Claws That Catch

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Weaver hit save and closed the form, then opened the next. But it was the usage estimate on food consumption… and he’d already done that one. Copy sent to the CO.

Weekly compilation of maintenance and repairs… No, that’s done. Sent.

Payroll… checked and sent to the CO.

He3 usage estimate…

He looked through his to-do list, knowing that there had to be something to do. He’d been running around the ship checking on repairs, fixing personnel problems, shouting at cooks and generally killing himself for the last three weeks. There was no way that he was…

“Christ,” Weaver muttered, running through the list. There wasn’t anything to do. He couldn’t ask the Eng for the spare parts inventory for at least another two days, there wasn’t a single department issue to “mediate” or otherwise deal with… “I don’t have anything to do.”

So what did an XO do when he was actually caught up on paperwork? Weaver thought back and decided that what his previous XOs had done was go out and find out what was wrong that wasn’t getting reported.

Which meant inspecting the entire ship until he found someone’s ass to chew.

He might actually find the door to his quarters.

“This is why you’ve been restricting the cereal ration?” Bill asked, holding up the box of generic breakfast cereal. A hole had been nibbled in the side and the cereal dribbled on the floor of the galley. “I thought you said that it was pilfering?”

“I run a clean galley,” Chief Duppstadt said mulishly.

Over two weeks, by daily abuse, Weaver had gotten Duppstadt to raise the quality of food to the level of “edible” if not “pleasant.” The reality of Naval regulations was that even the CO could not relieve a chief for simple incompetence unless it was mission threatening. And after looking at Duppstadt’s record, Bill figured out why Duppstadt was in the galley; it was on the one part of a ship that was not life-threatening. How he had made chief in the first place was the real question. How anyone had let him cook in the sub service, which was normally renowned for the quality of its food, was totally mind-boggling.

But now he had him dead to rights. Bill had asked him in a previous shouting session why he couldn’t at least provide cereal to the sailors, spacers, whatever, and the chief had told him, point-blank, that someone was pilfering. Bill had even assigned the Master-At-Arms to investigate.

What he had found, though, going through one of the supply lockers and not-at-all looking for his door, was that rats had been at the food. Rats. In his ship. This was what he got for spending so much time doing paperwork. Rats. In his ship.

“Chief, rats in the supplies are not a reflection on your galley,” Bill said, for once kindly. “If anything, they’re a reflection on me. But we need to get them tracked down. Have you set traps?”

“Yes, sir,” the chief admitted. “But they don’t go for them.”

Bill almost made the comment that if the chief was putting his food down as bait he could understand that but refrained.

“How are you baiting them?” Bill asked, biting his lip.

“Leftovers, sir,” the chief said. “But they don’t seem to be going for them.”

Must… keep… straight… face…

“Try something different, Chief,” Bill said. “I hear oatmeal and peanut butter works. Maybe some cereal. Cheese is, of course, traditional. Perhaps they’re not…” Connoisseurs? No that would be ARE connoisseurs… “meat eaters. And what’s the point of having a cat if he’s not catching the rats?”

“Won’t have that filthy beast in my galley, sir,” the Chief said, stoutly. “Won’t have it. Filthy things, cats. Lick their own butts.”

“Well, we need to get rid of them,” Bill said. “We only have so much food.”

He considered the problem, then shrugged.

“They can’t be hiding in the walls. They have to be in the compartments. I’ll get some hands down here to turn out the foodstocks and try to find them. And… where the food is stored away from the kitchen I’ll have Tiny participate. Maybe he can catch some of them.”

“Okay, this is maulk,” Sub Dude said, picking up the case of cans. “We’re rat-catchers, now?”

“Orders is orders,” Red said, picking up two cases with his Number Four lifting arm. “And I don’t want to be eating rat droppings.”

“Well, I don’t think there are any…” Gants said, then jumped back as a purple blur went past his feet. “What in the grapp was that?”

Tiny, though, had pounced at once, slipped a paw into a narrow crack between two boxes and fished out the creature. He flipped it out into the corridor and then chased after it.

