Easy to Be a God, page 8
“Here’s the analysis of the composition of the atmosphere inside the alien ship.” Iarrey handed his reader to the captain.
“Doesn’t seem to differ much from the atmosphere on Earth,” Morrisey noticed. “And the analysis of the bacterial flora?”
“We didn’t find anything,” reported Bourne. “The atmosphere seems to be as sterile as the inside of the booze bottle, but despite that and the similarities in the composition I wouldn’t recommend unsealing our suits even in critical situations.”
“No one’s suggesting that.” Morrisey thought for a moment. “The data you’ve gathered show clearly that the Aliens needed oxygen, just like we do. So we can conclude we’re dealing with a protein-based life form.”
“Possibly,” Iarrey agreed. “Judging from the size of the hatches, controls, and handles, and the chair in the capsule, they’re taller than us and more massively built. They might even be ten feet tall. While we’re on the subject, the shape of the seat is interesting …”
A view of the capsule’s interior appeared on the screen. The chair was very long, rounded, almost streamlined, with two vertical grooves in its upper part.
“Any thoughts?”
“Unfortunately not. I’ve got too little data to be more specific, sir. So far we’ve been only operating within the corridor. The robot did reach the lock leading to the turret’s main shaft and moved beyond to take samples of air, but then withdrew immediately. We waited for you before taking any further steps, sir.”
“Excellent.” Morrisey stood up. “Gentlemen, I think it’s time for a small step of a man but a giant leap for mankind. Annataly, you stay here. Someone has to keep watch over us in case of misfortune.”
“Bourne knows his way around this gear much better than I do,” she protested, pointing at the equipment.
The captain quietened her with a gesture.
“Honey …” he muttered, and walked over to her. “You’re the pilot and the only one around here who handles a joystick with such deftness—”
He stopped short on hearing a snort of laughter from Iarrey, but did not turn toward him. “Back off. You’ll have a chance for a trip once the coast is clear. I swear.”
ELEVEN
The four of them went: Morrisey, Iarrey, Bourne, and Nike. Surrounded by a swarm of robots and probes, they moved down gravitational belts into the corridor. The plan was simple. They were going to search the alien craft meticulously, chamber after chamber, leaving a chain of robots to extend their transmitters’ range and blocking open all the doors they encountered. Annataly, who had remained on the Nomad’s bridge, controlled the probes and supplied reconnaissance information.
Thanks to the robots they had an accurate virtual map of the three next chambers in front of them. That gave them an adequate margin of safety. Morrisey may have been hotheaded, but he also had something of an obsession with safety. Losing a hand in an accident had taught him to be cautious.
They descended into the lower part of the turret, searching one vehicle on each level. However, they did not find anything that might have helped them even with an approximate identification of the creatures who had built the ship. They only managed to confirm that all the seats were of the same size and shape, meaning the Aliens—whatever they’d looked like—had belonged to one species.
“Clones-of-bitches,” Morrisey muttered after they had left the last capsule. “Sterile clones-of-bitches.”
The interior seemed impeccably squeaky-clean. In vehicles piloted by human beings there were always lots of objects reminding people of their families and homes. Not here, though. The inside of the capsules looked as if they had only just rolled off the assembly line.
“Perhaps they didn’t feel the need to decorate their ship,” Iarrey offered. “Or maybe they took everything with them when they left …”
“I don’t give a fuck either way,” the captain replied, flying after the robots toward the lock leading straight on board.
Nike projected a hologram of the next chamber. It wasn’t very big, and from it emerged two identical corridors with elliptical cross section. The one on the left ended in armored bulkhead, and the one on the right led to something that resembled a berth deck. The glowing “fungi” were all over the walls, so the four men didn’t have to switch on their lights and could save their suits’ energy. Morrisey hesitated momentarily before he pointed to the right-hand corridor. He always took the easy way out, according to Annataly. That was fine with them—the lesser the risk, the greater the chances for a peaceful retirement.
When they passed a fork, the captain stopped suddenly.
“Annataly!”
“Yes, sir?” the navigator asked, a tad surprised by this unexpected call.
“Send …”—he quickly counted the machines accompanying them—“five robots and twenty probes to investigate the other corridor. And keep me in the loop.”
“Roger that,” she barked, and some of their machines turned back as if by magic.
The captain resumed walking when the robots were out of sight, then stopped in front of the next door and ordered it to be opened. The membrane furled as soon as one of the robots touched it. After it had closed behind them again, Iarrey ran his glove over its rough surface. A second later the door opened once more.
“Incredible,” whispered Heraclesteban in solemn awe, positioning a robot so that the membrane could not close.
“Alien,” Morrisey shrugged, clearly not impressed.
He looked down the corridor, which was bending sharply. The probes’ cameras had scanned every inch of it a long while before. Nike projected a hologram of the corridor right in front of the captain’s visor. From the readings it appeared that the corridor most probably ran around the hull and in that section had just one side door, the one through which they had entered.
