Scratch Monkey (39 page)

The skin of the craft is thick and vascular, full of wide passages and random tunnels, fractally accreted. Everything seems to have grown in incredibly intricate organic forms; the determinants of chaos. Lorma pulls herself down towards the floor and grips it with all six feet. A shadow falls; Parveen descending, a fearsome array of laser mirrors extended from her abdomen.

"Look," Lorma says. "Do we go horizontal or vertical?"

"Vertical," suggests Parveen. "That way to the control structures."

"Affirmative," I add, making myself known. "Go lateral."

"Okay."
I hope this is right,
I think. Two tunnels lead straight down. I note that her sensors are registering vacuum and cold; the surfaces are freezing. Vented gas chills the walls. She sees whorls and crescents of frost, looks closer. "Hey, check this out. What's it made of?"

"I've got the kit." Parveen stabs a mess spec terminal at the wall and vapourizes a tiny chunk. "Hey," she says; "this is crazy. Fragments mass up to ten daltons ... mostly diamondoid carbon ..." A mass profile pushes into my viewfield. "Shit! Solid nanoassemblers!"

"So?" Lorma asks. "It's alive. Or was. Let's move in before it notices us." She turns and aims herself at the nearest downward-leading passage. Sonar is useless; she flashes a searchlight along it. Darkness. Her throttle blips open effortlessly, punching her into the tunnel at breakneck speed.

I track Parveen following her, lagging at a distance. "Brake!" Lorma shouts as a bend lights up ahead of her like an oncoming train. There's something down there. I almost sit up in my restraint web, as if by leaning forward I can see more closely what her sensors are telling her. Venous patterns weave around the walls of the passage as strands of mist begin to rise around Lorma. Cautiously she stops her descent and braces herself between the sides of the tunnel. Gas analysis: almost entirely carbon dioxide. And it's
hot
. She switches her sensors to infrared and suddenly I can see the patterns on the walls more clearly; pulsing veins.

"Do you see what I see?" Parveen asked. "This whole ship seems to be alive!"

"No surprise," I say. "Life gets maximal data packing into the smallest structures ... ref DNA for you. This ship was probably grown from a seed the size of a cell."

"Thanks, Oshi. Pressure's going up ... past point one bar. Hey, this could get sticky. How's comm?"

"I stuck a transponder up top," Parveen says. "There shouldn't be any grey-out."

"Okay. If you see any recognizable sockets ..."

"Got the patch kit."

I break my attention back to the bridge for a moment. Mik has pulled out of his drone. He and Boris are talking quietly behind me. What ... oh yes.
You might as well follow it all on full-immersion
, Boris argues;
I'll go into fusion with Trotsky to oversee the dreamtime dump
. Mik finally agrees:
Who should I piggyback
? Boris names someone.
Check
. Then they fall silent, riding the overspill from the drone sensoria.

I blink. "
Info status
."

"You called?"

"
Where's the coder interface?
"

"Surface mounted, down and in place. Receiver is opening now."

I blip to one of the other drones, jump channels until I see a huge phased-array antenna unfurl against the stars above a darkling plain. It's Raisa. "How's it going?" I ask.

"Nominal." She keeps an efficient look-out; she's anchored the receiver carefully, and the hefty cable emerging from it looks about right. I'm abruptly glad that there's no way she can tell I'm watching over her shoulder; I get a nasty voyeuristic itch from it, something that makes me feel unclean. "What do you want to know?"

"Nothing new," I say. "See you later." I drop briefly back through my own skin, uncomfortable and itchy in free fall. I wonder for a moment if she really did upload before the incident in the medicentre, or whether she has some reason for not wanting to talk about it. But this isn't the time or place for distractions. I'm ready to dive back into Lorma's proxybody. Things are distinctly odd.

Something or other seems to be preventing the hot gas mix from breaking out into the vacuum-filled sections of the tunnel; something impalpable to telefactor senses. Round the bend there's a heat source, shrouded from view by a foggy condensate of water vapour. The tunnel widens; Lorma is clinging to a surface rather than bracing herself between walls. There's a regular chirruping noise, almost like a grasshopper the size of a --

Lorma bounces a radar pulse off the surfaces ahead, then opens fire. A scorching flash of laserlight drills a black line across the ceiling and down to the floor, bisecting the heat source neatly. A sudden slew of systems data smears across her optical displays. "Hostile propaganda!"

