Konrad made for the blank, metal box of the transmission unit at something just short of a run. Reel had left it a few feet from the base of the ramp, standing upright. It was just…sitting there in the dewy grass. A priceless piece of technology, capable of sending messages instantly across the solar system, left out in a field. He patted at his pockets as he came up alongside it. Tools, he needed tools. She’d said she couldn’t leave until she was sure this device was working correctly. If he could disable it, they’d have more time to look at her ship, more time to question her. Maybe even time for her to explain how their computers worked, while she worked to repair it. Assuming that it wasn’t easier for her to just fly back and get another one…

One of the soldiers gave him a doubtful look, noting his discomfort. “Sir?” He said, with the bare minimum of courtesy. They knew his reputation. “What are you doing?”

Konrad found a small flathead screwdriver in his breast pocket. The tapered wooden handle was splintery, and the metal rusted. He couldn’t even remember when he’d put it there. “Do you have any tools, soldier?”

The private blinked at him, uncertain. “Tools, sir? No, we don’t.” A look of cautious suspicion stole over his face. “What do you need, specifically? I can send someone to run and fetch it.”

“I don’t know yet.” Konrad’s fingers brushed something solid in a side pocket, and he found a pair of needle nosed pliers at the bottom. His other pockets came up empty; the rusty screwdriver and the pliers would have to do. He dropped to his knees next to the device, hesitating. Behind him, von Braun and Lusser’s voices drifted out of the open hatch, exclaiming in delight over whatever Reel was showing them. It wasn’t too late to abandon this, go see what the other two were seeing. But he’d come this far already…

He had no idea where to begin. The device was boxy, about three times as tall as it was wide, and made of what he thought might be steel. There were no dials, no buttons, and no controls at all that he could detect. There was a panel inset into the top third of one face, slick like glass. An interface, maybe? Like what she had used to test the schnapps? He prodded at it hopefully, but to no effect. Setting the screwdriver and the pliers in the grass by his knee, he ran his hands over the sides, squinting in the dark. The surface was smooth, and cold to the touch. He could find no hint of bolts, or screws, or even a seam where two pieces of metal might join. He scraped at it with his fingernails in mounting frustration. It couldn’t be impossible to open; how would they have built it in the first place?

One of his nails caught on something, some line in the metal. It was so shallow it might have only been a scratch, and he had to run his hands over the spot twice more to find it again. It ran straight up and down, too precise to be anything but deliberate. It turned at a right angle, forming a rectangle about halfway up the device. That had to be, he decided, an access panel of some kind, but it was utterly featureless. There was no latch or clasp, no hinges. He pushed at the groove with the screwdriver, but the tip was too blunt to get into that hairline gap.

He turned where he knelt to look up at the soldiers standing guard. “Give me your knife.” He whispered urgently.

The guards traded dubious looks, and neither of them moved to help him. “Perhaps we should wait for Doctor von Bruan.” The shorter of the two said slowly, touching the sheathed knife at his belt as though to assure himself it was still there. He squinted at the device, his baggy eyes full of wariness. “Who knows what could happen if we go prodding at that thing?” His companion nodded, shuffling a few inches further away from Konrad and the device.

“Whose orders do you think I’m following?” Konrad’s voice shook over the lie, quavery and unconvincing. He swallowed hard and went on. “We don’t have time to dawdle doing this, soldier.” That part was true, and it came more easily. The soldier wrinkled his pug nose, but relented, drawing the knife out of its sheath. He flipped it casually, catching it by the blade, and offered it to Konrad.

Konrad took it, fumbling to find the right way to grip it. “Thank you,” he said, hefting the weapon. It was heavier than it looked, a half a foot of dark, razor-edged steel ending in a stubby cross guard, and stamped with the ubiquitous swastika. Worn leather wrapped tight over the grip, ending in a small, rounded pommel. It glittered in the reflected spotlights, sharp and murderous, the tip a needlepoint. At the barest pressure, it slipped a half inch deep into the groove, widening the gap.

