Fireball: The Enigma Series Part Two Page 3

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Anatoly worked the line, compensating for the fumbling of his spacesuit gloves, Sergey hit another button and a door big enough to fit a two-car garage began to slide open.

  “I hope it doesn’t mind that we put such a big hole in it,” Irina joked nervously.

  “It does look like a big hole from close up, but it doesn’t go that deep,” Anatoly said. “The material is so hard that were still going to have to do a lot of cutting.”

  With small bursts of thrust from their maneuvering units, they floated like a small school of fish entering the side of a sunken ocean liner.

  Sergey was at the front of the pack. “Looks like the bomb only penetrated through two layers of the substructure. It didn’t save us that much time really, we’ll still to have to do a lot of cutting by hand. Irina, if you’d please.”

  She maneuvered ten feet inside the Enigma and switched on her laser torch. The point of impact glowed white hot as the beam slowly burned through. She held the unit steady through the agonizingly long process of cutting a circle two yards wide. Eventually, she was able to turn around, feet first, and kick in the cut-out section of the structure. She grinned widely as it fell away. “Let’s go.”

  “Ladies before gentlemen,” Sergey joked.

  “I think that the men should make sure it’s safe first,” she retorted.

  “That means you, Anatoly,” Sergey teased.

  “Fine by me,” Anatoly said, and pushed slowly through the opening. “There’s another wall… fifteen feet in front of me,” he said. “But I can’t see anything else. I’m guessing it’s an inner hull? I’m going to release the mapping probes to get an idea of the space.”

  “Go ahead.”

  They switched on the augmented reality functions in their helmet visors as three tennis ball-sized, self-propelled robots made their way away from Anatoly. They spun rapidly, projecting strips of laser light that crisscrossed the nearby surfaces and stretched away into the unfathomable darkness. The 3D mapping data was automatically processed by their suits’ computers.

  “It’s like someone just turned the lights on,” Irina said. “The space is a gap between two almost-flat surfaces that stretch away further than the probes can measure.”

  “Shall I start cutting through the far wall?” Anatoly asked.

  “Yes, please,” Sergey said.

  As Sergey started cutting, the rest of the explorers filed in behind him.

  Irina stuck a small light to the inside of the wall and turned it on. “Doesn’t help much, since the material this ship’s made of is eating all the light.”

  “At least it’ll make a handy beacon for when we come back,” Sergey said.

  Anatoly floated six feet from the far surface, wielding his laser torch. Once again the fierce, fiery heat of the beam bit into the Q-carbon substructure, tearing apart the 40,000-year-old bulkhead.

  “I can’t help but feel a certain respect for the race that built this thing,” Irina said. “Nobody’s done anything but scratch the surface of it so far. And I … can’t help feeling like we’re desecrating a tomb.”

  “We’re gonna find some strange stuff in there, I’m sure of it,” Anatoly said. “We were just producing our first cave paintings when this ship was launched. Sobering, isn’t it?”

  “You could use anything sobering,” Irina teased, mostly to ease her growing fear.

  “Hey, just because I like a little vodka every now and again…”

  The large circle was finally complete. Anatoly kicked in the resulting six-inch-thick chunk of bulkhead.

  “Send in the mapping probes again,” Sergey said.

  Once again, the saw a rapidly expanding 3-D rendering of the new space.

  “It looks exactly like where we are now—another gap between two layers of structure,” Sergey said with irritation.

  “How long until we have to go back?” Irina asked.

  “We have six hours yet. It’s my turn to use the cutter now.”

  “Be my guest,” Anatoly said, handing the instrument to Sergey.

  Conversation was sparse as they waited to see what lay behind the next wall. “I’m sure we’ve tunneled farther in than the Americans have now,” Irina said.

  “Here we go,” Sergey said as he followed the now familiar ritual of punching in the cut-out they’d made.

