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    Elliptical Galaxies
    Elliptical Galaxies
    Elliptical Galaxies
    Ebook375 pages5 hours

    Elliptical Galaxies

    By Philip Bosshardt

    ()

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    Galaxies are composed of stars and planets and bits of matter floating around. However, astronomers still don’t know what holds them together. There isn’t enough visible matter to keep them from flying apart. Enter a mysterious thing called ‘dark matter.’ No one knows what it is. No one has detected any such thing. But, if the laws of physics are to mean anything, it must be there...and so it is, as a sort of bookkeeping entry until we think of something else.
    I like to think of the stories that follow in these terms. What you see is not all there is. Oh, the stories have all the usual parts...characters, a setting, some kind of plot. But it’s what you don’t see that gives them the impact they have.
    Picture Og and Grog sitting around the campfire one evening after a dinner of mammoth meat and tree roots. Og is sharpening his spear points. Grog is skinning a hide. Og grunts and gestures at Grog: “If you had followed my orders, you wouldn’t have been injured by that mammoth, you stupid dolt.” After some loud arguing back and forth, and few threats, Slamdok intervenes and, using more gestures and grunts, recounts the events of the day that led to Grog’s injury and tonight’s dinner. Some modifications are made to the account and after awhile, after everyone is stuffed with enough mammoth meat and some fermented berries that Slamdok’s wife made, everybody agrees that this is what happened. The day’s hunt goes down in the annals of the tribe as “the way things happened.”
    It becomes a legend. Later, maybe a myth.
    I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of big over-arching themes, but perhaps we could say there are some common elements in the stories included in Elliptical Galaxies. Many of the stories deal with explorers and soldiers. One definition of an explorer is one who seeks the unknown, one who seeks to discover and explain the unknown. One definition I have seen of ‘soldier’ is one who seeks to impose his will on the unknown, usually an enemy.
    Man can be well defined between these two pillars of discovering and imposing his will on the unknown. Genesis 28 says “...be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” It seems like expanding into unknown lands and subduing them is a critical part of our nature. Can we subdue the entire Universe? I doubt it. Can we subdue our own nature? That’s what Elliptical Galaxies attempts to find out.
    Perhaps that is our real future. To range across eons of time and lightyears of cosmos only to eventually discover ourselves and our true nature. That’s my hope for Elliptical Galaxies. Maybe you’ll be the one who finally uncovers the true secrets of dark matter, the thing that holds all of us together.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhilip Bosshardt
    Release dateJan 17, 2020
    ISBN9780463125076
    Elliptical Galaxies
    Author

    Philip Bosshardt

    Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for over 20 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.For details on his series Tales of the Quantum Corps, visit his blog at qcorpstimes.blogspot.com or his website at http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt.

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      Elliptical Galaxies - Philip Bosshardt

      Elliptical Galaxies

      Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

      Copyright 2020 Philip Bosshardt

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      In Plutonian Seas

      Cloudchasers

      Marooned in Voidtime

      The Rain Queen of K-World

      Upload Incompatibility

      The Battle of the Gauntlet

      Test to Destruction

      Second Sun

      Statehood in Space

      Introduction

      My first collection of short fiction was called Colliding Galaxies. Continuing this theme, I have named this second collection Elliptical Galaxies. The usual definition of ‘elliptical’ is something along the lines of ‘having to do with an ellipse.’ However, a little digging uncovers a deeper meaning: something that is indirect, oblique or cryptic. I think these definitions fit the overall purpose of Elliptical Galaxies. Not to be cryptic, but to emphasize there are deeper meanings here than what you see on the surface.

      My introduction to the first collection said this: When galaxies collide in outer space, nothing much happens for a very long time. Surely, when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies merge in about four billion years, as astronomers insist they will, it will be one of the most epochal events in our cosmos. Yet you’d probably fall asleep watching it, if you could live long enough to witness the whole event.

      That’s because galaxies are mostly empty space.

