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Volcanic Valley, Planet Hoarfrost, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
April 24nd, 2038
The two minisubs sailed over the ocean mountaintops at a solid 20 knots. They hadn’t intended it, but they’d ended up with a massive escort of orcas and bottlenoses. All of them, actually. Doc and his team went in a full-size submarine, and thus didn’t need protection from Oohobo. The large submarines were tough and armed with lasers. The Oohobo likely had past experience with them under Selroth command, and stayed away from them,
It only took Katrina a few minutes to learn the minisub’s operation. The controls were simple and intuitive, having been designed for Humans, by Humans. While she didn’t have as much dive experience as Terry, she’d gotten more than a little since arriving on Hoarfrost. This was her first time out, though, and Kray had decided they needed a full escort. Not one to be outdone, the bottlenoses had come along.
“We need to get there and back quickly,” Terry said over intercom between the two minisubs.
“The adults will be pissed,” she reminded him.
“I know, but finding the stash will make it all good. It must have thousands of tons in it!”
The entire purpose of being at Templemer was to operate the mines. If they could generate a massive deposit of minerals for the Izlians in the first year of the contract, Doc had said it would ensure their success. Despite possibly getting in trouble, Katrina seemed excited to break the rules. He’d never had a friend quite like her. A little voice in the back of his mind whispered Yui’s name, but the memory of warm, wet kisses made it quiet and distant.
“How much farther?” Katrina asked.
Terry looked at his slate mounted in the minisub’s cockpit. The powerful computer was waterproof. The documentation said it would operate in any environment from 5 to 1200 kelvin, and pressure so deep most life couldn’t survive, the advantage of no moving parts or internal spaces. It was effectively grown from crystals as a single matrix.
“Looks like 3 kilometers,” he said. They were navigating based entirely on the data provided by their reconstructed Selroth program. Since it had provided a destination in the area, he was certain the location must be correct. If it had said the location was on the other side of the planet, he’d have doubted the results.
“Even with the heater, it’s cold,” she said, a shiver in her voice.
“You kind of get used to it,” he replied. The minisubs hummed onward.
Through the glass canopy, he watched Pōkole literally swimming circles around him. Despite not even being a year old yet, he was an incredibly fast, strong swimmer. Adult orca could exceed 25 knots. The calf was having no trouble keeping up with the minisubs’ 20 knots.
One of the bottlenoses came racing back from the direction they were heading, suddenly appearing in the dozens of lights from the many cetaceans and orca. It was Wikiwiki, a female known for her swimming speed. She’d often worked as a scout when the Humans had ventured out to explore Hoarfrost’s oceans. She’d been clocked at an impressive 33 knots.
For a moment Terry was afraid she would tell them an Oohobo was menacingly close, but instead, she had better news. “Machine near!” she said excitedly.
“Take us there, please?” he asked. Wikiwiki bobbed her head up and down, the lights on her harness dancing wildly, then she wheeled about and raced back the way she’d come.
“Wow, she’s fast,” Katrina said.
“Wikiwiki fastest Swift Brother,” Kray agreed, his huge bulk accelerating after the bottlenose with powerful strokes of his flukes.
The two minisubs skimmed through the water in the midst of a squadron of orcas and bottlenose dolphins. Terry wondered if this was how a vital ship felt being escorted by warships through enemy territory. He felt incredibly safe.
A minute later, his minisub’s sonar showed their destination. Another volcano, this one considerably shorter than the others nearby. Terry watched the depth meter descending and accessed the minisub’s built-in dive computer. He and Katrina were already breathing a mixture specially formulated for deeper diving. He entered the numbers and bit his lower lip. It was on the edge of their ability without having to undergo decompression.
“Is it safe to go so far down?” Katrina asked, obviously aware of the issue at hand.
The two minisubs slowed to a stop, and the orca pod circled back to ring them in. Pōkole stopped in front of Terry’s minisub, looking through the canopy curiously.
“What wrong?” Moloko asked.
“It’s very deep,” Terry explained. “You know Humans can’t dive deep and come up as easily as cetaceans.”
“Want go back?” Kray asked.
The bottlenose dolphins were clicking and singing ahead, already at their destination, inviting them to come join in the fun.
“No,” Terry said. “It’ll be okay if we don’t have to go any deeper.” He moved forward, Katrina fell in alongside, and the retinue of orcas did so, as well.
Terry tried not to watch the depth gauge as they continued downward. Despite his attempt, he ended up fixating on it so much he missed the extractor coming into view. When he looked up, he gasped in surprise.
“What’s wrong?” Katrina asked.
“The extractor,” he said, glancing over at her and pointing ahead. He could see her inside her own minisub looking in the same direction.
“I know,” she said, “it’s huge.”
“No, you don’t understand. It isn’t the same as the others. Doc said they were all somewhat different, but...” He shook his head. “It’s not even close.”
Where the first extractor he’d seen had looked like a motley collection of tanks and equipment mounted on a massive motorized tread-driven base, this one appeared more like a structure built on the surface of the volcano. It was also many times larger than the other extractor. Like five times larger.
“It’s like the extractor fell apart,” Katrina said.
“Or was rebuilt?” Terry wondered aloud.
They finally levelled out as the minisubs and the flotilla of orcas came even with what used to be an extractor. Now Terry could see his theory appeared to be correct. The extractor no longer possessed any means to move about; instead, it was built into the side of the volcano. Also, unlike the volcano the other extractor was working on, this one showed no signs of life, either fish or underwater plants feeding on mineral-rich ejecta.
“Why did it take itself apart?” he wondered.
“Can a machine take itself apart?” Katrina asked.
“Some can,” Terry said. “I think,” he corrected. He’d read about nanites in science. The Union had machines great and small. Some were like the Behemoths, kilometers across. Others were too small to see, so small they could enter your body and change things. Those were nanites, and Earth scientists had been working toward them for a long time. Naturally the Union was way ahead of them, and had been using them for thousands of years.
It wasn’t too much of a stretch to build a machine that could simply take itself apart and rebuild itself to do another job. Maybe lacking the space to store all the harvested material for centuries, they’d taken this extractor apart to create a depot of some kind. Perhaps it had been broken and couldn’t move anymore, or its fusion plant had stopped working. It sort of made sense.
He wished the minisub had sensors like a starship so he could scan for a fusion power plant. Unfortunately, he only possessed rudimentary sensors, like a compass, depth gauge, and temperature readouts. The latter showed the water temp down three degrees, further proof the volcano was dormant and extinct. He shivered, and he knew Katrina must be even colder. They needed to get into the base and out of the cold.
“Skritch?” he called over the comms.
“Terry, Terry!” the leader of Sunrise Pod replied.
“Can you look for an entrance? A hatch we could use to get inside?”
“We look,” Skritch replied instantly.
Terry could see the bottlenoses racing around the tanks and other structures by their headlights. In less than a minute, one of them called. Wikiwiki had found an entrance. Terry let Katrina know, and together they accelerated toward Wikiwiki’s sonar beacon.
The inside of the disassembled extractor wasn’t like the other one at all. There was barely any area in atmosphere, and what there was seemed almost an afterthought. He knew there were often no spaces in atmosphere in Selroth bases because they were water breathers. Doc had believed the reason that there were extensive breathing spaces on Templemer was the result of the water being unfavorable to the Selroth.
Terry and Katrina spent some time warming up in their drysuits and exploring, but there just wasn’t much to see. Eventually he located a data port and used his slate to log into the system. Like the others, its access code was a variation of the correct code, and he was quickly reading through the files.
“This is it,” he said excitedly. “There’s thousands of tons of sorted minerals here.”
“But why is it here?” Katrina asked.
“I have no idea,” he said. With full access to the computer, he began copying the entire OS and memory to his slate. With 11 exabytes on his slate, he had plenty of room. He’d only used two exabytes, and the extractor’s complete memory was less than 5 petabytes.
He glanced up as the files were copying. Katrina was examining a locker full of rusty gear. He caught himself admiring the way her drysuit clung to her hips and quickly looked away as she turned around. He was certain his cheeks were bright red.
When he looked back at the slate, he saw it had slowed way down. It was struggling with a series of files. Strange, he thought, his slate was massively more powerful than the entire processing power of the extractor. No file should be able to tie up his slate, especially one in an industrial machine like the extractor.
Terry waited until the copy was completed, then pulled up the strange file. It was unlike anything he’d seen in the Union to date. At first, he didn’t understand how the station’s computer could even cope with the thing. Like when he copied it, his slate struggled to load the file.
“This is the strangest thing,” he said.
“What?” Katrina asked, coming close.
Terry swallowed when she leaned on his shoulder to look. “It’s a file in the computer here. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
She watched the Tri-V display the codes moving in three dimensions. “Weird,” she said. She moved around to the side and looked at it from another direction. “It’s in three dimensions, layers upon layers.”
“I’ve never seen a program like it.” He froze the view and pointed. “Look at those strings. They’re almost woven together. How can you even program it? A three dimensional jigsaw puzzle, you’d have to have a strange brain to even understand it.”
“Like the code you put together to find this place?”
“A little,” he said. “Only a million times more complicated.” Who programs like this? he thought. Even more interesting, why do computers recognize it?
Terry spent a few minutes examining the other files, then saved them all and put his slate away. He checked his core temperature, then his drysuit’s power. They’d been gone two hours, and his suit showed four more hours of power. “How’s your power?”
“Three and a half hours left,” she said. “Is that enough?”
“Yeah, if we don’t spend too much longer.”
“We have to go back in the water so soon?” she asked.
“If we don’t, we risk running out of power for the drysuits.” The air inside the station was 10 below zero. Their suits could easily handle much lower temperatures out of the water than in it. Even so, without the hot air blowers, they’d quickly freeze to death. Time to go.
The return to Templemer took less than an hour. Terry and Katrina chatted about being out so far and finding the missing extractor. Terry carefully monitored their depth information and ran it through the dive computer app on his slate twice more to make 100% certain they were safe. As they were approaching the dome and the lights became visible, his radio came alive.
“Terry, are you out there?” It was Doc’s familiar voice.
He cringed. He’d hoped they’d beat the mercs back home. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“Where are you now?” The question was asked in Doc’s serious adult tone.
Crap. “Almost back. We found the missing extractor.”
“Come in immediately. Kiddo, you really screwed up.”
So much for a celebration, he thought. For the last few minutes of the ride, he ran the chain of events through his head, including how he’d justified their going out alone, despite the little voice in the back of his mind knowing it wouldn’t wash with the adults. By the time the cetaceans bid them farewell as he and Katrina sailed in through the lock, he understood that the idea was far from his best one.
Doc and his mother were waiting. Doc looked disappointed; his mother was just pissed. Yeah, not my best decision, he thought as he surfaced to face the music.
* * * * *
