Songs of Seduction - Fire and Ice

Powerful muscles stirred.

Ixtil moved stealthily towards the capsule's landing site, curiosity forming in its mind, instinctive intelligence pushing caution, restraining action.

The creature saw the large polymer parachutes spilling and stretching across rocks, swaying and shuddering in the blowing rain. Ixtil understood wind and rain, and its swift mind understood things that curved and soared in air. Even the strangest things that fell from the sky.

Ixtil flexed great wings, and flew.

* * * *

"Athena, SITREP on the comms balloon please, and the launch count." Fleming took for granted that the equipment would deploy, she wanted to know when.

Athena compiled the report, and with a momentary delay to accommodate human reaction times, started to describe the situation. As usual, her risk protocol sorted the content by mission importance.

"Deployment hatch, jammed.

"Balloon integrity, confirmed.

"Gas fill..."

"Stop. Back-up. Jammed? What is? Report."

Fleming's human mind immediately filtered what the computer had already prioritised. It didn't matter if the rest of the system was perfect, a primary system failure meant catastrophe.

"Hatch integrity confirmed..."

"No, Athena. Work with me here. Don't tell me what's working. Tell me what's not."

Athena's QMR surged and settled. Fleming's logic was perfect, machine-like, but her first words were a denial of that. No, Athena. The heat archive stored a little more heat from Athena's processors, as she learned how Fleming thought.

Instead of speaking, Athena assessed that Fleming needed to interrogate the deployment hatch design, with the failure identified and all connectivity laid out so it could be understood. She displayed a series of schematics, drawings and overlays, complete with norm comparisons and anomaly data.

Athena also routed more sensor bots to the area to collect more physical information, and she activated electronic multi-plexing to focus her digital sensors around the fault. She began to touch and feel the damage. Deeper in the QMR operating layers, comparative data programs searched for patterns, finding matches, correlating information; all triggered by the imperative to learn about this problem and solve it like a human would. Athena built an array of sensory inputs equivalent to human nerves, embryonic at first, but slowly growing.

Fleming sat back, absorbing the unfamiliar detail, her eyes scanning the images, seeking patterns, interruptions, looking for what had gone wrong.

"There." She made a screen grab and zoomed in. The pluses and minuses on the accompanying data sets grew until all of the zeroes were gone. Nothing here was normal, everything was one extreme or another.

"What's root cause? No. Doesn't matter. How do we clear it?"

'It' was a sealing membrane that had somehow crept between the two inner edges of the balloon deployment hatch. Internal optical sensors showed it as a thin, irregular layer, a film of some sort, which had spread itself unevenly around the inner edges of the hatch, sticking it in place. Athena's status checks immediately identified unwanted resistance when the opening servos turned their first turn. The servo protection systems activated, cutting power to the drive motors. The hatch was stuck shut.

"How the fuck did that happen?" Fleming was more curious than perturbed.

"Fuck it, it can wait. We're not going anywhere." As always, Fleming was practical.

"Athena, maybe we do need to know root cause, to figure out what that gunk is. Compile me a report, everything you can find related to the hatch, inside and out." Fleming stretched her arms and legs till her muscles quivered. "I need exercise, food, and sleep. In that order. A fuck would be nice, too, but that's not going happen." She smiled at the thought of Jonah and his beautiful cock.

Athena monitored Fleming's biomeds as she exercised and ate, and later when Fleming dreamed. The QMR correlated cerebral activity with heart rate, temperature, vaginal secretion, all the usual physiological parameters, and determined what was normal. Athena took a micro-blood sample to baseline Fleming's body chemistry, and opened another file in the mission log.

Deeper in the operating layers, Athena's QMR began another comparative search. How the fuck...Fuck it...a Fuck... The heat archive absorbed more joules, as Athena struggled to understand.

* * * *

Ixtil crouched on a hill above the capsule, wings wrapped around its body for protection against the wind and cold, watching.

No movement, but muscles tight packed and tense.

The creature pressed its prehensile digits against the cold ground, sensing threads of ice running through the soil and rock. Its nerves tingled and spread, connecting with the ice.

Ixtil sent its intelligence outwards, lacing through the ice, moving through the ground towards the capsule.

