Engine Room • Metal Rain • Gladius Touches Down • A Rescue • A Common Language

The engine room was beautiful. Minna stood on a shining silver balcony bordered by delicate fluted railings, looking into a sphere of white light six meters in diameter, with a coruscating spiral of purple, blue, red, and indigo ribbons of energy in the center, spiraling upward, except sometimes they seemed to be spiraling downward instead. “It’s a closed timelike curve,” Vicki said. “See how the spiral vanishes up at the top of the sphere and reappears again at the bottom? It’s remarkable, a continuous closed flow of energy. I have no idea how this engine sustains itself, but it does, and, moreover, it supplies all the ship’s power and propulsion. Our friend Gladius has remarkably advanced technology, beyond anything I ever saw in my world, despite his moral simplicity. How did your talk go?”

“Gladius is very… set in his ways. I don’t think I made much of an impact, unfortunately.”

“It was good of you to try,” Vicki said, and to their credit, sounded sincere.

Minna pointed at the spiral of ribboned light. “Victory-Three thinks if we throw a chair or something into that spinny thing, we can probably break it and crash the ship.”

I winced. Vicki must have noticed, because it said, “Don’t worry, there’s no surveillance in here. The very nature of this engine makes electronic observation impossible. We’re not even really observing the engine directly ourselves, because just our attention would cause the spiral to collapse into de-coherence, so what we’re seeing is a projection of one possible set of…” Vicki trailed off. “Well, just trust me. We can talk freely.”

“Surely the engine is protected from that kind of direct sabotage?” I said.

“You’d think so,” Vicki said. “But apparently not. I suppose Gladius and his people never considered the possibility that anyone with ill intent would make it this close. I queried the ship, and while its defensive and offensive capabilities are formidable, they’re all firmly directed outward, and down. The engine is very delicate, and any amount of disruption should ground the ship.” Vicki paused. “Throwing a chair into it would be very bad for the chair, though. What do you think? Should we cripple the ship, when we can do so without risking our own lives in the process?”

“I think we have to,” I said.

A huge magenta slug came wriggling into the chamber, and Gladius’s voice emerged from it, slightly fuzzed with distortion – the impact of the engine on its workings, I supposed. “We’re just dipping down toward the plateau now. Looks like there are a few specimens in one of their fields, doing something agricultural with wooden sticks or what have you. They’ll do for our first pass. Here, I’ll transluce the hull so you can see the collection process.”

The white around us went clear, and I clutched instinctively at the railing while Minna gave a little wail. We were close to the bottom of the ship, apparently, and it looked like one misstep would send us plummeting down through the clouds. Then we dropped further, and the land rushed up at us, frighteningly fast. What first looked like the slope of a mountain revealed itself to be a field on the edge of a cliff when the ship shifted its orientation and began to drop straight down. There were humanoid figures in a field of waving grass or wheat or something, hacking at the soil with hand tools, and they took no notice of the ship, even as we drew near; it must have been cloaked or camouflaged in some way, and I knew from experience how silently it could fly. We skimmed over the ground, low, and Gladius said from the slug, “I’m going to send out the manipulator beams and scoop up that one with the funny woven hat.”

“Now, Minna,” Vicki said.

She bent, scooped up the wriggling slug up in her arms, and hurled it directly into the heart of the engine.

The slug sizzled when it struck the ribbons, and flashed away to vapor that stank of salt and oil, but it did some damage in the process. The ribbons, which had flowed together so smoothly, came disentwined and lashed around wildly like whips. One hit a section of the railing just a meter away from us and sliced right through the metal, leaving a molten smear on the balcony floor before it snapped away. I grabbed Minna and hauled her back toward the exit as the ribbons spat bright flashes of energy and then went suddenly dull. The hull flickered to an opaque, metallic gray, and we stumbled and fell into each other as the ship struck the ground at an angle, probably digging a furrow into the field as it lost its momentum. Once it rumbled its way to a stop, we struggled upright. I hoped we hadn’t struck any of the people working there. Killing them in the process of trying to save them was not a desirable result.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

Minna said “I think so,” and then the ship’s hull vanished – was it some sort of field, and not real material at all? We were sitting in the churned dirt now, crushed plants beneath us. Suddenly objects began to rain down around us – more slugs, now gray or black, and a chair shaped like an egg, and small unidentifiable metal objects, and boxes and bottles and bits of cloth… and Gladius, who floated down gently, with some sort of golden glowing harness strapped around his chest and waist.

“The engine failed, and the force field couldn’t hold out for long under auxiliary power!” he called out as he settled. “Are you all right? The medical suite is offline, but there’s a first aid kit, erm, somewhere.” He hovered with the soles of his boots just above the dirt, looking at the contents of his ship, scattered across the field. “I don’t mind telling you, friends, we’re in a bad way. I’ve never heard of a total catastrophic failure like that. I didn’t even have time to send out a distress signal, which means we’ll have to make our way to the nearest camouflaged hermetic node…” He turned, his goggles glowing. “Oh, dear. The locals are coming. I don’t see our weapons locker, it’s so blasted dark down here even with vision enhancers, but it must be somewhere, maybe closer to the edge of the cliff.”

