Battle Station

— 4

It was a hand. A black, slinky metal hand of a type I was all too familiar with. Made of interlocking segments of rippling metal, it plucked me from the back of Marvin’s scooter. I struggled immediately. It was instinct, of course. My current battle suit design was nothing like the old units. They had exoskeletal strength, independent propulsion and thick armor. I’d not used my propulsion units up until this point, naturally, as I’d wanted to remain unnoticed. But now I knew it didn’t matter. Whoever was out here, whoever had blown ships to fragments in the vicinity of this ring, they were well aware of my intrusion into their space now. All I wanted to do was escape them.

I applied full thrust, but that wasn’t enough. Maybe if the arm hadn’t already had a grip on me, I could have darted out of reach. But now that I was in the grip of a three-fingered nanite arm, I didn’t have anything like the thrust needed to break free. I tried anyway and simultaneously activated my lasers, which were embedded in each arm. I fired back up at the main trunk of the arm itself, as it snaked backward, reeling me in.

A brilliant beam splashed on the metal of the arm. But it wasn’t holding still, and although a gush of vaporized metal was released, it didn’t cut away the arm itself.

Still, I struggled, knowing I was running out of time. I broke radio silence. “Marvin, can you get this thing off me?”

There was no answer. I glanced in his direction, and saw nothing. No scooter, no Marvin. Only a few frosty crystals of exhaust from his strange propulsion system. He’d gone through the point of no return and vanished. He was probably a dozen lightyears away, and unable to hear me. I wasn’t angry with him, he’d done what he could. The scooter had simply gone ahead to the far side. What I did feel, however, was very alone.

I thought about shooting away the fingers that gripped me, but I feared I would burn a hole in my own suit. I decided to try it anyway, but couldn’t get the angle right. The projectors were on my wrists, and with the bulk of the suit, I couldn’t get them turned so they would fire against my own chest and waist region.

I recalled something at the last instant, as the arm drew me up into a region of even more complete darkness: the ship’s maw. I recalled that Sandra had once slashed away one of these fingers with her combat knife. I drew mine now, and it took me two strikes, but I managed to hack away one of the three fingers. About a foot of its length twisted and writhed like a half-severed worm on a sidewalk as it floated away from me.

It was all too little, too late. I experienced the familiar sensation of being swallowed by a huge, hungry creature. Then the starlight shut off, and I knew I’d been consumed.

The arm released me and snaked away through an opening. Familiar nanite walls surrounded me. The arm retreated from my chamber into another, and I darted after it, using my suits propulsion systems.

In this chamber, two doors opened simultaneously. I eyed one, then the other. In the back of one a tiny gleam of white light shone. I froze, remembering.

“The tests,” I said aloud to no one. But I was certain my hunch was correct. I laughed suddenly, knowing where I was and what was happening.

“You big bastard of a ship,” I whooped. “You scared the living crap out of me.”

It was a test. It was all a test. The ship was a Nano ship, and apparently it was tired of its commander, or whoever had been in charge had died. Now, it was recruiting me for the job. Fortunately, I was very conversant with these tricks and ploys. I’d seen them all before. Hell, I could have written a book about them.

I waltzed through one trick after another. Each time I did so, I expected the ship to address me in some fashion, as Alamo had so long ago. But it didn’t. I opened my external microphones and turned up the gain. All I heard from the ship was some odd sounds-clicks and echoing squeaks. They sounded like something a dolphin would make at the bottom of the sea.

Maybe it wanted me to remove my helmet to talk, but I didn’t want to. I kept it firmly on my head in case the ship did eject me for some reason. Even if I failed a test, at least I wouldn’t die.

It was about the fifth test, by my count, when I met the alien. It was an entirely new life form. Big, but not impossibly so. If I had to estimate, I would say it was about ten feet long and weigh in at around a thousand pounds.

It looked like a crustacean of some kind. A big, bluish-green one. It dripped fluids, and didn’t look to healthy-but who was I to judge? Maybe this barnacle-encrusted sad-sack creature was an Olympic contender wherever it came from.

It approached me gamely enough. There was only one big claw and eight smaller legs instead of six, but I still considered it a lobster. It never had a chance, of course. I pushed away its snapping claw and sat on it. There was gravity in the ship, and I pinned it to the deck, where it scrabbled helplessly.

I almost killed it out of hand, but stopped myself. That’s what the ship wanted. That’s what had to happen, but I couldn’t do it. In fact, the entire situation made me angry.

