Forerunner Page 8

  “But we would have retrieved the Oberon anyway, even without that,” Mark said.

  “Yes, but the aliens wouldn’t know that,” Cranston said.

  “In fact,” Mark continued. “It could be argued that a hole like that would act as a deterrent, making any discoverers afraid of what they might find aboard, and reluctant to retrieve it.”

  “Maybe they figured that a member of their own species wouldn’t investigate if there wasn’t some sort of hull damage, so they made the opening on their holoemitters,” Cranston said. “They don’t know our psychology. Our belief systems.”

  “Xander, try to hail them,” Jain said.

  After a minute, Xander said: “No response.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re not trying to communicate via a different means,” Medeia said.

  “True,” Jain said. “Xander, are you picking up any emissions at all out there? High energy photons or protons? Low energy infrared?”

  “Nothing,” Xander said. “The signal spectrum is completely black out there. If they are trying to communicate with us, it’s via a novel means we’ve never encountered before.”

  “Maybe they have no power left,” Mark said.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Jain told him. “They did have enough energy to power their holoemitters, after all, and to mask the heat produced.”

  “But maybe that energy just ran out, and they’re completely dead in the water, as it were,” Mark said.

  Cranston turned toward Jain. “So what do you want to do?”

  Jain stared at the image a while longer. “We don’t really have much choice, do we? We can either turn the transport back, and pretend we never encountered this ship, or we can explore it. Given that we’re all former humans, and inherited the innate curiosity of the species, I suspect we’re all going to give in to the latter urge.”

  “I’m actually happy not exploring it…” Mark said.

  “I’m not,” Medeia said. “I want to know what that is.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Mark said. “These must be our attackers. They nearly destroyed us the last time. We should get the hell out of here. Maybe blast them to smithereens before we leave.”

  “Or the reverse could be true,” Medeia said. “They could have been attacked, just like us. Maybe they even came to our aid. And what did they get in reward? They were left for dead, relegated to a decaying orbit above a gas giant.”

  “And if they were our attackers, why did they fly all the way back to Ol’ Faithful?” Cranston said. “And how did they end up trapped in its gravity?”

  “Maybe either Admiral Williams or Commander Jang led them away,” Mark said. “We only found enough debris to account for one of their ships where we woke up, after all.”

  “Well, we won’t know either way,” Jain said. “Not if we turn our backs now without even trying to investigate. My curiosity is getting the better of me.” He glanced at the others and sighed. “But I’ll put it to a vote. I can’t just be making arbitrary decisions to satisfy my own desires, not for something as important as this. All in favor of exploring the alien ship, raise your hand.”

  Jain, Medeia, and Cranston raised their hands.

  Mark shook his head.

  “Xander, send the transport in,” Jain ordered.

  8

  Jain watched the transport land on the surface of the pyramidal object.

  A ramp lowered on the side of the craft, and a rover emerged. Its eight legs used magnets to attach to the surface in the void, and it crawled forward. When it reached the edge of the ramp, it lowered a tentative foot on the shiny alien hull to check the effectiveness of the magnets. When the foot remained attached, the rover placed another limb onto the hull, and slowly stepped forward until its entire body resided upon the alien surface, balanced between two pipes that were set relatively close together. Satisfied that the magnets were going to continue to hold, the rover proceeded forward more confidently.

  It moved over and between the trenches and protrusions formed by the different pipes, and slowly moved away from the transport. When the rover vanished behind a particular large horizontal pipe section, Jain switched to its viewpoint to observe directly. He considered taking complete control of the unit—the lag time would only be in the microseconds at the moment—but he figured he’d let the autonomous AI run its program.

  The rover emitted its own local LIDAR, which outlined the three-dimensional objects around it in white wireframes. Up close, the surface of the pyramid was a strangely chaotic affair, literally a mess of pipes crisscrossing back and forth and overlapping one another. Those pipes were colored gray on the feed to indicate a metallic substance that readily reflected photons.

