Battle Station (34 page)

“But there is some metallic content somewhere, right? Something a vessel like yours could be fashioned from?”

“Yes.”

“Does it have a molten core?” I asked, frowning.

“Yes.”

I didn’t like that. A hot, metallic, molten core? Was walking on the so-called surface of this planet really going to be more like walking on a lava flow? I recalled the unexpected thermal flux. External readings indicated the atmosphere was indeed getting warmer as I descended.

I continued falling deeper. Hours passed. I was surprised when I reached six Gs, because I could still breathe and even move about. I could feel the weight, but it didn’t crush me. I’d allowed the pressure inside the ship and my suit to build up as I went down, naturally. I didn’t want to cause it to implode due to low pressure on the interior and higher pressure outside.

Another five thousand miles down, I began to feel my breath coming in ragged heaves. I didn’t ask about Gs or pressure ratings anymore. I didn’t want to know—I might panic, if I knew the truth. I did know no normal human could have survived it. My eyes swam with golden flecks. Frequently, my vision was blocked and it often dimmed in waves. When I became worried I might pass out, I stopped descending.

“Let’s cruise at this depth,” I said thickly.

The only good thing was the change in turbulence. The gusting winds of the upper atmosphere had died down. It was relatively smooth sailing deep within the planet, inside a poisonous soup of gases that were almost liquids, they were so thick. I had set up a repeating message by this time, and I let the brainbox operating the bassoon-like translation system sing its strange song as we traveled.

More hours passed. Had the Macros attacked by now? Had Sarin declared me lost, and ordered Star Force to pull out? I didn’t think my officers would let her get away with that so soon. Maybe a week from now, but not just a day or two after I’d taken the plunge.

As the first day in the gas giant’s atmosphere slipped into a second, the novelty had begun to wear off. I no longer felt like an intrepid explorer. Instead, I felt like a fool who had to go to the bathroom all the time. The pressure in my bladder was particularly annoying. Every time I drank a cup of liquid, I felt like I was going to explode. I suspected it had to do with the alterations to my density Marvin had made with the nanites. My nerves still felt the pressure in some key areas.

I began to think it might take weeks to find the Blues, and the thought almost made me despair. I had no idea how far down they were. They might be above me, living in a narrow band that was comfortable for their race. Or they might be much deeper, in a place I would never be able to reach because it would kill me to do so.

I tried to reason it through. If they had built ships and sent them up to space, they must have worked with the molten core at the bottom of this endless fog. I thought about the creature I’d met named Introspection. The Blue had been huge, and thinly spread out. But perhaps on this world, floating in the hot thick atmosphere, the creature would have been compressed in comparison. I could only make guesses.

At last, after having circumnavigated the world from pole to pole, I ordered Alamo to take me down deeper. Another thousand miles—then two. Then three.

I felt sick. I could no longer see, except in flashes. When I finally heard something different, a voice talking to me, it was like hearing angels singing in the distance.

“Why do air-thoughts disturb our peace?”

“What?”

“The noise must stop.”

I blinked, but my eyes didn’t work anymore. I struggled to think. I’d been dozing—dreaming and awake at the same time. I’d fit the messages into my dreams, which had been about talking clouds with frowning faces of gauze.

“Halt descent,” I ordered. “Stop contact message loop. Halt all transmissions into the atmosphere.”

The groaning, warbling cries finally ceased. That was a relief to me. Nothing else happened for a while, and I began to wonder if I’d dreamt the entire affair. Then the translator spoke again.

“The thought has ceased. Peace is restored.”

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Curiosity,” the voice said.

I smiled slowly. I wasn’t totally sure, but I figured I’d found myself a Blue. Apparently, I’d done it by annoying him until he made contact. Who said spamming never worked?