He reached down, groping for the screwdriver, and wedged that into the opening a few inches further down from the point of the knife blade. Pushing on the knife, he succeeded in levering the opening further apart and felt something give way with a soft resistance, like pulling two magnets apart.

The panel fell away, dropping out of the side of the device. He snatched at it, his hands still full of tools, and missed. It slipped past him and tipped onto the grass with a heavy, muffled thump.

He froze, but the sounds of wonder continued unabated from the open hatch of the ship. Lusser and von Braun were peppering Reel with questions, and she seemed happy to chatter away with them. None of them gave any sign that they were coming back out. Konrad leaned away from the opening, trying to let a little reflected light in so that he could see what he was working with.

Three funnel structures sat stacked on top of each other, pointing up. Resting in the bowl of the topmost funnel was a huge torus of crystal, clear as water, and glowing with a faint, inner light. He hoped it wasn’t radioactive. Wires, or perhaps thin tubes, spiraled inside the crystal itself, as though it had grown around them. At the base of the bottom funnel, a hundred metal plates as thin as paper protruded all the way around like an inverted fan. A single thin tube ran between those plates, snaking over one and under the next. The tube led down to a set of cylinders, stacked next to each other around the base of the whole structure. And all around the inner walls of the device, lines of gold and silver traced over each other in tracks so fine that they might not have been there at all. Thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands of them, running parallel, turning, crossing, meeting in large clusters and then splitting off again in dizzying arrays.

He had no idea what any of it was. One of the soldiers cursed quietly under his breath, and he heard them both take a step back. “Doctor Hollenbach…” The pug nosed one said. “Is this safe?”

How much power would it take to send a message to the asteroid belt and back? He felt faintly lightheaded. “Definitely.” He lied, and heard the men take another shuffling step away from him.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

A rising sense of worry clogged his throat. He’d had some vague, half-formed notion that he’d remove a couple of pieces from the device, but there didn’t seem to be anything small that he could remove. Worse still, he couldn’t see how he might even begin to attack the device without utterly destroying it. The inside of the machine had the same number of screws and bolts as the outside, which was to say none.

Behind him he heard Lusser loudly asking about what Reel did for food. He stumbled over the question as he asked it, as though he was just blurting out the first thing to come to his mind. The tone brought a prickle of sweat to Konrad’s forehead; he was running out of time.

What could he safely touch? Not the crystal, that would be too obvious, and possibly lethal. The most mundane thing was the tubing, protruding where it met the cylinders. Short sections led from each cylinder to the one next to it, in series. He tugged at the closest one, and thought he felt it move a little.

Reaching in with the pliers, he took a firm grip on the tube and tried to twist it. Counterclockwise it resisted him, but clockwise it spun freely. He twisted the pliers around and around. He could have sworn that the tube was shifting, driving deeper into the cylinder on the left and coming free of the cylinder on the right. After two full rotations, it caught and held fast. He tugged at it gingerly, but it refused to move.

Konrad hissed a low breath between his teeth, frustrated. He put his whole head into the panel, and saw that the tube had come mostly free of a flared base, revealing a thin gap in its fitting. Taking up the knife again, Konrad worked it into the opening, twisting the blade to try to free it..

It abruptly slipped loose at the first touch of the knife with a spray of black liquid. He fell back with a smothered cry, trying to keep away from the unknown substance. It splashed into the base of the device, and to his shock, turned to a thick vapor that vanished just as quickly into thin air. From the ship, the sound of voices grew louder as von Braun, Lusser, and Reel drew near the hatch.

Panic overwhelmed good sense. He had to fix this, and fix it fast. If they saw the device like this, he’d be lucky if all von Braun did was kill him. The tube was still attached to the left-hand cylinder, protruding like a stubby twig on a thicker branch. He grabbed for it, bracing as he reached into the unknown chemical spray and it poured over his hand.

