The Mothership (41 page)

Slab’s eyes shot back to the lab drone,
certain it was going to dissect him alive. It floated up beside his hip as a
rectangular surface extended out from the table in line with his left shoulder.
The white nano membrane slid away from his left arm all the way to the
shoulder, but remained in place across his chest. One of the lab drone’s
tentacles moved his forearm onto the extended table section with the care of a
surgeon, while its other arms held the circular pad and the metal clamp above
his elbow joint. Once his arm was in place, nano membrane began to slide up
over his wrist from the extended table section. The lab drone floated toward
Slab’s arm, aiming the laser cutter just above his forearm. The tip glowed as a
red beam stabbed down onto the table and began to move toward his arm.

A burst of terror sent adrenalin surging
through Slab’s body, forcing paralyzed muscles to life and giving him a
strength unknown except in moments of primal fear. He jerked his arm off the
table extension before the nano membrane could coalesce around his wrist. His
arm felt unusually heavy, but panic was driving adrenalin into his sluggish
muscles.

The lab drone rotated slightly toward him,
surprised its large specimen retained the ability to move. Nano membrane from
Slab’s chest swarmed along his arm toward his elbow as he locked his big paw on
the finger thin tentacle holding the laser cutter. When the nano membrane
dragged his arm down to the table, he refused to let go. In spite of its
life-like movements, the tentacle was coldly metallic and in his weakened
state, as hard as steel. Unable to crush it, he turned his wrist, finding the
slender tentacle, designed for precision not strength, unable to resist. The
beam pointed to the floor harmlessly, then arced away as Slab twisted, trying
to snap the tentacle.

Knowing Slab was an air breather, the lab
drone wrapped one its free tentacles around his throat, and began to squeeze
while nano membrane reached his elbow, then slid along his forearm and engulfed
his hand. He felt the nano membrane force its way between his fingers, trying
to pry them loose. He realized he lacked the strength to resist for long as the
combined might of billions of nano machines fought to subdue him.

An urgent, incomprehensible moan sounded to
his right. Slab’s eyes darted towards the sound as Cracker, too paralyzed to
speak, made another meaningless noise.

What?
Slab wondered, confused.

Cracker moaned again, opening his mouth
wider as he strained to make a word.

Speak up!

Cracker partly closed his mouth, and
hissed, turning his eyes towards the bench.

Snake noises?

He wanted to tell Cracker what a bloody
useless idiot he was, when suddenly he realized what he meant. He wasn’t
hissing like a snake, he was hissing like a burning fuse!

The nano membrane pried Slab’s little
finger free, but he still had enough control to twist the laser cutter away to
the left, forcing the beam up to the bench. He angled the laser along the bench
top, slicing through Bill’s backpack, then Cracker’s, where it tore through his
last six sticks of dynamite.

The explosion blew out the wall and sent
the lab drone inspecting Bill’s pack spinning across the room. The shock wave
swept across the laboratory, clearing the bench tops and hurling the floating
lab drones against the far wall. The nano membranes covering Slab and the
others, so fluid in appearance when moving, acted like shields, absorbing the blast.
A spinning lab drone crashed through a wall into a central power conduit,
exploding in an electrical flash, then the lights winked out immersing the lab
in darkness.

Starved of photo electric energy, trillions
of nano machines turned to gray ooze.

Slab blinked, adjusting his eyes to the
sudden darkness, sensing the binding force holding him down had become a cold
gooey mass dripping onto the floor. He lifted his arm, trying to peer at the
fluidic blob pooling in his hand, and wondered,
What is this crap?

* * * *

The lights in the cargo
shaft winked out as the explosion in the medical lab above cut the shaft’s
power supply. Vamp, Timer and Dr McInness braced as the cargo platform they were
trapped in lost touch with the wall’s magnetic strip, and began to fall through
darkness. It
picked up speed
as the floor tilted down on one side, then the platform burst out into a light
filled section of the shaft. With power suddenly restored, automatic emergency
measures activated, pulling the platform back towards the magnetic strips, but
only one magnetic lock found a connection. It jerked the platform towards the silver
strip with a crash, then hanging by only one lock, the platform swiveled.
Suddenly the floor rotated to the vertical and the transparent dome faced
sideways into the cargo shaft.

They slid together down onto the side of
the dome as the brakes applied, bringing the platform to a halt. A moment after
it stopped, a hail storm of l
ab equipment and wrecked
med drones, blown out of the biolab far above where Slab and his companions
were held, peppered the side of translucent canopy facing up into the shaft. White
impact points appeared with each strike, then the body of a brown feathered
egret struck with a thud, and slowly slid off the dome, leaving a smear of
blood behind.  A heavy machine struck next, sending c
racks multiplying across the translucent surface,
linking the white impact points into a spider’s web of fractures.

When the hail storm of debris ended, Vamp breathed
a sigh of relief, even as the platform rocked slightly as it hung from a single
magnetic lock. To her right, the elevator door vanished as emergency escape
measures activated. She looked up, sensing, rather than seeing a dark mass high
above silhouetted against the distant light of the sky. She peered at it,
confused for a moment, then jumped to her feet.

“Get out!” she yelled in a voice filled
with fear.

Dr McInness lay closest to the exit, but
couldn’t walk. Vamp ran to him, caught the back of his jacket and dragged him
towards the open archway.  They were below the next deck up, and some way above
the deck below.  There was a small ladder near the magnetic strip, but she knew
there was no time. 

“Timer!  Help me!” she yelled. 

Timer staggered towards her with a welling
bruise on his forehead where he’d struck his head as he’d fallen.  He grabbed
the scientist’s other arm.

“What are you doing?” Dr McInness asked
apprehensively.

