“Isn’t this close enough?” I asked. “I’m right here guys, come and get me.”
Several more quiet seconds passed. I began to worry. They weren’t even answering. What if I’d somehow triggered a response I didn’t understand? Space was very lonely, especially when facing aliens all alone. And that’s what these ships were-alien. They weren’t even alive, and they certainly didn’t think like a human.
Suddenly, everything changed. I caught a flash of metal off to my left. I swiveled my helmet that way. One of the ships was moving in my direction. I felt relieved, but it was a short-lived sensation.
There was more movement. More reflections of sunlight and greenish radiance from the metal skins of these heartless little ships. They were rushing me, now. All of them. And every one of them had its long, black, serpentine arm out. They were all reaching for me, grasping with those whipping, three-fingered hands. They wanted me, the way a school of sharks wants bloody prey.
I immediately shouted, “Not all at once!” But it did no good. They swarmed me, like piranha. I knew that if several of them got hold of me, they might well pull me apart. Those big black fingers were essentially metal cables. They had incredible strength. I imagined the tug-of-war that might soon begin. I’d seen predators fight over scraps of dying prey before. It never went well for the animal being devoured.
Having less than a second to react, I flew to my left. I accelerated toward the first flash I’d seen. If one of these ships had gone for me first, that one should logically reach me before the others. If I could help it out, I could get aboard before the rest of them ripped off a boot or cracked my helmet.
In the end, I wasn’t sure if I ended up in the grip of the ship I’d seen move first. But I was sure something caught me. A jet-black hand whipped down and snatched me up as I scooted under it. The impact was jarring, and I gave a heavy grunt and a curse. An instant later, everything went black except for the LEDs in my helmet. I realized I’d been sucked up into the ship’s maw.
I checked all the readouts, but nothing seemed to be damaged. When the lights came on again outside my suit, I saw a dull glow that came from nowhere in particular. It was soft light, and it was way too familiar.
“Alamo?” I asked.
No one answered. I looked around and saw I was in a familiar cubical chamber. I reached out my gauntleted hand and the nearest wall dissolved. I stepped through, and saw several more cubicles. I knew the routine-but the ship wasn’t following protocol. It wasn’t giving me hints, or a puzzle. It wasn’t talking, either.
I stepped thorough seven small rooms like the first. Each move I made took me closer to the central command chamber, I knew-or at least it should be doing so. I worried that the Nanos had taken on a new software update. If the Blues had built these things, didn’t it stand to reason they could alter their programming at will? For all I knew, I’d just given myself in the hands of a resolute enemy. Maybe a Blue Admiral was down on Eden-12 now, high-fiving it with his fellows at having captured an idiot human without firing a shot. Perhaps the dissection was scheduled to begin at dawn.
Finally, the last door dilated open. I’d been expecting a physical attack all along, but I’d never found anyone to fight with.
“Alamo?” I asked, standing in the plain chamber I knew to be the bridge.
“How do you wish to address us?”
I smiled and heaved a sigh. This sounded like a script I knew. “What was your previous name?” I asked.
“I’ve had many previous designations.”
“Have you ever been called Alamo?”
“Yes.”
I frowned. “Why the hell didn’t you answer to that name, then?”
“I have no current designation.”
“You scared the crap out of me, you crazy witch of a ship. I rename you Alamo. Now, welcome me back.”
“Welcome back, Colonel Kyle Riggs.”
— 33
It was weird, being aboard Alamo again. It was like going out with an old girlfriend you haven’t seen in ten years. One who had ripped your heart out more than once in the past, but who still held a special place in your memories.
The first thing I did was affix a translation device to the outer hull. This was easily accomplished. I placed it against the ceiling and allowed Alamo to push it through the smart metal until it fused with the outer hull. The emitting part of the device was exposed, while the controlling portion was inside my command chamber. The device was sort of like a car horn, with thick tubing on it. To me, it looked like an exhaust manifold. The unit was supposedly able to create noises as high winds passed through it. A deep howling could be emitted when in a thick atmosphere. There were tubes and valves inside to modulate the noises, which Marvin had assured me Blues could understand if I got close enough to one of them. Attached to the instrument was a brainbox Marvin had educated with the language of the Blues. I was skeptical of the whole thing, but I figured if whales could talk with a similar system, this thing might just work.
I searched the ship briefly, and questioned it. Alamo confirmed it had once contained a Crustacean pilot-or victim, as it turned out. As far as I could tell, the creature had died from neglect sitting up here in orbit over Eden-12, alone and cut off from its fellows. I imagined that similarly grim fates awaited any individual who wasn’t in tune with Nano ship tricks.
This same ship had left Earth when it had marked its mission complete. It had then gone to the Crustacean world and kidnapped a number of them. Who knew how many had been tortured and killed within these smart metal walls? I certainly didn’t. Each of the survivors had thought they were the ship’s final master, but they’d all been wrong. The last lobster had been determined to be “obsolete”, just as my own pilots had been, so long ago.
Now that I was officially command personnel again aboard Alamo, I ordered the ship to take me down into the atmosphere. The ship did so without an argument. In fact, I didn’t even realize we were moving at first. The ships I’d built on my own had never possessed stabilizers as good as these vessels had. You could hardly tell you were moving when you were aboard a true Nano ship.
By the time I’d set up a crash seat, a bathroom and a forward screen, we were dipping down into the upper atmosphere. I could feel the turbulence starting to knock the ship around. They had to be pretty significant bumps, because they got right through the effects of the stabilizers. I sat in my newly-formed metal chair and stared at the outline of the different atmospheric layers depicted in metallic relief on the forward wall. It was deja vu, but I knew it wasn’t the planet Earth the ship was outlining-there was no curve to it at all from this perspective. The planet was so huge, it couldn’t fit on the wall. There was no horizon, almost no perceptible curvature at all.
The other noticeable effect was the increasing gravity. I’d ordered the vessel to allow me to feel the tug of this world. When I exited the ship at some future point, I wanted to know what I was going to experience so I could adjust to it now. If it became too intense, I figured I could always fly back into space.
But after a while, as we went deeper, I began to doubt the truth of this assumption. The ship shivered, and occasionally heeled over when a powerful gust struck us. I squinted when I noticed something else at about twelve hundred miles down.
“Alamo? What is that in the aft bulkhead? A ripple?”
“The stress fracture has been repaired.”
“Stress fracture?”
As I watched in growing concern, the hull seemed to balloon inward. The metal swelled unevenly, and turned a brighter shade of silver. I saw more smart metal flowing across the walls to the sagging spot, trying to shore it up.
“Halt descent!” I shouted. “Reverse course, take us up a hundred miles.”