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Kahraman Base, Planet Hoarfrost, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
May 14th, 2038
Terry woke up and yawned. The ever-present low-level of illumination in the Kahraman base wasn’t enough to make sleeping difficult. There’d always been more light on the Teddy Roosevelt than he had to deal with now.
When his friends arrived, they’d spent a couple of hours walking around and gawking at the structures. Everyone had been amazed that Terry had figured out how to get into the buildings, then he’d explained he’d done so by accident, and they’d enjoyed a good laugh.
“Do you think this is what the Selroth are looking for?” Taiki asked.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Terry said. “The answer is, I don’t know.”
They still hadn’t explored all the buildings when they needed to go back and check on the kids and adults. It was a good thing they had, because when they got there, some of the middle school-aged kids were arguing with the adult women about going back up the hatch and to the submarine. They thought maybe Templemer was still there. Of course, it wasn’t.
Terry and his friends calmed the situation down, explaining that they’d found a better place to stay and they’d work out how to get everyone there. Of course, getting them there was the problem. One of the adults had been so shaken by the argument, she was afraid she’d gone into labor, which nearly caused Terry to panic.
Luckily Katrina knew more about such things. She verified in short order that it wasn’t actual labor. The woman wasn’t due for another two months. Then, while the labor drama was going on, several of the younger kids decided to go exploring. Dan and Colin went to go bring them back. By this time, Terry decided he couldn’t leave the rest of them alone, and it was late.
The adults were in no condition to take charge (which was obviously why Doc had put him in charge in the first place.) Two of the women just sat and stared at the walls in shock. They could barely care for own their children, to the point that two of the other mothers did so for them. The last two were quite pregnant and needed to rest. Added to this, the kids were becoming unruly.
Terry left Taiki in charge while Katrina, Dan, Colin, and he returned to the Kahraman base to explore, then spend the night. Taiki wasn’t happy, but Terry didn’t care. Back at the base, he had the bottlenoses do a check outside. They came back an hour later confirming the Xiq’tal were still searching the area, though it didn’t appear they’d found the sub.
They’d bedded down in the open, not far from the armory he’d found. He didn’t want to sleep in the buildings yet. Simply put, he didn’t trust them. Better to be able to make a run for the moon pool if something weird happened while they slept. He got out of the simple sleeping roll he’d brought and checked on the others. Colin and Dan were still asleep, but Katrina was standing near a building looking at its wall.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
She looked up and grinned when she saw him, giving him a patented wink. “Come over here; you might be interested in this.”
“What?” he asked as he walked over. He couldn’t see anything other than a wall.
“Just watch,” she said and slipped her hand into his. She was warm and felt good.
He smiled from ear to ear. Then one of the triangular panels suddenly swung up, and a little animal skittered out. “Wow!” he said and jumped back. She hung on and kept him from retreating further.
“It’s okay, take a closer look.”
He’d thought it was a spider, but it wasn’t alive. He could see mechanical components, and it had a pair of large multifaceted eyes, along with a single antenna. “What is it?”
“It’s a robot,” she said. “A lot more advanced than any I’ve ever seen before, even in the Union.”
The machine skittered right toward them. Terry was about to move when it changed course, skirted around the two young people, then resumed its course. He took out his slate and snapped a digital image. With the picture, he ran a comparison in the GalNet.
“Multi-Environment Type 92 Service Bot,” the slate informed him. “No longer in service. Last used during the Great Galactic War.” The robot skittered out of view. Instead of following, he clicked to find out more about the war.
“The Great Galactic War between the Dusman and the coalition led by the Kahraman occurred more than 20,000 standard years ago. Involving all the major member races of the First Republic, the war lasted 322 years, and cost many trillions of sentient lives. After the mutual destruction of the Dusman and the Kahraman, the Peacemakers brought the remaining hostilities to an end and were instrumental in the formation of the Galactic Union, a government designed to make large-scale warfare impractical.”
“Wow,” Katrina said as she read over his shoulder. “Did you know about this?”
“No,” he admitted. “I wonder if Doc was going to teach about it in MST later?” She shrugged. “Where’d the robot go?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “Another will be along. I’ve seen three so far.”
“You know, this explains why everything’s so clean.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “I guess these Kahraman left the base, and the robots keep it running.”
“The power system said it had something called a thermal tap. I think it gets power from the planet, and there’s a fusion powerplant, too. This whole place is weird. Here, come into this room.” Terry took her to the armory and watched her eyes bug out at all the guns and stuff. “And this is a manufactory.”
“Woah,” she said, running a hand along it. “It’s a tiny one.”
“Well, autochefs are a kind of manufactory. Since this one is here, it’s probably designed to make weapons and stuff.”
“So maybe this is an abandoned military base,” she suggested.
“You know, that makes sense.” He suddenly felt like someone was watching him. Maybe there were Kahraman around? He used his slate to find out what they looked like.
“No Data,” it told him. Maybe it was data he’d never loaded. Also, the Kahraman were all gone, according to the GalNet. The Dusman and the Kahraman had exterminated each other. There were no pictures or details on the Dusman, either. All he cared was, they were gone, and that meant the base was theirs for the taking.
Colin and Dan were awake when they came out. Katrina explained about finding the little robots. One obliged by skittering by just as she’d finished her story. This time they followed it. The machine led them to a building near the center of the dome, where it went in though a tiny door. Terry walked around until he found a full-sized door and touched it. Nothing happened.
“This is the first time I couldn’t get into one,” he said and tried again. Nothing. All three of the others tried as well, with no luck.
“Maybe we can sneak through when the robot comes back out,” Dan suggested.
“Pretty small hole,” Colin said. “Taiki would fit.”
“Dan, go back and relieve him, okay?” Dan frowned. “See if you can organize everyone to move. The bottlenoses said the aliens haven’t found the sub yet, so go up and get all the drysuits and survival bubbles you can so we can prepare to move everyone here. Don’t take long at the sub. We’ll be back this afternoon to help.”
“Okay,” he said, though Terry could see he still wasn’t happy about it.
“We might as well keep looking around while we wait for Taiki,” Katrina suggested.
Consulting the map on his slate, Terry could see five buildings he hadn’t investigated yet. One was the biggest by far, and he headed for it. “Keep an eye out for more robots,” he told the others. “I don’t exactly trust them.”
“They’re just robots,” Katrina said.
Just robots, Terry thought. That didn’t comfort him at all.
They reached the big building. Terry didn’t have to look far for a door; one was already open. Like the portal that hadn’t responded to him, this was another first. For some reason, he had a strange feeling, and he drew his laser pistol and peered carefully around the corner.
“You see something?” Colin whispered.
“No,” he admitted. I’m getting jumpy, he thought and holstered the gun.
This was the first building he’d found that wasn’t a big open structure. The door opened into a short hallway, and he could see doors on either side, and one at the end. All of them were also open, but no lights were on inside. The lights in the hall matched the same pattern as every other building, scattered and rather dim.
They walked into the building and slowly down the hall. They still had their drysuits on, so each took one of the flashlights from their helmets to see better. Katrina pointed hers at the ground.
“Look,” she said. “Dust. The robots don’t come in here.”
“I wonder why?” Colin asked.
“They’re afraid of the vampires,” Terry said. Both looked at him, agog. “I was trying to be funny.”
“Stop trying,” Colin said.
“Yeah,” Katrina agreed.
“Sorry.”
Katrina narrowed her eyes at him, and he shrugged. She sighed and put her hand on the green spot, and the door opened for her. When the light from her flashlight fell inside and she saw what was there, she screamed.
Terry jerked the laser pistol from its holster and tried to move around Katrina. She was frozen in the middle of the doorway, gasping for breath. He managed to pull her sideways to reveal the threat. Skeletons.
“They’re not Human,” he said.
“I know,” she said, turning and grabbing him around the neck. Hot tears fell on his face. “It’s just, all this going on.”
“It would have freaked me out too,” he said, holstering the weapon. “If I’d opened the door, I probably would have shot the shit out of everything.” She gave a coughing laugh.
“If you two are done smooching?” Colin asked.
“We’re not smooching,” Terry complained.
“Yes we are,” Katrina said and kissed him. Colin groaned and rolled his eyes. “You came to my rescue!” she exclaimed. He shrugged. “That almost makes up for the vampire bit.”
“Not in my book,” Colin said.
“You want a kiss, too?” Terry asked.
Colin flipped him a rude gesture. “Can we see what’s inside now?”
The room was maybe eight meters on a side, and a dozen or more skeletons were scattered about. There were six low pallets, which reminded Terry of Japanese-style beds. Two of the skeletons were lying on them, adding validity to the concept. He knew they weren’t Human, because they possessed long necks, and almost alligator-type jaws, which came to a point and were full of sharp teeth.
“They weren’t very big,” Katrina noted, kneeling next to one on a pallet.
