Burnt Ice (30 page)

The deceleration began. Fritz had
crunched the numbers, and gave them reasonably good odds of survival. They just
had to hope that nothing bigger than a grain of sand was travelling at
relativistic speeds in the opposite direction to the giant ball of ice, rock
and ship. The decision was made to sacrifice an astronomical which popped out
over the rock cap covering the ice, showing its state. It was sobering to learn
that almost two-fifths of the enormous stone and ice shield had melted away.
The drone made it back to the ship in one piece. The tough little machine
managed to get back into the access tunnel under the rim with forty per cent of
itself still intact. The rest had been vaporised.

The only real problem occurred
when Fritz and Sirius had a falling out, something which was happening more and
more frequently. They had both studied martial arts under Veg, and their fights
were increasingly physical and violent, so the captain called it quits,
banishing them to the cryo units for a month, turn and turn about. That way the
rest of the crew could enjoy either of them, but not both in the same place at
the same time. Sirius grew more and more skilled at a great variety of things,
whereas Fritz focused his studies on the octopoids and the other recorded races
for their history, music and language. In spite of everyone, including Patrick,
trying to help him, Fritz remained an ubergeek. He could cook a mean pie though,
and became a master of everything pastry-wise, much to the delight of Harry,
who would call for beer and pie nights.

Jan took very serious interest in
their physical wellbeing. If anyone went one gram over their optimum weight she
would punish them with additional exercise regimes. Marko always found it funny
to watch her roundly telling off the captain and advising him that he was a
slackarse.

Even funnier to watch was when
she dragged Fritz down to the hangar and onto the practice mats, then threw a
bokken at him. Marko watched as Fritz would do a sad-puppy act with her, until
the constant poking with the fighting stick so agitated him he would get
seriously angry, lose his rag, and actually attack her with the intention of
beating her brains out. He always lost, but got a very good workout. Ernst said
that he was now so familiar with Fritz’s skeletal structure that he could have
a set of bone-knitting nanotes on hand, specifically for Fritz, whenever he was
awake.

Jan, under the tutelage of Harry
and Veg, would take months to build a rifle, learning everything there was to
know, then choose another design and build it as well, digging deeper and
deeper into the ship’s data banks, finding more and more obscure designs.

Harry even went so far as to build
additional racks and storage in the armscote for the creations. She was like a
kid, taking huge delight in tailoring a weapon for its user. They were superbly
balanced things of great beauty, with intricate carvings and inlays, but also
extremely accurate. The captain, on the other hand, spent more and more time
with Patrick, studying every aspect of astronomical history from the ship’s
library augmented with the data from the Octopoid Library.

Topaz and Marko, with serious
input from Stephine and Veg, finished the dragon. As he grew in the tank they
could all see he was a beautiful construct. Marko kept him just sub-sentient,
as he had always felt it unfair to allow full sentience without the client
present. They ran all the checks. He was fully functional with only a few small
concerns, all of which could be fine-tuned on delivery. They kept him for a few
weeks — the dragon behaving like a large, loveable dog — until Marko decided
that it was unfair to allow further imprinting to occur. He led him into the
cryo chamber, had him climb into one of the beds, then chilled him down.

Jan found him with his hand on
the outside of the cryo unit. She hugged him close, kissed him and then patted
him on the head.

‘You have a spider to make for
Harry, then a cat for Stephine. Then, darling man, I think you should build
something just for you. I’ve become very fond of you. No matter what happens,
you and I are who we are. We will always have a special place for each other,
and who knows, maybe one day we could settle down together. But that day, if it
ever occurs, is a very long way away. You need a creature who loves you for who
you are, who will look after you when I’m not there. By the way, have you
noticed that Sirius has moved into the boss’s cabin?’

‘No shit! Really? How is Fritz
going to take that, I wonder? Still, the last time they were together they were
yelling about how much they despised each other. And that they preferred not to
see each other ever again. Was a good shot, though, when Fritz hit her with
that pie. Pity he hadn’t trained as much as she had, though. He walked funny
for a couple of days after that. Ernst or you or even Stephine with her medical
knowledge could have quickly fixed his testicles, but none of you did. You all
got fed up with him acting like a spoilt brat, eh? We’ll just have to find him
an interesting project when we wake him up next.’

‘Have a chat with Harry,’ said
Jan. ‘He’ll have some ideas.’

‘Let’s not say a word to the
boss; he is old enough to sort out his own crap.’ Marko paused. ‘A critter for
me? Yeah, you’re right. About time I really did some serious work on that.’

For Marko, Harry’s spider was to
be a straightforward design and build. Knowing Harry, Marko decided he would
want the creature capable of lifting and holding things, and identifying and
fetching tools, so it could be of real use to him, not just a curiosity. So
Marko first created the abdomen to accept one of the mid-size micropiles he had
a design for, but even then he concluded that it was going to be a bigger
creature.

‘Hey, Harry. I’ve started work on
your spider. Going to be about six hundred mils in diameter, legs extended.
That a problem?’

‘Nope, you build it the way you
need to, mate. You know what I like.’

He based it on an amalgamation of
a spider crab, from the ocean depths on Earth; a tarantula, also from Earth
stock; and a cric cris from Zealandia. The design called for four heavy legs
with substantial feet/hands, four lighter, more refined legs terminating in
small twin-thumbed hands and a segmented abdomen of three parts.

One afternoon, deep into the job,
he was startled to realise that most of the crew were watching his progress on
their wrist screens, their crew-station monitors and, in Stephine and Veg’s
case, on the main wall screen in the galley.

‘Haven’t you lot got anything
better to do?’

