Starship Alchemon Read online

  She could literally feel the planet’s violence, even diluted by her shieldsuit gyros into meek wobbles. The heavy garment made her feel insignificant, a clump of flesh encased in mechanized armor.

  And she sensed hidden forces at work here, disguised behind a veil of psionic interference the way the hills hid behind the fog. The notion triggered a dismal question, one that had been occurring to her with increasing regularity during the nine-month trip out.

  Why did I come on this journey?

  “Are you all right, dear?” Faye Kuriyama asked. “You look far away.”

  The scientist stood a few meters to the left, observing her with concern.

  “I’m fine. Just thinking about what a strange place this is.”

  “No argument. Sycamore’s as weird as they come.”

  Faye had piercing ruby eyes, wavy blond hair and an exquisite face and figure that placed her at the pinnacle of the Danbury Lustre Scale, the popular system for measuring the visual attributes of sexuality. Although the Danbury quantified males as well as females, LeaMarsa and many other women viewed it as a misogynistic throwback to male-dominated Helio Age cultures, where feminine value was too often equated only with physical beauty. But in today’s Corporeal, voices such as theirs seemed increasingly in the minority.

  Faye didn’t come by her attributes naturally. She was a genejob, embryonically modified. Her parents had made a fortune cloning attractive twenty-first century actors and actresses from preserved DNA but limiting them to a low threshold of consciousness so they could be legally sold to wealthy families as house pets. Faye wasn’t consciousness-restricted. But she was created to maximize sexual radiance and was equipped with pheromone secretors that could be activated by willpower alone, and which supposedly could incite lust from any man or woman within sniffing distance.

  LeaMarsa liked Faye. The scientist resisted using her physical attributes for professional advancement, instead putting in seven e-years of concentrated study to become a GS, a multidisciplinary general scientist, a rarity in a Corporeal dominated by specialists. Still, LeaMarsa couldn’t help wonder whether Faye had disappointed her parents by not following their genetic prescription for her life.

  The scientist smiled. “I have to confess, dear, I’m beginning to share Hardy’s enthusiasm for this place. The very instability of the planet is enticing.”

  For reasons LeaMarsa couldn’t comprehend, Faye had taken to calling her “dear.”

  “Think of it,” she continued, her voice rising in excitement. “Life exists here, has somehow managed to adapt itself. The Sycom strain is like nothing we’ve ever discovered.”

  She was Hardy’s understudy, and at twenty-nine, six years older than LeaMarsa. In temperament, however, they remained far apart. What Faye found wonderfully strange and alien, LeaMarsa perceived as grim and dangerous.

  “Any new psychic connections?” Faye asked.

  LeaMarsa shook her head inside the bulky helmet, trying not to show frustration. Since touching down in this new area, Faye and Hardy had asked her variations of that question half-a-dozen times.

  Any telepathic messages, LeaMarsa? Do you detect something, LeaMarsa? Are there superluminal impulses dancing in your head, parading through your body, tickling your spirit?

  No!

  How many times had she tried to explain that her so-called abilities didn’t occur with the precision inherent to the hard sciences, that psychic impressions often occurred in jumbled ways. Back at the Jamal Labs, they’d subdivided her abilities into neat quantitative arenas in order to compare her with other humans possessing telepathic skills. They’d proclaimed her a psionic of the highest order, capable of tapping into that theoretical quantum jetstream believed to be the source of superluminals and psychic powers. The pronouncement suggested that they actually knew something about her.

  “Nothing new,” she said, maintaining an even tone.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, dear. I’m sure things will happen in their own good time.”

  Hardy Waskov’s booming voice cut in. “We’re within the area of greatest bacterial concentration. I’ve just received confirmation from the Alchemon. The Sycom strain originated within this grid.”

  LeaMarsa glanced at her control panel, a collection of multicolored data readouts and diagrams along the inner surface of her helmet. She didn’t understand all the readouts but knew enough to realize that a moving yellow blip sixty meters to her left represented Hardy.

  “Can we pinpoint the migration source any closer?” Faye asked.

