“I have no current designation.”
“You scared the crap out of me, you crazy witch of a ship. I rename you Alamo. Now, welcome me back.”
“Welcome back, Colonel Kyle Riggs.”
— 33
It was weird, being aboard Alamo again. It was like going out with an old girlfriend you haven’t seen in ten years. One who had ripped your heart out more than once in the past, but who still held a special place in your memories.
The first thing I did was affix a translation device to the outer hull. This was easily accomplished. I placed it against the ceiling and allowed Alamo to push it through the smart metal until it fused with the outer hull. The emitting part of the device was exposed, while the controlling portion was inside my command chamber. The device was sort of like a car horn, with thick tubing on it. To me, it looked like an exhaust manifold. The unit was supposedly able to create noises as high winds passed through it. A deep howling could be emitted when in a thick atmosphere. There were tubes and valves inside to modulate the noises, which Marvin had assured me Blues could understand if I got close enough to one of them. Attached to the instrument was a brainbox Marvin had educated with the language of the Blues. I was skeptical of the whole thing, but I figured if whales could talk with a similar system, this thing might just work.
I searched the ship briefly, and questioned it. Alamo confirmed it had once contained a Crustacean pilot-or victim, as it turned out. As far as I could tell, the creature had died from neglect sitting up here in orbit over Eden-12, alone and cut off from its fellows. I imagined that similarly grim fates awaited any individual who wasn’t in tune with Nano ship tricks.
This same ship had left Earth when it had marked its mission complete. It had then gone to the Crustacean world and kidnapped a number of them. Who knew how many had been tortured and killed within these smart metal walls? I certainly didn’t. Each of the survivors had thought they were the ship’s final master, but they’d all been wrong. The last lobster had been determined to be “obsolete”, just as my own pilots had been, so long ago.
Now that I was officially command personnel again aboard Alamo, I ordered the ship to take me down into the atmosphere. The ship did so without an argument. In fact, I didn’t even realize we were moving at first. The ships I’d built on my own had never possessed stabilizers as good as these vessels had. You could hardly tell you were moving when you were aboard a true Nano ship.
By the time I’d set up a crash seat, a bathroom and a forward screen, we were dipping down into the upper atmosphere. I could feel the turbulence starting to knock the ship around. They had to be pretty significant bumps, because they got right through the effects of the stabilizers. I sat in my newly-formed metal chair and stared at the outline of the different atmospheric layers depicted in metallic relief on the forward wall. It was deja vu, but I knew it wasn’t the planet Earth the ship was outlining-there was no curve to it at all from this perspective. The planet was so huge, it couldn’t fit on the wall. There was no horizon, almost no perceptible curvature at all.
The other noticeable effect was the increasing gravity. I’d ordered the vessel to allow me to feel the tug of this world. When I exited the ship at some future point, I wanted to know what I was going to experience so I could adjust to it now. If it became too intense, I figured I could always fly back into space.
But after a while, as we went deeper, I began to doubt the truth of this assumption. The ship shivered, and occasionally heeled over when a powerful gust struck us. I squinted when I noticed something else at about twelve hundred miles down.
“Alamo? What is that in the aft bulkhead? A ripple?”
“The stress fracture has been repaired.”
“Stress fracture?”
As I watched in growing concern, the hull seemed to balloon inward. The metal swelled unevenly, and turned a brighter shade of silver. I saw more smart metal flowing across the walls to the sagging spot, trying to shore it up.
“Halt descent!” I shouted. “Reverse course, take us up a hundred miles.”
The engines labored and groaned. A new source of fear crept into my guts. Could this ship do what I was asking of it? What was the escape velocity of this world? At this depth in the atmosphere, I wasn’t sure how much power it would take to fly upward. With around three hundred times the mass of Earth, I knew the gravity well was a vicious thing this near a gas giant.
When we’d pulled up higher in the atmosphere, the indentation in the ceiling faded and smoothed away to a perfect curve again. I wanted to scratch the sweat away from my face, but didn’t dare remove my helmet to do so. I heaved a sigh of relief.
Was this as far down as I could go? I didn’t think that made sense. This ship, if it had originated from this world, should be able to take the natural pressure. In fact, I’d long ago reasoned that several key technologies existed aboard these ships, such as powerful stabilizers, because they had to be able to deal with the harsh environment of their homeworld.
I frowned, and decided to try to talk to the Blues. I sent a variety of messages, howling out into the external winds. Marvin’s system played the noises in the cockpit. To me, they sounded like a cross between a herd of trumpeting elephants and a tornado. Maybe it was sweet music to a Blue-I had no idea.
After half an hour of cruising around at a safe altitude and crooning for Blues, I received no response. I sighed, knowing I was going to have to go deeper down into the soupy atmosphere.
What was really down there? No one knew. We’d had space flight for quite a while back home, and our system had four gas giants, but no one had ever bothered to plumb the depths of one. Astrophysicists generally figured they were gas all the way down, but who really knew? I knew from experience that scientists often took a theory and ran with it. They always scoffed at new ideas, and only embraced them when faced with undeniable truth. They also tended to laugh at the mistaken beliefs of their predecessors just decades past. Since we’d never actually been to a planet of this type and our best instruments only penetrated this type of murky world to a depth of maybe three hundred miles, there were sure to be a few surprises in store. After all, the planet had a radius of nearly forty thousand miles. I was only about a thousand deep now, and I really couldn’t expect the Blues to living be at the very outer upper fringes of the atmosphere. I sincerely hoped they weren’t all the way down at the core, however. Whatever it was that core consisted of.
“Alamo, do you have another configuration? A form suitable for entering high-pressure environments?”
“Yes.”
I smiled. “Of course you do. This was your home once, so you have to be capable of maintaining stable structure at a great depth. Transform into your standard configuration for gas giant atmospheric conditions, please.”
The response was immediate, and non-verbal. The walls began crushing in on me. It was impossible, seeing the compressing volume of space around my helmet, not to feel uncomfortable. My eyes roamed the room, watching as the bubbling surface of nanites thickened and the command module deflated. I became alarmed when I saw the ceiling was less than a foot from my visor. I’d sort of expected it to halt by this time. But it didn’t. It kept going, and if I let it finish, I figured the tuba-like translation device would be shoved directly into my person. I’d soon be wearing it on my battle suit’s chest plate like some kind of obscene corsage.
“Halt transformation! Freeze current configuration.”
The surfaces around me were all uneven, like a limestone cave. I could tell the smart metal was much thicker. It had to be two inches thick or more. I nodded my head inside my helmet, looking around at the walls. I was beginning to understand. This ship had come from very deep inside the planet. Perhaps from a crust of some kind at the core.
“Alamo, is there any command module at all in your fully transformed design?”
“No.”
“Where the hell am I supposed to sit, then?”
“At the point of departure, no biotics were in the command module. It had not yet been deployed.”
