Rockhoppers Ch 07

In the silence of vacuum, a steady stream of the

Rockhopper's

robotic helpers haul ore to the ship's hopper. Every few hours, another thirty meter section of the rail is extruded from a one-way cargo dump on the bottom of the engineering bay. The rapidly-cooling metal girders fall to the ground with the exaggerated sloth dictated by Sleepy's tiny gravity. Well-anchored spiderbots reach up and wait with infinite patience to receive each new section.

Once their manipulators have a solid grip on the tiny handles built into the rail for just that purpose, the little robots heave in unison. The section flies out from under the

Rockhopper

like a massive, shining javelin. Its path floats parallel to the already-constructed portion of the rail, coasting toward the horizon. The spiderbots launch themselves after it, hurtling with much higher speed than their erstwhile missile. Occasionally one or another might bump the rail, diverting its path by millimeters, or adjusting the speed with which it slowly glides over the surface of the planetoid. The tiny but constant pull of Sleepy's microgravity allows them to keep the rail in what amounts to extremely low orbit, skimming less than a meter over the path they've cleared for this purpose.

An observer might think they look a little like a pod of dolphins, playfully gamboling around a much larger creature as they leap and shepherd the shining metal. The only available observer, however, emerging in its tiny thousands from the mouth of a fresh tunnel just below the ship, has never seen a dolphin.

----

The spiderlings flow into each other to form a large, single alien. It crouches next to one of the smelter's conductive columns, a shaft that sinks into the stone of the planetoid, shedding the enormous heat-debt of the metalworks housed in the ship above. The creature patiently observes the activities of the mechanicals as they maneuver one of the metal rails away from the ship. Hours pass, and it watches another. And another.

Eventually, it moves forward, placing itself in easy reach of the army of diminutive robots, who ignore it. Even when it moves to block their most efficient path, they simply weave around it without reaction. It never leaves the covering shelter of the visitor's craft, so Faith's carefully calibrated surveillance cameras monitoring the external perimeter never get a peek at this latest visitor. It observes the activities of the robots for a few more hours before finally turns its attention to the ship.

It has watched the process long enough to establish that there are only two accesses the spiderbots are using to interact with the ship. The first is the large metal cube into which they deposit rock, which leads directly into a device with temperatures too hot for the creature to tolerate without shedding too much mass to maintain cognition. The second is the hatch from which large metal girders emerge, which does not share the hellish temperatures of the first, but operates in such a way that even if it split into the tiniest possible bits of itself that could still follow instruction reliably, it could not squeeze through the available gaps quickly enough to avoid being smashed by the cargo mechanism.

It turns its attention to the conductive column it shelters beside. There is still a pile of debris and oddly liquid-looking slag where the drill has torn/melted its way down into the rock. The aboveground portion of the column is sheathed in the same type of high grade steel the rest of the hull is comprised of.

The spawnling extends a pseudopod to the metal, causing tip of the appendage to become a fine point. Pausing for a moment just above the surface of the steel, a small, clear droplet forms at the tip, which the creature presses into contact with the metal. Though there's no hissing noise in the vacuum around the ship, the liquid clearly reacts with the alloy, boiling away in a few seconds and leaving a faint scar behind.

The creature examines the scar for a few moments, then applies another droplet slightly to one side of the shiny scar created by the first. This time, the reaction takes longer, and upon inspection, the second blemish is markedly more visible than the first, and has clearly eaten at more of the metal. A third improves on this result slightly.

The creature settles in, creating a grid of tiny pockmarks on the column's sheathe as it searches for the most efficient compound for its purposes. If neither of the two accesses available are useful for its purposes, it intends to create a third.

----

"Anything?" Faith glides in to Josh's cabin. Its occupant is sitting in front of his portable console. He's wearing a shipsuit on his legs, but hasn't bothered to pull the attached upper half around his shoulders yet.

"Nope, no movement for a hundred meters in any direction of the ship that can't be attributed to a tagged, verified spiderbot. At least, not for the last two days." He flicks his console closed, and stands, stretching.