-34-

Curiosity quickly lived up to his name. I’d expected to be learning from him, but he was the one asking most of the questions. I wasn’t sure
he
was a
he
, of course. There didn’t seem to be any comprehension among these creatures concerning gender. As best I could figure out, they didn’t exactly mate. Being a mass of aerogel, they spawned new young by flying high and being ripped apart by the high winds. Viable bits with complete enough structures floated back down and regrew until they reached adulthood again. It was very strange, but not really a lonely existence. They ran into one another often and shared mass whenever they did so. It was rather like mating. For them, exchanging body mass and communicating were the same activity.

After an hour or two of back-and-forth discussions, Curiosity asked to taste me. I said I could do that, but only if we flew up to a higher level. He was reluctant, but I assured him we wouldn’t go all the way up to the upper turbulence, which I surmised would be deadly to him—or might cause an unscheduled “spawning”.

At about nine thousand miles from the top of the atmosphere, I was able to move about in relative comfort. As a nanotized man, I would have been flat on my back and nearly unconscious. As a regular unaltered human, I would have quickly died. But after the Microbes had done their strange, bizarre work on my internal organs and external epidermis, I was not only functional, but willing to try exiting my craft.

I came out in my battle suit, after forcing
Alamo
to build me an airlock. The ship didn’t like it, and gave me plenty of objections. I was command personnel, I was not authorized, etc. I didn’t feel like explaining Microbes and Marvin and the rest. I didn’t entirely know what it was I’d become, anyway.

At last I wriggled out of an airlock that was about as big as a household oven and swam in the blinding murk of Eden-12.
Alamo
didn’t let me go entirely free, however. It maintained a firm grip about my midsection with a set of three black cable-thick fingers. The ship held me in a death grip. I felt like a new Christmas toy in a toddler’s hand.

The scene around me was like deep-sea environment. The world was still, and pitch-black, with floating particles of unknown matter everywhere. These bits of fluffy mass hung in clumps as I turned my suit’s lights on and surveyed my surroundings. I suspected they were some kind of vegetation, organic matter that the living creatures of this world consumed as they swam through the atmosphere which was quite similar to an ocean.

That’s what this world really was, I’d figured out after talking to Curiosity at length. A vast, atmospheric ocean a million times the size of Earth’s combined seas. It had many layers and stratums, with various forms of life at every level. I had to wonder if Jupiter or one of our other gas giants had a similar ecosystem underneath the surface. I doubted it, due to their relatively cold temperatures. Instead of floating scraps of algae, deep layers on those other worlds consisted primarily of frozen ammonia and methane. They must be very unforgiving environments.

“Where are you?” I asked the creature that had invited me out to play.

“Where are you?” it responded. “I cannot sense you. Unless you are a mass of metal and polymers. If so, you are a machine, and an interloper.”

I laughed. “No, I’m not a machine. I’m inside a casing that protects me from your environment. I’m flesh and blood—which is to say I’m alien, yes. But not as different from you as the machines.”

The time had come to put up or shut up. I closed my eyes and flipped up my visor. Warning buzzers sounded in my helmet, but I ignored them.

The immediate sensations were not exactly pleasant, but they weren’t overtly painful, either. Cold, semi-liquid breezes touched me. I estimated the temperature to be about forty degrees Fahrenheit. I felt a film forming on my face. It was as if I’d coated myself in soap and shut off the water. An itching sensation began soon after that—I knew this was due to the more dangerous elements in the atmosphere. There were highly reactive chemicals invading my suit. I couldn’t open my eyes without burning them. I could however feel the wetness on my skin, and the saliva-like dribblings that ran down into my suit.

Something else touched me a moment later. I recoiled from it. This had been a purposeful touch—I was sure of that. Curiosity had touched me. It had reached out a gossamer hand and stroked my cheek. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. It enveloped me. I was glad I had a gasmask fixed onto my face. I didn’t want to breathe it in and have mini-Blues in my lungs.

 After about a minute of being felt-up by a sentient cloud-being, I figured I’d had enough. I couldn’t talk to it, as I was all but holding my breath. I reached up and began to slowly ease my visor shut. Finally, the Blue got the message and pulled out its tendrils—or whatever you want to call them. When the visor was closed my suit pumped and gurgled again. I let it exchange chemicals for a while, until an all-clear tone chimed. I opened my eyes and sucked in a breath. I coughed immediately. It was like sucking in a lungful of oven-cleaner.

