Pestle (6)
Mar. 26th, 2011 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolPart 6. I suspect 4 more parts.
We were in position. We were ready. The sphere rolled around.
Hoggrid didn't need a vacuum suit. He also apparently didn't need limbs. Hoggrid seemed capable of forming whatever limbs he needed and extruding them out of his encounter suit. Two powerful metal arms thrust out of his front face and inserted themselves through the gap in the square hatch of the sphere that we had successfully opened minutes earlier. The arms then rapidly spread apart from each other. Servos whined in Hoggrid's suit and the gap in the doors opened by several meters. Bright sunlight flooded into the landing platform inside the door for the first time in thousands of years.
Something inhabited the back wall of the chamber, which was easily a hundred feet on a side. It might have been a blob of black oil, or it might have been a plant, or it might have been a nest of very large black snakes. It was big, and it was moving, and it had Lopez in its clutches. My Weasard engineer was wrapped in the coils of the thing; only his facemask was visible. He was clearly making an effort not to move at all. As the doors opened, the limbs of the black exotic began to uncoil and snake towards us.
"It's photosensitive," Swami announced, floating behind the rest of the formation. "Hitting it with a really bright light might be an interesting idea."
"Don't mind if I do," said Muskie. He was carrying a two million candlepower spot that was usually used for foiling jailbreaks on prison planets. He turned the thing on and flooded the landing bay with the equivalent of full daylight on Mercury. The black thing quivered. The photosensors on Lopez's facemask went completely dark.
Gray Gretchen jetted into the bay. She was wearing a Europan battlesuit; it had been made for counterterrorism deep in the dark oceans of that Jovian moon, but as it was sometimes used on the surface of that low-atmosphere place, it turned out to be fairly functional in hard space as well. Among its tricks was amplifying one's strength. Gray Gretchen pulsed herself to stand on the inside of the room's bulkhead and found that she could stand reasonably well under the false gravity. She unlimbered a broadsword taller than she was.
I followed her onto the other side of the door. I gave the reciprocating sword a single revv.
"Hello, dirtbag," I said. "You seem to have a hold of my weasel." Gray Gretchen rolled her single eye.
Swami pulsed into the center of the room along with Muskie. Hoggrid pivoted the arms holding the door open; the rest of his bulky body rotated up and through the gap, ending with his squared-off encounter suit inside the landing back and his arms still holding the door open. They turned into claws and grabbed both leaves of the door. The servos whined again, and the door slammed shut.
The black limbs of the creature shuddered. Then they split down the middle, all of them simultaneously; each tentacle unzipped itself, and suddenly where there had been a single arm there now were two skinny ones.
"Ah," said Swami. "Sometimes interesting effects are not necessarily desirable ones."
The tentacles coiled upon themselves and sprang out, several targeting each of us while a healthy spaghetti-mass remained behind to hold Lopez captive. I found a black limb in my face; it was tipped with nothing like teeth or claws, but it was bifurcated at the end, and the fork tried to grab me like a giant picking up a mouse between thumb and forefinger. The reciprocating sword cut into the crotch between the two ends of the limb and peeled it back. That tentacle left me alone, but another one grabbed me by the ankle and hauled me across the room.
Muskie found himself quickly engulfed in writhing limbs. He managed to turn off the spotlight, throwing the room into near darkness except for the lights from our various suits, but his blaster didn't seem to have much effect. Swami, too, was overwhelmed. He remained calm, however, quietly tapping away at the monitor inside his suit as the tentacles swallowed him up.
Gray Gretchen and Hoggrid weren't going down without a fight, however. Gray Gretchen was a dervish with her broadsword; the enhanced strength from her suit enabled her to spin about repeatedly, reaping loops of tentacle with every cycle. The bits lopped off didn't seem to die, however; they attempted to form coils and continue to launch themselves at anybody who wasn't already overwhelmed. The short bits didn't seem to have the ability to form themselves into a coil with significant launching power, though, so that was something.
Hoggrid's encounter suit spawned multiple asymmetric limbs. A great grasping claw seized a handful of tubes and squeezed them, then ripped them into pieces; a slender forked tendril snaked out and delivered an electric jolt. All of this was good for mayhem and made for a nice adrenaline buzz, but it did not seem to deter the ability of the creature (creatures?) to continue to press the attack.