She pads over and leans her forehead between his shoulderblades, feeling the soft fabric of his undershirt, enjoying his smell. "Okay, I'll let the Captain know when I go up for watch."

He nods, turning around to give her a hug. "I'll tell Grubs. We'll probably go under before the shift is over, I think the Captain is eager to get us back on a regular stasis cycle. If I'm honest, I kind of am too. It's nice to wake up once a week and see a big jump in production from the bots instead of watching them plod along every day."

Faith nuzzles his neck. "Hnn. As long as we don't get any more uninvited guests, I don't mind the extra uptime."

Josh chuckles bringing his arms up around her. "Don't you, now."

"Nope." she dots little butterfly kisses along his collarbone. One of her hands drifts down to give him a playful squeeze. "Don't mind the half hour till shift change either."

Grinning, he starts helping her out of her shipsuit.

----

"Hey, Skipper." Grubs arrests his motion down the hall when he encounters Nomi in one of the service corridors. "The boy says nothing is moving out there, and hasn't since we fired up the feed."

Nomi nods. "Faith told me. I'm headed down to engineering, I want to see the numbers on the rail construction. How's the boat?"

"Everything is in the green, I've been going over the temperature log since we shifted the equipment around, and the smelter's still dumping heat just fine. As long as the boy thinks the bots have the job well in hand, I think we're good to start getting some coffin time again.

"Thank god. I don't want the to have to spend a day eating vat paste this trip if we can avoid it."

They glide in silence a few moments, before Grubs puts his hand on his Captain's arm and stops her short of the engineering hatch. "How are you, Skipper? No bullshit, lass, I'm not one of the kids."

Nomi sighs. "I'm... okay. I haven't felt sick again. Some nightmares, more because I can't remember anything than because anything actually happened, I think. It was scary, Chief. But I'm sleeping better, and every camera on the ship, inside and out, hasn't caught a whiff of that thing in days. It wouldn't surprise me if the eggheads who come back here to find it have to hunt pretty hard. If anyone even believes us, with just 30 seconds of 'lock footage to show them."

Grubs grunts. "Aye. Well, I feel better with all the work Faith did on the surveillance package. I threw a couple dozen pebbles out from under the ship in different directions when we were outside, and it caught and tracked every one of them to the limits of the cameras. Every movement log inside the boat is us or the bots in engineering, so whatever the beastie was, it didn't leave any friends behind."

He claps her on the shoulder and winks. "You were right to keep us here, Skipper. It'll look better that we didn't scarper when they make all the historical dramatization about our amazing discovery."

She grins. "You have some ideas about who should play you?"

A shrug. "I've a name or two in mind, lass. Takes a lot of gravitas to pull off a proper Chief."

Laughing, she tugs open the engineering access.

----

"There they go."

The crew is gathered around the large mess display, watching the view of a temporarily retasked spiderbot as it records a team of its brethren hurtle a new section of rail across the surface of the planetoid.

Watching the bots in their strange dance of leaps and nudges around the massive rail, Faith says "They still creep me out sometimes, but that's weirdly pretty to watch."

Grubs nods. "Aye. Like a ballet." He thumps a fist on Josh's shoulder. "You've done well with your little toys, lad."

"Thanks, Chief. So, yeah, Captain, they've got this. Every week we get roughly another kilometer of rail built, with variance because of terrain or when we get a lower concentration of iron in the smelter. As far as my little guys are concerned, we can start using the mausoleum again. I'd feel comfortable with thirty days instead of seven if unless the Chief thinks the smelter needs more frequent checks."

Grubs says, "I've no problem with a month."

She nods. "I'll think about it tonight. All right then, really well done over the last few days, everyone. Grubs, fire up the grill. Everyone eat and catch a full eight hours of sleep. We'll start a stasis cycle at the beginning of first shift."

----

Nomi turns away from the console on Josh's coffin. Both of the younger crew are in stasis, leaving the captain and the chief engineer the only two conscious souls on board.

"Grubs."

"Aye, Skipper. Get in. I'll wait and make sure you go under clean."

Relief floods her, as well as gratitude that she didn't have to explain herself. She nods pulls herself into her own crypt, attaching her hookups with the ease of long practice.

