Rockhoppers Ch. 06

- Note -

SQUICK ADVISORY

- End Note -

Nomi floats in the warm stream of air the shower cubby uses to dry her and reclaim water in microgravity. Eyes closed, lights dimmed, she's tempted to nap right there, soothed by the white noise of the fans and cradled by the warm updraft flowing past skin still red from scrubbing.

Soon, though, the system cuts off, the humidity in the shower stall equalized with the rest of the ship, leaving her hair just slightly damp. Slipping out of the cubicle, she squeezes her hair and winds it in a towel she has pinned next to the stall, then fishes a fresh set of underwear out of her garment bag.

Rubbing her eyes with her palms, she drifts over to her bunk. She unzips the mattress-cum-microgravity-sleeping-bag and slips inside. Fastening herself up to her shoulders, so her head sticks out like the stem on a lumpy fruit, she relaxes and begins to let sleep steal over her.

Almost instantly drowsing, halfheartedly trying not to be jealous of the undoubtedly outstanding and athletic sex the kids are enjoying down the hall, she just manages not to soil herself when she sees the spiderbot clinging to the ceiling directly over her bunk.

She begins plotting her revenge even as she's fumbling for the seal inside her bag. First, she's going to interrupt their fun. Next, she's going to teach that boy precisely what it's like to have your captain angry with you on a boat this small. Next...

Her first inkling that something is not right is when her eyes finally adjust enough to pick out detail. The... thing... above her isn't a spiderbot. It's what a spiderbot would look like if someone who had never seen one before had been given a lump of tar and a brief description, and then had been forced to sculpt at gunpoint.

She breaks the seal on the bag and flings it open at the same time the thing on the ceiling shoves itself towards her. She moves her arms in front of her face out of instinct, and she feels the creature impact against them. Manipulators at the ends of two of its limbs immediately latch on to her wrists and pry her arms apart as though she had no more strength than a child. Struggling against the steel grip and kicking her legs wildly, Nomi begins to draw breath to scream. The thing spits a fine mist directly into her opening mouth, and her cry dies unborn behind suddenly slack lips. The muscles in her throat relax, along with those in her face, and then the rest of her body. She remains conscious, adrenaline pumping, but her lungs cannot draw air, and the edges of her vision begin to darken.

The creature simply holds her arms, unmoving. She can't make out any eyes, or any other features, really, the whole thing seems like it's made out of malleable black marble. As her last dregs of consciousness start to waver, she sees and feels the thing put a... a mandible on either side of her head, straightening her until she faces perfectly upwards. She watches with a sense of horror as it extrudes a tube towards her, pushing past her slack lips and deeper into her mouth, slick and tasting faintly of flowers and rust.

He body tries to choke, but it doesn't have the muscle control to effect the spasm. Her eyelids start to flutter and her vision fades to black. Her last thoughts are of Bill.

Suddenly, cool, blessed air floods her lungs, and her chest expands once more. Consciousness comes back in a rush, as does the flow of adrenaline. The thing is using the tube to feed her air! Her lungs fill almost painfully full, then deflate. She can feel it inside her, broadening slightly as it pushes oxygen into her. Her relief at breathing again is mitigated by disgust and her fear, as she finally has time to think about how helpless she is.

None of the rest of the crew have any reason to check on her for the next twelve hours, and despite the thing's questionable heroics in saving her life, she doubts that its intentions are benign. Suddenly, she feels a cool sensation in her lungs, and she realizes the thing has added something to her air.

What is that.

what.

what

w

The tableau holds for a few minutes, the spider breathing for the wide-eyed, insensate woman, until finally it draws the tube from between her lips. With a weak cough she begins breathing shallow breaths on her own again, still staring blankly upwards, her head cradled by alien limbs. Every minute or two the creature spits another small cloud into her mouth, and eventually her lungs are drawing air normally again.

A tendril, as thin as a silk thread, extrudes from the creature towards the helpless woman. Slowly, slowly, it bridges the gap between them, until it pauses just over an eye. With infinite precision, it begins to push into the space between the orb and her tear duct. Nomi does not blink as the thread traces its way inside the socket of her eye, following the curve of the orb all the way to the base of the optic nerve, and from there deeper into her skull.