‘Nope,’ Harry replied. ‘We just
want to see what you are going to come up with for a head. We have a few bets
on. The rest of it looks great, but I’m really intrigued about where you’re
going to end up.’

‘Yeah, that’s been a puzzle,
Harry. We go with the multi-eyes, right? But you specified you didn’t want
weapons on board. So if I go with the spider type, do we go for mandibles and
fangs, or do I pull up something almost feline in shape? Take a small reptile
skull, elongate the head with two large eyes to the front and two smaller to
the rear. Space a bunch of sensor plates around the eyes. Take the softer jaw
line, say, from a giant skink, so it can bite and hold something, but not put
holes in it. Actually, if I go for that style it would be sensible for it to
have a neck. More versatile. OK, Topaz. Let’s see what that looks like. Ugh,
ugly. Scrap that. How about another of Earth’s critters? An insect called a
praying mantis. Yeah, that’s more like it.’

It almost became design by
committee, although Marko mainly ignored the cross-chatter. He took the design
of the mantis head, shrank the eyes, edited away the feelers and the mandibles,
stretched the skull shape, elongated the nose portion, redesigned the upper and
lower jaws, created a suitable tongue and then opened out the cavity at the top
of the mouth. He pulled across a parrot’s internal mouth structure and voice
box, then had Topaz lay out the controlling nerves, tendons and musculature.
With his total-immersion design helmet and gloves on, Marko could delve deeply
down into individual parts of the creature’s design — down to individual cells
if necessary. Once they had all the main elements of the head in place they
worked on refining the overall design, making it naturally sleek and elegant
looking.

‘That’s really beautiful, Marko.
Go with it.’

‘OK, Harry. Topaz, lay out the
component lists please.’

Once those were sorted, Topaz and
Marko laid the primary power components into the assembly tank. He placed into
the transparent gel-like substance a whole series of standard components:
sensors and communication systems; two plug-ins; primary power cables; the main
power pack itself and the microfusion core; the main power source.

Veg and Marko had created all of
the surface components in the diamond nanote tanks, then irradiated each of
them, turning them a deep blue. Once finished, checked and ultrasonically
cleaned, Marko placed each of the extra parts in the tank.

‘OK, Topaz. Anything missed?’

‘No, Marko. Shall I initiate
construction?’

‘Yes please. Timings?’

‘One hundred seventy-three
standard hours to completion.’

‘OK, I’m off to make bread. See
you soon.’

He checked in over the next seven
days, between helping Veg assembling the new engines for their craft,
performing his normal duties and experimenting with the new grains and cereals
that Stephine had been growing. Digging deep in the ship’s library he’d found a
very old series of recipes that made a bread that contained an entire meal
inside it. He had enjoyed mixed results with the crew. Harry had cheerfully
stated that one particular effort would make good armour plate. Marko countered
that he could grow him a nice new set of diamond teeth to cope. The old German
heavy black breads were always appreciated, although Veg and the captain had
taken to having Marko bake extra, then smuggling the half-loaves back to their
quarters, much to Jan’s annoyance. Whenever she suspected that this had
occurred, she would spring additional studies of an obscure martial art on them
all.

Marko was greatly intrigued when
one day Veg arrived in the galley, while he was kneading, to deliver his latest
creation.

‘New brewing barrel, Veg?’

‘Nope, this is a wooden churn for
making the best substance in the known Universe to go with your bread: butter!
Steph has just created full-cream milk for your cereals and for her scones,
yoghurt and the like, so I had her grow me some planks of an ancient wood
called kahikatea, from Old Earth. Great wood. It doesn’t taint any foodstuffs
it comes into contact with. I’ll make you some nice big breadboards out of it.
That’s a thought. I’ll make up a butcher’s block while I’m at it. Stephine does
really great grows. The planks come out perfect, dead straight and flat, with
nice sharp edges. Takes the wastage out of the equation.’

‘Butter, Veg? We have plenty of
butter. The auto chefs make any amount of it! And that thing has got a handle
on it, with no motor. You expect one of us to do this by hand?’

‘Just wait till you taste it,
Marko. The taste and texture is like nothing you’ve ever experienced. Don’t
worry, there won’t be a shortage of volunteers to churn the butter, mate. Just
you watch.’

Two days later, when the first of
the full-cream milk was available, Veg dutifully made his first batch of
butter. After it was consumed, mainly by the captain, Veg and Marko on hot
bread, a mini riot occurred with everyone fighting over the remains, except for
Jan and Stephine. The next morning, Jan posted an additional fifteen minutes of
exercise for everyone. The captain said that didn’t include him because the
churning had been excellent exercise during breakfast.

At each visit to the assembly
tank, Marko could see changes in Harry’s spider ACE. Topaz, with her many
multi-sized manipulators, had first precisely spaced all the components in the
tank by energising the gel which held each piece. She further activated the gel
so that individual energy conduits were linked between the components, changing
the composition of the gel, thus further growing the main connective tissues
between every part of the creature, incorporating the nerves, tendons, power
cabling and semi-artificial musculature, which was individually encased in a
slippery, flexible, cartilage-like material.

Within four days, the main parts
of the spider were intact, tested and adjusted where necessary. Topaz then
spent most of the remaining time assembling the brain of the spider, tiny piece
by tiny piece, growing all the neural pathways and programming each as she
went, allowing additional space and material for new pathways to be grown by
the ACE itself, as required. Marko monitored from the suite of screens and
sometimes his helmet, making small changes as he saw the need. The eyes took
extra time as he had not installed so many in a creature before. They had to
delve down into the brain structure of a few of the multi-eyed insect types,
finding the required pathways and recognition protocols. When the brain
assemblage was complete, they installed it into the armoured compartment in the
hindmost segment, linked all the junctions together and sequentially sealed it
up.