Zach Hughes - Mother Lode

She had forgotten her loneliness. She had her work. She had very good company. Mop was not demanding. He fed and watered himself by pushing on his Mop buttons at his station. He had been trained to use an ingenious little pad in the exercise room that broke his body wastes down into recyclable liquids immediately and pulled the smells in behind them. He didn't talk a lot. In fact, except for that meaningful grunt which said, «Please, Erin, rub my belly,» he'd been silent since his disturbed howling had chilled Erin. On the opposite side of the orbital ring of debris she jockeyed Mother down onto a flat surface, stabilized the tumble, put out the extractor arm, and began to load ore that was the richest she'd seen since the first day. The detectors were humming merrily about gold and she was humming a little song that had been rewritten with some rather ribald lyrics by the junior officers aboard Rimfire. She was just about ready to knock off for the day when there was a clear tone, a vibrant, piercing tone that jerked her to attention. She stopped the movement of the arm and focused a viewer on the biter at the end. The vibrant, piercing tone of alert continued to sing in her ears. She saw something a bit lighter in color than the gold bearing rock, reached back to kill the foreign object alert, turned on a powerful light, lowered the viewer until its nozzle almost touched the biter at the end of the extractor arm. «Woah,» she whispered. All around her was the vacuum of space, the coldness and emptiness, the uncaring, glaring stars. The nearest planet, a bit larger than New Earth, was a chemical swamp with surface temperatures hot enough to ignite paper, if there'd been any oxygen in the poisonous atmosphere. Nearer the sun were the two cinder planets, lifeless rock baked by the solar storms. Far away, out past the chemical swamp planet, was a frozen, airless ball of ice. And at the tip of the excavator arm, still half encased in the matrix rock, was a fossilized skull, a skull that looked up at her with dark, eyeless sockets, a skull that had to be incredibly ancient, and was very damned definitely humanoid. Man had been twice in space. A very few had soared upward from Old Earth on the fire of primitive chemical rockets. Centuries later man had broken the bounds of planetary gravity once more, this time with the help of old Billy Bob Blink's invention that made star travel less dangerous and much less time-consuming. Man had been in space for the second time for thousands of years and in all that time he had encountered intelligence only in the mutated forms of life that had survived the Destruction of Old Earth. He had found evidence of alien intelligence, but the aliens were all dead—the residents of the Dead Worlds and the two races who clung together in a clasp of death as galaxies collided in Cygnus. The decades of work on Old Earth since the reunion had taught man much about himself. From her classes at the Academy Erin knew that life on Old Earth had begun millions of years in the past, but that man, himself, was a relative newcomer. The humanoid skull staring up at her with its blank, dark eyes was as old or older than the anthropoid remains that had been discovered in fossil form on Old Earth since the reunion. Here, then, was evidence of another manlike race. Whether or not the skull represented intelligence she could not guess, but she knew that X&A scientists would consider it to be of more importance than the gold and gold ore she had stowed in Mother's bins. She moved the extractor arm slightly. The skull was still attached to the matrix rock. «Well, damn,» she said. Mop looked up questioningly. «I can't believe I'm going to do this,» she said. Mop followed her to the air lock and watched anxiously as she worked her way into a suit. «Sorry, fella, this trip isn't for you,» she said. She took the dog to the control room, closed the door behind her, felt panic for one moment not because she was scared, but because if anything happened to her out there, Mop would be left all alone to punch out his food and water until it was all gone and then— «Oh, damn,» she moaned, as she closed the helmet and sucked air. «Oh, shit,» she said, as the inner hatch closed and a pump whined as it evacuated air from the lock. «Balls,» she whispered, as the outer hatch opened and she stared out into the big empty. CHAPTER FOUR She felt stiff and heavy as she stepped out of the hatch onto the ship's ladder. She could never get enough oxygen into her lungs while she was imprisoned inside a flexsuit. The feeling of being slowly suffocated was psychological, for the air mixture in the suit was richer than that aboard ship. She halted for a moment before turning around to adjust the tool kit strapped to her back. The hatch started to close behind her. She did not hear it, of course, but she felt the slight vibration of its movement coming up through her boots. She turned and was mesmerized as the opening narrowed. When the crack closed and the hatch snugged itself into its seal, she felt panic. What if? What if the hatch lock didn't respond to her instructions when she was ready to go back into the ship? She had only a few hours of air. With the oxygen gone, she would never decay. She would be held on the surface of the asteroid by the field of the ship's generator until, perhaps years from now, the generator used up its full charge and cooled. Would she then drift away from the rock to tumble free in her own eternal orbit around an alien sun? She had performed extravehicular work before, but never alone. There had been times when teams of crewmen in suits had swarmed over the outside hide of Rimfire to check her condition, but each man had been teamed with another. Every spacer who had faced the void knew the devastating effect of looking at the big empty through an impossibly frail faceplate from the doubtful security of a flexsuit. It was S.O.P. to never, never, send a man outside the ship without a buddy. There near the core, with legions, hoards, multitudes of brilliant stars surrounding her, she felt more isolated than she had felt while space walking in the nothingness outside the galaxy when she had to look in one direction to see the misty mass of the Milky Way, when there was nothing but blankness on three sides. She was dwarfed. She felt as if she were being infinitely diminished. She turned and with a shaking hand punched the entry combination into the lock. The hatch began to open. She took a deep breath and let it out, canceled the open order, turned her face up toward the viewport in the control room. She saw the shaggy face of Mop. His sharp nose and alert eyes followed her movement as she climbed down the ladder. She waved and said, «Hold the fort, buddy. I'll be back before you know it.» The Mother Lode was in harsh sunlight. The surface of the asteroid was not level so that the ship seemed to be tilted. From the inside the lopsided stance had not mattered, since the reference for the senses was the ship's own gravity which made her deck down regardless of her position. Standing outside, the breath of the nuclear furnace that was the nearest star raising the temperature on the surface of her suit, Erin felt momentary dizziness as she looked up at Mother. She took a deep breath. The hiss of air was loud inside her helmet. On all sides around her the shattered remnants of a world kept pace, most of them tumbling slowly. She was in the middle of an eerie sea of motion made up of the glaring, brutal, unfiltered sunlight reflecting off sunward planes and angles and the absolute blackness of space that was echoed on the dark sides of the asteroids. And over and under and to all sides were the cold, many-faceted faces of the core star fields. In the shadow of the ship the suit's coolers changed tone as their function was reversed to heating. The light attached to her helmet came on automatically. She pointed it by moving her head, approached the extraction arm, stepped down into the trench.Читать дальше