Stocky left Sci-Med and walked through the narrow corridors of the ship, looking for Moussa. He had finished his Sci-Med duties and was told he could take recreation the rest of the day. He had spent more time than usual with the Sci-Med team after the drill. A lot of it was make-work just to stay with the only team that treated him as before.
In truth, today’s work there had been mostly recreation. They stocked the Isolab with analytical equipment, test ran the incinerator, took tissue samples from their lab animals for exposure trials, and ran a containment cleanup and EVA injury drill. He also took Chandna and Patterson to the Workshops to help them with the 3dprinters there.
Now that the Rangers performing close observation of the derelict, they were getting lots of detailed video. Chandna and Patterson had been using that information to construct scaled down models of parts of the derelict. Since the machines take time to complete their projects, they watched one of Patterson’s horror movies to pass time.
He didn’t fully understand the human comprehension of horror. Sure, humans were weaker and more vulnerable than he was – and that extra level of vulnerability scaled down what was horrific to them. But many horror works were comically bad. They often reveled in degrees of weakness and stupidity that even the most basic humans – the so called normies – would have to intentionally live up to.
The “man with a knife” was insufferable to watch.
Vampires, like Dracula, were just low-key magicians with fangs. Mere flesh and bone behind their gimmick tricks.
The wolf-man was a disobedient pup in need of a stern beating.
The necrotic man with bees could never surprise a replicant and would be easily ripped to pieces.
The pod-people were mere humans with emotional problems. (Or maybe humans with their emotional problems fixed.)
The xenomorph had a useful acid defense. But other than that, it was only good at sneaking up on humans. (Not difficult.) But he had to admit that it looked like it came from hell.
The terminator had some potential. Rugged, strong, and fearless. It was intelligent enough to acquire the best weapons and it could hide in plain sight. But its design was also lacking. A true killing machine should hunt with a plethora of senses.
And zombies were ridiculous.
He never got the impression that Patterson was horrified by these. Even marginal splicers should be able to keep their rational composure if faced with most of these phantoms of imagination. He would give an allowance to normie humans only. But she liked them for reasons he didn’t understand. And he liked being with her even if he didn’t always like the films.
The one they just watched surprised him though. It started cheesy enough with a woman swimming naked (and he couldn’t help but to image her naked) but then she was attacked from below and her body was thrashed in the water with shocking violence. He held his breath while she desperately held on to false safety, only to be brutally torn away from it. And then she died in agony, helpless and alone.
And for the first time he felt what might actually be horror – when that scene interrupted and merged with his thoughts about her. She had leaned against him fairly early in the film and he had soon put an arm around her before being aware of it. Her presence filled him with nervous tension. He liked it, and he liked that she didn’t seem to mind. But he would also have liked to have better focus on the film.
Now that was a movie monster – a razor rimmed mouth big enough to fit a curled-up human into! And he queried TURING afterwards and found that Great White Sharks actually existed on Earth, even if the movie one was embellished. No wonder humans had a fascination with horror. It was a remembrance of their primitive past. They knew of real monsters.
It would be worth watching that film again to focus on the movie. Unless if he was with her – because he would do it all again just the same. But the idea of floating on endless water was intriguing. He had heard that some of the O’Neill cylinders were fully aquatic but had never seen one. Maybe one day he would.
Why did humans ever come way out here when they had it so well on Earth?
He put a bit more than hour in the gym after leaving Sci-Med and then went to the Workshops. The damage done to Robbie earlier had not been entirely superficial. The robot’s motor functions glitched out seemingly randomly. Its internal diagnostics indicated the cause was a failure in the power converter circuitry. TURING agreed with that assessment.
He had disassembled Robbie after noticing the problem, and it was currently resting in pieces on several worktables joined together and with several oscilloscopes and LSAs (logic and state analyzers) connected to test points that he had soldered on the circuit boards over the last couple days. They would help him trace the origin of the random faults. A mess of wires and optical fiber connected everything together. Like the Nineveh, Robbie was built to aerospace standards. And that meant that no one failure was allowed to impede operation. So there were actually two problems to find. He expected a tricky job.