“Right or left?” Bourne asked.
The corridor looked identical in both directions.
“Right,” the captain replied.
They covered four more similar sections, from which they could reach further docks. For the moment they only registered the presence of side chambers, presuming them all to be identical, which was later confirmed when the returning probes fed new data into the computers.
In the fifth section they finally reached a side membrane, apparently leading to the ship’s central part. However, it would not open automatically in spite of their considerable efforts. In the meantime Morrisey sent some robots to the farther sections of the corridor, in order to check whether there were any other similar membranes ahead. He could do it because Annataly’d already redirected the probes, which up till then had been—ineffectively—trying to force the bulkhead blocking the way at the first fork.
Having nothing else to do, the crew members sat down with their backs against the curved wall and watched further pieces of the 3D puzzle appear on Nike’s holopad. In less than fifteen minutes the robots checked the corridor’s remaining sections and found out that it indeed was a ring closed off at the opposite end by a heavy bulkhead, very similar to the one they hadn’t been able to open. Clearly, the only way onboard the alien ship was through the membrane they were all sitting idly at.
“Hell,” Iarrey murmured, when the holoimage was complete.
“Hell,” Bourne repeated. “And so our adventure on the alien ship comes to an end.”
Nike reached out to switch off the device, but Morrisey clutched his wrist.
“Gentlemen, do you really want to give up?” he asked. “We’re sitting in the corridor of the first alien ship Humankind has ever encountered, and we aren’t going to find out what’s behind that fucking door?”
“The first we’ve ever heard of,” Iarrey corrected him.
“What do you mean?” the captain demanded.
“I mean, we can’t be sure it’s the first alien ship encountered by Humankind,” Iarrey replied calmly.
“I don’t quite follow,” said the commanding officer.
Bourne and Nike also looked confused.
“Just because we’ve never heard of the discovery of alien vessels, doesn’t mean there’s never been any contact. Can any of you swear High Command doesn’t cover up findings like that?”
“What the fuck—” Bourne began, but the captain silenced him with a gesture.
“Do you have any proof for what you say?” he asked.
“Do you recall what happened to the Vagabond?” Iarrey parried the captain’s question.
Everybody went silent. Nike glanced at the crew members uncomprehendingly.
“I don’t.”
Morrisey put a gloved finger to his visor, indicating that Nike should remain silent. Bourne lowered his head.
“The Vagabond,” Heraclesteban explained, “was the Nomad’s sister ship. Years ago we were investigating the Oscar Sector. They were clearing up trash in the O2A7 System; we were doing the same in O2A6. Then we were supposed to move on to O2A8 together. Linden completed his work sooner than us. He reported that he would fly off to set the stage, and later sent information that he had two clear readings and was waiting for us. We had one more L-point to collapse. It was really dangerous there during the war. We finished a day later and were just preparing to jump when we received orders to return to base at once.
“And when we came back we found out that the Vagabond had flown straight into an unmarked minefield and the Fleet was blocking the O2E8 until further notice. Two weeks later we received new maps of the system and cleared up the mess. But there was only one reading this time.”
Morrisey nodded his head; Iarrey clenched his fists.
“One fucking reading, get it?” Bourne said. “Linden had reported two, and that guy was accurate down to a click in cases like those. I served with him for three seasons, so I know what I’m talking about.”
“Perhaps the Fleet sorted it out by themselves,” Nike suggested, “and neutralized the minefields at the same time.”
“Son …” Iarrey pulled Nike toward himself until their visors were almost touching. “They send us to do that kind of work, and I assure you no one from the Corps cleaned out that system. I know every lousy skipper and every crate in Federation service. That aside, Linden didn’t sail into a minefield; he spoke to us after taking his bearings, and while it’s possible to hit a mine and not be able to react, it only happens when you’re leaving hyperspace. Tadam said they had to take some additional readings because something wasn’t right … I’ve always thought that the other L-point was some kind of trick, and that the Vagabond sailed off to its death because of an amazingly interesting wreck they wanted to check out before we arrived.”
“Clone-of-a-bitch!” Morrisey swore. “Either we’re letting our imagination run away with us, or High Command really is trying to cover up contacts with Aliens. Which means that if we report—”
“Bang and we’re six feet under,” Bourne said, snapping his fingers.
“There’s no over or under in space …” Heraclesteban muttered.
“Who gives a shit,” the lieutenant snapped. “With an extra hole between my eyes I won’t much care!”
“So what do we do?” Nike asked.
“What do we do?” repeated Morrisey with indignation. “We blow this safe open.” To the comlink he said, “Annataly, send a ripper to the other bulkhead, will you? Try to get through.”
“But what about—”
He didn’t let her finish.
“Honey, it looks like we’re not gonna become famous, at least not this time.”
TWELVE
The ripper looked like a huge spider, with its spherical abdomen and nine limbs—four for support, movement, and anchoring and five for operating tools. That sufficed to overcome every possible obstacle.