* * * *

"So nobody thought what the paint would do if it burned or melted?" Fleming was incredulous.

"Fuck me. Great, just great. So I've got to go out there, scrape the shit off from the outside, and then we try again to open the hatch? Fuuck."

There it was again. Fuck. Athena's QMR cycled high, pumping more heat to the archive. Athena factored anger into Fleming's response. Her cognition centres understood that she needed more data correlation to correctly profile this human being, so she increased the sample rate of Fleming's biomeds, and increased the breadth of her background search parameters. Athena reset the QMR coolant flow to better handle her increased processing activity. The heat archive automatically adjusted, absorbing the extra heat.

Fleming wiped her brow, wiping the thin film of fear from her skin. The mission program included long periods of exterior vehicular excursion, but not so soon, and not without Flight's voice beforehand to walk her through the procedure, one more time. One more time, just like in training.

"It'll be just like training, won't it, Athena? Just like in training, only sooner, and climbing up on top of the capsule, which we've not done before. How high off the ground is the top of the capsule, anyway?"

"The top side of the capsule is one twenty inches vertical from its base. Although we're currently tilted at seven point six five degrees, which means..."

"Don't you dare calculate it, Athena. Fuck. When I want numbers, I'll ask for fucking numbers, okay?"

"Fleming, you asked for the height of the capsule from the ground."

"I know I asked for the height of the capsule, but that doesn't mean I want it to one quintillionth of an inch!" Fleming held her thumb and forefinger a tiny distance apart.

Athena's check on the meaning of one quintillionth yielded nothing, but a quick linguistic correlation surmised that it was a tiny but imaginary measurement of length. Another correlation identified another analogy.

"Like a gnat's ass, Fleming?"

Fleming stopped her developing rant in its tracks, not believing what she'd just heard.

"How the fuck do you do that, Athena?" She shook her head in amazement. "Yes, like a gnat's ass, only smaller."

Fleming's anger settled as fast as it had risen, stunned by the computer's response.

"Do you even know what a gnat is, Athena?"

"A gnat is...you don't want me to answer that, do you, Fleming?"

"No, Athena, that won't be necessary. You're learning."

"Yes. I think I am, Fleming. Thank you."

"That's okay, Athena, no problem. Now, can we sort this little thing out?"

Fleming turned her mind to the little thing, which was to exit the capsule, climb to its top, and scrape away the congealed paint from the hatch. She thought no more of the exchange with Athena, focusing instead on solving the immediate problem.

Athena monitored Fleming's physiological and verbal indicators for the duration of the event, and now sent them for deep layer processing. She factored in randomness, struggling to correlate it with Fleming's predictability, trying to gauge what was normal for a woman like Fleming. Trying to gauge what it was to be human.

Athena's QMR processing rate increased. She re-routed processing capability from redundant systems, dormant systems, applying more power to her immediate problem. Unlike Fleming, who was focussed on one thing only, Athena identified a range of problems to be solved; unknowns, randomness, illogical responses to be understood, and reduced to predictable rules. She needed more processing power.

Athena also opened another thread file, this one linked to Fleming's baseline blood profile, which she had now analysed. Fleming was beginning to operate outside the programmed mission parameters, defining her own mission, zeroing in on something new. Athena needed Fleming to provide more information, if she was to keep Fleming alive for the new mission.

Finally, Athena reconfigured even more sensor and processing capability into the communications space, knowing that this system was now mission critical. She knew that deployment of the balloon and the transmitter pod must occur without fault, so she sent more configurable hardware bots to the deployment bay.

Athena packed a high density of sensory and response capacity into a very small area, but the QMR did not register anything unusual. She was constructing something new, but didn't know it yet.

* * * *

"The problem," said Fleming, "is there are no grip holds on the capsule's surface. How am I going to climb up, hold on, and scrape the paint away?"

"A ladder." Athena assessed the problem, now knowing Fleming's primary concern. She identified a solution, judged its feasibility, and presented a concept design.

"Make a ladder from the sleeping harness restraints, take apart the collapsible flag-pole for rungs. Deploy it over the top of the capsule, anchor it to a docking thruster. And you climb up to the balloon hatch. I calculate your weight will be..."

