Time for that periodic disclaimer: I don't own these guys, but I sure do love them. ;) Thanks for coming along. Thunderbird Shadow, Akimakel, Creative Girl, Bow Echo and Whirl Girl, I very much appreciate your helpful comments and valuable insights. Will respond with alacrity. Have to go out to lunch with my clamouring son, first! =)
27
Traversing the vast space inside of a slowly awakening alien death-ship:
"We've got trouble," Virgil had told them.
Faced by a huge, dimly pulsing crystal, surrounded by snaking cables as large as the new Channel Tunnel, flying for his life, Scott risked a look back and sideways. Got just a fleeting impression, because he didn't have time to stare, but what he saw made his gut clench.
First, their entrance had vanished. There were no more gaps in that thumping and slamming neutronium wall. No portals or passages big enough to fly through. Second, the massive block-and-pillar surfaces behind them were no longer solid structures. They had been divided repeatedly by flares of branching white energy, forming what looked like a canyon wall of awakening nanites. 'Oh, sh*t,' just didn't seem adequate.
"It's them," Virgil murmured. "The whole frickin' ship is made out of nanites!"
John nodded, adding a few new terms to his on-the-fly shield equations, thinking: landslide, dust-storm and robotic locust swarm.
"There's no central intelligence," Kane informed them, after scanning the vessel's cyber traffic. "No computer core. Each part adds to the swarm's programmed behaviour."
"So... no big red button to press, no handy self-destruct sequence, and no 'hive queen' to take out," said Scott, cutting toward a relatively stable, floating box-thing. The size of a warehouse, their potential landing-site appeared to be made of the same dark metal as everything else, in there. "It's all or nothing."
Once again, his astronaut brother nodded, saying,
"I'm sorry you came with me, Scott… everyone. Figured this was kind of a one-way trip, and…" he shrugged, not wanting to say: I was planning to kamikaze this bastard, alone.
The Mechanic barked something close to a laugh.
"Unless you're one h*ll of a pilot, John Tracy, you wouldn't have been able to fly and handle shields, both."
Cocking a red-golden eyebrow, John boasted,
"I am one h*ll of a pilot. Scott thinks he's better, but he's wrong. Jet fumes on the elderly brain, is all."
"True," put in Virgil, grinning boyishly. "But I'm better than both of you put together; anytime, name your conditions, whatever you want to fly… and I'll prove it, once we're back home."
"Challenge accepted," grunted Scott, cutting his air speed through that fog of poisonous gas, and lining up with the huge metal 'box'. There were no markings or evident doors, but it was the target of sweeping energy bursts from the nearby power crystal. Had to be important. About once a minute, the whole thing was bathed in violet-white lightning. "Think that stuff's dangerous?" he wondered aloud.
Virgil snorted.
"Seriously, Boss-man? What in here isn't?" he demanded.
"It's communication," said Cody, coming part-way out of his working trance. "This is a sort of starter, left just awake enough to track distance. Earth was targeted over three-thousand years ago, after the derelict's last cleansing job. I'm not an astronomer, but it looks like the ship was last active somewhere in the constellation Orion. This 'starter' is what's triggered the metamorphosis."
"Good place to set a gravity bomb, then," Kane decided. "If your pet A.I. can keep the system from realizing we don't belong here, and Beech makes all the luck go our way, this could work."
"Doing my best," said Cody, smiling faintly. He was having to harvest their pod-ship's structural damage, along with the chaotic billowing of that nerve gas atmosphere, just to have some entropy to work with. The ancient ship had been too well-designed for easy manipulation.
Scott kept on flying. Weaving past giant, serpentine power cables, slicing through that thin, toxic 'air', he brought them close to the starter, extended his landing gear, then eased his way straight down. Settled in very gently, as there was no sense disturbing anything's beauty rest.
The surface vibrated slightly, like the deck of a GDF cloud-carrier. That enormous, 4D crystal hung before them like a rotating, self-swallowing moon; eerie to look at, and slowly brightening. Gravity changed constantly this close to the thing, making tethers a vital necessity.
"We're going to have to stay together," said John, "If we want to keep everyone shielded. My projector's only got so much range."
"Works for me," shrugged Scott. "I hate waiting in the car."
The poet in him was stirred by his incredible surroundings, the pilot by their challenging task… but the rest of Scott Tracy just wanted to make it back home to his folks and his woman. Wished he'd sent her a message, after all.
Feeling various things, (and hiding them well) the five young men gathered at their pod-ship's port bulkhead; spacesuits on, generator packed and ready to go. Kane gestured, and the hull simply irised open before them because, hey… who needed an airlock, with the Mechanic along? A boarding ramp formed, too, as jumping or climbing in shifting gravity fields was not recommended.
Jaeger's red gleam followed them out of the ship, reinforcing their pearly blue force bubble. Scott and John went first, followed by Virgil and Kane with the mass-transfer generator, and then Cody Beech, who drifted along like a sleep-walker.
Together, they made their way down-ramp; stepping carefully against waves of varying gravity that one moment crushed at them, the next sent them hurtling up against tight-straining tethers. Their shadows shrank and grew with the crystal's pulses. Sometimes, they cast more than one shade, in odd colours and orientations. Seemed as if 4D sourced light came from weird angles, or something.
The surface hummed through their boot soles like the sound of wasps and the feel of a mild electrical shock, whenever both feet were planted. You got used to it. Meanwhile, those sweeping energy waves didn't hurt, exactly. They filled your head with too much distance, age and hatred to grasp, eroding at purpose and plan.
The young men moved across the starter like ants on a boulder, as those vast, impossibly distant dark walls continued to break up, forming seething tides of nanites. Scott led the way, about thirty yards out from their pod-ship.
"Right here," he said to Virgil, and the Mechanic. Then, "John, you're the one who knows what you did to this contraption. You're up, Little Brother."
Kane and Virgil had managed not to drop or lose that alternately super-heavy, then weightless generator. Now, they eased it down on the starter's buzzing metallic surface. Stepping back a few paces, the cyborg caused screws to bud out of its casing. Another sharp gesture caused them to lengthen, then drill their way into the stuff of the landing site.
Beech caught and diverted the entropy, Jaeger stifled alarm signals, and John programmed like mad; his sea-green eyes never leaving that virtual keypad. The thin, poisoned atmosphere didn't carry much sound… machines had no need for such… but all five young men could hear a deep, intermittent thumping noise from below. The starter's countdown clock, probably.
"Time's almost up," the Mechanic remarked, as an opening began to form in one of those far-distant walls; just an unzipping river of light, that soon yawned like the Grand Canyon. Vertical, though. The noise produced was that of a hundred miles of crackling cellophane and shattering glass.
"Understood," said John, reaching for Brains' proverbial big red button. "It's on a three-minute timer, or else you guys can go back to the ship, and I'll…"
"Shut up, Dumbass," said Virgil, giving his red-haired brother a rough, affectionate shove. "That's not how we do things. You know that."
"However you 'do things', it needs to be now, Virgil Tracy," rumbled Kane. "Listen. The countdown has stopped."
So, taking a deep breath, John pressed the button that switched on their altered generator. At the same time, those seething, particulate walls burst forth in an endless, tornadic storm of nanites, completely inundating the starter, the pod-ship, and one tiny bubble of swirling blue force. Everything vanished in a roaring hurricane of ravenous dust.
From out there in Thunderbird 3, meanwhile, wide-eyed and worried, Alan whispered,
"Oh, crap…!"