Once she's settled, she looks up at the grizzled engineer floating beside her. She reaches up to give him a fond pat on the cheek. "Thanks, Chief. See you in a month."

"As you say, Captain. Sleep well."

The coffin slides home with a familiar crash, and Grubs watches the readouts until his captain is safely under. Satisfied, he gives the surveillance logs one last perusal before pulling himself into his own coffin.

----

The spawnling draws a thin line along the alloy below its test grid, and the residue it leaves behind reacts and boils away almost immediately. A perfect centimeter-deep groove is left behind in the metal.

Satisfied, it dispatches a tiny bit of itself to scurry back down to the core. The remaining mass examines the memories of the original visit inside the ark and repositions itself under a portion of the bay it remembers to be clear of activity and concealed from casual observation. Shoving itself away from the rock of the planetoid, it adheres the hull on the underside of the ship. If a few moments, it has bonded itself with the strength of a weld to a circular section of the hull about ten centimeters across. The metal inside the circle begins to bubble as it applies the compound it has developed.

Over the next hours, the creature clings to the hole it is making in the ship's half-meter-thick hull, occasionally belching out the gaseous residue of the chemical reaction chewing through the metal. It is spending its own mass to fuel the reaction, and by the time a small section of the floor in the engineering bay boils away to nothing, all that is left of the spawnling is a thin, tight membrane stretched across the hull breach. It is strong enough to trap the pressurized atmosphere of the ship, but not enough mass remains to fuel independent thought. It simply holds station, following simple directives it had given itself before it boiled away to imbecility.

Minutes later and meters away, dozens of tiny spiders flood out of the passage to the core, immediately hurling themselves up towards the black patch on the

Rockhopper

. As they strike the surface, they merge with it. Seamlessly, each new addition of mass to the patch causes another spider of equal mass (but not necessarily the same molecules) to pop into the atmosphere of the ship. The first few to reach the lip of the hole in the engineering bay cling there, snatching their brethren as they come floating up, until the hole is plugged full of black alien. A few spiders remain outside the ship, touching the patch, available to convey information to the core should the need arise.

The spawnling extends a tiny pseudopod above the lip of the hole and spends a few minutes observing the environment. Mechanicals bustle around the bay on various arcane tasks, none of which bring them into the vicinity of the spawnling, tucked away below a bank of large, silent machines. There is no sign of their arboreal masters, although the atmosphere contains trace examples of their biology. The vast majority of the bay is floodlit, though the spawnling's vantage does not allow it to observe the light sources, somewhere near the top of the bay. The light itself falls into a very low, narrow spectrum, deep into the infrared.

The spawnling does not understand why the creatures would rely on light so far outside their visible spectrum, as the bay would be mostly shadows to their visual sense. It watches the mechanicals go about their business for a few hours, but still sees no sign of their masters. After a few more minutes, it dispatches one of the spiderlings outside the breach to report to the core.

----

The main mass of the alien has no trouble judging the nature of the light its child has discovered inside the ark. The visitors might not be able to see in the infrared, but there is no reason their machines cannot, and the likeliest explanation for the new state of affairs aboard the vessel is that its masters have some inkling that they are not alone on the planetoid.

Possibly the mass it had left in the female has been discovered, possibly mechanical eyes have noted the movements of one of its spawnlings. Regardless, they are exercising caution in the face of an unknown. Their equipment uses infrared light precisely

because

they cannot see into that spectrum. It has been designed to observe the furtive actions of their own species, who would blunder into the floodlights all unknowing.

The creature sends a courier back to the ark, carrying instructions.

----

The cameras in the engineering bay observe what looks like a bloom of thousands of tiny black hairs begin to flow from underneath the console for the ship's radiator fins. They stretch in every direction until they reach every wall of the engineering bay. The spiderbots working in the bay notice them as well, in as much as they notice anything: obstacles to be maneuvered around.

The entire process is recorded in extreme fidelity from multiple angles, to the point that each of the tendrils could be individually examined by anyone accessing the recording. The software behind the surveillance apparatus, however, observes nothing that passes the size filter dictated to make an entry in the log, much less perform an emergency wakeup of the crew, and so the recordings anonymously join thousands of hours of footage already collected by the system, with nothing to distinguish them in the log.