Her drone is standing near the widest point of a spindle-shaped chamber, narrowing to another tunnel at the opposite end. Some kind of structure is situated in the middle, rooted at floor and ceiling. She's hit it. "What," she says; then there's a mournful organ-pipe roar that seems to enclose us in a physical grip. It rattles her telefactor body like a pea in a pod. The world flips over lazily, landing her on top of Parveen, who grabs her with three spare legs. Everything is confused for a while.

"That must be the thing that keeps the atmosphere in," Parveen says. "We're in a natural venturi ... " The concealing fog tumbles in shreds, to reveal a cylindrical object, badly scarred by laserheat.

"
Oh shit
," says Lorma. "I've started a blowout." She sounds cut up about it, and well she might. There's no way of telling how critical the atmosphere is to internal functioning in the ship. We don't want to damage it. The turbulence begins to die away. She tries to use her sonar; oddly, it works. Air pressure is stabilising.

"Hey," she says. "Sonar's working. Which means."

Parveen: "We've been cut off. Onwards and inwards, no? It's the only way to go."

"I agree," I say, intervening. "Comm traffic is holding up. The coder is in place. As soon as we can isolate a control interface to plug the fat pipe into --"

"Understood."

But we're eight light-seconds from Pascal. And how long will it take us to figure out an interface protocol? There's no rule to say that the control space or architecture of an Ultrabright expansion processor will resemble anything we know about.

I hop channels, looking for more trouble. I can't feel my body; I'm a ghost in the telepresence wires, unable to localise myself. After a few false tries I find something interesting: Mik.

Mikhail scans a full circle around his sensor turret. Ahead of him the passage he's in diverges into three prongs, two of them descending towards the core of the alien ship. Veins and ropes of blue light flutter just under the skin, which pulses gently in time with it. As if he's in a tunnel under a reservoir of luminance, and a thin puncture in the wall would drown him in flashbulb brightness. Some kind of optical storage system, I guess. So something in here needs light?

"Mik: anyone seen any recognisable structures yet? Or anything?"

He scuttles forwards towards the central tunnel as he waits for a reply. The hissing in his ears seemed to be louder --

"Parveen here. We zapped some kind of structure, localised a blow-out, but no life. No joy. All it seems to have done is alerted a local subsystem to take care of the leak. Any ideas?"

"Ack. I'm going deeper." With full-three-sixty degree vision nothing can sneak up on him. He continues his downward slide, pausing every twenty metres to listen to the walls. The tunnel twists in a crazy corkscrew around a hidden axis, so that the bends are constantly concealed from view. "There's got to be a better way than this! "That central axis. I wonder what's inside?"

Before I can object, he ejects two spiderbombs and sends them scuttling along the tunnel in opposite directions. Then he sits down, glues his feet in position, and listens.

Echoes reverberate through the wall, which is thin and rigid; echoes and the
ping!
of something expanding or contracting under the influence of heat. Mikhail zaps a sample into his mass analyser. More nanostructures, fullerene-anchored molecular-scale robotics. This lot look like interpreters, synthetic ribosomes specialised to construct components of nanomachines. They're all dead. It used to be a nanofactory: now it's bone. "Found structural tissue," he says. He unslings his tool pack and selects a drill bit. It whines and spins itself into red heat before the wall gives, churning a small whirlwind of fragments into the tunnel. He anchors himself by bracing a pair of legs against the roof of the tunnel.

Suddenly there's a brilliant flash of blue-green light and a hiss that nearly saturates his sonar.
Paydirt.
"Gotcha!" he shouts over open circuit. "In the walls!"

"What --"

"Who said that?"

"-- Clear the channel!" he adds. "It's standard high-bandwidth silicate optics. Probably a backup circuit. Light's pulsing ..."

Even as he speaks the light begins to die, plunging the tunnel into darkness. He steps up his optoamplifiers and looks at it. I don't know what it means to him; to me it looks weird. Stringy, glutinous, muscle-like fibres that are translucent, fluorescing with an ugly light in his UV gaze. Whatever it is it has weird phase characteristics.

"Zoom, please," I say.

"Looks like the real thing!"

"Explain?" That's not me: that's Nikita, a sallow-faced engineer I barely know.

"High temperature high bandwidth cybernetics," he says. "I've seen it before ... used where superconductors won't do. It's a light switching system. Looks pretty homogeneous, figuring a hook-in will be a bitch."