A trio of locals – who looked completely human, just dirtier and more ragged and less perfectly symmetrical than Gladius – raced toward us, waving their arms and making a lot of noise. I stepped back, wondering if we’d made a horrible mistake. Maybe the locals would murder us on sight. They certainly had enough reason to attack people who fell from the sky. They shouted as they ran, and after a moment their words became comprehensible to me, even if they didn’t quite make sense: “Get away from there!” “Hurry!” and “Stop her!” were a representative sample.

Gladius rose up about three meters into the air for safety.

They reached us… and then ran right past us, parting around us and paying us no mind at all. Were we cloaked somehow?

I turned and watched them rush toward the edge of the cliff – closer than I’d realized – and they all begin to wail and peer over the side. “Hold on!” one of them shouted. “We’ll get rope!”

Oh, no. We weren’t invisible; they just had bigger things to worry about. I set off running, Minna following close behind, and, after a moment, Gladius floated after us, coming closer to ground level but still skimming over the field, not sullying himself with the dirt of the ground. One of the groundlings ran past us back the way he’d come, another peered over the edge of the cliff, and a third wailed. I put together what happened quickly enough from what I overheard. “One of their children was playing near the edge, and when we crashed, she got scared and lost her footing. She went over the edge.”

“You speak their gibber?” Gladius sounded both impressed and disgusted.

“You’re a naturalist. I’m a linguist.”

“I didn’t even know they had a proper language,” he said. “I thought it was like… bird cries or dog barks.”

I went to the edge, crouching next to the person looking over the edge. The little girl had landed on a small ledge about five meters down. Her tiny dirty face was twisted in pain, and she lay on her side, clutching at her ankle, so she probably couldn’t have climbed back anyway. The groundling beside me stared at me for a moment and then said, “Who are you?”

“We’re here to help,” I said firmly. I stood and pointed to Gladius. “I need you to go down and get her.”

Gladius drifted, centimeters above the soil, and peered over. “Oh, dear, it’s a young one. I haven’t seen one so small up close. They’re too much trouble in captivity, prone to despair and vulnerable to illness. The ones who make it to adulthood are more robust, naturally, they’d have to be–”

“Gladius! Help her.”

His goggles were transparent at the moment, so I could see him blink rapidly at me. “Ah. Yes. Quite.”

Gladius stepped over the edge, and the person beside me gasped, but Gladius didn’t fall, just fiddled with a control on his harness and slowly descended to the level of the ledge. “It’s all right!” I shouted down to the girl in her language. “He’s going to help you back up!” Switching tongues, I said, “Be careful of her leg, Gladius, I don’t know how badly it’s hurt.”

The naturalist stepped onto the ledge and knelt, deigning to touch the earth at last. He said something – if it was something offensive, at least the girl wouldn’t understand it – and then bent awkwardly and scooped her into his arms. She locked her hands around his neck, and he began to ascend, rising to the plateau and stepping onto the ground. The wailing person stood up and snatched the girl away from Gladius, clutching her and sobbing tears of relief. The other person, bushily-bearded face covered in tears, reached out and grasped Gladius’s shoulder. To his credit, the naturalist didn’t flinch away. “Thank you. Thank you. The sky people have never helped us before.”

“He says thanks,” I translated. “He’s very grateful.”

Gladius stared at the hand on his shoulder, then at me. “Ah. Tell him it’s no trouble at all, my pleasure, quite.”

I passed that on, then returned to Gladius’s language. “You said there’s a first aid kit somewhere?”

Gladius blinked at me again, then nodded. “Yes, it’s in a big white… Ah, it’s over there.” He pointed to a rectangular trunk, half-embedded in the dirt. I rushed over and pulled the case out of the dirt, found the button that opened it, and looked inside. There were more of the slugs there, in various sizes, these glowing softly pink. I lifted out one about half a meter long. “Will this help her?”

Minna was standing next to Gladius, murmuring something to him, so I had to call again before he looked at me and said, “Ah, yes, yes, it will. Just… apply it to the injured area.”

I went to the person I assumed was the girl’s mother and said, “This looks strange, I know, but it’s medicine. Will you let me help?”

She was nervous, of course, but I’m good at sounding soothing and knowledgeable, so she sat her daughter down on the dirt and pulled up the hem of her ragged dress. I placed the slug on her swollen, possibly broken, ankle, and the biomechanical bandage began to glow a deeper pink. “Does it hurt?” her mother asked anxiously.

The daughter shook her head, eyes wide. “The squishing thing is warm and now it stopped hurting!”

“Just stay there for a little while, until, ah…” I had no idea how to tell when the slug was done doing its work.

Gladius knelt down beside me. “Until its color changes back to pale pink,” he said. “Then you’ll be just as good as new.”

It took me a moment to realize that Gladius was speaking the groundling tongue. “How can you understand them?”

“Your Minna, she gave me a sort of pill, though in truth it seemed more like a seed, and after a few moments, their words just… made sense to me. I had no idea you’d created such things on the Peninsula.”

I looked at Minna, who was talking to the bearded man, and marveled. She’d put the linguistic virus into a seed? She was so matter-of-fact I sometimes forgot how remarkable her abilities were.

A common language would go a long way toward enacting Plan C. “Gladius,” I said. “Would you be open to a… different approach to your studies?”