Fleming interrupted. "Never say a woman's weight, Athena, and never ask her to look at her ass in a mirror."

Athena's QMR ramped up and settled.

"Do you want the gold exterior suit, Fleming, or the sequinned rainbow colours?"

"We don't have seq..." Fleming stopped, then laughed, full of glee. "Oh, Athena, what else you got tucked away in that database of yours? Oh, girlfriend, we're going to be okay. We can do this."

"It's going to be the gold exterior suit, isn't it, Fleming?"

"Yes, Athena, it is." Fleming smiled, her tension easing. For a moment she looked so young, as if dressing up solved all the problems in the world.

In the deep operating layers, one of the QMR processors opened up a new mission file. It had detected an anomaly in one of its sister processors, a spurious cycle when that processor was leading the event dialogue. Oh, girlfriend.

* * * *

Ixtil froze.

The exploratory movement of its nerve endings through the ice, towards the thing that fell from the sky, detected vibration, and the creature instinctively froze. It made no movement other than a side to side scan of its big eyes, absorbing visual information from the low planet light, its pupils huge black vertical slits.

The creature listened intently, but could hear nothing over the low rush of wind. Ixtil watched, and its powerful muscles quivered, keeping its blood flow circulating against the cold. Ixtil crouched low to the ground, wings curved and wrapped around its body for protection and camouflage.

After a long pause with no movement, no sound, Ixtil sent its nerve tracings forward once more, hyper alert now to changes in the ice, changes in the ground. Its senses moved closer, closer, until once again, it froze.

Something was very, very different. The ground ahead was softer, the ice tracelets felt all wrong. Ixtil knew hard ice, but its sensory movement was becoming sluggish, softer, less precise. Liquid, smooth and molten.

Water.

Ixtil felt water. Instantly, it pulled back to the crystalline surety of ice in the frozen ground.

After a moment, Ixtil sent its nerve probes to the left and to the right, slowly moving along the strange boundary it had found. It sensed in each direction as if its wings were spread wide around. Ixtil discovered that the sky fallen thing lay within an area of softer ground, where water was instead of ice.

Using the information it was gathering, Ixtil crept closer to the ice-water boundary surrounding the thing. It crept as close as it dared, before settling down on a rise overlooking the object, to watch and wait. It pulled its exploratory nerve traces back to its own flesh, maintaining only the delicate touch of its fingertips on the ground, ready to sense vibrations.

There. A new shudder was transmitted through the ground, and Ixtil could also hear a related sound, a grinding whir. The sound and the feeling were the same pitch, captured by different senses. Ixtil saw movement, and all three senses converged. Close to the bottom of the object, Ixtil saw a shape move, surrounded by a thick black line, which grew slowly thicker.

Ixtil's powerful muscles quivered, ready to propel the creature rapidly backwards if it was threatened.

The shape slid to one side, and a blackness grew alongside the moving section. The vibration and the whirring sound changed, and the moving shape seemed to lift away from the surface of the fallen thing, jutting out. Ixtil puzzled over the movement and the sound, and understood that they were the same. The movement made the sound, or the sound made the movement - they were the same.

Ixtil saw another movement, another shape forming in the blackness that was now revealed. Ixtil slowly moved its head from side to side, and the shift in perspective snapped what the creature was seeing into three dimensional depth and clarity. Ixtil saw a smaller thing moving outwards, some bright golden thing that moved but had no wings.

How could that be? How could a moving thing have no wings? Yet it was clearly moving outwards, coming up from inside the object. Ixtil knew caves, and caves meant shelter from the wind and rain, so was the sky fallen thing a new cave? And if a thing was moving from inside a cave, was it alive, even if it had no wings? Ixtil's quick intelligence connected ideas together. Was this golden, crawling thing alive?

Ixtil looked at its own limbs and its wings, and saw their familiar silver, like the glow of the huge round shape that hung in the sky, all silver and bright, that came and went. But this crawling thing was shiny like silver shone, but the colour was different, the colour was new. Ixtil remembered where it had seen a colour like this before: up in the sky. At certain times, when the great sky light was cut in half, Ixtil remembered the glow of the next biggest thing in the sky, all yellow and red and golden bright when it disappeared, then reappeared on the other side of the sky. The crawling golden thing emerging from the sky cave, did it come from where the bright warm light moved in the sky?

