The Ninth Circle (40 page)

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Authors: R. M. Meluch

“Which is to say carbon-based,” said Ski.

“But these are built with a whole different box of biological blocks,” said Weng.

“Not entirely different,” said Ski. “The amino acids are at least left-handed,” said Ski. “As are ours.”

“Our amino acids are left-handed,” Weng clarified. “Not our actual hands.”

“This has some amino acids I’ve never seen before,” said Ski.

“We don’t have a live specimen,” said Weng. An implicit request that. He sounded hopeful.

“You’re not going to get one,” said Calli. “These things are intelligent. So the LEN would call that kidnapping.”

“Which is in stark contrast to locking up Naval officers,” said Weng. He’d heard about the Hamster and her man.

“Apparently,” said Calli.

“Then can we get a dead one of these?” Ski asked. He picked up the appendage. “A whole one?”

Calli made a motion with her head that said maybe. “Colonel Steele’s dogs were not gentle when they retrieved the scientist’s body.”

The aliens had not been as devout as Marines about retrieving their own fallen comrades. The alien bodies were probably still in the woods where they dropped. And since their amino acids were different from Zoen natives, it was possible the local scavengers hadn’t cleaned them up already.

Captain Carmel hailed the command deck. “Mister Ryan, do we still have swords in the armory?”

The next evening, a group of xenos from the LEN expedition ventured into the forest in a phalanx, carrying polymer shields, in hopes of opening a dialog with the aliens.

Instead they collected a large sample of finger and toenails in their shields’ meshwork. Dr. Maarstan took a nail in the foot. The others had to carry him back to camp. They brought along a struggling “guest.” It had no finger or toenails.

No projectiles chased the xenos on their retreat back to camp. The other creatures had abandoned their comrade to his fate, or else they had shot themselves empty.

There was no fast reload when you had to grow your own bullets.

The LEN “detained” the one creature, which was a polite word for taking it prisoner. “Not thuggish at all,” said Glenn.

“You would say that,” said Director Benet. “And I admit it. The action is thuggish, but we have no intention of hurting the being. It will be released immediately we have talked to it.” The LEN needed to impress on the being the humans’ peaceful intent and willingness to communicate.

They restrained their guest by its five appendages. They spoke soothingly, but the being would not be calmed. The humans didn’t know how to safely tranq it.

The alien showed no interest in communicating. It vomited and shat on them. Now it was just writhing, its spongy sides heaving, the orifice on its shoulder moving, no sounds but gurgling and hissing coming out.

It didn’t have a skin. All terrestrial life, down to the single-celled organisms, had a container, a sac, a membrane, a skin. This didn’t. The oblong body was two sponges that might be lungs, in between which other ersatz organs were strung. The jointed arms and legs were stranded with sinew and chitinous ball-jointed bone.

Director Benet enlisted the expedition’s resident linguist, Dr. Patrick Hamilton, to tell him what the alien was saying. “Please come communicate with it.”

“No,” said Patrick.

“Let me rephrase,” said Benet. “Come communicate with it.”

Patrick balked, loathing. “I am working on foxes and mammoths. I came here to work with fox languages. I don’t have any interest in those toadstools—and by that I don’t mean to call them funguses. I mean to call them the stuff that comes out of a toad.”

“You are here for what the LEN needs you for, Dr. Hamilton. Tell me what this being is saying?” said Benet, as if Patrick could pull a magic translator out of his ear.

Patrick walked to the hut where the thing was held captive. Because the aliens only came out in the dark, the xenos kept the hut darkened.

The alien made no noise that might be speech, though its mouth was wide open. Its shoulder eye strained on its stalk.

Patrick gave a huff. “Okay. I think I can help you out on this one, Izzy. Nearest I can translate what this thing is saying is ‘
AAAAAAHHH-HHHHHHHH!
’”

When the thing yanked its own arm off, there was no choice but to let it go. Upon release the alien threw rocks at the humans and scrambled in perfect terror back into the forest.

“Thank you for all the effort you put into that translation,” Benet said.

“It’s probably not talking at all,” Patrick said.

Benet scowled. “How can you possibly imagine that spacefaring beings do not talk?”

Patrick shrugged. “Maybe because they don’t have ears.”

Patrick got on the com to consult with the xenogeneralists on board
Merrimack
. He had to make sure he wasn’t lying when he told the director that the aliens didn’t have ears. “Do they really not have ears?”

Weng answered, “Nope.”

Patrick hesitated. “Nope, they don’t really not have ears?”

“They have no ears,” said Weng.

“That fits,” said Patrick. “They have mouths but they still can’t scream.”

Ski said, “The clokes have no external orifice designed to pick up vibrations in the atmosphere. Doesn’t mean they can’t feel vibrations through solid objects same as you and I.”

