“Jack, I’m telling you, I saw it. Something metal, rounded. Like a capsule or a fuel tank” Curtis’s voice was just as distorted by the comms.
“Look, I’d believe you if you said that anywhere else in the galaxy. But here?” In celestial terms, we were a stone’s throw from home - a mere few hundred million miles from Earth, in the thick of Sol’s asteroid belt. “Thick”, of course, is subjective - besides the one I was standing on, I couldn’t see any other asteroids against the starfield.
“I wouldn’t drag you out here for no reason.” That was true - I didn’t doubt that he believed there to be profit in this little adventure, only the chances of actually turning said profit. “Space has been more active here than anywhere else. Why not have a few lost goodies so close to home?”
“Because space is still more active here.” I pointed out, picking my way around a spiky mineral formation that looked sharp. I shouldn’t have worried, of course - the suits we had, while not top-of-the-line, were hard-plated, hence the need for joint motors. What one had to look out for was ice patches - a few of these asteroids were known to hide frozen lakes under overhangs and in crevasses. “People still mine these rocks, Curtis.”
“I dunno. Maybe this one hasn’t been mined?” Curtis guessed. I was about to point out that this practically every asteroid inside Sol’s gravity well had been prospected, until I realized that I’d yet to see signs of mining, even as we made our approach. I had to settle with sighing into the receiver, given that I couldn’t refute his point.
“Careful, blind fissure here.” Curtis’s bulky-suited form ahead of me stopped at the top of a hill, and waited for me to catch up.
The asteroid wasn’t very big - According to my tracker, though we’d only been walking for a few minutes, the Starhopper was now both behind me and significantly “down”. If it weren’t for the AG systems in the suits, there would barely be enough gravity here to hold us against its surface.
I came alongside Curtis. He was checking his tracker, probably, determining the direction of the place he remembered. As he had warned, the downslope on the far side of the rise was broken by a chasm that could easily swallow an unwary explorer.
“Say, why were you out here last week anyway?” We were, after all, supposed to be on vacation after our last payout, when we’d salvaged data from the wrecks at Regency and sold it to the Fleet. Even for us, vacation meant beaches, parties, drinks, and women, not unannounced trips out to the asteroid belt.
“You know how it is, Jack. Tell a pretty girl you have a spaceship, and she says she’s never been off-planet, wishes she could take a trip with you...” Curtis trailed off. I knew what he meant, but I’d thought we had a policy about not burning reactor fuel (which has never been cheap) without a chance at a payout. I realized I’d have to discuss the meaning of the word “payout” with my partner when we were back on Earth.
Having finished getting his bearings, Curtis pointed vaguely ahead and jumped over the chasm. His suit interpreted the maneuver, and dialed back the AG power just enough to let him sail in a graceful arc to the bottom of the rise. I took a moment to scrutinise the close horizon where he’d pointed. There was a jagged mess of rock formations just peeking over the curvature of the small body, and I figured that’s probably where he meant. Following, I jumped, trusting my suit to calculate a proper arc.
We trudged along in silence for a few minutes, and at about the same time that the tracker told me that our Starhopper was directly below my feet, we came to the edge of the formation.
“The goodies are always at the farthest point from where we park.” Curtis muttered into his comm.
“Hey, you landed the ‘Hopper. you could have put us down on this side of the asteroid.” I retorted. Why he hadn’t tried to find his cargo container from above first, I hadn’t yet figured out.
“I needed to be able to retrace my steps, Jack. It’s not visible from above.”
“Wait. You brought some bimbo down onto this rock for a spacewalk?” I realized that to do that, Curtis would have had to put his busty blonde passenger in my suit. This made me more than mildly uncomfortable and fairly angry - letting an untrained user operate an E-V suit was dangerous and illegal.
“Not exactly...” Curtis hedged. “She wanted a rock, to keep as a souvenir. I left her in the ‘Hopper and came out to cut something off.”
My anger subsided. Of course, Curtis was a womanizer (in those days, so was I), but he wouldn’t stuff his latest squeeze into my EV suit. Curtis might push the boundaries, but he knew enough not to run afoul of Confederate law.
