3
Ava woke some time later in a fog. She was in her cabin. She was sure of it. She had no memory of how she got there. She remembered faintly hearing Ethan and Hailey talking, but the last thing she remembered with any certainty was being angry and going to check up on her team. She had been on her way to see them, and then she was here.
She was no longer in her suit. She was wearing the long, thick-knit long johns of a spacer. The weave helped keep her warmth in, and they were durable as well as comfortable. For most on-ship duties, Ava wore these long johns under her normal outfits, but when she was going out on a mission, she wore the standard compression bodysuit. The long johns would bunch up in ways that made them too uncomfortable to wear in the sleek armored Klavis Mark 3 suits that she had convinced Kane to purchase. She had done her research, and they were much better than the Clovis models he had wanted to outfit the ship with. They were also three times the price.
Ava lay in her bunk, working things out, trying to piece together how she had ended up here and why she was in these clothes. Someone had taken her suit off and changed her clothes. Hailey was the only likely suspect. Ava made a mental note of another line Hailey had crossed.
Ava turned in her bunk to try to swing her feet off the bed, but she was met with resistance in the form of physical pain and overall weakness. Her muscles still didn’t want to listen to her, and the ones that had listened were now screaming in protest.
Ava let out an involuntary cry as she gave up her attempt and rolled back into her resting position.
The door to her cabin cracked open, and Hailey walked in before it shut behind her. The cabin was small and not well lit, but not dark either. No rooms on the
9Lives
were ever truly dark. All crew had to be able to wake and get their bearings immediately in an emergency. Ava had an officer’s cabin, but it was not much more than an oversized closet with room for her footlocker, upright locker, small desk, bunk built into the bulkhead, and a sink with a mirror. The sink was a luxury, built to specific specifications and with failsafes so that it could not operate if there was anything wrong with the ship’s artificial gravity system.
“Good morning, Ava. It is time for your next dose,” Hailey greeted as she produced another capsule. Hailey filled a cup at the sink and turned back to Ava, who was glaring at her.
“What is in that pill?” Ava asked in a level, untrusting tone.
“It’s a pain suppressant, steroid, and anti-inflammatory. It will help you through the worst of the pain right now and set you on the path to recovery,” Hailey assured her.
Ava thought for a moment. “What would happen if I did not take the next dose?”
Hailey shook her head to hide a laugh. “That would be awful for you. It has been just under four hours since the first dose, and I am sure the pain is already coming back. Either you take the pill and sleep for the next four hours, or you don’t take the pill, remain in your bunk in pain until you can’t stand it, and beg for the pill. I really hope you choose to take the capsule. But because I know how stubborn you are, I will leave the cup of water and capsule here.” Hailey indicated the small shelf welded to the wall of the bulkhead. The shelf was within easy arm’s reach of Ava on the bed, if she was able to sit up.
Ava imagined reaching for the pill, struggling, and succeeding only in knocking over the glass of water or tumbling the capsule onto the floor.
“No,” Ava said hurriedly. “I will take the capsule now.”
“Oh,” Hailey smiled. “Good. Here you go. Let me help you.”
Hailey helped Ava sit up. Ava grunted but kept from crying out. With Hailey’s help, Ava held the cup and took a sip before popping the capsule into her mouth. Ava swallowed the pill. It was more difficult this time, but she managed to force it down. Hailey made her drink two more full glasses of water before Ava succumbed to sleep.
Dr. Hailey patted the head of her stubborn patient and pulled the thick woven covers up to better protect Ava from the persistent cold of the ship. The good doctor set a timer for three and a half hours and left the cabin.
Sixteen hours later, Hailey was administering Ava the second half-dose of medication.
Ava was groggily trying to force down part of a bowl of cut, semisweet oats with dried pieces of apricoons and citros. She had managed to stay awake during the first half-dose and had cleaned and readied herself to be up and about, but it had taken her almost the entire six-hour period to do so and make it down to the mess hall. Hailey was there waiting for her. The rest of the crew were seemingly too busy to check in with her. Ava was fine with that. She was torn between returning to duty as soon as possible and not wanting to be seen in this state.
Hailey told her that she would need to go down in dosage before she would be able to reliably function, but Ava was pushing to hasten her return. Ava knew that her duties were being split among the other crew while she was out of action, and the rotation would be burdensome.
Ava swallowed the second half-dose with relative ease. The capsule wasn’t cut in half; it had simply been scaled down to half the size.
Hailey patted Ava’s head and left her to her meal.
