Pestle (2)
Mar. 22nd, 2011 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolThe Second Part. Still don't know where I'm going with this.
We were going down to Pestle, but we were going to do it Swami's way. That meant not leaving anything to chance. Swami was determined that if McMillan's gang had made any mistakes in their attempt to penetrate the ancient tomb, we weren't going to repeat them.
_Petunia_ was fit out for microgravity operations, so me and Lopez were given the task of doing some preliminary surface scouting. Other people were given other tasks. It wasn't so much that Swami was giving the orders, and more that everybody recognized he was smarter than the rest of us combined. We pretty much did what we were told.
I broke formation from the convoy and began pulsing the thrusters to bring us closer to the surface of the enormous artifact. Lopez chirped out data from the distance scope while I put us a hundred yards off the dayside surface of the rotating object.
The cigar-shaped barrel of the moonlet rolled away from us. At this range we could tell it wasn't perfectly smooth; there was a milky-white fluff hanging off of it, strands of some kind of interstellar lint a good meter long. There was a thin smear of an atmosphere, too; really just a haze of carbon monoxide, the merest fraction of an Earth-surface pressure, blanketing the stony outer surface of Pestle.
One of the three spheres rolled by. There was no fluff in the huge groove that the spheres rolled in; apparently the constant traffic kept the grass mown. There wasn't any of the strands on the spheres, either. I guess a rolling stone gathers no moss, or some shit like that.
"Okay, Lopez," I said, "earn your Weasard-kibble. Got any energy readings off that thing?"
"First things first," said my engineer and first mate. "That 'chili' you've been eating the last few nights has been the Weasard-kibble soaked in beef broth and microwaved. Tasty, no? I've been eating your chicken pot pies."
"That's outstanding," I said, suddenly feeling queasy.
"Okay, next, I don't know what that hull's made out of, but it doesn't like to let energy in or out. I can't find a wavelength that will let me bounce anything off it, and it doesn't seem to be emitting much either. It's pretty much a black box." Lopez turned his monitor around so I could see the graphs. They didn't mean much to me.
"See any doors? Holes? Blast marks?" I popped a beer. "McMillan had to have some kind of entry point into the thing."
Lopez shook his head and screwed up his nose in disgust. "Nothing we can see from here," he said. "Maybe Hot Henry or The Gob are having better luck at the ends of the cylinder. That's where I'd put an entry lock if I was a Swanturni. Those ends are only rotating; everything else is translating too."
"That's not where I'd put it," I said, guzzling my beer. "Swanturni didn't want visitors. They wanted you to stay the hell away. If I'm one of these Swanturni paranoid jerk-offs, I'm making it as hard as possible to break into my man-cave."
"Maybe." Lopez frowned. "Hey, I'm getting a bit of a signal bouncing off the hull that just rotated around to our side. Something metallic – aluminum, copper, a few other elements. Jackpot, I'm afraid it's down in the groove."
I winced. "How often do the rolling spheres go by?" I asked.
Lopez did some figures, ticking things off on his short furry fingers. "One should roll over that spot every one hundred thirty seconds," he said. "Of course, they're really big spheres; a lot of that time the spot will be partially covered by a sphere either coming or going. I figure you only have about a minute of clear open access."
"Well, crap." I threw the bottle in a tight spiral into the recycler. "We're not going to have a great view of it from up here. We're going to need to go EVA. Let's drop a few paint bombs and suit up."
I jetted _Petunia_ out, then laid in a course that would sweep us in a vector over the cylinder's surface that pointed directly at the metal Lopez had spotted. I fired a string of missiles at the surface as we passed over it – missiles full of paint impregnated with conducting fibers instead of explosives. It was like throwing water balloons at the Washington Monument; all we did was paint an overlapping series of circles in a half-klick strip from the groove down toward one end of the cigar.
We got on our vacuum suits. Mine dated back to the Jovian War and most of its red and blue paint had flecked off; it also had a beautiful scorch mark on the back of my helmet. But it held atmosphere so I wasn't picky. Lopez had a Chinese-made suit, brand new, with the Weasard Adaptor kit to accommodate his tail and muzzle. Generations of gene-spliced EVA's had taught the space suit companies that people with tails REALLY didn't like to have their additional limbs stuffed down one leg or up their back; it destroyed their sense of balance. So, Lopez had a foil-clad tail waggling around off the back of his suit. He had a vid camera attached to his.