The Workshops Gate was composed of many wide open workspaces with hoists overhead for moving large equipment, and there were also many tool rooms with rows of shelving and then also the 3dprinter stations. The rescue business required considerable repair and fabrication capabilities, and this was some of what he loved most about his work.
He considered himself a man of tools. He had been ever since his mining work on superearths. And the Workshops is where he had spent most of his time while on the Abydos. He liked the change of spending more time with Sci-Med now, but he had no intention of leaving general engineering work.
Robbie saw him as soon as he entered the workfloor. “It’s been a long day for you,” it said, “don’t you wish to rest?”
“No, you’ve been like this long enough.” Like any replicant, he prided himself on productivity. He turned on the flatscreen displays he had set around his tables and which showed the suspect circuit schematics. And then he reenergized his test equipment – their displays showing stable and proper power and control signal levels for no movement condition. He had now familiarized himself with Robbie’s hardware enough so that he wouldn’t just be blindly following TURING’s suggestions. He would fix Robbie either tonight or the next night.
He rolled a stool over and sat. “TURING, mark all failure points.” He looked at Robbie. “Begin the full ops check for movement and motor control.”
Robbie began a set sequence of every possible movement. Slowly, various failures manifested and they were populated on the displays. And Stocky mentally traced out their origin in the circuitry to find common points which might be the cause. TURING did the same, and they compared the two. They worked late into the night, and then the next one too. But the job was done.
----------------------------------------
Patterson drank a nutrient shake while arranging tools and metallic components on a table in Sci-Med. The Rangers were now performing close surveillance of their target and gathering a lot of visual imagery. She had worked with Stocky earlier to produce models of drifting components of the alien Whipple shield using their 3dprinters. Seeing everything on the table now, together with a single block model of the shield, she already knew their tooling would work.
The time spent away from family was weighing on her. She had told them they were going out on a lengthy trip, but of course she couldn’t inform them of just how far and long. They were certainly beginning to worry. Probably would be frightened and angry upon her return. She deserved the rebuke and hoped it would be worth it for Qureshi and the other women. She would never agree to such a thing again. Too much stress, and she couldn’t even write papers on her discoveries.
She stacked three pylons on the table and then placed the triangular backplate of the shield in its position. She placed the retaining rings on it and then grabbed a closely sized universal driver. These had fine carbon nanotubes which extended from the end to match the shape of whatever needed to be torqued. They easily adjusted for driving screws, torquing nuts, or bolt heads. Picking up a locknut and bolt, she saw they fit with the alien technology. She affixed the retaining rings by tightening their associated locknuts and screws.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
She finished securing that plate and then tried to do the same with the metal foam layer. The retaining rings proved to be improperly sized, showing there was another part not yet discovered in the debris field, and so she epoxied it in place. Then she secured the top plate in the same manner as the bottom one.
She took another sip of her drink while admiring the alien shield and nodding in satisfaction. They were now reasonably assured that their tooling would work inside the derelict too. (The ship would certainly be designed for a simplified tool set.) They could open access panels and disassemble equipment without much difficulty. The team would probably still have to do some destructive evaluation (cutting or blasting to gain access) but not much.
Ghost sat by her looking up, likely expecting to be fed since she was having a treat. She smiled at him, grateful for his companionship. He meowed back and then started to circle her legs, rubbing against her.
Her ship family was also on her mind. She perceived the crew treating her differently. They did the same toward Stocky. It was easy to know what was really going on with crowds when she could hear whispered secrets. The tone of many of their voices showed fear, resentment, and, in some cases, a hopeless acceptance. She pushed it out of her mind while watching more recorded video of the clumsy looking alien ship (badly pockmarked from impacts).
The crew’s apprehension would pass in time. De Silva would soon be directing operations. They would see things going on as before, and they would remember that they belonged together. But she was keeping both herself and Stocky largely separate from them for now.
