Pestle (5)
Mar. 26th, 2011 12:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolFifth part. I think I know where it's going now.
The whole convoy packed into Swami's lounge to discuss what to do next. We had finished licking our wounds and had made what repairs we could. It was time to make our assault on Pestle.
At least, that's what Swami and I had discussed in private. We agreed that there was no sense sitting around and twiddling our thumbs. We also agreed that staging an assault on McMillan might be a good idea for the future, but it would give up the only advantage we had at the moment – that we were wise to them and they didn't know it yet. An attack on a cloaked Deuce, invisible to all sensors and bristling with weapons, would be a dangerous and difficult thing to do. Drawing them out, on the other hand, might make them vulnerable just as they hoped to be on offense.
So, we had agreed that we would continue on as if nothing had changed. The Swami's convoy was here to loot some sequestered Swanturni Javanite, and we were going to go about doing it as naturally as possible. However, Swami believed a distributed approach made more sense. "The Deuce, if it strikes, can't be everywhere at once," he had told me. "If we go after all three spheres at the same time, their ability to swoop in and take our goodies will be hampered."
That made sense to me at the time, since I was in the know about McMillan. It was trickier to convince the others that this was a good idea.
"Are you high? Right now, right here, in front of your Weasard and everything?" demanded Mincey. "There are three doors into the tomb; anywhere we go could be full of unknown dangers – and you want to expose us to all of those dangers at the same time?"
"I didn't say that," I said. "But we have a lot of people and a lot of ships. There's no reason not to tackle the doors, at least, at the same time. If we get one of them open, then we can talk about joining back up again. This way we can look for McMillan more easily, too."
"You mean he can pick us off one at a time, I suppose," grumbled Gray Gretchen. One of the engines on her mining rig had been irreparably damaged and she wasn't in a good mood. "He's already got Hot Henry; I'm sure he's waiting for the rest of us to expose ourselves."
"Hey, you do whatever you want," I said casually. "What I know is, my dropship is one of the few vehicles that has the maneuverability to snuggle up to the door controller AND can fit through the door if we open it. Some of you can come with me. Some of you aren't invited. If the rest of you want to sit around up here while my squad takes a LOOT-BATH, then you're welcome to do it."
"I can't believe you would think this is a good idea," Mincey said to Swami.
"I don't," replied Swami, "but I don't see it's any worse than any other option. Let's split up into groups."
We bickered about who should go with what group to maximize the division of skills. We all agreed that _Petunia_, _Quiet_Bitch_ and Layla's Martian Sabre, _Tasty_Fumes_, were the best candidates for penetrating the square hatches. My squad wound up being me, Lopez, Gray Gretchen, Muskie and Swami. Hoggrid suddenly spoke over the comm.
"I WILL GO WITH JACKPOT," he said.
"You're coming out of your ship, then?" I asked.
"MUST HAVE JAVANITE," said the Betellian curtly.
"All righty then," murmured Lopez, his whiskers twitching.
The group dispersed. Everybody returned to their ships and gathered their gear. Then a spider-webbing of intestines snaked out to permit the transfer of personnel to the various ships.
_Petunia_ wasn't neat as a pin or clean as a whistle, but she held pressure okay, and Lopez had both the reactors and the thrusters back online. There was a lot of Kwik-Weld and patchplate holding things together, but the ship was ready to go. It started to get pretty crowded with only three strangers in our little lounge. Then there was the rasping sound of metal-on-metal as Hoggrid docked to our cargo hatch. I went down to welcome him.
Hoggrid was completely invisible within his blocky encounter suit, which was three meters tall and two wide and deep. There weren't any legs on the thing; he looked like a big metal-and-glass block shuffling into my cargo bay. Some of the atmosphere from his ship leaked into mine, and it stank badly. There were glossy plates of black glass-stuff high and low all over the suit; it was hard to tell if there was a face I should be communicating with.
"Welcome aboard _Petunia_," I said.
