Rayguns Over Texas

  “They’re probably like those moving rocks in Earth’s Death Valley,” Palacios said, looking up from the controls. “That’s the result of wind or ice. The remotes tracked some of these buggers moving a few meters a year — enough that there’s a small chance they could be life forms.”

  “If that’s the case, SeleMine’s got to pay for impact studies,” Xiu said. “Hell, they may even need to figure out how to negotiate drilling rights.”

  “Negotiate with rocks?” Kirby shook his head. “Good luck with that.”

  Noor crossed her arms. “So if your pet rock is intelligent life, does that make us kidnappers?”

  Palacios looked up, visibly annoyed that the discussion had distracted her from her work.

  “We’ve never encountered intelligent life out here,” she said. “And the air on the planet is such a toxic soup that there’s almost no chance of any evolving.”

  “The company’s covering its bases,” Xiu said. “It’s a mission for the lawyers.”

  The laser pulsed inside the atmospheric chamber, filling the room with its ghostly green glow.

  #

  On the bridge, Noor slipped into her chair and lit up her control array. A picture of her brother, Amir, and his wife smiled up from the desktop screen. Between them sat the two young children that Noor had never met.

  She’d last seen her brother in flesh--not just as ones and zeros in a holoconference--at his wedding. At the feast, he had urged her to come back home, to give up deep space for a job shuttle jockeying to Mars and back.

  “Money blows away like sand,” he’d said, quoting one of their father’s favorite parables. “Family is a solid rock.”

  She pulled up the Carpathia’s coordinates, and a three-dimensional model of the star system spun to life in the navigation globe. The ship had broken out of the planet’s atmosphere. A flashing downward arrow icon signaled that artificial gravity had kicked in.

  “Back to the station in six days,” Xiu said from the bridge entryway. He carried a mug of steaming tea in each hand.

  “Looks like it.” Noor scanned the route data and Xiu slid a mug in front of her.

  “Black Oolong. Tell me what you think. Way better than the ersatz stuff we had in the mess last time out.”

  “It’ll be Eid in two hours,” she said, touching the cover of the Quran that she kept by her workstation. “Then I’d be happy to try it.”

  “Still fasting?” Xiu shook his head. “I don’t think sunup and sundown mean much out here.”

  Noor sighed. “It’s almost over. I don’t suppose we’ve got a feast waiting in the mess at midnight? Lamb biryani maybe?”

  “I’m sorry we pulled you away from family time.” Xiu blew steam from his tea and sipped. “It’s just that when SeleMine waves eighty grand--”

  Palacios’ face flickered onto the view screen.

  “Captain, I need you down in the science bay.” Her brow wrinkled in concern. “I think you need to see what our specimen just did.”

  #

  Metal tools clattered under Noor’s boots as she and Xiu entered the lab. Its floor was strewn with medical instruments, measuring tools, and a myriad of other gadgets that she couldn’t identify.

  A dozen metal storage drawers lay scattered at the base of the atmospheric chamber, bent and misshapen. Their slots on the opposite wall smiled back, empty.

  The worn, brown stone sat in the bottom of the tube, unmoved from when she’d last seen it.

  Palacios swept an arm around the room. “I went to my cabin for a few minutes and came back to this mess.”

  Kirby picked up a dented drawer.

  “Our specimen did this?” he asked. “How?”

  “It’s magnetic.” Palacios cocked her head toward the atmospheric chamber. “The sample that I lasered off contained iron oxide, nickel, zinc. All stuff you’d expect to find in ferrites, in magnets.”

  “And it pulled the drawers out of the goddamned wall.” Xiu shook his head.

  “Why didn’t it stick to the bottom of the Atmoscarrier?” Noor asked. Palacios had slid the stone into the science bay tube with ease.

  “Been thinking about that,” Palacios said. “My nearest guess is that the rock is only magnetic when it releases some kind of energy burst. Stone can store energy, so it stands to reason it can also release it spontaneously.”