      Yet when galaxies collide, and dust gets stirred up, strange and violent things do occur, given enough time. Dust clouds collapse. Gravity builds up. Matter gets compressed. Before you know it, the thing ignites. A star is born. And it burns hot and bright for billions of years.

      Words are like that too…whether on a piece of paper or arrayed as bits on a disk. When put together the right way, words get compressed. They ignite. Light and heat follow. Readers exposed to all this find new ideas, like new elements, bubbling to the surface. Illumination follows, if the writer did his job and pushed the words together the right way.

      Galaxies are composed of stars and planets and bits of matter floating around. However, astronomers still don’t know what holds them together. There isn’t enough visible matter to keep them from flying apart. Enter a mysterious thing called ‘dark matter.’ No one knows what it is. No one has detected any such thing. But, if the laws of physics are to mean anything, it must be there…and so it is, as a sort of bookkeeping entry until we think of something else.

      I like to think of the stories that follow in these terms. What you see is not all there is. Oh, the stories have all the usual parts…characters, a setting, some kind of plot. But it’s what you don’t see that gives them the impact they have.

      Editors and agents often call this narrative tension. Let’s face it: the basic structure of story hasn’t changed in ten thousand years, since the time of Og and Grog, sitting around a campfire, swapping lies about the big hunt that day.

      Picture Og and Grog sitting around the campfire one evening after a dinner of mammoth meat and tree roots. Og is sharpening his spear points. Grog is skinning a hide. Og grunts and gestures at Grog: If you had followed my orders, you wouldn’t have been injured by that mammoth, you stupid dolt. After some loud arguing back and forth, and few threats, Slamdok intervenes and, using more gestures and grunts, recounts the events of the day that led to Grog’s injury and tonight’s dinner. Some modifications are made to the account and after awhile, after everyone is stuffed with enough mammoth meat and some fermented berries that Slamdok’s wife made, everybody agrees that this is what happened. The day’s hunt goes down in the annals of the tribe as the way things happened.

      It becomes a legend. Later, maybe a myth.

      Man is preeminently a storytelling animal. We don’t know if this is how stories began but we do know, from research, that stories have for generations served a profoundly important evolutionary purpose.

      All good stories have an underlying structure. I’m indebted to the website Storysci.com for the following list:

      Include a beginning, middle and end

      Show, don’t tell

      One word: conflict

      Make your protagonist proactive, not reactive

      Have a central core to your story

      Know what your story is about

      It’s better to be simple and clear, rather than complicated and ambiguous

      Say as much as possible, with as little as possible

      Get in late, get out early

      Characters, characters, characters

      All great ideas. I’m pretty sure I’ve violated every one of these guidelines in the stories that follow. The stories of Elliptical Galaxies run the gamut, with a variety of characters, settings and conflicts. There are explorers in a sub-surface ocean on Pluto. Explorers trapped in a storm on Venus. There are time-traveling soldiers and a married couple arguing over memories, which in ‘Upload Incompatibility,’ can be created and edited at will. There is an elderly father, suffering from a sort of dementia from his years as a time-traveling soldier, and his daughter just trying to please him and make him comfortable. There are engineers testing a new subterranean vehicle beyond its limits and a saboteur on a mission, who encounters something he never expected, causing his mission to change completely.

      I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of big over-arching themes, but perhaps we could say there are some common elements in the stories included in Elliptical Galaxies. Many of the stories deal with explorers and soldiers. One definition of an explorer is one who seeks the unknown, one who seeks to discover and explain the unknown. One definition I have seen of ‘soldier’ is one who seeks to impose his will on the unknown, usually an enemy.

      Man can be well defined between these two pillars of discovering and imposing his will on the unknown. Genesis 28 says "…be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it." It seems like expanding into unknown lands and subduing them is a critical part of our nature. Can we subdue the entire Universe? I doubt it. Can we subdue our own nature? That’s what Elliptical Galaxies attempts to find out.

      Perhaps that is our real future. To range across eons of time and lightyears of cosmos only to eventually discover ourselves and our true nature. That’s my hope for Elliptical Galaxies. Maybe you’ll be the one who finally uncovers the true secrets of dark matter, the thing that holds all of us together.