Ava spooned another sloppy portion into her mouth as she tried to plan her next move. She couldn’t trust that she was capable of much at the moment, but she also wanted to know what had happened. She had no idea how she had come to be back on the ship. She didn’t know what had happened to the relic ship, how her crew had made it back, or what was left behind in the explosion. As far as she could reckon, the salvage run had been an utter failure. It was possible she would never get to go out on a salvage run again. She hated that thought.
Since she was young, she had heard her father’s stories of exploring derelict, hulking ships, finding treasures, and searching jungle planets or desert moons for traces of hidden cargo or ancient battles. Ava had some sense of the money that could be made from a good haul, but she liked finding things more. She liked to find, learn, and decipher.
There was a story she had once seen on a vid link about explorers who looked for long-dead civilizations, not to steal salvage or sell it, but simply to learn about them. The main character was some sort of scholar, and he wanted to collect these things and put them in what he called a “museum,” where anyone who was curious could come see them. Ava idly wondered if they had museums on any of the core planets of the Dominance systems or First Founding colonies.
She had heard that Concordian space was filled with more extravagance and less brutal necessity. Very different from the space between law and rule.
Here, though,
she thought,
we can have something, work toward something, and eventually be something.
Ava coughed up a bit of the oats as the medication took effect and stared blankly at the wall.
Five hours later, Ava changed her overjacket and began working her way down the Main, using the hull to steady herself. She was avoiding the bridge for the moment. She wanted to talk to her team: Juarez, Peters, or Ethan. They weren’t in their quarters. She checked the equipment lockers next, then the med bay, and lastly the cargo bay.
The bulkhead door slid open at her approach. The ship’s AI tracked every crewmember’s movements and predictively opened most doors as they neared them with strong accuracy.
Ava stiffly walked through the portal, and the door slid shut behind her.
The
9Lives
had a crew of twenty-five, and almost all of them were right here.
The cargo hold was easily the largest space on the ship, encompassing more than a fourth of the ship’s total square footage. The room was an 18,700-square-foot rectangle with a forty-foot ceiling, with two floors of catwalks running around the perimeter and lifts and ladders leading to them. In the center of the bulkhead, there was a retractable and raisable catwalk that could be extended and adjusted to the correct height for whatever need might arise.
Currently, the adjustable catwalk was fully extended, with all four of the ship’s engineers and both maintenance technicians upon it. They were looking down at the artifact.
Ava’s breath caught in her throat as she took it in. The artifact looked the same as it had, but it felt so much more alien now.
A pristine white, smooth obelisk with rounded corners sat on what now appeared to be a crude metal floor in a dingy gray and gunmetal-black cargo hold. The cargo hold was well maintained and clean, as clean as a working space on a salvage ship could be expected to be. Seeing it here felt wrong, as if it were out of place and did not belong. What was more, the artifact itself felt wrong. It was not quite how Ava remembered it.
It was taller, she realized. It appeared to be the same width, though she wasn’t sure, but its height had nearly doubled. On the relic ship, she had marked it as being nearly twelve feet tall, but now it was clearly twenty or more feet in height. The adjustable catwalk had been raised to almost its full height to allow the engineers to look down on it from above.
Ava’s team stood off to the side with Kane, apparently going over all the recordings and readings from their time aboard the relic ship. Ethan spotted Ava at the door and said something to Kane. Kane turned to see Ava standing there, clutching the railing to stay upright. He shook his head and said something to Ethan, who turned away and walked to a tech bench near the bulkhead. He grabbed hold of one of the cargo hold’s many work stools.
The stool was essentially a rolling chair, but instead of wheels, it used magnetics to lock in place while also maintaining a gap between itself and the metal grating. This allowed the occupant to work in relative comfort without crouching and without needing to stand and move the seat as their work demanded. Instead, it could slide or adjust with the user’s needs. Ava realized they were about to use the stool as an impromptu wheelchair for her.
Ava stifled a reaction at the indignity and instead prepared to be thankful for the assistance. From where she stood, traversing the distance on her unstable legs would have been a hardship.
Ethan walked up, pulling the stool with him. He swung it around himself and extended it toward her. She grasped the back of the stool and let go of the railing. The stool shifted subtly under her weight, but she pulled herself onto it so that she was sitting backward and leaning over the backrest. She hugged the backrest tightly.
“What is going on?” Ava asked.
Ava wanted to know what she was about to walk into, or more accurately, what she was about to be pulled into. Ava trusted Ethan to be straight with her. She had known him for many, many years. They had been friends growing up in the shipyards of a small asteroid production colony. Neither of their parents had worked for the corporation that funded the colony.
He had gone his own way for a time, working the docks and then getting taken onto a ship to help move cargo at the other end. When they had run into each other later, it had been Ava who approached Ethan with the idea of joining the crew of the
9Lives
, a ship her father had only recently procured. He had taken very little convincing. His short-lived spacer experiences had not been kind to him.
Ethan looked Ava over. “Not a high point for you.”
“You know how to call it,” she said, not looking at him but instead at her father. “What is going on?” she repeated.
“Too much to explain and yet not a whole lot of anything. The captain is still grilling us over what happened down there. There are massive inconsistencies with our equipment and readings, as well as the audio and video recordings. Then there is this thing.” He gestured at the artifact in the center of the otherwise empty cargo hold. “It showed up just before the ship down there blasted into the moon, and you were stuck to the roof of it.”
Ava listened and thought it over. “That is a lot, so why are you saying there is a whole lot of nothing?”
Ethan sighed, exasperated. “Because while we are sure this thing is what you found, especially since you were stuck to it, it is not the same size, nor does its elemental makeup match your initial readings. So either it is not the same artifact or it somehow changed. And it didn’t launch up here, nor was it blasted up here. It appeared. It blinked into existence, stationary. It maintained a fixed position fifty feet from the cargo hold doors.”
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“What do you mean it blinked?” asked Ava.
“I mean it was on the relic ship, and then it was outside. If I’m not mistaken, it performed a short-distance leap to just behind the
9Lives
.”
Ava leaned back slightly as she processed what she had just heard. It was difficult for a ship to make a leap from one side of a system to the other without drastically overshooting. Making a leap from the surface to just past the gravity well was unheard of.
Ethan continued, “They scrambled to get out to it and extract you, but they couldn’t deactivate your mag locks, and you were unresponsive. They settled for pulling the whole thing into the bay. From what I understand, they tried to pull it in lengthwise, but it oriented itself into a standing position as they pulled it in. They tried to adjust it, but it resisted.”
“It resisted?” asked Ava. “What does that mean?”
“The way it was explained to me was that it seemed to correct against the pull and stayed oriented the way it wanted to. You might also note that it is not actually resting on the floor grating. Much like this stool, it is hovering slightly above the surface, so it could be moved easily by hand.”
“What?” Ava asked.
“Yeah. And according to all scans, there is no signal coming from it and no active power source. Right now, all of our brainiacs are trying to figure out how this thing works, what it does, whether it works, what it should be doing, what it could be doing, or anything about it at all.” Ethan put his hand on Ava’s back and began gently pushing her toward the captain.
“Well, I don’t know what it does or is supposed to do, but I would assume the access point would be the screen on top of it,” Ava reasoned.
“Yeah, that is what we thought too after reviewing your cam logs, but now we can’t find the damn thing,” Ethan explained.
Ava tried to turn back to look at Ethan but felt her world begin to jumble and instead said, “Explain that to me.”
“Nothing to explain. It is not there. The top of the thing is as blank as the sides and bottom. This is either not the same thing, or it changed. That’s all there is to it.” He finished as he continued pushing Ava farther into the room.
Ava looked at the artifact, puzzling over whether it was the same one she had found. It had to be, she decided. After all, how many things like this could there even be?
“Captain,” Ethan said as he removed his hand from Ava’s back and stood straight.
Captain Kane Summer was tall for a spacer. His face was weathered but shaved smooth. He wore his hair buzzed short, a habit held since his youth. He was lean but muscular and stood with a firm stiffness, not unlike the pristine obelisk standing tens of feet from him.
“Ava,” Kane greeted.
“Captain,” she answered. She waited a moment before adding, “I’m alright, Dad.”
Captain Kane knelt and embraced his daughter. She hugged back as well as she could. For a moment, Ava almost cried at the relief of the embrace.
Kane stood again. “Not completely alright yet, but you are on your way.” Kane turned back to Juarez and Peters and gestured for them to step forward. “Your team has been helping piece together what happened yesterday. We have vids, readings, and, of course, what we all experienced, and things are not lining up. This relic ship was a payday beyond any we could have imagined, but now the ship, or what remains of it, is lost to us. We will mark this location in the cartographer, but for now the radiation levels are well above what is safe for our suits or equipment. What we do have,” Kane pointed at the artifact, “eludes us. We have no idea what this thing is or how we can sell it.”
Ava watched him as he talked. He wasn’t upset. He sounded excited or curious. He was like that. He loved a good mystery as much as she did. This white object was a puzzle to him.
“I am slowly accepting that we do not have the equipment or expertise to crack this thing, certainly not without doing damage that could lower its value,” Kane continued. “We do have a contact who moves these sorts of things. Old Earth tech. I have had dealings with him in the past, but we are by no means familiar. I hate to have to cut him in, but I am confident he can find us a buyer. We are on our way back to port. We will arrange things there. I should not need to say it, but talking about this cargo to anyone until it is out of our hands is dangerous.”
Kane looked sternly at Peters, who held up his hands as if to say he would never.
“So until we get back to port, we are trying to figure out what this thing is?” asked Ava.
“Anything we can figure out about it could raise its value or help us know who to sell it to and ask for a finder’s fee,” Kane answered.
“Not looking good for that if our engineers can’t glean anything from their scans,” Juarez added.
Kane nodded his assent. “There is still the puzzling nature of the vids and audio. I was just showing your team this, Ava.”
Kane directed her attention to a holo screen behind him. The footage was from Ava’s helmet cam. It showed the top of the artifact. She remembered this. She had been floating back from the ceiling, aiming at the top so that she could look at the screen.
But there was no screen.
The video continued to play. She was closer now. Then she impacted the top and adjusted, using her mag locks for purchase. She oriented herself and focused on a spot of bare surface. There was nothing there. There should have been a screen with letters scrolling across it. She saw her hand reach up and touch the screen that was not there. Her suit lights blazed to full power before being reduced.
On the screen, it should have said,
Greetings Ava. We will be leaving now.
But there was nothing.
After that, it should have said,
Do not be afraid.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Ava’s voice over the recording.
Ava wasn’t breathing as she watched. The vid made it look as though she had said this unbidden instead of reading it. From the edges of her cam’s view, she could see the artifact had already started rising. The cam swung around, looking toward the walls, the door, and then the ceiling. The hole was forming. The cam swung down to look at the artifact again. It should have said,
Ship Destruction Sequence initiated,
on the screen, but the vid showed nothing.
The crackling comms sounded in the vid as Peters yelled for them to get back to the ship.
Ava heard her own voice again. “There was a notice in here. The ship is terminating itself. Get back to the Cat’s Paw now. Leave any equipment not packed. I have found a way out and will activate my beacon,” the recording of her yelled.
Ethan’s voice followed. “You heard her. Back to the ship now!”
Then the cam swung back to the artifact.
Kane paused the vid and turned to Ava. “What was it you saw that made you think the ship was self-terminating?”
Ava blinked, searching her memories. She had seen a screen. She had read those messages.
“I thought I saw a screen on top of the artifact. It was about a foot by two feet and initially had unfamiliar symbols on it, but when I touched it, my suit lights started working again, and it displayed messages on the screen,” she said.
“What did it say?” Kane asked.
“Um, it said not to be afraid, that it was time to go, and then gave the notice that the ship’s destruction sequence had been initiated, followed by ‘breach imminent.’”
Ava rattled it off, leaving out that it had initially addressed her by name. Ava wasn’t sure why she left that out, but she felt she couldn’t share it. She felt silly enough recounting everything she thought she had seen after watching the vid show that she clearly hadn’t.
Kane watched her. He could tell she was uncertain about what she was relaying to him, possibly because it didn’t match what she had just seen for herself.
“Undoubtedly, you saw that there was no screen in the video.” Kane skipped back to where the suit lights flared, then a little further to where she had reached out to touch the surface of the artifact. “Right here. Is this you touching the screen?” he asked.
Ava nodded. “It was right there. As soon as I touched it, it sort of blinked and said it was time to leave, and my lights kicked back on.” Ava’s confidence was low, but she was sure that what she had experienced had really happened.
Kane nodded. “Okay, and then there is the gravity question.”
He skipped back farther to when she entered the room. He allowed it to play forward, showing Ava’s perspective as she floated into the room, not contacting the floor until she had nearly touched the artifact. Then he skipped ahead to Ava flying up to the ceiling before pausing again.
“That moon has one-fourth standard gravity, and yet, based on how you were moving, it was more like zero gravity. The comms cutting out and the sensor readings were not consistent at all. We dumped everything we gathered into the ship’s AI, and it suggests that things were being manipulated or altered, possibly from the moment the winches pulled that door open. We won’t be able to study the winches themselves since they were abandoned on that ship, but their job queues were backed up, and a command had been sent for them to release. They didn’t malfunction, if that is the case. They were hacked and given new orders. The door then slammed shut at the exact moment you crossed the threshold.”
Ava listened, mouth open, as she worked through the implications of the object that now rested in their ship’s hold.
Ava looked from the frozen image on the holo screen to the artifact itself.
