Stars Rain Down (12 page)

Jansen drifted toward the control panel. "That's the spirit, Hop. You've got what the French call a real
joie de vivre,
you know that?" His hands danced through the generator activation procedure, and the console beeped in approval. After another second, he could hear the station's generators starting to cycle.

Hopkins had turned ghost white. Even whiter and sweatier than normal, in fact. "What do we do if they come for us?"

Jansen said, "Say cheese."

"Die," Marco offered. "If it makes you feel better, you could go outside and chuck a stapler at 'em. Who knows... maybe they have a secret vulnerability to staples. You could be a hero."

"I'm pretty sure I'm gonna give 'em the finger," Jansen said after some thought. "But not just any finger. This would be a historic flip-off. One for the ages. See, it wouldn't just be my finger, but the human race's collective finger."

Hopkins pouted. "I frigging hate you guys."

"With good reason," Jansen agreed as he looked out the window at the smoking ash heap that was his planet. "Bad news, though. Seems we're all you've got left."

Hopkins groaned for a very long time, so long that Jansen began to wonder if the man might be part whale. Hopkins certainly looked the part, with his big bald pasty white head. Maybe one of those melon headed whales, or a pilot whale.

When Hopkin's unnatural groan finally finished, Jansen looked back to the console and saw that the generator was running at full output. "In other news," he said, "fiat lux."

He hit
ENGAGE
and the lights came on, followed shortly afterward by a draft of sweet fresh air.

"Thank God," Marco said. "It was starting to smell like a jock strap in here."

Jansen smiled sheepishly. "Sorry. Skipped my shower this morning. Hey Hop, why don't you give the comms a try?"

The whale man swam over to the comm console. "Sure thing, Nils. So you can blame me when the aliens blow us away, right?"

"You're catching on. Getting anything?"

"Gimme a second." The whale-man slapped the console several times with his sweaty flipper. "Nope. Whole network's static."

Marco, still lying in his imaginary space hammock, laughed. "Alrighty. There might be someone to call, but we still can't call them. That brings us back to slow suicide."

"Real slow if you like. We've got supplies to last for a couple months. Maybe more if we're stingy."

"Christ. Do you have to be such nihilists?"

Jansen gave Hopkins a dry look. "Hey man, I don't hear you coming up with any brilliant escape plan." He didn't want to die. Not at all. It just seemed like the only option left... but he realized the lack of options might possibly stem from his atrophied imagination. "Here's an idea," he said. "Instead of whinging, why don't you use the contents of that massive cranium and come up with some way out of this?"

Marco had floated all the way across the command center, where he reached out and knocked on one of the numerous control stations. The dull metal clank echoed through the chamber. "Copernicus is, like, the pride of the Foundation, right? We're inside a shiny new multi-billion credit deep space scanning doo-hickey, and you're telling me there's no way to send an email?"

"Waaaaait," Hopkins said, dragging the word out while his brain spooled up. "I bet the active scanners can cut through the interference. We fire up the actives... the microwave laser or the infra-red, and use it to send Morse code or something."

Jansen sighed. "It's a
maser,
dumb ass. And not to rain on your parade, but I don't know Morse code. Do you know Morse code, Marco?"

"Do I look like a boy scout to you?" Marco chuckled derisively and went on. "Screw that noise. Use the comm networking protocols to generate a packet stream, and pipe it through the maser. Instant output device."

"You can do that?" Jansen asked. "I thought you were just a wrench monkey."

"I took network programming in college, so... maybe? Probably not. Won't know till I try, though. You think Hopkins can do the bullshit he said?"

Jansen looked over at the sweaty, quivering mass of flesh that was Larry Hopkins, and they all shrugged in unison. "Sure," he said. "Why not? We're literate, college educated men. We have tech manuals. We've got more time than we can shake a stick at, and there isn't any damned TV to distract us. I'm positively filled to the knees with hope."

Marco climbed into a chair. "Sarcastic bastard. So, what message do we send?"

