Outward Borne (9 page)

There were dull hissing and
whirring sounds from the equipment in that place, but there was
more. Scratching clicking noises came from the other side of the
wall. These were not machine noises, but moving and scratching
sounds like some animal. Twice the Hag went through a small door
and into that room. The noise got much louder and sounded angry
when that happened. Kit was certain that there was something else
alive in that room, but it was not one of us.

It came for Kit the next day. Two
small bots, the ones with long arms, came into the room. Her cage
was opened and a dank tube was pressed against her leg. She felt a
vibration then a minute later she collapsed to the floor. She could
not move her body, but she was still awake. Those bots put her on
the table and strapped her down. She was conscious and worried. How
far was this was going to go? Would she be helpless forever or
would they just leave her there to die? She did not want to think
about that again and refused to say any more.

Zep was horrified by Kit’s tale,
but hopeful. If they could get to that room it might be possible to
capture one of the Hags, but her hopes were dashed when Kit claimed
the room was far away. How that could be was beyond imagining.
Their habitat was already larger than anything she had ever seen.
How could it be in a space that was much larger still?

The day after they put Kit on that
table to do whatever they did, they came again. She was put to
sleep somehow, but woke a little when they moved her. She was still
weak and sore from the day before, but could see what was
happening. One of the rolling table bots put a mask over her face
that provided breathing air. Perhaps the air outside the laboratory
was no good. It took her out of the room and down a ramp into some
very large space; it was the empty insides of an unfinished
building. It was too dark to see the ceiling, and it was cold. A
large black pipe came down through the above and into the floor. It
looked very old and had stains down the side. When the cart got
near the tube, some doors opened into a much smaller space and it
went in there. The doors closed with a hiss and the chamber started
to accelerate upwards. It seemed to be moving very fast, it shook
and there were scraping sounds as if it were passing things by. It
was strange. Kit claimed that she began to feel very light, the
straps across her body started to float around, the whole room
stopped and seemed to turn around and it began to go down, then,
after a while, everything became heavy again.

Kit was not very clear about what
happened next, she might have fallen asleep, but she had the
impression that she was taken a short way through a very dark area
until she came to a large building that was standing inside another
huge space. It was our habitat.

Zep was stunned. Where were they?
Most believed that they had been lifted into the sky, because that
is where the lander came from. Zep did not know, but she never
imagined that there could be anything so immensely large. She never
had a real plan to attack the Hags, but she had assumed they would
be nearby. Now she would need to find them in a large unknown
complicated place. How could she do that?

Zep went slowly to her room to think about
what Kit had told her. All the Cathians had feared that the missing
people were dead, but it was a shock to hear they had been killed
by some experiment. What were the Hags after? When would it stop?
Why had they impregnated Kit? Did they want the colony to survive,
or were they all in some type of experiment that would end in
death?

Sut and Pok came in. The robots
that they had captured had been taken to bits and were being
examined to see if they held anything of use. Zep was not
interested. She told them what she had learned about the ship and
how large it was. It was clear that Zep thought they would never be
able to find the Hags or get to them.

Pok was sorely disappointed. She
had come to hope that if they could capture one of the Hags they
could gain some advantage. She sat down next to Zep with some
resignation. Pok thought they should try to somehow lure the Hags
into this habitat, but Sut was being silly and proposed that they
ask the Hags to take them there. Sut had little faith in Zep’s
ideas and was not so upset to see the thing go bust.

Looking up at her, Zep ignored the
sarcasm and wondered how, how could we do that? There was something
about Sut’s quip that stuck in Zep’s mind, but she had not quite
sorted it out. The crewmates kept meeting and Zep kept probing the
idea that Sut had unintentionally surfaced. Day by day, they worked
through the problem until it became a plan. It was a plan that the
three had to follow by themselves. The Cathians on the Outward were
disorganized and still unwilling to follow anyone who had not held
the old recognized authority.

Pok went to the bright room to
begin their plan. She knew all of these people by now, but the
change she saw in them was striking. People were beginning to
shrink. Not just because of weight loss, but from stooped postures
and downcast looks that made them appear to have retreated into
themselves. It was clear to her that they could not suffer any more
abductions. They could not remain in this place. They needed
hope.

Everyone, at least for a while,
was to move into the bright room and stay there during lights out.
Surely the Hags would not enter into a mass of Cathians. It would
be too dangerous for them. There was not much discussion. They were
all afraid of being kidnapped, of course, but the thought of Kit
and her induced pregnancy seemed to be their greatest fear. What
invasions might be performed in that laboratory? It infected their
minds more than the fear of death itself.

Zep and her mates did not tell Kit
about their plan, but she knew there was something going on. When
Zep asked her to make sure no one left the hall during the night,
Kit agreed to do it. Pok, Sut, and Zep offered to stand watch and
spread an alarm if any bots came through the portal. The Cathians
were relieved to let them do it.

Chapter 8 Desperate Fear

Those Cathians were a bother from
the start. The probe and its captives had not closed on the Outward
until well after the star rounding was complete. The anti-modules
had been detached from the support flanges and their rotation was
being ramped up. It was a precision operation, with the small craft
gliding between the three-kilometer long arms as they spun past on
each side of the hull. The counterbalancing modules looked like
giant paddles poised to swat the tiny probe like a bug as it
maneuvered toward the docking port.

These new aliens would be inserted
into the space once occupied by the Gurmatians. The habitat, which
occupied half of the seventh deck of the Filim module, had been
divided into six floors, rather than the usual three. It made the
ceilings low, but adequate. The Cathians were about the same height
as the Gurmatians, but heavier. The simulated gravity would be less
than they were accustomed to, even after rotation came up to full
speed, but there was nothing to be done about that.

