Melchior's Fire

III: SALVAGE OPERATION

There wasn’t an awful lot of sentiment among the crew for respecting a new lifeform. There just wasn’t much love lost for a creature or creatures who had killed so many humans so wantonly and who had then tried to get at them. There were some, including Randi and Jerry, who wondered about the safety of continuing, and whether or not it was worth the potential cost even if doable, but the general sentiment was, if it could be done, let’s do it, and if this thing gets in the way, let’s deal with it.

“I’m not at all sure what would kill it,” Randi Queson commented. “Something certainly can—if it eats, it can be gotten—but without a lot of experimentation on it who can tell? I doubt if shooting it with anything we have would do much. The industrial stuff, maybe, but not any sort of slicer and dicer. We’d simply make a big one into a few littler ones who’d recombine and be even angrier. We can probably incinerate it, if we’re sure we do it completely, or totally and completely disintegrate it, but if we do we’d better get all of it or it’ll just come back.”

“Seems to me the best thing to do would be to poison it,” Sark suggested. “Get the whole damned thing at once. Let it gobble up its own doom.”

“That’s great, except that it probably wouldn’t work. Any poison would probably be ingested by one of the smaller bits, and if it was very slow acting the thing would probably adapt to the new substance and either expel it or figure out a way to eat it. Fast and it’s not going to be able to infect all the pieces. As we said, if you miss even one, we’re potentially toast.”

The problem was fed to the ship’s master computer, which came up with a compromise none of them had considered.

The lifeforms all burned food for energy in a range that made them show up on sensors the same as people. That meant they could be located. Doing anything to the large mass in the core would be impractical, maybe impossible with what they had available, and would certainly take better lab work than they could do even if they could figure out how to safely get and contain a tissue sample of the creature or creatures. They also had mass, but couldn’t come through walls or floors or solid rock, and certainly they still had problems with inorganic substances overall.

The obvious solution was to use the big industrial salvage lasers to sever the greenhouses from the main complex and then create a molten rock flow that would cover and seal in the cliffside complex, core and all. Then it would be a matter of sending in small disassembler robots with full torches and dealing with the small ones that might be left outside. From that point on, and with a constant watch on the cliffside to insure that there were no more holes and that there was no breakout by the main mass, they could methodically and safely disassemble the greenhouses. The profit would still be huge; it just wouldn’t be as huge as if they could have reclaimed the interior complex and the reactor. Humans would be placed in harm’s way only when absolutely necessary, always fully armed and fully suited up, and with cover.

“The computer believes we could do this operation in six weeks or less, that the profit on the enterprise would still be in the millions, and that it’s the most likely compromise,” An Li told them. “Of course, it assumes that we can contain the thing and deal with any small ones left outside.”

“And if we can’t?” the uncharacteristically nervous Jerry Nagel asked her.

“Huh?”

“If those things can’t be dealt with and or the big one figures a way out? What then?”

“Then the only solution would be to abandon everything in place and use the shuttle to lift survivors to the ship if possible. If that happens, we will all be dead broke and unable to return home unless we find money for new equipment and a new salvage job. And if we just say goodbye right now, we’ve got no credit and nothing to trade, so even if we find something else, which probably wouldn’t be nearly this profitable, we couldn’t pay for maintenance and repairs, recharges, you name it. Cap says, though, that she can’t order this one since we’re safe up here. You got to decide down there.”

“I can kill anything except my bills,” Achmed growled. “Let’s go do it.”

“I say so long as I don’t face no thirty meters of morphing worm, let’s get the stuff that’s just lying there and get out of here,” Sark added. “The little ones, they got to burn.”

Cross joined them. “I just can’t be no grasshopper, sittin’ on a farm workin’ fixin’ some guy’s milking machines,” she said, “or flyin’ over pissing pesticides. Let’s do it. I’ll yank your shit-ugly necks out in time if I have to.”

Nagel sighed. “Well, that makes Doc’s and my votes unnecessary. So let’s get to work, see what we’re dealing with here, and I’ll start running scenarios through the computer. Luckily the greenhouses are of only two types, both known prefabs, so it’s going to be easy to create a deconstruct model. The wicked part’s going to be getting the smelter in place to turn that cliff into a lava flow.”