“That wasn’t no rat,” Red said, following the cat. “Tiny, bring!”

The cat caught the little beast and ran over, dropping it at the machinist’s feet. But as soon as the thing hit the ground it took off, fast, faster than any rat the two had ever seen. Red never even got a good look. Tiny pounced again and brought it back over, holding the squirming thing out in his jaws.

“What the grapp is that?” Gants asked, his voice hushed.

It didn’t actually look like a rat, more like a purple crab or spider.

“I’m not touching that thing,” Gants added, backing up.

“I got it,” Red said, grabbing it with his number four arm and squeezing slightly. The shell of the thing cracked and it went limp. “I think we need to report this, though.”

“What in the hell is that?” Weaver asked, holding up the plastic bag containing the body of the spider-thing.

“Chee-hamster, isn’t it, sir?” the Eng asked.

“Chee-hamsters are more yellowish,” Bill said. “And furry. This looks sort of like a crabpus. But not really. I’m not sure what it is.”

“Well, it’s what’s been getting into the chow, sir,” the Eng said. “Once they got to moving boxes, Tiny caught two more.”

“Sir, if I may,” Red interjected. “Tiny obviously recognized them; he chased them like he knew what he was doing. I think he’s been chasing them for some time.”

“What this is, is a quarantine violation,” Bill said, sighing. “That means we’re all in quarantine when we get back unless we can determine that it’s from a nonthreatening biosphere. And since we don’t know where it came from… Hell, just when we need a biologist…”

“Miss Moon?”

“Forensics isn’t biology,” Miriam said, looking at the thing in the bag. “Cute, though.”

“They’re getting in the food,” Bill said. “And we need to know where they came from; Colonel Che-chee didn’t recognize it. If they’re from an unknown biosphere, we’re all in quarantine for thirty days when we get back.”

“That wouldn’t make me happy,” Miriam said. “Well, I’ve got the whole bio lab just sitting there. I guess I’ll use it. If Tiny catches any more that live, save them for me.”

“Successfully adjusted to system HD 242896.”

The Blade had stopped in deep space, done a complete weapons and sensors check and chilled. This was potential Dreen territory; if the enemy was present the CO wanted the option to either fight or run as seemed most prudent.

“Sensor sweep,” the CO said, holding down his position in CIC. Lieutenant Fey had the Conn with Captain Weaver at the secondary Conn in Damage Control near Engineering.

“No unusual particle emissions,” the TACO said after a moment. “All nominal for an FV9 star.”

“Conn, make course for the referenced Jovian,” the CO said.

“We’ll have to find it first, sir,” Lieutenant Fey replied over the comm. “We weren’t actually given its trajectory by the Hexosehr. Doing a planetary sweep at the moment. Permission to take the ship into the edge of the warp denial zone. We can sweep better from in near the star.”

“Move her in, Conn,” the CO said, his face blank. Item One on his report: The Navy needed a better class for COs of spaceships. “TACO, any sign of Dreen?”

“No sign of any other ships in the system, sir,” the TACO replied. “No neutrino or quark emissions over nominal for the star.”

“Stand down to Condition Two,” the CO said. “Captain Weaver to the CIC.”

“The best way to find the planets is still reflectance, sir,” Bill said, looking at the information starting to come up on CIC’s monitors. “The telescopes spot them automatically. We can get some from gravitic anomalies and standard astronomical distances. But mostly we have to just look, so looking with the sun behind us works better. The first time around we had a heck of a time but we learned from it and the algorithms are better, now. But we won’t be seeing anything on the other side of the sun, obviously.”

“CIC, Conn. We have the indicated jovian spotted as well as two more jovians, one super-jovian and two rocky planets.”

“Head for the indicated Jovian,” the CO replied. “We’ll do a sweep of the other side of the sun after checking it out.”

“I’m not spotting any other installations in orbit,” Lieutenant Fey said. “And the Hexosehr buried the other one.”

