Archaea 3: Red (32 page)

“
Yow… I’ll just cool my jets.” Yak replied, somberly. He slowly moved his hands down to his side.

“
Thank you for your patience; this is a very complex interface. I have normal torso ranges mapped; now I need to map resistive motions. Please lightly press your palms together, and then slowly build pressure until you are pressing as hard as you can.”

I couldn’t help but take another step backwards. Surrounded as I was by machinery, I was running out of safe places to stand.

Yak and Shorty slowly rotated their arms outward, and pressed their palms together. Nothing else seemed to happen.

“Great, thanks. Now, please place your arms directly out to the side, and hold that pose. I will lock the joints, and want you to try as hard as you can to return your arms down to your side.”

“I can’t move my arms at all Janis!” Shorty gasped, after a short while.

“That’s correct. I have unlocked your arms. Please hold your arms out, like you are holding a tray. I will lock your arms again, and I want you to try to lift the tray as best as you can.”

“Sorry Janis”, Yak grunted after a short while. “I can’t move my arms at all.”

“That’s just fine, Yak”, she replied. “I have completed calibration, and am again unlocking your torso. You may now try punching, or moving your arms more vigorously.”

Yak turned partly over to watch Shorty as she pulled her fists in close. She floated her hands there for a few moments, feeling the weight, and then delivered a wicked one-two combination punch. Her fists flashed through the motions almost faster than I could see, and it sounded like an air hammer had just blasted a hole through the machine shop. I took a few more steps back and almost climbed on the workbench.

Watching them, I decided that it might be a good time to move to a safer distance, and stepped aft to Engineering. Hopefully a few bulkheads and pressure compartments were enough.

*****

“Janis, I’m not sure I understand the correlation of these reports
. Can you clue me in here?” I was flipping through a stack of reports and wire articles she had mined while I was trying to destroy my liver, but I wasn’t seeing a pattern.

“
Steven, the correlation is subtle, nevertheless, when they clearly show a deeper pattern with analysis.” Janis replied smoothly, clearly pleased with herself.

I flipped through again.
It looked like glom news, market analysis… the occasional tabloid exposé on a colony collapse. None of it seemed to relate, except for a commonality that these snips all seemed to be glom-related. What isn’t, these days? It might be harder to find a collection of articles that weren’t related to gloms.

“
Steven, it may be helpful to view a plot of these articles, when overlaid as to their origin on a chart.” She loaded a new layer to my screen that I swiped open.

My knowledge of astrogation wasn’t up to the task of finding this relationship, but she had a good point – t
hese articles may have been chronological, but they also showed a clear direction in movement from system to system, throughout almost an entire arm.

I flipped back through the reports… but I wasn’t getting it. There was something there, but it was
just out of reach, dancing like a mote on the periphery of my sight.

Something caught at my attention, and I swiped back a few screens. Colony collapse… I had seen that before… I pu
lled up another tab and started running another query.

“What are you working on, Pauli?” Captain Smith asked as he floated forward into the bridge.

“I’m not sure yet, sir”, I replied. “Janis has a bit of a puzzle for me. She sees a pattern, but is letting me find it for myself.”

“Good girl! She recognizes the importance of working hard, serves you right. What are you looking at?”

I shrugged, and swiped my screens to the forward holo, and set them to cycle. One after the other, snippet after snippet, we read through the articles she had collected and highlighted.

“Well, isn’t that interesting”, he said, after a few moments. We weren’t even half-way through the stack, and because we were looking at a report on deuterium trading market records for the Eastern Arm Consortium… I had to assume he was talking about something else. This sure wasn’t in the slightest bit interesting.

“What is interesting, sir?”

“The pattern, Pauli… don’t you see it?”

“No… I am not seeing it, sir. I’m not convinced you are either… sir.”

“You’re not?” he sounded shocked.

“Sir…” I chose my words carefully, “I think it’s possible that because I told you there was a pattern here, you’re simply agreeing with me.”

“Son, very little I do could be regarded as simple. In this case, I’ll lob that ball back into your court. I think you are trying to play to my poor, hurt ego, to trick me into telling you what you haven’t figured out yet.” He took a sip of coffee and looked at me over the rim.

I laughed, “Fair enough, sir. You got me… so what is the pattern?”

He smiled, and waved a finger at me. “Nice try, Pauli. Nope… you are on your own here – but I’ll give you a hint.
This is definitely part of an even bigger pattern that none of us really understand, and so far, only two of us recognize.”

And with that, he kicked aft, following h
is coffee cup as it guided him back towards a more comfortable place; far away from any work that needed to be done.

*****

“I am going to release your legs now, please try not to jump around too much”, Janis warned. I looked down at Jane and smiled.

“That’s okay Janis”, I laughed. “I don’t think there’s enough headroom for me to jump.”

“Well, I could jump…” bragged Jane.

“Yes, but you really shouldn’t, until you get more comfortable with the movement characteristics of the suit, Jane”, Janis replied. “I am afraid these bulkheads would not provide adequate containment, should you leap energetically.”

I gingerly raised a foot, and almost as carefully set it down. Now she had me terrified to move.

“Okay Janis, no leaping”, Jane replied, taking a smooth step forward into the open section of the machine shop. Even at .75g, she seemed to float as she moved.

“What do you think, Jane?” I asked as she slowly stepped around in a circle.

“It feels like walking, Yak… but there’s a slight bit of resistance when I lean…”

“Jane, that is intentional, the suit is currently rate-limited to prevent sudden movement.”