I decided that I wasn't so interested in killing the thing. My goal was to find Lopez and get him out of this mess. I started to hack at anything black and head in the general direction of wherever Lopez was the last time I had seen him. I felt like I was swimming through a room full of black spaghetti. The arms, when cut, didn't bleed; they were evenly black all the way through and didn't seem organic in the least. One of them grabbed my laser rifle and wrestled it away from me; I didn't mind so much as it didn't seem to be doing much of anything. I made some progress across the room, and the arms didn't wrap me up, but I didn't have much luck finding Lopez either.
The knot of tentacles holding Swami became curiously inert. Swami pulsed out of their grasp. More arms came at him, but he had some kind of an antenna raised up from his pack, and as the black members approached him, they suddenly stopped moving. Swami began sweeping across the room paralyzing any of the oily black tentacles that came near him.
"Hey," said Muskie from deep within the coils of the tentacles, "they don't like ultraviolet light much." Apparently the spotlight had some features other than making really bright visual light. Whether they liked ultraviolet or not, however, the tentacles did not seem to be letting go of Muskie.
"I have bad news," Gray Gretchen announced, grunting with exertion as she continued to lop away at the arms. "These guys seem to be able to reform themselves." Indeed, down near my feet I could see two short segments writhe over to each other and merge their ends somehow.
"KNOTS DO NOT WORK," Hoggrid announced. He had experimented with trying to wrap up strands in each other. The oily tentacles appeared to be able to untie themselves, so Hoggrid was going back to smashing things with enormous fists spontaneously extruded from his suit.
Only Swami was having anything that you could reasonably call success. He began gridding across the room, freezing tentacles in an orderly progress across the room. "Stop cutting them," he said as he approached me. "When you cut them you expose more of their surface to the ambient light."
"What the hell are you doing, anyway?" Gray Gretchen asked.
"This is a next-generation 3D printer," Swami said calmly. "It's mapping the surfaces of the tentacles and painting them with a graphite film that light can't penetrate. Without light they go inert. Interesting; their metabolism has gratifyingly just-in-time production features."
"I don't believe that any of the words you just said actually mean anything," I accused.
"No, it makes sense!" said Lopez. I could hear him spraying with the aerosol paint cans in his leg pouches.
Muskie climbed out of the grasp of the knot that Swami had paralyzed. He bathed the room in ultraviolet, making the remaining tentacles sluggish. Swami made short work of the remaining actives, and then the battle was over. We were in a frozen forest of black coral.
I peered through the maze of outstretched limbs. "This place is a dump," I said.
"We have to clear this creature out of the way somehow," said Gray Gretchen.
"Not a creature," said Swami. "A construct. A trap, if you like, planted at the door where it could be activated by incoming light when the door was opened. It's not actually alive. But you're right; we need to clear this stuff out of the way and bring _Petunia_ inside."
I grabbed Lopez and pulled him into a bearhug. "I thought I had lost you, buddy," I said, tearing up.
"I want a raise," Lopez said.
Following Swami's directions, we began a process of lopping off pieces of tentacle with Swami standing by to paint the ends. The bits we cut away were launched out into deep space. There, I felt certain, they would eventually come to plague some intelligent civilization in the far future. But, and this was the important part, not us.
"Let's save a little of that and put it in _Petunia_'s hold," I suggested. "It might come in useful later."
I boosted back out to _Petunia_ and got her lined up on the door. Lopez figured out how to get it all the way open. When the sphere came around, I got her lined up and then glided her through the doors with feet to spare. Lopez closed the doors behind us, and Muskie lit up the room. We were in.
Swami had found a console and was puttering around with it while Gray Gretchen and Hoggrid investigated several sets of doors leading out of the place. "It's actually fairly intuitive stuff," he said. "There's still an active power source somewhere, too, and the guts of it seem functional." He thought for several seconds. "I'm going to restart all of it," he said finally. "It might be risky, but we may also be able to get some atmosphere, and perhaps some communications."
"If I were the Swanturni," I said, "I'd definitely make a booby trap triggered by turning the power back on."
"And yet," Swami replied, "why would they leave the power here, and controllable, at all? Clearly they intended to return for some reason. Hence there must be a way to restart it. And you would imagine that they might have reasonable faith in the success of the one trap we've already found."
