Alien hostiles, p.10
Alien Hostiles, page 10
“Not life as we know it,” Dr. Brody said.
“Exactly.”
“Are . . . are they intelligent?” Commander Wheaton wanted to know.
“Probably,” Dr. Vanover told him. “An emergent intelligence, perhaps. The individuals are not, but a few trillion of them working together . . .”
“Same as with us,” McClure pointed out. “Our bodies are made up of a hundred trillion cells. No one cell is intelligent on its own, but all of them functioning in a group and we have . . . us.”
“What happened to Kellerman . . . was that a deliberate attack?” Groton wanted to know.
“I think,” Hunter said slowly, “that was an accident.” He glanced at Norton. “We didn’t know what we were doing.”
“‘We?’” Groton asked.
“It was my fault,” Norton said. He sounded miserable. “Commander Hunter tried to warn me off.”
“I’ve seen what can happen when a pressure seal fails at depth,” Hunter went on. “The environment on our side of that hatch was around . . . what? One point two atmospheres?”
“Close enough,” Brody said.
“But the pressure on the other side must have been hundreds, even thousands of times that.”
“We’ve made some estimates,” Vanover said, nodding. “We think it was seawater on the other side, and that the pressure was equivalent to twenty thousand meters on Earth. Well . . . actually, there’s no place on Earth where the ocean is that deep. Maybe way down inside the planetary crust. The water pressure, we think, was in excess of two and a half tons just over the area of that drill hole. Have any of you seen a water jet cutter?”
Several heads around the table nodded.
“I once saw a demonstration of one,” Wheaton said. “A jet of water at sixty thousand psi sliced through an anvil just like butter.”
“Now imagine that being turned on a man in SAS armor,” Vanover said. “Poor Kellerman didn’t stand a chance.”
“Which still leaves the question,” Groton said. “Why was that kind of pressure on the other side of the hatch?”
“The atmospheric composition on the near side,” Brody said, “may offer a clue. That gas mix sounds very much like the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon. One of the best possibilities for alien life inside our own solar system would be Titan’s surface. It’s cold. Ethane and methane form rain and standing liquid on the surface, while ice, water ice takes the place of bedrock, okay? There could be alien life on the surface.
“But there’s also evidence of a water ocean deep beneath the surface, maybe fifty to eighty kilometers down . . . and that ocean is deep—120 miles, we think. The Challenger Deep on Earth, the deepest spot in the ocean, is only about seven miles deep. The pressures at the bottom are insane.
“But where there’s water, there might be life. We’re thinking that whatever is behind that hatch evolved ten or twelve miles down. Life, intelligent life, evolved in conditions alien to anything on Earth.”
“So what about these biots of Dr. McClure’s?” Groton said. “Or the things they molded themselves into?”
“Couple of possibilities,” Vanover told him. “Abyssal life-forms, life evolving at extreme depths in a global ocean, would be hard-pressed to develop a technological civilization. No fire. That means no metal smelting, no electronics . . . and with an ice ceiling miles thick, they would think that their ocean was the entire universe. They would never be able to see the stars.”
“So how did these guys capture an asteroid and turn it into a starship?” Hunter asked.
“Great question. And the answer is . . . we don’t know. Maybe they developed high-pressure chemistries unlike anything we’ve even dreamed of. Or they were helped by some other species, one with extremely high technical skills. Or they followed a purely biological route, creating life-forms in the depths that were immune to the pressure and could do their exploring for them.”
“The biots?” Wheaton asked as he tried to piece all the information together.
“The biots might be the Oumuamuans’ means for exploring other environments. Biots that tiny won’t have the same problems with pressure that something as big as a human would experience. Maybe the larger creatures are like remote bodies for the Oumuamuans.” Vanover shrugged. “Or, hell, maybe the biots and the larger creatures are the Oumuamuans. Or the Oumuamuans are some sort of evolved AI, a machine intelligence, but one way different than anything we could understand. We just don’t know. We’re literally shooting in the dark here.”