Queson nodded. “And I’ll coordinate with the ship. We’re going to need a much more exhaustive ground survey extending down as far as our instruments allow. We’ve got to know how far that sea extends under the complex, and beyond, and where any weak points to it might be other than the cave in the cliffs.”

In the meantime, Cross flew in over the complex and dropped a dozen or so ferrets, small robots no larger than a man’s fist that nonetheless had a great deal of instrumentation as well as continuously broadcasting cameras and the ability to both hide when need be and move up walls and even along ceilings in most cases. They’d been used in the initial surveys and found nothing, but now they were not so much hunting as guarding, simply searching for signs of any sort of life. If they found none, they took up positions between the cliff complex and the greenhouse area where work would be done in order to insure that nothing at all snuck up on anyone or anything working there.

Queson suspected that the creatures only reacted to organic life, which was why neither the initial ferret survey nor their own walk into the complex had triggered any alien actions. It was only when they were stomping around in the control room, looking down at the mother thing or whatever it was, that the thing had become aware of them even through their suits. If that really was the case, and it wasn’t simply noise that did it, then they might get lucky and trap the whole thing inside the cliffs.

The only thing that worried her was the inability of the orbital survey equipment to get a good sense of where that sea began and ended. The lay of the land wasn’t conducive to accurate underground mapping; something was throwing off the information. There were some indications, though, that the sea extended very deep down under much of the complex, and that, in fact, it was the reason why the colony was here at all.

“It’s very deep down,” she explained, “particularly out this way. It could be a vast complex of flooded caverns hundreds of meters down below this very hard rock. That would mean that we’re talking maybe not being able to pen that thing in there.”

Nagel looked at the readouts and nodded. “If these holding tanks are filtered by this system under the greenhouses rather than from a central supply, those things could ooze out of every faucet—at least, if they could get through all the twists and turns.” He paused. “No, I’d say not, though. To open the valves in the filtration setup is going to require power. So long as we keep ’em powered down, it shouldn’t be possible for anything to get up through there. It’s designed to purify the water and keep the crud out. I’d say our friend qualifies as crud. Power would be required to bypass the system. Otherwise, forget it.”

She nodded. “I hope you’re right. I don’t see any faults or openings through the rock there that would allow another route.”

They worked through the better part of a day getting their settings right, running simulations, making sure that this operation was as safe and as feasible as it could be made to be.

Another worry was that it was going to take a lot of power they could ill afford to use to get the smelter in the right position and then to use it at full power for as long as it would take. If nothing went wrong, there would be enough to do the whole job and still get it back and into operation for what it was intended to do. The tricky part of that was the phrase, “If nothing went wrong…”

Both of them could find a thousand ways things could go wrong, but, using what they knew, the vast majority of computer simulations showed that everything would work out quite nicely.

“There’s nothing left to do but to do it,” Jerry Nagel said at last.

Lying on the plain was the complete salvage complex, detached from the mother ship and then landed and anchored on the surface. It was basically a rectangular structure but with the front and back ends tapered outward, and its length was divided into three sections by a series of inverted U-shaped structures that at first glance seemed built into the rectangle but which were actually simply attached to it. The shuttle sat in a cradle at the front end, just beyond one of the “U” structures, providing both an independent on and off system and a primary control for the entire thing when it took to the air or space. For ground salvage work, though, each of the parts as it deployed had its own independent control cabin as well. It was where everything was housed, including the crew, and where all the work of salvage was based.

Achmed moved into the control seat of the central structure and strapped himself in. Normally the job of the Smelting Section was entirely automated, but in this case they felt that someone had to be there, to take manual control if need be. The computers were smart, but they hadn’t been programmed nor tested for this kind of thing. The smelter was not intended to move any great distance, just to be able to move beyond the salvage modules so it could exercise its great heat and power without risking anything else. Now it was expected to go a very long distance, then rise not to fit into a structure but to hover independently while it did its work.

The robotics would be relied upon for the needed precision, but it had been decided that it would be easier for Achmed to handle the operation directly than to try and explain it to the computer in such a way that there were no slips. All of the cliffside complex had to be sealed, yet not enough to dissolve sufficient base rock to burn through into the caverns below.