Curtis sighed into his comm. “I walked all the way around. It only took twenty minutes, and I wanted to see if there were any deposits. You know, something shinier than this stuff. Something better for a souvenir.” He kicked a protruding lump of the asteroid’s rock. He was right - it was a dull gray-brown in color, like light basalt, and completely unattractive.
“All right. Let’s see this artifact of yours.” I still didn’t believe he’d found anything more than a metal deposit or at the best a lost rocket cowling, but he was convinced that there was something valuable out here.
“Should be a chasm through the rocks. Watch your step.” Curtis, waving slowly, stepped in between the broken rock spikes and vanished. After a moment’s hesitation, I followed.
Sure enough, after a few moments of slow progress through the uneven area, the promised chasm opened up before our feet. This one was wide, large enough that the Starhopper might fit inside if it turned to the right angle. The bottom was pitch black, the sun not being directly above.
“The last time I was here the sun was right overhead. Otherwise I’d have missed it.” Curtis pulled a glow-light from his suit’s tool-belt, shook it several times, and tossed it down the chasm. The glowing stick bounced against the sloping wall of the gap several times before coming to a halt, and silhouetting the graceful curve of an obviously artificial metal surface. “See?”
I frowned in my suit. The light from one glow-light is poor, but it could indeed be a lost storage pod or a fuel tank, like Curtis thought. For the first time today, I thought highly of our chances of payout. Confederate law concerning salvage was fairly simple, which enabled people like Curtis and I to make a living - if we could prove something was lost, it was ours unless the loser paid a finder’s fee. Essentially, we’d gain either way if we could recover the object.
“Jack?” Curtis finally said, breaking my train of thought.
“Yeah, Curtis, I see it. From here, looks like it could be something.” That was as close to an apology as I was willing to get. “What next?”
“I’ll go get the ‘Hopper. Why don’t you go see how easy it’ll be to pull out of there?”
Of course, a normal person might have qualms about jumping into a pitch-black chasm of indeterminate depth in a place this far from medical care, but people like Curtis and I have always been a special breed of crazy. “Sure.” I replied. “Give me all your glow-lights.”
After complying, Curtis headed back for the landing site. I dropped a few more of the lights down, enough to illuminate an open space to land, before jumping down.
It took me only a few minutes to ring the object in light. It was about thirty feet long, with an ovoid cross-section, and if it was intact below the loose rock gravel it was half-buried in then it was around fifteen feet high and wide. In addition, one of the ends was fully buried under the gravel, and the other, the one not buried, ended in a flat, seamless face. I tapped on this end with my plated knuckles. Obviously I heard nothing, given the lack of atmosphere, but the metal felt solid, thick. I got the sense that this couldn’t just be a fuel tank or storage pod - it was designed to take a beating.
Though the light was too poor even with over a dozen glow-lights to determine for sure, I fancied that the metal of the boxy object was totally unfamiliar to me. I shrugged that off, of course, knowing that space travellers have built their equipment out of dozens of metals and hundreds of alloys over the last few hundred years.
“Jack, I’m at the ‘Hopper. How do things look?” Curtis’s voice was less distorted - for some reason, the units in spacecraft cockpits always received your voice clearer.
“It’s half-buried in loose material.” I responded. “Maybe thirty by fifteen by fifteen. If we clear some of this mess down here we might be able to pull it out without any help.” I meant, of course, pull it out with the Starhopper. The motorized joints of our suits weren’t up to moving anything this size.
“Nice. Told you I found something.” Curtis shot back. “Be overhead in a few.”
“Roger that.” I returned my attention to the boxy shape. Looking closer, I noticed that the object tapered a little toward the buried side, rather than being about even width all along. It wasn’t obvious, unless the observer was looking at it from the right angle. I didn’t know of any fuel tank models with that shape, though spherical and ovoid tanks were always reasonably common.
I climbed gingerly onto the top of the object, looking for access points and anything I could use to identify the object. As an afterthought, I dialed back my suit’s AG setting a bit to reduce the chance of my metal-shod feet causing damage. Then -
* * * * *
“Jack, Jack can you hear me?” Curtis was shaking me, and I could see concern in his face behind the suit visor. I realized I’d blacked out. Above and beyond him, I saw the Starhopper’s forward sensor cluster protruding over the lip of the chasm. Curits had probably parked it more or less on top of the rock formation around the chasm.I waved my arms to show that I was alive so he’d give me room to sit up. Relieved, Curtis backed off. “What happened?” I asked, looking around at the bottom of the chasm. All around, the glow-lights I’d scattered minutes before lit up the scene, bare save for Curtis and I.
