The Mothership (34 page)

“No shortage of power here,” Vamp said as
her attention shifted from the cluster of illuminated platforms, to the endless
rows of inactive platforms that filled the chamber. There were too many to
count, but she guessed there were thousands. She walked around an embryonic
battloid, unaware of its military purpose, then her eyes settled on one of the
largest platforms. It could comfortably have accommodated the ‘tank’ wedged
between the blast doors below.

Dr McInness saw the curious look on her
face. “It’s probably some kind of maintenance facility. Not surprising,
considering the size of this ship.”

“So where are the spare parts?” Timer asked,
unconvinced. “And the machines to fix stuff?” He drew his knife and moved to
poke the nearest skeletal battloid with it. As soon as the blade passed over
the edge of the platform, a golden cloud appeared around the point. He jumped
back, startled. “Did you see that?”

Vamp caught his wrist, lifting it so she
could inspect his knife. Four centimeters were missing from the end.

Timer eyes bulged in amazement. “It ate my
knife!”

“Imagine what it would have done to your
hand.”

Timer swallowed uncomfortably as a hiss of
equalizing air pressure behind them signaled the arch had opened. Vamp grabbed
Dr McInness and dragged him down behind one of the empty platforms while Timer
hid behind the skeletal battloid.

A repair drone identical to the machine
they’d seen cutting the damaged deck floated in, carrying a slab of twisted
metal the size of a small car. It flew toward a platform holding its skeletal
twin and dropped the metal slab onto the dish beside the platform. The repair
drone turned and flew back through the arch, while a golden cloud formed in the
column of light over the platform. The cloud swarmed across into the dish and
swirled around the salvaged metal. In seconds, the metal dissolved while the
golden cloud bloomed in brightness. When the metal had completely vanished, the
cloud swept back to the platform and enveloped the skeletal maintenance drone.
Internal parts began to form out of the air, tentacle arms grew from nothing
and an outer skin appeared while the cloud’s luminosity faded. Moments later,
the new maintenance drone was complete. The brim of the coolie hat atop the
drone’s slender body glowed to life, lifting the self-aware machine off the
platform. Fully cognizant of the mothership’s desperate need, it tilted
forward, glided through the archway which opened as it approached, and flew off
to its first allotted task. On the platform where it had been created, the
golden cloud swirled again, as it formed the beginnings of a new skeleton. When
the luminosity faded to nothing, the cloud vanished, having exhausted its
supply of salvaged metal.

Dr McInness watched the repair drone
depart, almost unable to contain his excitement. “You can tell yourself a
thousand times, but until you experience it, you just don’t understand! Not at
all!” He beamed a smile at her.

Vamp looked at him sideways.
He’s kind
of cute for a geek, but mad as a hatter!
“Understand what?”

“Arthur C. Clarke was right! Advanced
technology really does look like magic to primitives, like us!” He glanced
around the room, then pointed to Timer. “You wanted to know where the equipment
was. Well, it’s right here! We’re surrounded by it!”

“Yeah, we sure are,” Vamp said with a
worried look on her face.

“It’s nanotechnology, developed to an
incredible level.” His forefinger shot up excitedly. “No, it’s more than that!
It’s manufacturing at a molecular level. Nano machines convert raw metal into
molecules and reassemble them into whatever they want. That’s what the cloud
was, trillions of nano machines. The platform must have some kind of acceleration
field, I can’t believe nano machines could generate their own fields. Or could
they? No, surely not.” He shrugged and laughed. “Who knows. It’s beyond me!”

“So, all they needed was minerals from the
mine, and they could make…?”

“Anything!” He turned and looked at the
rows and rows of platforms in realization. “This is not a maintenance facility,
it’s a factory! A million years ahead of ours!”

Vamp studied the skeletal battloid sitting
on the platform near her. “We destroyed their mine, so now they’re
cannibalizing their own ship for metal.”

“And scavenging the countryside,” Timer
added, remembering the research station stripped of metal.

“What choice do they have?” Dr McInness
asked. “They can’t repair their ship without resources.”

“With this technology, they can build
another mine. Right? They could build ten, a thousand, as many as they needed.”

Dr McInness looked across at one of the
larger platforms with growing relief. It appeared to be large enough to
construct another drill head. “You’re right. We haven’t done them any permanent
harm.”

Vamp looked at the endless rows of nano
fabricators apprehensively. “You’re missing the point, Doc. With enough raw
materials, this factory could pump out thousands of machines an hour. Tens of
thousands!”

“That’s right,” Dr McInness agreed. “It’s
amazing. Imagine, with this technology and enough resources, we could wipe out
world poverty in a week.”

“Yeah, or they could build an army to wipe
us out.”

The scientist looked aghast, then gazed at
the sprawling facility with growing unease. The rows of platforms of all sizes,
capable of manufacturing vast quantities of machines and equipment, limited
only by the supply of raw materials, vanished into distant shadows. In a
heartbeat, he knew if her suspicions were correct, it meant only one thing.

The ship was a colossal time bomb.

The
striker
was a black, elongated wedge-shaped aircraft five meters long and two meters
wide at the front. Its outer edges curved down thirty degrees like bent wings,
before sloping gracefully back to a spear like tail. Small spherical turrets,
fitted with needle-like weapons, were mounted at each wingtip, while two thin
glowing strips ran the length of its undersides, brightening each time it
accelerated or banked. Along the horizontal leading edge was a thin glassy
black sensor strip that gave the flying machine perfect vision to the horizon.

