Battle Station (33 page)

Nothing happened for several minutes. I didn’t fly too fast, as I didn’t want to shoot in the middle of their swarm and cause them to misinterpret my approach. It would be a shame to have come this far only to have them burn me down at point-blank range.

I couldn’t even see the ships at first, they were so far off. All I could see was the gauzy green world. My God, it was huge! It filled my entire field of vision.

Finally, I reached a range of about a mile from their line. I felt nervous sweat tickle at my skin. I could see them now, dozens of them. They weren’t lined up, but rather were scattered in a shotgun pattern between me and the planet. I slowed and regarded them. No one moved for a few seconds. The oxygen hissed in my helmet, and I cleared my throat. I opened a channel and hailed the ships again.

“Isn’t this close enough?” I asked. “I’m right here guys, come and get me.”

Several more quiet seconds passed. I began to worry. They weren’t even answering. What if I’d somehow triggered a response I didn’t understand? Space was very lonely, especially when facing aliens all alone. And that’s what these ships were—alien. They weren’t even alive, and they certainly didn’t think like a human.

Suddenly, everything changed. I caught a flash of metal off to my left. I swiveled my helmet that way. One of the ships was moving in my direction. I felt relieved, but it was a short-lived sensation.

There was more movement. More reflections of sunlight and greenish radiance from the metal skins of these heartless little ships. They were rushing me, now. All of them. And every one of them had its long, black, serpentine arm out. They were all reaching for me, grasping with those whipping, three-fingered hands. They wanted me, the way a school of sharks wants bloody prey.

I immediately shouted, “Not all at once!” But it did no good. They swarmed me, like piranha. I knew that if several of them got hold of me, they might well pull me apart. Those big black fingers were essentially metal cables. They had incredible strength. I imagined the tug-of-war that might soon begin. I’d seen predators fight over scraps of dying prey before. It never went well for the animal being devoured.

Having less than a second to react, I flew to my left. I accelerated toward the first flash I’d seen. If one of these ships had gone for me first, that one should logically reach me before the others. If I could help it out, I could get aboard before the rest of them ripped off a boot or cracked my helmet.

In the end, I wasn’t sure if I ended up in the grip of the ship I’d seen move first. But I was sure
something
caught me. A jet-black hand whipped down and snatched me up as I scooted under it. The impact was jarring, and I gave a heavy grunt and a curse. An instant later, everything went black except for the LEDs in my helmet. I realized I’d been sucked up into the ship’s maw.

I checked all the readouts, but nothing seemed to be damaged. When the lights came on again outside my suit, I saw a dull glow that came from nowhere in particular. It was soft light, and it was way too familiar.

“Alamo?” I asked.

No one answered. I looked around and saw I was in a familiar cubical chamber. I reached out my gauntleted hand and the nearest wall dissolved. I stepped through, and saw several more cubicles. I knew the routine—but the ship wasn’t following protocol. It wasn’t giving me hints, or a puzzle. It wasn’t talking, either.

I stepped thorough seven small rooms like the first. Each move I made took me closer to the central command chamber, I knew—or at least it should be doing so. I worried that the Nanos had taken on a new software update. If the Blues had built these things, didn’t it stand to reason they could alter their programming at will? For all I knew, I’d just given myself in the hands of a resolute enemy. Maybe a Blue Admiral was down on Eden-12 now, high-fiving it with his fellows at having captured an idiot human without firing a shot. Perhaps the dissection was scheduled to begin at dawn.

Finally, the last door dilated open. I’d been expecting a physical attack all along, but I’d never found anyone to fight with.

“Alamo?” I asked, standing in the plain chamber I knew to be the bridge.

“How do you wish to address us?”

I smiled and heaved a sigh. This sounded like a script I knew. “What was your previous name?” I asked.

“I’ve had many previous designations.”

“Have you ever been called Alamo?”

“Yes.”

I frowned. “Why the hell didn’t you answer to that name, then?”

“I have no current designation.”

“You scared the crap out of me, you crazy witch of a ship. I rename you Alamo. Now, welcome me back.”