“You tell me. Where’d it go?” Curtis gestured to the hole, and I remembered surveying the object that had been resting there before I’d blacked out.
“I have no clue.” In fact, all I had in place of a clue was a headache. Whatever happened as I was inspecting the top of the artifact, my memories ended with dialing back the AG settings.
“Let’s get you back to the ‘Hopper. You might have a concussion. We’ll check your suit’s recorder.” The recorder would have all the video from my helmet cam, so it could show us what had happened.
Ten minutes later, I was leaning back in one of the Starhopper’s foam chairs, pressing a compress from the medical cabinet against my throbbing forehead while Curtis affixed cables to my suit helmet, plugging it into the ‘Hopper’s computer. “There.” He finally stepped back from the assembly and typed a set of commands into the computer from the terminal. “Let’s see what you saw.” One of the screens switched to display the data from the suit recorder, and Curtis set it to the time he left me at the chasm.
We watched me jumping into the black pit, and setting up the glow-lights around the object. Insets provided by the recorder showed my vitals and the status of the suit.
Eventually we got to the part I did not remember. Just after the AG number in the inset fell, the helmet cam showed an opening in the top of the object iris open, though no seam was visible before it happened. The me I could not remember stepped toward it curiously, leaning over the hole and getting ready to drop a glow-light in.
I’m sure I would have screamed when a set of metal fingers reached out and grasped the edge of the opening, but the comm wasn’t on, so it escaped recording. I watched myself stumble back, falling off the edge of the object and into the loose rubble at the bottom of the crevasse. Curtis watched in silence, but I could tell from his expression that he was astonished.
Before I could get to my feet, I was lifted from where I’d fallen, metal fingers as wide as my wrists circling my torso. I struggled to pry the metal fingers from my suit, but even motorized joints were no match for that grip. The insets showed that I was in danger of over-straining and destroying the elbow and shoulder assemblies in my zeal to escape capture.
Eventually, the helmet camera got a good look at my assailant when the suit’s occupant (who I realized I couldn’t really think of as myself) looked up from his efforts to escape. The unbelievably intricate metal hands were attached to cable-wrapped arms that stretched back to meet an armored, trapezoidal metal torso. From this chassis, a hemispherical dome of a head sprouted out, studded with a number of sensory apparatus. It was huge - from the video, I estimated twelve feet tall at least.
The perspective was lifted closer to the head, as the metal giant brought the forgotten me closer to its sensors, almost curiously. That’s when I passed out, according to the suit’s vital statistics. Whether the giant had done something or I’d lost consciousness out of fear it was impossible to tell.
After a few seconds of scrutiny it laid me down at the bottom of the chasm, and that’s when we lost sight of it in the recording. We did, however, after about ten seconds, see a bright blue light reflected off the gray rocks, which appeared suddenly and dwindled quickly back to nothing. After the light was gone, the recording showed nothing until Curtis returned to find me there.
Too stunned to speak, we sat in silence for a long moment. Even reminded, I couldn’t dredge up first-hand memories of the metal giant inside the capsule. Still, my skin crawled at the thought of the experience I’d supposedly just had - what was the giant? Surely human robotics could create machines like that, but this was nothing I was familiar with. There was something else, too, lurking in my mind, but I let it lurk for the time being, not acknowledging it.
We sold the recording to the Fleet as soon as we got back to Earth. Interestingly enough, we made more on those ten minutes of EV suit data than we did for the petabytes of intelligence we’d recovered at Regency - it was understood by everyone involved that the Fleet was buying our silence as well as the data.
I never told the Fleet reps or even Curtis one thing, though. Though I still can’t specifically remember the experience firsthand, when I try an impression leaps to the forefront - an impression of watching and of waiting - watching Earth, and waiting for something a long time anticipated. I am convinced that this impression was put there by the metal giant, which is why I haven’t told anyone - they’d think my sanity compromised by the stress of that encounter.
What, I often wonder, is it waiting for, that Earth is so important to?
This story written for Klazzform's Short Story Competition on dndonlinegames.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment