“The felines that you refer to as Tuffs, Notch, Spy, and Maul have been down on four occasions. If you wish to know the dates, times, and duration of their stays, I will be happy to provide Jolene the star-time standard of my commander’s race for her to apply Earth conversion rates.”
Four times. The cats had been here four times. And that had to have been after Spy was an adult and had chosen a mate, which meant four trips down in the last few weeks.Devious little four-legged sneaks.“No. For now, keep this between us two. Also, the cats are forbidden access until and unless I say so.”
“I am sorry, Shining. I cannot follow that order. My commander and pilot left orders that the cats are to be allowed access as they choose.” Along with a peppermint scent from the air filters, an unpronounceable noise came across Gomez’s speakers that sorta sounded like, “Garrouling PopPop likes the felines.”
The phantom fear increased. “Garrouling PopPop?”
“That is a most unsuitable vocal approximation, without the twelve hertz syllables, and the scent is missing.”
“I can’t hear or speak twelve hertz, and I can’t make smells appear.”
“That is unfortunate. Without the proper vocal range and scent, my commander and pilot’s name is incorrect.”
“So if I meet a Bug alien I should just bow and say hi?”
“Bowing means you are offering yourself as protein.”
Bloody hell.Why hadn’t I asked this kind of question before? Not that there were any live aliens down there. Just the dead one, so far as I had ever found. Not that I had explored fully in the dark. Once I found the dead Bug, I was done.
Below me, the deck began to lighten and revealed a staircase of sorts, each step with a drop over a meter to the one below, with foot space only half a meter wide, perfect for the Bugs. Not so easy for me. But it was still better than the chute, which had required me to scoot on my butt, palms, and heels. This time, I’d be going down on hands and feet, facing backward, like on a ladder.
I wiped my palms on my pants, grabbed the floor, and dropped over the edge. “I’d like the lights brighter, please,” I said as I dropped into the dimness.
The lighting brightened, mostly in the red range, and when my hands pulled away, the hatch closed over my head.
* * *
The ship was built for free-floating, nongravitational travel, constructed of what I’d call interlocking gyroscopes, meaning that lots of things were overhead and/or upside down. I figured that the Bugs didn’t need gravity and the gyro let them have access to anything they needed by rotating the ship around them.
I knew what each deck was used for because they were identified by symbols carved into the metal. It was all in Bug language, but on one of my visits I had taken vids of everything, and Mateo and Jolene had later translated from her databanks. I didn’t come down here often because it was dark and spooky. I had to admit it was a little less creepy with the better illumination, but not by much.
The ship’s power source and engine were located two decks below my office in a metal bubble that was held in place through the center of the ship like the core of a planet. Weapons had to be sandwiched in an outer layer around and between the power source and the command level. When the ship crashed in the junkyard, most of it had been buried by the impact and had rotated so the office was on the top, with windows I could see out of, and weapons unseen. They had to be underground.
I didn’t need the engine room. WIMP energies would probably fry me anyway. In desperation, I had once used the ship’s shields (which were considered to be weapons, in Bug-think) against Clarisse Warhammer, but I had never been able to make the weapons move using the controls in the Command Chair. Now, I wanted a look at the weapons, if I could figure out where they were located from the inside. In the back of my mind I was curious if the weapons could be powered by an Earth power source, and if I could remove the weapons and retrofit them to take with us, the way Mateo had with the bunker busters. That crazy idea had come to me in the mission-op briefing.
I crawled around the side of the wall along the gyro ring where one of the laser-WIMP-destructor weapons should be mounted—if Jolene’s Bug language translations were correct—looking for an access plate. The Bugs would have needed to be able to access the weapon and its mounting at some point, and I figured there would be a way to close off the rest of the ship from atmospheric loss to repair or service things, and therefore I could get to any external weapons from the inside. The first year Mateo and I had come to Smith’s Junk and Scrap, we had used a backhoe, digging from the outside, looking for the airlocks and weapons. We never found the weapons from the outside, and I’d never looked for the mounting booms from the inside. I should have. Long ago.
“Could I get some more illumination here?” I asked Gomez.
The light brightened to full spectrum, instantly chasing away most of the creepies.
I crawled, feeling for an access panel. Anywhere. I knew the weapons weren’t on top. I’d spent a lot of time up there working on the rain-water collection barrel. No weapons were visible along the sides, or even up to two meters underground, which was as far as Mateo and I had dug out the ground and the bedrock, so they had to be on the bottom half and deeper.
The metal felt fuzzy, scratchy, and slightly uncomfortable to my hands as I worked all the way around the ring, and the ring beside it. There was no discernable access panel. There was also nothing I could identify as metallic nuts and bolts or an attachment plate. When I had worked my way around the rings twice, and was deep underground, I finally discovered a faint groove between the two rings I’d been inspecting.
“Gomez, can you hear me down here?”
“You are within me, therefore, yes.”
There was something vaguely insulting and droll about the tone, which I put down to my exhaustion and not the fear that he was sentient like Jolene.
“How are your weapons attached to the gyro? Like plates and nuts and bolts and access panels?”
“My weapons are not attached to the gyroscopic rings. They are part of the rings and develop in place, during the initial growing process.”
Growing process?Had to mean manufacturing process; maybe a translation glitch. I ran my hands over the faint seam, where nuts and bolts or the Bug equivalent should indicate where the weapons were attached. There was nothing. It wasn’t smooth, but there was the crack. “Where are your weapons located now, in relation to the office?”
“They are beneath me, the weapons rotating into landing struts.”