      Read on, my friend. And do keep the lights burning tonight….

      Philip Bosshardt

      Atlanta, Georgia

      January 2020

      I first wrote this story in October 2017. The genesis for this story was an old Twilight Zone episode from the early 60s, called ‘Death Ship.’ It still gives me the chills. In that old story, an American ship lands on a distant planet, after detecting something on the surface from space. The target turns out to be the wreckage of their own ship, with their own dead bodies inside. Believing this to be just a hallucination, the ship captain orders them to take off again. Once more, the target is detected and they land. Same discovery. The ship takes off again and despite the crew’s protests, the captain orders them to land and investigate again and again, each time finding the same thing, like an infinite loop. Is it real? Is it a hallucination? Is it something completely inexplicable?

      The crew of FCS Trident discovers something in the subsurface ocean of Pluto (subsurface oceans on Pluto are suspected but not yet proven), something they can’t explain. Is it a lifeform? Is it just a case of long-mission nerves, jitters, fatigue and human irritability? A waking nightmare? Bad medicine? Or all of these?

      Neurologists tells us that human memory is a malleable thing. It doesn’t exist in any one place in our minds, but is spread out across our brains like a pattern and must be reconstructed and even re-edited each time we recall something. The more we recall an event, the stronger the synaptic connections. The less we recall, the weaker the connections. That’s the biology of human memory. For the poor crewmembers of FCS Trident, each effort to recall things they had tried to forget only makes the memory worse. And when the local lifeforms can template what you recall into something explicitly physical, a voyage in Plutonian seas can truly become a never-ending nightmare….

      In Plutonian Seas

      "It is better to conquer yourself than to win a hundred battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or demons, nor heaven or hell."

      Buddha

      "For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one."

      Khalil Gibran

      Aboard FCS Trident

      Pluto, Sputnik Planitia

      Two hundred meters below the ice surface

      June 15, 2144 (EUT)

      0400 hours (local)

      Alicia Yang Lifelogger File #30:

      It was Marta Sepulveda’s idea to quarantine Commander Skellen in his quarters, for his own good. And for ours. It was hard but it was the right thing to do…even Marta the Bitch Goddess said if we didn’t, the skipper would be driving Trident right back to the Wreck again.

      Nobody wanted that.

      I’ve taken the liberty of downloading and synchronizing everybody’s lifelogger files for the last few days, so as to put together some kind of chronological report on what happened. Win Blakely calls it CYA or maybe self-justification but we all have a responsibility to make factual reports during the mission. If we don’t, Frontier Corps could easily send another unsuspecting crew right into the very same trap.

      As it stands now, the vote is three to one, in favor of boring back through the ice, getting to the surface, somehow driving back to the lander and returning to orbit. From down here, comms with Fort Apache in orbit are pretty spotty, so they don’t have a clue as to what we’ve run into here.

      I just hope they can figure out a way to treat us, all of us, before this thing, this infection or whatever it is, gets worse.

      Here’s the first of the lifelogger files I patched together…

      Joe Skellen Lifelogger File #27 (appended):

      I was looking over some old maps and sea charts when the sonar contact alarm sounded. Okay, so I like old maps. The Corps psychs tried to convince me, after Trieste and Europa, that hanging out with old maps was symbolic of me wanting to run away from Kristen, from my boy Tyler and all that. Can you believe that? Really, I just happen to like old maps.

      Trident had been cruising serenely at thirty knots, in level trim, when that first alarm sounded. I guess I had dozed off because it startled me.

      I realized as I startled myself awake that it was the sonar alarm. Trident had detected something ahead, something big from the looks of it. Auto-helm was engaged and she had already begun slowing.

      I came fully awake and rubbed my eyes. I studied the sonar plot. Whatever it was, it was a large object, some ten thousand meters dead ahead.