The top half of Hoggrid rotated about slowly, making a full three hundred sixty degree turn. Then his voice synthesizer crackled to life.
"I WILL NOT FIT THROUGH YOUR DOORS," he said.
I glanced around. "Probably not," I agreed. "You'll have to make yourself comfortable down here."
"YES," agreed Hoggrid. He stood perfectly still and filled most of the cargo bay. I looked at him. He presumably looked at me. This continued awkwardly for more time than I liked.
"Okay, then, off we go," I said, climbing up through the accessway.
"There's no room for any loot," complained Lopez bitterly.
"Hoggrid's a treasure," I replied sourly.
I rotated the thrusters and we jetted for the Apex sphere – the one that was on the arbitrarily-chosen top side of Pestle. Part of it was always shaded by the rim of Pestle's cigar-shaped body. It rolled smoothly in the groove with no hint of a wobble.
"I wonder what holds it all together," Swami said, standing behind me and peering through the forward screen. "It can't be gravity; there's not enough mass, not even if it's solid all the way through, and it's too stable."
"Must be all that treasure weighing it down," rasped Gray Gretchen. She was older than dirt, but mean, and supposedly handy at close quarters. She only had one eye left, and she was fond of antique weapons. She had some kind of an axe slung over her back, and the haft kept knocking me in the ear in the close quarters of the cockpit.
"Okay, how are we going to do this?" Muskie asked nervously. "That sphere's rolling by awfully fast." The white surface was only about a hundred yards below us.
"We," I said, hauling myself out of the crash chair and pushing my way past my unwelcome visitors, "are going to go fishing."
"What's the bait?" asked Lopez. I smiled.
On the next pass, we had gotten Lopez into his vacuum suit and the harness around them both. I paint-bombed the entire area of the square door with magnetic paint and shooed everybody out of the accessway. "Okay, buddy," I said, slapping Lopez on the back, "go make me proud."
"Why am I going by myself?" Lopez demanded. "Swami should be down there with me helping me to figure things out. Why don't you send me and Swami?"
I adjusted the camera mounted on top of Lopez's helmet. "Swami's not expendable," I explained kindly. I rechecked the link on Lopez's tether, then got on the comm. "Swami, open the outer door," I said.
The door opened. The sphere was rolling away below us. The dark spot marking the door was coming up. "Out you go," I said, picking up Lopez and tossing him out the door.
Lopez, to his credit, didn't flail pointlessly as he fell slowly towards the sphere. I paid out the tether as he glided through space. He used boosters to torque his body around as he neared contact, and absorbed the impact with his boots. The boots stuck, and Lopez was down. I ran up to the lounge where we had the monitor set up.
I saw the signal from Lopez's camera on the screen. The rest of the team was gathered around with Swami on the comm. "Lopez, pan left," Swami requested. Lopez complied. There were faint traces of cracks in the surface of the stone – long straight lines, but very narrow. We knew from signal processing that it was a door, but it was as flush-fitting as any spacecraft hatch.
"Please paint off the door's outlines," Swami requested.
"Aye sir; tagging," the Weasard replied. Pulling out an aerosol can, he painted a thin orange line where the cracks of the door were. It was a two-leaf door, clearly opening by popping inwards and then sliding to the sides. I could fly _Petunia_ inside, but only just barely.
Swami frowned. "Lopez, I'm trying to see that bit off to the side that we thought might be an access panel of some kind," he said. "Do you see it?"
"Er….yeah. Yeah, I got it, boss," said Lopez. As he passed the zenith of the sphere, he trotted over to a shallow crater in the sphere's surface. He painted it off; it was a recess about a hand-breadth deep, perfectly circular, about a meter across.
Lopez bent down and pushed and pulled at the surface of the recess. "Uh, guys? If this is supposed to move to the side or something, then I'm not strong enough to move it."
"I should go out there and help him," I said, suddenly anxious.
