Edward Lee: Mangled Meat

But another thing we found a lot of were what could be categorized in earth terms as insectas : hexapods, anthropods—aquatic and terrestrial—anything with an exoskeleton. And a lot of them were pretty big.

Ever seen a cockroach the size of a 55-gallon drum? Ever seen a moth the size of a bald eagle? We’d get so much stuff like that—alien insecta phylas—that you wouldn’t believe it. For an entomologist, it was exciting as hell.

For about a month.

Then it all got to be the same. When the exploratory surveys started, there was this idealistic hope that someday one of the missions would find mammalian life, would even find something akin to the human species. But that never happened.

All we found were bugs.

Big bugs. Insects that had evolved for millions or even billions of years and had genetically adapted a physical size that could accommodate longevity. Heavily shelled creatures that could withstand hostile environments, drastic fluctuations in atmospheric pressure and content, neutrino and meteoric showers and volcanic debris.

Big bugs. Big bugs with hard shells. That’s pretty much what the rest of the galaxy had waiting for mankind to discover.

So that was my job.

As the mission’s decortication tech, I had to take two samples of each sex of any insecta we discovered. One sample I’d cryo immediately. The other sample I’d autopsy if the creature’s size was deemed by the OAC as practical. Some of these things had three of four sexes. And a lot of them were huge.

I had to establish the most effective way to decorticate the insect while still alive. In other words, I had to cut off its hull, shell, carapace, exoskeleton, or whatever, and autopsy the bug while digigraphing the entire procedure for the Academy’s archives.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. How hard can it be to cut the shell off a bug?

Space bugs? It’s a bitch. See, I gotta do it without destroying the bug. You don’t use scissors. You don’t use a knife—not for this job. You don’t pin the goddamn thing to a board. Some of these things are as big a man, bigger. If you try to open ‘em with an ectine torch, all you’ll do it fry the damn thing. And if you fry it, the OAC logs that into your service file as a demerit.

You should see some of the shit that these bugs got inside of them. Black slop, brown slop, green slop. Slimy organs whose purpose you couldn’t even guess at. Hell, one time I decorticated an octopod from P31 on the Ryan Cluster—I cut the sheath off the groinal trap and this thing had something that looked just like a human cock! No lie! This thing didn’t have an ovidpositur—it had a dick!

So, anyway, that’s my ten-year gig. Decorticating bugs.

I never would’ve imagined that, one day, I’d be ordered to decorticate something else.

It was the MADAM that picked it up first—that’s Mass-Activated-Detection-Alarm-Mechanism. It’s a souped-up spheric-pulse radar, picks up anything in the scan field that the OAC calculates can’t be organically or naturally formed.

We’d just hypervelled through the Zuby System, using grids piped to us from the Hubble 6 matrix, and we weren’t thrusting through this white-dwarf system for more than an hour before the MADAM went off. The OAC called General Quarters, and all we could do then was wait. Wait for the tri-wave scans to bounce back to the sensor-slats and tell us what was out there.

The OAC told us this:

:-mADAM cOORDINATES vIA hOME pLATFORM aS zERO: sEVEN-sIX-tHREE dEGREES sIX mINUTES oN mENISCUS cHART. pROBABLITY cOMPUTATIONS iNDICATE nINE-nINE-pERCENT lIKELIHOOD oF eXTRATERRESTRIAL vEHICLE oF hIGHER tECHNOLOGY dERIVATION tHAN iS pREVIOUSLY iNDEXED-:

I’d been sitting in the chow hall, eating gengineered monkfish-steak when that call came through. The Army grunts were scrambled, and thrusted out on a retrieval skiff in less time that than it takes to fill your piss bag. About an hour later, they were redocking and asking for ingress countercodes. The OAC passed them through, and that’s when I was ordered to r-dock.

You’re still wondering what this has to do with me shitting my EUDs, right? Well, I’m getting to that. I’m standing on the lock-rails in r-dock when the grunts bring the victor in and tack it down to the stulls. They close the dock door but wisely don’t represh; we all keep our CVC helmets on with defoggers set on high. This victor—vehicle—looked stunning, a perfect crescent with no seams, no doors, no visual outlets or propulsion vents, no indiction even of a gravity-amplification node.

Just a thirty-meter-wide crescent, a giant boomerang.

The laze scales put the thing in at just under two-hundred pounds. Something that big? It should’ve weighed at least a couple of tons. Which meant that whatever unknown element it was made of had very little weight, very little photon mass. It was at the least a kick to have the grunts following my orders. Federal Military didn’t like it when civilians told them what to do. But I was the expert here, at least the best that this mission could provide. My expertise involved cutting bugs open. Therefore I was the best candidate to cut open an alien vehicle.

“Pop this can,” one of the field privates muttered, wide-eyed behind his glexan visor. “Crack it open.”

“Do it,” SSG Yung said.

“What do you think I’m going to do? Play paddycakes with it?” I strapped on the force harness, then closed the chuck on the Black & Decker neutron drill; the treated black-phosphorus bit would make a million-and-a-half cycles per minute but it wouldn’t get hot. No heat conduction, no sparks. “And if this doesn’t work, I’ll try the nuclear spanner.” I raised the massive drill on its waist-bracket, then planted my nanoboots on the floorwall and pressed the bit against the victor’s hull.

“Hardcore,” someone said.

“Last chance to evac, guys,” I reminded them. I winked at SSG Yung.

“Just rev that fuckin’ thing up and go!” Yung yelled.

Suit yourself. I toggled down the charge lever, flipped open the safety. Just as I was about to hit the power detent—

“Wait a minute!” a platoon Spec 4 shouted. He was standing on the other side of the victor, running a hand-held photon-activation-analysis scan on the hull.

“What?” I said, the drill harness weighing down on my hips.

“You ain’t gonna believe this…but I’ve got double-pozz poroscopy on the hull, and residual chloride ions.”

“ Bull shit!” I practically spat into my mic.

“I shit you not, man,” the Spec replied. “Ain’t nothing else this could be.”

It’s got to be a mistake, I thought, but I unstrapped the drill anyway.

“What the fuck are you fuckin’ talkin’ about?” Yung complained. “Chloride what? ’

“Chloride ions,” I said. “It’s part of a typical sebaceous amino acid secretion, unless that OAC’s glitching. Your man just found a fingerprint on the hull.”

Yung’s eyes opened as wide as a condenser slug behind his visor. “The fuck?”

“It looks overlayed a bunch’a times,” the Spec 4 observed, focusing the p/a/a screen. I checked it out myself and he was right.

“No ridge patterns,” I said more to myself than to him. “The pore pattern’s relatively intact, but that’s it. Then it looks like…”

“A smear?” the Spec ventured.

“Yeah, I think so. Digigraph it a couple of times and save the files in the OAC,” I said. Then I turned to SSG Yung, who still didn’t get it.

“Someone or some thing touched this victor, Sergeant Yung. And whoever touched it, touched it repeatedly in the same place.”