Lopez also had a field kit of microtools, a high intensity lamp, and a crowbar. I, too, brought the tools of my trade: a blaster rifle and a reciprocating sword. I can't fix a starship or cure cancer, but if you need a donut-sized hole burned through another sentient being, and then you want it cut in half with the flashy, drug-fueled grandson of an Earth-chainsaw, then I'm your specialist. We both had a short-hop jetpack good for about thirty seconds of delta-V, some plasline and pitons, a few flares, and four hours of oxygen and power. We put _Petunia_ in park, cycled the lock, and launched ourselves towards the object as soon as we saw our paint-circles come around below us.
Lopez and I were both good enough EVA'ers to hit the paint without wasting our precious jetpacks. We jumped 'down' headfirst but spun around with attitude control jets until our feet were facing the rapidly approaching surface of Pestle. As we touched down, the superconductors in our boots attracted the magnetic paint, and we had just enough sticking power to hold onto the artefact's surface.
Looking up, we saw _Petunia_ roll away from us across the dayside sky. We could see some light gleaming off a handful of other shapes in the sky as well – the craft of our friends, and the derelict Deuce of McMillan. The ground shuddered, and as I turned towards the groove I realized that the passage of the mighty grinding spheres would be felt wherever we went on Pestle. "C'mon," I grunted to Lopez, and we carefully tromped our way across the stony surface towards the groove.
Swami came over the comm. "Jackpot," he said, "what exactly are you doing?" I explained to him what we intended. "All right," he said, "but be exceedingly careful. The Gob is dead."
"Dead?!" Lopez and I looked at each other. "Shoot, Swami; we haven't been here but for a few hours. How did that idiot find a way to get himself killed so quickly?"
"We're still piecing that together," Swami answered. "I believe he found some kind of an aperture on the narrowest end of the cylinder. He either tried to open it, or it opened itself. There was a large energy emanation out the end of Pestle, and the Gob and _Gob-Smacked_ were in the line of fire. There's only a cloud of debris left over. I'm doing a spectral analysis."
"Crap," I said. The Gob owed me money.
"The important message is, the usual operant assumptions for Swanturni defense systems should still apply," said Swami, who could never use a small word when a big one was available.
"Watch for booby traps," I translated. "Got it."
"Of both Swanturni and McMillan provenance," added Swami.
"Yeah, yeah," I grumbled.
We followed the blackened pathway we had painted across the surface of Pestle. The force of the paint-missile explosions had cleared the floating lint away; we had only a smooth surface between us and massive spheres looming above the lip of the groove ahead of us. Lopez toggled his comm.
"Better boost your suit's heater, Jackpot," Lopez warned. "Nightside is coming up."
Capaestri Superior vanished over the horizon of the swiftly rotating artefact. Even though the spheres were locked in position with the sun, from our frame of reference they seemed to be rapidly rolling from left to right across the surface of the world. The light faded quickly and the temperature dropped forty degrees in seconds. "Huh," I said as our eyes adjusted. "Look at that."
The heat released from the surface of Pestle had an effect on the milky strands stuck to the outside of the stone. The wispy growths seemed to inflate as they grew more translucent, and they stood up straight to almost two meters' height off to the sides of the black-painted path we had made. The very tip of each strand had a miniscule red light on it. It was impossible to tell if the light was invisible on the dayside, or if it was only lit when the daylight was gone. The peculiar space-weeds seemed to drift in unison in an unperceivable wind, bowing first this way and then that, curving and wheeling like a flock of birds playing follow the leader.
"Creepy," said Lopez. "Let's go find that metal."
We trudged up to the very edge of the lip. A boulder was going by. If there had been an Earth-standard atmosphere, the air would have been screaming with the noise of stone grinding only a few yards from where we stood. As it was, there was still the faintest of winds: the very thin carbon monoxide shell around Pestle was still humming and vibrating, riffling the foil of our vacuum suits. Of course, the ground was vibrating like crazy; it felt like a perfectly silent jackhammer was being used on the floor of the next room over.
The rear edge of the retreating sphere rolled up and out of the groove. The nightside of Pestle was very dark, but the abyss of the groove was an impenetrable blackness. Lopez lit up his industrial strength illuminator and directed the beam down into the gap. We were looking down into a deep canyon with steep sides that ran down in a perfect 'U' to bottom out in a flat valley. Something reflected back up at us from the bottom. Lopez took a lot of pictures with his camera, and then pulled the images up and magnified them on his computer screen as the next sphere rolled by.
It looked a like a probe of some sort – perhaps a Jovian model, or a Gorelid launch. Probably the latter, I figured; most likely part of the complement of the Deuce upstairs. It would have been the size of a two-man shuttle, were it not for the fact that it had been ironed absolutely flat. Somebody had piloted the craft, hopefully remotely but probably manually, down into the groove. There it had been run over by a sphere the size of a small moon. I shook my head.