  “So it becomes an electromagnet,” Xiu said.

  “Exactly,” Palacios said. “A powerful electromagnet. Probably explains how they move around the planet surface.”

  “Any danger to our memory storage?” Xiu pointed upward to the bridge.

  “The Carpathia’s old, but this isn’t the Dark Ages,” Palacios said. “Our systems are pulse shielded.”

  “Screw the memory,” Kirby said. “This whole ship’s metal. If this rock--or whatever it is--can send drawers flying across the room, who’s to say it won’t do worse next time? Like pull the rotors out of the engines.”

  Noor eyed scalpels and sharp-tipped probes amid the mess. Palacios’ departure had been well timed. She’d narrowly missed a skewering.

  “I don’t think it’s big enough to generate a charge of that magnitude,” Palacios said. “Just the same, I’ll pull together some supplies and build a Faraday cage to contain it.”

  “Fara-what?” Noor asked.

  “Faraday,” Kirby said. “It’s an enclosure of conducting material. Blocks out electrical fields.”

  “Or, in this case, seals them in,” Palacios said. “I can solder one together in a few hours using the scan mesh from our chemical analyzer.”

  “Alright then.” Xiu clapped his hands. “Let’s clean up so that our pet rock doesn’t turn this place into a whirling hall of knives.”

  #

  Noor leaned against the back of a chair in the mess, waiting for the Cuisinier to dispense her bowl of lamb korma. Her stomach grumbled in anticipation.

  The korma seemed like the most celebratory offering that the machine had to offer. Somehow, it felt wrong starting off Eid with miso soup or buckwheat fettuccine.

  She reminded herself to record a video greeting to her brother and piggyback it onto the next transmission back to the station.

  It would arrive late, but he’d understand. He always had.

  The Cuisinier’s door slid open and Noor extracted her order. The steaming contents of the white plastic bowl wafted up, rich and spicy, but she was hard pressed to spot the advertised lamb in the golden-hued sauce.

  She carried it to the table, sat cross-legged, and shoveled a spoonful into her mouth. Its warmth felt good in her belly. Fast long enough and even ship food becomes tasty.

  Kirby entered. He walked to the fridge and extracted a beer.

  “You think that thing in the science bay is alive?” he asked, popping the can.

  “I’m not sure.” Noor wiped the corner of her mouth with a finger.

  “I don’t think any of us--not even our science officer--can make that call.” Kirby sucked down a long pull of the beer and shook his head. “Given our rookie status wrangling ETs, I don’t think we should be messing with it.”

  “SeleMine wouldn’t have thrown us this mission if they thought we were dealing with intelligent life. We’re a glorified tug with a science lab.”

  “Maybe, but that thing makes me nervous. Who knows what it could do to our engines, to the hull, while Palacios sits in her cabin tinkering with the Faraday cage.”

  Noor swallowed another mouthful of korma. She shrugged.

  “Pulling a few drawers out of the wall is different from compromising the engines,” she said.

  “If it’s alive, maybe it was just messing with our heads,” Kirby said. He emptied the beer and hurled it into the recycling tube. “Maybe next time, it does something worse
.”

  #

  A crash, metal on metal, jarred Noor awake. She pulled on her jumpsuit and stumbled into the hall.

  Kirby and the captain stood in their open cabin doors.

  “Science bay?” Kirby, shirtless, blinked his eyes as they adjusted to the hall lights. “That where it came from?”

  “Sounded closer,” Xiu said. “This deck, I think.”

  The captain pounded on Palacios’ door. “You in there?”

  No response.

  “You think she went down to the lab?” Noor asked, rubbing sleep from her eyes. She took a few steps toward the ladder well to the lower deck.

  “At 3 a.m.?” Xiu pounded the door again and got no response.

  The captain slid his entry card into the panel. The door hissed open and he stumbled back; his jaw hung open like someone had punched him in the stomach.

  “Jesus,” Kirby said.

