“I wasn’t thinking you were crazy.”
“No? You’re wearing the kind of contemplative look people assume when they’re questioning my sanity.”
“I was only contemplating the idea of them being able to communicate with you. And also noticing that the way your hair is plastered to your head from being in your helmet makes you look very determined and captainly.”
“Captainly? Is that a word?”
“I’m studying to be a research scientist. Formulas are more important than words.”
“Don’t you have to write papers discussing your formulas?”
“I was hoping to become prestigious enough to warrant an assistant to write my papers for me.”
“I’m sure scientists fresh out of school have that happen all the time.”
“You’re damaging my delusions, Jelena.” He smiled.
“Sorry.” She raked her fingers through her sweat-plastered hair, feeling more like someone in need of a sanibox trip than a captain. “What did you mean them?”
“I’d like to hear that too,” Thor said, walking in.
“Are our guests incarcerated?” Jelena asked.
“Brody is in sickbay. I thought you wanted the others in cabins, not in the brig."
“You have a brig?” Zhou asked.
Had he been picking up his slides and missed that exchange?
“Just the lav. Cabins are fine, Thor, yes. So long as they’re out of my mind and not trying to take our new paperweight.”
Thor’s gaze shifted to the artifact.
“Zhou?” Jelena prompted, ignoring the glowy teardrop. “Them, you said?”
“Yes.” He straightened in his seat and slid the microscope toward her. “It took a while to get anything but the long-dead fossilized material, but I managed to find a live sample. On your thrust bikes, of all things. Austin swung us over so Erick could pick them up—the pirates hadn’t decided to fire at us yet at that point.”
“Live sample?” Thor asked. “There’s nothing alive in the asteroid except us. I would have sensed anything else.”
“Besides, what could survive here besides people in spaceships or spacesuits?” Jelena asked.
“An extremophile,” Zhou said.
“Pardon?” Jelena looked at Thor, but he didn’t appear any more enlightened than she.
“Would you sense bacteria?” Zhou looked back and forth between them.
“I suppose not,” Thor said. “I’ve never tried to look for anything that small.”
“Bacteria?” Jelena remembered Zhou saying something about bacteria that could survive in space, but she had a hard time believing that was true. Space was so inhospitable. No air, no anything. And ridiculously freezing temperatures, especially this far out from the suns. Even if bacteria could survive, surely he’d meant that it could survive for a couple weeks on the hull of a spaceship that had left a planet, right? Bacteria that had evolved on a hospitable planet and then hitched a ride and stayed in some kind of stasis until they reached the next hospitable planet? She couldn’t imagine how else it could work.
“Bacteria.” Zhou grinned from ear to ear and pushed the microscope closer. “Take a look.”
Jelena peered into the eyepiece, not that she had any idea what to look for. She vaguely remembered staining onion cells with Leonidas during the distance-learning biology course she’d taken when she’d been eleven. They had also dissected glowworms and sand squids, both of which she’d proclaimed disgusting. Leonidas had informed her that both were edible and that a good-sized sand squid could keep her alive for weeks if she was ever stranded on a desert planet without the necessities. She’d made the mistake of asking him to prove it and had been horrified to watch him chomp down a rubbery tentacle covered with suction cups.
You may want to focus, Thor commented into her mind. I doubt our guests will stay quiet for long. I can sense the woman—Litton is her name—scheming right now.
Thanks for the tip, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing that’s important. Jelena shifted the slide around, then froze. A little cell—a bacterium, she supposed—had come into view. It didn’t look like life, not as she would think of it, but it was moving in whatever medium Zhou had stuck it in.
“Can you see them? Aren’t they wonderful?” Zhou asked as another one swam into view. “Look at the crystalline structure. It’s unlike any bacteria I’ve seen before, certainly not like anything descended from Old Earth. And it’s the same structure in the webs. I’ve talked to Erick, and we’re hypothesizing that they might be the building blocks for that tower too.”
Jelena tapped the comm to engineering. “Erick, is that true? You saw the tower up close, and you think it’s made from the same thing as the webbing?”
“Possibly,” Erick replied. “I wasn’t able to get a sample. The pirates attacked then.”
“I’ve been calling them fossilized,” Zhou said, “but I believe they’re able to deliberately suspend themselves, perhaps sacrifice themselves is the way to say it, in order to use their bodies to clump together and create things. Clump sounds so inarticulate for what they’re doing. They’re making very orderly building blocks to engineer complex structures. That tower even has a power source. Or it had one before it was damaged. Can you imagine a single-celled organism capable of that degree of thinking and planning? They’re clearly working together, and I’m speculating that they share some kind of collective intelligence. I suppose it’s also possible that there’s a brain or a queen or something like that directing the individuals, but I don’t have any proof of that. I’m extrapolating from what’s familiar of course. Do you realize there’s nothing in my books about these bacteria? I searched my databases. Of course, I can’t access the sys-net out here, so I’ll need to double-check later, but it’s possible this is an entirely new life form that’s never been documented before.” Zhou gripped Jelena’s arm. “Do you know how exciting this is? This must be the reason Leonidas asked me to come along.”