“Wonder if it’s still down there,” Bill said, gesturing with his chin in the direction of the Jovian. “Be funny if it’s sitting down on the metallic hydrogen bottom.”

“Metallic hydrogen?” Prael said. “Oh, yeah. The egghead said something about that. How do you get metal out of hydrogen?”

“Lots of pressure, sir,” Bill replied. “You’ve had chemistry, sir. Three states of matter.”

“Solid, liquid, gas,” Prael said. “Four with ions.”

“Yes, sir,” Bill said. “Ice is solid water, fog is gas and, well, water is liquid. Any material known has, potentially, all three states. But for you to get solid hydrogen requires sufficient pressure, say the pressure of the gravitational force of a gas-giant, pressing the hydrogen atoms together until they’re a solid. Nominally, due to their configuration and position on the periodic table, a metal. Metallic hydrogen.”

“Got it,” Prael said then paused. “Let me guess. If the pressure gets higher, say more mass…”

“Then you pass the pressure threshhold of the material, bits of hydrogen start to fuse and you have a star,” Bill finished. “Super-massive jovians, there’s one on this planet, are very close to stars. The pressure is so high that it generates some internal kinetic energy so they’re not actually as cold as they should be for their position in the system. There’s a theory that you could find some bodies that are right on the edge of both, sort of fusing but not really willing to be a star. Those are one class of white dwarf.”

“And so much of the planetology lecture of the day,” the CO said. “Plan.”

“We’ll approach to low ball-and-string orbit on each of the rocky planets and major moons,” Bill said. “From there we can do a ground-penetrating radar sweep as well as a computerized visual sweep. Both will be looking for straight lines. They don’t tend to form in nature but civilizations always seem to have them. If we find one, we’ll consider the imagery and try to determine if it’s an artifact or just an anomaly. If we think it’s an artifact, we land and deploy the Marines.”

“And who is the ‘we’ who are checking on the hits?” the CO asked.

“The intel section has an imagery specialist, sir,” the XO reminded him. “He’ll check them.”

“Oh My God.”

Julio Plumber hadn’t been quite sure what an “imagery analyst” was when he signed up, but he By God learned in A School. It was a guy who was going to go blind, early, from looking at satellite shots. When, rarely, satellite shots were shown to the media they were always carefully labeled and the clearest shots possible. The media didn’t get the shots that were just a blur of movement or a shadow that might be a rocket launcher and might just be, well, a shadow.

And they sure as hell didn’t get one hit every ten seconds of various rock formations.

“Chief, I’m getting swamped here,” Plumber squeaked. “I could look at this stuff for the rest of my natural life and not catch up.”

“What you got?” the chief asked, looking over his shoulder at the oversized monitor.

“Chither,” Plumber said exasperatedly. “I don’t care what anybody says, you get straight lines in nature. I got ridges, lots of ridges, I got recently cracked boulders. I got landslides. I got a couple of things I don’t know what they are but they’re not ruins I’ll tell you that. And I got more than I can look at in a million years.”

“I’ll bump it up,” the chief said with a sigh. That meant to the XO. “Makin’ bricks without straw.”

“That’s the Navy way, Chief.”

Miriam was not a biologist, but she could hum the tune and do a few of the dance steps.

Fortunately, the Blade’s biology department was as automated and modern as anything on Earth. There were many benefits to information technology and automation, but they all came down to the word “productivity.” Since it was anticipated that the Blade was going to be doing major science missions — an anticipation that had mostly been unrealized — and given that the maximum number of science crew was restricted, making the science section as productive as possible had been the goal.

Thus, rather than slow and tedious “wet” chemical analysis, a full chemical work-up could be obtained by sliding a small sample into a chamber. Molecular Resonance Imaging, gaseous chromatographic structuring and even atomic level X-ray analysis was automatic. Pop in the sample, wait twenty minutes and you had a full description of every molecule in the sample, complete with three-dimensional topology. The device was state-of-the-art, very capable and, because it was in the Blade, very small. It was, thus, very very expensive. “No expense spared.”

Knowing what you were looking at, though, was something else.