      Probably a chunk of ice from the surface crust…broken off, I surmised. From the nav console, I could see Trident had just about made her first waypoint coordinates, hundreds of meters below the ice at Sputnik Planitia. I got on the intercom.

      STO 1 to the command deck…Marta, get up here to the command deck at once….

      I disengaged autohelm and took the controls myself, slowing the ship to a crawl. I didn’t want to run Trident into something this big without studying it first.

      Sepulveda’s head popped into the compartment a few moments later.

      What gives, Captain?

      Take a look at the plot.

      Marta Sepulveda—our STO 1 and chief engineer-- slid into the second seat and studied the sonar return. What is it, Skipper…one of your shipwrecks? Can we get a little closer?

      We can try, I said. I ignored the jibe. It’s no secret Marta and I don’t get along but that’s for later.

      Slowly, Trident closed on her target, dead ahead. The subsurface ocean below Pluto’s ice surface was completely devoid of light, black as night. But the returns from Trident’s sonar indicated that the object could be something worth investigating.

      Marta studied the plot. Doesn’t look like ice to me…too convoluted.

      Eventually, I brought us to a complete stop, five hundred meters away.

      We discussed our options. Alicia came up too. She’s an astroglaciologist and she said it didn’t look like ice to her either. Both Doll-Face and the Bitch Goddess concurred. "We need to check this out. What about Uncle?"

      This is about as well as our sonar can resolve the target, I agreed. "From the returns, it seems to be a large platform, with some kind of structures on top. I’m getting faint returns around the main one, too, smaller objects of some type. Get Uncle ready, both of them. Win can help you. And Alicia, get back to the galley and get me some of that amunofen…I’ve got a splitting headache."

      Marta disappeared into the main gangway and headed aft to G deck. That’s where we kept Uncle One and Two…our little robotic ships that often did initial recon on objects and sites of interest. Alicia came back a few moments later.

      You too, Skipper? My skull’s been about to crack all morning. We both washed down several pills and concentrated on getting the feed from Uncle.

      As soon Marta called up and said the drones were ready, I started inching us forward, cranking up our spot and floodlights, trying to bring as much illumination to bear on the targets as possible. It was like shining headlights through a dense fog.

      "Launching Uncle One and Two," came Marta’s voice. Presently, the murmur of their jets could be heard nearby.

      Got ‘em, Alicia said. I have full control…both bots…steering straight ahead…you want sonar, Skipper?

      Sound away, I said. I’ve got nothing but scrambled eggs on my scope.

      "I’m calling up Uncle One, I told everybody. By now, even Win Blakely had come up to the command center. Let’s see what the drones can find out." I pressed a few keys on my wristpad and the underwater bots surged forward, their jets whirring gently. They both plunged into the murk and were soon lost to view. Blakely patched in to the bot’s sensors. Soon, the whole team was getting sonar, EM and visuals back from Uncle One.

      What we saw made my throat go dry.

      It was some kind of shipwreck. No one could deny that. In fact, it looked like a smashed-up, crumpled version of Trident herself. You could see the borer lens up front…it looked like a broken dinner plate. And the rest of the ship—you could only call it a ship—was broken into a misshapen hulk. Treads along her hull had mostly come untracked. Her stern pod was stove in like a beer can. The hull had been breached in several places, like some kind of flooding casualty, like--

      "What the—" said Marta.

      It’s a ship…like us--? Blakely muttered. I don’t—"

      Hey, just keep it down, will you? I warned everybody. Everybody stay cool. Even as I said it, I could feel my own heart jackhammering in my chest. And my head was about to split in two.

      Maybe I should pause here— unintelligible noises in the background—okay…that’s better. Looks like we lost Uncle Two…Win’s checking to see what happened but One’s still with us. At this point, Alicia and Marta started arguing about our mission and I had to tell them to pipe down. The mission parameters were simple enough to list…we all know ‘em by heart: land on Pluto at Sputnik Planitia and bore through the ice layer, penetrate subsurface ocean and conduct cruise science ops for ten Earth days, take samples, measure gross ocean properties, map currents, temperature profiles, chemical, salinity, brine…all that stuff. Then we return safely to the surface. Return to orbit and dock with Fort Apache. Transmit all the raw data and experimental results on high-band to UNISPACE Gateway Station at Earth-Moon L2.

