Stars Rain Down (26 page)

Jack wasn't quite thirty and he'd already seen thousands of open wounds, but he hadn't always been numb to the sight of blood and gore. He'd thought he was a real tough guy during his first month with the ERC, but all that bravado vanished in an instant when he found the remains of someone blown apart by a roadside bomb.

The air was thick and smelled like a slaughterhouse, but he didn't immediately put it all together. Not until he saw parts he recognized. A hand. A leg sheared off below the knee. Intestines spilling over a curb. Then the floodgates opened and realization rushed into him all at once... the smell was human meat.

Jack ran away and puked his guts out, and was grim and despondent for days afterward. That's when he first met Leonid Nikitin, another young corpsman who already had a year of duty behind him.

Nikitin had enough sense to take Jack out for a beer and listen while the new recruit came to grips with what he was feeling. He didn't say a word all night, not until Jack was done, and then all he said was, "It's a good thing you're disgusted, Jackie-boy. You better be, because it's a damn disgusting world out there. That's why we're here, ain't it? Because we're disgusted. Because we care enough to try and make things right. Need another beer?"

And that was enough. Jack had a pounding headache the next morning, but when that passed, he was alright. Really alright. He got up, he did his job, and a handful of years later, he became head of his brigade.

That night was eight years past, but Jack still thought about it sometimes. As he stepped down into the darkened shelter that'd been converted into a ramshackle morgue, the smell brought the memory back again like a freight train. For a moment, Jack thought he was going to lose his lunch, but he metered his breathing and concentrated until the nausea passed.

It took his eyes a few to adjust to the light. The center of the room was sharply lit by an overhead lamp, and everything beyond that faded to blackness. Something lumpy rested on a raised platform, attended by someone in a white coat. Jack recognized Lisa Albright a second later, who looked momentarily like a doctor again as she dissected and documented the aliens, while Charlie stood off to the side manning a camera.

Albright had protested that she wasn't trained for this kind of work, but she was the best they had and the bodies were already starting to decompose. Without refrigeration, they wouldn't get half-way to the Russian Ark without falling apart.

Jack could make out more detail after a bit. The thing on the table was one of the half-tonne rhinos, all of its limbs stretched out and its chest cavity split open. Its thick elephantine skin was pinned to the sides, revealing amorphous and discolored organs. Several parts had already been removed and were sitting in shallow metal dishes.

He approached the platform and looked down at the lifeless creature with disdain. "You're having fun, I see. So, what am I looking at?"

"I haven't identified everything yet, but most of it's more like us than not. Heart, liver, stomach, lungs." She pointed them out as she went, some still inside the corpse and others arrayed around the table,
a la carte.
"It's all there in one form or another."

"Learn anything useful?"

"Not yet, but a couple interesting things for sure. For one, they don't wear the
armor.
It's attached to them. Grows right out of the skin."

"Weird. And the bugs on their backs?"

"Some kind of symbiotic relationship. The rhino has a secondary breathing tube on its back, like a whale's blowhole, and the insect is attached there. It has a snorkel that extends right down into the hole, and branches into the rhino's lungs. I'd guess they have complimentary respiratory chemistries. The armor grew around the insect's hooks, so it's likely been attached for a while."

She walked around the platform and pointed at the creature's crotch. "There's something else. The sex organs are horribly atrophied, probably vestigial. His gonads are about the size of rice grains. I can't imagine it being able to breed at all, which seems to imply some sort of caste structure."

"Interesting. Have you gotten to the bug?"

"Not yet, but I don't expect I'll learn much when I do. You could fill a library with everything I don't know about insect physiology. I've already finished the jackrabbit and the pilot, though."

"And?"

"Weird and weirder. The jackrabbits are all over the place. Their eyes are highly developed, with tapetum lucidum and full nictitating membrane. Their eyes also have multiple lenses, lined up in a series. I think. I've never seen anything like it before."

"I don't speak Greek, Lisa."