“Speaking of the dark,” Hunter said, “how were those things even seeing us? A life-form that evolves under fifty miles of solid ice is never going to see the sun, much less stars.”
“Dr. Tyler was detecting powerful electromagnetic fields,” McClure pointed out. “They might have an electrical sense, something like sharks and rays, bees, platypuses, and some other animals have on Earth. Those stiff hairs might detect vibrations in the medium around them. And there might be light at those depths. Think about deep-sea fish on Earth, with their bioluminescence.”
“I didn’t see any eyes,” Norton said.
“No,” McClure said. She spread her hands. “And we simply don’t have any answers at this point. All we can say for certain is that the Oumuamuans are extremely alien, not life as we know it at all. Their senses will be quite alien as well, and may reveal the world around them in ways that we can never understand.”
“Can we take that picture of a giant tick down?” Hunter said.
“Of course,” McClure said. “Sorry . . .”
The monitor again showed a panorama of star-clotted space, the Sun tiny in the distance.
“Wait a sec,” Groton said. “Where the hell is Oumuamua?”
The asteroid was gone.
“What the hell?” Brody said.
“Bridge,” Groton said, speaking into the table’s built-in intercom. “What’s going on with the asteroid?”
“Sir!” Commander Haines sounded confused. “Uh . . . yessir! It just disappeared?”
“What? When?”
“Just now, sir. Maybe ten seconds ago. One moment it was there, and the next—”
“Are you tracking it?”
“No, sir. It’s off all our instruments . . . radar . . . everything!”
“So,” Vanover said softly. “They can travel faster when they want to.”
“Digs up a big bucket of worms, though,” Hunter said, his voice a low murmur. “Why’d they bother with coming in like a rock? Deception?”
“Could be . . .”
Groton was still talking with the bridge. “Bill, have the sensor department scour the sky! I want that thing found!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“And give me a video feed of what went down here in Briefing One. I want to see what happened.”
A moment later, Oumuamua reappeared on the briefing room monitor, serene and seemingly as motionless as before.
And then it was gone.
“Did anyone see movement there?” Groton asked. “Did it move? Or did it just wink out?”
“Try looking at it frame by frame,” Wheaton suggested.
Advancing the video a frame at a time showed nothing. One frame it was there . . . and the next it had vanished.
“Hard to tell,” Janet Tyler said. “It might have zipped off at the speed of light, instantaneously. Too fast for the human eye—or the cameras—to see it go. But it looks like it might somehow have taken a shortcut past space.”
“Either way,” Wheaton said, “that technology is way beyond anything we have.”
“Which begs the question,” Hunter observed, “why were they slow-boating it through the solar system?”
“Pretending to be a rock,” Vanover said. “That’s . . . worrisome.”
“I suggest, Captain,” Hunter said, “that you message Earth and give them all the details. You also warn them to be on the lookout for more visitors like this. This incursion looks to me like a scouting expedition, maybe in advance of something much, much bigger.”
“An invasion?”
“Maybe.”
“Why the interest all of a sudden?” Norton wanted to know.
Wheaton looked across the table at him. “Best guess? Our solar system has become real busy since the 1980s, when Solar Warden got started. Ships—both ours and aliens—coming and going like Earth was the center of the universe. We probably have neighbors who are wondering about all the activity. If they’d never visited us before, if they didn’t know what to expect, they might send a covert scout through, something we wouldn’t suspect was a starship.”
“But we did suspect it was a starship,” Vanover said.
“Even with the oddball light curve,” Brody reminded them, “we were pretty sure it was a comet until it sped up going outbound. That might have been a course adjustment, and they just hoped we wouldn’t notice.”
“Makes sense,” Groton said. “Let’s hope they’re just curious, not genocidal.”
“Trying to figure out how an alien thinks,” McClure said, “is a fool’s errand. Something evolving in the deep ocean? Or locked under a planetary ice cap? Its thought processes would be wildly different from ours. A completely unfamiliar worldview.”