He was working well with Fuller and Chandna too. She had known from the beginning that he would pair with Fuller. Fuller was a program baby – made to fill colonization requirements. He didn’t have real parents, just like how Stocky didn’t. They both grew up in classes under automaton caretakers who taught them how to socialize in society and work toward galactic expansion. They felt a certain amount of kinship for each other just as she had guessed.
Stocky’s relationship with Chandna was more peculiar. She sensed Stocky had some distrust for him, although they worked quite efficiently together. She wondered some about the reason. Chandna was a corporate man, and she knew that central corporate personnel with Tamil-Hazamaz mining were aloof on his previous job. Could that alone be the reason?
Ghost had approached the door and sat, looking up. Soon he began to meow and he lifted a paw to scratch.
“Door opening,” TURING said.
Ghost walked through into the main hall with his tail up in a candycane curl, giving a final “thank you” meow. He even had the computer trained. She had to fight to resist spitting out her shake, laughing inwardly. It affirmed how well they all belonged together.
Chandna and Zhu came in the room shortly after. “Excellent,” Chandna said as he saw the completed section of the Whipple shield. He remained by the doorway while Zhu came up to the table to inspect everything closer. His eyes were wide and bright like a child who had received a new toy.
“So far our hypothesis that physical laws would necessitate their tooling being not too different from our own is holding up.”
Zhu nodded in understanding while he connected a universal driver to a socket wrench. He grabbed a metal post and quickly connected more pieces to it, trying to recreate what they believed to be a pylon for carrying cargo pods. He soon ran into a wall because they hadn’t yet found all the pieces for that structure, but he was still happy with his work. And the ease that he had pieced the partial pylon together further confirmed the adequacy of their universal drivers. And if they found something strange that their tooling wouldn’t work with then they would just take measurements on site and 3dprint a solution.
Zhu set his piece down and then picked up hers to examine the Whipple shield. “Have you seen our latest view of the airlock?” he asked. “It’s file A41128.”
She swiped through recent messages on her tablet and opened the video file. The exterior airlock door appeared open, judging from the shadowing in the image. Although the Rangers were not properly aligned yet to make that certain. “Interesting.” They would certainly need to position a Ranger to get a better view.
“Yes,” Chandna said. “There are two possibilities. Either that is the outer airlock door that is open, or they use a sacrificial door as part of their shielding which is open.”
“I think it’s the former,” Zhu said. “They probably use a clamshell section of shielding to protect their airlock just like we do. You can see what looks like the hinges for such a thing on two sides of the opening. The rest has just broken off.”
“It doesn’t make sense for the outer door to be open though.”
“It does make entry easier,” Zhu said. “And we can discover the reason for the ship’s foundering once we get aboard.”
She wondered if that was really the case. Perhaps it was a bad sign of something. They still had time to gather more information. She would later spend time thinking about how to get the most use out of the Rangers.
Zhu picked up a laser cutter from the table. “So we have adequate tools, and it looks like it may be easy to get inside. But there are still bound to be sealed areas.” He pointed the cutter at the top plate of the Whipple shield and fired a brief pulse to burn a hole through it, being careful to not keep the energy applied long enough to set off the ship’s fire protection system. “How do we deal with that?”
She snatched the laser cutter away from him. “The ship is so cold that even the sealed sections are almost fully depressurized. So we’ll use lasers to cut and weld. And blasting won’t set off a large pressure transient. But we must still be careful.” She looked sternly in his eyes. He needed to listen. The extreme cold (around -200 degrees Celsius) meant that most of the atmosphere in the ship (in the sections still sealed) had condensed or even froze. But if they added energy then it could become volatile again.
He nodded. “Okay.” He clearly understood the danger.
She set the cutter on the table and then began to disassemble the Whipple shield. “We’re getting there.” She made eye contact with Zhu. “The Isolab is ready.” She was looking forward to receiving the first samples for analysis.