Weng: “But we haven’t confirmed that part.”

Ski: “They don’t have any skin.”

Weng: “Never seen anything like them.”

Ski: “No external membrane. No exoskeleton.”

The xenos sounded excited.

Weng: “The rigid structures in their appendages are fibrous alien proteins, similar to chitin.”

Ski: “We’re pretty sure they can regrow their nails.”

Patrick nodded. “Yeah. They’re probably reloading even as we speak.”

Weng: “That would require nourishment. We don’t know what clokes eat.”

“Clokes?” Patrick echoed.

Weng: “That’s what the Marines are calling the extraplanetaries. Cloke. It’s short for cloaca.”

Patrick said, “I thought cloaca was a Roman swear word.”

Ski made a sound of half agreeing. “It’s a Roman vulgarity. It means latrine. But it’s also a scientific term. The aliens are monotremes.”

Patrick rummaged his memory for that term. Came up with something that couldn’t be right, “They’re platypuses?”

Ski said, “So you know what a monotreme is?”

“Not exactly.” Linguist though Patrick was, monotreme was not a word he ever used. “I think it was something I was supposed to know in fifth grade. A platypus and a spiny something-or-other that lays eggs are the only two of whatever a monotreme is. It means egg layer?” He took a guess. “No wait. Mono means they have only one of something. And it can’t be the duckbill because the spiny thing has a long nose. It means they only lay one egg? No. I give up. I don’t know. I wasn’t that jazzed on biology in the fifth grade. But I’m guessing now that it’s something biological you wouldn’t want to go into detail about with a bunch of fifth-grade boys.”

“You bet your eighth planet,” said Weng.

“Monotremes have one anus?” Patrick guessed.

Ski said, “You’re getting very close. Monotreme means ‘one hole.’ All elimination and reproductive functions use one hole.”

“
All
functions?” said Patrick.

“All.”

“Out
and
in?” Patrick asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“That would have been marvelously gross to know in the fifth grade,” said Patrick.

“It still is marvelously gross among your Fleet Marines,” Ski said dryly.

The Marines were a young group. They lived hard, fought hard, laughed loud. Patrick supposed the Marines would have fun with that bit of knowledge.

Weng said, “The technical term for the multipurpose hole is cloaca. So your Marines are calling the aliens clokes.”

“So are we,” said Ski.

Patrick had no objection. “I guess for insults that beats asshole all to hell.”

Weng and Ski finally had an approximate age of the alien orb for Captain Carmel.

“One hundred years,” said Weng.

“Give or take some,” said Ski.

“Durable,” Calli commented.

Weng: “Very. If they weren’t hostile, I’d think about buying their stuff.”

Calli asked, “Why didn’t they exhaust their fuel in all that time?”

Ski: “That’s the beauty of using the most common element in the universe as your fuel.”

“Do we know where they’re coming from?” Calli asked.

Weng: “No.”

Ski: “They’re using a sublight powerplant. Wherever they came from has to be in walking distance.”

Walkers
or
crawlers
were terms for sublight vessels.

There were no hospitable worlds within a hundred light-years of Zoe. There was a reason this region of the galaxy was called the Outback.

Weng: “The orbs could have been manufactured in transit on a mobile platform.”

Ski: “That opens up their outer limit to, well, anywhere.”

Weng: “The LEN expedition has been here for seven years. LEN ships have been coming and going for seven years. It took seven years for orbs to intercept an intruding ship. We don’t know how they knew there was something here to intercept.”

“Are we looking too far?” Calli suggested. “Did the clokes come from another planet in this system? They almost have to, don’t they?”

Ski went mute. He could not tell his beautiful captain how wrong she was.

Weng: “There’s no other planet in the habitation zone. No manufacturing facilities on any of them. No sign that any of the other planets ever supported life. And I know you’re going to ask, we did look at the moons. That there is a pretty cloud of ammonia around the moons.”

“I have another question for you,” said Calli. ”How did the clokes get onto the planet?”

“Good question,” said Ski.

Weng agreed. “Clokes can compress pretty small, but we
know
they didn’t fit inside a space vessel with no oxygen, no heat, no water, and no food. These orbs don’t have landing capability.”

Ski hedged. “Well.”

Weng: “Fine. They have the landing capability of asteroids.”

Ski: “We’ve found no evidence of FTL capability, except for the obvious fact that they are here.”

“Wormholes?” Calli offered.

“No wormholes out here,” said Weng.

“We looked,” said Ski.

“Collapsed wormholes?” Calli revised.

“Then we wouldn’t know about them,” said Weng.

“And we can never know,” said Ski.

“How else could they get here?” Calli asked.