When it encounters the sac enclosing the captain's brain, it begins to divide, and divide, and divide, until tens of billions of molecular-scale child-threads begin to penetrate the barrier. Soon it is in direct physical contact with surface of the brain of the Rockhopper's captain, and begins to insinuate itself deeper still.

The tableau holds while the invasion her mind continues. The creature is statue-still, clinging to the human woman, the only movement the slow rise and fall of her breath. A few minutes after the initial attack her extremities begin to jerk, spasmodically flopping as the tendrils invade her motor cortex. Her mouth opens and closes, over and over, though there isn't enough of her conscious mind available to form words.

The spider is undisturbed by the physical symptoms of the mind-rape, holding her head still in the vice-like grip of its limbs. Soon, every neuron in her skull is under observation by a child of the original tendril, and she stops moving.

Satisfied, the creature settles in to read, occasionally spitting another cloud between the captain's slack lips.

----

"Ung. Kid, grab me a bulb of coffee, would you? And try not to look so goddamned chipper."

Faith does her best to smother the smile that's been on her face since her activities last night (and this morning) with Josh.

"Sorry, Captain."

Nomi grunts and takes a grateful sip of the hot beverage her astrogator propels towards her. "Thanks. My head feels like I got in a drinking contest with Grubs. Is he down in engineering?"

"Yes, with Josh. Grubs had an idea about the bot priorities they think might make the mining a few percent more efficient, they're trying to prove that out before we go back under."

Nomi nods. "Well, we'll give them a half hour and check. I don't mind letting us cheat the stasis schedule a little if it saves us time overall. Are there any sausages left?"

----

"So, yeah," Grubs says, pulling himself along Nomi in one of the corridors bordering engineering, "Buys us a couple of weeks overall, would have been more if I'd thought of it before we finished making the bots, that's where it would have given us the most savings."

"Two weeks is two weeks." Nomi replies. "Remember it if we ever need to make a new batch, but I don't intend to scrap the bots we have now when we push off. We'll rig up some sort of cold storage for them here, so they'll be waiting with the rail when we come back for a second helping."

"Aye. Welp," the engineer stands, stretching, "I suppose I'm ready for the grave if you are, Skipper."

She nods and reaches over to flip on the ship-wide com. "It's that time again, kids. Everyone head to the mausoleum."

----

Grubs helps Josh with the hookups while Nomi is pushing Faith's coffin closed. Mashing the talk button, she asks, "All good in there, Faith?"

"Yes, Captain. See you soon."

She looks over just in time to see Grubs push Josh's coffin home. She walks over and checks the coffin's chronometer to make sure it's timed to wake him correctly, then turns to the Chief.

"Your turn, old man."

"Yeah yeah."

The gruff engineer clambers into his coffin and deftly hooks himself up. He's about to pull the drawer closed himself when he glances up at Nomi, who is staring blankly at her own open coffin. "You ok, Captain?"

She shakes herself out of her reverie. "Fine, Grubs, just thinking about the next shift. Here."

Nomi walks over and pushes the engineer's coffin closed for him, and then stands in the near silence of the mausoleum. The dim hum of the ship's reactor is the only sound, except for the inexplicable racing of her heart.

Without looking at the display, Nomi raises one hand and reprograms Grubs' coffin with a series of lightning key presses.

Time passes. The Captain stares at nothing, preternaturally still.

Suddenly, the release on the engineer's coffin unseals, and she pulls out the drawer to reveal him. Grubs is unconscious from the cocktail she's had the coffin deliver to him. His flesh, however, remains pliant, and he has none of the rough cilia of a partial stasis procedure.

Her eyes looking a thousand yards past the bulkhead, she swiftly works the clasps on his shipsuit, exposing his flesh to the chill air. Moving various connections out of her way, she lowers her face to the crotch of her chief engineer and takes him into her mouth. Her movements are not mechanical, but they are repetetive and determined. The vasodilator she'd ordered administered quickly takes effect, and he begins to grow and thicken in her mouth. Once he's hard, she locks her lips over the head of his penis, forming a careful seal, and rapidly begins to pump him with one hand.

In just a few minutes he's erupting into her, still unconscious. Holding his issue in her mouth, she cleans and redresses him. She double checks all the connections and pushes his coffin back into the wall. Her fingers dance over the controls once more as she sends him into proper stasis.