Once the job was done, all survey equipment would be directed into determining the firmness of the seal. Once that was done, smoldering lava or not, the other units would be coming in to begin salvage work on the greenhouses, starting with the farthest ones out. That at least should be doable entirely by remote control and, after the first one was completely done, by robotic control, but this equipment was never to be depended on a hundred percent. It was always best to have a human being overseeing the thing, ready to take over for the unforeseen.

Randi Queson had seen pictures of earlier days, the state of the art in this, when master engineers were fitted with direct implant jacks and could be plugged into machines like this and become one with the machines for these operations. Although some of the military ships had them even now, the operations to implant the jacks required sophisticated surgical machines that needed constant maintenance and upkeep due to the incredibly tiny tolerances required. The expertise and technology needed had been held close to the vest by the old System Combine and the specialized guilds who each guarded their programs.

Another major part of human knowledge lost for the most part, the few jacks left kept going by cannibalizing others that had failed for parts. She wasn’t at all sure it was a big loss, not like a lot of the other stuff, and many others agreed with her. We’ve had to give up our metamorphosis into machines and learn to become human again, she thought.

Still, at this time, for this kind of operation, she wouldn’t have minded being able to use those jacks just for this.

“Power at point nine nine nine forever percent,” Achmed reported. “Clock on, tied to power reserve. Detaching unit aft.”

The inverted U of dull blue-gray coloration came to life and there was a series of chunk! chunk! chunk! sounds as the connecting pieces detached and slid back into their recesses. A light on the tiny cab centered atop the structure flashed yellow, and the two side lights flashed red and green as the section slowly lifted off the main structure and then turned, cleared it, and lowered itself to only a few meters off the ground.

“Moving out. Lucky, you coming?”

“I’ll wait a few minutes,” the shuttle pilot responded. “You’ll be a while getting that thing over there, and I don’t feel like waiting around in this crud.”

“Fair enough. Punched in, navigation is on automatic. Ride is steady. Some slight buffeting by the winds at the cab level, but nothing that isn’t being compensated for. Estimated arrival time at current very slow speed is sixteen minutes.”

“Hell, I’m gonna take a crap and I’ll still beat you there. Hold off at least one klick out, though. We don’t want any of them things gettin’ ideas.”

“Never let me stand in the way of a woman going to the bathroom! Go, in more ways than one!”

Queson was no pilot nor, even less, a salvage center controller, but she drew the chair at the center control room while everybody else would be away. Achmed would be operating the smelter unit, Jerry and Sark would be backup on the shuttle, and Cross would be flying. That left the anthropologist/geologist, the latter a field she’d added late in life because it was actually marketable, to monitor everything. In one way it was the best seat in the house; her monitoring screens showed every lens view, every ferret, the cabin view from Achmed’s lofty perch, the fore and aft shuttle views, the surrounding security perimeter established around Salvage One, as well as the maps, monitors of lifesigns, and just about everything else. It was, in fact, too much information; while it was useful to the master computer and the ship above, in most cases she had to pick a view and stick with it. She knew that if anything unusual showed up, the system would automatically switch to that view.

She felt the whole complex shudder and then there was a big banging sound for a moment. The shuttle was away.

“Overview of target complex,” she said, and the whole thing, as photographed from high above, came on the screen. “Show infrared and lifesigns.”

The reactor showed as a nice, steady glow, but there seemed to be nothing else of note within the structure. “Active overview,” she commanded.

Now she could see the smelter unit, represented by a simulation but looking probably as real as a current picture, with Achmed’s small lifesign at the top, and the shuttle closing in on it rapidly, three dots showing inside it.

“Li? You on?”

“Yes, Doc, I’m here. What’s the problem? You’re the only one down there who can sit this one out.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I sure don’t envy any of them being out there. I dunno. Maybe it’s just what almost happened to me there, maybe it’s my anthropologist’s self saying that we’re trying to seal off the first apparently intelligent creature we’ve met out here, maybe it’s a hundred things. Mostly, though, I just feel like we’re underestimating this thing. If nothing else, it’s going to take several minutes to heat up that rock so that it becomes useful. Those things were fast. I don’t like not knowing about those caverns below, too. Too many unknowns.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what the face of poverty will do for you. Take risks. The bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff, too.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

The shuttle now did a slow flyover of the cliffside above the complex, and checked the openings and interconnects to the first rows of greenhouses in the complex. They, of course, would have to be sacrificed to the rock seal as well. It wasn’t what they wanted to do, but it was necessary.