"No, wait," said Swami. "The door is square. But the recess is round. Why round? Surely it can't push in; then anything crushed by the sphere might trigger it."
"Could you think faster?" Lopez asked. "I'm starting to drop towards the surface of the cigar."
A light went off in Swami's eyes. "Lopez, attach an epoxy-stick to the recessed surface. A few inches away from the edge, please."
"Sure," said Lopez. He pulled a stubby disc out of his leg-pouch, removed a wrapper, and pressed it to the surface of the round crater.
"Now see if you can unscrew it," Swami instructed.
Lopez bent down and put his weight into it. The high-adhesion epoxy stuck immovably to the surface. Lopez grunted and strained but the circle didn't budge.
"I'm reeling him back in," I said.
"No, wait," Swami implored. "Lopez, try the other direction."
Lopez swallowed as he saw the surface of Pestle coming up at him, but he turned around and heaved on the puck from the other direction. To his surprise, it slipped an inch.
"Good enough," said Swami. "Jump off."
Lopez leaped off the sphere. I ran down to the accessway and fired up the reel on his tether. In a minute he was pulling himself back in the hatchway.
"You did good," I said, brushing off Lopez's suit as he gasped with exertion. "Are you feeling okay? Do you need some water? Bathroom break?" Still breathless, he shook his head.
"Right," I replied. "Back out you go." Before he could protest, I picked up Lopez and threw him out the door again.
"I hate fishing!" spat my engineer as he sailed once again towards the painted spot.
"Very interesting," said Swami from topside. "None of the paint rubbed off. One must conclude that the sphere and cigar surfaces do not actually touch. However, you said you felt a grinding vibration…"
"You know what's interesting?" I asked. "Money. Lopez, get that thing unscrewed."
"Get yourself unscrewed," muttered Lopez, but he put his back into the work. After a full rotation the plate was rotating freely, dropping further into the bulk of the sphere. After five rotations it bottomed out, and Lopez found he could slide it to one side. There was some kind of a primitive console behind it – a few very dusty buttons, a blank and somewhat frosted screen, and a single large throw-lever set flush into the panel. Lopez played his camera over this for Swami.
"Very hard to intuit anything from this," Swami mused. "But I should say that the buttons and screen are more likely to be communication devices; the lever's principle use is unmistakable. Lopez, loop a line over that thing, step back, and give it a pull."
Any resentment Lopez had been feeling regarding being given the crap job vanished in the face of his native Weasard curiosity. Lopez clipped a loop to the handle, stepped away, and tried to heave. He found the friction of his boots was too light to give him enough leverage, however. Discarding caution, Lopez stepped into the control panel recess, braced his feet against the floor of it, grabbed the lever and heaved.
The lever lifted easily and folded over flush on the other side of its hinge. From the vantage of Lopez's camera, nothing happened.
"Guys," said Muskie from the cockpit window, "Look."
I rushed up the ladder. The square door had changed. There was gap between the two leaves about a foot wide. I grabbed the comm. "Lopez, you've done it," I said. "Jump on back and we'll go through on the next pass."
"I wanna see!" shouted Lopez. He rushed over to the gap and shone his light into the darkness.
The camera did a lousy job of picking up what happened next. Lopez yelped as something dark in coloration came out of the slot. My Weasard was pulled in through the door, and the line jerked in after him.
"Lopez!" I shouted. I jumped down into the accessway and prepared to launch myself through the hatch. Gray Gretchen's hand on my shoulder stopped me.
"Don't do it, boy," she said, peering at me through her facemask with her one good eye. "Sphere's going over. You'll never make it."
"Lopez!" I said weakly. The door slowly rolled over to the far side of the sphere, pulling the tether along with it.
"We'll go in on the next pass," said Gray Gretchen sympathetically. "We'll all go with you."
"Dammit, Lopez," I groaned, banging my helmet on the bulkhead. The sphere rolled on top of the line, and the tether broke, coiling as its frayed end snapped back into space.