She pulls herself out of the mausoleum and back to the crew quarters. Opening her cabin, she comes to rest, waiting. The creature unfolds itself from below her bunk, flowing back into the surprisingly useful shape it has borrowed from the Rockhopper's bots. It drifts over and latches on to the unresisting woman, positioning the bulk of itself just in front of her face.

Black threads push their way out from behind the edges of the captains eyes, hundreds of them. They strive away from her, toward their maker, like black rivers pouring from her eyes. The tiny strands begin to wind together until they form a single cord, thick as a finger. The creature crafts a new orifice to receive the umbilical.

They share a moment of communion, a frozen tableau. Suddenly, the black spider draws itself closer to her, and she leans forward, lips parting slightly, as though to accept the kiss of a lover. A slick pseudopod enters her mouth and surrounds her tongue, forcing her jaw wider. It collects the semen nestled there and, now bulbous with the engineer's genetic material, pulls itself out of her mouth with a slight pop.

After a moment, the cord that binds them together falls away from the creature and separates, The individual threads reeling themselves back into the captain's skull. Nomi stands unmoving, mouth still slightly agape from her master's kiss. Her eyes are vacant, even as the final threads pull themselves around the edges. Her gaze offers no hint of the rider just behind it.

She blinks, spins, and makes her way back to the mausoleum to join her crew in stasis.

----

A thousand thousand thousands of infinitesimal robots ride a flood of diamonds into the bloodstream of the Rockhopper's captain. They slip through the walls of her vascular system, spreading rapidly throughout her flesh and organs, coordinating with one another to that every nanometer of her being is accounted for in the complicated dance towards stasis.

In her brain, several million of them encounter an anomaly. They share information until they have a clear map of the foreign tissue. Sampling detects no DNA or RNA, human or otherwise, but energy signatures are positive for biological life. Acting on protocols established decades before, they classify the organism as a parasite. Within a few thousandths of a second, far more quickly than any mere organic could react, they shred it down almost to its constituent elements.

Several minutes later, unaware of her sudden freedom (or previous captivity) Nomi slips into stasis.

----

At Sleepy's core, the last few hundred thousand tons of biomass finish the chemical reaction that warms them enough to kindle them. Weeks after the process began, the being that had begun to stir at the first explosive incursions of the Rockhopper's soundings is fully awake. The distributed mind finally turns its attention away from the task of leaving stasis. Extending a pseudopod hundreds of meters long, it stretches towards the spider-spawnling clinging to the wall of the enormous chamber, and draws it within. Impressions and experiences wash over the entire creature, as it assimilates the spider's experiences and gleanings from the Rockhopper. A significant portion of mass is given over to the examination of the carefully preserved genetic material the spawnling has returned with.

As it carefully disassembles the tiniest parts of the semen of the male arboreal, another part of the creature begins to stitch together something that would look very similar under molecular-level scrutiny. Similar, but not the same.

----

"Up, lad, something's wrong with the captain."

Josh's eyes snap open, his system flooded with the artificial endorphins of the wake-up cocktail.

"What?" he asks, already yanking connections as he watches Grubs glide over to join Faith at the readouts for the captain's coffin.

"Something happened just before she went under, and the system won't revive her without permission." Faith says over her shoulder, her fingers flying across the interface.

Josh moves over to the main mausoleum console and pulls up the same data. "Parasite, in her brain, nothing on record matches, but the nanos don't have a full medical library."

Grubs is looking over Faith's shoulder, and grunts. "Pull that up." he says, pointing.

She complies and he continues, "Now pull mine up next to it. Right."

He points at the timestamps in the stasis logs. "This shows her going under a full twenty minutes after me. Now pull your numbers up, lass, I was still awake when that happened. I was in my coffin not three minutes later."

They all stare at the numbers. The readout shows Grubs didn't enter stasis for an hour after the junior crew members had.

"Lass, I want you to pull every line of the medical logs. Go through them and look for anything you don't expect or understand."

"Yes, sir."

"Start the captain's cycle, lad. The system thinks its safe to wake her, and none of us know better."

"Yes, chief."

----

Nomi's first impulse upon waking is to vomit. She flails and bats at the hands trying to help her, striving to pull herself to the head before she loses it, but it's let go or choke.

