Metal Boxes - Trapped Outside (32 page)

Li slid between the front line and the hatch. He pushed against the hatch using his suit’s enhanced muscles. Nothing moved.

Stone said, “Wait a second.” He could see the shimmering outline of a hidden panel. It had the same glow around the edges that a marine suit had in gilley mode. Stepping up to the wall, he let his fingers flicker over the edges. Feeling a button, he pushed it, and the panel popped open. With typical Hyrocanian technology, there was one simple button and two lights. The red light was lit. He pushed the button and the red light went out, the white light coming on.

The hatch slid open silently.

With a roar and a rush, the humans ran full tilt into the ship’s engineering bay. Allie was limping slowly, leaning to the side to help ease her back pain. Stone walked with her. Tuttle and Dollish with Ryte following behind them took flanking positions. In a sudden flood, they were surrounded by a minor horde of piglets. A pair stopped next to Stone and looked up at him. They all looked alike to him, but somehow this looked like the same pair that had been with him and Allie in the shuttle’s command center. Both wore bulging shoulder bags. He wondered how they got here and why they were following him.

Stone stepped away from them, found a second panel, and closed the hatch, locking it. A piglet reached into its shoulder pack, pulling out a short piece of duct tape. It reached up and taped the button down, locking the hatch closed.

With the weapons borrowed from the guards, the battle for engineering was little more than target practice for trained marines. In short order, there were only a few Hyrocanians alive and those were wrapped up and bundled tight with duct tape. Stone nodded, this was a good time to start taking prisoners. He didn’t want prisoners. Even those aliens bundled up tried to bite and snap at any human who might get too close. However, he was in charge and didn’t want to order the mass murder of intelligent creatures though they were mass murders themselves.

He wanted to kill them all, right down to the last egg or larvae. Genocide was far too prevalent in human history and if the Emperor ordered it, he would participate. Such a harsh tactic was a mistake in the past, nevertheless these creatures looked at everything living as nothing more than food. How was negotiation possible with a species that looked at you as if you were nothing more than lunch?

Stone shouted, “White light means it’s off. Shut everything off.” Anyone not in armor went around pushing buttons. He wanted to smash something with his giant wrench, but there wasn’t anything he could do much damage to, so he looked for hidden panels, turning off anything he could find. A remarkably familiar vibration tickled his feet; the engines were running, although there wasn’t anyone at the controls.

He hadn’t realized Dollish was pacing behind him, until the spacer tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to Ryte. She was waving at him. The huge engineering space was filled with dozens of banks, rows, and jumbled piles of equipment, most of which meant nothing to him. He turned a corner and saw what had excited Agent Ryte.

A series of the encased, spinning liquid metal discs stood alone in an open space on the deck. They looked exactly like the human designed discs generating engine power, shields, and artificial gravity, except in human spacecraft the connecting cables were firmly wrapped and encased in hard protective conduits. This series of discs had odd bits of wires, lines, and leads running in all directions. Stone traced one such wire and found it wasn’t connected to anything.

Buttons were all over the place, some colored and some white. Shutting down everything would kill the engines, but it might also shut off power to the environmental and artificial gravity systems. Tracing each bit of wire to find what bunch went to what system could take days.

He thought about cursing, but didn’t think it would help. Private January reached over his shoulder and pressed a button. The engine vibrations ceased.

She shrugged. “They’re the same controls as a T1 Battle Tank. I used to drive one of those on my first deployment. I suggest we leave the others on, unless you want me to rig up a self-destruct?”

Stone could hear the wishful thinking in her voice. It did make sense to just blow the Hyrocanian ship to pieces while they escaped in the shuttle, but this particular ship might be a goldmine of intelligence about the enemy species. He shook his head. “Let’s just destroy the engine console, so if they do manage to retake the ship, they won’t be able to use the engines again without a major overhaul.”

January tapped a component. “This interface is all it’ll take. Unless they have spares, this ship isn’t going—”

Stone interrupted her by whacking the component with his wrench. The noise rang loudly across the bay and the wrench vibrated out of his hands. The interface was undamaged. He shrugged and gestured for January to take over.

Stone’s dataport beeped. Tapping open the comms, he called up a display. “Major Numos. We have taken engineering and shut down the engines.”