      That’s it. It was after I had recited all that to Marta, Alicia and Win for about the millionth time that Marta pointed out something on Uncle One’s vid. I looked. It was some kind of lettering along the side of the sunken ship’s hull. When I realized what it said—it was partly obscured by some kind of barnacle-like growth—my blood ran cold and my heart skipped about ten beats.

      T-R-I-E S-T-E. Trieste. The submersible I had nearly died in on the Europa Explorer mission in ’43.

      No way. It couldn’t be—

      Marta Sepulveda Lifelogger File #41 (appended):

      (Voice Note from Alicia here: "I had to really bargain with Marta to get this. She didn’t want to give up any files…too personal, they’re not for publication, Doll—but I told her the mission report needed them…I guess her headaches were pretty bad at that point. She was weak and I just took the pendant from around her neck.").

      We got Skellen—the Skipper—back to Berthing on C deck right after he collapsed. Win gave him something. I don’t know what, but he was calmer after that. I guess seeing something that looked like his old Trieste ship just made him snap. Maybe I would have too. I feel like some kind of bug has infected the whole crew. We all have these terrible headaches and even Win…rock-solid Win…said he was having trouble concentrating. Plus we’re about out of amunofen and we don’t have anything else.

      I was trying to maneuver Uncle One inside one of the hull breeches in the side of that ship-thing out there when the lockout alarm light and siren came on. That meant someone was trying to use the lockout chamber and airlock to exit Trident. Win and Alicia and I were all on the command deck. It had to be Skellen.

      By the time Alicia and Win got back to G deck, the lock had already been cycled and Skellen was already outside—against all protocol, against all procedure and common sense.

      Alicia got on the comm circuit. "Skipper…Commander…Joe Skellen…get back in. This violates P-1. Nobody goes outside without all P steps taken and verified by another—"

      Skellen’s voice was weak, but you could hear the determination. We could see the shadow of his suit sliding across the deck porthole. He was heading forward. Toward that ship-thing.

      Gotta know…for sure— his breath was ragged. Sounded like the beginning of convulsions. Probably his gas mixture was all wrong. He hadn’t taken time to dial it in. Gotta see…I did everything I could—I can’t run from this any more.

      Alicia practically screamed in her comm. We all knew what he was talking about "Commander…Commander Skellen…listen to me. Don’t leave Trident…we don’t know what that is out there...let Uncle do the recon…Command—"

      Okay, just slow down here. For the record, I said we all knew what Skellen was up to…or we thought we did, great psychiatrists that we all are. Back in ’39, there was this mission called Europa Explorer. The idea was to land a ship on Europa’s ice surface and bore into the ice, just like us. The submersible was Trieste, a sister to Trident, from what I’ve been told. One week in, Trieste suffered a catastrophic flooding casualty. Lots of onboard casualties…most of the crew, in fact. She was able to make it back up to the borehole on the underside of the ice surface but then she sank. They couldn’t hold buoyancy anymore. Only Skellen and some electrician’s mate—I think it was Thielen—survived. They crawled and scrambled their way up through the icehole and somehow made it back to the lander.

      For this, the Corps gave Skellen an Order of Merit. Can you believe that? I mean the man lost his ship, for God’s sake. The mission was a failure. And inquiry boards sprouted like mushrooms.

      I suppose it didn’t help that I was on the crew of the Yangtze-Benthic mission that followed…successfully I might add. The Benthic was able to complete the mission that had been assigned to Trieste. And for this, I’m known as the Bitch-Goddess.

      See, Joe Skellen is actually a Grade A sourpuss and he’s also consumed with jealousy at me for completing the original mission and just aches to find a way to get back at me. That’s what this is all about. I’m sure of it.

      Somebody’s got to go out there and get the Skipper, Alicia said, wringing her hands around the porthole. He’ll freeze out there. He could die out there.

