A ripple of excited whispers and hoots echoed across the gantries far above as Nathan glared at the warden.
‘You think that I’m not going to report this as soon as I get back to…’
‘Put them in Reed’s cell!’ the warden boomed. ‘Ensure that they have everything that they’ve asked for!’
Nathan moved to protest, but suddenly his arms were yanked up behind his back as two security guards hefted him away from the warden.
‘You’re going to regret this!’ Nathan shouted as he was dragged away. ‘I’ll have your badge by the end of the week you assho….!’
The warden’s thunderous laughter drowned out Nathan’s belligerent profanities as he was dragged away toward the prison once again, this time with Reed and Allen following him.
***
XXII
CSS Titan
Foxx stood on Titan’s bridge and watched the hive of activity ongoing in the wake of the alien vessel’s arrival. She barely noticed Vasquez hurry onto the bridge and move alongside her.
‘I got word back from San Diego before the communications shut down,’ he said.
She turned to him. ‘What do we got?’
‘Turns out that Anthony Ricard wasn’t all happy days prior to being shot,’ Vasquez replied. ‘I got his financial records and he was in deep, looks like either a gambling addiction or maybe even drugs.’
‘Unlikely,’ Foxx said, ‘the prison service is subject to routine testing, he wouldn’t have got through.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Vasquez said. ‘There’s evidence of a gambling habit so I pushed the drug angle and guess what? Ricard was twice reported as having been seen in known drug–dealing areas of the city on his own time.’
Foxx frowned. ‘How come the reports weren’t followed up?’
‘Because Ricard claimed he was working a case under his own initiative, and that was backed up by his partner, Xavier Reed. At trial, the prosecution used this as evidence that Reed was involved in the drugs trade and that the shooting was the result of a dispute between the two men, with Reed being a dealer and Ricard investigating his own partner. The defense played the same card but with opposing roles.’
‘Let me guess,’ Foxx said, ‘the jury played out both scenarios and rejected them.’
‘Bang on,’ Vasquez agreed. ‘Neither was used as evidence because neither could be proved. If anything, the judge felt that both men were covering each other and that both were involved.’
‘Which doesn’t jive with Xavier’s claims,’ Foxx said.
‘Exactly, and Reed wasn’t the one who was neck–deep in debt. The prosecution claimed that Ricard’s debt wasn’t motive for homicide, although they conceded it could have been enough to cause his drinking the day of the murder and perhaps his desperation. The defense said that Xavier’s covering for his partner’s issues wasn’t evidence of complicity but an act of friendship to a colleague in need, something that Xavier himself said when on the stand, that he did it to help Ricard and that the last thing he wanted was his partner dead.’
‘Again, hearsay,’ Foxx said. ‘So what we’ve got is the fact that Ricard was the only one with financial issues, which makes him the most likely to have gotten himself involved with criminal activity. He might have got into gun–running to get himself out of debt.’
‘But we’ve got no evidence linking him to any such activity other than hearsay sightings of him,’ Vasquez pointed out. ‘Another loose end.’
Foxx was mulling this over when the admiral strode onto the bridge with Schmidt.
‘We’re going to need a crash course here,’ Marshall said to Doctor Schmidt as Foxx and Vasquez watched from nearby. ‘Tell me everything that you can about what that thing out there is.’
Although ostensibly every other officer on the bridge had plenty of work to be doing, Foxx could tell that they were listening in as Schmidt spoke.
‘Our knowledge of alien species has been limited until now by the fact that we have encountered so few,’ Schmidt said. ‘The best examples of bona fide alien species we have to date are those that infected the human race four hundred years ago, simple bacteria and viruses lodged in the hearts of cosmic stardust grains that made it to the surface of Earth and thrived only in human bodies.’
Foxx knew well enough the cause of The Falling, the same virus that had infected Nathan Ironside and sent him immediately after his death into cryogenic storage to await the hoped–for cure that had taken four hundred years to reach his long forgotten capsule.