“Twenty-six, move forward to interconnect with the cliffs and hold on the ceiling,” Queson ordered, and the ferret moved with lightning speed down the last big warehouse and into the interconnect. “Pan.”

This was the area where they’d emerged, the one with the only bodies left on the planet as far as could be determined.

“Hold it! Lock onto the floor and pan.”

“What’s the problem, Randi?” An Li asked.

“Take a look. Bones, some remnants, dumped out and all over. Those are the bodies, but where are the e-suits?”

“Huh? Even if they took the suits, why didn’t they consume the remains?” An Li asked, even as she confirmed the video.

“I have no idea. I don’t know what the hell we’re dealing with at this point,” she responded. “Queson to shuttle. Watch out below. They’ve dumped out the e-suits, which means that they’re wearing them.”

“What? Hey! Everybody hear that?”

“I don’t believe it,” Achmed responded. “They’re just animals. You just went down the wrong corridor. At any rate, I’ll melt their slimy little asses in a few more minutes and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Suddenly all sorts of alarms went off on the main board, causing Queson to almost jump out of her seat. She looked around frantically, silenced them, then sought what had triggered them. It wasn’t hard to figure out.

“What the hell…?” Lucky Cross said, amazed.

The reactor was clearly being powered up inside the cliffs, and, eerily, like some kind of ghostly march, one by one, row by row, the lights and general power in each of the greenhouses was coming on.

“Animals my ass!” Queson called to him. “Damn it, it knows how to work the control center! It’s powering up! Stay above your targets by a fair distance! It knows you’re there and it’s moving to try and stop you from doing whatever you’re doing. It may not have figured us out yet, but it sure as hell knows we’re up to something nasty for it!”

“I am in position, power at ninety point two percent!” Achmed called to them. “Clear?”

“All ferrets back to safety distances, shuttle in hover mode well over you, Achmed!” Randi Queson told him. “Do it! Do it now, before that thing figures out a way to stop it!”

“Engaging on target at forty percent power,” Achmed responded coolly. “Going up five percent per minute.”

Queson looked away from the general view and to the monitors showing the ferret views from just inside the safety circle, as close as they could safely risk to the smelter’s actions.

“Fifty percent. Surface rock going into the red, six hundred degrees surface at the mark. Mark! Fifty-five percent. Seven hundred degrees, accelerating nicely.”

Two distinct and large patches of something came out of the entry tube and into the now well-lit greenhouse. They looked like large two-meter-by-half-a-meter puddles of water to Queson, only they were moving, moving under their own power somehow, and leaving no wet trail behind.

She watched, even as Achmed’s status report came through the audio, and a much more precise account of its progress was being posted on a parallel screen.

The two things, whatever they were, came up to where some of those eerie, empty clothes were lying and they flowed right into them. It was as if some sort of invisible balloon inside them suddenly inflated, and now those clothes were once again inhabited, this time by living sculptures in that translucent watery material. A man and a woman, so detailed that it was as if they were reincarnated on the spot. They actually looked at one another, nodded, then got up on two legs inside their work shoes and walked over to the door. The male took a pair of utility goggles from the tools hanging on the wall and put them on quite like anyone else would, then pressed the door latch which, with power restored, at least for a short while, slid back. “He” stuck his head outside, carefully looking back up towards the cliffs, then withdrew back inside, took off the goggles, and closed the door. The pair were so humanlike in every movement that they actually looked, well, if not angry then certainly pissed off, yet there was an air of puzzlement, too, like they were trying to figure out what the hell to do about things.

“I’ve got primary melting at seventy-five percent,” Achmed announced. “White hot around the edges but nothing major. I’m going to hold at this, both to save power and to allow it to spread as an even flow. Surface rock temperature is at fourteen hundred thirty-four degrees Celsius. That’s a rather nice temperature for a nice, slow magma flow.”

“We’ve got flickering on the lights,” Cross reported. “I think we’re into the cliffside interconnects.”