  “Too much wild energy in the atmosphere,” Hardy said.

  “What about temperature spikes?”

  “No discernible hot spots. One hundred twenty degrees is pretty much the average during daylight hours.”

  LeaMarsa glared into the gloomy skies, trying to locate the sun. It was hard to believe that this portion of the planet’s rotation was referred to as daylight.

  “There has to be some sort of anomaly,” Faye insisted.

  There is, LeaMarsa thought. Me.

  At the instant Hardy was calculating the source of the migration she’d felt a shiver of fear, followed by what the researchers at Jamal referred to as a psychic blackout – a loss of consciousness in the here and now – a phenomenon that often accompanied her psionic impressions. The moment of fear and the subsequent blackout, lasting less than a minute, had come upon her without warning.

  She’d never told anyone what happened during the blackouts, always insisting that she couldn’t remember. Deceit was preferable to the truth, which likely would consign her to those regions of the OTTO scale inhabited by the delusional or hopelessly insane. In truth, she remained awake and alert, but with her consciousness transported elsewhere.

  LeaMarsa called the place to which she journeyed during her blackouts neurospace. The name had popped into her head during the first blackout she could recall, at age thirteen, which had occurred at some point after her parents had died in a shuttle crash near one of the lunar colonies. She’d been 400,000 kilometers away at her New Haven, Connecticut, boarding school. According to the testimony of amused classmates, she’d been walking out of her dorm room when she’d frozen in an upright position, eyes wide open and face a blank.

  Neurospace. It was an alternate universe that existed beyond the immediacy of her senses. Although she could see it – a vast starfield, pulsating specks of light against the black – she sensed that regular vision played no part in her perception. Eyesight was an analogue for what she witnessed when she journeyed there, a trick of the mind to process a form of information beyond normal sensory comprehension. She couldn’t even be sure whether neurospace was an actual external universe or something that existed solely within her own head. Maybe it was a bit of both.

  Her reverie was interrupted by a sudden wind lifting a pond into the air and scattering it into droplets. The action brought a touch of life to the gloomy atmosphere. The Sycom strain lived within those ponds. The periodic explosions served to distribute the bacteria across the planet.

  The husky voice of the fourth member of the lander crew, their pilot Rigel Shaheed, entered the conversation.

  “I scanned the target area for any formations that don’t belong. No luck. Just more boulders and ponds typical for this latitude.”

  “Are you certain?” quizzed Hardy, sounding disappointed.

  “As certain as shit floats in zero-g.”

  LeaMarsa was glad Rigel remained within the lander. There was a brutish quality to the Alchemon’s tech officer. She found his colorful language and in-your-face mannerisms annoying.

  “Try running a basal geo,” Faye suggested. “See if these rocks have any compositional differences.”

  “Doing it now,” Rigel said.

  “LeaMarsa, is there any particular type of scan you think we should try?” Hardy asked.

  She sighed. “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “Anything at all, dear?” Faye prodded.

  LeaMarsa gave
a weary shrug. The shieldsuit translated the movement into a slight rising of her shoulder pads.

  “Hey, got something,” Rigel said. “A boulder that doesn’t match the surrounding terrain.”

  “Location?” Hardy demanded.

  “Close. Five meters northwest of Faye and LeaMarsa.”

  “Don’t touch it until I get there! It is of the utmost importance that I be present.”

  Faye switched to a private channel, grinned impishly. “Hardy doesn’t want some lowly researcher like yours truly upstaging him on a big discovery. That might jeopardize his dream of a Corporeal knighthood.”

  LeaMarsa followed Faye toward the rock. It was about three meters in diameter, with a craggy, weathered surface that made it indistinguishable from adjacent boulders.

  “What’s so different about it?” Faye asked.

  “Check out the other side,” Rigel said.

  They circled the rock. The center of the far side was smoothly elliptical. Even more telling was its coloration, a shade of blue reminiscent of an Earth ocean in sunlight.