The British had been the first to discover the alien forms way back in 2014, long before routine space travel, ID chips, hard–light or any of the orbital cities and other basic technologies familiar to Foxx and every other human citizen. The British had sent a balloon twenty miles into the atmosphere and captured microscopic aquatic algae, biological organisms known as extremophiles, living high in Earth’s atmosphere that could only have come from space. Their findings had been published in a paper during the Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology conference in San Diego. The entities they described had varied from a colony of ultra–small bacteria to two unusual individual organisms – part of a diatom frustule and a two hundred micron–sized particle mass interlaced with biofilm and biological filaments.
‘The findings of the British team were the first confirmation that life is common in our universe both around and between the stars,’ Schmidt said. ‘The seeds of life exist all over the universe and travel through space from one planetary system to another. The fact that several Earth–bound bacterial species are known to be able to survive for up to two hundred fifty million years in salt crystals and be successfully revived in the presence of liquid water allows for the time scales required for such species to move between planetary systems.’
Foxx could recall first seeing examples of the alien species that had almost rendered humanity extinct. Some had segmented necks connected to tear–drop shaped bodies. Others were like small animals, but the majority were spheres that seemed to leak a biological substance that had simply been named “
goo”
. But what had frightened the people at the time was that the spheres, each as wide as a human hair, had all been identified via X–ray analysis as being made from titanium and traces of vanadium. They had also found that they had a “fungus–like knitted mat–like covering”, a combination known to no species on Earth at the time.
‘What does that have to do with this?’ Olsen asked as he jabbed a thumb in the direction of the now silent vessel a few thousand meters away. ‘That’s not a bunch of teeny bacteria locked up in some asteroid.’
‘No,’ Schmidt conceded, ‘but it’s my estimation that what that entity consists of is almost certainly along the same lines.’
‘Explain,’ Marshall said impatiently.
‘Nobody considers an individual neuron to be conscious,’ Schmidt said, ‘nor a single ant or termite to be capable of building a mound or a nest. It is their collective awareness that forges an intelligence, a machine if you will, which is the sum of its parts and perhaps greater than. When our drones get close enough to that ship, it is my estimation that they will detect a biological entity encompassing countless trillions of cellular forms acting in concert.’
Marshall’s eyes narrowed as Detective Allen spoke.
‘So you’re saying it’s a big bunch of bugs, right?’
‘Eloquently put,’ Schmidt replied with a flat tone, ‘but correct none the less.’
‘How come they don’t freeze out there?’ Olsen asked.
‘They do,’ Schmidt said, accessing Titan’s sensors. ‘Spectrographic sensors indicate from the reflection of sunlight that the outer covering appears to be frozen solid, consisting of water and methane ice as hard as rock. But that outer covering acts as protection for the interior, a thermal layer that seals the rest of the colony inside.’
Marshall sighed heavily. ‘This wasn’t what I was expecting when I joined up.’
‘Of course not,’ Schmidt said. ‘We’ve all been raised on a diet of movies featuring insectoid aliens or anthropomorphic beings, but the most likely form of life to spread across the universe in large numbers is cellular bacteria and viruses. Even on Earth, bacteria have always outnumbered larger life forms by billions to one. Your own body contains more bacteria than every human being who has ever lived.’
‘And now they’re here,’ Olsen murmured uncomfortably. ‘Last time something like this made it to Earth five billion people died, and that was from just what Nathan Ironside managed to breathe in. Look at that thing out there. If that makes Earth–fall, the population will be gone in days.’
‘It may not have a willfully predatory purpose,’ Marshall said.
‘Correct,’ Schmidt replied, ‘we just don’t know whether it has any purpose at all other than to survive, which is both a curse and a blessing.’
‘In what way?’ Foxx asked.
‘Because if it’s a non–sentient being then it merely
exists
,’ he replied. ‘It has no emotion, no cares other than consuming prey. It cannot be reasoned with, or empathized with, it simply is. However, its fundamental simplicity means that a coherent defense against it should be well within our capabilities.’
Nobody replied for a moment, and then the Tactical Officer’s voice carried across the bridge.
‘The drones are in sensor range.’
‘On screen,’ Marshall ordered.
The display switched to the perspective of one of the two drones dispatched to investigate the vessel. Entirely automated and with low–level intelligence, the drones approached the vessel slowly.