Instinctively, she pulls herself into the fetal position to try to minimize the mess in microgravity. She begins to heave, globs of black sputum instantly staining her shipsuit and that of her chief engineer, who is braces her as she shudders and chokes.

Endless minutes later she finally stills, exhausted. Grubs is patting her back and making soothing noises that seem incongruous coming from the gruff old salt. Faith and Josh are moving around the mausoleum with sponges and vacuums, cleaning up stray globs before they can get into anything important.

"what." she asks, weakly, "the fuck. was that."

"Well, Skipper," replies her chief, "we sort of hope you can help us answer that. Lets go get cleaned up first."

----

"I don't remember a thing about it. I don't even remember getting in the coffin. The last thing I remember is helping put the kids under." Nomi slowly nurses a coffee bulb, her face still wan from earlier.

"I remember everything I expect to, but the logs don't have me frozen for another hour after that. Both the kids apparently went under when they were supposed to. Faith is going through the raw data. Josh is running some of your spew through the medical scanner. None of us feels sick, at least not yet."

"I don't feel sick, either, really, just wrung out." she sighs. "This is fucking scary, Grubs."

"I know, lass."

----

"So the good new is that the black stuff isn't contagious. I don't think the captain is sick at all."

The crew is gathered around the display in the mess where Josh has pulled up the medical scans he'd run.

"The, um, weird news is that whatever it is, it's organic, or it was before the nanos tore it apart, but it's not terrestrial."

Everyone is silent for a few moments, until Nomi speaks.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me."

"Nope. It's definitely biological, but it's constructed in ways the scanner has never even heard of, and this time it did have the full medical database available to it. It found nucleic acids, sort of, but they use sugars it's never seen."

More silence.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me."

Faith breaks in. "Um, I think I'd better show you guys something."

Josh moves to allow her access to the console. She pulls up a summary of the logs she's been looking at.

"You see Josh and I go into stasis here, neither of us have any anomalous readings all the way until we woke up." She brings forward another report. "This is the Chief's log. It registers him in the coffin at the right time just a couple of minutes after us, but he doesn't go into actual stasis for an hour."

She highlights a few lines. "These are commands given to his coffin, stopping the stasis process, and ordering him dosed with these drugs." She pulls up the list.

Grubs looks it over and grunts. "Standard knockout cocktail and a vasodilator. That's it?"

Faith nods. "In an hour, the normal course of stasis drugs is ordered and you went under."

"Where did the orders come from, lass?"

"According to the security log, the Captain."

Nomi shakes her head. "I can't remember a thing about any of this. I assume none of our internals were on?"

"None of the cameras. Security logs have your cabin opening twice, a few minutes apart, right before you went into stasis yourself, Captain."

"Once for in and once for out, presumably. Is this all you found?"

"There's one more thing. None of the internal cameras was on, but externals were running. This," she says, pulling up the footage, "is the area outside the airlock, just a few of minutes after the Captain went into stasis."

The crew watches about thirty seconds of footage, which just shows a bunch of spiderbots coming and going from the airlock.

"What are we supposed to be seeing, lass?"

"Here, watch."

The footage restarts, this time giving each bot a tag with its unit designation. About ten seconds in, Faith pauses the video and points.

One of the bots has no designation. As Grubs peers closer, Faith notices that the captain is staring at the screen, wide eyed, and has started to tremble.

Josh is peering close, too. "Hey, that bot..."

Grubs finishes for him, "Has too many fucking legs."

----

"No."

Grubs sighs. "Nomi, be reasonable. We need to get the fuck off this rock and back to civilization. This is extraterrestrial life, for the love of God, the first thing larger than a microbe that humans have ever found outside of the atmosphere of Earth. Someone needs to know about this, and we don't have a laser strong enough to reach anyone from here. Christ, it put something inside you."

"It might have been the equivalent of a defensive bee sting, and the thing already ran off. I can't remember anything, and apparently I was wandering around delirious for an hour, but I did manage to put us both in stasis, and the nanos took care of it. The medscan says I'm fine now. I'm sure they'll be just as happy to hand us all Nobel prizes in three years as they would be now. The problem is I'm mortgaged up to my ass for this ship, and if we renege on this contract there's no guarantee we don't lose the Rockhopper for good before the money starts rolling in from all those university lecture tours."