Nikitin had enough sense to take Jack out for a beer and listen while the young corpsman came to grips with what he was feeling. He didn’t say a word all night, not until Jack was done, and then all he said was, “It’s good that you’re disgusted, Jackie-boy. You better be, because it’s a damn disgusting world out there. That’s why we’re here, ain’t it? Because we’re disgusted. Because we care enough to try and make things right. Need another beer?”
That was enough to help Jack pull through. He had a pounding headache the next morning, but when that passed, he was alright. Really alright. He got up, he did his job, and a handful of years later, he became head of his brigade.
That was eight years past, but Jack still thought about it sometimes. As he stepped down into the darkened shelter that had been converted into a ramshackle morgue, the smell brought the memory back again like a freight train. For a moment, Jack thought he was going to lose his lunch, but he metered his breathing and concentrated until the nausea passed.
It took him a little while to adjust to the light. The center of the room was sharply lit by a single overhead lamp, and everything beyond that faded to blackness. Something sat on a raised platform, attended by someone in a white coat. A moment later, Jack recognized Lisa Albright, who looked temporarily like a doctor again. She was busy dissecting and documenting the aliens, while Charlie stood off to the side, manning a camcorder.
Albright had protested that she wasn’t trained for this kind of work, but she was the best they had, and the bodies were already starting to decompose. Without refrigeration, they wouldn’t get half-way to the Russian Ark without falling apart.
Jack could make out more detail in the room. The thing on the table was one of the half-tonne rhinos, all of its limbs stretched out and its chest cavity split open. The thick, elephantine skin was pinned to the sides, revealing amorphous discolored organs. Several parts had already been removed and were sitting in shallow metal dishes.
He approached the platform and looked down at the lifeless creature with disdain. “You’re having fun, I see. What am I looking at here?”
“I haven’t identified everything yet, but most of it’s more like us than not. Heart, liver, stomach, lungs.” She pointed them out as she went, some still inside the corpse and others arrayed around the table. A la carte. “It’s all there in one form or another.”
“Learn anything useful?”
“Not yet, but a couple interesting things for sure. For one, they don’t wear the armor. It’s attached to them. Grows right out of the skin.”
“Weird. And the bugs on their backs?”
“Some kind of symbiotic relationship. The rhino has a secondary dorsal breathing tube, like a whale’s blowhole, and the insect is attached there. It has a snorkel organ that extends right down into the hole, and branches into the rhino’s lungs. If I had to guess, I’d say they have complimentary respiratory chemistries. The armor grew around the insect’s hooks, so it’s probably been attached for a while.”
She walked around the platform and pointed at the creature’s crotch. “There’s something else. The sex organs are horribly atrophied, probably vestigial. His gonads are about the size of rice grains. I can’t imagine it being able to breed at all, which seems to imply some sort of caste system.”
“Interesting. Have you dissected the bug yet?”
“Not yet, but I don’t expect I’ll learn much when I do. You could fill a library with everything I don’t know about insect physiology. I’ve already finished the jackrabbit and the pilot, though.”
“And?”
“Weird and weirder. The jackrabbits are all over the place. Their eyes are highly developed, with tapetum lucidum and full nictitating membrane. Their eyes also have multiple lenses, lined up in a series. I think. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Come again? I don’t speak Latin.”
“Good night vision, can probably see farther than us. Maybe telescopically.”
“Gotcha. Are the rabbits fixed, too?”
“Nope. The specimen we brought back is female, with fully formed ovaries and what appears to be a marsupial pouch.”
Jack chuckled. “Maybe we should start calling ‘em kangaroos, then?”
“Nah. The huge eyes and floppy ears are more iconic.”
“True.”
“As for the pilot… well, there’s just nothing like it on Earth. Or wasn’t, anyway. It’s kind of like someone yanked out some animal’s nervous system and made it its own creature. It’s mostly high density nerve bundles connected to a big fat brain, with a lidless, bioluminescent eye. Judging by the brain to body mass ratio, I wouldn’t want to play chess against him.”
“I hate chess.”
“Me too,” Charlie chimed in.
Albright chewed on her lower lip. “The thing that’s bothering me the most is that none of these things appear to be even remotely related. It’s like us teaming up with pigeons and crabs. I just don’t get it.”
Jack was still staring at the half-dismantled corpse. “I’m all for academic advancement and shit, and I’m sure this is all really interesting, but all I want to know is how to kill them. Tell me you found a weak-spot.”
Albright shook her head. “Sorry, Jack. No silver bullets. They live just like us, though. They eat, they breathe.”
“They bleed,” Charlie added.
“Then we’ll just keep killing ‘em any way we can.”
Chapter 31:
Dreaming in Color
Sal traveled back and forth between Mars and Legacy constantly during the construction of the second factory, and by the time the new complex finally sparked to life, she’d completely moved aboard Legacy. With every trip, she brought more tools, scraps and pieces of junk, until her workshop on the great alien vessel was a perfect recreation of the one she abandoned on the Arcadian Plain. The furniture, lighting and even gravity were all the same. She even rigged up a device to imitate the sound of small stones hitting the colony shielding; the noise had irritated her to tears on Mars, but much to her surprise, its absence bothered her even more.
The difference was that with a single thought, her new workshop’s walls could turn clear as glass, revealing the bustling factory beyond. It was hers now, and was churning out equipment at a startling rate. It had become her pride and joy.
The factory certainly wasn’t the only source of activity on Legacy. The rest of it was in a constant state of change as the ship and its crew adapted to one another. Legacy grew terminals that mimicked human computers, which went a long way toward improving communications with her new inhabitants. The terminals weren’t perfect, and the ship’s grasp of language especially could be puzzling, but they were a start.
Engineering posed its own challenges. The original Eireki occupants had been in continual psychic contact with one another, which made their thoughts more orderly and fine tuned. They weren’t just people; they were something more, capable of doing complex mathematics and spatial transformations in their collective consciousness. To run the factory, they simply dreamed up new devices to the last exacting detail and the machinery turned the dreams into reality.
Sal was supposedly “more like the Eireki” than the others—whatever that meant—but she just didn’t have the mental brawn necessary to drive construction that way. On a few occasions, the machines managed to produce small baubles she pictured in her mind’s eye, but she was scribbling on the wall with crayons when they needed the Sistine Chapel.
This left her in a lurch. The factory could dissect and reproduce her machined parts, but couldn’t fabricate things like microchips. It could produce a variety of standard Eireki components, but most of it left Sal utterly baffled. She needed to integrate the two somehow, but it just wasn’t coming to her.