Rockhoppers Ch. 06

The engineer and his captain are in her cabin. The door is sealed so the kids can't hear them argue.

"Now," she continues, "can we do it?"

Grubs waves a hand. "Yeah, yeah. I can set up the smelter's hopper to be outside the ship. We can put reactor hookups out there too so the bots don't have to come inside to charge, and the manufactory already has its own hatch on the bottom of the ship. It will take some suit time, but Josh and I can have it done in a few shifts."

"We still have to have some spiders inside the bay, right?"

"A couple dozen, purely for moving metal out of the smelter and into the manufactory. Mind, we'll have to go out and bring all the equipment back inside the bay before we take off. We can seal the airlocks so nothing goes in or comes out. Faith's got a quarter of the ship wired for visual and sound now, as well as alerts set up in the computer for anything it doesn't recognize as us or one of our bots. She says she'll have the rest covered in a few days."

Nomi nods. Then she sighs and reaches over to touch the chief's arm.

"I know it seems crazy, Grubs, but we've got this. Nothing can get inside the hull without tools once we zip up, and we'll set the coffin wakeup protocols to a hair-trigger if Faith's cameras spot anything. We just make it through another month and a half subjective, and we're on our way back to Galileo anyway. If we get lucky, the externals will pick up more than a few seconds of fuzzy footage to hand the UNS for evidence by then, now that we've programmed them to look."

"I still don't like it, Skipper."

"But you'll do it?"

"... aye."

----

Later that night, like the two preceding it since they last woke up from stasis, Nomi cries to herself in the solitude of her cabin for a few minutes. She'd told Grubs the truth, she really didn't know what had happened to her, but she was certain it was more profound than she'd characterized it to her engineer. All of the reasons she'd recited for staying were true, but none of them could tell her why she'd rather risk the ship and all the lives on board it than leave Sleepy.

A few minutes later, her pillow still damp from her tears, her hand steals deeper into the sleeping bag. Slipping under the cotton of her panties, her fingers begin to tease her sex, and soon, just like the previous two nights, she's moaning into her pillow, soaked with yearning for something she can't quite recall.

----

"Careful, lad."

"I've got it, Chief." Josh's voice echos strangely inside the bubble helmet of the pressure suit. "It's just bulky."

"It's got plenty of mass, too, lad. You may be able to lift it here, but be mindful of inertia."

"Yes, sir."

Finally maneuvering the large steel square into position, Josh unclips the flashwelder from his belt and tacks the metal into place with a couple of bright sparks. "Okay Chief, I've got this, the weld will take me another half hour if you want to go grab lunch."

"It's all right, lad, I don't want either of us alone out here if the beastie decides to come pay its respects. I'll finish the reactor nipples for the bots while you finish with the frame, and then we'll mount the hopper together. With a little luck we can call it a day in a couple of hours."

"Okay, Chief. I'll get you when I'm done." Turning up the polarization on his visor to the point that Rockhopper's floodlights dim almost to nothing, Josh fires the torch up and sets to work.

A few minutes later, his radio crackles again. "Josh?"

"I'm here, sweetie."

Grubs cuts in. "Me too, sweetie. You kids use channel 12 if you don't want an audience."

"Uh, okay. Josh?"

"I'll be over there in a minute."

A little fumbling with the bulky suit radio controls later, he says, "You there, Faith?"

"Yeah. I don't really have anything to report, I just don't like you two out there with that thing. I wanted to hear your voice."

He smiles. "Nice to hear you, too. The work out here is mindless when it isn't frustrating. What are you doing?"

"I'm working on the motion algorithms for the cameras. Our software wasn't really designed with alien intruders in mind."

He snorts. "I don't doubt it. I'm welding the frame for the smelter's hopper as we speak, Grubs thinks we'll tie things up out here for today in another couple of hours. How's the captain?"

"She's back to normal. She made a long log entry about what happened and put all our information so far in it. I think she's still a little freaked out by what happened, but mostly she seems impatient to get the bots building the rail again."

"Well, we should be up and running after a couple more shifts. Grubs it turning on the outside reactor feeds, and once we get the hopper set up all that's left is doing some trenching so the manufactory can drop finished rails from the bottom of the ship."

"I've got cameras covering everything for a two hundred meter radius out there. If anything that's not in a pressure suit or doesn't have bot identification moves we'll know it. I'm watching you right now, actually."

Josh waves his hand for a moment before returning to the weld.

"Be careful out there, Josh. I've got to get back to work."

"I will be, sweetie. I'll see you in a couple of hours."

Twenty minutes later, he calls Grubs and the two of them move towards the large, hollow cube that is the bulk of the hopper.

----

A spawnling watches the two arboreals in bulky pressure suits wrestle a large, hollow cube of metal against the side of their steel ark.

It has also observed minute changes to the positions of a number of devices around the perimeter of the ark. The electromagnetic net coursing through the hull has changes as well, pooling around those devices. A much larger pool surrounds the area the arboreals have been laboring for the past few cycles, and the fragment has observed the mechanicals drawing energy from outlets there, rather than entering the ship as they did previously.

The spawnling extrudes limbs and begins to pull itself swiftly and with extreme care out of the line of sight of the ark. Once obscured, it pulls itself along with great speed away from the landing site.

In time, it stands above a tiny hole at the bottom of a small crater. The creature pokes one limb in, and begins to shed hundreds of tiny copies of itself. The limb slowly disappears as its mass is used up, and soon the entire creature follows, converted to a small mountain of tiny, wriggling spiders. A few wander around the crater aimlessly, but the majority follow the herd and slip into the hole with their brethren.

The hole opens onto a rough-edged pitch-black tunnel, a few centimeters in diameter, and over a kilometer long. The tiny spiders spill through it, drawing themselves and each other further and further down until they boil out of the opposite end, floating free in a chamber almost two kilometers in diameter. The bulk of the space is occupied by the enormous black sphere that is the creature at the heart of Sleepy. An enormous pseudopod extends and absorbs the spawnlings, and in the process, the observations of their erstwhile parent.

The spawnlings had drawn no conclusions about the new activities of the arboreals on Sleepy's crust. Their maker, however, draws many.