Edge of the Wire, page 4
As members of the Situational Response Force—which was only a small squad—Rowe and Waverly had other, more pressing responsibilities.
With only a few formalities and goodbyes, they set off from the lander with a detachment of eight other Silkworms toward the stranded, dead ESA Marie Curie. Because it was only half the size of the Apollinax or the Halifax (which meant that it was still unfathomably enormous), the Marie Curie used no landing craft to deploy its Silkworms, but rather descended wholesale to the planet’s surface. According to the mission briefing, the massive ship would be several minutes’ walk from their own landing point, and would be blocked entirely from view by a shallow hillside with a deep crater valley beyond. As best as the Goo could forecast, the Marie Curie should have parked within that valley.
The detachment of Silkworms silently made their way across the surface of Tendus-13, with Rowe leading the way. They were walking to where the ship should be—Rowe knew—but there was nothing to confirm that it would actually be there.
This was the first and biggest un-known.
And if it was where it was supposed to be—if only that was confirmed—then it only meant that Rowe had found the entrance to the house of horrors.
He and his team would need to verify the state of the ship’s crew, and also that of the ship itself. They would be tasked with assessing and addressing any dangers that might remain behind. It was not enough to know that Silkworms had been killed; they must discover the how and why of it, and in doing so prevent such a thing from happening again. The size of the task before them was massive, however you looked at it. There was no scenario Rowe could think of in which this was going to wrap up easily or quickly.
After several minutes, they sighted a broad hill—the side of a crater left by an immense asteroid impact—straight off in the distance, just where the Goo had said it would be. They approached and then carefully climbed this hill, and stared down into the circular valley below.
True to the Goo’s forecasting, there was the Marie Curie.
Neither Rowe, nor Waverly, nor any of the other Silkworms in the squad spoke aloud. The sight before them was quite literally dumbfounding.
Beholding the ship was like seeing a Manhattan skyscraper disconnected from the power grid and turned on its side. The Marie Curie could not have seemed more out of place in this lifeless alien landscape. The sheer magnitude of the vessel seemed to bring forth some ancient and atavistic fear upon the men. They fought the impulse to tremble like a prawn before a blue whale—or perhaps a prawn before the bloated, floating corpse of a deceased blue whale. For although the thing looked intact and ready to glow alight and fire its thrusters at any moment . . . it did not. And something told them that it could not. An eerie wrongness and deadness pervaded the gigantic spacecraft. It was quiet, still, and utterly dark. But more than that . . . It was a thing that, in some essential way, was no longer itself.
Rowe could not remember any instance of an entire ESA crew being killed . . . but the ship itself remaining. (What happened in such cases? Was the ship left where it had been found, a memorial to the lost crew? Or was it flown back to an ESA facility on a populated homeworld—refitted, refreshed, and renamed before being put back into service? There had to be an ESA protocol, he figured. There were protocols for everything. It was a strange, dreadful thing . . . but also a procedural conundrum.)
An immense loading ramp extended down from the open belly of the ship—which was supported on giant legs—to the glowing veins of the planet’s surface. It gave Rowe the feeling of an open storefront in a ghost town. If Rowe hadn’t known better, he would have said the ship had been abandoned for years, not weeks. That it was an ancient husk, now welded to the planet’s surface by time.
“I’ve never seen something like this outside of a shipyard,” said Waverly, finally breaking the silence. “Fucked up, huh?”
“Yeah,” Rowe agreed. “I’ve never seen anything like it either.”
“What do you think?” Waverly said. “I mean, how did it come to have no power like this? The Silkworms inside killed each other, but . . . What the hell happened to the ship?”
“I don’t know yet,” Rowe replied. “We’ll have to figure that out.”
In most missions, the dangers faced by a Silkworm were known and quantified. The Goo could tell them exactly what they were up against, and even assigned specific dangers “hazard ratings” that helped the Silkworms to have a sense of how likely the dangers were to actually occur. This made their challenges—even considerably lethal ones—somehow less unnerving.
If the Marie Curie had only been disabled by radiation, or a caustic chemical release, or an unanticipated quantum of dark gravity, the ultimate tragedy for those aboard might have been the same, but the challenge facing those coming after would have been a clearer thing by several degrees.
But this was an un-known wrongness. This was an ESA spaceship looking in a way an ESA spaceship should never look.
“Noyes, are you reading anything from aboard the vessel?” Rowe asked. “That is, can the Goo see anything happening in there using our suit sensors?”
The hologram was silent for a moment while it compiled information from the scanners and cameras in the men’s enviro-suits.
“Negative,” Noyes replied. “No juice left in the old girl, far as I can tell. I don’t know anything you don’t. But we’re bound to learn something when we power it up . . . assuming that is possible to do.”
“I didn’t get the highest marks in Engineering and Pilotage,” said Waverly, “but you can’t just ‘turn off’ a ship like the Marie Curie. The power plant inside would take thousands of years to run down, especially sitting idle like this.”
