The Colony Ship Warren #1-7, page 178
part #0 of Colony Ship Warren #1-7 Series
The capsule proceeded on a slow arcing trajectory out and away from the Warren. That was a very similar trajectory to the typical launches, and Monitor hoped that the Jellies would not perceive this launch as anything unusual. The capsule’s path would take it on a journey away from the emitters which propelled the colony ship.
The capsule’s launch was perfect and it maneuvered out and away from the Warren. Then, after a set period of time—again very similar to the Project Breadcrumb launches—the capsule would halt its flight and remain in relatively the same position, considering that the universe was moving all around it. To any observers, this capsule would appear to be just another one of the breadcrumbs left in a trail leading back decades and tens of billions of kilometers.
There was even a bogus message which Monitor had recorded and which would be activated just as any of the other Project Breadcrumb messages could be activated. Monitor was just completely unsure of what the Jellies knew about the previous capsules, and therefore, took extraordinary precautions to make it all look like just another typical launch.
The masquerade needed to be perfect.
The capsule flew on its way, found its terminal position, and then remained in standby mode awaiting the connection to the sending pad and the subsequent devastation and wrath which would be unleashed.
The blue automacube, rolled back into the doorway of Exterior Repair Station 831.
22 Culmination
Colonel Landcaster, Sora, Beth, and Allen sat at a work station in Auxiliary Engineering Laboratory 5-9-20JTD. Before them were numerous display screens. The light from those displays danced on the faces of those watching, illuminating the range of emotions from anxiety, to eagerness, to worry, to anger, and determination. Some emotions were mixed on all their faces.
Screen one was labeled, “Sending Pad” and was the only view of the biome’s interior. That specific screen showed a view of the teleportation sending pad. It was still surrounded by the wall of busted-up vodnee automacubes.
Screen two was labeled “Receiving Pad” and was a view of the capsule which had been launched and was out in space. Telescopic lenses focused on that capsule, and the blackness of space was punctuated by countless dots. Those were the light of distant stars, and aside from the capsule, that was all that was visible on that display. In its own way, that was a soothing and beautiful sight.
Displays three through six showed Habitat 6 from various external angles. Habitat 6 looked no different from the other parts of the Colony Ship Warren. There was the greyish blue color of the permalloy and the numberless small lights on the hull which gave it a shadowy gleam. The constituent joints which connected the habitat to the needle ship were visible in many of the screen’s views.
“Project Zenith has reached its final stage,” Monitor’s voice announced. “I have been forced to concentrate all of my attention on this endeavor, while delegating the essential duties of maintaining the Warren to the other systems on the lattice of compeers. Those systems are overtaxed, but we will press onward.”
Beth spoke, “Would Elsa be able to assist?”
Allen looked at her in surprise, “With the risk of Doyle coming back or interfering?”
“I am willing to help,” Elsa spoke from the ALP which was sitting on the workbench. It was still not connected to anything, so Elsa’s abilities were limited, which was a comfort to Allen.
Monitor answered, “It is too late to add additional systems. The lattice is strained, but I project success for Project Zenith. The capsule with the receiving pad is in position. No interference from the Jellies. My best scanning shows that the malignant habitat is now free of humans, as well as any living biological life, aside from the Jellies. All the biome’s ecosystem has been coerced into mutilated status by the Jellies. It is ready for disconnection. The teleportation sending pad remains operational and undisturbed by the Jellies. All aspects of Project Zenith are ready.”
“Why are you waiting?” Allen asked. “Open up that rabbit hole and send the Jellies away!”
“I am having to focus all my efforts to make the disconnection happen. The overrides were built with multiple redundancies and even though the marines did a superb job at the disconnection process, I am still having to wrestle against my core programming,” Monitor replied. “My core programming is to keep the humans and biomes of the Warren safe, and deliberately jettisoning one of the biomes, despite it being overrun by hostile life forms, is difficult for me. Every suspended animation repository cocoon on that habitat has been violated and each occupant has been murdered. The entire ecosystem, aside from what was rescued has been lost. Destroying it is a painful, but necessary choice.”
“Monitor, just do it,” Beth encouraged.
“I am in Command Mode, but I appreciate the support. Jettisoning Habitat 6: Primary Aquatic,” Monitor said with immense sadness in its voice. “I am sorry I failed all of you. Goodbye.”
On all the approaches to Habitat 6, the last of the huge, thick, and heavy doors dropped into place—the Emergency Containment Curtains—and gaskets around those doors sealed. The vast majority of the ECCs had already been deployed by Monitor as a method of containing the Jellies, but with Monitor’s command the last ones were set in place.
Then the air pressure in the constituent joints altered, driving apart couplings which held the locks together. Hoses, ducts, wiring, and other auxiliary and tertiary systems snapped under that strain.
Simultaneously, rocket engines fired from the hull of the habitat, appearing on the display screens as yellow plumes blasting away in silence. Those rockets shoved the huge cylinder out and away from the needle ship.
Those viewing this event saw the habitat from optics set at distant points, which gave the impression that the process was slow, but that was just an illusion. The habitat was so enormous, the distances were so great, that to those watching, the acceleration just appeared as slow. Had they been standing near any of the rockets, they would have been shocked at how quickly the habitat was moving away.