But before any of that, Miriam could start on the one part she really knew: Dissection.

“It’s not a spider,” Miriam muttered.

“Would you like to record this analysis session?”

One part of the bio section Miriam did not care for was the new Vocal Interactive Network. Vinnie was a pain in the ass unless you turned him all the way off. He wasn’t an AI, just a bloody “smart” program, but the programmers had tried to make him as much like an artificial intelligence as possible. Which just meant he was a revolving busybody.

“Vinnie, leave me alone,” Miriam said, pinning down the carapace of the alien bug.

“Procedure 419 dash 587 dash 326 Delta indicates a preference for recording of all analysis sessions.”

“I know that,” Miriam said. “I don’t want to talk to you right now, Vinnie. Go away.”

“Recommend initiate procedure 419 dash 587 dash 326 Delta.”

“Shut up, Vinnie,” Miriam said, positioning the laser scalpel.

“Procedure 419 dash 587 dash 326 Delta is highly recommended but can be overridden by following procedure 876 dash 239 dash 12540 Alpha. Do you wish to initiate procedure 876 dash 239 dash 12540 Alpha?”

“Oh, God!” Miriam snapped. “Okay, okay! Vinnie, initiate procedure 419 dash 587 dash 326 Delta recording of analysis session!” The alternative was a five minute procedure required to turn the damned thing off.

“Initiating procedure 419 dash 587 dash 326 Delta,” the program responded happily. “Full audio and video. Please maintain running commentary for thoroughness. Beginning Procedure. Step One: Ensure quarantine of biological specimen.”

“Quarantine ensured,” Miriam said.

“Analysis indicates that specimen is not in quarantine zone. Ensure quarantine of biological specimen.”

“Skip,” Miriam said. “Quarantine breached.”

“Quarantine breach logged and noted,” the program replied as blast doors slammed down. “Quarantine field activated in science section. Quarantine breach report sent to Ops. Step Two: Ensure safety of session personnel. List materials used in session.”

“Laser scalpel,” Miriam said with a sigh. “Pins. Probes.”

“List by stock number,” Vinnie said, primly. “Item one: Laser scalpel. Two possible systems. Item One: Bogdan Slicer Laser Scalpel, Federal Stock Number…”

Miriam got up from her stool, placed the arachnoid in the refrigerator, then walked to one of the computer stations. Sitting down, she cracked her fingers and started typing.

Three minutes were required to hack into the administrator permissions on the mainframe. Another ten seconds were required to find the core of Vinnie’s program. The voice in the background, which was still requesting information, shut off abruptly. It took about an hour to reverse engineer the program, find the appropriate sections, rewrite them, then recompile and debug. There weren’t any bugs.

“Vinnie, this is Miriam Moon, Ship’s Linguist,” Miriam said, standing up and going back over to the refrigerator.

“Yes, Mistress,” the program replied in a deep Transylvanian accent.

“I’d like you to record this dissection session and record any results from the analysis of this organism,” Miriam said.

“Yes, O Great One.”

“Oh, and drop the quarantine restrictions,” Miriam said. “These things are all over the ship.”

“It shall be done.”

“Begin recording,” Miriam said, laying out the creature. “Analysis of aterrestrial organism tentatively designated astroarachno titanus common name Tiny’s Space Spider. Creature is approximately ten centimeters from mandibles to tip of carapace. Exoskeleton color is purple shading to red in places. There are two eyes and a complex but truncated set of antennae. Creature has ten tri-segmented legs and two scorpionlike claws, each claw approximately three centimeters in length. Claws overlap, indicating cutting ability. Body is multisegmented and doesn’t conform to arachnid body type. The carapace is flexible.” She drove pins through the edge of the carapace and slid a laser scalpel down the center, just opening up the abdomen.

“Space Spider has book lungs with closure points on exterior. Removing sample of internal fluids for analysis.”

She sucked up a bit of the fluid with a pipette and carried it to the analysis chamber.

“Begin analysis of internal fluids,” she said, shooting the sample into a chamber.

“By Your Command!”