“All right…uh— Just get back on that drill and cut this fucker open,” he said.
Be as dumb as you can be—in the Army, I thought. “The nute-drill could take hours or days. Let me try something. If it doesn’t work, then I’ll power the drill back up. Is that square with you?”
Yung smirked, reached up and tried to scratch his chin before he remembered he was wearing a sealed CVC. “Yeah, fuck, all right.”
“Represh the dock to six-five,” I told the Spec. Yung nodded consent. It took a few minutes but I needed enough PSIs in the dock to take my EUD mitt off. Then I grabbed an SV probe off the hardware lock.
“What the fuck are you fuckin’ doin’?” Yung asked.
I didn’t bother answering. The sub-violet lume element would show me the same spot where the hull was touched. “There it is,” I muttered. It was a downward streak. Someone had pressed his or her fingertip against the hull at this precise point. Then they’d dragged their fingertip down in a straight line…
With my mitt off, then, I did the same thing. I pressed my fingertip on the same spot, then dragged it down.
A small ingression on the high quadrant of the hull formed. And for you earth-loving no-hackers who don’t know what that means… It means a doorway opened.
“He did it!” Yung barked. “The candyass civvie fuck did it! First Platoon! Lock and load.” Yung shoved me back out of the way as his troops charged their Colt M-57 Squad Assault Systems. “Cole, Alvirez, take firing positions at the bulkhead! Filips and Bensin, cover the entrance at one-five meters! Come on, Roburts! It’s me and you.”
“Sarge, Sarge,” I interrupted. “The G.I. Joe stuff isn’t going to be necessary.” I showed him my fileflat which was now out-indexing the atomic chromatography specs from the p/a/a scan. “Check this out.”
Yung frowned at the readouts, his trigger finger twitching. “The fuck am I supposed to know what that shit is? I ain’t no wirehead—I’m a fuckin’ Army Ranger!”
Tell me about it. “This is a radio assay and carbon-date of the fingerprint. It’s over 2,000 years old, Sarge. Any life form inside that victor is long dead.”
“Balls,” the platoon sergeant replied. “Cover me, Roburts!” Then he raised his weapon and entered the craft. I guess these guys had their games to play, so what the hell. They had to go through the motions, I guess to maintain their identities. And I guess I did the same thing, in my own way, too.
But when Yung entered the victor with his wrist-light and rifle—it seemed like a whole lot of time went by with all of us just standing there staring at the doorway. Yung didn’t respond. We couldn’t even see his shadow moving in there.
“Hey, Sarge?” I called out.
Nothing.
“Sergeant Yung! Relay your status!” one of the other grunts cracked.
Nothing.
Then—
“Holy everlovin’ motherfuckin’ shit…”
It was Yung’s voice that carried back to our CVCs. I turned to the SGT E-5 next to me. “You’re next in command, pal. You better send someone in there.”
“I-I-I—,” he stammered.
What the hell, I thought. I grabbed the SGT’s wrist-light and stepped into the victor. The cabin walls were black but somehow tinged with silver. I saw no evidence of an operator’s seat, instruments, or controls. Just the weird silver-black, which sucked up the 1000-candle-power sodium light I was carrying.
“Down here,” Yung’s voice drifted to me.
It was like walking through black fog. I seemed to take many more steps than the depth of the craft would allow, but eventually Yung’s form came into focus. He’d dropped his weapon on the victor’s floor and was just sitting there on a starboard protrudement.
“Guess I just wasn’t ready for it,” he said. He sat there with the rim of his helmet in his palm. He looked out of it. He looked whacked.
“What’s that, Sarge?”
“Seen a lot of fucked up shit in my time. Seen guys die, my own men, seen whole transport plats blow up ‘cos some mech jockey forgot to close a vent-line. I saw the P-4 quake split the whole planetoid in half and swallow fifteen thousand colonists five minutes after my thruster took off. It’s fucked up shit, man.”
“Straighten up, Sarge,” I said. For whatever reason, he was going down memory lane, and the scenery wasn’t too great. “Get yourself squared away. Sure, we’re standing inside an alien spacecraft—the first one ever discovered—and you’re right, it’s fucked up. But we gotta keep it together. We got our jobs to do. You got men out there shit-scared. They’re counting on you.”
His CVC turned toward me. Through the glex visor, I could see his blank eyes in the light. “Since I was a little kid,” he droned, “I always thought that this would happen someday. But it was just a fantasy, you know? Some kids fantasize about being president, some kids fantasize about seeing an alien…. Man, this is fucked up.”
The tone of his words wrapped me up. “Seeing…a what?” I said. But now I guessed his point. We knew there must have been something inside this ship, however long dead. What else could it be but an “alien?” A “spaceman?” Something every man, woman, and child in the Federate had thought about, dreamed about, but something, by now, that nobody really believed in anymore. Like afterlife, reincarnation, spirituality. Just myths now. Mankind in the 23rd century no more believed in spacemen than they believe in Santa Claus.
Yung’s voice cracked like tinder. “Take a look, civvie,” he said.
I let my light follow his gaze. Some kind of a molded object rose from the floor, something like a chair, and sitting in that chair was the victor’s obvious pilot.
An ecstatic chaos filled the plat, everyone running around like meth-freaks. Time seemed to stand still. The OAC ordered most of the crew to analyze the victor. As for the dead pilot, of course we couldn’t analyze him until we got his suit off. That was my job: to decorticate the pilot, so to speak. To remove his environmental suit and extract the body for digigraphics and autopsy.
We’d moved the body to the medcove, lain it out on an exam table under the lumes.
“Twenty-one May, 2202,” I said into the mission recorder. “Jonsin, Dugliss, FOS 95C20 decortication technician for mission survey on DSP-141. The Operational Analysis Computer has ordered me to attempt to extract the body of the victor’s apparent operator for analysis and archives indexing. For this record, the victor’s operator will be referred to as VO from here on…”
Oh, damn. Some story teller I am, huh? I forgot to tell you what the guy looked like. Humanoid and bipedal. Two pronating arms, two pronating legs, and a head. Each hand showing four fingers with three phalanges, and an opposable thumb. One hundred and forty-six point four pounds via specific earth gravity, and seventy-one inches long in extremis. For all intents, it was a guy in a spacesuit with a general surface anatomy similar to ours.
But it was still an alien, and it was the ev-suit that kept reminding me of that. Same color, same hue as the ship: a flat silver-black. To the touch, the material felt like something polycron or cloth, but if you pressed down on it, it wouldn’t give at all. I tried a particle vise on the right thumb and nothing happened. The vise broke at 750,000 psi. But if you grabbed the hand, you could bend the fingers in their natural direction. Same with the rest of the body. The suit was pliable…but then again, it wasn’t.
The head was the weirdest part. Not a helmet, nothing like what you would think of as utility headgear. Just a bullet-shape extending from the shoulders. No visor, no visual ports, no bumps where the ears should be. Just imagine dipping a doll in wax enough times that only the basic shape remained.