  As the mapping probes flew in, Sergey looked inside with his flashlight, expecting to see only another black wall. Then his jaws dropped in surprise. “There’s floating chunks of ice in there!”

  “The probes aren’t showing a thing,” Anatoly said. “They’re probably busy trying to dodge them. How big are they?” he asked, floating forward to look inside.

  “Six to ten feet across I think—it’s difficult to judge scale without a visual reference,” Sergey said. “They’re stationary, and probably have been for thousands of years. It’s spooky, isn’t it? They remind me of icebergs coming out of the night to meet ships on the high seas, like the one that sunk the Titanic.”

  “I’m starting to see a picture building up now,” Irina said. “There’s the inside of the wall we just cut through, but the only solid objects are more of these icebergs. I’m betting it’s a very large space, since there isn’t another wall in sight. How long do you want to let the probes keep going? I’m worried they’ll run out of fuel, with all the maneuvering they’re having to do.”

  “Let’s give it another minute,” Anatoly said.

  They watched as the field of floating icebergs gradually expanded into the distance.

  “Command the probes to come back,” Sergey ordered.

  The small devices began to drift back toward the hole, taking the most direct path they could around the obstacles.

  “This is the first real mystery,” Anatoly said. “It’s a giant water tank, and the ice is just dregs.”

  “I think you’re probably right,” Sergey said. “And that gives us our first real clue: it was probably used to provide reaction mass for some form of interstellar drive used to accelerate the ship to great speeds.”

  “I wonder what its power source is?” Irina said.

  “You and me both. The technology behind this drive will be fascinating, and probably something that no humans have even thought of.”

  “Where to next?” Anatoly asked.

  “We’ll have to take a left turn,” Sergey said. “That’ll take us towards the front of the object. The power plant has to be here somewhere.”

  The four cosmonauts proceeded with small bursts from their thrusters, staring around them as though exploring a vast warehouse with a very low ceiling, mostly dark.

  “I can see the end!” Sergey said, as the probes mapped the limits of the giant space. “It’s about 300 feet away. It’s just a flat wall.”

  “I see it,” Irina said.

  “It’s hard to tell how close we are to the walls, since it just absorbs the flashlight beams,” Anatoly said.

  “That’s why we need to take it slow,” Sergey said.

  Irina’s lamp, attached near their entry point faded into the distance behind them. “It’s so creepy in here,” she said.

  “Okay, we’re at the wall,” Sergey said two minutes later. “The probes are showing what amounts to a cliff, and its equivalent of ‘down’ heads in towards the center of the object. The corner we just came around is the end of that gigantic tank. Let’s head that way.”

  They braked using their hands on the solid surface of the bulkhead, to save the precious fuel of their maneuvering units, before making a ninety degree turn and heading in towards the center of the Enigma.

  “The probes are showing the space comes to an end,” Anatoly said “The wall to our right—the end of the tank—keeps going, but the one to our left opens into a giant open space.” They floated on, like divers in the total darkness of a sunken ship, for fifty feet or so, until they reached the beginning of the giant chamber.

  “I wish I had more probes,” Irina said. “It’s taking forever for these three to map the space.”

  “The outer wall of this path cuts towards the front of the object again,” said Sergey, lost in contemplating the inner contours of the Enigma. “But there are some very large items here. Short, very wide cylinders, almost as wide as the entire Enigma. Their center is probably the axis of the ship.”

  “Yes, I see them,” Anatoly said. The end of the nearest one is about sixty feet away. Shall we investigate?”

  They turned to their left, and headed in at an angle toward the end of the first giant cylinder.

  “Finally, something that’s not black!” Irina said, as her flashlight illuminated a surface that appeared to be galvanized.

  They braced themselves on it to arrest their movement, and swept their flashlight beams along it, towards the center of the Enigma.

  “It’s gigantic, like everything else in here,” Sergey said. “I want to know what’s inside.”

  “Me too,” Anatoly said. “Who wants to cut a hole in it?”