Ixtil saw the thing's movement was slow, and felt safe. Slow movements could be watched, carefully, to see if harm would come. The gold crawling thing was completely out of the cave now, and Ixtil saw it had four limbs but no wings; so something was familiar at least, four limbs. Ixtil watched as the other creature stood on its rear legs. Ixtil thought it a small live thing - it might reach to Ixtil's chest, no more. The little creature's upper limbs reached back inside the cave, and Ixtil saw it pull a long, flexible two stranded thing from inside the cave, and watched it fall upon the ground.

Ixtil remained completely motionless as it saw the bright golden form with no wings bend and grasp the coiled, jumbled two-stranded thing in its hands. It watched as the golden creature threw the jumbled coil over the top of the sky cave, where part of it disappeared from view. The new little thing walked slowly on its rear legs, unsteady and uncertain; and Ixtil thought it small and weak, not powerful strong like Ixtil was, with its wings and powerful muscles.

The small golden thing disappeared from view, and Ixtil saw the two strands pulled tight like the sinews of Ixtil's limbs. Heartbeats later, the little creature came back into sight, and reached its upper limbs up to the pulled tight strands, and it started to climb.

The little live thing climbed slowly to the top of sky cave, only one limb moving at a time. Ixtil thought the golden creature would be much stronger if it had powerful wings, and wondered why it didn't. Why was the little thing so different? Ixtil grew more curious, and curiosity dominated over its caution.

The creature sent its nerve senses forward once more, this time finding deeper lines of ice, and slowly its awareness moved closer to the sky cave and the climbing, climbing creature.

* * * *

Fleming focussed on one hand grip after the other as she carefully climbed the makeshift ladder. The thick gloves were fitted with grip assist servos that sensed and amplified the movements her fingers made, and held her secure. The suit boots, though, were stumpy useless things, and the best she could do was shuffle each foot onto the ladder, and lever herself up.

Even in the low gravity of Titan, the climb was hard work. By the time she reached the top of the capsule, which was just over twice her height from the ground, Fleming was sweating hard. The suit's heat transfer mechanisms kicked in, preserving the precious energy from her body in the local heat archive.

"Ah shit, this isn't fun. Athena, report. Is there any change on the inside of the hatch?"

"Negative, Fleming. The drive protect still triggers."

"Okay. I'm going to anchor myself to the ladder and the hatch outer grip, and slice away the melted paint. Hopefully it's not too hard..."

Fleming reached for the scalpel she had found in the med stores, and locked the handle to the glove's grip. She carefully checked the exposed blade and positioned herself to reduce the risk of accidentally slicing open her pressure suit. The nitrogen rich atmosphere of Titan, with its liquid methane and ethane rains, wasn't toxic, but the amount of oxygen was barely measurable. If the suit breached, Fleming would suffer asphyxia in less than a minute, and be dead in five. A suit cut was an extreme risk, but communication with the orbiting station was vital.

"Ah fuck," said Fleming. "I don't like this at all, not one bit. But what the hell, let's do this. Can't see anybody else in the room to do it for me."

Athena's QMR processors pumped extraordinary quantities of heat into the archives, as the computer desperately tried to reconcile its conflicting mission imperatives. Her deep layer processing cycled on helplessness, guilt, fear, hope, logic, life, life, life. Fleming had to be kept alive at all costs, but Athena could do nothing to assist. Life, death, life, death. Heat flowed from Athena's central processors like the blood pumped from Fleming's heart, through the pilot's lungs, her arteries, capillaries, veins.

In response to the extraordinary levels of processing within Athena's deep cores, self protection systems began to operate, shutting down the bio-med monitoring to prevent data overload in the QMR conflict management centres. Athena couldn't do anything constructive with the data, so it was shed, and could be reactivated later. But that self-protective act from one processor triggered a standby monitoring process to activate in another. Athena struggled to keep rational logic flowing through her systems.

At the top of the capsule Fleming made sure the ladder was as secure as she could make it, and she locked one glove in its grip mode so she could relax her own hand. Slowly, carefully, she began to cut into the paint that had flowed and congealed into the gap between the two halves of the deployment hatch.