  “Bless my odorous ass,” Rigel said. “That blue stuff isn’t rock. It appears to be the surface of a single, carbon-based multicellular organism.”

  “Alive,” Faye whispered.

  “And mostly encased inside the rock. Which means it must have been here for at least a billion e-years. That’s the age of much of the surface debris.”

  Hardy’s shieldsuit bounded out of the fog to join them, the excitement of discovery coloring his words. “It’s unlikely the rock landed here as a meteorite. Possibly the organism is of subterranean origin, detritus from some lifeform that exists or existed underground.”

  “Unlikely,” Rigel said. “Doesn’t fit the geo profile. And Jonomy ran a preliminary compositional scan through GEL. Initial analysis indicates no known organic comparisons.”

  GEL was the general library. All the Alchemon’s major and minor systems had three-letter designations. LeaMarsa hadn’t bothered learning most of the acronyms but GEL was an exception. On the voyage out, she’d frequently accessed the library from her wafer, becoming enamored of vintage novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The characters were arcane, but she couldn’t get enough of the stories, particularly a Victorian detective called Sherlock Holmes whose bohemian lifestyle and innate cleverness enabled him to unravel the deepest mysteries.

  “Don’t ask how the damn thing’s carrying on metabolic activity,” Rigel continued. “Even Jonomy’s stumped.”

  LeaMarsa was reminded of the popular saying: If a lytic doesn’t know, it’s probably unknowable.

  “The organism must have been entirely encased within the rock,” Hardy said. “Erosion likely exposed part of it half a million years ago. I think we can make a preliminary assumption that that’s when the bacteria was released from it and began migrating across the surface.”

  “Makes sense,” Faye said.

  The scientist knelt in front of the organism, leaned in until her visor was only centimeters from the blue surface. “Partially translucent. I can see what appear to be thin interlacing channels, almost like a venous structure. Should I risk taking a sample?”

  “By all means,” Hardy said. “But to be on the safe side and not disturb any unknown equilibrium, keep it minimal. Ten cc’s. Surface layer only.”

  Faye uncoupled a pistol syringe from her utility belt, pressed the barrel gently into the bluish mass.

  “Feels soft. Gelatinous.”

  The instant Faye’s syringe touched the organism, LeaMarsa felt a shiver vault the length of her spine. The shiver reached her brainstem, morphed into a single word-thought.

  Tragedy.

  Tragedy in the past? Or in the future. Like many of her psychic impressions, clear interpretation remained a challenge.

  Before Faye could depress the syringe, a loud screeching filled LeaMarsa’s helmet. A sheet of emerald-green fire lanced across the sky. Bolts of lightning sliced through the fog, cracked against a distant hillside.

  For an instant, everything was illuminated by an eerie light. And then the organism seemed to perform some energy counterpoint. Shafts of fiery red energy erupted from its surface, shot upward into the bleak skies.

  A tremendous explosion lifted LeaMarsa’s shieldsuit off the ground, sent her tumbling backward. She crashed hard on her back, five meters away. Fragments of shattered rock rained down all around her.

  “Jesus!” Faye hissed. “What the hell was that?”

  LeaMarsa realized Faye and Hardy had also been thrown onto their backs.

  “Everybody check your suits,” Rigel ordered.

  “I’m fine,” Hardy grunted. “All systems green.”

  “Same here,” Faye said.

  LeaMarsa turned her attention to the row of status indicator lumes on the control panel. She drew a breath of fear when she realized all of them weren’t green.

  “I have two yellow indicators.”

  “Which systems?” Rigel demanded.

  “Thermal balance and mech symmetry.” She had no idea exactly what those things were but was relieved by Rigel’s response.

  “They’re noncritical. Just hit your main reset.”

  She did as the tech officer asked. A moment later, the two lumes returned to reassuring green.

  “I’m good,” she said, moving her legs to stand up. Servos responded, motored her suit to an upright position.

  “Jonomy says the energy transformation you just experienced appears to be a unique event,” Rigel said. “Neither our mapping sensors nor the original probe registered anything like it.”