“Welcome back, Colonel Kyle Riggs.”

-33-

It was weird, being aboard
Alamo
again. It was like going out with an old girlfriend you haven’t seen in ten years. One who had ripped your heart out more than once in the past, but who still held a special place in your memories.

The first thing I did was affix a translation device to the outer hull. This was easily accomplished. I placed it against the ceiling and allowed
Alamo
to push it through the smart metal until it fused with the outer hull. The emitting part of the device was exposed, while the controlling portion was inside my command chamber. The device was sort of like a car horn, with thick tubing on it. To me, it looked like an exhaust manifold. The unit was supposedly able to create noises as high winds passed through it. A deep howling could be emitted when in a thick atmosphere. There were tubes and valves inside to modulate the noises, which Marvin had assured me Blues could understand if I got close enough to one of them. Attached to the instrument was a brainbox Marvin had educated with the language of the Blues. I was skeptical of the whole thing, but I figured if whales could talk with a similar system, this thing might just work.

I searched the ship briefly, and questioned it.
Alamo
confirmed it had once contained a Crustacean pilot—or victim, as it turned out. As far as I could tell, the creature had died from neglect sitting up here in orbit over Eden-12, alone and cut off from its fellows. I imagined that similarly grim fates awaited any individual who wasn’t in tune with Nano ship tricks.

This same ship had left Earth when it had marked its mission complete. It had then gone to the Crustacean world and kidnapped a number of them. Who knew how many had been tortured and killed within these smart metal walls? I certainly didn’t. Each of the survivors had thought they were the ship’s final master, but they’d all been wrong. The last lobster had been determined to be “obsolete”, just as my own pilots had been, so long ago.

Now that I was officially command personnel again aboard
Alamo
, I ordered the ship to take me down into the atmosphere. The ship did so without an argument. In fact, I didn’t even realize we were moving at first. The ships I’d built on my own had never possessed stabilizers as good as these vessels had. You could hardly tell you were moving when you were aboard a true Nano ship.

By the time I’d set up a crash seat, a bathroom and a forward screen, we were dipping down into the upper atmosphere. I could feel the turbulence starting to knock the ship around. They had to be pretty significant bumps, because they got right through the effects of the stabilizers. I sat in my newly-formed metal chair and stared at the outline of the different atmospheric layers depicted in metallic relief on the forward wall. It was déjà
vu, but I knew it wasn’t the planet Earth the ship was outlining—there was no curve to it at all from this perspective. The planet was so huge, it couldn’t fit on the wall. There was no horizon, almost no perceptible curvature at all.

The other noticeable effect was the increasing gravity. I’d ordered the vessel to allow me to feel the tug of this world. When I exited the ship at some future point, I wanted to know what I was going to experience so I could adjust to it now. If it became too intense, I figured I could always fly back into space.

But after a while, as we went deeper, I began to doubt the truth of this assumption. The ship shivered, and occasionally heeled over when a powerful gust struck us. I squinted when I noticed something else at about twelve hundred miles down.

“Alamo? What is that in the aft bulkhead? A ripple?”

“The stress fracture has been repaired.”

“Stress fracture?”

As I watched in growing concern, the hull seemed to balloon inward. The metal swelled unevenly, and turned a brighter shade of silver. I saw more smart metal flowing across the walls to the sagging spot, trying to shore it up.

“Halt descent!” I shouted. “Reverse course, take us up a hundred miles.”

The engines labored and groaned. A new source of fear crept into my guts. Could this ship do what I was asking of it? What was the escape velocity of this world? At this depth in the atmosphere, I wasn’t sure how much power it would take to fly upward. With around three hundred times the mass of Earth, I knew the gravity well was a vicious thing this near a gas giant.

When we’d pulled up higher in the atmosphere, the indentation in the ceiling faded and smoothed away to a perfect curve again. I wanted to scratch the sweat away from my face, but didn’t dare remove my helmet to do so. I heaved a sigh of relief.

