Neal Asher: The Engineer Reconditioned

“Ninety-eight percent frozen water inside. The rest is carbon compounds and trace elements.” Abaron refused to acknowledge Chapra’s grin. Touch consoles, screens and holographic displays surrounded them in the central processing room. The specialised AI-linked computers that collated information, from the isolation chamber and from the ship’s skin of sensors, worked silently, but there seemed a hum of power in the air.

“Should I be smug, do you think, and point out the obvious?” asked Chapra, spinning around on her swivel chair.

Abaron finally looked at her and snapped, “I wouldn’t call what you said a serious scientific prediction.” Chapra pouted at him, which made him even angrier. He thumped his fingers over his touch console, calling up displays of information. He did not turn when Chapra rolled her chair up beside him.

“A hundred years time you might get just as bored,” she said. Abaron paused and turned to glare at her, but she was gazing back at the holographic display above her console. “Ah, here,” she said, and rolled her chair back across. He quickly followed.

Above the console now hovered a holographic representation of the sphere. Beside it information in the form of graphs, bio’ equations, and Standard English scrolled up too fast for Abaron to read. Chapra picked up an interlink transmitter from her side table — the device looked like a polished ball bearing —

swept back her hair to expose an interface plug behind her ear, and plugged in.

“Outer shell is a polycarbon fabric, superconductive up to seven hundred degrees Celsius.” As she said this, the outer layer melted away to reveal a honeycomb structure. “The inner layer is again of polycarbon, but with interleaved calcite and calcium formations. It would appear to be structural only.” She looked at Abaron. “The shell.” She grinned.

Abaron ignored her. He watched as the inner shell fled, and tried to tell himself his fearful fascination was scientific curiosity.

“Water,” said Chapra. “Loaded with organic impurities the most common of which is this.” Using her console she projected a red circle on the sphere’s surface, then expanded it to infinity, zooming in on that point to reveal a complex helical structure. It was crystalline at first, but grew to reveal individual atoms. The display spread; the structure filling the entire room and fading beyond it.

“DNA,” said Abaron.

“Not quite,” Chapra told him. “It’s trihelical and has some very complicated protein structures wound in there as well.”

Abaron was now too fascinated to be annoyed. He called up information from his console, limiting it to his screen. This just does not happen to me , he thought. Major events always occurred light years from where he happened to be at any one time. Great discoveries were always on the other side of the Polity, Separatist outrages a hundred worlds away.

“Damn close,” he eventually said. “Bloody damned close.”

“To what?” Chapra enquired kindly.

“To the theoretical models.” Abaron looked at her sharply, but she had turned away. He watched her banish the large hologram and return the display to the revealed sphere of ice. She sat back, relinquishing control to the AI again.

“There’s an anomaly with the water here,” she said. “The nominal temperature of the sphere is fifty Kelvin, which is low enough for the water ices to have become complex ices, yet they have not changed. I would say that certain free proteins in the ice have stabilized it. We need to have a long hard look at that… Let’s cut to the chase now shall we?”

The AI responded by excising the water ices to show the shape at the heart of the sphere. It was a creature: coiled like an embryo, reptilian. There was a tail there, finned, something like a head, strange triangular-section tentacles folded against a long ribbed body, and an arm easily recognisable as such, but ending in a hand with tens of long twiglike fingers. Chapra drew in a sharp breath. Abaron swore.

“It’s an egg,” he said, a species of dull dread in his voice.

“I think not,” said Chapra in an abrupt reversal.

Something close to the creature, held under its long fingers, the AI picked out in bright red then projected to one side and expanded. It was a structure of folded tubes and unidentifiable components. They watched in silence as the AI took it apart, expanding sections, then further dismantling them. Equations blurred past at the bottom of the projection.

“Well?” Abaron eventually asked.

“I expected this to be an artefact, something manufactured. That would go some way to disprove the egg theory.” Chapra regarded him. “But, as we are both well aware, when technology reaches a certain level its artefacts are often indistinguishable from life.”

“Then it could still be an egg?” he asked, sensing a victory, if a somewhat Pyrrhic one.

“Oh no, the creature is adult. This is probably an escape pod of some kind.”

“The creature —” began Abaron, hardly daring to ask.

Chapra finished for him. “ — is in stasis.”

Abaron licked his lips. He’d come out here to study the few micro-organic motes the Box trawled up. This was his ultimate wet dream: the discovery of an alien life form, possibly sentient, and wholly weird. He didn’t know whether to be ecstatic or terrified.

“Do you think we’ll be allowed to revive it?” he asked.

“We’ll probably be instructed to do so. This is not a question of xenology but one of morality. We have rescued this creature and now we are responsible for its well-being.”

“There’s a lot of work to do.”

“There is. We’ll have to reproduce its optimum environment and sources of nourishment, and those are only the first steps. Reviving it without killing is not going to be easy. Then there’s communication… ”

“Can we be certain it’s sentient?”

“At the moment nothing is certain. But what would an animal be doing in an escape pod?”

“It might just be a disgusting killer,” said Abaron, making an awkward attempt at humour.

“Quite,” said Chapra. She did not laugh. She waved her hand, and the AI consigned the holographic model back to its memory.

The isolation chamber was fifty metres across, circular, the ceiling and floor flat grey ceramal. There was frost on every surface. Padded clamps, like cupped hands, held the sphere at the precise centre of chamber: two metres from the floor and two metres from the ceiling. Chapra and Abaron, clad in carbon sixty coldsuits, paced around it in the usual point seven-five gees of the ship. To one side squatted a Physical Study and Research robot, telefactored from the ship’s AI. The PSR was a nightmare of chrome, glass, and dull ceramal. There was something insectile about it. It bore the appearance of a giant chrome cockroach stood upright. But a cockroach never had so many arms and legs. Abaron felt nervous around the thing, even though he had been using such devices all his adult life. It was just the knowledge that in a few seconds it could strip him down to his component organs, muscles, and bones. And if that was not horror enough, it could put him back together again to complete his screaming. He shuddered.

“The cold isn’t getting through your suit is it?” asked Chapra.

“No. Are we going to get on with this?”

“Not entirely up to us. This is a command decision.”

Abaron felt a dull humming from the floor, then the clamps folded back and abruptly withdrew into the floor, leaving the sphere floating in place.

“Gravplate suspension,” observed Chapra. “We’d best get back.” As they got out of the way the PSR moved in and embraced the sphere. It reached in with U-sound cutting appendage then, like a scarabid beetle working its ball of dung, revolved the sphere. With a high-pitched whining the cutter scribed a line around the sphere’s circumference. This complete, it grasped above and below the line with its many limbs, twisted the two hemispheres in opposite directions. At first these screeched like seized bearings, but soon began to move more freely. Then in a fog of ice powder, the PSR separated them from the inner skin Abaron had earlier seen in the computer model, and put them aside. Now the machine cut again, this time following the hexagons in the honeycomb. When it finally reached into the cuts with hundreds of spatulate limbs, and levered them apart, this final outer shell opened off the central ball of ice in four parts, like the petals of a flower. Then after putting these aside the PSR really got to work.