"What do you think they were looking for?" I asked. "And what kind of idiot would go down into there like that?"
But I was talking to nobody. Lopez was gone.
"Lopez?" I asked. I picked the Weasard's signal up. He had crawled over the edge of the groove and was waiting for the sphere to roll all the way past. I crept up to the edge of the lip and looked down at him.
"What in the hell do you think you're doing?" I demanded.
"Gathering data!" he replied. As the back edge of the sphere rumbled past, he turned himself upside down and fired his jetpack. With a burst of flame he dove into the groove.
"Lopez! You stupid, furry moron!" I shouted. "Turn that thing around this instant!"
"Sorry; I'm committed now!" he yelled back, his voice warbling with the stress of the delta-V he was under. "Gotta see what was so interesting down here!"
"I'll tell you what was so damned interesting!" I snapped. "It was probably some fool Weasard pilot, going down to see the remains of the last fool Weasard, who in turn was really damned intrigued by the smashed corpse of the Weasard before him! You're going to be the last coat of Weasard paint on a moonlet that's being Weasard-whitewashed with the blood and guts of the over-curious!"
I heard the pack cut out. "I'm down and checking out the wreck," Lopez called out.
"I get half of whatever you find," I answered.
"I'm taking some readings – huh. Pretty interesting," he said.
Suddenly the leading edge of the next sphere passed by. "Lopez," I said, "enough screwing around. Get out of there."
"No problem, chief!" the Weasard said cheerily. "I've easily got 40% fuel!"
"Meaning you used 60% to get down there!" I shouted. But there was no reply from Lopez; the mass of the sphere was blocking our comm signals.
I spent a nervous minute waiting for the sphere to roll out of the way. "Lopez, come in," I repeated several times.
"Aw," crackled a voice on our private band. "Somebody lost his weasel."
"Shut up, Hot Henry," I snarled. "Lopez, you out there?"
"Here, boss!" came the Weasard's faint voice. "Had to jet out the front of the sphere to get out from under. I'm floating free of Pestle now; you better come pick me up. But Jackpot, you're going to love it! I got good readings, pictures and everything."
"What is it?" I demanded. "What did you find."
"A door, boss," answered Lopez. "A way in."
We were going down to Pestle, but we were going to do it Swami's way. That meant not leaving anything to chance. Swami was determined that if McMillan's gang had made any mistakes in their attempt to penetrate the ancient tomb, we weren't going to repeat them.
_Petunia_ was fit out for microgravity operations, so me and Lopez were given the task of doing some preliminary surface scouting. Other people were given other tasks. It wasn't so much that Swami was giving the orders, and more that everybody recognized he was smarter than the rest of us combined. We pretty much did what we were told.
I broke formation from the convoy and began pulsing the thrusters to bring us closer to the surface of the enormous artifact. Lopez chirped out data from the distance scope while I put us a hundred yards off the dayside surface of the rotating object.
The cigar-shaped barrel of the moonlet rolled away from us. At this range we could tell it wasn't perfectly smooth; there was a milky-white fluff hanging off of it, strands of some kind of interstellar lint a good meter long. There was a thin smear of an atmosphere, too; really just a haze of carbon monoxide, the merest fraction of an Earth-surface pressure, blanketing the stony outer surface of Pestle.
One of the three spheres rolled by. There was no fluff in the huge groove that the spheres rolled in; apparently the constant traffic kept the grass mown. There wasn't any of the strands on the spheres, either. I guess a rolling stone gathers no moss, or some shit like that.
"Okay, Lopez," I said, "earn your Weasard-kibble. Got any energy readings off that thing?"
"First things first," said my engineer and first mate. "That 'chili' you've been eating the last few nights has been the Weasard-kibble soaked in beef broth and microwaved. Tasty, no? I've been eating your chicken pot pies."
"That's outstanding," I said, suddenly feeling queasy.
"Okay, next, I don't know what that hull's made out of, but it doesn't like to let energy in or out. I can't find a wavelength that will let me bounce anything off it, and it doesn't seem to be emitting much either. It's pretty much a black box." Lopez turned his monitor around so I could see the graphs. They didn't mean much to me.
"See any doors? Holes? Blast marks?" I popped a beer. "McMillan had to have some kind of entry point into the thing."
Lopez shook his head and screwed up his nose in disgust. "Nothing we can see from here," he said. "Maybe Hot Henry or The Gob are having better luck at the ends of the cylinder. That's where I'd put an entry lock if I was a Swanturni. Those ends are only rotating; everything else is translating too."