Was this as far down as I could go? I didn’t think that made sense. This ship, if it had originated from this world, should be able to take the natural pressure. In fact, I’d long ago reasoned that several key technologies existed aboard these ships, such as powerful stabilizers, because they had to be able to deal with the harsh environment of their homeworld.

I frowned, and decided to try to talk to the Blues. I sent a variety of messages, howling out into the external winds. Marvin’s system played the noises in the cockpit. To me, they sounded like a cross between a herd of trumpeting elephants and a tornado. Maybe it was sweet music to a Blue—I had no idea.

After half an hour of cruising around at a safe altitude and crooning for Blues, I received no response. I sighed, knowing I was going to have to go deeper down into the soupy atmosphere.

What was really down there? No one knew. We’d had space flight for quite a while back home, and our system had four gas giants, but no one had ever bothered to plumb the depths of one. Astrophysicists generally figured they were gas all the way down, but who really knew? I knew from experience that scientists often took a theory and ran with it. They always scoffed at new ideas, and only embraced them when faced with undeniable truth. They also tended to laugh at the mistaken beliefs of their predecessors just decades past. Since we’d never actually been to a planet of this type and our best instruments only penetrated this type of murky world to a depth of maybe three hundred miles, there were sure to be a few surprises in store. After all, the planet had a radius of nearly forty thousand miles. I was only about a thousand deep now, and I really couldn’t expect the Blues to living be at the very outer upper fringes of the atmosphere. I sincerely hoped they weren’t all the way down at the core, however. Whatever it was that core consisted of.

“Alamo, do you have another configuration? A form suitable for entering high-pressure environments?”

“Yes.”

I smiled. “Of course you do. This was your home once, so you have to be capable of maintaining stable structure at a great depth. Transform into your standard configuration for gas giant atmospheric conditions, please.”

The response was immediate, and non-verbal. The walls began crushing in on me. It was impossible, seeing the compressing volume of space around my helmet, not to feel uncomfortable. My eyes roamed the room, watching as the bubbling surface of nanites thickened and the command module deflated. I became alarmed when I saw the ceiling was less than a foot from my visor. I’d sort of expected it to halt by this time. But it didn’t. It kept going, and if I let it finish, I figured the tuba-like translation device would be shoved directly into my person. I’d soon be wearing it on my battle suit’s chest plate like some kind of obscene corsage.

“Halt transformation! Freeze current configuration.”

The surfaces around me were all uneven, like a limestone cave. I could tell the smart metal was much thicker. It had to be two inches thick or more. I nodded my head inside my helmet, looking around at the walls. I was beginning to understand. This ship had come from very deep inside the planet. Perhaps from a crust of some kind at the core.

“Alamo, is there any command module at all in your fully transformed design?”

“No.”

“Where the hell am I supposed to sit, then?”

“At the point of departure, no biotics were in the command module. It had not yet been deployed.”

“Ah, I see. You were built under great pressure, and designed to fold out when you reached space. Like some kind of giant solar sail.”

“Reference unclear.”

“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. What I want to know is if you can reshape yourself with a small, but effective command module. I need an egg-shaped region of airspace around me—let’s make it about three feet from my person in every direction. That should be enough room for my seat and the translation device.”

At length, I got the ship reconfigured into a tight, coffin shape that had a hull several inches thick. I was certain it could withstand tremendous pressure—but could I? The jury was still out on that point.

I ordered the ship to descend gradually, not wanting to crash into anything. Every five hundred miles, I stopped and made a communications attempt. There was plenty of howling wind out there, but I never heard an intelligible response.

The more I thought about the structure of this world, the more sense the deep-planet theory made. This ship was made of metal, and if it came from this world, there had to be a source of metal somewhere to build it. I decided to ask
Alamo
.

“Does this world have a rocky core?”

There was a slight hesitation. “No.”

I was surprised to get a direct answer. These Nano ships had always been reluctant to reveal any information concerning their origins. I thought perhaps by being here, and asking about the world I was on, rather than the world of its creators, I’d bypassed some of these defenses.