“Why’d they open the front door when you showed up?” Groton asked.
“Obviously they figured we’d seen through their camouflage,” Tyler said. “Maybe they were afraid we were going to blow a hole in it.”
“Smart aliens. We were going to blow a hole in it, if you’ll recall.” Hunter looked again at Norton. “Things didn’t get nasty until we tried drilling through their pressure door.”
“We’ve established that was an accident,” Vanover remarked.
“Okay. But we also had Dr. Norton opening fire on one.”
“We—we were being threatened!” Norton said.
“Were we? Maybe they were trying to communicate.”
“No one blames you, Doctor,” Groton said. “You were in a terrifying and dangerous situation.”
“I do wonder if we should review the policy of arming civilians,” Hunter said. “No offense, Doctor . . . but us knuckle-dragging military types have had a certain amount of training in following orders, and in not panicking in bad situations. We do not want to start a war out here. Any potential enemies we encounter are probably a few million years ahead of us, and Humankind wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“Okay, people. I want a complete after-action report from each of you by oh-nine-hundred tomorrow. We’ll transmit them all to Earth, along with my recommendations, and let Majestic-12 decide what to do about our asteroid-riding friends.”
“We’re not going back ourselves?” Norton asked. He sounded surprised.
“Of course not. Our primary mission, remember, is Aldebaran. We have ships out there waiting for us, and our orders are specific. We will depart tomorrow at oh-nine-thirty. Dismissed!”
Hunter and the others stood and walked out.
He wondered if the investigation of Oumuamua could be classified as a success . . . or as a failure.
Duvall always feared getting lost in here. The main engineering spaces of the Hillenkoetter stretched in all directions like a vast maze, leaving the fighter pilot feeling distinctly rat-like.
Ah . . . there. Turn right at that junction.
“Welcome to the catacombs, sir,” a voice said from behind him. “You been down here before?”
Duvall turned. HM1 Vincent Marlow stood in the narrow passageway, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “Not often, Doc,” Duvall replied. “I prefer the wide-open spaces, y’know?”
“I hear you, sir. But Chief Steiner likes his privacy for these transactions, and the engineering spaces do have plenty of that.”
Highly automated, the Hillenkoetter carried a crew of only around six hundred, a tiny number for a ship almost a thousand feet long and massing as much as a US Navy supercarrier. In a ship that large, six hundred men and women tended to rattle around lost in all those endless miles of compartments and passageways, making some areas of the ship seem like ghost towns.
The hospital corpsman led Duvall deeper into the maze, but stopped outside of a sealed fire door. “Okay, sir, it’s like this. Before we continue in, the chief asked me to tell you that if word of this operation makes it up to the master-at-arms, they’ll come in here and find this compartment bare-naked empty, understand? And you’ll look like an idiot.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time, Doc. But . . . no. I’m not going to turn anyone in.”
“Just so that’s understood, sir.” He undogged the door and dragged it open. A wave of heat caught Duvall by surprise. “Welcome to Bathtub City.”
Inside, an engineering chief and a couple of lower-ranking petty officers were working in front of a massive contraption with a definite homemade and jury-rigged look to it. One of the ratings, a third-class electrician’s mate, saw Duvall’s collar pins and shouted “’Tention on deck!”
“At ease, at ease,” Duvall said, waving a hand. “Today I’m a deckhand.”
“Welcome aboard, Lieutenant,” the chief said. “This here is Liberty Hall. Y’can spit on the deck and call the cat a bastard.”
“‘Bathtub City?’”
“Ever hear of bathtub gin, sir?”
“Ah.” He had.
The still looked nothing like a bathtub, however, and almost seemed to disappear into the tangle of wiring and conduits behind it. Copper tubing wound in tight spring coils up at an angle from what looked like a discarded fuel cell, a yard-wide sphere of silvery metal with a heavy-duty heater glowing yellow-hot underneath it. The three sailors were busy collecting the distillate from the other end and pouring it off into what looked like mason jars from the galley. The familiar bite of alcohol hung heavy in the warm air.