"That's not where I'd put it," I said, guzzling my beer. "Swanturni didn't want visitors. They wanted you to stay the hell away. If I'm one of these Swanturni paranoid jerk-offs, I'm making it as hard as possible to break into my man-cave."
"Maybe." Lopez frowned. "Hey, I'm getting a bit of a signal bouncing off the hull that just rotated around to our side. Something metallic – aluminum, copper, a few other elements. Jackpot, I'm afraid it's down in the groove."
I winced. "How often do the rolling spheres go by?" I asked.
Lopez did some figures, ticking things off on his short furry fingers. "One should roll over that spot every one hundred thirty seconds," he said. "Of course, they're really big spheres; a lot of that time the spot will be partially covered by a sphere either coming or going. I figure you only have about a minute of clear open access."
"Well, crap." I threw the bottle in a tight spiral into the recycler. "We're not going to have a great view of it from up here. We're going to need to go EVA. Let's drop a few paint bombs and suit up."
I jetted _Petunia_ out, then laid in a course that would sweep us in a vector over the cylinder's surface that pointed directly at the metal Lopez had spotted. I fired a string of missiles at the surface as we passed over it – missiles full of paint impregnated with conducting fibers instead of explosives. It was like throwing water balloons at the Washington Monument; all we did was paint an overlapping series of circles in a half-klick strip from the groove down toward one end of the cigar.
We got on our vacuum suits. Mine dated back to the Jovian War and most of its red and blue paint had flecked off; it also had a beautiful scorch mark on the back of my helmet. But it held atmosphere so I wasn't picky. Lopez had a Chinese-made suit, brand new, with the Weasard Adaptor kit to accommodate his tail and muzzle. Generations of gene-spliced EVA's had taught the space suit companies that people with tails REALLY didn't like to have their additional limbs stuffed down one leg or up their back; it destroyed their sense of balance. So, Lopez had a foil-clad tail waggling around off the back of his suit. He had a vid camera attached to his.
Lopez also had a field kit of microtools, a high intensity lamp, and a crowbar. I, too, brought the tools of my trade: a blaster rifle and a reciprocating sword. I can't fix a starship or cure cancer, but if you need a donut-sized hole burned through another sentient being, and then you want it cut in half with the flashy, drug-fueled grandson of an Earth-chainsaw, then I'm your specialist. We both had a short-hop jetpack good for about thirty seconds of delta-V, some plasline and pitons, a few flares, and four hours of oxygen and power. We put _Petunia_ in park, cycled the lock, and launched ourselves towards the object as soon as we saw our paint-circles come around below us.
Lopez and I were both good enough EVA'ers to hit the paint without wasting our precious jetpacks. We jumped 'down' headfirst but spun around with attitude control jets until our feet were facing the rapidly approaching surface of Pestle. As we touched down, the superconductors in our boots attracted the magnetic paint, and we had just enough sticking power to hold onto the artefact's surface.
Looking up, we saw _Petunia_ roll away from us across the dayside sky. We could see some light gleaming off a handful of other shapes in the sky as well – the craft of our friends, and the derelict Deuce of McMillan. The ground shuddered, and as I turned towards the groove I realized that the passage of the mighty grinding spheres would be felt wherever we went on Pestle. "C'mon," I grunted to Lopez, and we carefully tromped our way across the stony surface towards the groove.
Swami came over the comm. "Jackpot," he said, "what exactly are you doing?" I explained to him what we intended. "All right," he said, "but be exceedingly careful. The Gob is dead."
"Dead?!" Lopez and I looked at each other. "Shoot, Swami; we haven't been here but for a few hours. How did that idiot find a way to get himself killed so quickly?"
"We're still piecing that together," Swami answered. "I believe he found some kind of an aperture on the narrowest end of the cylinder. He either tried to open it, or it opened itself. There was a large energy emanation out the end of Pestle, and the Gob and _Gob-Smacked_ were in the line of fire. There's only a cloud of debris left over. I'm doing a spectral analysis."
"Crap," I said. The Gob owed me money.
"The important message is, the usual operant assumptions for Swanturni defense systems should still apply," said Swami, who could never use a small word when a big one was available.
"Watch for booby traps," I translated. "Got it."
"Of both Swanturni and McMillan provenance," added Swami.
"Yeah, yeah," I grumbled.
We followed the blackened pathway we had painted across the surface of Pestle. The force of the paint-missile explosions had cleared the floating lint away; we had only a smooth surface between us and massive spheres looming above the lip of the groove ahead of us. Lopez toggled his comm.