"I'm coming, Lopez," I growled.
The whole convoy packed into Swami's lounge to discuss what to do next. We had finished licking our wounds and had made what repairs we could. It was time to make our assault on Pestle.
At least, that's what Swami and I had discussed in private. We agreed that there was no sense sitting around and twiddling our thumbs. We also agreed that staging an assault on McMillan might be a good idea for the future, but it would give up the only advantage we had at the moment – that we were wise to them and they didn't know it yet. An attack on a cloaked Deuce, invisible to all sensors and bristling with weapons, would be a dangerous and difficult thing to do. Drawing them out, on the other hand, might make them vulnerable just as they hoped to be on offense.
So, we had agreed that we would continue on as if nothing had changed. The Swami's convoy was here to loot some sequestered Swanturni Javanite, and we were going to go about doing it as naturally as possible. However, Swami believed a distributed approach made more sense. "The Deuce, if it strikes, can't be everywhere at once," he had told me. "If we go after all three spheres at the same time, their ability to swoop in and take our goodies will be hampered."
That made sense to me at the time, since I was in the know about McMillan. It was trickier to convince the others that this was a good idea.
"Are you high? Right now, right here, in front of your Weasard and everything?" demanded Mincey. "There are three doors into the tomb; anywhere we go could be full of unknown dangers – and you want to expose us to all of those dangers at the same time?"
"I didn't say that," I said. "But we have a lot of people and a lot of ships. There's no reason not to tackle the doors, at least, at the same time. If we get one of them open, then we can talk about joining back up again. This way we can look for McMillan more easily, too."
"You mean he can pick us off one at a time, I suppose," grumbled Gray Gretchen. One of the engines on her mining rig had been irreparably damaged and she wasn't in a good mood. "He's already got Hot Henry; I'm sure he's waiting for the rest of us to expose ourselves."
"Hey, you do whatever you want," I said casually. "What I know is, my dropship is one of the few vehicles that has the maneuverability to snuggle up to the door controller AND can fit through the door if we open it. Some of you can come with me. Some of you aren't invited. If the rest of you want to sit around up here while my squad takes a LOOT-BATH, then you're welcome to do it."
"I can't believe you would think this is a good idea," Mincey said to Swami.
"I don't," replied Swami, "but I don't see it's any worse than any other option. Let's split up into groups."
We bickered about who should go with what group to maximize the division of skills. We all agreed that _Petunia_, _Quiet_Bitch_ and Layla's Martian Sabre, _Tasty_Fumes_, were the best candidates for penetrating the square hatches. My squad wound up being me, Lopez, Gray Gretchen, Muskie and Swami. Hoggrid suddenly spoke over the comm.
"I WILL GO WITH JACKPOT," he said.
"You're coming out of your ship, then?" I asked.
"MUST HAVE JAVANITE," said the Betellian curtly.
"All righty then," murmured Lopez, his whiskers twitching.
The group dispersed. Everybody returned to their ships and gathered their gear. Then a spider-webbing of intestines snaked out to permit the transfer of personnel to the various ships.
_Petunia_ wasn't neat as a pin or clean as a whistle, but she held pressure okay, and Lopez had both the reactors and the thrusters back online. There was a lot of Kwik-Weld and patchplate holding things together, but the ship was ready to go. It started to get pretty crowded with only three strangers in our little lounge. Then there was the rasping sound of metal-on-metal as Hoggrid docked to our cargo hatch. I went down to welcome him.
Hoggrid was completely invisible within his blocky encounter suit, which was three meters tall and two wide and deep. There weren't any legs on the thing; he looked like a big metal-and-glass block shuffling into my cargo bay. Some of the atmosphere from his ship leaked into mine, and it stank badly. There were glossy plates of black glass-stuff high and low all over the suit; it was hard to tell if there was a face I should be communicating with.
"Welcome aboard _Petunia_," I said.