----

The spawnling waits, the bulk of its mass spread across the space of the bay in the form of thousands of tendrils, each thinner than a human hair. It retains one visual organ, which watches from under cover as spiderbots continue their work in the bay. For each click of a robotic claw against the deck plating, the network of hairs tracks not only the sound, but all of the resulting faint echos.

It takes a few hours, because some of the arboreal machinery produces a great deal of white noise when it activates, but eventually the spawnling has an intricately detailed sonic map of the entire engineering bay, including the lumps of polycarbonate near the ceiling that must be the ark's surveillance apparatus. As slowly as it extended them, it reels its tendrils back into itself, until it is once more a formless blob plugging the hull breach.

A courier spider dives away from the patch outside the ship, bound for the core, but this time the spawnling does not wait for a response. Instead, it begins to extrude itself into pulsing black worm, a couple of centimeters thick. Soon it is adroitly winding around equipment, always flowing just out of the point of view of the cameras above. Eventually the snake comprises all of the spawnling's mass, and nothing remains in the hull breach except the thin black membrane holding in the atmosphere.

The creature is almost twenty meters long, now, and moves more swiftly as it becomes confident in its survey of the bay. Soon it reaches the bank of thick pipes that house the cabling that feeds the rest of the ship power from the engineering bay's reactor. The snake coils itself around one of the pipes and reels in the rest of its length. Then the spawnling applies a tiny amount of solvent to one of the pipes, creating a small hole that immediately uses to enter the ship's wiring infrastructure. It spends another tiny bit of mass to plug the hole with a small patch.

A few moments later, the spiderbots are once again the sole occupants of the engineering bay.

----

"Hey Captain, there's coffee. Grubs says he'll be up here in a few minutes to make breakfast."

Nomi glides into the mess, having left Faith on the bridge to verify that none of Sleepy's orbital mechanics have changed since they went under. Josh is nursing a bulb of coffee with one hand while he flips between spiderbot views on the main display with the other.

"Thanks." She fills a bulb from the vac-dispenser. "So how did your little minions do with our extended nap?"

"Like gangbusters. The rail construction has reached a relatively flat plain on the surface. They're on track to finish it up about the time we wake up again. Are we still going under in three hours?"

"No. Grubs said everything in engineering held up fine as well, so now that we can go down a month at a time I'm giving us a solid twenty-four hours at each cycle."

"Aye, Captain. I won't mind that a bit. I feel loopy when we do a few cycles without any actual sleep."

"I know what you mean. A thousand studies will tell you its psychosomatic, but I like natural sleep between crypt sessions too." She settles down at the table with him. "So, you think we can start pushing iron on the next cycle?"

"I think so. At that point the spiders will just be hauling ore, so you'd be better off checking with Faith, the rail systems are her baby. I can just tell you that the construction side should be complete."

Nomi nods. "She's rechecking the orbital math again right now. I don't think there's going to be much for any of us to do the rest of the shift. If you're satisfied that the bots are in order, go put your head together with hers about when we should set the next wake cycle for. I want us to be watching when the rails fires the first slug."

"Aye, Captain."

----

Later that evening, Nomi has left the other three in the mess, where Grubs is educating the two younger crew members in the fine art of properly appreciating scotch in microgravity.

Uninterested in going into stasis hung over, Nomi has bid the others goodnight and is gliding along the corridor to her cabin. Palming the release, she waits for the hatch to slide open. She doesn't even have time to scream before an oily black tentacle splashes over her face and around her head, dragging her inside while she flails helplessly.

A few moments later, the hatch slides closed on a silent corridor.

----

Several hours later, the spawnling believes it understands what happened to the mass of itself that had once occupied the female's mind. They are unable to communicate with language, and the female lacks the capacity for nuanced pheromone production the creature prefers to use for rapid communication, but after insinuating itself into the arboreal's sensorium, it had been able to use pleasure and pain stimulus to force the visitor to revisit its memories of the events over and over until it believes it understands them.