----------------------------------------
De Silva felt stressed on the days after the drill, to his surprise. The exercise had worked to wake up the crew to the risks involved in an alien salvage effort. And Zhu and Holly seemed to be performing well as acting Captain and First Officer. By any proper accounting they were more ready than they had ever been. And he knew that he should feel accomplished for preparing them for this undertaking. But he had also been injured, and the effects from that didn’t feel right. He hated making it appear that he wasn’t hurt (lying) when he was out in public. And he hated spending so much time secluded in his cabin because he could only hide the discomfort and stiffness for so long.
He sat down in his seat on the Bridge, being careful not to lean back. The pain would briefly come shooting whenever he disturbed his bruising. And it was hard to pretend that everything was fine when it spiked. It hadn’t yet gotten much better, and he had abandoned his hope that Patterson would clear him early.
He now spent an inordinate amount of time on the Bridge. It was an easy way to make it appear to the crew that he was still largely in charge. He could sit there and read or walk between the workstations, being careful about moving his right arm and shoulder, and appear to supervise. And he would talk with Nieves and Samoylova when they came by.
He didn’t think he had Samoylova and Nieves fooled. But they weren’t fully convinced he was hurt either. Nieves had come by the last hour and asked how he was doing. And she had done so casually, with no evident concern.
“I’m fine,” he remembered saying in a forthcoming tone. “If it weren’t for the fact that we’re completely out of reach of major hospitals then she’d be letting me manage my full duties. II can’t fault her for caution – especially when I am championing it myself.” He loathed himself for saying that even though he believed it was mostly true. And he easily made it sound true. She seemed to believe it.
He tried to focus on the positives – and there were many. The derelict was very likely to be structurally sound enough for tow. (That would shave several days off the retrieval operation.) Holly always had an emergency egress prepped for immediate use. The Nineveh’s Whipple shield was actually in great shape, and so there was little risk to the ship from the debris field.
But he couldn’t get a puzzling feeling out of his head. He had put himself into his current situation. He hadn’t foreseen the danger involved in ordering Stocky to win and that, together with his injury, left him feeling inadequate. If he had overestimated himself…
He heard the lift arrive behind him and then the voices of Holly and Zhu. He turned to greet them as they brought over serving trays.
“How about a working lunch, Captain?” Zhu said.
He sniffed the air. “Sounds good, what is that?” He recognized the scent of culantro – or maybe just a lot of cilantro. He guessed it was a Caribbean inspired sofrito based stew.
“Comfort food,” Zhu said.
“Anytime rat smells appetizing it’s an accomplishment,” Holly said. She didn't have anywhere near the same enthusiasm.
“Well you know, real spacers develop a palate for rat.”
“How about just an acceptance?” she said as she pulled out one of the fold down tables.
Zhu pulled out another and then handed De Silva a covered bowl. “We got you plenty of meat protein to help you recover.”
“Got you a bone broth too,” Holly said. “Can’t let the carcass go to waste.”
He gladly took the bowl and removed the lid, savoring the aroma. They had treated him good. He had a much larger portion of meat than rice. Indeed, spacers wouldn’t do that.
Holly handed him the thermos containing the broth and a side bowl of black beans, and then they set themselves up nearby. He gave thanks and then they dug in. And he wondered if he was being too hard on himself. Maybe he had only almost overestimated himself. Because he had picked the finest crew.
He went to his cabin after lunch and stripped down to his undergarments with careful movements. He sat at his desk, not wanting to lay down on a full belly. He made himself comfortable, adjusted the picture of his wife, Isabella, and then pulled his personal tablet out of his drawer. He propped it up and set it to record. His thoughts drifted to home and family.
Fifty years ago he had started a custom of daily recording all of his thoughts about her. His career required him to frequently be far from home, and he knew that distance weighed on her just as heavily as it had on himself. But he wanted her to know that there was never a day that she did not fill his heart. And he left these love journals with her each time he journeyed out again.
And now he had plenty of time. And he would have a lot of days to make up for.