The major had a bandage wrapped around his head, but he smiled. “So I have been told, Governor. I have ordered Lieutenant Vedrian to lock the bay down in case the Hyrocanians mount a counter-attack, although we did manage to eliminate quite a few of their command staff. Or Whizzer thinks they were command since they were the fattest creatures I have ever seen, big enough they could hardly waddle.”

Stone nodded at the major’s face in the hovering display. “You have Whizzer with you?”

“I’m swamped with civilian scientists wanting to dig into any little piece of hardware we’ve found.”

“I suggest we invite—ask—no, dammit, tell Mister Arnold and Mister Lee their responsibility is to find a way to communicate with our Hyrocanian captives. Whizzer still has the translator Triplett started with. Oh, warn them not to get too close or they may end up as a Hyrocanian snack.”

“We have managed to isolate a display that shows the jump port to Brickman’s Station. It is thickly mined.”

Stone thought for a minute, “Can we send a Hyrocanian torpedo through the jump port? If we take out the warhead, we can add a message describing the situation to anyone on the other side. One of their own torpedoes should get through based on its IFF signals.”

Numos replied, “I don’t know, I’ll get Whizzer and his team on it. We’ll have to see what we can do, but we’re going to have to be quick. We only have a toe-hold here and we are all out of beans, bullets, and bandages, but this ship is ours to give back or keep. I suggest we keep it.”

FORTY-ONE

Stone sat on the edge of a long ramp that led nowhere, his feet dangling in the air. Hanging above him was the flat part of a Hyrocanian shuttle. It felt as close to having a ceiling over his head as anywhere he could be and still be outside. He was more surprised than anyone when he realized being outside didn’t bother him like it used to. He still liked a roof, deck, or ceiling over his head, but he could function without one, if he needed to.

Moving into the Hyrocanian compound was a no-brainer. Without any materials to rebuild their own walls, trying to survive in the jungle wasn’t a valid option, yet. The marines, when not on duty guarding Hyrocanian prisoners on the ship in orbit, managed to help the navy expand some of the walls, pushing the jungle back.

His dataport buzzed with an incoming call. As short as his break had been, his free time was over. With a sigh, he tapped the comms open. “Hello, Major Numos. How goes things up there?” Numos and Butcher had taken up residence on the Hyrocanian ship.

Numos laughed, “Hammermill is still trying to keep our Hyrocanian prisoners under control. Of course, that is the easy part. Trying to keep them from eating Whizzer and his gang of scientists is the real challenge.”

“They still insisting on digging through every nook and cranny on the ship?”

Numos nodded, “More and more every day. The more they find, the more excited they become. I actually think Dr. Wyznewski is looking for you to overrule some decision that Lieutenant Commander Butcher told him he couldn’t do. Butcher can’t decide whether we should space the Hyrocanians or the scientists first. I think Master Chief Thomas is in favor of dumping the lot of them on some back corner of another continent and leaving them to fend for themselves.”

Stone nodded, “That might not be a bad idea—oh, I mean the Hyrocanians, not the scientists. Dollish says the Hyrocanians are going through their, um, foodstuffs faster than we hoped. I certainly don’t want to start supplying more live animals from Allie’s World to feed them. We’re having enough difficulty hunting food for ourselves without having to provide for prisoners of war. I was hoping someone would come along before now and take them off our hands.”

Numos nodded, “It’s only been six months or so, Governor. We need to give them time to respond to our message.”

Stone said, “Assuming it got through.”

“We can only assume that it did. We only managed to find one shuttlecraft we could retrofit with jump engines to send to Brickman’s Station.”

Stone didn’t want to think what would happen to the two marines if they failed to get into, through, and back out of hyperspace. They’d volunteered to pilot their tiny craft through the Allie’s World jump point, through hyperspace, and back out again into human space. He wanted to believe al-Julier and January would manage to survive.

Numos said, “Butcher wanted me to tell you that no one has made any progress on moving the ship anywhere out of its stable orbit.”

Stone shook his head. “Why is it that Whizzer and his team can tell me the square root of pi to the umpteenth point, but they can’t figure out which button to push?”

“They want to find out what works by pushing buttons at random and Master Chief Thomas won’t let them. By the way, we’ve managed to paint a huge Empire symbol across the front of Rusty Hinges in hopes that when, or if, the navy ever shows up in the system, we won’t be blasted to space dust before we get the chance to communicate.”

