Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“I can kill anything except my bills,” Achmed growled. “Let’s go do it.”

“I say so long as I don’t face no thirty meters of morphing worm, let’s get the stuff that’s just lying there and get out of here,” Sark added. “The little ones, they got to burn.”

Cross joined them. “I just can’t be no grasshopper, sittin’ on a farm workin’ fixin’ some guy’s milking machines,” she said, “or flyin’ over pissing pesticides. Let’s do it. I’ll yank your shit-ugly necks out in time if I have to.”

Nagel sighed. “Well, that makes Doc’s and my votes unnecessary. So let’s get to work, see what we’re dealing with here, and I’ll start running scenarios through the computer. Luckily the greenhouses are of only two types, both known prefabs, so it’s going to be easy to create a deconstruct model. The wicked part’s going to be getting the smelter in place to turn that cliff into a lava flow.”

Queson nodded. “And I’ll coordinate with the ship. We’re going to need a much more exhaustive ground survey extending down as far as our instruments allow. We’ve got to know how far that sea extends under the complex, and beyond, and where any weak points to it might be other than the cave in the cliffs.”

In the meantime, Cross flew in over the complex and dropped a dozen or so ferrets, small robots no larger than a man’s fist that nonetheless had a great deal of instrumentation as well as continuously broadcasting cameras and the ability to both hide when need be and move up walls and even along ceilings in most cases. They’d been used in the initial surveys and found nothing, but now they were not so much hunting as guarding, simply searching for signs of any sort of life. If they found none, they took up positions between the cliff complex and the greenhouse area where work would be done in order to insure that nothing at all snuck up on anyone or anything working there.

Queson suspected that the creatures only reacted to organic life, which was why neither the initial ferret survey nor their own walk into the complex had triggered any alien actions. It was only when they were stomping around in the control room, looking down at the mother thing or whatever it was, that the thing had become aware of them even through their suits. If that really was the case, and it wasn’t simply noise that did it, then they might get lucky and trap the whole thing inside the cliffs.

The only thing that worried her was the inability of the orbital survey equipment to get a good sense of where that sea began and ended. The lay of the land wasn’t conducive to accurate underground mapping; something was throwing off the information. There were some indications, though, that the sea extended very deep down under much of the complex, and that, in fact, it was the reason why the colony was here at all.

“It’s very deep down,” she explained, “particularly out this way. It could be a vast complex of flooded caverns hundreds of meters down below this very hard rock. That would mean that we’re talking maybe not being able to pen that thing in there.”

Nagel looked at the readouts and nodded. “If these holding tanks are filtered by this system under the greenhouses rather than from a central supply, those things could ooze out of every faucet—at least, if they could get through all the twists and turns.” He paused. “No, I’d say not, though. To open the valves in the filtration setup is going to require power. So long as we keep ’em powered down, it shouldn’t be possible for anything to get up through there. It’s designed to purify the water and keep the crud out. I’d say our friend qualifies as crud. Power would be required to bypass the system. Otherwise, forget it.”

She nodded. “I hope you’re right. I don’t see any faults or openings through the rock there that would allow another route.”

They worked through the better part of a day getting their settings right, running simulations, making sure that this operation was as safe and as feasible as it could be made to be.

Another worry was that it was going to take a lot of power they could ill afford to use to get the smelter in the right position and then to use it at full power for as long as it would take. If nothing went wrong, there would be enough to do the whole job and still get it back and into operation for what it was intended to do. The tricky part of that was the phrase, “If nothing went wrong…”

Both of them could find a thousand ways things could go wrong, but, using what they knew, the vast majority of computer simulations showed that everything would work out quite nicely.

“There’s nothing left to do but to do it,” Jerry Nagel said at last.

Lying on the plain was the complete salvage complex, detached from the mother ship and then landed and anchored on the surface. It was basically a rectangular structure but with the front and back ends tapered outward, and its length was divided into three sections by a series of inverted U-shaped structures that at first glance seemed built into the rectangle but which were actually simply attached to it. The shuttle sat in a cradle at the front end, just beyond one of the “U” structures, providing both an independent on and off system and a primary control for the entire thing when it took to the air or space. For ground salvage work, though, each of the parts as it deployed had its own independent control cabin as well. It was where everything was housed, including the crew, and where all the work of salvage was based.

Achmed moved into the control seat of the central structure and strapped himself in. Normally the job of the Smelting Section was entirely automated, but in this case they felt that someone had to be there, to take manual control if need be. The computers were smart, but they hadn’t been programmed nor tested for this kind of thing. The smelter was not intended to move any great distance, just to be able to move beyond the salvage modules so it could exercise its great heat and power without risking anything else. Now it was expected to go a very long distance, then rise not to fit into a structure but to hover independently while it did its work.

The robotics would be relied upon for the needed precision, but it had been decided that it would be easier for Achmed to handle the operation directly than to try and explain it to the computer in such a way that there were no slips. All of the cliffside complex had to be sealed, yet not enough to dissolve sufficient base rock to burn through into the caverns below.

Once the job was done, all survey equipment would be directed into determining the firmness of the seal. Once that was done, smoldering lava or not, the other units would be coming in to begin salvage work on the greenhouses, starting with the farthest ones out. That at least should be doable entirely by remote control and, after the first one was completely done, by robotic control, but this equipment was never to be depended on a hundred percent. It was always best to have a human being overseeing the thing, ready to take over for the unforeseen.

Randi Queson had seen pictures of earlier days, the state of the art in this, when master engineers were fitted with direct implant jacks and could be plugged into machines like this and become one with the machines for these operations. Although some of the military ships had them even now, the operations to implant the jacks required sophisticated surgical machines that needed constant maintenance and upkeep due to the incredibly tiny tolerances required. The expertise and technology needed had been held close to the vest by the old System Combine and the specialized guilds who each guarded their programs.

Another major part of human knowledge lost for the most part, the few jacks left kept going by cannibalizing others that had failed for parts. She wasn’t at all sure it was a big loss, not like a lot of the other stuff, and many others agreed with her. We’ve had to give up our metamorphosis into machines and learn to become human again, she thought.