She was right; in life it had probably been no bigger than a large dog. Despite its size, its rear legs were longer, so it might have stood upright like Humans, and it was about a meter and a half tall. With so many teeth, he didn’t think he’d want to meet a living one.
“I wonder if these were Kahraman,” he said aloud. He took some pictures with his slate. It couldn’t hurt.
“Why didn’t the robots take the bodies away?” Colin asked. “They just left them here to rot.”
“Gross,” Katrina said.
The three moved around the room that Terry was thinking of as a bunkroom, examining the skeletons. He knelt down next to one that was lying over a pallet and saw a tiny angular hole in its head. He carefully moved the skull, which detached from the long neck, causing a few vertebrae to fall away and rattle to the floor. He found another hole roughly on the opposite side of the head.
“I think this one was shot in the head,” Terry said.
“This one, too,” Colin said across the room.
“Same here,” Katrina noted.
They spent a minute going from skeleton to skeleton, verifying; they had all been shot in the head in an obvious scene of mass execution. In total, there were 14 skeletons. Other than the bones, the room was only rusty with some discolorations on the floor or pallets around the bodies. Terry guessed if they were Kahraman, they might have been killed 20,000 years ago. He wondered if the people who’d first gone into the Egyptian pyramids felt like he did.
“Let’s see what’s in the other rooms,” Terry said.
They exited the bunkroom and crossed the narrow hall. Katrina touched the green space, and the door opened. Terry had a hand on his laser pistol, just in case. The room was the same size as the other, with three long tables less than a meter high. A machine took up half the length of one wall. Terry went over to the machine, and a display came alive on it. He used his slate to translate.
“Autochef Online—Nutrient Reserve Status—Low.”
“Food, heat, safety,” Terry said.
“Looks pretty good to me,” Katrina agreed.
“Going to be tough getting the little kids down here,” Colin said.
“Harder for the moms with little babies,” Terry agreed. “As soon as Taiki gets back, we’ll see if this will work.”
“What about the last room?” Katrina asked, pointing back out to the hallway.
“Yeah, let’s check it out,” Colin agreed.
Terry shrugged and they approached the last door. He was mentally comparing the spaces they’d discovered so far in the building against its exterior size and guessed more than half was left. Katrina opened the door and verified his estimate. After finding a lunch room and a bunkhouse full of skeletons, he guessed he couldn’t be surprised. He was wrong.
“What the hell?” Katrina said.
All three entered and looked at what they could see. Three cubical-style workstations were in front of them, and a line of clear tubes to either side. The tubes were full of water, and a creature was suspended in each one. Terry walked over to the nearest workstation, while his friends wandered over to look at the tubes.
Like every other machine he’d encountered so far, the workstation came alive. This one had a complicated wraparound Tri-V instead of a flat display, which made it much harder to translate through his slate. He had to hold the slate at just the right angle and distance, which took several tries.
“Codex Status—Standing By.”
“Codex,” he said aloud. “What does that mean?”
The submenus were no help either. “Codex correlation,” “Biome Codex Indexing.” “Task Codex Assimilation,” and many more options like them. The words had meaning, but didn’t help him understand what they meant in the current context. A few of the menu selections were like the big computer, not translated at all.
After a few minutes, he realized his friends were gone. Since he wasn’t learning anything, he got up to see where they were. The workstation shut down as soon as he was a meter away from it.
It turned out there were six small corridors running off from the entry area. They were both halfway down one of them looking at more tubes. As they entered one of the corridors, more subdued lights came on. “What did you find?” he asked.
Katrina pointed to the line of tubes in the corridor. “Look at these,” she said.
“Bunch of different fish,” he said. He leaned in closer to examine the one next to him. It was a little like a lobster, only much larger. Probably a meter long, it also had a tail that split at the end, and no obvious eyes. It looked like it could be alive; there was no sign of decay.
“Not different,” Colin said and pointed to the one next to it.
Terry moved over and examined it. Colin was confused, it was clearly a different species. Then he spotted all the similarities. The only thing different was that the ‘head’ now had eyestalks, and the second set of legs had tiny pincers. “Evolutionary samples?”
“Keep looking,” Katrina said, so he moved to the next one.
Two sets of the front legs now had pincers, and the pincers were segmented to provide articulation. The first set also had a fixed ‘thumb.’ The eyes were now mobile and compound, and the tail was smaller, tougher, and appeared to be able to curl up under the body. There was another down the line, and the theme continued, with both front sets of limbs showing thumbs and more detailed articulation. The progression was obvious.