I flipped up the visor on my helmet, having tested the air with my suits sensors and found it breathable. The atmosphere was humid, dank and made me sweat in my suit almost immediately.

“Ship, talk to me. I’ve beaten this poor fellow. Let him live, I command you.”

More clicks, squeaks and a few new sounds: gurgles. I frowned. Could this be the language of the crustacean? It did sound watery, ghostly. Like the noises undersea creatures made.

I kept talking to the ship, but it didn’t say anything back I could understand. After about ten minutes however, I smelled something-something mouth-watering. With a shock, I realized what it was: burnt lobster.

The ship had been heating the floor, cooking the poor alien I had pinned to the deck. I hadn’t even felt the heat due to the air-conditioning in my suit which was working overtime. I’d thought the warmth was for the comfort of the being I had pinned below me, but the truth was much worse.

The situation was horrible, and I quickly stood up and tried to lift the alien away from the hot surface. The carcass was limp, flopping. The limbs hung loosely and dribbled steamy fluids. I sighed and put him back down, as gently as I could. A moment later, the ship’s nanite flooring swallowed him and ejected him into space.

“Heartless tin monsters,” I said. “You’re just as big of a bastard as Alamo ever was.”

The ship finally responded in English. “How do you wish to address us?” it asked.

“Oh, now you can speak English, eh?”

The ship said nothing.

“You aren’t the same ship I called Alamo before, are you?”

“This vessel has never utilized the name Alamo.”

“All right then, I’ve got a name for you. I’m going to call you Butcher. How about that?”

“Rename complete.”

Butcher was my third Nano ship and this vessel had a true Nano mindset. It wasn’t like the ships I’d dealt with lately. Star Force ships were tame, and didn’t have agendas of their own. I had to keep reminding myself of this as I dealt with Butcher. I couldn’t trust this ship to obey my orders forever. At some point it was likely to do whatever it damned well pleased. We called ships like this “wild” Nano ships.

“Butcher, I need information. How many Nano ships are in this system?”

“Reference unclear.”

I frowned, then nodded. “Ships built with nanites such as yourself are ‘Nano ships’, at least, that’s what I call them.”

“Reference clarified. Language lookup table updated. There are three hundred twenty-nine Nano ships in this star system.”

My eyebrows lifted in surprise. Three hundred ships? Could this be the fleet that had ditched Star Force years ago? I was about to ask this question next when I heard the distinctive sound of large, firing lasers. The Nano ship was shooting at something. I put my helmet back on in a hurry. If the ship took a hit, I didn’t want to be caught floating in space without it.

“What are you shooting at?”

“An unknown aggressor.”

“It is a Macro?”

“Unknown.”

I thought fast. Could it be one of my own men, or even one of my ships? I didn’t have time to teach this ship to put up sensory images on the walls. That took careful work. I stared around at the blank, metallic walls. They were frustrating, just like all Nano ship interiors. No screens, no cameras. No intrinsic way for a pilot to see what the hell was going on.

“If the target is not firing at us, I order you to cease fire.”

“Command invalid. Defensive systems engaged. Command personnel must be protected.”

The ship lurched then, almost knocking me off my feet. I stumbled, using my magnetics and the exoskeleton armor to keep me from falling on my face. Even if I had fallen, it wouldn’t have hurt much, but my reaction was instinctive.

“Dammit Butcher, what are you doing now?”

“Defensive maneuvers engaged. Enemy is too close for weapons systems to target it.”

Too close? I shook my head. These guns had very nearly a complete field of fire. The standard issue Nano ship came with two large laser turrets, one on top and one on the bottom of its oblong disk-shaped body. Just about anything could be hit with one turret or the other, if not both. In order to be too close, the target would have to be touching the hull itself, or perhaps clinging to one of the turrets.

I suddenly had a hunch. “Butcher, is this target in physical contact with the hull?”

“Yes.”

“It is approximately equivalent to my mass?”

“Yes.”

“Butcher, this entity is known to me. Cease fire, cease evasion efforts.”

“Command personnel must be protected.”

“I’ve undergone nanite injections, and I’m wearing a battle suit that is tougher than your hull. I’m in no danger.”

Reluctantly, I managed to talk the panicked ship into standing down. It has been flying around erratically, like a bucking bronco. It couldn’t do anything to the hitchhiker however, so after a while Butcher reluctantly paused and let me climb up to the top levels, where the intruder was located. After a few minutes of arguing, I managed to get the ship to dissolve a region of the hull so I could poke my head up and have a look around. I finally had to force the issue by threatening to burn my way out with my lasers.