  LeaMarsa knew what the others only suspected. It was her presence here that had caused the violent energy eruption and the organism’s subsequent release from the rock. She sensed the truth of that even if she couldn’t explain how or why.

  “Look,” Faye whispered, pointing to where the boulder once stood.

  The energy discharge had exploded away the rock, fully revealing the organism. To LeaMarsa, the blue clump resembled an extra-large medicine ball made of hardened jelly. It pulsated faintly, like some impossibly large human heart.

  Faye pressed her hand against it. “Much cooler than the atmosphere. Glove sensors read it at nineteen degrees.”

  Hardy frowned. “Perhaps the rock protected the bulk of the organism from the heat…”

  He trailed off. The two scientists exchanged intense looks.

  “It might not be able to survive in a higher temperature,” Faye said.

  Hardy nodded. “Rigel, I want a capsule dispatched immediately. Never mind the internal adjustments. Just make sure the coolers are set to nineteen degrees.”

  “Got it.”

  “And inform the captain that he should begin prepping the Alchemon’s containment system.”

  “I’ll pass along your request.”

  Hardy grimaced. “Please do so. But kindly make it clear to Captain Solorzano that Pannis would be most unhappy to learn that we’d discovered a unique alien lifeform, but then just as quickly lost it because of a captain’s bureaucratic intransigence.”

  Rigel didn’t respond.

  Faye again knelt in front of the organism and leaned in close. But she immediately jerked back, startled.

  “There’s a smaller and denser object in the center. But that can’t be right.”

  “What can’t?” Hardy demanded.

  Faye removed a scope from her utility belt, stuck it onto her faceplate at eye level and pressed the cylindrical end against the organism.

  “Oh my god! The denser object, it has an internal skeletal structure. Something similar to a ribcage. More bones, though, and different spacing.” She paused to adjust a setting on the scope. “It looks similar to a humanoid fetus.”

  “Astounding,” Hardy said. “But what did you mean when you said that can’t be right?”

  “It wasn’t there prior to that energy outburst.”

  “You must be mistaken.”

  “Take a lo
ok.”

  Faye transferred a replay of her suitcam video to Hardy and LeaMarsa. She was right. Prior to the outburst, the fetus wasn’t there.

  “It’s about thirty centimeters long,” she continued. “Two arms, two legs. The head appears to be more vertically elongated than ours.”

  “This is utterly amazing,” Hardy announced. “We may be bearing witness to one of the most dynamic and important finds in the long and colorful history of the human species. We very well could be standing at the dawn of a new era of discovery.”

  LeaMarsa thought Hardy’s remarks sounded rehearsed, a speech recorded for future media consumption. The science rep often came across like he was performing for an audience.

  “Capsule dispatched,” Rigel said. “You should see it approaching from the south.”

  A thick white cylinder drifted out of the fog. Microjets on its underside and stern were firing synchronously, keeping it aloft and moving forward.

  The capsule halted three meters from the organism. The jets tapered off, allowing it to settle onto the surface. Its front end popped open, revealing an interior lined with delicate webbing.

  “How do we get the organism into the capsule?” Faye wondered. “It appears delicate. We could tear it apart trying to lift it.”

  “Good point,” Hardy said. “Perhaps we could slip a tarp underneath and gently slide…”

  He trailed off as the organism rolled across the ground toward the cylinder. With a gentle bounce, it hopped over the lip of the capsule and nestled itself inside. The smart webbing tightened around the gelatinous blue sphere and the hatch closed. Exterior readouts turned green, signifying it was safely contained.

  No one spoke for a few seconds. Faye broke the silence.

  “Perhaps it sensed an environment similar to its previous one.”

  “Sensed how?” Rigel wondered. “It doesn’t have any sensory organs.”

  “But that fetal creature inside it might.”

  “There may be a simpler explanation,” Hardy said. “Perhaps some form of magnetoreception, similar to what certain Earth based organisms like sharks and honeybees use for navigation. The capsule has a plethora of electronic instrumentation and projects fairly strong magnetic fields.”