"Survivors on Copernicus. Send help." Hopkins said.

Marco looked skeptical. "Yeah. That'll bring 'em running. How about
Busty bikini models on Copernicus. Starved for love. Come quick and bring beer
?"

Jansen looked down at the generator panel, and the long list of systems waiting to be activated. None of them had a purpose anymore. He idly wondered how things might have turned out if Copernicus were a great big railgun instead. Then he read the word
telescope
and an idea caught fire. "Nobody out there has any clue what went down. Not Midway. Not the Moon. Not Mars. Why don't we point our big fat telescope at Earth, and show them what's happening?"

"Not bad," Marco said.

Hopkins nodded enthusiastically. "Yeah, I like it."

Each of them floated silently in their own corner of the command center. They had a plan and a vague idea of how to accomplish it. The deadline was months away, and since they were all professional technicians, they wouldn't bother to start for at least another week. Not as if anyone was left to fire them for laziness.

As he stared at the wounded Earth and started to zone-out again, one thing really burned Nils Jansen's biscuits: Donovan and his nerds were tens of millions of kilometers away, completely ignorant of this whole catastrophe, and having the time of their lives. He'd had his suspicions before but now it was official... he made the wrong damn decision.

He hated when that happened.

The members of the Shackleton Expedition were having the time of their lives. It didn't take them long to master Zebra-One's unique transportation method, and soon they were flitting about and mapping the ship's internals faster than they ever could have dreamed.

There was a specific approach that proved most effective: an explorer pictured the entire vessel in their mind then focused down to their intended destination, and the ship took care of the rest. Once a person had been to a location, though, all they needed do was picture it again and off they went. The system was learning.

A third of the group were especially talented, able to pick up the process in under a minute, and were then able to get around effortlessly. Most of the rest could navigate the ship after a half-hour of practice, and a few others needed longer, but precisely two simply couldn't get any response at all.

One of them was the cantankerous Professor Caldwell, and the other was a young miner named Joseph Terrel. Both tried well into the second day under mounting frustration, but the ship refused to take them anywhere. Zebra-One otherwise reacted to them normally, providing light and displaying the electrical pattern when they touched the walls, but they were both eventually forced (rather embarrassingly) to travel with someone else who could operate the transit system.

Doctor St. Martin latched onto both men and became their permanent tour guide in return for a chance to study them in detail. She very badly wanted to understand how the system and its psychic interface worked, and she believed that the two men's inability to use it might hold the answer.

It was also discovered that any of the irises could be opened from the inside with a thought, similar to how one operated the transit tubes. From that point on, the stream of personnel on and off the giant alien ship was constant. Teams worked in rotating shifts, composed of everyone aboard the Shackleton except for a skeleton crew who watched from outside. That group included Mason Shen, who finally allowed himself to get a few hours of shut-eye only to immediately return to the communications puzzle the next morning.

There were never fewer than five people aboard Zebra-One at any one time, including Marcus Donovan and Commander Faulkland, who each felt compelled to stay following their first incursion. They claimed to be quarantining themselves to avoid infecting the rest of the crew, but no one much believed them. In truth, each was enamored with the strange alien vessel, and it would've taken a platoon of marines to drag them away.

Exploration began in a handful hollow cavities detected during the years of scanning, which the Gypsies considered most likely to hold important systems. The team targeted the smallest ones first, and each offered wonders stranger and more perplexing than the last. There was a great vaulted arcade with a ceiling lit in every color of the rainbow and columns curved like a ribcage. There was a dank cavern full of organic structures that looked like fruiting fungi, and a branching network on the lower decks that was best described as a swamp.

One of the most mystifying was a perfectly circular room with concentric rings full of clear water set in the floor. Professor Caldwell suspected the room might have some religious significance to the natives, but it was more a hunch than anything. No one else had a better idea.