“Yeah, well, that central worm can drop down into the sea below, and it’s got some offspring running around looking and acting just like us,” Queson warned them. “We’re not out of this yet!”

“We’ve got the laser cannon on manual and are covering,” Jerry Nagel’s voice came in. “We’re open wide, maximum heat at a three meter square spread. I—”

At that moment, the audio from all sources suddenly began blasting out very bizarre sounds that were stepping on and breaking up everybody else.

“What the shit is that?” An Li managed through the direct to ship link that was the only one not affected.

“It’s—it’s music!” Randi responded, confused and amazed. “Some kind of Hindu or Buddhist chanting against some exotic instruments.”

“Damn! That’s one smart worm! Can you get through to the shuttle or Achmed at all? This link’s only good to the base where you are unless the shuttle activates its emergency communicator, and I suspect that’s not a good option with all the other power, particularly weapons, on. Damn!”

Queson set the intercom on full scan. It scanned tens of thousands of frequencies in the blink of an eye, but it just kept locking on different south Asian music or eerie, rhythmic chants.

“It’s got a repertoire, but no signals ground-to-ground are getting around the jamming,” she reported. “I’m getting video, but no audio, but I suspect that’s the next thing to jam. Lucky’s got her keyboard active but either it’s being jammed, too, or she’s really rusty actually typing out anything. It’s mostly garbage.”

“How’re your keyboard skills?” An wanted to know.

“Rusty, but competent.”

“Pull it out and send, ‘Do you want to abort?’ That gives her a yes or no. She should be able to manage that.”

Queson turned and found the release and brought out the keyboard. It was a last-ditch antique transmitting on an equally ancient frequency, but it was often the only way to get through in high-interference regions.

The screen responded, “N. I thr trblnhyt=”

“No trouble. Your keyboarding is awful. Stick to yes or no.” Clearly Lucky was typing with a finger while trying to check on a dozen other things at once and going off the keys without realizing it.

The smelter was doing its job on the rocks, but it wasn’t at all clear that the solution was working. Magma wasn’t something that could easily be predicted or controlled, and the models were based on standard assumptions. The fact was that, at this point, the whole face of the cliff was melting like some surreal painting, and the base of the complex where it connected to the first row of greenhouses was heavily engulfed in billowing smoke. The four connected directly into the cliff were on fire, even though they were nominally fireproof.

“Ha! Let anything try and get out of there now!” Achmed cried in triumph. “Powering down, still have thirty-one percent, more than enough to get back and mate with the main unit. There is no question that the linkages are sealed!”

The main board in front of Randi started going wild. She looked up at the displays, but so much was going on at once she could barely make sense of it. Small dots, small units or something, were outside the greenhouses but well away from the action. Two—no, three small blips. Yellow… red… green… Why?

Suddenly she realized that the colored blips had numbers in them. They were e-suits, powered up and therefore registering on the universal transponder frequency. Red, yellow, green…

Suddenly the vision of the partially decomposed suits came into her mind. Yellow, red, green… They were using the suits to move about outside and away from the fire!

“Lucky, you’d better cover down there! Three things in powered suits heading out and away from the complex! They could be coming my way!” she warned.

“Huh!” the pilot responded, surprised. She hadn’t really seen these things in action. “I’ll be damned! Think we can shoot ’em?”

“Fire will take them out, or full power disintegration,” Queson told her.

“Yeah, but those suits can take a lot of shit. Stand by! I’m going to swing around and see if I can spot the little buggers.”

“Watch it!” Li cautioned from above. “If they have power in those suits then they have short-term weapons!”

“Ah, c’mon! They’re fuckin’ worms, aren’t they?” Cross came back.

“Worms that can figure out what the suits are for, operate them, and, more important, worms that have figured out how to recharge the batteries in the past day or so!” Queson reminded her. “And if they can do that, then you better damned well figure they can shoot.”

“Well, I’ll keep the hatches closed. Nothing they would have could penetrate the shuttle,” the pilot responded, a bit chastened. “I think we can put a few energy bolts down there where they’ll do the most good!”

Queson looked at the board. Something else was going, too, something that was only readable by a faint yet enormous heat signature.

