Rubber Ball. On its present ballistic course, it would reach the convergence point in about four months. Should they follow it? If so, when?
They continued watches, with someone “on duty” for data collection operations and habitat minutiae. Since the Niki came from the Solar System, its day, and thus the colony day, followed a human convention of twenty-four hours, but whereas human beings divided this into two twelve-hour segments, the octal-raised Kleth more naturally divided it into three eight-hour segments. That, it turned out, was best for people as well. So Amber was on nine hours, including an hour overlap with her predecessor. This evening, that was Ga Tan. While their shift could be done anywhere, they’d established precedent of a face-to-face handover; in this case, Ga Tan flew over to her house.
