Stepping Stones (28 page)

But where?

Using the torch,
I cut a hole through one of
the circular portals.  By then the torch
charge was running low, and toward the end I had to nurse it.  Fortunately the metal wasn’t as thick as the hull’s, and we made it through.  An oval passageway lay
on the other side.  Its walls felt
strangely pliant,
almost
as though
it were
composed of living tissue.  A pair of oval tubes lined the tunnel, and we used them
as handrails
to propel ourselves
down the tube
.  As we
drifted down the tunnel
, we noticed smaller shafts br
anching laterally into the ship
.  Not wanting to get lost, we continued without exploring any of these, traveling about six hundred meters before the passageway
we were in abruptly came to a dead end
.

Forced to retreat, we tried
carefully
investigating one of the
branching
side
tunnels on our way back.  Despite the antenna
we had
placed on the outer hull, upon leaving the main shaft we lost contact with the
Magellan.
  Until then
we had
been in
voice
communi
cation with Stringer and Julie.  Losing that link
was disconcerting.  Nonetheless, time was growing short, so instead of turning back we flipped on our suit recorders and kept going.

The
deeper
we wormed our way into the ancient ship, the more I began to feel trapped.  The claustrophobic shaft we’d entered had a
slight
curve to it, with irregularities and constrictions that
once more
reminded me of living flesh.  I couldn’t shake the feeling
that we were exploring some dark,
alien hive
.

After
we had
covered about thirty meters, we came to a
nother
round portal—large enough for a man to pass
through
if it hadn’t been blocked by a transparent
,
rubbery sheet.  In the combined light of our beams, Cruz and I could make out another corridor on the other side. 
I wished I still had some charge left on the torch.  Using our suit claws, w
e tried to tear our way through the
transparent
barrier, but couldn’t.

We counted fourteen similar portals before the secondary tunnel ended. 
After returning to the main shaft, we tried another
lateral tunnel.  That one
terminated
after only two portals.  On our third
tunnel attempt,
we counted forty-eight portals before we ran out of tunnel.  By then we were getting low on air and decided to head back.

Hoping to learn something that might prove useful on our next trip over, we shined our lights through every
branching tunnel
on
our
way out.  Halfway to the hanger bay I noticed something different about one.  It was
located
all by itself, separated from the others by a stretch of blank wall on either side.  I peered through the transparent barrier
covering the opening, just able to make out an
open space beyond.  At that point Cruz and I had been crawling through the alien ship for the better part of an hour, and this was the most promising thing
we had
encountered
.

I called Cruz back, and together we tried to break through
the barrier
.  As before, the rubbery sheet covering the opening pr
oved to be surprisingly tough, but
Cruz accidentally discovered a way in.  In frustration, he poked his suit claw into the
exact center of the portal.  To
our amazement a small hole appeared, dilating like the iris of an eye.  With help from us it eventually snapped all the way open, receding to a thick band rimming the
entrance
.

Shining our lights ahead of us, we proceeded through, finding
ourselves in a dome-shaped room, with b
anks of equipme
nt filling one entire wall.  Another
wall
was
covered with what
appeared
to be a gigantic viewscreen.  And there was something else
in the chamber
—hundreds of them, floating eerily in the beams of our lights.

We had
found the crew . . . or what was left of them.

The reptilian creatures
who had
piloted the ship were larger than a man, with ovoid heads and two sets of compound eyes above and below what we later decided were probably mouths.  Tentaclelike appendages sprouted from either side of their leathery torsos, with powerful legs, each jointed at the origin and again at a knee, terminating in three-toed feet.

“What do you make of this?” asked Cruz, examining one of the vacuum-bloated bodies.

Unlike most of the other frozen corpses, the figure in Cruz’s light was enclosed in what looked like an EV suit.  I could see the alien’s frost-covered eyes
glittering
behind the faceplate.  I played my beam around the chamber, discovering others in similar
protective clothing
.  “Looks like some of them suited up at the end,” I ventured, wondering why
they had
needed
EV
gear
inside
their ship.

“Time to go, Mac.  My air’s getting low.”

“Right.”  But as I turned, something
else
caught my eye. 
Against a far wall, the control panel of an
equipment console had been pried open, revealing a multicolored matrix of wires and circuits.  Several components appeared to have been torn out
as well
, and a number of cables
lay
severed in their harnesses.
Puzzled
,
I panned
my helmet camera around the ruined electronics, hoping it would pick up something I wasn’t
seeing
.

“C’mon, Mac.  I’m down to reserve.”

I checked my gauge.  I was in the red, too.  “Right,” I said.  “Let’s go.”

Taking shallow breaths to preserve air, we returned to the
main shaft.  When we got there
I heard Stringer’s
frantic
voice crackling in my helmet.  “Cruz, McGuire, come in!”