"Good night vision, can probably see farther than us. Maybe telescopically."

"Gotcha. Are the rabbits fixed, too?"

"No. The one we brought back is female, with fully formed ovaries and what appears to be a marsupial pouch."

Jack chuckled. "Maybe we should start calling 'em kangaroos, then?"

"The huge eyes and floppy ears are a little more iconic," she said. "As for the pilot... well, there's just nothing like it on Earth. Or wasn't, anyway. It's like someone yanked out an animal's nervous system and made it its own creature. Mostly high density nerve bundles connected to a big fat brain. Judging by the brain to body mass ratio, I wouldn't want to play chess against him."

Jack said, "I hate chess."

"Me too," Charlie chimed in.

Albright chewed on her lower lip. "The thing that's bothering me most is that none of these creatures appear to be even remotely related. It'd be like us teaming up with pigeons and crabs. I just don't get it."

Jack was still staring at the half-dismantled corpse. "I'm all for academic advancement and shit, and I'm sure this is all super edifying, but all I want to know is how to kill them. Tell me you found a weak-spot."

Albright shook her head. "Sorry, Jack. No silver bullets. They live just like us, though. They eat, they breathe."

"They bleed," Charlie added.

"Then we'll just keep killing them any way we can."

Sal traveled back and forth between Mars and Legacy constantly while the second factory was being constructed on the ground, and by the time it finally sparked to life, she was another of Legacy's permanent residents.

She brought more tools with her on every trip, more half-finished scraps and pieces of junk, until her workshop on the alien vessel was a near-perfect replica of the one she abandoned on the Arcadian Plain. The furniture, lighting and even gravity were all the same. She even rigged up a device to imitate the sound of small stones hitting the colony shielding; that noise had irritated her for years, but for some reason, its absence bothered her even more.

But there were differences. With a single thought, her new workshop's walls could turn clear as glass, revealing the bustling factory beyond. That was all hers now, and had begun churning out new equipment at a startling rate.

The factory was her pride and joy.

It certainly wasn't the only source of activity on Legacy, though. The rest of the ship was in a constant state of change as it and its crew adapted to one another. Legacy grew terminals that mimicked human computers in order to facilitate communication, and while they weren't perfect (especially the ship's grasp of English syntax), they were nevertheless a start.

Engineering posed its own challenges. The original Eireki occupants had continually been in psychic contact with one another, which made their thoughts more orderly and fine tuned. They weren't just people but something more, capable of doing complex mathematics and spatial transformations in their collective consciousness. They simply dreamed up new devices to the last exacting detail and let the machinery turn them into reality.

According to Donovan, Sal was
more like the Eireki
than the others—whatever that meant—but she just didn't have the mental brawn needed to drive construction that way. On a few occasions, the machines managed to produce small baubles she pictured in her mind, but she was scribbling on the wall with crayons when they needed the Sistine Chapel.

This left her in a lurch. The factory could dissect and reproduce her machined parts, but couldn't fabricate things like microchips. It could produce a variety of Eireki components, but most of that left Sal utterly baffled. She needed to integrate the two somehow, but the answer just wouldn't come to her.

She briefly considered volunteering for a freaky brain interface like Donovan's, but she couldn't stomach the idea... and it would only go part of the way to solving her problems. While it would aid in back-and-forth communication, it wouldn't make her any smarter.

She was plenty sharp with numbers, but wasn't a savant. And she definitely wasn't some Eireki living computer.

What she needed was a way to plug her workstation into the ship. She'd been using modeling and simulation software for years, and considered the machine her better half, but trying to get it and Legacy to talk proved impossible.

At first glance, the problem was similar to designing the MASPEC's interface, but her work there relied on decades of other people's research into biofeedback and human nerve conductivity. The building blocks were known quantities; she simply had to arrange them correctly, with a smidgen of elbow grease and patchwork.

Her current problem was a mirror image. She was trying to reverse engineer an alien nervous system, and build a translation layer on top of it. The task was miles outside of her expertise.

