“And I’m having a hard time reading their body language because of that,” Miriam said. “Gimme some popcorn.”
“Yes, my dear,” the doctor replied, grinning through his beard. “Hard to read are they?”
“Extremely nonreactive,” Miriam admitted. “At least what I can get through the suits. Almost emotionless.”
“There’s a fair bit of chatter on the EM band,” the doctor said. “They’re more or less continuously sending and receiving.”
“And I can’t match any of it to their movements,” Miriam admitted. “It’s like most of it is a continuous background hum. And some of it looks more like radar than communication.”
“And the first one is taking off his helmet,” Dr. Chet said excitedly as the alien fumbled at the catches.
“Not the leader, either, notice,” Miriam said. “They’re doing it the way that the Marines would, probably. Junior man first.”
“Oh, my,” Dr. Chet said as the helmet came off. “Ugly.”
The alien’s head was round and… knobbly. And…
“Where are the eyes?” Miriam asked as the thing released a series of clicks. “I don’t see any sign of visual organs. Do you?”
“No,” Dr. Chet admitted.
The linguist leaned in closer to the monitor and considered the aliens’ movements and the series of clicks as the threesome shucked their suits. They had sleek purplish bodies with fine hair, which came in for some vigorous scratching as soon as the suits were off. Then the three huddled and clicked at each other for a while.
“Uh, oh,” Miriam said after watching for about ten minutes.
“What?” Dr. Chet asked.
“I think I know why they don’t have eyes,” the linguist replied. “And I don’t think those clicks are language.”
“Sonar?” Dr. Chet said. “In a land mammal?”
“Looks like,” Miriam said, exasperated. “And that means that most of their language is going to be ultrasonic! I’m never going to be able to talk to them! I’m barely a mezzo soprano!”
The movement to the probable Dreen ship was a relatively short distance. Short enough that the Marines remained on the hull, grav boots locked down and safety lines clipped off, but exposed to the debris.
“Whoa!” Himes shouted, leaning backward to let a piece of metal fly past. It cleared his suit by bare inches.
“This one’s interesting,” Berg commented, stretching out a claw and getting a hook into what looked like a wiring harness. He wouldn’t have grabbed it if it wasn’t clearly nonconducting. The harness held, fortunately, but his grav boots didn’t. He detached from the hull and slapped to a stop at the end of his safety rope, swinging through an arc that connected on Master Sergeant Guzik’s armor.
“Damnit, Two-Gun!” the master sergeant snapped as he, too, was detached from the hull. He swung outwards and in a spiral on the pivot of his safety line which intersected with Smith’s back, hooked into the traverse mechanism for the gun and pulled the Marine up to drift as well. His line caught Sergeant First Class Hanel across the back of the knees, popping his armor off the hull, then proceeded to wrap around the sergeant’s safety line.
In barely fifteen seconds, all five of the Wyverns, and their safety lines, were snarled in a cat’s cradle and drifting randomly. The chunk had grounded out on the ship’s hull so when it hit Himes’ suit there was barely a zap.
“Nice going, Two-Gun,” Master Sergeant Guzik growled.
“Hey, I got the wreckage,” Berg replied. “And unless I’m much mistaken, it’s some sort of engine.”
“Oh,” Guzik said, panning his sensor pod around and trying to get a look at the piece. “In that case… Nice going, Two-Gun.”
“Is it just me or does this thing look like a cut-open lung?” Himes asked as the threesome approached the probable Dreen ship.
“It sure looks organic,” Smith said. “I’m getting some monatomic oxygen readings. It’s still leaking.”
The shattered bit of ship did look a bit like the interior of a lung. Under the suit lights, the part facing them was purple and composed of a large number of small chambers, each less than a meter wide and in irregular shapes.
The team was approaching from a direction that took them to what had been the “interior” of the ship. Alpha Team was checking out the hull while Charlie was backing them up.
“Gunny, Berg,” Two-Gun said, puffing to a stop. “This looks like something that’s going to require dissection rather than entry. I don’t see any bits to enter. I’m getting some fermion readings from the aft quadrant, though. If that’s a working quarkium plant, we’d better be careful or this thing’s going to blow sky high.”
“Roger, stand by,” the gunny replied. There was a moment’s pause and then: “Try to cut into the area that the fermions are coming from. See what the source is.”
“Oh, great,” Berg muttered, moving forward. He located the closest point to the source and pulled out a vibe knife. The material, whatever it was, cut a bit like bubble wrap. Between working in microgravity and the flexible yet strong nature of the compartments, it wasn’t exactly easy to cut into. He’d cut through two of the compartments, having to shove his suit actually into the materials, when he noticed a glow ahead. Cutting his suit lights he determined that it was a green glow and that fermion levels were up, along with gamma ray levels, indicating a radioactive source rather than quarkium.
He ran the results against a matrix of radioactive generators and got a hit.
“Gunny, I think I’m looking at a chunk of californium, here,” Berg said. “At least, that’s what the computer’s telling me. In other words, it’s a radioactive chunk of material. I think that this other stuff is attenuating the nastier radiation but I’m picking up gamma rays as well as fermions now.”
“Berg, Commander Weaver. We’re also getting EM from the area. I’d like you to cut out a big area around that source and pull it away from the ship.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Berg said, trying not to swear. He backed out of the hole he’d made and looked around.
“Guys, we’ve got to cut out a big chunk of this material,” Berg said. “I’d like to blow it out with our rockets, but I think we need to be a little more surgical than that. We’ll cut it in an equilateral triangle, each cut being five meters long on a side. Once we’ve cut down past the source, we’ll try to join them up. If you hit anything strange, or the inner side of the hull, back out. Clear?”
“Clear, Sergeant,” Smith said.
“Aye, aye, Captain Crunch,” Himes replied.
It took nearly an hour of sweating and often swearing, but they finally managed to get the chunk cut out. By that time the rest of the teams had completed their survey and found nothing of equivalent interest.
“So what do we do with it now?” Himes asked as they pulled the chunk free of the surrounding material.
“I have no idea,” Berg admitted. “LT, what do we do with it now?”
“I guess we drag it back and strap it to the ship,” the platoon leader said.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Berg said, then checked his monitors. “Bravo Team, back off! Sir, radiation levels are increasing!”
“All teams, back away from the material,” the lieutenant said, putting his own suit into reverse.
As Berg backed away, he could see the glow expanding throughout the material. There was outgassing from it now, a lot, and it read as mostly carbon, which meant the radiation source had really increased in energy output. He’d gotten about fifty meters from the chunk of material when it just blew up.
The explosion had no effect on him — explosions propagate poorly in space — but it was spectacular. The chunk of lunglike material ballooned outwards and popped with a huge rush of gasses and a flair of intensely actinic light.