The Mothership (23 page)

“What the hell is wrong with them?” Timer
asked, amazed.

“There’s a huge blind spot on the west
side!” Beckman said incredulously, realizing it was why the two animals had
been able to run a short distance before being killed.

“It’s a trap,” Hooper warned.

Tucker nodded. “Got to be. Those sons of
bug-eyed bitches are just itching to fry us.”

“Maybe they haven’t had time to finish
their defenses,” Markus suggested.

“If it’s a scientific expedition,” Dr
McInness added, “They might have few weapons.”

“Either way,” Beckman said, “We go in after
sunset.”

* * * *

The moon appeared
as a blurred orb through the energy curtain as Beckman’s squad waited at the
edge of the artificial surface surrounding the installation. The harsh glare of
the five energy beams bathed the area in an unnatural white light, denying him the
cover of darkness he’d hoped for. He double checked they were dead center of
the weapon’s blind spot and confirmed the mounts visible on the other power
plants were indeed empty. Finally, Hooper signaled his squad was in position,
hidden at the edge of the forest, ready to provide fire support should it be
needed.

Beckman nodded to Hooper, then led his
squad out toward the central tower. He’d decided to bypass the power plants to
save time, much to Dr McInness’ dismay, choosing instead to focus on the installation’s
main building. As they approached the massive central tower, the roar of steam
blasting under pressure from the vents filled the air and the radiant heat from
the energy rings clawed their skin and cast a dull red hue over their clothes.
When they reached the foot of the tower, they found a seamless, spotlessly
clean white wall with no visible entry point.

Xeno shielded her face from the ferocious
heat with her arm. “We’ll fry if we stay here!”

“Anyone see a door?” Beckman asked, drawing
his special.

“Blasting it might trigger an alarm,”
Markus warned.

Beckman ran his hand over the milky white
metal experimentally, finding it surprisingly cool under the searing heat. He
stepped back and fired a single exploratory burst with his midget. The small
weapon punched a neat hole in the wall surrounded by hairline fractures.

“It’s brittle!” Dr McInness said
astonished. “It might be ceramic!”

Beckman holstered the midget and drew his 9
mm Beretta. “Let’s see how brittle.”

He fired several shots into the ceramic
metal composite in a vertical line. The big, relatively slow moving slugs
caused more fractures than the midget’s hypervelocity particles. Beckman nodded
to Timer, who stepped forward and slammed his rifle butt into the web of
cracks. The fracture lines multiplied, but the wall held.

“One shaped charge ought to do it.” Timer
said.

“Make it fast,” Beckman ordered.

While the others moved away, Timer placed a
shaped charge in the middle of the fracture lines, activated the timer and
stepped clear. “Fire in the hole.”

The air shook as the explosive punched a
meter-wide opening in the wall. Beckman stepped through with his Beretta drawn
before the smoke had cleared, finding a deserted passage running parallel to
the outer wall. Jagged triangular wall fragments littered the floor, visible in
the soft orange tinted light that glowed from the walls. He sniffed the air,
finding it filled with the same strange odor he’d encountered in the
beetle-like machine.

Timer scowled after his first few breaths,
“What’s that disgusting smell?”

Dr McInness wiped his eyes with a
handkerchief as the alien air began to irritate his eyes. “Hmm, trace elements
of ammonia, sulfur and methane.” He inhaled more deeply, adding. “It’s
breathable, but less oxygen than we’re used to. Avoid exerting yourselves, or
you’ll feel like you have altitude sickness.”

Beckman coughed. “It wasn’t this bad in the
beetle.”

“The beetle kept opening its rear hatch,
letting our air in,” Xeno said.

Beckman started down the passage to the
right. Just like the beetle, there were no visible doors or controls, only
sonic sensors they couldn’t see or use. The walls and floor were featureless
metal, broken by small rectangular light panels emitting a feeble yellow-orange
light.

“Major,” Xeno called from the rear of the
group.

Beckman turned to see she was looking at a
slight recess in the wall.

“This remind you of anything?” she asked.

“It does,” Beckman replied as he stepped
into the shadowed recess, virtually a twin of the elevator they’d encountered
in the beetle. A moment later, he found himself in a wide domed room. Ten
control panels were spaced around the walls, each with its own overly wide
chair, and a large circular window was embedded in the center of the floor. He
stepped from the elevator, pistol leveled, finding the control room empty.

“Hiding again,” he muttered to himself.
“Sneaky little critters.”

Dr McInness appeared in the spot Beckman
had just vacated, his face glowing with excitement. “Fascinating!”

“So what do you think, Doc?” Beckman asked.
“Is it a teleport?”

“No, just a very fast elevator, with no
gravitational or inertial effects. Impressive. I expected something like that
in a ship, but in an elevator, that’s just showing off.”

“So no more elevator music?”

“Not where they come from.”

“I never liked elevator music anyway,”
Beckman said as he approached the circular floor window. It was composed of
curved segments separated by thin metal frames. Several of the segments were
cracked, while one section was filled with a gray metal panel. Beckman looked
down through the window into a yawning abyss that revealed the tower was a vast
hollow cylinder. “Wow!” He took an involuntary step back, fighting vertigo.

When he regained his equilibrium, he looked
down warily at a circular black machine floating in the center of the chamber
beneath the glass. Five glowing transmission beams reached from the outer wall
to the machine, feeding it energy from the power plants outside, while a series
of red laser beams stretched from the machine to the wall, aligning its
precisely in the centre of the chamber. The skin of the machine was laced with
conduits that snaked over it like veins, and anti-gravity panels glowed bright
blue beneath it, balancing it in the air. Below the machine, swirling brown
clouds boiled furiously, prevented from rising by an invisible barrier as large
intakes sucked the clouds from the chamber. Filters separated the gases before
expelling the residual steam through the tower’s external vents, while a brilliant
conical beam blasted down from the machine into the dirty clouds below and
vanished.