When I finally was able to get a look at our visitor, I smiled. Marvin had wrapped his body around the base of the laser turret. He looked like a bundle of wires up there. As I waved to him, several cameras swung to examine me. A tentacle-like wire extended toward me. I allowed it to make contact with my battle suit. It was a good thing Butcher wasn’t watching. The ship was in mother-hen mode and would have objected.

When we were in contact, I transmitted to him over a closed circuit intercom as we had done when riding his little scooter together. “Hello Marvin, welcome back to this star system.”

“You are uninjured? I presume this ship is now under your control?”

“You presume correctly. This is my new Nano ship, I’ve christened her Butcher.”

“An apt name,” Marvin said. “Why didn’t you stop it from firing on me? My scooter was destroyed, and I barely managed to crawl over the hull to this safe point.”

“Sorry about that. The ship’s actions were automatic and defensive in nature. It doesn’t have any kind of display systems. I couldn’t see it was you.”

After a while, Marvin finally stopped complaining about how close he’d come to annihilation and began asking questions. After survival, the urge to explore and study the universe was his greatest driving motivation. Unfortunately, I didn’t know most of the answers to his questions. I promised him we could learn more about our environment if we were inside Butcher and spent some time programming a sensory system for it.

Getting Marvin inside the ship took a considerable amount of effort. I didn’t know if I could ever convince Butcher he was harmless, but I did finally convince the ship to let him aboard. The only requirement was that I remain inside my battle suit at all times while in his presence. It was annoying, but workable.

We spent the next half-hour assembling sensory-input scripts and the like in the ship. Marvin was helpful in this regard, as he had recorded the precisely worded instructions that had worked on Nano ships in the past. Obviously, this ship knew something about Earth and humanity, or it would not have been able to speak English. But I had yet to get out of it any details as to its current mission and whether it had previously been part of Star Force. Both Marvin and I were more interested in seeing the star system layout right now.

First, the three big planets came into view. There were more than the dozen moons around each of the three large planets. There were seventy-seven major satellites, in all, plus rings of fine dust particles that had a gray-orange color.

There was only one world that could support life, as we’d detected earlier. The moons themselves around the warm world, seen with more detail, were the amazing part. Three of them had liquid water on the surface. The planet they orbited was about half the size of Jupiter, and many of the moons were tidally-locked with the gas giant. They still received light from the two stars, however. As they swung around their planet, different portions of their faces were exposed to sunlight from both the nearby stars.

Watching the orbital patterns of these Mars-sized moons, I tried to imagine life on such worlds. It was not ideal. Days would be long and hot, while nights would be cold indeed. The worst times would be when the moons entered the long shadow of the titanic planet they circled. During these frequent eclipses, darkness would be total.

Finally, Butcher added the presence of ships to the display. At first, nothing showed up. I was surprised. Could this Nano ship be the only one in the system?

“Where are the rest of the ships, Butcher? You said there were over three hundred of them.”

“All independently mobile systems that meet filtering requirements are displayed,” said the ship.

I saw only a single greenish beetle, right near the ring. That was us.

“I think the parameters need adjusting,” Marvin said. He quickly gave me instructions to display neutral ships-ships that didn’t register as friendly or hostile. These were to appear as golden beads of metal on the forward wall of the bridge.

The scene changed dramatically. Tiny beads welled up in a mass. As more and more of them appeared, I frowned. “Where are they all headed? Butcher, give me an overhead, system wide view.”

The image swam and shifted. As it reconfigured itself, I was reminded of a pool of water, being drained so that the stones at the bottom came up in full relief.

“Uh-oh,” I said aloud as I began to understand what I was looking at.

“They appear to be coming this way, Colonel,” said Marvin, stating the obvious.

There did indeed appear to be three hundred of them. They were moving as a mass, coming toward our position, having gathered into a swarm around the gas giant and her moons.

I had a sudden, unpleasant thought. I’d come into this system, and assaulted the sole Nano ship that had been left on sentry duty at the ring. When they’d lost contact with their lookout, they’d decided to come and investigate. Perhaps they’d even heard the pitiful cries and burblings of the ex-pilot, while I sat on him and cooked him.

I imagined the lobster pilots, hell-bent on revenge. So much for sneaking onto this side of the ring to have a quiet look around.