It sat exactly where it had been moments ago.
Silent.
Motionless.
Impossible.
The engineers continued their work around it. One was running a handheld scanner across the lower corner while another compared readings against a terminal mounted to the catwalk. Their frustration was evident even from here.
Nothing made sense.
Ava was beginning to hate things that didn’t make sense.
“Can I see the rest?” she asked.
Kane studied her for a moment before nodding.
The holo screen flickered, and the recording resumed.
The artifact rose.
The hole opened.
The sky appeared.
Then the feed showed the outside of the relic ship, panning to look all around. The vid bounced about as the winds buffeted her back and forth. Then she was pulled flat against the surface of the artifact. Her cam was right up against one of her own arms. The wind still jostled her body as she lay flat.
Then something happened that she didn’t remember.
She looked back at the artifact and then at the holo screen. The arm of her suit was changing color. It was becoming white, as if a film of paint were moving up and over her arm. She watched it overwhelm her before the cam feed went dark.
It remained dark for several seconds before the cam feed returned, like dust being cleared from a visor. Her vision returned. She could still only see her own arm and the surface of the artifact, but her arm was no longer jostling in the wind.
She had lost consciousness shortly after her grav locks clamped her to the artifact’s surface. She was seeing this for the first time, and it didn’t make sense.
She looked back at her father questioningly.
As if he heard her unasked question, Kane responded. “Yes, it appears the artifact did something to shield you just before it traversed to orbit. It coated you with its own materials.” Kane shook his head. “I have never even heard of something like this before. Old Earth tech is supposed to be supremely crafted, more durable, or more energy efficient, but this is more than that. Our best guess is some sort of living metal.”
“Living metal?” Ava asked. “What do you mean? How could the metal be alive?”
Peters stepped forward. “Actually, in a few ways. It could be liquid metal with charges sent through it, similar to synapses, causing it to change shape or grow rigid. It could also involve the use of nanomachines that operate like individual cells of the whole. They would be able to move, shape, and repair, but that would also mean this thing is only temporarily shaped as it is. It could theoretically assume any shape and perform any function it needs to.”
Peters spoke in a rush. “We still aren’t sure, of course,” he added as Ava stared at him.
“Well, that would explain how it could have a screen and then not have a screen, or how it could be larger now than when it was originally scanned. What doesn’t make sense is that the suit cam did not show the screen you saw, or how that room was altering gravity or blocking comms without having any sort of energy signature,” Ethan reasoned.
“Or I could be crazy and seeing things that weren’t there,” Ava joked.
Kane was silent for a moment before adding, “Possible, but there are enough other oddities that lead me to believe the artifact was manipulating things.”
Ava released a breath, losing tension she hadn’t realized she was holding. She had needed to hear that. She had slowly begun to fear that maybe she was crazy. The artifact had talked to her. It had said her name.
“Of course, it could still have something to do with the artifact being able to alter perceptions and make people see things that aren’t there,” Kane added.
Ava felt the tension begin to return.
“But again,” Kane continued, “the things you claim to have seen line up with what was actually happening around you. It told you it was leaving, and it left. It told you it was terminating the ship, and that happened too. In my experience, hallucinations rarely line up that well with what is actually happening. So no, Ava. No one thinks you are crazy.”
Ava glared at her father. She did not feel he had needed to take her through that back-and-forth reasoning to put her at ease. He had been toying with her.
“Thank you for the clean bill of mental health, sir,” Ava said darkly.
Kane laughed. Ethan snickered. Peters and Juarez exchanged a look of relief.
“Laugh it up,” Ava said indignantly as she swiveled with immense effort so that she was oriented to stare at the object.
Kane doubled over at her reaction before collecting himself and playfully punching her arm.
Ava ignored him but asked, “So what do we do now?”
“Now?” Kane asked. “Now we get underway and head back to port. Curry, Johnson, and UmWrey have volunteered to pull extra shifts to continue studying the artifact between their normal duties, but everything else is business as usual. We need a full inventory to be sure what was lost to us here. Equipment checks need to be completed, and our maintenance team could use some help with their checklists before we make port. I have volunteered Team B to help them since they are still at full manpower. Team A,” Kane said, making eye contact with Ethan, Juarez, and Peters, “will take point on inventory and equipment checks. And you, Ava, will continue light duty until Dr. Hailey clears you.”
His gaze settled on Ava.
“Understood?”
Kane had asked, but it was not a question. He was telling Ava that she understood. He was standing right next to her, so she had to look almost directly up at him.
She felt so small and useless.
“Understood, sir,” she said.