The rest of the team gathered around the
edge of the window, except Markus whose attention had been captured by one of
the wall mounted screens. Dr McInness paced around the edge of the window with
an increasingly puzzled look.

“Don’t worry Doc,” Beckman said, “I don’t
know what the hell it is, either.”

“It’s a drill!” Markus declared. The screen
before him depicted the central cylindrical structure in profile, sitting on
the ground, with horizontal lines dividing the strata below the surface. Markus
indicated a vertical line stretching from the cylindrical structure down into
the ground. “It’s drilling a shaft, a deep shaft.”

Beckman gauged the width of the shaft at nearly
twenty meters. “That’s a big hole!”

“And they’re nearly through the crust,” Markus
added ominously.

“Man, if they dumped a bomb down there,”
Timer said, “They could smoke the whole freaking planet.”

“They could do that from orbit,” Dr
McInness said absently as he approached Markus’ display. “This is what the boreholes
were for. They were looking for a place where the Earth’s crust was thin, to
build this! Or others like it.”

“What’s below the crust?” Beckman asked.

“The mantle, which is molten lava,” Dr
McInness replied, “And the core, which is a giant spinning iron ball. Nothing
they can’t find on millions of uninhabited planets.”

“They’re not on millions of uninhabited
planets,” Markus said. “They’re on one, inhabited planet.”

Beckman wiped his watering eyes, stinging
from the irritating atmosphere. “All right people, go over this place with a
fine-tooth comb. Look for anything: hair follicles, scales, creepy green skin.
I want to know what they’re after. And don’t touch those control panels, I
don’t want any more stretcher cases.”

He watched the team disperse to examine the
various control consoles, then wandered back to the circular floor window.
There was something about it that bothered him. The floating drill head
directed a stream of energy into the earth, vaporizing vast quantities of solid
rock every second. He guessed the heat on the other side of the window must
have been incredible, yet the window was cool to the touch.

“Major,” Markus called, motioning for
Beckman to join him and Dr McInness at a display panel showing a real time
image of the hole Timer had blown through the outer wall. “There’s something
outside, admiring our handy work.”

“It’s probably an automated repair unit,”
Dr McInness suggested.

Beckman activated his radio. “Hooper, is
there anything near our entry point?”

“Negative.”

“It might be too small for him to see,” Dr
McInness said.

Beckman hit the transmitter again. “Have
Cougar check it with his scope. It might be small, about two to three meters
from our entry point.”

“Major.” Xeno called from a control panel
on the far side of the window.

Beckman hurried to her, avoiding stepping
on the floor window. “Got something?”

She indicated the side of the control
panel. The lower half was blackened and charred, and the metal had buckled. The
floor by contrast was clean and smooth. “It was damaged, before it was
installed. There’s another damaged panel over there.”

Hooper’s voice sounded in Beckman’s
earpiece. “There’s a red golf ball sized object floating outside the entrance.
Cougar’s got it sighted.”

“Don’t shoot,” Beckman radioed as he
approached the panel Xeno had indicated. “Just keep an eye on it.” The damaged
control panel had a diagonal crack across its surface, and was scratched from
attempts to scrub it clean. He passed his hand over it, trying to activate its
proximity sensor, but the surface only flickered with blurred colors, close to
shorting out.

That’s what’s wrong with the window!
The transparent panels were cracked and a metal
slab had been cut to replace a missing window. Below in the drill chamber, one
of the five energy emitters was circular, while the others were all elongated. He
approached the window thoughtfully. “This thing is jury-rigged!”

Dr McInness face beamed with relief. “I
knew it! It has to be a forced landing!”

Markus looked more reserved. “Or it’s
sloppy maintenance.”

“This is a fantastic opportunity! We have
to help them!”

“They don’t want our help, Doc” Beckman
said.

Markus gazed thoughtfully at the improvised
power transmitter below. “So what we have is two million tons of mothership,
stranded like a beached whale and no one to help it.” Markus watched their
expressions before adding meaningfully. “It’s a gold mine, waiting to be
mined.”

Dr McInness eyes narrowed in alarm. “You
can’t be serious! We can’t even figure out the artifacts we’ve got! What would
we do with a mothership for God’s sake?”

“Get every scientist on the planet to study
it for a hundred years,” Markus replied. “Advance our technology a hundred
thousand years, in a single century.”

Dr McInness looked appalled. “You don’t
know what you’re talking about! Even if we could figure out their science, we
couldn’t use it. Our industrial base would be far too primitive. The Romans
could never have produced a microchip, even if they knew what it was. It’s
impossible!”

“Are you sure?” Markus persisted. “Suppose
there’s a computer on board that explains how their technology works? How to
build industries to make motherships? What then? All we have to do is translate
their language, and we’ve got it all.”

“Tempting as it sounds,” Beckman said,
“Stealing their technology isn’t our mission,”

It’s not your mission
, Markus thought.

The scientist turned to Beckman. “Major, we
know they’re not here to attack us. We should report back immediately.”

“We don’t know what their intentions are,”
Markus said. “They’ve been damned unfriendly, so far.”

“No,” Dr McInness said. “They’ve only tried
to stop us getting too close. For all we know, they’ve quarantined us, for our
own safety.”

“Or it’s a colony ship,” Markus countered,
“That can’t reach its destination, and has decided to set up house here.”

“They wouldn’t do that!” Dr McInness
spluttered. “Earth is already inhabited.”