  Noor jogged toward them. Xiu extended an arm to keep her away.

  “You don’t want to see,” he said.

  She pushed past.

  He’d been right. Palacios’ severed head lay on the floor, beside her desk, in a spreading pool of blood.

  Her decapitated body slumped in the chair, a pen-sized soldering torch still clutched in one hand. Strips of silver mesh--the unfinished Faraday cage--scattered the desktop.

  The steel panel from the room’s air-conditioning duct lay detached behind the corpse--a makeshift, but perfectly lethal, guillotine.

  #

  “I found these on the floor beside Palacios,” Kirby said, rolling four long, metal screws onto the mess table. “They’re not broken or stripped. Your goddamned pet rock, captain, was smart enough to unscrew that panel. And it had enough control to drop it with deadly force. It needs to go. Now.”

  “It’s hazardous cargo,” Xiu acknowledged. “But we’ve also got a contract to fulfill. I messaged SeleMine about our situation and demanded an expedited response.”

  “‘Expedited’ can’t come fast enough.” Kirby pounded the table. “That thing understands how the Carpathia is put together and it can direct magnetic energy like telekinesis. It’s going to tear this ship--and us--to shreds while we wait.”

  Noor’s eyes fell on the mess shelves, loaded with metal cutlery. She shivered.

  “We wait an hour, and if there’s no response, it goes out the airlock,” Xiu said. “But we need to show that we at least asked for guidance. We get sued, I’m the one who loses the ship.”

  Xiu’s arguments always possessed a cold logic, the mathematics of credits and contracts. That’s how he’d convinced Noor to forgo her vacation.

  Not this time.

  She stood and walked to the door.

  “You could lose a ship, but we all stand to lose our lives,” she said. “I’m getting rid of the rock. If you’ve got a problem, cut me out of the contract.”

  She tramped toward the science bay. Two sets of footsteps echoed behind her.

  “I can also have the station guard cuff you for mutiny when we land,” Xiu called.

  Noor ignored the threat and threw open the equipment locker. She ripped the lid from a plastic detergent bucket and dumped its contents.

  Kirby appeared behind her. He grabbed a plastic-and-foam mop and swung it, apparently testing its heft as a weapon.

  “If SeleMine comes after my ship--” the captain began.

  “This is about covering all our asses, not just yours.” Noor said.

  The captain exhaled. He yanked a rubber mallet from its wall bracket. “Let’s do this then.”

  Noor opened the science bay’s sliding door and the three entered. They circled the atmospheric tube in silence, improvised weapons at the ready.

  The rock inside lay still, innocuous--seeming as when she’d first seen it in the Atmoscarrier.

  She scanned the room for unsecured metal and saw none.

  An icy worm of fear wriggled at the base of her spine. She wondered if their captive could tear off fragments of the deck and launch them like shrapnel.

  Kirby gestured toward the robot arm of the laser cutter. “Why don’t we carve up the bastard?”

  “You know how to use that thing?” Noor asked. “I don’t think we have time to pull up the tutorial on the ship computer.”

  Xiu squatted by the tube’s access panel. He punched a code into its keypad.

  “I’m evacuating the gaseous contents through the exhaust port,” he said. “We open the door now, it’s lethal.”

  Noor nodded and crept up beside the captain. She readied the plastic bucket. Kirby extended the mop, his knuckles white around the handle.

  “As soon as we get this thing in the bucket, we run for the starboard airlock,” Xiu said. “Get rid of it before it sets off another charge.”

  “What if it sticks to the airlock?” Noor asked.

  “Then we pray like saints that it’s not stronger than the vacuum.” He poised a finger over the control panel. “Ready?”

  Kirby nodded.

  Noor gnawed her lip, waiting for the rock’s defense mechanisms to kick in. The bucket was slick in her perspiring hand.

  Xiu mashed the code into the key panel and the door slid back without a sound.

  Kirby thrust the mop into the opening and hooked the rock. He yanked backward and it tumbled into the bottom of Noor’s waiting bucket.