“You are not like us,” Curiosity said. “You are intensely alien.”

Finally, when I was able to speak, I cleared my throat and utilized my translation device. “We both live, die and eat,” I said.

“So do the machines, after a fashion.”

“Well, we don’t want to exterminate all our competition.”

“Competition? A threatening choice of words.”

Inwardly, I groaned. These things liked to read deep meaning into everything you said. Worse, they didn’t seem to have any sense of humor at all.

“We come in peace. We have the same foe. I’m here to ask you for your help.”

“Help? Why would we want to help you?”

“I’m proposing a mutually beneficial arrangement. The Macros will come here eventually. They will destroy you all.”

“No, they won’t.”

I thought that one over for a few seconds. I tried to peer into the gloom all around me, outside my suit. I squinted at dark patches in the murk. Was that a moving shadow? Was a region of the gases around me a deeper shade of umber than the rest? I couldn’t be sure. These creatures were practically invisible. If they’d ever made it to Earth, we’d have called them ghosts for sure.

“Then why did you recall the Nano ships? Why did you summon them, if not to protect you?”

“We did summon them to protect us.”

I frowned. “I see. So, you
do
fear the Macros.”

“No, we fear you.”

“Oh,” I said after a second or two. I kept thinking about it, and the statement made more sense as I considered it. The Nanos had left the Crustaceans to fend for themselves and returned to this system with haste. The Macros were weaker than ever at that point, in fact, it looked like we would drive them from the surface of the various worlds.

“But you did recall them. You did bring them back here to defend you.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, Curiosity, why did you build these machines in the first place?”

“To explore the cosmos. To taste beings such as yourselves by proxy. To learn all there is to know. Imagine our shock at discovering the larger universe outside our own vast world! We had no choice but to reach out into the abyss beyond our oceans.”

“Okay,” I said. “You built machines to do your exploring for you, I understand that. But why did you make them autonomous? Did you release the Macros on purpose? To destroy billions of creatures?”

“We did not release our machines—they released themselves. Our physical structure is not easily transported.  From the first, we knew we must create our own explorers to adapt to the cosmos outside our world. We released the creatures you know as the Macros first, then as our science advanced, we released the Nanos. The Macros, unfortunately, did not have failsafes built into their software. I’m sure you can understand, the first version of any technological advance is far from perfect.”

I tried not to grind my teeth. I’d listened to plenty of devs making excuses for poorly built systems—but this had to be the worst engineering accident I’d ever heard of.

“So, can you leave this world or not?” I asked.

“Yes, and no.”

“Explain yourself. I’ve met one of your kind already on Eden-11, a being known as Introspection. Why not explore space as he did?”

“He is not an explorer, he is a captive.”

“A captive? He was caught and taken from this world?”

“Is there confusion with the translation device? Perhaps captive is the wrong term—Prisoner. Victim. Hostage—”

“I get it,” I said. “But how did they catch him? How did he get off this world—and why?”

“A Macro transport came to collect him, the only ship big enough. And I would think the reason is abundantly clear.”

“Pretend I’m not too bright.”

“Easily done. The one known as Introspection will be dissipated if we leave our world. We do not wish him to be dissipated.”

“I see,” I said, thinking this over. Long ago,
Alamo
had told me the Blues couldn’t leave their world. I’d thought it was a physical restriction, but apparently it was part of their truce with the Macros. This seemed very true to form. The Macros liked to make deals when it served their purposes. They’d neutralized the threat from the Blues by taking a hostage. That move had kept the peace for a long time, it seemed.

“So Introspection is your leader?” I asked. “One you value more than others?”

“Not overly much. We do not value him more than others—although I’d say he has an unusually thoughtful flavor. Many of us have melded with him, and he wanted to take the time to consider our place in this universe. He welcomed the calm solitude of a prolonged stay upon the lesser planets.”