As the rockets reached their peak output, the habitat was moving at more than five kilometers per second and would continue to accelerate as there was virtually no friction to impinge on its acceleration.
Adjusting one of the display screens, Beth commented, “That looks weird.”
A fountain of something was pouring, spraying, or erupting from a place on the constituent joint. As Beth zoomed the optics in on that, she could see that whatever it was, it was dissipating and crystalizing into a strange collection of something.
“That is a tube transport tunnel which failed to seal,” Monitor answered quickly. “The fluids are being drawn out of the habitat, not from the needle ship. The fluids are somewhat odd, but responding much as expected by being boiled and vaporized away. The alien elements in the fluids are all that remains in what you are seeing. I am too overwhelmed and focused to give further elaborations. Apologies.”
The lights which had been on the hull of Habitat 6 suddenly winked off. An animated overlay showed the outlines of the habitat.
“That will be Monitor shifting all the power sources to feed the teleportation sending pad,” Allen announced. “I wonder how the Jellies like zero gravity?”
Inside the habitat, the gravity manipulation oscillators all uniformly quit. The gravity vectors no longer pulled anything in any direction. Fluids were unbound, and nothing was as it had been.
Next, the inertia dampening systems shut off. This caused a pseudo-gravity to be felt all through the habitat. That force slammed into everything inside the biome and the shell. Monitor had designed the specifics of that occurrence so that when it happened, no debris would be flung into the teleportation sending pad and system, yet the wall of broken vodnees did crumble and fall apart somewhat as the perceived forces in the biome were now far in excess of Earth normal gravity.
The whole huge cylinder was shaking and bucking from all the strain which it had never been designed to endure.
“It is starting up!” Sora said and pointed to the screen which was displaying the view of the teleportation sending pad.
The grid was glowing brightly and two dazzling orbs of energy popped into existence. They hovered over the ends of the grid and grew in brightness. Allen considered how different these white objects looked in comparison to the white spherical weapons the Jellies used. These white orbs glowed differently, and, to Allen’s mind, they looked ready to eat something.
He smiled.
“They will converge and the connection to the receiving pad will be made!” Beth declared with a smile. “It is working!”
They all watched eagerly as the orbs grew brighter and brighter. There was no sound from the optics, but a running tally of figures and equations were scrolling across the bottom of that screen. The scroll was for the logs and records and passed by too quickly for any of the humans to make sense of those readings.
As the two orbs grew, they expanded into ovals which were spinning slowly about, each rotating in a different direction.
“Is that supposed to happen?” Allen wondered as he compared what he had witnessed previously with this newest of teleportation attempts. “Monitor? Is that working properly?”
“Busy,” Monitor replied.
Elsa then hesitantly added, “I conjectured such an appearance. From my limited perspective, it all looks operational. The mathematics is precise. I wish Brink could see this application of his theories. I have been following the calculations and the habitat reached the minimum safe distance shortly before the teleporter was engaged.”
As the twin spinning orbs grew, they changed. They also advanced along the grid toward each other. Sparks of white kept them connected to the grid which was also glowing. The spinning kept going and the orbs altered and transformed becoming more like spinning rings than disks.
Beth and Allen looked carefully, seeking what they hoped would be a successful connection, when an irritating purple glow appeared to the side, off the screen.
“No! Jellies are approaching the teleporter!” Allen yelped out. “They will wreck it!”
The purple glow grew, but the brilliant white spinning rings also intensified and drew closer and closer together.
As the orbs—now nothing much like orbs, but instead just brilliant spinning rings with a thin edge—touched each other something deep and black appeared in the centers of them.
They merged.
A flash temporarily blinded the watchers, but then their eyes adjusted and they saw the teleportation sending pad had connected to the receiving pad. A deep, tunnel-like image sat right in the middle of the ring of brilliant white. There was no longer any spinning observed.
Through that was a blackness with depth and portentous gloom. For the blackness was moving, undulating, and heaving in an eerie manner which caused the watcher’s stomachs to lurch with primordial fears.
“Look at that!” Sora yelped out and pointed at the second display.
That display, labeled, “Receiving Pad” had been just showing the capsule with the background of the tranquil sprinkling of stars on the cosmos, but now there was a thin, silver-colored stream jetting out from a small cone-shaped vortex of energy.
“The receiving pad is working!” Beth declared.
Display One’s images jiggled and shook. For that camera’s optics were being tugged and pulled by the forces which were sucking things into the teleporter.
Several of the ruined vodnees burst upward and got caught in some of those forces. They pirouetted about and then disappeared into the maw of the sending pad.
Right behind that rubble, the irritating purple glow intensified and a Jellie became visible on the display. Its tentacles were holding onto some of the vodnees’ wreckage, but it had also established some kind of deep-purple-colored barrier. That was similar to what the Jellies had used to deflect Varley’s lightning bolt attacks, but here the Jellie had placed it between itself and the teleportation sending pad.
Yet, the Jellie was getting dragged toward the pad.
