Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

Still, at this time, for this kind of operation, she wouldn’t have minded being able to use those jacks just for this.

“Power at point nine nine nine forever percent,” Achmed reported. “Clock on, tied to power reserve. Detaching unit aft.”

The inverted U of dull blue-gray coloration came to life and there was a series of chunk! chunk! chunk! sounds as the connecting pieces detached and slid back into their recesses. A light on the tiny cab centered atop the structure flashed yellow, and the two side lights flashed red and green as the section slowly lifted off the main structure and then turned, cleared it, and lowered itself to only a few meters off the ground.

“Moving out. Lucky, you coming?”

“I’ll wait a few minutes,” the shuttle pilot responded. “You’ll be a while getting that thing over there, and I don’t feel like waiting around in this crud.”

“Fair enough. Punched in, navigation is on automatic. Ride is steady. Some slight buffeting by the winds at the cab level, but nothing that isn’t being compensated for. Estimated arrival time at current very slow speed is sixteen minutes.”

“Hell, I’m gonna take a crap and I’ll still beat you there. Hold off at least one klick out, though. We don’t want any of them things gettin’ ideas.”

“Never let me stand in the way of a woman going to the bathroom! Go, in more ways than one!”

Queson was no pilot nor, even less, a salvage center controller, but she drew the chair at the center control room while everybody else would be away. Achmed would be operating the smelter unit, Jerry and Sark would be backup on the shuttle, and Cross would be flying. That left the anthropologist/geologist, the latter a field she’d added late in life because it was actually marketable, to monitor everything. In one way it was the best seat in the house; her monitoring screens showed every lens view, every ferret, the cabin view from Achmed’s lofty perch, the fore and aft shuttle views, the surrounding security perimeter established around Salvage One, as well as the maps, monitors of lifesigns, and just about everything else. It was, in fact, too much information; while it was useful to the master computer and the ship above, in most cases she had to pick a view and stick with it. She knew that if anything unusual showed up, the system would automatically switch to that view.

She felt the whole complex shudder and then there was a big banging sound for a moment. The shuttle was away.

“Overview of target complex,” she said, and the whole thing, as photographed from high above, came on the screen. “Show infrared and lifesigns.”

The reactor showed as a nice, steady glow, but there seemed to be nothing else of note within the structure. “Active overview,” she commanded.

Now she could see the smelter unit, represented by a simulation but looking probably as real as a current picture, with Achmed’s small lifesign at the top, and the shuttle closing in on it rapidly, three dots showing inside it.

“Li? You on?”

“Yes, Doc, I’m here. What’s the problem? You’re the only one down there who can sit this one out.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I sure don’t envy any of them being out there. I dunno. Maybe it’s just what almost happened to me there, maybe it’s my anthropologist’s self saying that we’re trying to seal off the first apparently intelligent creature we’ve met out here, maybe it’s a hundred things. Mostly, though, I just feel like we’re underestimating this thing. If nothing else, it’s going to take several minutes to heat up that rock so that it becomes useful. Those things were fast . I don’t like not knowing about those caverns below, too. Too many unknowns.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what the face of poverty will do for you. Take risks. The bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff, too.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

The shuttle now did a slow flyover of the cliffside above the complex, and checked the openings and interconnects to the first rows of greenhouses in the complex. They, of course, would have to be sacrificed to the rock seal as well. It wasn’t what they wanted to do, but it was necessary.

“Twenty-six, move forward to interconnect with the cliffs and hold on the ceiling,” Queson ordered, and the ferret moved with lightning speed down the last big warehouse and into the interconnect. “Pan.”

This was the area where they’d emerged, the one with the only bodies left on the planet as far as could be determined.

“Hold it! Lock onto the floor and pan.”

“What’s the problem, Randi?” An Li asked.

“Take a look. Bones, some remnants, dumped out and all over. Those are the bodies, but where are the e-suits?”

“Huh? Even if they took the suits, why didn’t they consume the remains?” An Li asked, even as she confirmed the video.

“I have no idea. I don’t know what the hell we’re dealing with at this point,” she responded. “Queson to shuttle. Watch out below. They’ve dumped out the e-suits, which means that they’re wearing them.”

“ What? Hey! Everybody hear that?”

“I don’t believe it,” Achmed responded. “They’re just animals. You just went down the wrong corridor. At any rate, I’ll melt their slimy little asses in a few more minutes and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Suddenly all sorts of alarms went off on the main board, causing Queson to almost jump out of her seat. She looked around frantically, silenced them, then sought what had triggered them. It wasn’t hard to figure out.

“What the hell…?” Lucky Cross said, amazed.

The reactor was clearly being powered up inside the cliffs, and, eerily, like some kind of ghostly march, one by one, row by row, the lights and general power in each of the greenhouses was coming on.

“Animals my ass!” Queson called to him. “Damn it, it knows how to work the control center! It’s powering up! Stay above your targets by a fair distance! It knows you’re there and it’s moving to try and stop you from doing whatever you’re doing. It may not have figured us out yet, but it sure as hell knows we’re up to something nasty for it!”

“I am in position, power at ninety point two percent!” Achmed called to them. “Clear?”

“All ferrets back to safety distances, shuttle in hover mode well over you, Achmed!” Randi Queson told him. “Do it! Do it now, before that thing figures out a way to stop it!”

“Engaging on target at forty percent power,” Achmed responded coolly. “Going up five percent per minute.”

Queson looked away from the general view and to the monitors showing the ferret views from just inside the safety circle, as close as they could safely risk to the smelter’s actions.

“Fifty percent. Surface rock going into the red, six hundred degrees surface at the mark. Mark! Fifty-five percent. Seven hundred degrees, accelerating nicely.”

Two distinct and large patches of something came out of the entry tube and into the now well-lit greenhouse. They looked like large two-meter-by-half-a-meter puddles of water to Queson, only they were moving, moving under their own power somehow, and leaving no wet trail behind.

She watched, even as Achmed’s status report came through the audio, and a much more precise account of its progress was being posted on a parallel screen.

The two things, whatever they were, came up to where some of those eerie, empty clothes were lying and they flowed right into them. It was as if some sort of invisible balloon inside them suddenly inflated, and now those clothes were once again inhabited, this time by living sculptures in that translucent watery material. A man and a woman, so detailed that it was as if they were reincarnated on the spot. They actually looked at one another, nodded, then got up on two legs inside their work shoes and walked over to the door. The male took a pair of utility goggles from the tools hanging on the wall and put them on quite like anyone else would, then pressed the door latch which, with power restored, at least for a short while, slid back. “He” stuck his head outside, carefully looking back up towards the cliffs, then withdrew back inside, took off the goggles, and closed the door. The pair were so humanlike in every movement that they actually looked, well, if not angry then certainly pissed off, yet there was an air of puzzlement, too, like they were trying to figure out what the hell to do about things.