Stone tried to keep from smiling. “I thought we were holding off naming the ship for now?”

Numos snorted, “You’ve already named a whole planet after your girlfriend. You still want to rename a captured enemy ship after Vedrian? Besides, this is literally a rust bucket. We’re lucky the environmental systems work. Half of every hatch we come to has its hinges rusted shut. Whizzer has a team working to open every space just to see what’s inside. Oh, don’t worry, I have someone keeping an eye on them, just to make sure they don’t cut the wrong thing.”

Stone asked, “So what can I do for you, Major?”

“I’m just reporting in, per your request. We still haven’t figured out how to disable the mine field around the Brickman’s Station nav-jump point.”

“Any word on finding the jump point the Hyrocanians used to get into this system?”

“Butcher says he has a rough idea where that nav-point should be. His best guess is that it’s out behind that big gas giant at the edge of the system. That would explain how the Hyrocanians could jump into the system and not be seen by the Vasco de Gama, but he says he has to figure out how to move the ship out there to do a closer study—unless you want to let him take the shuttle on a little jaunt around the solar system.”

Stone shook his head, “I think we need this shuttle overhead for now. It is our only link between the ship and the ground base.” Without the shuttle, one or the other would have to be abandoned.

“I concur, Governor, but don’t be surprised when Butcher brings it up again. It’s been a while since his ribs healed up and sitting in an office on a stationary ship while everyone around him is making discoveries and working on fancy exciting projects is making him a bit antsy.”

A voice called out from above Stone. “There you are, Governor.”

He looked up and saw Whizzer standing on the shuttle surface. The man appeared to be hanging from his feet, causing Stone a moment of vertigo. The man jumped up—or down, depending on your point of view.

Stone held up a hand to forestall Dr. Wyznewski’s opening comments. He looked back at Major Numos’s face in the display. “Anything else, sir?”

Numos laughed, “There is always something else, Ensign Stone. You know that by now. I just flashed you a status report on our prisoners of war.”

Stone nodded, tapped the comms off, and looked back at the scientist.

Wyznewski plopped down next to him on the ramp and started in without preamble. “The ship was built for them, but not by them. It was cobbled together with a variety of tech, some we know, and some we can only guess at.”

“We assumed much of that. Are you sure?”

“Everything is designed for their physiology. There are controls obviously made for one creature to operate, but only if they have two arms in front and two in back. A normal human would be spinning like a dervish to keep up.”

Stone wondered what a dervish was and thought to ask, but then remembered past conversations with Dr. Wyznewski that set the man off on an hour-long lecture about some obscure piece of history or technology. He simply asked, “So if it was designed for them, how do we know it wasn’t built by them?”

“Because, young man, the control in question is part of their environmental system and it’s non-operational. I agree with my colleagues that if the aliens could fix it, they would. A different species built this cobbled up mess for them and then turned them loose on the galaxy. These idiots have lost the repair manual, if one ever existed. The system in question is the ship’s humidity controls. We believe the Hyrocanians normally prefer a much higher percentage of suspended liquid in their atmosphere. Tests prove their preferred range is between ninety-five and ninety-seven point five percent humidity.”

“Um, what is this?” Stone waved his hands at the air around them.”

“I’ll get my instruments and have an evaluation taken for you—”

“No,” Stone interrupted. “Just give me a guess.”

“Guess? Young man, I am a scientist, I don’t guess.”

Stone blew a raspberry at the man. “Whizzer, that is a crock of—”

Wyznewski interrupted him with a laugh. “Okay, you caught me.” He stuck his finger in his mouth, wet it, and held it up in the air. “My instruments say we are at about sixty percent here. That is high, but it’s because this jungle is a semi-tropical rainforest.”

Stone asked, “What does the lack of high humidity mean for our guests?”

Wyznewski shrugged. “They aren’t as comfortable as they could be. Their oil secretion glands must be working overtime to keep their skin from drying out. Why do you ask? Do you care?”

Stone shook his head. “What does the low humidity mean for us?”

“The ship’s current humidity is set at twenty-five percent, much more comfortable than the soup we have to breathe down here. The issue isn’t the low humidity, but the damage caused by their running high humidity for so long. Everything with even a hint of iron in it is rusting like a forty year old flitter parked on a salt sea beach.”