"Oh, just do it," said Muskie. "I can't stand being inside these suits for one minute longer than necessary."
Swami pushed some buttons. A screen lit up, and voices spoke. They sounded human. "That's a good sign," Swami said. "Vocal chords that act within range of our hearing. Suggests an oxygen atmosphere."
Swami pushed more buttons. Pictures came on the screen. Some of them were of bipedal beings – beings with heads and two arms and faces. They all had red hides, or red clothing. They looked a little like people who were jointed the wrong way. "Behold, finally: the Swanturni," he said, a smile lighting up his face. "The ancient and cryptic empire before ours."
"YOURS," corrected Hoggrid.
"None of ours," Gray Gretchen said. "It's not like anybody here is going to run for a prefecture office any time soon."
"Ugly cusses," I said.
"I'm getting a pretty good language sampling here," Swami said. "In a few hours I can probably have a reasonable translator going. Meanwhile, let's have some utilities." He pushed a few more buttons. Overhead a few feeble lights flickered to life. Slots opened in the walls and air began to hiss into the space, generating a little fog. Muskie read the counters on his suit display.
"The mix is a little rich in oxygen, but not toxically so," he said. "No biologicals and no chemicals at dangerous levels. Radiation is almost nothing."
"Right on!" chirped Lopez. He unclipped his facemask and breathed Pestle's air. He smiled.
"Ah," he said. "Like a fresh country day." We all opened our suits – all except Hoggrid, who continued to stand very still.
Swami was still working away at the console. "I think I have a schematic – but only of this sphere," he said. "The rest of Pestle isn't here. But… ah." Swami grinned. "We have a broadcast antenna. I think it's time to make a little trouble."
Gray Gretchen frowned. "For who?" she asked.
"For McMillan," Swami answered. "I'll explain later. Here we are…"
Swami leaned forward and spoke into a microphone:
"Attention convoy," he said. "Swami here. Massive Javanite finds in the Apex sphere. We're all very rich, ladies and gentlemen. Don't worry, we're sharing. Come on by!"
Muskie boggled. "Why the hell did you do that?"
"I guess we have some explaining to do," I said.
We were in position. We were ready. The sphere rolled around.
Hoggrid didn't need a vacuum suit. He also apparently didn't need limbs. Hoggrid seemed capable of forming whatever limbs he needed and extruding them out of his encounter suit. Two powerful metal arms thrust out of his front face and inserted themselves through the gap in the square hatch of the sphere that we had successfully opened minutes earlier. The arms then rapidly spread apart from each other. Servos whined in Hoggrid's suit and the gap in the doors opened by several meters. Bright sunlight flooded into the landing platform inside the door for the first time in thousands of years.
Something inhabited the back wall of the chamber, which was easily a hundred feet on a side. It might have been a blob of black oil, or it might have been a plant, or it might have been a nest of very large black snakes. It was big, and it was moving, and it had Lopez in its clutches. My Weasard engineer was wrapped in the coils of the thing; only his facemask was visible. He was clearly making an effort not to move at all. As the doors opened, the limbs of the black exotic began to uncoil and snake towards us.
"It's photosensitive," Swami announced, floating behind the rest of the formation. "Hitting it with a really bright light might be an interesting idea."
"Don't mind if I do," said Muskie. He was carrying a two million candlepower spot that was usually used for foiling jailbreaks on prison planets. He turned the thing on and flooded the landing bay with the equivalent of full daylight on Mercury. The black thing quivered. The photosensors on Lopez's facemask went completely dark.
Gray Gretchen jetted into the bay. She was wearing a Europan battlesuit; it had been made for counterterrorism deep in the dark oceans of that Jovian moon, but as it was sometimes used on the surface of that low-atmosphere place, it turned out to be fairly functional in hard space as well. Among its tricks was amplifying one's strength. Gray Gretchen pulsed herself to stand on the inside of the room's bulkhead and found that she could stand reasonably well under the false gravity. She unlimbered a broadsword taller than she was.
I followed her onto the other side of the door. I gave the reciprocating sword a single revv.
"Hello, dirtbag," I said. "You seem to have a hold of my weasel." Gray Gretchen rolled her single eye.
