“Uh, Captain…” Sheila started to say.
“Bring it in.”
She glanced over at Ian, and he nodded. He was deck boss, he’d take the grief.
“Captain, Nations protocol calls for an anomaly to be quarantined,” Ian said. That meant tagged and bagged and left on deck for some Nations investigator to handle. Good idea, Ian thought.
“Bring it in,” Cap said.
“I’m gonna have to log a protest,” Ian said. That was the union rule, too. If your captain made a bad decision, you covered your ass by making a protest.
“So logged. And Deck Boss?” Captain banged the thick port. “Bring it in.”
That would be the second dumb thing they did: bringing in the squid. The first dumb thing had been catching it in the first place, or not dumping it once they realized what they had. But, you know, it looked all shiny, they’d say later. That was the thing about crabbing: you saw so much dull gray junk that the shiny stuff made you want to reach down and pick it up, like bright blue sea-glass on a white beach.
Idiots. They brought it in.
Cap had the sense to keep the squid sealed in the big garage lock, strapped at six points, those weird tentacles flopping loose in zero gee. The crew floated in through the little airlock in the tunnel running along the spine of the ship. They looked out at the squid through a nice thick viewport, still in their suits, Sheila standing by at the panic button, ready to slam shut the port shutters should anything get hinky.
We’re way beyond hinky already, Ian thought. Light-years.
Sheila ran a scanner on a little boom arm over the squid, the scanner’s big camera recording away down to macro, mapping every pit, scratch, dit, and dot. It ran into the hot spectrums, too, temperature and radiation, all that stuff.
“We’ll blow it if it’s at all hot,” Cap swore, the first sensible thing he’d said since “bring it in.” Only sensible thing so far.
Thing was, the squid whistled clean, no radiation and cool as space, just like pretty much any hunk of moop short of an old satellite nuclear reactor. Well, nothing above background. As Sheila ran the scanner over the squid proximal and distal, dorsal and ventral, her hands moving the robocam along like she was petting the thing, a display showed the topography of the damn squid. Little tiny laser beams bounced back and forth, mapping its texture down to nanos.
“Nothing,” Sheila said.
They glanced up at the display. Anything out in space more than a month would have micropits from all that dust slamming into it—steel, metal, plastic, you name it. Flying through space was like glass shooting through a sandblaster, and with the big orbital bang, there was a heck of a lot of sand to blast.
“What do you mean, nothing?” Cap asked.
“I mean, nothing. Whatever the hell that thing is made of, it’s polished smooth down to the molecular level,” she said.
“Huh,” Cap grunted.
They all looked at each other. When Cap grunted, it usually meant he was about to do something stupid.
“Blast it,” he said.
“What?” Sheila asked.
“Shoot it. The plasma cannon?” He waved his hand up at the smooth-bore plasma cannon all crabbers carried. They had one fore and aft, on gimbals, and one in the hold. Idea was if a big chunk of moop was going to get personal with the Anna Marie, you’d blast your way through it. Same idea if something came into the hold too fast: blast it back out.
Sheila didn’t even have to look at Ian for him to say it. “Captain, with all due respect…” he said.
“Oh, hell, you pansies. So logged. I’ll do it myself,” Cap said.
He stepped over to the cannon rig, strapped himself in, and gripped the two pistol handles. The cannon swiveled around out there in the hold, business-end turning down, and Cap pulled the triggers.
Was that the second or third dumb thing Cap did? Ian thought. He was losing track.
The plasma cannon really didn’t shoot plasma. It used plasma to shoot moop, random bits of shredded crap like shotgun pellets, an old-fashioned kinetic gun. Kaboom. The bolt of pulverized metal and hot gas roared down in a nice little narrow cone toward the squid. Anything else it would have blown to bits, or at least dented severely.
Only, well, the blast bounced off the squid, a nice billiard shot, out and away at the same angle it had hit, which was a good thing, because the shot had come from fore and got reflected aft, right at the outside docking bay doors.
Sven lost his newbie stripes right then for what he did, and if they made it to Dutch, the crew definitely was going to buy him a night’s drinks. Damn kid slammed his hand fast on the panic button that blew the aft door open, irising away in little metal leaves like an old-fashioned camera shutter. He’d later say it was just damn luck he hit the green button and not the red.
And Sheila, even though her hand hovered over the port shutters, never even touched the button. She was going to buy the first round, Ian thought. Second and third, too.
The blast still nicked the inside edge of the door as it opened up out of the way, but the door panels had a little give and could be pressured up enough to compensate. If the door had blown, they would have been hosed. No docking garage, no big airlock. No airlock, no way to haul in moop. No moop hauled in, what was the point? They’d have to limp back to Dutch, get repairs, and then go back out and reset their pots.
“As I was saying, Cap,” Ian said.
Cap gave him a hard look, but shut up. Guy knew when not to push it—you could give him credit for that.
Still, it was data, Ian thought. Now they knew why nothing pitted it, why however long it had been in space nothing had dented, scratched, or marred its pristine surface.
“Fucker has a damn force field,” Todd said.
“Ya know,” Cap said. “I think it would be a good idea to quarantine the squid.”
But it was too late for that.
Later, at the tribunal, after they’d all been hauled up one by one to make their depositions, and then one by one again to go through any discrepancies between testimony, they all agreed on only one thing: The squid came alive. What happened after that none of them could agree. It might have helped if the radiation blast hadn’t blown the camera, too.
Sheila said she saw the squid roll over, open wide those fifteen tentacles, cut them loose and leave them behind like a lizard’s tail, and then jet away through the open hatch.
Todd said he saw the squid just squirt out, vanishing in a puff of plasma or something, “like a big stinky fart,” he said.
Sven said he didn’t see anything, that one moment the squid was there, the next it was gone, and who the fuck knew where it went?
Ian knew what he saw, though, because he was watching Cap. The squid opened wide its tentacles, sure. It dropped its tentacles and jetted away, Sheila had that right. Only when it opened up those long arms, its mouth, if that’s what you could call it, a row of fifteen teeth overlapping, that mouth opened up and out came a little silver sphere.
And Cap squeezed the trigger on the plasma cannon again. He’d deny it, said Ian had it all wrong, nothing like that had happened. It was what Sheila said and Todd said, the thing just disappeared.
No way, Ian thought. Cap fired, and the plasma cannon fired straight at the smooth silver orb. Maybe it had been a lucky shot. Maybe Cap knew exactly what he was doing, because when the plasma beam bounced off the orb, it bounced straight back toward the plasma cannon, all the energy coming at it meeting energy going back out, like two fire hoses blasting away at a soccer ball in between.
The orb fell back into the squid just as the squid slowly eased out of the docking bay, which was a good thing, a real good thing, because it blew up.
Not just blew up, though, like a big nuke or something going boom. It like vanished blew up, that’s what it did. One moment it was there and another moment it wasn’t.