  “Got it,” she said, snapping on the lid.

  She fastened the seal and ran for the door. The footsteps of the other two rattled the deck behind her.

  Noor made it halfway down the hall when a scream echoed behind her. Xiu.

  She spun. The science bay door had pinned the captain across his chest. His right arm and head extended into the hall, and a grimace of agony contorted his face.

  Kirby, frantic, jammed a finger at the door’s control panel.

  Noor took a halting step toward them. The bucket in her hand suddenly seemed like it had taken on weight, tugging downward.

  “Get it out the airlock!” Kirby shouted.

  He slammed the panel with the heel of his palm. Xiu groaned and his head rocked back. Blood slicked his bared teeth.

  Noor sprinted around the corner.

  She hung the bucket’s plastic handle over her elbow and punched in the airlock’s entry code. The thick steel door hissed, starting its slow slide open.

  “Come on!” she yelled. The handle dug hard against the crease in her arm. She pushed her shoulder to the door and tried to speed it along.

  Glass shattered behind her.

  She instinctively twisted to the side and metal slammed the hull where she’d just stood.

  A dented red fire extinguisher rattled to the floor, gushing foam. A fan of glass lay on the ground in front of its empty case.

  Realizing the door had opened just wide enough, Noor hurled the bucket into the waiting airlock.

  She mashed the red “Evacuate” control with her shaking hand. Klaxons rang through the hall. The inside door reversed its path and slid closed.

  Through the interior door’s window, she saw the bucket laying capsized, lid peeled away. The rock sat two feet away.

  Did the lid come off when she’d thrown it? Or had the rock freed itself?

  Noor’s heart thundered in her chest as she waited for the exterior doors to open. She gritted her teeth, bracing for another salvo of flying metal.

  Finally, a narrow band of black showed between the parting doors. The bucket and lid shot across the chamber, splintering as they sucked through the too-narrow opening.

  But the rock adhered, even as the doors yawned wider.

  Of course it would. It wouldn’t give up that easy. What if it just stuck there, tearing panels from the exterior hull as if peeling an orange
?

  Noor beat the “Evacuate” button with the back of her fist.

  “Just go,” she pleaded with the thing. “Stop killing us and go.”

  It clung defiantly, hanging for what could have been ten seconds or a lifetime.

  The lock opened further, frosting the edges of the interior door’s window.

  “Go,” she said again.

  The rock slid backward, perhaps a few inches, then a foot.

  It skittered the rest of the way across the deck and out the open lock, disappearing into the void.

  “Allahu Akbar,” Noor said.

  She closed the outside door and slid to the deck, shaken and spent.

  A single set of footsteps sounded behind her. Kirby joined her in the hallway. Blood soaked his tunic.

  “Xiu?” she asked.

  Kirby shook his head.

  #

  Noor and Kirby trudged silently onto the bridge. The view screen flashed the arrival of a transmitted message. Its origination read “SeleMine Prevention and Loss Dept.”

  She fought the urge to hurl something at the screen. The captain and Palacios were dead. She didn’t need permission for what she’d done. She owed no explanation.

  “Christ,” Kirby said, leaning over the captain’s control panel. The glowing instruments bathed his face with splashes of red and blue. “That can’t be.”

  Noor’s stomach sank. “What now?”

  “The engines have been idling all night. Our little friend was powerful enough to mess with the counter-rotors.”

  He punched at the controls and cursed. “I can’t get them to fire. Says we need to switch them off and do a manual restart.”

  Noor slunk into her chair and pulled up their trajectory. In the navigation globe, the Carpathia’s icon glided toward the upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere.

  #

  The planet’s rocky surface came into excruciating focus on the view screen as the ship plummeted. The heart-clenching descent vibrated the hull, as if it could pull apart any second.

  Noor yanked backward on the yoke, clenching her teeth. Like the computer controls, it was useless to stop their free fall.