“Were they purposely modifying these lobster things?” he asked.
“We think so,” Colin said. “It starts down there with a lobster creature half the size of the one you’re looking at, and ends over there.”
Terry looked at the one Colin had indicated. It was again a little smaller than the largest, and its pincers were basically small three-fingered hands. He also saw unmistakable pinplants on the side of its head. “Hey, how are these here? Aren’t they 20,000 years old?”
Katrina moved her foot through the millimeters-thick dust on the floor, just like the rest of the building. “Hard to say how old, but nobody’s been in here for a long time.”
Terry looked for a display on the cylinders. There wasn’t one. There were nine tubes in the corridor, taking the lobster from a simple creature to one that would have been at home wandering through Karma. “Wait,” he said, “there’s a term for this.” He went into the personal files on his slate. He’d downloaded a ton of books and videos while aboard Teddy Roosevelt. He typed in a few search words, and up came a term.
“Uplifting,” he said. “They call this uplifting. Taking a species from basically an animal all the way to full sentient beings. Doc talked about how they thought some races looked, well, designed.” He pointed at the final stage of the lobster-thing. “What are the others like?”
They went to the next corridor. This creature looked like a sea snake he’d seen in an aquarium on Honolulu. Over the next five cylinders it became bigger, its eyes more forward focused, and it grew tentacles on either side of the head, which must be manipulative limbs. Unlike the lobster, it didn’t have a pinplant, and seemed to suddenly stop in mid-uplift. Failed project? he wondered.
Three of the remaining corridors had progressive examples of different creatures. One reminded him of a sea urchin. There were only four examples; apparently it hadn’t worked out early on. The next was a sort of shark with armored plates on its body. This one had seven examples, the most of any, and ended with pinplants and six crab-like limbs—two with vicious pincers, the rest more like hands.
The last was a dead ringer for a cuttlefish. Like the lobster, it hadn’t started out with eyes, but they’d quickly added them in. It had only made it to the fifth iteration, where it ended without pinplants.
“I think the pinplants signify that they graduated,” Terry said.
“God, I hope not,” Katrina said.
“Why?” Colin wondered.
“Because that means there are giant armored sharks out in the galaxy!”
“At least they don’t have laser beams on their heads,” Terry said. She giggled. They’d both watched those movies a week earlier. It seemed like a million years now, as he remembered everyone was dead. He put it out of his mind.
The last of the six corridors wasn’t a gallery of uplifted alien sea life. Instead, it led to another doorway. Terry opened this one himself. He wasn’t bothering with the gun anymore. It seemed there was nothing more dangerous here than long-dead alien science experiments and dust.
This room seemed to be the remainder of the large dome, or about a quarter of the space along the back wall. It looked rather boring compared to the dozens of cylinders full of half-uplifted alien creatures.
There were a pair of workstations like the ones in the entry area, one to either side of the door. Further back toward the wall sat a series of a dozen blocky structures set into the floor. The curve of the back wall was interrupted halfway down from the curved ceiling, and came straight down, suggesting there was something behind it out of view.
The only thing that seemed out of place was an empty cylindrical clear tank mounted on treads with several manipulator arms attached. Terry moved closer to examine it, and found the glass covered in a light residue, as if whatever liquid had once been in it had evaporated, leaving a dried scum on the sides. In the bottom were a couple of inlets and outlets that had probably purified the water, a couple of pieces of corroded electronics that might have been pinplants, and what looked to him like a bird’s beak.
“What is this place?” Katrina asked aloud. She was looking at one of the blocky structures, which showed no response to her presence.
“Maybe a lab?” Colin suggested. He looked at the tracked tube Terry was examining. “This was an experiment when they all started shooting each other?”
Terry went to a workstation and used his slate again once it came alive, like the others in the entry area.
“Project Suspended—Standing By”
“Analysis Available.”
He stared at the options for a moment. Other items in the display noted available quantities on hand of things called biofilm, gene silencers, mutagens, and phages. None of the terms made sense to him, though his translator recognized them. At least as many others were untranslated. ‘Analysis Available’ was highlighted, so he reached into the Tri-V and touched it. The entire display flashed blue, and another much larger Tri-V came alive.
“What did you just do?” Katrina asked, accusation in her voice.
“It’s just a lab,” he replied and shrugged. “What can it do?” She opened her mouth to tell him when the new display resolved into an obvious representation of the structures within the dome. He held up his slate, which translated more of the buildings. Habitation, Life Support, Thermal Tap, Backup Fusion Power, Stores 1, Stores 2, Armory, Labs, and Pool. Then a series of white spots appeared. A dozen or so in the pool, and three in the lab.