  The surface was completely unlike the hulls of the Space Machinist ships, which had smooth “Whittle” layers designed to absorb the impacts of micrometeoroids. When he saw small pockmarks dotting the surface of some of them, he suspected those pipes served the same purpose as the human-designed Whittle layers, protecting the inner armor of the ship from damage.

  “What a mess,” Mark commented.

  “Can we tell what those pipes are made of?” Jain asked.

  “No, not conclusively,” Xander replied. “They are metallic, and magnetic, of course. But otherwise, that’s all we have.”

  The crab crawled across the surface, moving back and forth in a regular search pattern, mapping the different pipe areas over the next several hours. Meanwhile, the miners Jain and the others had deployed on the surface of the moon continued to harvest water. Every half hour the transports became full and returned to their respective vessels to deposit the ice blocks. Those blocks were transferred via internal rovers to the extractors aboard each vessel, which separated the frozen water into liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for use as propellant. Jain kept an eye on his propellant levels as the hours passed and watched them steadily climb.

  During that time, Jain also dispatched a telemetry probe to the northern polar orbit of the moon in order to send regular updates to Sheila and Gavin—the communications particular to the Space Machinists required line of sight to operate correctly. Unfortunately, the radiation produced by Ol’ Faithful on the other side interfered with those communications, so the probe would queue any messages Jain sent and transmit them during a lull in said radiation.

  “You know, it’s too bad there isn’t any frozen nitrogen on this planet,” Medeia said. “I’m low on hellraisers.”

  “We all are,” Jain said. “But honestly, I don’t consider them all that important a weapon when it comes to space combat. Sure, they can be good for herding if your enemy has poor propulsion systems, but otherwise, lasers and energy weapons are the way to go.”

  “That we’re low on hellraisers tells me we used them the last time,” Cranston said. “And they probably weren’t all that effective, given the result.”

  “Yeah, six offline ships, and two more completely destroyed,” Mark said. “I’d say we probably don’t need hellraisers going forward, nor frozen nitrogen.”

  “But the same could be said for all our other weapons,” Medeia insisted. “I’d feel better, knowing I had my full arsenal.”

  “Maybe we’ll make a stop at another moon if we detect frozen nitrogen,” Jain said.

  “The rover just found an opening,” Xander announced.

  Jain immediately diverted his attention to the viewpoint of the rover, which he still had open in the upper right of his vision. He saw a small conduit lined with pipes leading away into the hull.

  “I’m willing to bet we’ll lose our comm signal if we send the rover in there,” Cranston said.

  “Probably,” Jain said. “Considering we have no idea what the composition of that hull is. Let the rover continue using its search algorithm... I want it to map out as much of the interior as it can. If it encounters hostiles, or danger of any kind, I want it to retreat.”

  “What if aliens attempt to make contact?” Xander asked.

  “Then ensur
e the rover runs the First Contact protocol,” Jain responded. That was a standard protocol developed by military scientists. It utilized various methods to attempt communications with new alien races, such as sending transmissions across all available frequency bands, flashing lights, miming with telescoping limbs, and so forth.

  “The protocol is already installed and good to go,” Xander said.

  “Then send her inside,” Jain commanded.

  The rover descended into the opening; the rover continued to emit LIDAR so that the video feed returned a three-dimensional wireframe representing the passageway. Jain watched the rover continue deeper into the monotonous conduit for several minutes, and then his view abruptly pixelated and froze.

  “Well, I just lost the signal,” Jain said. He glanced at Xander. “I want other rovers down there. We need to check if there are any more openings.”

  Two more rovers departed the existing transport and began fanning out. The transport returned to the surface to help collect water. Meanwhile, Medeia also landed a transport on the alien hull to deploy three more crab-class rovers. That craft, too, returned to the moon’s surface shortly after depositing the units.

  More hours passed; the Talos and the other ships continued to restore their propellant levels. The latest rovers hadn’t found any other openings along the exterior of the alien hull, and Jain returned them to the surface of the moon after diverting a couple of transports.