The top half of Hoggrid rotated about slowly, making a full three hundred sixty degree turn. Then his voice synthesizer crackled to life.
"I WILL NOT FIT THROUGH YOUR DOORS," he said.
I glanced around. "Probably not," I agreed. "You'll have to make yourself comfortable down here."
"YES," agreed Hoggrid. He stood perfectly still and filled most of the cargo bay. I looked at him. He presumably looked at me. This continued awkwardly for more time than I liked.
"Okay, then, off we go," I said, climbing up through the accessway.
"There's no room for any loot," complained Lopez bitterly.
"Hoggrid's a treasure," I replied sourly.
I rotated the thrusters and we jetted for the Apex sphere – the one that was on the arbitrarily-chosen top side of Pestle. Part of it was always shaded by the rim of Pestle's cigar-shaped body. It rolled smoothly in the groove with no hint of a wobble.
"I wonder what holds it all together," Swami said, standing behind me and peering through the forward screen. "It can't be gravity; there's not enough mass, not even if it's solid all the way through, and it's too stable."
"Must be all that treasure weighing it down," rasped Gray Gretchen. She was older than dirt, but mean, and supposedly handy at close quarters. She only had one eye left, and she was fond of antique weapons. She had some kind of an axe slung over her back, and the haft kept knocking me in the ear in the close quarters of the cockpit.
"Okay, how are we going to do this?" Muskie asked nervously. "That sphere's rolling by awfully fast." The white surface was only about a hundred yards below us.
"We," I said, hauling myself out of the crash chair and pushing my way past my unwelcome visitors, "are going to go fishing."
"What's the bait?" asked Lopez. I smiled.
On the next pass, we had gotten Lopez into his vacuum suit and the harness around them both. I paint-bombed the entire area of the square door with magnetic paint and shooed everybody out of the accessway. "Okay, buddy," I said, slapping Lopez on the back, "go make me proud."
"Why am I going by myself?" Lopez demanded. "Swami should be down there with me helping me to figure things out. Why don't you send me and Swami?"
I adjusted the camera mounted on top of Lopez's helmet. "Swami's not expendable," I explained kindly. I rechecked the link on Lopez's tether, then got on the comm. "Swami, open the outer door," I said.
The door opened. The sphere was rolling away below us. The dark spot marking the door was coming up. "Out you go," I said, picking up Lopez and tossing him out the door.
Lopez, to his credit, didn't flail pointlessly as he fell slowly towards the sphere. I paid out the tether as he glided through space. He used boosters to torque his body around as he neared contact, and absorbed the impact with his boots. The boots stuck, and Lopez was down. I ran up to the lounge where we had the monitor set up.
I saw the signal from Lopez's camera on the screen. The rest of the team was gathered around with Swami on the comm. "Lopez, pan left," Swami requested. Lopez complied. There were faint traces of cracks in the surface of the stone – long straight lines, but very narrow. We knew from signal processing that it was a door, but it was as flush-fitting as any spacecraft hatch.
"Please paint off the door's outlines," Swami requested.
"Aye sir; tagging," the Weasard replied. Pulling out an aerosol can, he painted a thin orange line where the cracks of the door were. It was a two-leaf door, clearly opening by popping inwards and then sliding to the sides. I could fly _Petunia_ inside, but only just barely.
Swami frowned. "Lopez, I'm trying to see that bit off to the side that we thought might be an access panel of some kind," he said. "Do you see it?"
"Er….yeah. Yeah, I got it, boss," said Lopez. As he passed the zenith of the sphere, he trotted over to a shallow crater in the sphere's surface. He painted it off; it was a recess about a hand-breadth deep, perfectly circular, about a meter across.
Lopez bent down and pushed and pulled at the surface of the recess. "Uh, guys? If this is supposed to move to the side or something, then I'm not strong enough to move it."
"I should go out there and help him," I said, suddenly anxious.
"No, wait," said Swami. "The door is square. But the recess is round. Why round? Surely it can't push in; then anything crushed by the sphere might trigger it."
