Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“Everybody back! Now! ” An Li ordered. “The captain has issued a full abort! Lucky, drop the hunt and cover Achmed. Get that smelter and all of you back to the ground base. Ain’t no way we’re gonna salvage anything except maybe our lives here.”

Randi Queson looked at the heat shadow that came in and out on the board, twisting and turning, sometimes too faint to make out, other times very clear if amorphous in shape, and it was very clear that the thing was trying to figure out how the hell to get to the base and her. Only the fact that they’d feared that the weight of the base would break through the crust and so chosen a solid basalt outcrop for the anchor site, and the fact that the creature couldn’t stand that weather out there unprotected any more than they could, were saving them.

But what if you had the brains of a thousand or more colonists and their collective knowledge of everything from geology to conventional biology to use? It— they— would figure something out. She knew it.

“Screw the smelter!” she yelled. “Pick up Achmed from the cab and get back here now! Otherwise it’s going to be here waiting for you!”

“Belay that!” An Li cut in. “There’s no way we can make up for the loss of the smelter. You come up here without it, we won’t be here. Understood?”

“You mercenary bitch! Next time you’re comin’ down!” Queson said, disgust competing with fear as her dominant emotion.

“It’s all about money, honey,” An Li replied. “Always was.”

“Calm down, ladies!” Achmed called. “I’ll be home as quickly as I can! Nothing’s going to get up here to me, so relax! And I don’t think that the Big Bad Worm can undermine the base. It may be the fastest learner in the universe, but it’s pretty soft and at least as much water as we are. Not to worry! Allah is merciful! He will protect me!”

“Allah pays as much attention to you as you do to Him,” Nagel responded. “Just get your big smelter over there and show us you can mate!”

“Jerry, I think we all ought to switch to a private frequency,” Cross commented. “If this thing can listen, let’s put its ears out! Randi! Li! Achmed! Listen up! Private fourteen, full digicode! Got that?”

“Wait!” Queson called. “How do I do that here?”

“Fourteen full, aye!” Achmed responded, and the whole communications system went very, very dead.

Queson looked around for something, anything, to order a change, and nothing was obvious.

She looked up at the main display. The thing was almost engulfing the plateau, but so far below that it still registered only as a faint shadow. On the other hand, the three dots, no longer color coded, showed up quite close to the base now and proceeding towards it on the ground. They’d minimized their energy signatures to a remarkable degree, but this close in they couldn’t hide from the scanners any more.

They didn’t have to.

She was all alone, and about five minutes from possibly having the worst kind of visitors.

Randi Queson was never more frightened in her life than at this moment. At the same point when they’d all switched frequencies without telling her how to do it back at the base, she was getting the distinct impression of being surrounded by what was surely an alien intelligence of tremendous malicious potential.

She frantically tried to figure out the frequency shift. It would be easy to just scan for the active ones if this were a conventional switch, but this was a security switch to an encrypted and secure channel that wouldn’t even show up on any monitors even as gibberish. That required more knowledge of this master control board than she had, simply because she’d never had to do it before and nobody had thought to teach it to her.

She was always “out there” in these operations; Cross or occasionally Sark or Achmed would handle this.

She tried opening all the common frequencies, thinking that surely An Li above would have them scanned, but instead of the silence she expected she got ear-splitting screeches that forced her to cut the audio. For a second she was confused as to what the sounds were, and then it hit her: the standard frequencies were being jammed! Damn! This thing, whatever it was, was one quick learner. Must be nice to eat your education instead of having to work at it.

She looked back up at the area scan visual and saw that all three small dots were now stopped at the bottom of the base, a bit spread out, as if assessing the situation and figuring out how the heck to get in. She knew that the security seals were locked down, but she couldn’t underestimate this new intelligence.

Even as she frantically looked for loopholes in the defense perimeter and decided to check out a couple of hand weapons from the locker outside she also felt a sense of regret that what was possibly the first human contact with an alien mind was in this sort of situation. She would love to have a conversation with it, learn something about it, see if some kind of equilibrium could be reached, but she also knew, deep down, that it would have no percentage in doing that. If it got to her it would simply absorb her and all that she was would become a part of it. If it couldn’t reach her, then there was really no percentage in it talking at all, except, perhaps, to deceive.

It was smart enough to do everything else, she thought. Why not some good old human trickery?

She looked at the board and saw that Achmed and the smelter were almost halfway back, shadowed by the shuttle. Whatever this alien was going to do, it would have to do it in the next fifteen or twenty minutes or it would be too late. The smelter would dock from the top, affording Achmed access through the top hatch that otherwise was sealed, since there was no other use for it, and the shuttle would settle in its cradle and lock down, activating the forward lock. Theoretically, she was sealed in and totally protected.

Theoretically.

She went to the locker in the ward room and pulled a long-burst disintegration rifle and a wide-mode sidearm. Theoretically, either one would be sufficient to vaporize any of these things.

She retreated back into the command and control center and shut the door.

Every door on the base unit was a total seal, so that even the unexpected, fires and floods and who knew what else, could be isolated. The C and C was particularly well protected, since it could control the entire unit if the shuttle wasn’t mated. It even had its own bathroom, food unit, and water supply. The only point now open to the outside, via its own separate channels, was the air supply, and she quickly switched it to self-contained and heard the rebreather apparatus come on. It could recirculate things for weeks if need be, and she only needed a quarter of an hour.

Now she had to wait, rifle in her lap, to see if the rest of the team could get back before the alien or aliens figured out a good move.

In the meantime, the control center suddenly started feeling like a cold, silent, and lonely tomb, an office in the City of the Dead.

Curse you, you bastards! You didn’t all have to go on that junket and leave me here all alone!

The tracking board indicated that the smelter was well on the way, covered by the shuttle, but there was no longer any sign of the three non-company spacesuited figures. That meant that they were somewhere close, probably at the base camp, trying to figure out a way in. They wouldn’t find the cracks or vents that they’d used to ooze into the colony, not here. Anything like that would have meant that the base couldn’t have withstood space and the descent. The air vents would be the only way in, and those were up top and pretty well exposed for the shuttle’s guns to take out. Cross would know to just blow away anything up there, unless, of course, the damned things were already up and inside before Cross was close enough to act.