Swami pulsed into the center of the room along with Muskie. Hoggrid pivoted the arms holding the door open; the rest of his bulky body rotated up and through the gap, ending with his squared-off encounter suit inside the landing back and his arms still holding the door open. They turned into claws and grabbed both leaves of the door. The servos whined again, and the door slammed shut.
The black limbs of the creature shuddered. Then they split down the middle, all of them simultaneously; each tentacle unzipped itself, and suddenly where there had been a single arm there now were two skinny ones.
"Ah," said Swami. "Sometimes interesting effects are not necessarily desirable ones."
The tentacles coiled upon themselves and sprang out, several targeting each of us while a healthy spaghetti-mass remained behind to hold Lopez captive. I found a black limb in my face; it was tipped with nothing like teeth or claws, but it was bifurcated at the end, and the fork tried to grab me like a giant picking up a mouse between thumb and forefinger. The reciprocating sword cut into the crotch between the two ends of the limb and peeled it back. That tentacle left me alone, but another one grabbed me by the ankle and hauled me across the room.
Muskie found himself quickly engulfed in writhing limbs. He managed to turn off the spotlight, throwing the room into near darkness except for the lights from our various suits, but his blaster didn't seem to have much effect. Swami, too, was overwhelmed. He remained calm, however, quietly tapping away at the monitor inside his suit as the tentacles swallowed him up.
Gray Gretchen and Hoggrid weren't going down without a fight, however. Gray Gretchen was a dervish with her broadsword; the enhanced strength from her suit enabled her to spin about repeatedly, reaping loops of tentacle with every cycle. The bits lopped off didn't seem to die, however; they attempted to form coils and continue to launch themselves at anybody who wasn't already overwhelmed. The short bits didn't seem to have the ability to form themselves into a coil with significant launching power, though, so that was something.
Hoggrid's encounter suit spawned multiple asymmetric limbs. A great grasping claw seized a handful of tubes and squeezed them, then ripped them into pieces; a slender forked tendril snaked out and delivered an electric jolt. All of this was good for mayhem and made for a nice adrenaline buzz, but it did not seem to deter the ability of the creature (creatures?) to continue to press the attack.
I decided that I wasn't so interested in killing the thing. My goal was to find Lopez and get him out of this mess. I started to hack at anything black and head in the general direction of wherever Lopez was the last time I had seen him. I felt like I was swimming through a room full of black spaghetti. The arms, when cut, didn't bleed; they were evenly black all the way through and didn't seem organic in the least. One of them grabbed my laser rifle and wrestled it away from me; I didn't mind so much as it didn't seem to be doing much of anything. I made some progress across the room, and the arms didn't wrap me up, but I didn't have much luck finding Lopez either.
The knot of tentacles holding Swami became curiously inert. Swami pulsed out of their grasp. More arms came at him, but he had some kind of an antenna raised up from his pack, and as the black members approached him, they suddenly stopped moving. Swami began sweeping across the room paralyzing any of the oily black tentacles that came near him.
"Hey," said Muskie from deep within the coils of the tentacles, "they don't like ultraviolet light much." Apparently the spotlight had some features other than making really bright visual light. Whether they liked ultraviolet or not, however, the tentacles did not seem to be letting go of Muskie.
"I have bad news," Gray Gretchen announced, grunting with exertion as she continued to lop away at the arms. "These guys seem to be able to reform themselves." Indeed, down near my feet I could see two short segments writhe over to each other and merge their ends somehow.
"KNOTS DO NOT WORK," Hoggrid announced. He had experimented with trying to wrap up strands in each other. The oily tentacles appeared to be able to untie themselves, so Hoggrid was going back to smashing things with enormous fists spontaneously extruded from his suit.
Only Swami was having anything that you could reasonably call success. He began gridding across the room, freezing tentacles in an orderly progress across the room. "Stop cutting them," he said as he approached me. "When you cut them you expose more of their surface to the ambient light."
"What the hell are you doing, anyway?" Gray Gretchen asked.
"This is a next-generation 3D printer," Swami said calmly. "It's mapping the surfaces of the tentacles and painting them with a graphite film that light can't penetrate. Without light they go inert. Interesting; their metabolism has gratifyingly just-in-time production features."
"I don't believe that any of the words you just said actually mean anything," I accused.