The Gurmatians had all died
following an unfortunate accident. A construction bot malfunctioned
in the service conduit, lost its grip, and dropped a filtration
unit onto a cluster of gas transfer lines. Air entering the
Gurmatian habitat became contaminated with exhaust from the Nivinwa
complex. Even the slightest contact between alien species was
likely to cause severe suffering if not death. That is well known.
All of the alien habitats were tightly sealed and were entirely
self-contained. Each of the fifteen decks within the Filim module
was isolated from all others to prevent any such occurrence. Still
the accident happened.

All known life forms within the
galaxy are made up of replicating cell-like structures and the same
sets of molecular components. The same laws of chemistry occur on
all planets and so these biological similarities should be
expected, even so, it was startling to discover that the same
molecular families acted as building blocks for cells everywhere.
Cell membranes were made of lipids, enzymes were proteins, genetic
information was carried by nucleic acids or something close to
them, and carbohydrates supplied the energy. It seems that only
this very limited group of molecular types, out of all the
chemically stable possibilities, were able to satisfy the very
demanding requirements needed to construct a living, reproductive
entity. These molecules not only served their needed purpose, but
they were present in the stew of molecules that were lying around
when life was coming about. It all came down to the primordial
ooze. The Primaforms had worked this out through their long years
of interplanetary communication, centuries spent exchanging
information about distant planet biology and chemical composition.
It was the critical fact that enabled the ObLaDas to sustain alien
life forms within the Outward Voyager.

While the basic protein,
carbohydrate, and lipid molecular families were same in a general
sense, at least some of the individual molecular structures within
these families differed from one planet to another, and therein lay
the problem. The body does not take well to similar-but-different.
We have a whole elaborate immune system to avoid such things. Every
life form had some way to fend off foreign-body assaults and toxic
substances. Similar-but-different molecules tend to interfere with
the normal workings of cellular interactions. They are recognized
as being foreign and possibly nasty, and that sets off energy
intensive, multifaceted reactions to get rid of them.

If you were to take so much as a
breath of air on a life-harboring alien planet, you would be
exposed to thousands of physiologically active molecules,
particles, and microscopic life forms that were all different, in
some way, from anything that your body had ever experienced. It is
inevitable that some of those foreign substances would prove to be
poisonous, harmfully toxic, or induce some massive immune response.
It was so with the Gurmatians. The species died off within eight
days of the accident, all of them.

Food was a problem. The Cathian
supplies that the lander had accumulated would be exhausted within
five months. The ObLaDas needed to reproduce the molecules for each
required nutrient in order to synthesize acceptable food stocks.
They were in a rush to succeed. It was the only way to keep those
beings alive over the long term, though it would become
unnecessary.

In order to maintain the Cathians
and handle their medical needs, the ObLaDas needed to learn about
their physiology and understand their bodily functions,
particularly reproduction. LePan Lukut would conduct the necessary
dissections and she had fallen behind. Her laboratories were in the
Filim antimodule, a long way through the rotating arms from the
living quarters. LePan had been in a dither getting her laboratory
ready. Some shelves had fallen open during the rounding and caused
a great mess. When set alongside the hull, the antimod was upside
down, unusable all during the rounding and then became weightless
for a short time after the engines shut down. She was amazed at how
her precious instruments could find their way into the most obscure
cracks and hard-to-reach spaces.

The probe docked only days after
the arms reached a sufficient speed to provide some semblance of
normal gravity. LePan had little time to get her labs functional.
It was a great rush, not as it should be, and LePan was always
annoyed when she could not so things in the right way. It took some
while to set up the dissection tables and start conducting the
disassemblies. All this trouble delayed her experiments, but the
delay caused its own trouble. Ordinarily, individuals selected for
sacrifice would never be allowed to mix with the rest of the alien
population, but this time it seemed preferable. They had no place
to store them. The ObLaDas were unconcerned about the fear and
hostility that the abductions would cause. There is no record that
they even noticed.

For three nights they waited,
always ready. Pok felt increasingly angry and driven. She ground
her broad teeth together inside her lipless slit of a mouth and
hardly ever spoke, but on the fourth night it happened. The fly bot
came, but Sut was able to block the dart while Pok swatted it away.
Zep and Pok lay down in the middle of the room, Sut slumped in a
dark corner and remained as quiet as she could. They waited. A
cumbersome machine came down the hallway. It had a hard time
maneuvering in the small room with two bodies lying about. It
fumbled around trying to get some leverage, but received no
direction from its operator. The observation cameras had been
disabled. Finally, the bot pushed Zep aside, got hold of Pok’s
midsection, and lifted her awkwardly. Just as Pok’s body was
lowered into place, Sut slipped the shields and weapons under her.
The bot moved forward to lift Zep and deposited her on top of Pok.
As the bot moved away, Sut edged into the corridor and ran toward
the bright room. She had to make sure no one would interfere with
the capture.

Zep and Pok were fitted with
breathing masks, but they could still see. The heavily loaded bot
rolled out through the habitat gateway, wheels squeaking. The
Cathians tensed, expecting to meet one of the Hags just outside the
tall doors. They intended to attack the first Hag they came across,
but there was nothing in sight. They were taken through a lofty
dark space beyond the habitat. It was noticeably colder there. The
bot stopped suddenly and sat still in that dark space. Zep felt a
strong urge to jump off and hide. It would not take much to see
that she was faking helplessness. She would soon lose her chance.
Pok was in considerable pain, Zep’s weight was pushing the pick
handle into her side, but she did not dare move. Pok was about to
lift her head when suddenly something grabbed her waist. She
twisted in surprise, but the mechanical hand did not notice. It
positioned her on another flat-topped carrier and took her into the
waiting shuttle.