"Check," comes another voice. "So you've got their main circuit keyholed? When can we --"

"Peace," says Mik. "Got to get hooked up and let the protocol analyser loose. Got to find how they transmit their data. Who says they still use binary logic?"

"Okay." The voice is reluctant; I recognize Boris by his manner, bullish when excited. "I've got your position locked, feeding track to Ish and Raisa. They're nearest; should give you cover. Uh, there's a signal from your foreign correspondent, it says you should expect --"

Mikhail glances up, suddenly remembering where he is; then an icon flashes carmine, braying in his ear for attention. Defences come up automatically as a blazing flash lights up the tunnel, shockwaves echoing round the helix as the 'bomb detonates. Mik rocks on his feet, but unlike a human being his telefactor body is virtually immune to blast. "Shit. I'm too exposed here." He breaks the connection between his feet and the floor, shoves himself backwards with alacrity, scuttling away from the unknown intrusion.

"Wait," I say. "Are you sure it's covered --"

"Stuff it!" There's a faint vibration in the walls as he pauses, just round the pitch of the spiral. "You want I should walk into whatever's coming?" His dispenser contracts twice, ejecting bombs; on the third try it jams. The two weapons scuttle forwards, clinging to the walls. "Journalists covering the story," Mik whispers redundantly. "Where's my cover?"

"That's what I've been trying to tell you.
Move
--"

There's a noise from behind the curve of wall, a faint pop transmitted through the air as the bombs blow their tops. Mik braces himself, sensor stalks whipping into sockets in his streamlined body; then the weapons ignite. The fuel/oxidant aerosol expands to fill a large volume before it detonates -- the blast jolts him back on his shock absorbers and ripples down the tunnel. His sonar is an engineering casualty.

"Headlines made," he says. "Come
on
, where is everybody?" He extends his feelers and main laser array. He begins to move forwards.

"Ish here. We're tracking you, but we got the wrong tunnel mouth. Pitch opposed, okay? We'll be with you in three, count that, three minutes. Over."

"
Shit
. Okay." Mikhail looks at the damage. An unidentifiable char is plastered across one section of wall; fragments of something or other still drift in the low-gee. "My foreign correspondent is dead," he reports; "press conference is over, linotype jammed. Moving out -- someone else'd better keyhole the goopware, okay?"

He tanks forwards, pulling himself along with all eight legs. One of them is disturbingly weak, possibly the result of a damaged motor. I follow him intently, trying to figure a low-cost track to get him in synch with the nearest backup. The tight pitch defeats radar; visibility is lousy. All I can go by is inertial tracking. And then -- "hey, what's happening?" No reply. Mik freezes. "Are you alright?" I ask.

Nothing.

Something is wrong.

Everything happens simultaneously; there's no time to stop and think. That's best, isn't it? That's how I wanted it. This way you don't have time to think about me, Oshi: as if you ever did. I know you're ignoring me, the still small voice in the back of your mind, assuming I'm a figment of your imagination. Well, I can talk if I want to. You don't have to listen. But I digress: your situation is dire.

For one thing, the starship is accelerating. Your friends were far too optimistic about its response time. As soon as it sensed us, before the drones even touched its surface, it began to power up the drive that had dropped it into Ridgegap system. The drive kernel is a black hole trapped in a magnetic bottle, like the smaller hole it used as a weapon: methane drops in at one end swirls into a fusion-hot accretion disk, is blasted out of the other end. The thing is preposterously powerful. Luckily for us, it has a mountain to move; several billion tonnes, a starship twenty kilometres long. Acceleration is slow. Even luckier; the controlling mind was dumber than even I thought possible, little more than a robot placeholder filling an expansion processor sized for an Ultrabright pilot. It's very sloppy. You can tell the Ultrabrights have little experience of working in the real world. Unlike us.

For another thing, we have bandwidth limitations. The drones are demanding, five hundred virtual presences to maintain in parallel. Then there's the 'coder link to maintain, not to mention the interface analysers, designed to crack the connectionist language of a neural network and allow your human friends to inject their cannibal memes at will. All of this strains your facilities to the max.
Bronstein
and the other ships of the fleet are crammed to overflowing, and you're hopelessly under-equipped for such a venture. What you lack in tools has to be made up for in time. And finally, there's the other thing.