Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“I’ve got primary melting at seventy-five percent,” Achmed announced. “White hot around the edges but nothing major. I’m going to hold at this, both to save power and to allow it to spread as an even flow. Surface rock temperature is at fourteen hundred thirty-four degrees Celsius. That’s a rather nice temperature for a nice, slow magma flow.”

“We’ve got flickering on the lights,” Cross reported. “I think we’re into the cliffside interconnects.”

“Yeah, well, that central worm can drop down into the sea below, and it’s got some offspring running around looking and acting just like us,” Queson warned them. “We’re not out of this yet!”

“We’ve got the laser cannon on manual and are covering,” Jerry Nagel’s voice came in. “We’re open wide, maximum heat at a three meter square spread. I—”

At that moment, the audio from all sources suddenly began blasting out very bizarre sounds that were stepping on and breaking up everybody else.

“What the shit is that ?” An Li managed through the direct to ship link that was the only one not affected.

“It’s—it’s music! ” Randi responded, confused and amazed. “Some kind of Hindu or Buddhist chanting against some exotic instruments.”

“Damn! That’s one smart worm! Can you get through to the shuttle or Achmed at all? This link’s only good to the base where you are unless the shuttle activates its emergency communicator, and I suspect that’s not a good option with all the other power, particularly weapons, on. Damn! ”

Queson set the intercom on full scan. It scanned tens of thousands of frequencies in the blink of an eye, but it just kept locking on different south Asian music or eerie, rhythmic chants.

“It’s got a repertoire, but no signals ground-to-ground are getting around the jamming,” she reported. “I’m getting video, but no audio, but I suspect that’s the next thing to jam. Lucky’s got her keyboard active but either it’s being jammed, too, or she’s really rusty actually typing out anything. It’s mostly garbage.”

“How’re your keyboard skills?” An wanted to know.

“Rusty, but competent.”

“Pull it out and send, ‘Do you want to abort?’ That gives her a yes or no. She should be able to manage that.”

Queson turned and found the release and brought out the keyboard. It was a last-ditch antique transmitting on an equally ancient frequency, but it was often the only way to get through in high-interference regions.

The screen responded, “N. I thr trblnhyt=”

“No trouble. Your keyboarding is awful. Stick to yes or no.” Clearly Lucky was typing with a finger while trying to check on a dozen other things at once and going off the keys without realizing it.

The smelter was doing its job on the rocks, but it wasn’t at all clear that the solution was working. Magma wasn’t something that could easily be predicted or controlled, and the models were based on standard assumptions. The fact was that, at this point, the whole face of the cliff was melting like some surreal painting, and the base of the complex where it connected to the first row of greenhouses was heavily engulfed in billowing smoke. The four connected directly into the cliff were on fire, even though they were nominally fireproof.

“Ha! Let anything try and get out of there now!” Achmed cried in triumph. “Powering down, still have thirty-one percent, more than enough to get back and mate with the main unit. There is no question that the linkages are sealed!”

The main board in front of Randi started going wild. She looked up at the displays, but so much was going on at once she could barely make sense of it. Small dots, small units or something, were outside the greenhouses but well away from the action. Two—no, three small blips. Yellow… red… green… Why?

Suddenly she realized that the colored blips had numbers in them. They were e-suits, powered up and therefore registering on the universal transponder frequency. Red, yellow, green…

Suddenly the vision of the partially decomposed suits came into her mind. Yellow, red, green… They were using the suits to move about outside and away from the fire!

“Lucky, you’d better cover down there! Three things in powered suits heading out and away from the complex! They could be coming my way!” she warned.

“Huh!” the pilot responded, surprised. She hadn’t really seen these things in action. “I’ll be damned! Think we can shoot ’em?”

“Fire will take them out, or full power disintegration,” Queson told her.

“Yeah, but those suits can take a lot of shit. Stand by! I’m going to swing around and see if I can spot the little buggers.”

“Watch it!” Li cautioned from above. “If they have power in those suits then they have short-term weapons!”

“Ah, c’mon! They’re fuckin’ worms, aren’t they?” Cross came back.

“Worms that can figure out what the suits are for, operate them, and, more important, worms that have figured out how to recharge the batteries in the past day or so!” Queson reminded her. “And if they can do that, then you better damned well figure they can shoot.”

“Well, I’ll keep the hatches closed. Nothing they would have could penetrate the shuttle,” the pilot responded, a bit chastened. “I think we can put a few energy bolts down there where they’ll do the most good!”

Queson looked at the board. Something else was going, too, something that was only readable by a faint yet enormous heat signature.

They’d awakened the big one, the one wrapped around the power core! The sucker had oozed down into that underground sea and was now moving around the molten area. The ground was so thick and the interference from the greenhouses and the smelter operations so prevalent that only the size of the thing made it obvious that it was more than an intermittent anomaly.

“The mother creature is free in the water,” she reported. “I think it’s coming my way. What the hell do I do?”

At almost the same moment, Cross called, “Where the fuck are the little bastards? I don’t have them on visual at all!”

“Try the emergency transponder frequencies! They show up here!”

And, at just about two seconds after she said it, they suddenly vanished from her board.

“What? Where?”

“Damn it! They’re listening to us! ” Queson almost screamed.

How was that possible? How could such a creature, however smart, learn enough of their language to understand it? Or to power up and operate all those complex gadgets, including knowing just how to turn the emergency beacon off? Hell, even these colonists hadn’t spoken the language the crew of the Stanley was using!

“Good God!” she swore, almost as if speaking to herself. “I think those things absorb the knowledge, the intellect, of the people they ingest! They’ve got the collective knowledge of every colonist who lived down there!”

“Oh, c’mon! That’s impossible! ” Nagel put in. “Anything that adaptable and that smart wouldn’t be sleeping wrapped around a radiation core!”

But that was exactly what it might do, several of them realized at once. All that collective knowledge couldn’t get them out of this hole. All it could do was frustrate a smart entity or entities, now knowing all the wonders of the universe out there but being unable to get to it. It would make sense to put the power on minimum, use it as an alternate energy source, and then just go to sleep, hibernate, dreaming great dreams of potential conquest, waiting, waiting for somebody, from somewhere, to stumble over this outpost of Hell and give it a ride to the stars.

This wasn’t something they were prepared for, nor something they could deal with. There was only one course they could follow, and they all knew it.