There were also areas that were less mysterious. They discovered several large cell-like networks of rooms that were undoubtedly living quarters, each complete with its own sleep area and not-unfamiliar waste collector. The quarters were clustered around evenly spaced dining halls, while small recreational parks were always nearby.

Much of the forward fifth of the craft was full of rod-shaped structures connected in series, starting very large and getting progressively smaller and more numerous as they approached the bow, all focused on the huge cavity at the front of the vessel. Debates erupted over the purpose of that cavity, with many hoping it was a scientific array while quietly suspecting it was a weapon.

Late on the second day, a few teams started to examine the secondary hull, which was two-thirds the length of Zebra-One's main hull and attached by two thick struts. Unlike the primary hull, the secondary was streamlined and mainly hollow, devoted almost entirely to a series of interconnected chambers. Each housed different kinds of machinery, including a legion of segmented manipulator arms attached to gargantuan support rings.

All of that equipment, alien as it may have been, bore a striking resemblance to manufacturing equipment back on Earth. Unless the expedition missed their mark, the secondary hull was a factory complex. The largest ever seen, in fact. The only question remaining was what it was supposed to build.

On the morning of the third day, Marcus Donovan decided it was finally time to take a look at her heart. Back on the Copernicus Observatory, it was the discovery of a network of veins connected to that organ that convinced him and Rao that the vessel was biological. Now that he was aboard, he'd seen the sheaths that contained the thick, fibrous veins, but it was anyone's guess what was inside the heart itself.

The structure was the size of a skyscraper, and it lay at the center of the primary hull. Marcus was sure it was the main power generator, and he absolutely had to know how it worked.

Faulkland volunteered to join him, which surprised no one; the two had become inseparable since they came aboard. Rao also came along, being twice as eager as the others to learn how the aliens generated power.

They ate a quick breakfast, looked over the old scans to get a fresh image of their destination in mind, then each of them pictured the heart and was flung through the endless maze of corridors. The entire five-kilometer journey took only a dozen seconds, and undoubtedly involved enough momentum to splash them against a wall like water balloons. Marcus would've preferred not to think about it, but just couldn't stop.

At the other end, the artificial gravity gently lowered him back down to one of the octagonal landing pads, whose like were found beneath every corridor entrance. Much as nearly everything else onboard, no one knew whether they were merely decorative or served some mechanical purpose.

Faulkland followed a moment later and floated down beside Marcus, followed by Rao, whose eyes were closed. Considering the fact that he usually had to be sedated before orbital launches, simply closing his eyes was a significant step in the right direction.

Marcus had expected the heart to already be lit when he arrived, since it was ostensibly powering every other light on the ship, but he didn't have any such luck. In fact, it took longer for the room to react to human presence than any other they'd explored.

When the walls finally began to glow, in a cool blue rather than the warm amber of elsewhere, the trio found themselves in a small cul-de-sac with no obvious opening apart from the one they'd come through.

"Think she's screwing with us?" Faulkland asked as he, like the others, slowly scanned the surroundings.

"I dunno. Hope not," Marcus said. The vessel hadn't been anything but accommodating so far; perhaps even
obedient,
but he was careful to keep a tight lid on thoughts like that. Just in case.

Rao drew the probe from his shoulder and started to take readings. "Maybe the generator is dangerous. Radioactive. Do you think she would reroute us away from something potentially lethal?"

"That's not a bad thought," Marcus said, taking a few cautious steps forward. "But then where did she take us? Seems strange having a corridor lead to a dead-end, doesn't it?"

Faulkland laughed. "Wouldn't be the first strange thing, Marc."

"I guess not," Marcus said. It didn't add up, though. A dead-end wouldn't just be strange; it'd be
pointless,
and he had trouble believing there was a single millimeter of anything pointless on the ship. "No," he added after a moment. "It's an ante-chamber. She wants to make sure we're serious."

Marcus stepped forward and took a good look at the wall in front of him. The room looked unfinished, like someone had just given up and stopped. It was an ante-chamber. It had to be.