“That is correct,” the hologram replied. “There is little chance that the tank went to empty, so to speak.”
“Unless it has been here thousands of years,” said Waverly.
Rowe looked at Waverly to ask what he meant.
Waverly only shrugged.
Rowe shook his head. His expression said that standing here, now, like this—in the literal presence of staggering un-knowns—was not the best place to make jokes about time travel (which was still thought to be impossible) or time dilation (which would never occur on a planet as isolated as Tendus-13).
“Unlike you, I got great marks in Engineering and Pilotage,” Rowe said, “and there are plenty of ways you could disable a ship like the Marie Curie. You’d just really have to know what you were doing. And I think someone did.”
They headed down the crater wall and entered the valley below.
The craft was quite tall. It seemed after only a few steps they were eye level with it, and only a few after that that they walked in its shade. The asteroid which had created the valley aeons ago had exposed thick deposits of the green glass veins. The Silkworms’ boots crunched it as they walked.
Rowe felt the oppressive totality of the ship. The whole of the thing. Like a great preserved beast inside a museum, dead and haunted, with dead men and women inside. And it was their destination. The grainy image of the mangled corpses they had been shown by Commander Collins danced in Rowe’s brain.
Rowe looked into the dark, empty windows and closed ports along the sides of the Marie Curie. He saw no light or sign of life. Only darkness in a vessel that was designed to be perpetually illuminated.
They walked to the foot of the gigantic loading ramp. It was wide and strong enough to hold vehicles weighing several tons. Rowe looked up to the top of the ramp. It led only into stillness and shadow—the open hole that was the belly of the ship itself.
But no.
No.
Up at the top of the ramp . . . Rowe saw something.
He initially mistook it for a row of hitches or ball mounts but quickly realized his error.
“Hey,” Rowe said to Waverly, “do you see something up there at the very top of the ramp?” He took care to look away across the landscape as he spoke. He did not want to alarm the other Silkworms.
Waverly stared at the top of the ramp and squinted.
“Look hard in the center,” Rowe continued. “Right at the top. Are those balls or knobs?”
“Or some trash left over from a loader?” his friend guessed.
But then Waverly saw it too, and put a hand to his brow to block the glare from the lightning above.
“No,” Waverly said. “Those are heads.”
“Okay good,” Rowe said. “Because that’s what I see too.”
Waverly began to move more circumspectly. He rotated his torso and neck carefully and slowly, not wishing to betray that he had detected anything of note.
“Is there anything—or any person—around here?” Waverly asked quietly but urgently. “I mean down here with us. Like, anything that could have caused . . .”
“No,” Rowe said. “I’ve been doing a 360 scan of the crater. There’s nothing here. Nothing moving or warm, at least. I can’t think of what to do other than go up and investigate.”
“All right then,” Waverly said, letting out a deep breath. “You’re the boss, boss. I’m right behind you.”
Rowe stepped onto the ramp and looked up intently at the heads. Anything hostile—anything that might be observing them from cover, waiting for them to notice the carnage—would now understand that the jig was up.
Rowe took several steps up the metal ramp. He stared hard.
Heads. No question about it. Three of them. Severed. Equidistant. Looking out. Eyes open. And all—it appeared—were male.
There was nothing behind them that Rowe could see, only darkness and unmoving shadows in the immense, yawning loading bay.
The other Silkworms looked at Rowe cautiously, waiting for his order.
“Noyes, what you got?” Rowe whispered. “Any information is appreciated in a moment like this.”
“Hold still and focus your eyes on the heads,” Noyes said to him. “I’ve almost done it.”
Even at a distance, Rowe could see that there were clumps of dried blood like corn smut underneath the necks. They had been rudely lopped, the flesh hewn into uneven flaps.
“Okay, boy-o. Here we are. James Waxworth. Timon Bush. Arnold Clegg.”
“Silkworms?” Rowe asked.
“Yes,” answered Noyes.
“From the Marie Curie?”
“I . . . Of course they are. That is . . . That is . . . They must be.”
Rowe looked back and forth, smiling anxiously.
“Noyes . . . you don’t sound very certain,” Rowe said.
He advanced up the ramp.
“I . . .” Noyes hesitated. “They are Silkworms.”
“But why won’t you say that they’re from the Marie Curie?” Rowe pressed.
“I haven’t an explanation, boy-o,” Noyes said. “I’m trying to think of one. This self-contained version of the Goo they sent along with me . . . that is me . . . It’s got the names and faces, but the rest of the information . . . Boy-o, it’s just not there.”
Rowe stopped and looked at the tiny clergyman at his shoulder. Noyes gave only a sheepish shrug.
Rowe then experienced a momentary dizziness as though he might suddenly pass out. It was like he was waiting for an optical illusion to cease, and for his senses to finally discern the true nature of whatever he was looking at. But in this case, the illusion was never going to fade, and no matter how Rowe squinted, he was always going to see the same thing. The Goo—even a mobile, finite version of it—with only partial access to a truth it should have known. This was a wrongness. An offness. A thing that should not be . . . and yet was. For the Goo itself to have a hole in its own knowledge made it feel like it was not the Goo at all, but some new, other thing.