A snort came over the comm. “Please,” Erick said. “Leonidas sent you along because he wanted to push forward a more suitable match for his daughter.”
Zhou blinked. “Match?”
“Suitor, beau, boyfriend, tender and earnest lover.”
“Yes, thank you for demonstrating your thesaurus skills, Erick,” Jelena said, shooting an exasperated look at the comm button. “It’s clear you’ll be writing your own papers instead of having an assistant do it. Now, back to work on the pulse thing, please.”
“You’re the one who commed me, you know.”
“Next time, I’ll ask for Austin.” She closed the comm.
Zhou was looking back and forth from her to Thor again, his brow creased in puzzlement. “I didn’t realize that we were in competition for Jelena’s affection,” he finally told Thor.
Thor hesitated. “We’re not.”
He spread his hand toward Jelena, as if to dismiss any claim on her.
“No, everybody knows Thor only cares about his empire and artifacts that can kill people,” she snapped, feeling stung by his rejection, even if it was a stupid time to worry about it. Why had Erick even said anything?
Thor’s face grew closed, cold.
“Zhou,” Jelena said, ignoring Thor, “you said these bacteria have a collective intelligence? What does that mean exactly? Is it like bees, and they’re smart enough to build a hive and make honey? Or is it… more?”
He couldn’t possibly be implying that the bacteria were intelligent the way people were.
Zhou looked uncomfortable under Thor’s dark glare, even if the glare was more for Jelena than for him, but he shifted toward the console, tapped a button, and brought up a holodisplay of the tower. “This is more sophisticated than a beehive. The electrical component… Well, Erick would know more, especially if he could get out and study it, but it suggests an engineering capability far beyond what any animals we’re familiar with possess.”
“Erick’s going to have trouble studying a
nything while we’re buried under boulders,” Jelena said.
“Yes, that’s unfortunate.”
“I will see if I can assist him with the pulse generator,” Thor said and walked out.
Jelena rubbed her face. “Zhou, this seems spaced, but is it possible those bacteria were trying to communicate with me? That they were what was threatening me and predicting this?” She waved toward the boulder-filled view screen.
“I wouldn’t expect that from such a simple organism, but whatever they are exactly, they evolved here, in this system. And presumably on this asteroid—or the planet that was here before it was destroyed.” Zhou frowned, his eyes growing troubled.
“What are you thinking?”
“I just had an idea. But there’s no evidence to support it. It would be speculation, nothing more.”
“I’d like to hear your speculations.”
“Would you?” He started to smile but glanced through the hatchway in the direction Thor had gone. “I… let me consider this one a little longer. I’d also like to hear Erick’s thoughts on the purpose of the tower.”
“I’d have to comm him again for that. I’m not sure that’s good for my irritation level right now.”
“Perhaps with a little prodding, he can be kept to the pertinent topic.”
“Like an electrical prod? I wouldn’t mind applying that to his butt.” Jelena tapped the comm. “Are you still there, Erick?”
Clangs came over the open channel. “Yes, have you realized you can’t brainstorm without me?”
“Not exactly. I know you weren’t able to scrape any samples from that tower, but do you have any speculations as to what it was built for?”
“Oh, sure. That’s easy. It’s a radio transmitter.”
Zhou’s eyebrows rose thoughtfully.
“Is it… transmitting now?” Jelena asked.
“No, it’s damaged, as you saw.”
“But you think it was transmitting before then?”
“I have no way to know, but I found footage of the surface of the asteroid from our fly in and can confirm that the antenna extends up through the rock and pokes out. It’s very subtle and easy to miss, but it’s there, and the tip does look like a transmitter. It would be interesting to see if I could figure out how to get it operable.”
“Where would it be transmitting to?”
“I couldn’t tell from that little bit of footage, but it did seem to be pointing out into the galaxy rather than back into the system. I thought that odd. Who would you talk to out there? Unless it’s like SteadyFour Station, where it’s just about research and having a big dish pointed out into space to transmit hellos and listen for signs of life out there.”
Jelena stood up, leaning both hands on her console. She felt the urge to go somewhere and do something useful—it wasn’t as if she could fly anywhere now—but she didn’t know what it would be. Check on the pulse generator creation? Check on their guests? She eyed the artifact. Find a place to hide that thing? Not that she could hide it effectively when every Starseer within a thousand miles could sense it.
“This is so fascinating,” Zhou whispered. He was bent over his microscope again.
“Maybe you can come back with a special team to study everything further,” Jelena said, wanting nothing more than to escape. They’d done what they had come to do. This mystery should be for someone else to solve. A team full of Zhous.
An alarm went off next to Jelena’s hand, and she jerked back, thinking she’d bumped something. No, it came from the shield controls. The shields couldn’t already be depleted from holding off the boulders, surely. She had expected to have far more time to experiment with escape methods, but a small holodisplay came up, showing the percentage of power remaining. Seventy-nine percent.
“Uh, Jelena?” Erick asked over the comm.
“Yes?”
“We have a problem.”
“I’m staring at it. What’s going on with the shields?” As she watched, the gauge ticked down to seventy-eight.
“They were stable, but now they’re being drained more quickly. It just started.”