“So what’s cooking?” Duvall asked. “What’s the mash?”
“Oh, we can use just about anything,” Steiner said. “Usually it’s potatoes or rice from the galley. We’ve got a . . . friend up there who brings us a load now and again. Today, though, it’s special.”
“And that is . . . ?”
“Cornmeal whiskey!”
“You’re distilling alcohol from . . . cornmeal?”
“Abso-damn-lutely, Lieutenant! Doc, here, brings us supplies from the galley. And we’re giving it some extra distillation. Grain alcohol, Lieutenant. One hundred ninety proof! Got a kick that’ll set you back on your ass with one fuckin’ shot!”
Duvall looked at Marlow. “Why bring food from the galley? Don’t you have plenty of ethanol in sick bay?”
“We do,” Marlow agreed. “But do you have any idea how carefully they keep track of that stuff, Lieutenant? Nobody’ll miss a couple sacks of potatoes out of God knows how many tons we ship out with. Same for cornmeal!”
“Takes a lot of sugar, too,” Steiner said. “And malt. We have to smuggle that up from Earth.”
“They don’t allow us enlisted pukes to go Earthside,” the young third class said. He sounded bitter. “Just you officer types, ’cause they don’t trust us not to run to the National Enquirer with Solar Warden’s specs.”
“Well, some enlisted pukes get to go on liberty, once in a blue moon,” Marlow said, grinning. “So we bring up the necessaries when they let us out.”
Duvall nodded. He knew how tough it was for anyone, enlisted or officer, to go ashore. When you did, you signed a book full of papers promising to behave . . . and threatening you with fifty years or worse if you spilled the beans. Duvall had once had one of the so-called “Men in Black” insinuate that breaking his secrecy oaths could result in your permanently disappearing.
Duvall wasn’t worried. They cut more slack for fighter jocks than for enlisted ratings, and he wasn’t planning on splitting on the setup in any case. Hell, why should he? He had a job flying fighter spacecraft cooler than anything in Star Wars! He lived on the freakin’ Moon, even if it did suck as a duty station! He wasn’t about to screw that up.
All he needed were a few creature comforts to make life in Bumfuck a bit more interesting. . . .
“If you like the product, Lieutenant,” Steiner said, “maybe we could sign you on to bring us a few odds and ends now and again. Potatoes are easy. Brewer’s yeast can be a pain. . . .”
“Don’t see why not,” Duvall said. “Can I have a sample?”
One of the ratings went to the far end of the distillation apparatus and retrieved a spoonful of the clear liquid collecting in a glass beaker. He accepted it, put the spoon in his mouth, and let the cool liquid flow across his tongue toward the back of his throat.
He'd never tasted anything quite like it. A little bitter . . . a little sweet . . . and then the afterkick slammed him from behind. Cool liquid turned to fire. He started coughing.
It tasted nothing like whiskey.
“One ninety proof, Lieutenant, like I said.” Steiner was grinning at him. “You can cut it as much as you want. Ha! Or as little. . . .”
“What—” He stopped and coughed again. God that had a kick! “What are you asking?”
“Twenty dollars a pint, sir.”
“Twenty dollars! That’s highway robbery!”
“Oh, that it is. I agree. But out here, y’know, it’s a hell of a long walk back to where you can order a shot of vodka for two fifty and just put it on your tab! You’re paying for the convenience.”
The chief had a point.
Duvall did some fast calculations. He wasn’t going to touch that hell-firewater again at full strength, but cutting it by half would take it down into the alcoholic realms of various whiskeys. He needed enough to share between himself, Traci, and Duff.
“Gimme a quart,” he said, reaching for his wallet. Steiner went to a nearby locker and retrieved a one-quart glass mason jar almost filled with the potent clear liquid. Duvall reached for forty dollars and handed him the cash. “It’s not all for me, Chief.”
“Wouldn’t care if it was, Lieutenant. You enjoy, now. And come on back anytime you need a refill.”