Foxx could already see that the massive ship was entirely entombed in ice, its surface visible through minor striations in the otherwise crystalline cocoon. The fact that the ice was so clear was in itself interesting to Schmidt.
‘It must form as a fluid, devoid of pollutants,’ he said in wonder. ‘Sensors indicate that it is as hard as steel, the near absolute zero temperature of deep space responsible for its rigidity.’
‘You think that’s by design or a consequence?’ Marshall asked.
‘Hard to say,’ Schmidt replied, ‘but most likely it’s an evolutionary response. If these things first evolved to travel within cometary debris or similar, they could gradually have evolved defense mechanisms against the cold vacuum of space.’
The drones moved closer to the surface of the cocoon, and slowly their cameras began to relay footage that showed some kind of motion beneath the surface of the ice. Foxx moved a step closer to the displays, her sharp young eyes noticing the aberrations, almost like rivers of rippling haze flowing beneath the cocoon.
‘There’s something moving,’ she said.
‘Channels,’ Schmidt replied, ‘passages of heat generated by biological processes through which the life forms move.’
‘But then where do they get their energy from?’ Olsen asked. ‘That ship’s dead.’
Schmidt thought for a moment before he spoke.
‘Can the drones focus and zoom in on the damage around the ship’s hull?’
Marshall indicated the Tactical Officer to comply, and moments later a signal was sent and one of the drone’s cameras zoomed in, penetrating the ice it seemed as it produced a high resolution image of the ship’s cavernous interior.
Slowly, through the tiny imperfections in the ice, Foxx could see patterns emerging. The massive structural braces of the ship’s interior that had appeared shattered by the passage of massive plasma blasts were in fact delicately carved open, bizarre curved striations in the massive metal beams like the petals of flowers patterning their surfaces.
Doctor Schmidt moved forward, himself enveloped in an aura of amazement and wonder as he spoke.
‘They didn’t just attack that ship,’ he said finally. ‘It’s the food source.’
‘Food,’ Olsen echoed. ‘The crew?’
‘Maybe,’ Schmidt said, ‘but likely mostly the ship itself. That’s their fuel, the metals of the hull.’
Foxx realized what Schmidt meant, that the patterns in the beams were the signature of countless millions of cells attacking the metal itself, eating it atom by atom.
‘They’re either breaking the metal down by oxidizing it,’ Schmidt said, ‘or perhaps by corrosive means consuming it directly on an atomic scale.’
‘Which allows them to power that spacecraft if they feel the need to travel,’ Foxx said as she observed the display. ‘But if they didn’t attack the craft, then how did they get aboard it?’
Schmidt shrugged, slipping his hands into the pockets of pants that didn’t really exist, the gesture an endearing sign of his human origins.
‘They probably didn’t attack it at all,’ he replied. ‘They would not have needed to infiltrate the vessel in great numbers, only sufficiently so that they could replicate and spread. If I’m right and they’re in fact a collective intelligence constructed of cellular forms, they would be able to move freely throughout the vessel without the crew ever having known that they were there until it was too late. They might even possess the ability to metamorphose into any form that they choose and…’
Schmidt broke off mid–sentence and Foxx saw his wonderous expression suddenly collapse as his voice became terse.
‘Bring up the medical scans from the sickbay,’ he said to the admiral.
Something in his tones forestalled any protest by Marshall at the doctor’s audacity to direct a command at him, and moments later three scans appeared to hover in front of Schmidt. The doctor stared at them and his face fell in abstract terror.
‘Oh no.’
‘What is it?’ Foxx asked as she looked at the three scans of the Ayleean warriors.
Schmidt shook his head. ‘I know how the alien ship was occupied,’ he said, his voice rasping and dry. ‘I couldn’t see it in these scans, I couldn’t tell!’
‘Tell what, man?! Marshall snapped. ‘They look identical!’
‘That’s the problem,’ Schmidt replied. ‘Two of them are
too
identical. One of the Ayleeans is an utterly perfect clone. That’s why one of the emergency capsules didn’t detect a life form within it, why we couldn’t detect its beacon. The DNA of these things must be fundamentally different from our own and it wasn’t recognized in the capsule’s database.’
Marshall blinked. ‘The Ayleeans?’