  “It’s not going to come back,” Mark said, referring to the first rover.

  “It’ll be back,” Jain said.

  A half hour later, when the propellant levels were at seventy-five percent, the initial rover finally reappeared.

  The frozen pixelated display in the upper right of his vision updated. The rover was approaching the hull exterior, and promptly crawled through.

  “Well look who’s come out of the anthill,” Mark said. “Guess you were right.”

  Jain remotely accessed the archival video and began to download it. When he had queued enough to begin playback, he streamed the feed to the others, so they could watch. He played the video at normal speed first, but as more of it downloaded, he kept accelerating the playback until he was able to watch it at 10X speed.

  The video consisted of the rover traveling through hundreds of different conduits. They wound to and fro, crisscrossing the ship, and filling out a map of the ship that was displayed in isometric perspective in the upper right of the feed. There were several smaller passageways that remained unexplored in the process, because the rover had been unable to fit the tighter confines. But in the explored conduits, so far, the rover discovered nothing of note.

  “The hell is this?” Mark said. “There are no compartments anywhere. Just conduits, conduits, and more conduits. Surrounded by those pipes.”

  “It is kind of odd, isn’t it?” Jain said.

  “The mapped passages only match up with about ten percent of the ship, when you overlay them against the outer mass,” Medeia said. “It’s almost like whoever owns the vessel let us inside a special honeypot environment: a subset of the main ship, meant to mislead and misdirect, not to mention entrap, like a software honeypot does to hackers, making them think they hit the mother lode, while the whole time the perpetrator is merely inside a partitioned, walled off environment, giving the AI of the real system time to track down the intruder while he’s distracted by the honeypot. By the time the hacker realizes what has happened, the police are knocking at his door.”

  “So, what are you saying, these aliens are going to send the interstellar police after us?” Mark asked.

  “Only that the aliens could be studying us,” Medeia replied. “Observing our behavior. Gauging us to see what makes us tick.”

  “Well, for now all they’ve seen is how our autonomous AIs execute search protocols,” Jain said.

  “They’ve also seen us harvest ice from the surface,” Medeia said. “So they know we use water as a form of fuel. That reveals a lot about us already. Like we probably rely upon engines constrained by Newtonian physics.”

  “Did you see those smaller passageways?” Cranston said. “Maybe it’s worth it to send a few of my micro machines inside to more thoroughly explore. They can fit in where your rover can’t. Maybe with them, we can break out of that so-called ‘honeypot’ environment.”

  “That’s certainly an option. Though you’ll still lose communications with them until they return to the hull, and I’m not big on that.” Jain continued to watch the accelerated feed for several minutes; and then one of the conduits suddenly opened up into a wider chamber. He slowed down the playback immediately.

  “Finally, something interesting,” Jain commented.

  Blue strips on the bulkheads glowed a subtle blue, lighting the wireframes produced by the LIDAR.

  He watched the crab crawl deeper into the room, toward a table—well, more of a wide pedestal, really, because it had no legs, but was a single smooth, rectangular object.

  The rover reached the pedestal and began climbing the closest wall. It reached the top and pulled itself onto a broad counter. Two large metal cylinders were laid out in a row. They looked like oxygen tanks, or…

  “Is it just me, or do those things look like AI cores?” Cranston asked.

  “It’s not just you,” Mark commented.

  The rover maneuvered toward one of the cylinders. He saw what looked like an array of black and white diamonds printed on the side.

  “That looks like a SERE code,” Medeia said. That was a machine-readable code stamped onto machine parts to identify them.

  “Xander, look up that code,” Jain said.

  “It’s an AI core all right,” Xander said. “The code belongs to Admiral Paul Williams. It’s his AI core.”

  “You’re certain?” Jain asked.

  “You can perform the lookup yourself,” Xander replied. “It’s the same identifier we have on file. Not a backup. Not a duplicate. But the AI core that was running inside of the admiral’s ship.”