“Best you don’t know!” Vamp said, then
nodded. They threw him through the archway onto the deck below, then grabbed
their weapons and jumped after him.

They hit the deck heavily, then the dark
mass Vamp had seen shot into the light.  The falling cargo platform crashed
into their platform’s dome, showering thousands of translucent shards into the
shaft and tearing their platform away from its single magnetic lock. Together,
the two wrecked cargo platforms tumbled into the shaft, bouncing off each other
and the shaft walls as they fell.

“Ouch!” Timer said. “Next time, I’m taking
the stairs.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Dr McInness said
as color began to return to his face.

Vamp helped the scientist to his feet,
supporting him as they started along the landing. They were more than halfway
around the shaft before an arch appeared in the inner wall, revealing a
corridor leading to a large circular room with a domed ceiling. In the center
of the room was a single chair of the familiar squat design. The walls and
floors were featureless and smooth, made of the same glassy black material used
on control consoles and sensor surfaces.

“Do you mind?” Dr McInness asked,
indicating the seat.

Vamp lowered him onto the chair, which he
found surprisingly uncomfortable due to its lack of padding and odd contours.
As soon as he sat down, a sphere of light appeared at what would have been eye
height for the amphibian species, but was only chest height for him.

Cautiously, he probed the light with his
finger tips, finding it made his skin tingle. “It’s some kind of field.”

She gave it a wary look. “Don’t mess with
it, Doc. No telling what it is.”

“It’s obviously a control interface.”

Timer glanced back into the short corridor.
“Or it might call an army of pissed off tinheads to kick our butts.”

Dr McInness eased his hand into the sphere,
finding the tingling sensation increased.

Vamp gritted her teeth. “Doc, you shouldn’t
play with stuff you don’t understand. Remember what happened to Virus.”

“Nonsense. We must dare to learn.” He
jumped as if his hand was being bitten off. “Aaarrrrgh!”

“What is it?” Vamp rushed forward.

He grinned. “Just kidding. It’s actually
quite pleasant. Feels a bit like a glove.”

“Not funny!” She punched his shoulder hard.

He pushed his hand fully into the sphere of
light and the room vanished, replaced by a sea of stars. The blue green
Intruder homeworld floated beneath them. Wispy white clouds drifted through its
atmosphere above continents and oceans. The shape of the continents was
unrecognizable, as was the large ocean that dominated the northern third of the
world. A vast polar cap crowned the northern ocean, reaching well beyond what
would have passed for the arctic circle on Earth. Sunlight lit the western
hemisphere revealing mountains, deserts, vast cultivated plains and cities that
swallowed every coastline, but no forests or jungles. They had been cleared
eons before. The mountain ranges, rather than being capped with snow, were
tipped in metal. They had long ago been hollowed out and filled with immense
atmosphere scrubbers that replenished the world’s oxygen, something its
ecosystem had lost the capacity to do. Surrounding the continents were oceans
underlaid with quilted patterns that marked vast marine farms. They spanned the
great oceans at every depth and produced the bulk of the world’s food supply.

By contrast, the eastern hemisphere was in
the midst of night. Its outline was marked by the light of one unending city
that ran along the coast for thousands of kilometers. It formed a single band
of light that wound around bays and inlets until it vanished beyond the edge of
the world. The lights charted the course of thousands of rivers, estuaries and
lakes, many of them artificial, designed to provide an ideal home for billions
of inhabitants.

Floating above the world were thousands of
ships, and structures so large they were cities in their own right. The ships
ranged in size from a few hundred meters to leviathans resembling the
mothership many kilometers in length, while the great orbital cities were
spheres hundreds of kilometers across. Each city followed a similar pattern, a
central disk with spherical domes on either side filled with spires. The
central disk provided power, atmosphere and gravity, making life virtually
indistinguishable from the continent wide cities below. The orbital cities and
visiting ships floated above the world in layers, each layer a higher orbit,
stacked on top of each other out to the fringes of the planet’s gravitational
field. Flitting between the ships and the orbital cities were thousands of
small cargo vessels, streaking in and out of orbit at a frenetic pace. Some
were aerodynamically streamlined, others were not. In the distance, the
orbiting cities became tiny specks, while many more went unseen at even greater
distances. Towering above it all, a radiant yellow-orange star shone, slightly
smaller than the sun, yet a third closer to their planet than Earth was to its
sun. To eyes evolved under a warmer yellow sun, the star cast a bright orange
hue over every ship and city in orbit, and slightly tinted the color of the
oceans and polar caps.

No one spoke for a long time, so captivated
were they by the blue green globe below and the technological triumphs that
floated above.

Finally, Timer said, “I guess that’s not
Earth.”

“It might be,” Dr McInness whispered, “A
million years from now.”

* * * *

Slab tried to
stand, but found his legs were like rubber. He rolled off the examination table
onto the floor, landing in a slippery puddle of nano slime. Nearby, Wal fell
onto the floor and lay there twitching, while Bill dropped his legs over the
side of his table and sat up, supporting himself with his hands.

“They’ll be coming,” a raspy voice
announced from the dark. It was the voice of a man starved of food and water
and wearied from countless examinations. He’d been spared dissection because he
was the only sentient specimen the ship had obtained. The weary man sat up,
weak but glad to be free after days of confinement. He lowered himself onto his
feet then gingerly made his way to where Slab was learning to crawl. He gave
Slab a friendly smile.

“G’day,” the man said, slipping an arm
around the big ex-footy player and helping him to his feet. “I’m Dan.”

Slab tried to speak, but his tongue
wouldn’t obey. He made an unintelligible slurring sound, but found that if he
used Dan for support, he could stand.