“What now?” Bourne asked, his fingers hovering above the keyboard. “Do we blow up the entire entrance, or cut cautiously and find out what’s on the other side?”
“Drill a hole through that shit, just to be on the safe side,” Iarrey said.
“Yeah …” agreed Morrisey, who was sitting a few yards away and checking the data from the probes in the dock tunnels.
The ripper spread its support limbs wider. It could not anchor itself on such a hard surface, the electromagnets didn’t work there either, and so it used suction cups. The plasma needle cutter approached the circular door, its point emitting a blinding light, and when the brightness became too much even for their helmets’ visors, the arm moved toward the membrane blocking the passage. However, even before the plasma blade touched its strange surface the membrane furled all by itself, revealing a narrower, vaulted corridor.
“Oh, fuck,” Bourne groaned, staring into the dark opening.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Morrisey leapt to his feet and flew over to the robot. “Lights, cameras!”
The small probes skittered between the spindly limbs, and a moment later, they were looking at a dead straight corridor, which ended with a membrane identical to the one that had just opened. Several smaller openings were visible in the side walls. Iarrey directed a camera toward one of them. The membrane furled the moment the robot flew up to it. The same thing happened with all of the remaining membranes, even the one at the end of the corridor. The four men stared in silence as another 3D image captured on the drones’ cameras grew on the hologram.
On both sides of the passage linking the two ring corridors—outer and inner—there were only a few small rooms containing mostly equipment of the kind people use every day, but also a few completely strange things. Wherever they looked, however, they did not encounter even the tiniest shred of evidence of the beings which had built the ship. No images, no odds and sods, nothing; just the sterile chambers that had never been used—even the ones that seemed to be living quarters.
“Bizarre,” Bourne commented, perching on the edge of a large seat and examining the streamlined surface of a table covered with peculiar controls. “Everything’s integrated, impersonal. Like it had been designed by machines for machines.”
“Perhaps it’s some kind of unmanned—” Iarrey began, but didn’t finish his sentence. The soft, but familiar bleeping coming from Nike’s holopad quietened him.
They all gathered around the cadet to watch a red dot pulsating in one of the two accessible chambers on the other side of the corridor’s inner bend. The probes had discovered traces of life.
“Visuals!” Morrisey demanded.
“There are none,” Nike reported. “We’ve only got some scanning drones there and no other equipment. All the camera drones have been sent to search the shafts in the hangar.”
“Get those pieces of junk back here! Right now!” the captain ordered.
“Yes, sir!” The cadet quickly fed in the appropriate commands.
Seconds went by, but none of them moved a muscle. No one said anything either; they were all staring hypnotically at the pulsating red dot. Annataly’s raised voice sounded like a gunshot in the total silence. Even Morrisey jumped like a scalded cat.
“I’ve got a small problem here,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I sent the additional camera drones to you, but—”
“Out with it,” the captain ordered impatiently.
“There’s something wrong with the holomap,” she ended much more quietly.
“What do you mean?” Iarrey asked, confused.
“Take a look for yourself.”
The grid recorded by the camera drones covered the iridescent green outlines of the ship’s chambers, showing that one of the sections of the outer corridor was narrower than the first measurements had led them to believe.
“Perhaps the sensors are uncalibrated,” muttered Bourne after examining the differences. “Most of our robots are museum pieces.”
“So how do you explain that?” The drones had just reached the passage between the corridors. “It was straight according to the first readings, and now—”
Morrisey approached the membrane, which opened before him noiselessly.
“Clone-of-a-bitch …”
The corridor was indeed bending gently—very slightly, yet discernibly.
“The difference is about a foot and a half in the middle section. The measurements can’t be out by so much.”
Bourne shook his head in disbelief.
“Say what you like …”
“We have visuals,” Nike interrupted them.
They gathered around the cadet and his holopad. In the inner corridor there were no such differences; all the lines in both colors matched up perfectly. A moment later, the displays showed the inside of a cabin with gleaming cylinders arranged against the walls. There were a dozen of them, all looking the same and almost as high as the ceiling, with a diameter of over three feet. A thirteenth cylinder was in the center of the chamber, suspended above the floor or floating in the air. And the drone emitting an alarm signal was hanging right in front of it.
“Time to greet our hosts!” Morrisey shouted, and—not waiting for the others—glided toward the open membrane. They followed him, arming their weapons as they flew.
The inner loop, although a little smaller than the first, seemed to go on forever. Identical sections divided by elastic, self-sealing bulkheads, glowing with fungi-like growths, devoid of any distinguishing marks. The only sign that they were approaching their destination was the red dot on the hologram coming closer. They finally reached a dark-blue circle, beyond which—at least according to the readings—there ought to be something alive.
They entered warily, pointing their phasers at everything within view, but this cabin seemed just as empty as the others. Nike looked at the hologram, enlarging it to be able to see more details. The flashing red dot was inside the cylinder floating in the air. Seeing the captain’s enquiring glance he nodded toward it.