"Could you think faster?" Lopez asked. "I'm starting to drop towards the surface of the cigar."
A light went off in Swami's eyes. "Lopez, attach an epoxy-stick to the recessed surface. A few inches away from the edge, please."
"Sure," said Lopez. He pulled a stubby disc out of his leg-pouch, removed a wrapper, and pressed it to the surface of the round crater.
"Now see if you can unscrew it," Swami instructed.
Lopez bent down and put his weight into it. The high-adhesion epoxy stuck immovably to the surface. Lopez grunted and strained but the circle didn't budge.
"I'm reeling him back in," I said.
"No, wait," Swami implored. "Lopez, try the other direction."
Lopez swallowed as he saw the surface of Pestle coming up at him, but he turned around and heaved on the puck from the other direction. To his surprise, it slipped an inch.
"Good enough," said Swami. "Jump off."
Lopez leaped off the sphere. I ran down to the accessway and fired up the reel on his tether. In a minute he was pulling himself back in the hatchway.
"You did good," I said, brushing off Lopez's suit as he gasped with exertion. "Are you feeling okay? Do you need some water? Bathroom break?" Still breathless, he shook his head.
"Right," I replied. "Back out you go." Before he could protest, I picked up Lopez and threw him out the door again.
"I hate fishing!" spat my engineer as he sailed once again towards the painted spot.
"Very interesting," said Swami from topside. "None of the paint rubbed off. One must conclude that the sphere and cigar surfaces do not actually touch. However, you said you felt a grinding vibration…"
"You know what's interesting?" I asked. "Money. Lopez, get that thing unscrewed."
"Get yourself unscrewed," muttered Lopez, but he put his back into the work. After a full rotation the plate was rotating freely, dropping further into the bulk of the sphere. After five rotations it bottomed out, and Lopez found he could slide it to one side. There was some kind of a primitive console behind it – a few very dusty buttons, a blank and somewhat frosted screen, and a single large throw-lever set flush into the panel. Lopez played his camera over this for Swami.
"Very hard to intuit anything from this," Swami mused. "But I should say that the buttons and screen are more likely to be communication devices; the lever's principle use is unmistakable. Lopez, loop a line over that thing, step back, and give it a pull."
Any resentment Lopez had been feeling regarding being given the crap job vanished in the face of his native Weasard curiosity. Lopez clipped a loop to the handle, stepped away, and tried to heave. He found the friction of his boots was too light to give him enough leverage, however. Discarding caution, Lopez stepped into the control panel recess, braced his feet against the floor of it, grabbed the lever and heaved.
The lever lifted easily and folded over flush on the other side of its hinge. From the vantage of Lopez's camera, nothing happened.
"Guys," said Muskie from the cockpit window, "Look."
I rushed up the ladder. The square door had changed. There was gap between the two leaves about a foot wide. I grabbed the comm. "Lopez, you've done it," I said. "Jump on back and we'll go through on the next pass."
"I wanna see!" shouted Lopez. He rushed over to the gap and shone his light into the darkness.
The camera did a lousy job of picking up what happened next. Lopez yelped as something dark in coloration came out of the slot. My Weasard was pulled in through the door, and the line jerked in after him.
"Lopez!" I shouted. I jumped down into the accessway and prepared to launch myself through the hatch. Gray Gretchen's hand on my shoulder stopped me.
"Don't do it, boy," she said, peering at me through her facemask with her one good eye. "Sphere's going over. You'll never make it."
"Lopez!" I said weakly. The door slowly rolled over to the far side of the sphere, pulling the tether along with it.
"We'll go in on the next pass," said Gray Gretchen sympathetically. "We'll all go with you."
"Dammit, Lopez," I groaned, banging my helmet on the bulkhead. The sphere rolled on top of the line, and the tether broke, coiling as its frayed end snapped back into space.
"I'm coming, Lopez," I growled.