“We’re here, Skipper,” Cruz answered.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Sorry.  We lost you when we explored one of the lateral shafts,” I replied.  “We kept our suit recorders
on
, though.  Wait’ll you see what we found.”

“It’ll have to wait.  Get back
here now,” Stringer ordered.  “I don’t know how, but w
e’re receiving a transmission from the
smaller
ship.”

Cruz and I had nearly sucked our tanks dry by the time we
made it back
to the
Magellan
.  After stripping off our suits, we joined Stringer and Julie in the computer bay.  Stringer
glanced
up from the signal analyzer when we arrived.  “Look at this,” he said.  “It’s been coming in from the smaller vessel for the past half hour.”

I
handed
Julie the recorder spools from our suits, then inspected the
subspace transmission
displayed in the
analyzer
screen. 
The signal we were receiving from the smaller vessel was a high
frequency, multichannel transmission coming in on an extremely tight beam.  No doubt about it—it was meant for us.

“What is it?” Stringer
asked
.

“I can’t be sure,” I answered.  “If I had to guess,
I’d
say it’s some sort of data feed.”

“Put it through
to
Carla.  See what she makes of it,” suggested Julie.

I glanced at Stringer.  “Go ahead,” he said.

I patched the signal
through to Carla
.  Nothing happened at first.  Then the signal
abruptly
went wild, increasing in intensity, bandwidth, and modulation.

“Carla, what’s happening?” I asked.

She didn’t respond.

Something was wrong.  I
severed the connection.

B
y then it
was
too late.

With a sinking feeling, I noted that Carla was still receiving the signal over the communication net.  Then she began transmitting back.  “Carla, terminate all contact with the alien vessel,” I ordered.

“Unable to comply,” she replied.

Julie, Stringer, and Cruz were staring at me, waiting fo
r me to do something. 
I couldn’t. 
Our
communication net was an integral part of Carla, and she, of it. 
There was no way to separate the two. 
Helplessly, I watched as the signal from the alien craft began to change again.

And again, Carla responded.

Long minutes passed
.  Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over.

“Carla?” I said.

Nothing.

Hours later Ca
rla came back on
line.  For some reason her voice mode was inoperable, but at least she could print her responses on the
view
screen.  Fearing the worst, I had her run
an
entire diagnostic protocol
on herself
.  Excepting
for
her loss of audio, everything tested normal.

Next I asked her what had happened while she’d been linked to the alien vessel.

“My memory was accessed,” came her response, flashing up on the screen in neat block letters.

“All of it?” I whispered, shocked at the thought of her unthinkably huge data banks having been accessed that
quickly
.
 
“Did you get any information from whatever
it was that
contacted you?”

“The entity tha
t merged with me bid me welcome.  It
told me
that
I was no longer alone.”

Entity? 
Merged?

Something was definitely wrong. 
We couldn’t afford to have Carla damaged; without her the
Magellan
couldn’t function.  Yet despite her audio loss, according to the diagnostic tests she was still fully operational.  Nonetheless, I continued
to monitor
her, and over the next several hours I became increasingly concerned.  It wasn’t anything major, just little glitches—taking an extra second to respond, for example.  And spelling.  Inexplicably, she began transposing letters, occasionally even substituting a wrong
letter
entirely.

It may not seem like much.  But
for an Omni 4000,
it was.

I tried to rerun the diagnostic program.  This time I couldn’t get it to initialize.  Then Carla disconnected herself
from the access terminal, and n
othing I could do would make her accept further input.

I called an emergency meeting.  Stringer and Cruz were preparing for another EVA trip to the large
r vessel. 
I caught them before they l
eft.  We all met on the bridge. 
I laid out the situation without beating around the bush.  Cruz took it the hardest.  “What happened?” he
asked
.  “I thought Carla was all right.”

“I did, too,” I said.  “I was wrong.”

“That’s the understatement of the century,” he
muttered
, spinning his coffee mug on the table in tight angry circles.

“What about life support?” Julie asked.

“Air, waste recycling, heat, and lights are all functioning normally.”

“So everything’s peachy—except we can’t move, navigate, or send a message for help,” Cruz
said angrily
.

Though reluctant to admit it, I knew he was right.  Unless I could get Carla ba
ck on
line, things looked grim.  “I’ll keep working on it,” I said.  “Worst case scenario, the research ship is on the way.”

“That could take weeks!”
snapped
Cruz, beginning to lose it.
“If life support fails, what are
we supposed to do in the meantime?”

“Keep your shirt on,”
said
Stringer.  “This isn’t McGuire’s fault.  The environmentals are still operational, at least for the moment.  We’ll
go on as usual until the Omni is back on
line
,
or
until
the research ship arrives.”