  “I will,” Irina said, darkening her helmet visor. “Everyone darken your helmet visors, this is gonna reflect a lot of light.” She turned the ferocious heat of her laser cutter on the metal. “It’s burning straight through! It’s thin,” she said. Irina swept the beam around in an arc, very quickly compared to the effort it had taken to get through the carbon bulkheads. They were soon facing a six-foot-wide metal circle, its edge still glowing.

  “Push it in,” Sergey said.

  Irina gave the metal a tap, and it tilted slightly before stopping a few inches behind where it had once stood.

  “What’s stopping it?” Anatoly said. He reached around the bottom half of the circular panel, the only part easily accessible, and pulled on it. The light metal floated down and out of their way, like a slow-moving discus. Anatoly shone his flashlight into the hole.

  “Well I never!” Sergey said, smiling. His eyes twinkled with delight. “It’s a zinc–rubidium harvester.”

  “The heart of a zero point powerplant!” Irina said. “So, humans aren’t the only race to have invented this.”

  “It seems not,” Sergey said, rubbing his hands together. “There are probably hundreds of acres of both zinc and rubidium panels in this thing, since I expect that all these giant cylinders house the same components.”

  Sergey’s eyes suddenly widened in fear as Irina and the others were silhouetted by a red glow that spread rapidly up the hundreds of feet of cylinder towards them. The band of light swept across the vast powerplant hall, including the end of the giant water tank. It came as far as their location, bathing them all in an eerie red glow, and then kept going, before disappearing.

  “Holy crap! What was that?”

  “Never seen anything like it!” Sergey said. “There’s clearly something in here besides us.”

  “Do we want to press on or go back?” Irina said. “I don’t like the look of that lightshow. It’s like the entire interior just phosphoresced. What was that?”

  “No idea,” Anatoly said. “Unless… the whole structure were somehow an active display built from microscopically thin coating. But why would the creators of this ship do that?”

  “I haven’t the first clue,” Irina said. “And next question: does it do that by itself, or is it reacting to us?”

  Sergey shook his head. “Not sure. But it means this thing isn’t dead.”

  “We should go,” Irina said.

  “We do not back out until we’re down to two hours’ oxygen remaining,” Sergey said. “That gives us three more hours.”

  “At least we’ve got a sense of the scale of this place now,” Anatoly said.

  “And I think I glimpsed something of interest,” Sergey said. “For a moment, I think I saw power ducts on the side of the cylinder running along the object’s axis. And I’ll bet they’re made of pure platinum. So not only are there tons of platinum here, but a bigger prize yet. If the drive itself is of conventional design, we all know what’s in the thrust chamber.”

  ****

  Even as the crab’s claws held fast to the outside of the Enigma, Storm felt his possession of the object slipping away by the hour. He could see the outline of the RSS Vasily Korolev clearly; it was impressively large. Her floodlights shone on the side of the Enigma like the noonday sun, which made her exterior details all the harder to discern because of the glare.

  The crab had enough food, oxygen, and water to sustain him for another eight days if he was careful. I really hope the others come back soon, Storm thought. He turned away from the window, and the Korolev, and looked instead at the eight-by-ten photograph of Anna taped below the main cockpit window. What was she doing at that very moment? What did she think of his exploits there? Did she know he was risking everything for her? The rest of humanity would certainly know by now that the Russians were trying to take the Enigma by force. Maybe she thought he’d flown back with the crew of the Zephyr. Hopefully she didn’t realize that he was still clinging to the side of the Enigma, exposed to anything that it, or the Russians, might do.

  Maybe he should’ve gone back, relinquished the claim on the Enigma, been content with what he had. Sure, they would’ve lost some money, but at least he would be safe — as safe as anybody could be in the looming presence of the cosmic bullet. It seemed like his plan to rescue Anna had gone wrong, like nearly everything else in his life.

  Storm keyed the comms panel. “Storm to USS Sigma. Do you copy?”

  “We hear you, Storm,” came Holly’s voice.