They’d awakened the big one, the one wrapped around the power core! The sucker had oozed down into that underground sea and was now moving around the molten area. The ground was so thick and the interference from the greenhouses and the smelter operations so prevalent that only the size of the thing made it obvious that it was more than an intermittent anomaly.

“The mother creature is free in the water,” she reported. “I think it’s coming my way. What the hell do I do?”

At almost the same moment, Cross called, “Where the fuck are the little bastards? I don’t have them on visual at all!”

“Try the emergency transponder frequencies! They show up here!”

And, at just about two seconds after she said it, they suddenly vanished from her board.

“What? Where?”

“Damn it! They’re listening to us!” Queson almost screamed.

How was that possible? How could such a creature, however smart, learn enough of their language to understand it? Or to power up and operate all those complex gadgets, including knowing just how to turn the emergency beacon off? Hell, even these colonists hadn’t spoken the language the crew of the Stanley was using!

“Good God!” she swore, almost as if speaking to herself. “I think those things absorb the knowledge, the intellect, of the people they ingest! They’ve got the collective knowledge of every colonist who lived down there!”

“Oh, c’mon! That’s impossible!” Nagel put in. “Anything that adaptable and that smart wouldn’t be sleeping wrapped around a radiation core!”

But that was exactly what it might do, several of them realized at once. All that collective knowledge couldn’t get them out of this hole. All it could do was frustrate a smart entity or entities, now knowing all the wonders of the universe out there but being unable to get to it. It would make sense to put the power on minimum, use it as an alternate energy source, and then just go to sleep, hibernate, dreaming great dreams of potential conquest, waiting, waiting for somebody, from somewhere, to stumble over this outpost of Hell and give it a ride to the stars.

This wasn’t something they were prepared for, nor something they could deal with. There was only one course they could follow, and they all knew it.

“Everybody back! Now!” An Li ordered. “The captain has issued a full abort! Lucky, drop the hunt and cover Achmed. Get that smelter and all of you back to the ground base. Ain’t no way we’re gonna salvage anything except maybe our lives here.”

Randi Queson looked at the heat shadow that came in and out on the board, twisting and turning, sometimes too faint to make out, other times very clear if amorphous in shape, and it was very clear that the thing was trying to figure out how the hell to get to the base and her. Only the fact that they’d feared that the weight of the base would break through the crust and so chosen a solid basalt outcrop for the anchor site, and the fact that the creature couldn’t stand that weather out there unprotected any more than they could, were saving them.

But what if you had the brains of a thousand or more colonists and their collective knowledge of everything from geology to conventional biology to use? It— they— would figure something out. She knew it.

“Screw the smelter!” she yelled. “Pick up Achmed from the cab and get back here now! Otherwise it’s going to be here waiting for you!”

“Belay that!” An Li cut in. “There’s no way we can make up for the loss of the smelter. You come up here without it, we won’t be here. Understood?”

“You mercenary bitch! Next time you’re comin’ down!” Queson said, disgust competing with fear as her dominant emotion.

“It’s all about money, honey,” An Li replied. “Always was.”

“Calm down, ladies!” Achmed called. “I’ll be home as quickly as I can! Nothing’s going to get up here to me, so relax! And I don’t think that the Big Bad Worm can undermine the base. It may be the fastest learner in the universe, but it’s pretty soft and at least as much water as we are. Not to worry! Allah is merciful! He will protect me!”

“Allah pays as much attention to you as you do to Him,” Nagel responded. “Just get your big smelter over there and show us you can mate!”

“Jerry, I think we all ought to switch to a private frequency,” Cross commented. “If this thing can listen, let’s put its ears out! Randi! Li! Achmed! Listen up! Private fourteen, full digicode! Got that?”

“Wait!” Queson called. “How do I do that here?”

“Fourteen full, aye!” Achmed responded, and the whole communications system went very, very dead.

Queson looked around for something, anything, to order a change, and nothing was obvious.

She looked up at the main display. The thing was almost engulfing the plateau, but so far below that it still registered only as a faint shadow. On the other hand, the three dots, no longer color coded, showed up quite close to the base now and proceeding towards it on the ground. They’d minimized their energy signatures to a remarkable degree, but this close in they couldn’t hide from the scanners any more.

They didn’t have to.

She was all alone, and about five minutes from possibly having the worst kind of visitors.