"Better boost your suit's heater, Jackpot," Lopez warned. "Nightside is coming up."
Capaestri Superior vanished over the horizon of the swiftly rotating artefact. Even though the spheres were locked in position with the sun, from our frame of reference they seemed to be rapidly rolling from left to right across the surface of the world. The light faded quickly and the temperature dropped forty degrees in seconds. "Huh," I said as our eyes adjusted. "Look at that."
The heat released from the surface of Pestle had an effect on the milky strands stuck to the outside of the stone. The wispy growths seemed to inflate as they grew more translucent, and they stood up straight to almost two meters' height off to the sides of the black-painted path we had made. The very tip of each strand had a miniscule red light on it. It was impossible to tell if the light was invisible on the dayside, or if it was only lit when the daylight was gone. The peculiar space-weeds seemed to drift in unison in an unperceivable wind, bowing first this way and then that, curving and wheeling like a flock of birds playing follow the leader.
"Creepy," said Lopez. "Let's go find that metal."
We trudged up to the very edge of the lip. A boulder was going by. If there had been an Earth-standard atmosphere, the air would have been screaming with the noise of stone grinding only a few yards from where we stood. As it was, there was still the faintest of winds: the very thin carbon monoxide shell around Pestle was still humming and vibrating, riffling the foil of our vacuum suits. Of course, the ground was vibrating like crazy; it felt like a perfectly silent jackhammer was being used on the floor of the next room over.
The rear edge of the retreating sphere rolled up and out of the groove. The nightside of Pestle was very dark, but the abyss of the groove was an impenetrable blackness. Lopez lit up his industrial strength illuminator and directed the beam down into the gap. We were looking down into a deep canyon with steep sides that ran down in a perfect 'U' to bottom out in a flat valley. Something reflected back up at us from the bottom. Lopez took a lot of pictures with his camera, and then pulled the images up and magnified them on his computer screen as the next sphere rolled by.
It looked a like a probe of some sort – perhaps a Jovian model, or a Gorelid launch. Probably the latter, I figured; most likely part of the complement of the Deuce upstairs. It would have been the size of a two-man shuttle, were it not for the fact that it had been ironed absolutely flat. Somebody had piloted the craft, hopefully remotely but probably manually, down into the groove. There it had been run over by a sphere the size of a small moon. I shook my head.
"What do you think they were looking for?" I asked. "And what kind of idiot would go down into there like that?"
But I was talking to nobody. Lopez was gone.
"Lopez?" I asked. I picked the Weasard's signal up. He had crawled over the edge of the groove and was waiting for the sphere to roll all the way past. I crept up to the edge of the lip and looked down at him.
"What in the hell do you think you're doing?" I demanded.
"Gathering data!" he replied. As the back edge of the sphere rumbled past, he turned himself upside down and fired his jetpack. With a burst of flame he dove into the groove.
"Lopez! You stupid, furry moron!" I shouted. "Turn that thing around this instant!"
"Sorry; I'm committed now!" he yelled back, his voice warbling with the stress of the delta-V he was under. "Gotta see what was so interesting down here!"
"I'll tell you what was so damned interesting!" I snapped. "It was probably some fool Weasard pilot, going down to see the remains of the last fool Weasard, who in turn was really damned intrigued by the smashed corpse of the Weasard before him! You're going to be the last coat of Weasard paint on a moonlet that's being Weasard-whitewashed with the blood and guts of the over-curious!"
I heard the pack cut out. "I'm down and checking out the wreck," Lopez called out.
"I get half of whatever you find," I answered.
"I'm taking some readings – huh. Pretty interesting," he said.
Suddenly the leading edge of the next sphere passed by. "Lopez," I said, "enough screwing around. Get out of there."
"No problem, chief!" the Weasard said cheerily. "I've easily got 40% fuel!"
"Meaning you used 60% to get down there!" I shouted. But there was no reply from Lopez; the mass of the sphere was blocking our comm signals.
I spent a nervous minute waiting for the sphere to roll out of the way. "Lopez, come in," I repeated several times.
"Aw," crackled a voice on our private band. "Somebody lost his weasel."
"Shut up, Hot Henry," I snarled. "Lopez, you out there?"
"Here, boss!" came the Weasard's faint voice. "Had to jet out the front of the sphere to get out from under. I'm floating free of Pestle now; you better come pick me up. But Jackpot, you're going to love it! I got good readings, pictures and everything."
"What is it?" I demanded. "What did you find."
"A door, boss," answered Lopez. "A way in."