“That’s us,” Colin pointed at the lab.
“Which means those are the cetaceans,” Terry said and pointed at the pool. As they watched, the simple spots of white grew into perfectly rendered Tri-V dolphins and orcas. Curious and emboldened by his success at bringing the view up, he reached out and touched the pool area. It expanded to take up the entire viewing area.
Like any alien-made Tri-V, the image was true-to-life in full detail. He recognized Moloko with her calf Pōkole, Maka, Kray, and the other orcas, along with numerous bottlenoses. One by one, the representations of each cetacean was taken apart layer by layer, completely deconstructed down to their skeleton, and then popping back into existence.
“Woah,” Katrina said, “that’s freaky. What’s it doing?”
“Scanning them,” Terry said. He touched the display and moved his hand sideways until the lab and their three shapes were visible. It was more than a little disconcerting to watch themselves live from above, all their actions perfectly copied. Colin looked up at the ceiling, and his miniature did the same thing.
“That’s even more freaky,” Katrina said. Then the miniature Katrina’s clothes disappeared. She squealed and her hands went to her privates. Her skin was gone, then muscles, and so on.
Terry had been momentarily titillated, then blanched as she was stripped to the bones, just like the cetaceans, only to pop back to normal. He was next, and it all happened too fast for his belated attempt at modesty to work any better than Katrina’s had. Colin looked from them to the display just in time to be looking at his own naked miniature.
“What the heck?” he barked as his skin disappeared. He glared at Terry.
“Not like I can control it,” Terry said. Katrina looked at them both peevishly, her cheeks flushed bright red.
Terry turned to look at the workstation display. “All Analysis Complete,” was displayed.
“Marine Mammal—Fully Actionable / Non-Resident—Analysis Results: Size Class 6 / Biome Type 3 / Tech Index 1 / Combat Index 9—Sapient Stage 5—Candidate Stage 8”
“Marine Mammal—Fully Actionable / Non-Resident—Analysis Results: Size Class 3 / Biome Type 3 / Tech Index 9 / Combat Index 3—Sapient Stage 6—Candidate Stage 10—Special Alert—Multi-Level Nav Candidate”
“Land Mammal—Partly Actionable / Non-Resident—Analysis Results: Size Class 2 / Biome type 2/4—Potential 3/5/6 / Tech Index 7 / Combat Index 10—Sapient Stage 9—Candidate Stage 10”
“Is the last one us?” Katrina asked.
“I think it is,” Terry said. “The first must be the orcas, the second the bottlenoses. It looks like the system’s evaluated them for uplifting.”
“And us, too,” Colin pointed out. “Sapient stage 9? I guess it thinks we aren’t quite as far from monkeys as we think we are.” They all laughed. Katrina made a chimpanzee sound, and they laughed again.
“How’s it getting all this?” she asked. “The best scanners we have on Earth are huge and take minutes to get even a fraction of the kind of data they’ve gotten in seconds. It must have scanned our DNA.”
“Those panels,” Terry said, snapping his fingers. “They reminded me of something. The walls of the Tri-V theater on the Behemoth have similar panels. They’re sensors, really, really good ones.”
“I guess,” Katrina said. “Did you see...”
“Nope,” Terry said, hoping he wasn’t blushing. He moved the big Tri-V display to the armory building and touched it. Once again it zoomed in, and data began to scroll.
“Manufactory Standing By—Available; 500 Class 1 Type 2/3/4 Configurable Beam Weapons. Available, 100 Class 2 Type 2/3/4 Configurable Projectile Weapons. Available, 400 Units Configurable Armor.” It continued to list more items but didn’t translate them. He was pretty sure he understood some of it, which made sense from what they’d seen in the armory; there were a lot of guns.
He tapped at the displays of weapons, but it just flashed at him. After the third time, a line of text appeared. “Configure To Match Candidate”
“You better stop before you break something,” Colin said.
“This thing is 20,000 years old,” Terry scoffed. He glanced at his watch and saw that Dan had been gone over three hours. He was about to use the radio relay through the base comms when Dan’s voice came over loud and full of panic.
“They’re here!” he yelled. “The crabs snuck into the sub! They’re coming in—” The transmission cut off suddenly.
“Dan?” Terry said into the radio. “Get out of there, go, leave! Get everyone through to here!” No response came back. The three friends stood in shock, staring at each other, none of them knowing what to say or do.
* * * * *