Sal was idly toying with a design program on her workstation, while waiting for an answer to come to her. On the screen, a rendered model hovered and spun around in an endless sea of grey.

Then she heard the whoosh of the transit tube, followed by a pair of boots clacking on the floor. She found the prospect of company dreadful, and didn't bother to look up. Hopefully, whoever it was would take a hint.

The person stopped behind her chair. "Looks interesting. Let me guess... A planetary probe?" It was Marcus Donovan.

"Close. I've been thinking about the people on Earth. They have no idea we're out here, that help is on its way, and I thought maybe we could give them a little
hope.
"

"You're planning some kind of two way communication, I presume?"

"Depends on if I can figure out Legacy's comm technology or not. If not, then we can at least send a message in a bottle. Pack in some orbital photos and a note letting them know we're getting ready."

"Maps are good, but leave it at that. I don't want the enemy to know we're out here until it's too late. Until we're knocking at their door. Your plan's clever, though."

"Thanks and all," she said, "but I'm not feeling too clever. These are just wasted pixels if I can't communicate it to the factory."

"That's why I'm here," Donovan said. He had that seductive tone in his voice again, like the devil about to offer a banjo. "Rao and I discovered something we think might help."

Discovered something? Sal doubted anything less than a hidden network port would be of much use. She turned and looked at Donovan with skepticism in her eyes. "Well?"

"That'd be telling. Just take the transit tube, and you'll see."

Sal considered not going to spite Donovan and his stage magician theatrics, but if he had an answer, she needed to see it. "Fine," she said, "after you."

"No, ladies first," he replied.

And Sal smiled despite herself. Chivalry was an extinct species on Mars.

She stood and walked to the landing pad, and the artificial gravity sucked her into the tube. She couldn't escape the feeling Legacy's transit was a bit like being flushed down an impossibly large toilet, and she didn't know if that was hilarious or terrifying. Probably a little bit of both.

The tubes passed by in a blur, and then she was set down inside a white dome-shaped room. Concentric rings were cut into the floor, each filled with what appeared to be water, but glowing a rich sea-blue.

Donovan arrived a second later, and strode out across the floor, beckoning Sal on with a curled finger. "We've been trying to figure out the purpose of this room since we arrived. As usual, everyone had their pet theory, but most were like Professor Caldwell's, who was absolutely sure it was some kind of temple. He was really keyed into these perfect circles, and the possibility of a pseudo-Pythagorean geometry cult... or something."

"Doesn't seem like a bad theory."

"No, not bad. Except that it was completely wrong." Donovan waved his hand and the lights dimmed. The man really had a thing for stage theatrics. "Of course, that's just the way Caldwell is. All symbolism and nothing practical. If he dug up an ancient wrench, he'd spin a theory about it being an abstract lunar sculpture used by moon worshiping priests to summon the seasons."

"So why'd you bring him along?"

Donovan had a sheepish smile. "Because I'm the kind to dig up a lunar sculpture and assume it's a wrench."

"Sensible. Alright then, Mr. Smarty Pants, what the hell is this place then?"

"It's a projection room."

There was a slight disturbance in the gravity, a tiny readjustment that Sal could hardly feel. Then the fluid in the channels began to rise in streams that dissipated to thin vapor a half-meter later.

Donovan said, "The fluid is doped with micro-organisms that fluoresce when excited."

Stars and nebulae appeared all around, swirling in the humidity. Donovan floated up from the floor and swam through his new galaxy, and as he pointed to the different stars, each burned more brightly.

"Even better," he said, "it's fully interactive." With those words, a literal handful of stars swarmed above his open palm and circled like fireflies.

"Whoa," was all she said.

"Exactly what I said. Give it a try."

Sal closed her eyes and tried to summon absolutely any idea, but drew a hard blank. This new development was just too startling; the infinite possibilities opened in front of her and left her heart racing. She'd never dealt well with a blank piece of paper.