"No, it makes sense!" said Lopez. I could hear him spraying with the aerosol paint cans in his leg pouches.
Muskie climbed out of the grasp of the knot that Swami had paralyzed. He bathed the room in ultraviolet, making the remaining tentacles sluggish. Swami made short work of the remaining actives, and then the battle was over. We were in a frozen forest of black coral.
I peered through the maze of outstretched limbs. "This place is a dump," I said.
"We have to clear this creature out of the way somehow," said Gray Gretchen.
"Not a creature," said Swami. "A construct. A trap, if you like, planted at the door where it could be activated by incoming light when the door was opened. It's not actually alive. But you're right; we need to clear this stuff out of the way and bring _Petunia_ inside."
I grabbed Lopez and pulled him into a bearhug. "I thought I had lost you, buddy," I said, tearing up.
"I want a raise," Lopez said.
Following Swami's directions, we began a process of lopping off pieces of tentacle with Swami standing by to paint the ends. The bits we cut away were launched out into deep space. There, I felt certain, they would eventually come to plague some intelligent civilization in the far future. But, and this was the important part, not us.
"Let's save a little of that and put it in _Petunia_'s hold," I suggested. "It might come in useful later."
I boosted back out to _Petunia_ and got her lined up on the door. Lopez figured out how to get it all the way open. When the sphere came around, I got her lined up and then glided her through the doors with feet to spare. Lopez closed the doors behind us, and Muskie lit up the room. We were in.
Swami had found a console and was puttering around with it while Gray Gretchen and Hoggrid investigated several sets of doors leading out of the place. "It's actually fairly intuitive stuff," he said. "There's still an active power source somewhere, too, and the guts of it seem functional." He thought for several seconds. "I'm going to restart all of it," he said finally. "It might be risky, but we may also be able to get some atmosphere, and perhaps some communications."
"If I were the Swanturni," I said, "I'd definitely make a booby trap triggered by turning the power back on."
"And yet," Swami replied, "why would they leave the power here, and controllable, at all? Clearly they intended to return for some reason. Hence there must be a way to restart it. And you would imagine that they might have reasonable faith in the success of the one trap we've already found."
"Oh, just do it," said Muskie. "I can't stand being inside these suits for one minute longer than necessary."
Swami pushed some buttons. A screen lit up, and voices spoke. They sounded human. "That's a good sign," Swami said. "Vocal chords that act within range of our hearing. Suggests an oxygen atmosphere."
Swami pushed more buttons. Pictures came on the screen. Some of them were of bipedal beings – beings with heads and two arms and faces. They all had red hides, or red clothing. They looked a little like people who were jointed the wrong way. "Behold, finally: the Swanturni," he said, a smile lighting up his face. "The ancient and cryptic empire before ours."
"YOURS," corrected Hoggrid.
"None of ours," Gray Gretchen said. "It's not like anybody here is going to run for a prefecture office any time soon."
"Ugly cusses," I said.
"I'm getting a pretty good language sampling here," Swami said. "In a few hours I can probably have a reasonable translator going. Meanwhile, let's have some utilities." He pushed a few more buttons. Overhead a few feeble lights flickered to life. Slots opened in the walls and air began to hiss into the space, generating a little fog. Muskie read the counters on his suit display.
"The mix is a little rich in oxygen, but not toxically so," he said. "No biologicals and no chemicals at dangerous levels. Radiation is almost nothing."
"Right on!" chirped Lopez. He unclipped his facemask and breathed Pestle's air. He smiled.
"Ah," he said. "Like a fresh country day." We all opened our suits – all except Hoggrid, who continued to stand very still.
Swami was still working away at the console. "I think I have a schematic – but only of this sphere," he said. "The rest of Pestle isn't here. But… ah." Swami grinned. "We have a broadcast antenna. I think it's time to make a little trouble."
Gray Gretchen frowned. "For who?" she asked.
"For McMillan," Swami answered. "I'll explain later. Here we are…"
Swami leaned forward and spoke into a microphone:
"Attention convoy," he said. "Swami here. Massive Javanite finds in the Apex sphere. We're all very rich, ladies and gentlemen. Don't worry, we're sharing. Come on by!"
Muskie boggled. "Why the hell did you do that?"
"I guess we have some explaining to do," I said.