“Drained by what?”
“I don’t know.”
Chapter 19
Jelena checked the sensors. What was draining power from the shields so rapidly? The instruments couldn’t detect much through all the rock, but energy did seem to be coming from an external source. The pirate ship? It was still there, trapped in the tunnel, but she was reading…
“It’s that damned tower,” she growled.
Erick was spaced. It was generating far more than radio waves.
“That tower is a magnificent representation of something an alien intelligence created,” Zhou said.
“Erick, that pulse thingie?” Jelena asked over the comm. “Now would be the time to deploy it.”
“Thingie?” Erick protested.
“Sorry I don’t have your vocabulary. I think we need to destroy the tower as well as the rocks.”
“Destroy it?” Zhou stared at her.
“Before it destroys us.”
“But it may be all that’s left of an ancient alien civilization.”
“They’re bacteria. That’s what you called them.”
“Intelligent bacteria.”
Yeah, intelligent and mean.
Jelena eyed the shield power. It was down to seventy-four now. She thought of all those images flashing into her mind. Threats, indeed. Maybe if they’d gotten out faster, they wouldn’t be in this situation now, but everyone had wanted that stupid artifact, and now the same thing was going to happen to them as had happened to the Starseers five hundred years ago. Unless they could blow their way out of here first.
She sat on the edge of her seat, pushing the microscope aside so she could reach the blazer controls. The Snapper had been buried facing that tower, so she would have to fire the rear weapons to have a shot at cutting through to the tunnel.
“Jelena.” Zhou frowned sternly at her poised hand.
“What do you think happens when the shields fail, Zhou? Something got in and gnawed those Starseers down to the bones. Was that your intelligent bacteria?”
“I’m not sure how they would have gotten through the hull and aboard the ship.”
“They were there, trust me.” Jelena thought of the cobwebs that had adorned the passages in that old ship, the cobwebs Zhou said were made from the dead bacteria.
“Maybe someone brought a sample on board, and they multiplied.”
“Well, I’m glad nobody here was dumb enough to do that.” She gave a frustrated and pointed look to the microscope, abruptly imagining those squiggly dots on his slides multiplying and turning into flesh-eating bacteria that had been waiting five centuries for a good meal.
“I’m not dumb,” Zhou said, his shoulders slumping. “We needed a sample to know what we were dealing with.”
She took a deep breath. “I know. I’m sorry. I know you’re smart. A lot smarter than I am. I’m just frustrated that I let us get trapped like this when there were signs all along that we shouldn’t come in here at all.” She shot the artifact a scathing look. Was Thor even now fantasizing about using it to amass an army? He’d have to get them out of here first, if he was going to do that.
I’m prepared to throw all my power into an escape attempt as soon as you’re ready, he informed her. He sounded almost as hurt as Zhou. I’m sure the others will work with me. If they want to live. Brody is waking now.
Alarm flashed through Jelena. Already? Would he retaliate against Masika? Should she tell Kiyoko to keep Brody under, or would they need him to get out?
It would be good to have his assistance. Thor’s admission sounded very reluctant. I will warn him that if he strikes against Masika or you or anyone on the ship, I will use the artifact to kill him.
Jelena didn’t like the idea of him making such threats, but Zhou spoke again before she could tell Thor that.
“I do understand,” Zhou said, “but I don’t think des
troying a civilization is the answer.”
“Now it’s a civilization?”
“If we were dealing with some cute, furry animals that had proven intelligent and were attacking us, I doubt you would be fantasizing about destroying them.”
“All I’m fantasizing about is getting out of here.”
“Still, you’d try to talk to animals.”
“Yes, but these aren’t animals. Thor can’t sense them, and I—”
Jelena’s thoughts tumbled to a stop. Could she sense them? If these bacteria were what had been threatening her, was it possible that she could reach out and share images with them? Even communicate with them? If so, how did one communicate with bacteria? Would they even want to talk to her? Just because they’d been threatening her didn’t mean they were open to a chat. If they’d killed the other Starseers, that might mean they considered humans nothing more than invaders to be destroyed.
“Maybe I could try,” she said quietly. What could it hurt? She looked at Zhou. “How do I…”
“You’re asking me about Starseer telepathy?”
“Well, can you tell where the highest concentration of them would be? Is it at that tower, or is that just something they built and left? Where are they?” She thought of Austin’s electromagnetic readings.
The shield alarm beeped again. Sixty-nine percent. She couldn’t expend much time on this effort.
“The sensors aren’t designed to read such small life unfortunately, though maybe I can re-calibrate them…” Zhou stepped past her to peer at the display. “Maybe try the area by the tower while I tinker with this? I may need Erick’s help.”
Jelena didn’t want to distract Erick from building that pulse generator.
“I’ll check around the shields. I don’t know if that’s them or some weapon they’ve made, but…” She shrugged, closed her eyes, and reached out as she usually did when trying to sense life.
That involved lowering the barriers she had erected around her mind, and as soon as she did, the itching sensation returned to her brain. She clenched her fists to keep from grabbing at her scalp, and this time, instead of curling up in the mental equivalent of a ball, she tried to open herself to the intrusion.