It felt…It didn’t feel like anything, really. He couldn’t even feel it hitting his skin, hell, it passed right through his arm and out the other side. It fell through the metal casing just as easily, like a ghost. He caught hold of the tube and jammed it back into place. The spray of black liquid flared, as though he’d stuck his thumb in a faucet. He twisted feverishly at the tube, lining it up with the fitting. One twist and the spray faded to a trickle. Another and it became a drip. One final twist sealed the breach, and the liquid left behind in the bottom of the device’s case puffed away to vapor and vanished.

The voices were so loud in his ears that he thought they must be right on top of him. He snatched up the tools and the knife, dumping them into his pockets. The panel was still in the grass; he grabbed at it, heaving it up. Straining under its weight, he grunted with exertion as he wrestled it into place. It slid out of his hands with the same magnetic pulling sensation, drawn with unnatural smoothness into its moorings.

He stepped back away just as Lusser led the way back down the ramp. He was almost shouting. “…Can’t begin to tell you how grateful we are for the opportunity to see the magnificent work your people do–” He saw Konrad standing away from the transmission device and dropped his voice to a more normal level, tinged with relief. “I’m sure our own engineers would be thrilled to learn from your expertise.”

Reel followed him out. “Ah…Yes, of course. And I from them.” She answered, sounding like she was very pleased and didn’t want it to show.

Von Braun came down last, and he cast a wistful glance over his shoulder as he descended. “We will have to develop some sort of exchange program, I think. On that note, will you show us how this device works?”

Reel sighed. “I suppose I’d better. My Captain is already mad that I’ve delayed so long.” She stepped up to the front of the box, to the face with the inset panel. “I’ll activate it so that you can operate it through the screen, and we’ll test it to make sure it’s working.” She passed a hand over the glass panel in a swiping motion, and it came alight with symbols. It was exactly as Konrad had thought, an interface screen like the one on her chemical testing kit. The glow lit her face from below, as she clattered at it with all eight of her claws, as fast as any human secretary at a typewriter. The screen cleared, the symbols flashing away, and two large circles appeared on it. One was green, the other red.

She pointed at them. “I’ve put it on standby mode to save power. To communicate with the ship, tap the green circle to open a link. When you’re done, tap the red circle to turn it off and save power.”

Von Braun circled closer to the device, reaching out to run a finger over the top of the screen. “Does it run on a battery? How long will it last?”

“It does! Here, I’ll show you.” She said happily, reaching down and pushing on the access panel that Konrad had pried open minutes before. The damn thing clicked in, and then fell back away on the grass again without the faintest hint of resistance. From behind, Konrad heard one of the soldiers dissolve into a fit of coughing that sounded a lot like anxious laughter.

Reel pointed to a thin circle of metal attached to the base. “This is the battery—it should be good for several months of normal usage, but I’ll leave you with an extra one just in case.” She picked the heavy panel back up with a single hand, pushing it back into place with another click. Straightening, she tapped the green circle, and said something in her own language into the empty air.

The circle pulsed faintly on the screen, and she pointed at it. “That means that it’s establishing the connection. When the link is stable, it will show the signal strength up top here.” As she gestured to the spot, two pale white dots flickered to life, as if on cue.

A deeper voice came at once from the machine, gravelly and more masculine. “This is Captain Arcturus of the Old Bug.” It said, slow and formal. “We are honored to meet you, and look forward to establishing a mutually beneficial trade relationship.” The words had a stiff, practiced feel to them, and Konrad’s heart fell through the soles of his feet. He’d failed to affect the machine at all.

Von Braun leaned down to put his head close to the screen. “This is Doctor Wernher von Braun, Technical Director of the Peenemunde Army Research Center. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance as well.” The formality fell away from his voice as he grinned from ear to ear. “I have a million questions for you. I can’t begin to tell you how exciting this is for all of us, and I’m sure it must be the same for you.” He fell silent, waiting for a response.

A long moment of silence passed, and then another. Reel cocked her head and said something puzzled in her own language. She tapped at the screen, perplexed, and then kicked the side of the box in obvious frustration. The silence stretched even further, until she turned to them, seeming embarrassed.

“They’re not receiving us. Something’s wrong with the relay.”