“That’s interesting, Whizzer, but is that why you came looking for me?”

Wyznewski’s voice took on an officious tone, “No, Governor. Lieutenant Colonel Butcher and Major Numos are denying us direct access to the prisoners of war.”

“Why do you need direct access?”

“We are still trying to collate their language with Dr. Triplett’s recorder … and, well—some of our team would like, how do I put this … enveloping physiological diagnostics.”

Stone repeated the phrase “enveloping physiological diagnostics” into his personal assistant. It repeated the phrase, then said, “Cutting open to see what’s inside.”

“No, Whizzer. I don’t have any reason to like these creatures, but we are not killing them and cutting them open. Can’t you cut up the dead ones?”

Wyznewski shook his head. “They do die, but before we can get to the bodies, their friends eat them. There were so many dead ones laying around when we took the ship no one thought to save any for autopsy. The cleanup crews spaced them all. We were pretty busy those first few days trying to maintain control and consolidate the prisoners. By the time we thought about doing autopsies, we couldn’t find the bodies. Space is big, you know.”

Spacer Dollish stepped up to the ramp. Instead of walking up the slope, he stood at Stone’s feet waiting to be recognized. Stone nodded to him before turning back to the scientist. “I’m not going to authorize killing an intelligent species just to see how they work. If we ever get out of here, I’m going to have to justify my decisions to the navy and to the Emperor. I don’t want to tell them we went Auschwitz on enemy prisoners.”

“Nice reference.”

“Yeah, I looked it up the last time you mentioned it. As I recall you were on my side of the argument back then against Arnold and Lee. I will not authorize experiments on intelligent creatures.”

“It’s the Hyrocanian level of intelligence that is in question.”

“Whizzer, no. Not on my planet and you should know better. That is the exact argument they used way back when.”

“I do understand and agree, I just promised a couple of my team that I would ask.”

“That would be Dr. Arnold and Dr. Lee? It wasn’t that long ago those two were willing to enter into negotiations with the Hyrocanians for our surrender, and now they’re ready to kill them and cut them up?”

Wyznewski laughed, “It’s all about the science, young man. Those two would kill your marines and cut them up if they thought they could learn something and get away with it.”

“Is that all?” He could see Allie stepping out of a bunker the medical corps had appropriated as a hospital. As usual, a dozen piglets surrounded her immediately. The small creatures formed up in precise military formation: point and rear guards, with flankers. She yelled and tried to shoo them away, just like every other day, but they refused to budge. She and her escort headed his way. He hoped Whizzer was done, then he could dispatch Dollish and maybe catch a few minutes alone with his girlfriend. It was a futile hope, as he could smell another question on Wyznewski’s agenda.

Wyznewski said, “Governor, we would like to use the shuttle for a few days to survey the nearby moons. There are some anomalies that we would like to—” He stopped talking when Stone shook his head vigorously.

“No, Doctor. I have already denied the navy the use of the shuttle to hunt down the Hyrocanian jump point. Locating it would be a security issue and take precedence over pure scientific study, but we have only one working shuttle and we need it here.”

Dollish said, “Excuse the interruption, Ensign. But, I was hoping to use the shuttle for food gathering. We have a lot of mouths to feed, not counting the prisoners. I mean just the humans. Your drascos feed themselves quite nicely and the piglets, well, they’re a great help in the gardens we’ve planted. They’re keeping the insects and small rodents down to almost nil. But, marines aren’t vegetarians. We need meat and after all of these months, nearby game is getting scarce.”

At the mention of his drascos, he looked over his shoulder. Jay and Peebee were lying in the grass, their bellies raised toward the sun, snoozing and giggling, telling stories to each other between naps. They were surrounded by and practically buried under a small herd of piglets. The drascos had tried talking to the piglets, as had every scientist and military linguist on the planet. The piglets apparently understood them, but didn’t speak. They hummed. Even now, Stone could hear and feel their multi-part harmony as they cuddled up to his drascos.

Jay shouted over the piglet’s humming. “
Mama, me and Peebee go hunting with Dollish. We can look for more us, while marines hunt.
” They had tried, and repeatedly failed, to speak to the native drascos, but they refused to quit trying. Whenever Ryte’s drone crew reported a drasco trio in the area. they would disappear over the wall, entering the jungle to find the trio.