The sensor was equipped with a suite of
passive sensors – electromagnetic, motion, metallurgical and thermal – which
gave it a detailed view of the battlespace. Its temperature sensor had been
calibrated to the subarctic environment of the mothership’s original
destination, an environment where the background thermal radiation would be
minimal and the targets would be thermally shielded. The sensor was extremely
sensitive to minuscule thermal variations at low temperatures, but was wholly
incapable of scanning an environment soaked in solar radiation. Consequently,
the thermal sensor had fried itself the moment it activated, blinding the
striker to heat signatures. A replacement sensor had been scheduled for
construction, one that would allow it to filter out the tropical heat and
detect minute variations at high temperatures, but it was far down the priority
list.

The striker also possessed active sensors,
which it rarely used, preferring not to give away its position. It was able to
precisely target any point in an operating volume that reached from horizon to
horizon to orbit, and while it was not a spacecraft, it could achieve suborbital
altitudes if required. The striker, however, preferred to hug the ground where
it could use terrain for cover, dodging behind ridges and into valleys, where
it could shoot and scoot with lethal efficiency. Normally the mothership’s
bombardment control center would allocate fire support missions to the striker
negating the need for it to hunt, but that center had been destroyed, forcing
the striker to find its own targets as it patrolled the inner perimeter. It was
in every respect a devastating piece of aerial artillery, self aware and
stealthy, cunning and mobile, yet it was an inferior perimeter guard. It was
fulfilling that role now out of necessity, as no sentry drones had survived,
and none could be constructed for many days. It had shot down aircraft and
neutralized satellites to ensure no hostiles flew over the mothership, and now
it searched for the primitives who had destroyed one of the few operational
battloids.

Without its thermal sensor, it was unaware
that Cougar hid a short distance away among the trees. Behind Cougar, the rest
of the team waited undercover, watching through the canopy as the aerial
predator passed within twenty meters of their position, drifting left and
right, scanning all the way to the horizon.

Cougar watched it glide to the south,
following the ridgeline. He kept the striker in his telescopic sight for
several minutes until it had become no more than a distant black dot loitering
above the trees, then he called back, “Clear!”

The sniper started creeping forward through
the trees, over ground covered with a light sprinkling of fine ash, stopping
only when he reached a sandstone ledge that protruded out over jagged cliffs.
From his high vantage point, he looked out across the Goyder River to a wall of
gray metal that spanned the valley from east to west. For a moment he thought
it was a fortress, then he realized it was the mothership’s hull. It was
composed of enormous dark gray slabs pockmarked with hundreds of circular black
heat scars. The ship was like a city encased in metal, stretching more than
twelve kilometers up the valley. Its sides towered above the ridge tops and in
places had torn through the surrounding sandstone cliffs like chalk. At the top
of the metal wall, the hull sloped back sharply into a ridge that ran the
length of the ship. There was no gash through the valley, indicating the ship
had come down vertically, crushing everything beneath it. The forest that had
covered the valley floor between Cougar’s position and the ship had been
flattened and incinerated. Charred black trees, knocked flat by the impact
blast, were everywhere, while the normally ochre colored cliffs looked as if
they’d been seared by a blow torch. Where the ship blocked the river, ashen
water had backfilled into a small lake that was slowly drowning the burnt
remains of the forest.

Cougar swept his telescopic sight over the
ship, finding not a single window anywhere along its length. “Ship in sight,”
he called back when he got over his initial shock at the mothership’s great size.

Beckman issue a muted order to take cover,
then he and Markus approached the sniper’s position. When they saw it, Beckman
said in a low voice, “We need more bombs.”

“They said two million tons!” Markus
exclaimed, knowing the behemoth blocking the valley was many times that.

“You can tell them to check their math when
we get back,” Beckman said, silently cursing himself for not expecting the
brainiacs to get it wrong. “We’ll have to get the bomb inside.”

“Inside?” Markus asked surprised.

 “It’s too big to detonate outside. We’ll
have to set it off where it can do the most damage, next to power plant or a
weapons stockpile. We’ll use the timer, that’ll give us twenty-four hours to
get clear.” Beckman began studying the ship with his binoculars, for the first
time beginning to take in the small details that its sheer size had hidden at
first glance. “What the…?”.

“What is it?” Markus asked, reaching for
his binoculars.

From their distant vantage point, the black
pockmarks appeared to be no more than dots on the immense hull, but magnified,
they became gaping circular wounds seared into the hull. In a few places, tiny
repair drones floated inside the holes, nibbling at the damage like insects
buzzing around an enormous carcass. Waterfalls of sparks cascaded down from the
repair drones as they cut charred and twisted metal away from the hull.

“That couldn’t have happened when it
landed,” Markus said.

“How could it fly like that?” Cougar asked
as he watched it through his sniper scope. He wondered if he could hit one of
the repair drones from there, always keen to test his aim. He’d like to try,
but he knew it would alert the ship to their arrival.

Beckman studied the dozens of holes blasted
through the massive hull, wondering what could have caused so much damage. A
meteor shower? An internal explosion? Whatever the cause, he was sure of one
thing. “It’s not flying anytime soon.”

“From the looks of it, it’s no threat to
us,” Markus said.

“Thank God for that,” Cougar said as he
lowered his sniper scope. “No invasion!”

Beckman’s jaw tightened. “Our guys tried
nuking it. They must have had a good reason.”

“Did they?” Markus asked doubtfully.

“We all saw the flash.”

“We don’t know it was one of ours. Suppose
the Chinese or the Russians figured out what we’ve got here, and decided they
didn’t want us getting our hands on it.”

“And risk starting a war?” Beckman said.
“No chance.”

“Well, there’s no way we’ll be sharing this
with them.” Markus said. “You can’t attack without confirmation.”

“I can’t get confirmation.”

“My God!” Laura exclaimed as she edged up
behind them, eyes riveted to the valley of devastation. Crouching behind her
was Bandaka whose face was a mask of foreboding.