  Jain froze the video frame and performed the lookup. “It matches up.”

  “Yes,” Xander said.

  “So these bastards kidnapped the admiral’s AI core after they shot him down,” Mark said.

  Cranston thrummed his fingers along the top of his station. “Could be a hologram. Look at the positioning of the crab unit: its avoided touching the objects, instead placing its feet between the two cores.”

  “That’s how the unit is programmed,” Xander said. “To avoid interacting with any objects in its surroundings, other than decks and countertops.”

  “I know,” Cranston said. “But that doesn’t really do much to prove the cores are real.”

  Jain began playing the video once more. As he watched, the crab moved to the next cylinder, capturing the SERE code on it as well.

  “This one belongs to Commander Jang,” Xander said.

  Like it had done with the previous, the rover was careful not to actually touch the second AI core.

  “So, the question is, how did the alien ship get its hands on these cores?” Jain said.

  “Assuming they’re not holograms,” Mark said. “I think it’s fairly obvious now that Admiral Williams and Commander Jang led them away, and before they were destroyed in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere, they managed to disable the alien ship, and send it into a decaying orbit.”

  “But we detected debris consistent with one of their starships near where we woke up,” Cranston said. “That means only one of them led away the alien vessel. The other was lost.”

  “My guess is, the captain of the first ship that went down managed to eject his AI core, and the aliens captured it,” Mark said. “The aliens pursued the surviving ship to Ol’ Faithful, and destroyed it, too. The pyramid took severe damage in the process but managed to capture the second AI core when it ejected from the lost vessel.”

  Cranston rubbed his chin. “AI cores don’t automatically eject. Williams and Jang would have had to manually trigger th
e jettison. The question is, why didn’t any of us eject, when given the opportunity?”

  “Maybe we saw the aliens capture the AI core from the first ship that went down,” Mark said. “Or maybe we didn’t have time to eject. One moment we were operational, the next, we went offline.”

  Cranston sat back. “Or maybe, just maybe, Jang and Williams attempted some sort of ramming operation with their vessels. Then they’d have ample time to jettison.”

  “Their ships weren’t designed for ramming, unlike mine,” Medeia said.

  “I know,” Cranston said. “That’s my point. That’s why they’d eject before impact, because their ships would be incinerated in the process.”

  “Well if they did ram, it didn’t really have the desired effect on these aliens,” Jain said.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Cranston said. “They were damaged enough that they couldn’t escape the gravitational well of the gas giant without our help.”

  The Space Machinists were quiet for a moment. They were considering their options. Or at least Jain was.

  “So, if those two AI cores are real, we can’t just leave them here,” Mark said. “We can’t abandon them to the enemy.”

  “I agree,” Cranston said. “No one gets left behind. We send in some rovers with grip attachments and retrieve them. And then when they’re back in our custody, maybe we can find out just what the hell is going on.”

  “After we blow the alien ship to hell,” Mark said.

  “Not until we’re sure about their intentions,” Medeia said. “I still think they could have been trying to help us.”

  “If they were trying to help us, why steal two of our AI cores?” Mark asked.

  “Maybe they did it to protect them from the real attackers,” Medeia said.

  “There were no other attackers!” Mark said.

  “But you don’t know that for sure…” Medeia said.

  “Let’s finish watching the feed,” Jain said. “Then we’ll decide what to do.”

  The crab climbed down from the pedestal and explored the remainder of the compartment, which proved empty, then it left via a conduit on the far side. The rover encountered no further chambers, with its explorations restricted to the conduits that seemed to permeate the alien craft, or at least, that particular interior area of the craft. There were still the occasional side passages that were too small for the rover to fit, and it passed those by. When it had mapped out the last of the labyrinth, which accounted for only fifteen percent of the ship, when compared to the exterior, it backtracked. Soon the rover joined up with the conduit that led to the main opening and returned to the hull outside.