One of its tentacles whipped out and wrapped around whatever the camera was connected to, and the camera violently shook and then the image swirled about and shut off.
“It went in the rabbit hole!” Allen exclaimed. “That Jellie did not even eat a cake or fan itself! Ha! See how small you can shrink, monster!”
“I see nothing different coming out the other side,” Sora observed. “Did the sending part break?”
Beth sighed out, “Mechanical failure already? The silvery stream is still there, but no change in color. Is it failing?”
“Not yet,” Colonel Landcaster remarked. “Look at the scrolling information. As long as those facts are still being presented, I believe the sending pad is working. See that number?”
He pointed to a small number which was right next to the scrolling messages. The screen above that information was all blank, but the number was going up, and the scrolling information was still being presented.
Sora nodded as she put one of her knuckles into her mouth and lightly bit on it.
“That is the temperature of the sending pad, if my guess is correct. The rest of the readings appear roughly unchanged,” Colonel Landcaster offered. “When that thermostat is gone, the sending unit will be finished. Is it Celsius, or Kelvin, or Fahrenheit?”
“Busy,” Monitor replied in a very distracted manner. “Most, most, busy.”
“The display is reading in Celsius,” Elsa stated. “Beth, by adjusting the display screen’s knobs you can maximize the information readouts. I believe that no more visual signals will be coming from that observation camera which was inside the biome. Colonel Landcaster is essentially correct on the readings. The upper limit of the temperature is unknown, but the heat is steadily rising.”
“Done,” Beth said and made the correction. “Sora, nothing identifiable will come out at the receiving pad.”
“Like violently squeezing an orange and having the juice squirt into your face?” Sora asked rhetorically.
“Squirting into space, yes,” Beth laughed.
“We are making jam out of Jellies!” Allen yelped in triumph. “Oh, they are shrinking down now. Down to nothing but streams of atoms.”
Unseen by the human observers, the optics had failed on the teleportation sending pad, for indeed, the Jellie had tried to save itself by grabbing that structure. As its tentacles wrapped around the permalloy post where the camera was mounted, the forces pulling it toward the teleporter caused immense strain on the Jellie’s fluids, especially its carapace.
The Jellie struggled to fight against this unexpected and unrecognized foe that the air-breathers had deployed against it. Squelching noises shook the carapace, the physical Jellie inside, and the liquids which surrounded it. Unlike being in vacuum, or in air, or submerged, here the Jellie was in an unfamiliar medium and its own understanding of gravity, hydrodynamics, and physics was challenged.
It tried vainly to fight back, but the forces were greater than it could withstand.
That made it involuntarily eject some of its compounds. A gooey substance spurted from the tentacle and dissolved the molecular bonds of the permalloy.
The permalloy broke, but the Jellie was already being pugnaciously drawn into the teleporter. Its shields, defenses, and even its cognition of what was happening were ineffective against this unknown event. It tried to communicate with its pod of other Jellies, but mayhem was all that was perceived.
With the tentacle’s grip broken, the tentacle tried to grab again, but just got entangled in the debris of the loose and broken camera, the shattered post, and some more of the ruined vodnees. That mass of junk tumbled away, being sucked into the ever-expanding maw of the teleportation sending pad.
Once inside the teleporter, the squeezing, minimization, and compression were horrific and the Jellie died, with shock and astonishment on its mind.
It was the first of a multitude of Jellies to experience those emotions.
The island where the teleportation sending unit was located was consumed, but the sending unit’s own operations created a type of bubble which insulated it from the immense forces around it.
Sucking up everything around, the air soon reached hurricane velocities, swirling in a distinctive pattern as the atmosphere of the biome disappeared into the ferocious quaffing of the sending pad. Vents in the ceilings and walls popped off, being of thinner, or weaker metal than the great permalloy wall structures. The gases inside the shell howled like banshees as they were drawn out and gathered into the biome.
The general trend of the teleporter’s swallowing had to do with the density of substances. Therefore, in general the biome’s gases were first to go, but proximity to the sending pad also played a role. With the gravity manipulation gone, once things began to move, they moved quickly, colliding with whatever was better secured. The teleporter’s maw was hungry and consumed all that it could as fast as it could.
Everything near the teleporter was first to feel the effects. The broken vodnees disappeared, the protruding land mass swirled up and mixed with the liquids and air, so that at the maw, it was a rusty, muddy, sludge which entered. The brilliant white of the sending unit framed all that, and a weird kind of blank space formed on the opposite end of the grid from the maw. In that spot, there was almost a lack of everything, and while it was not drawn down to vacuum, it was a very negatively pressured area. Oddly, the teleporter still was registering that area’s information all the way to the very end.
Voraciously, the sending pad drew in its victims.
Air disappeared, then liquids, and then the ground followed. But it was all being insatiably drawn together. Dirt, soil, rocks, bedrock, and the carcasses of once great trees were all spun about with countless smashing, breakage, and destruction, even before the materials reached the comparatively small maw of the teleporter.
Despite all that the Jellies tried to do, they could not resist the draw of the teleporter and multitudes of them were smushed together with everything around them.