“That makes sense… if you can literally jump through walls; I don’t think we want to be falling over in these things. We might punch a hole through
this compartment trying to catch ourselves”, she added.

She had a good point. My suit was a lot bigger than hers, and while I had a lifetime of experience being a bigger person, this was a lot different. The floor looked far away, as I raised a leg and stepped forward,
in a smooth parade step.

“Nice Yak
! You look like a cat!”

I made a few slow steps in a circle, to look at her. It was amazing how fast I was adapting to this. I wore combat suits in the service, and it took weeks of training and sweating (and cursing, naturally) to get used to even basic movement. This was far more intuitive. Once I get used to
my new height, that is.

Jane raised a leg, wiggled it around a little, and crossed the machine shop in two casual steps. She looked like she had been doing this her whole life.

“What do you think, Jane?” I asked, waiting for her next move.

“I’m really tall”
, she said after a few more tentative steps around the shop. “There’s really not enough room in here, Janis. Can we take these up to the cargo bay?”

I shifted my weight from leg to leg, marveling at the smooth responsiveness. She was right, this felt almost completely normal.

“Yes Jane, though it will require your full and careful attention to do so, I do need to move these out of the shop to make room for additional projects.”

Jane didn’t waste a moment. With a look up to me as if to say ‘me first’, she stepped around a framework and over to the ladder compartment. I moved in behind her, and waited for her to navigate the ladderway opening.

“Is it a tight fit, Jane?” I asked, watching her feet disappear up the ladder.

She laughed. “I can’t wait to see you try to get up this, Yak.”

For some reason my cheeks grew hot. Definitely conduct unbecoming a Marine. I had to duck pretty low to get through the opening, but the suit contorted perfectly to crouch my way in.

My back was almost near the wall behind me, and I didn’t think my knees would really work to pull me up the ladder, but I quickly found out that I didn’t need to. I could pull myself hand-over-hand up the ladder without even thinking about it. Even with the ring spun up as it was, with the weight of the suit, it was easier than
falling on my face.

“Impressive, Yak…” Jane said softly as I pulled myself up and out into the null-g of the gun deck. “Mind the focal rings, now” she admonished, as she pulled her way aft along the handrail.

“What the hell?” Captain Smith exclaimed from behind us as we pulled ourselves along. I meant to turn, and suddenly realized I could see him, without needing to.

I just about threw up in my helmet.

*****

My heart started to slow down a little bit in my chest.
I wasn’t expecting to see three-meter creatures on my gun deck, even as coffee-deprived as I was.

I
t was definitely a shock to my system.

“Hi Captain”, the smaller one said, in a strange tone that sounded a little bit like Shorty.

“Hi there… Shorty…?” I replied, not taking my eyes off of them. They had both stopped, and were rotating around towards me. As I got closer, the uneasy feeling certainly didn’t seem to want to go away. They looked terrifying.

“Of course
... the big one is Yak, naturally” she replied with a deep metallic laugh.

“Ooh-rah sir”, Yak said, saluting with a hand that moved so quickly it blurred.

It took me a little bit longer to collect my wits than normal, so I bridged the gap with a solid sip from the depths of my cup.

“Has Gene seen these yet?” I asked after a moment of reflection. The workmanship of these power suits was fantastic. They looked even more organic than the
crab; though it was obvious they had a lot of the same sort of design characteristics.

“Yep, Gene was there when we were calibrating. He
didn’t feel very safe down in the machine shop with us learning how to move, so I think he went back to engineering.”

“I went to go take a nap, if you must know”, he yelled, his voice floating up from the ring ladderway between us.

“You can nap later Gene”, I called back. “Don’t you want to see this?”

The sound of grumbles and curses, and something about boots floated up along with some crashes, bangs, and the unmistakable sound of someone being old and cranky.

“Hah. Hah.” Yak modulated, as he moved aft towards the inner lock. Shorty shrugged, an impossibly human characteristic to see in such an incredibly inhuman figure, and kicked aft behind him.

I wasn’t going to miss this
, even while the future of the entire galaxy rested on the last few remaining swallows left in my cup. I followed behind at a respectful distance as they entered the lock.

“Coming?” Shorty asked. I took a look into the small remaining space left in the lock and the thought of being enclosed in a small room with those things was about enough to make me take another sip. “No thanks, I’ll wait until you cycle through. Y
ou both look a little wobbly.”

She laughed a metallic chuckle. “That’s probably for the best. We definitely don’t know our own strength yet.”

Gene joined me while I was waiting for the ambers on the lock, and looked as cranky and irascible as he sounded.

“What’s the matter Gene? Didn’t you get enough sleep last year?”

He looked over at me, and sniffed. “Dak, I am not sure I remember the last time I actually fell asleep.”

I laughed a deep, evil laugh. “Oh, I do… If I remember correctly, it was while you were on watch, mister.”

He flashed a look of remorse at me, and I smiled to make sure he understood I was just making fun of him. I wiggled an ultimate eyebrow of assertion however, to remind him that I was locked in – that I was going to make fun of him, forever and ever, amen.

He sighed, and scowled. “That is never going to get old, is it?”

I laughed, and shook my head slowly. “No Gene, I don’t think so.”

He was spared from any
further evisceration, as the ambers had just clicked green. We waited while the lock cycled, and stepped in.

*****

“Jane, hide!” Yak said on the suit comms as the inner lock above us flashed amber.