Rowe searched his mind for explanations.
“Noyes, is this part of preparing me for death?” Rowe asked cautiously. “Part of your role as a counselor? Like, you’re withholding this information because you think it’s good for me? For example, I’ve heard that sometimes dying people find that the Goo withholds certain information because it’s trying not to worry them about something they won’t live to see. It won’t tell them that the summer wheat harvest is going to be bad because it knows they’ll be dead by spring.”
“I’m not doing that, boy-o,” the hologram said. “Between us, I’m as confused as you are.”
“Fuck,” said Rowe.
The lightning above the Marie Curie flared and skittered so brightly that even in the shadow of the great dead ship it was startling. A bolt struck nearby, at the lip of the giant crater. All the Silkworms flinched or ducked a little.
Rowe looked back up at the heads. He stared into their open eyes. Their pupils did not follow him, of course—of course—yet they wore the expression of the interrupted. Their eyes were focused on conversation partners who were suddenly no longer there, but they looked like they still had something to say.
Rowe climbed the rest of the way up the ramp. Near the top, he could better see past the heads into the ship’s dark bay. It was full of loading equipment and endless pallets of unwrapped supplies. There was no sign of life.
“All right?” Waverly shouted from the base of the ramp.
“Yeah, all right,” Rowe called back. “Come see this.”
As the other Silkworms looked on, Waverly climbed to the top of the ramp.
“Do we just bag and tag them?” he asked as they stooped to inspect the stunned, decapitated triumvirate.
Rowe put his hands on his hips and thought.
“Someone on our team is a medic, yeah?” Rowe answered, gesturing to their colleagues below. “Let him deal with it. You and I should go deeper.”
CHAPTER FOUR
WITH GREAT CARE, THE EIGHT OTHER SILKWORMS ASCENDED THE loading ramp and joined Rowe and Waverly in the belly of the ship. There, they began hunting for an acceptable outlet that could be used to connect a long cord that would stretch back to their landing craft and power at least a part of the great vessel. This would be the first step in reanimating the Marie Curie, accessing its cameras and recording devices, and learning precisely what had happened aboard. At Rowe’s urging, one Silkworm, nominally a medic, grabbed the severed heads by their hair and simply carried them back to the lander on foot.
“I know the Marie Curie is a different model,” Rowe said to Waverly as they began to survey the walls of the dark and immense cargo bay. “That is, it’s not the Apollinax or the Halifax . . . But I feel like there should be more connection points in this bay. I’m not even seeing a power outlet.”
Waverly nodded thoughtfully.
Noyes, gently glowing alight on Rowe’s shoulder, said: “I’ve accessed the schematics of the ship, and it seems we should be finding access points in several locations right here by the ramp. Should be.”
“What do you mean?” asked Rowe.
The projected man did not immediately answer.
“There,” Noyes said after a beat, gesturing with his tiny hand to where a Silkworm ran his enviro-suit’s fingers over an interior wall. “Some of those tiles should open to reveal input ports. But they’re not opening.”
“Because there’s no power?” asked Rowe.
“That’s not it,” Noyes said. “Those should open without power, using springs and compressed air.”
Rowe watched a Silkworm pressing against the wall to no avail, the man’s frustration evident.
“What’s your best guess?” Rowe asked.
“I don’t have one,” said Noyes. “The ports are acting as they would act if they’d been intentionally disabled. Locked shut.”
Waverly stepped over and looked hard at the small floating man on Rowe’s shoulder.
“So what the hell happened here, Encarta?” he said sternly.
“I don’t know yet,” Noyes replied rather defensively. “Or was that not clear to you?”
“I don’t see how AIs can know practically everything, but still be so bad at making guesses,” Waverly said. “Is it true that ro-bits still can’t do literary interpretation? Hey Encarta, what does Shakespeare mean when he says, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’”
“Well,” said Noyes, initially seeming to take the question seriously, “he means that you are the warmest of all seasons, with long days filled with plenty of sunshine and a reduced chance of precipitation, and that you can kiss my virtual ass.”
Rowe liked that one.
“Boys . . .” he said, “knock it off. We’ve got problems to solve.”
Rowe directed the other Silkworms to continue searching for ports at the top of the loading ramp. He and Waverly stalked farther into the belly of the loading bay. Their enviro-suits suddenly struck very bright at the joints, casting a ghostly green glow in every direction.
One thing impressed both men immediately.
“This bay is almost completely full and packed,” Rowe said. “I mean the whole bay, not just where the ramp opens.” He peered across rows and rows of loading equipment and endless crates of wiring components.
“They must have just landed when . . . things started to happen,” said Waverly.
The men walked deeper into the bay, and deeper still. In every direction, as far as they could see, things were tied down, stowed, and locked away. Many pallets were wrapped up in plastic which glistened eerily as it reflected the lights from their suits. There was no noise at all. Nothing moved.