  “Can I talk to Drew?”

  “Hello, Storm,” Drew said. “How you doing?”

  “I’m a barnacle on the side of the Titanic.” Storm smiled at the comparison.

  Five miles away, Drew smiled too. “Sounds pretty accurate to me. I just hope this thing has better luck than the Titanic did, since we still have absolutely no clue why this thing is here.”

  “Yeah.” Storm squirmed inside with what he was about to ask next. “Could you guys… move closer?”

  “How much closer?”

  “Within half a mile?”

  “We’ve been staying this far away to steer clear of the Russians. There’s another American ship on the way out to join us, the USS Theta.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah. Once she’s here, she’s gonna take over watching the Russians, and then I’m going back in to explore the inside of the Enigma.”

  “Really? Coming back into the danger zone?”

  “Yes. Although we don’t exactly want to be near them, we also don’t want them to get to anything valuable inside the ship before we do. They’re pretty much forcing our hand. Did you know they already used explosives to blow a hole in the tail?”

  “Is that what that light show was? How big of a hole?”

  “About fifteen yards across. It’s not very deep though.”

  “They’re not messing about then.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  “Makes sense, though. They want to stake a claim, too. Maybe we should let them go first, in case there’s something dangerous deeper in than we’ve been.”

  “You know, that reminds me of the old mill, except this time it’s two high-tech superpowers playing chicken over an immense alien artifact. Not all that different though, I guess: still two boys going into a dark tunnel, neither wanting to find something horrible waiting on the other end.”

  Storm chuckled. “You want the other one to go first, but not by so much that you lose credibility.”

  “Exactly. You know, we’re more alike than we are different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it: two days ago, we were bitter enemies over this thing. And then the Russians turned up.”

  Storm bit back the tears threatening the edge of his eyes. He’d never thought of himself as being on the same side as Drew, ever. Not that they were on the same side even now, exactly… He sighed. “Yeah, bro. More alike than we are different.”

  “In the end we just want good things for ourselves and our families, right? I’m doing it through science, and you’re doing it through ripping panels off a gigantic alien object.” Drew couldn’t suppress a chuckle.

  Storm smiled. He felt a weight lifting off his shoulders. And then his frown returned. “I’m worried about Anna. I couldn’t forgive myself if something happened to my baby girl.”

  “Sure sounds like a bad situation there. After all this is over, maybe we could figure out what we can do about it. You know, together. I know some really good lawyers.”

  “Thanks, bro. I’d like that. A lot.”

  ****

  Storm saw the rubber, nonslip surface of the crab’s floor, then the lower control panel, the Enigma through the window, the display, the ceiling, and then the airlock door as he somersaulted slowly. He rarely got time to just enjoy weightlessness; they were usually frantically busy when out on a job, and when they weren’t working he was on the Moon. What are Dmitry and Desira up to right now? Probably bargaining frantically with anyone they can find to get a warp ship to come back out here. It won’t be easy with an international standoff in progress. But they’ll manage, I’m sure.

  Meanwhile, Storm had some time on his hands. Then it hit him: why not explore the Enigma a little more? He had the necessary equipment: a space suit and a laser cutter. He would tell no one, and mount a one-man expedition into the unknown, emerging with bragging rights to Drew and the others, and perhaps some more knowledge of what lay inside. After all, everyone else who had been inside had made it back out safely. What could possibly go wrong? He chuckled. It was a crazy idea. But then, Storm was crazy; it went with the territory of doing space salvage.

  He suited up. Luckily, they had autolock helmets, so no assistance was required. Grabbing his laser cutter, he entered the airlock. I’m crazy to be doing an EVA by myself. Nobody to help if something goes wrong. There was a reason divers only entered the deep with a buddy, and even with all the advancements in space technology there were hundreds of things that could go wrong in an environment utterly hostile to human life. And that was without entering an unknown object of alien origin. But still, he who dares, wins.