      About time, I didn’t say, but then I felt bad and did what was right. I volunteered because I was the only other crewmember qualified in hypersuits.

      Suit-up took an hour. The hypersuits had been rigged out for deep diving in Pluto’s sub-ice ocean. All us troopers had been respirocyte-treated; our bloodstreams were thick with nanobots shuttling boosted amounts of oxygen back and forth. But the Plutonian ocean was cold and dense and we needed pressure and temperature protection, as well as personal propulsors. So…hypersuits.

      I entered the lockout chamber and cycled through.

      My first impression was cold, with a capital C. Numbing, penetrating cold. I switched on my suit lamps, saw only a fuzzy blur. Too much sediment, too much something in the water. I dialed down the light intensity, and kicked off under one-quarter propulsor, sounding ahead.

      I gently felt my way forward along Trident’s underhull, until I came at last to the borer head.

      End of the line, here—I remember muttering. I checked my own sonar scan. The Wreck was out there somewhere, giving off intermittent returns. There was a fuzzy patch near the center of my scope.

      That has to be Skellen.

      Alicia…SP, this is STO 1…can you move in just a little closer…put more light on the target?

      Yang obliged. As soon as I was clear, the sub inched forward, cranking up her spot and floodlights, trying to bring as much illumination to bear on the target as possible. It was like shining headlights through a dense fog. And it did look like a smashed-up mirror-image of us…like Trieste, but I figured that was just the light and the ice dust playing tricks.

      I found Skellen clambering all over the hull of the Wreck, trying to find a way in.

      Come on, Skipper…come on, Joe…let’s get you back. Your gas mix is all hosed. Inside his helmet, I could see his lips turning blue…somehow the respirocytes either weren’t working or they’d gone bad. I had to get us back inside as fast as I could. And I wasn’t feeling so hot myself…I checked my own mixture, checked my respirocyte settings…looked okay, but I didn’t want to take any chances,

      Skellen fought me for quite a while and the Commander is a physically strong man. But they don’t call me Iron Lips for nothing. I’m a fitness junkie and I was finally able to wrestle the man away from the Wreck and started up my propulsors, trying to keep the squirming, shaking mass close enough to me to keep us on course. Trident’s lights helped me to home in through the dark but it was what Skellen kept saying over my comms that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

      I saw him, Marta…it was Tyler…inside that wreck. His body, just floating right by…right by the porthole. I’m telling you it was Tyler in there…we’ve got to go back…get in there.

      Sure it was. And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, not to mention Frontier Corps psychs and some pretty advanced medicine, couldn‘t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

      That’s when I saw something floating just aft of the Wreck that brought me up short. It was the little rover from Hellas Basin…Oscar, we called him…the Promontory Plunge…five days buried in a landslide of dust and rock…God, I thought I’d put that memory behind me for good—

      Winston Blakely Lifelogger File #88 (appended):

      Alicia and I argued for quite a while about what order to put these files in. Even now, I’m not sure this sequence best captures the reality of what happened…what nearly happened.

      I was listening to Marta on Comm 1…she was describing the Wreck, what she could see of it, and the Commander’s condition, when she just sort of started trailing off…just gibberish, after that.

      Marta saw something. Nobody doubts that. Even Trident’s sonar was already picking up multiple contacts. But what she saw…ah, now that’s the key.

      Somehow, some way, we coaxed her back into Trident’s lockout and cycled the locks. She and Skellen fell out onto the deck, shivering, shaking, flopping about. I helped Alicia get their helmets off and, because I’m supposed to be the med guy on this mission, I made myself sound like a chief medical officer and ordered them both to bed. I prescribed the rest of the amunofen and then decided to set up a bioweb in Berthing to isolate them from everything else. I also made sure the web was flooded with oxygen and over-perfused with nitrogen to boot, to take care of any decompression problems.

      Once I was sure the two of them were stable, I told Alicia I needed to check and probably turn off everybody’s respirocytes. Something’s happened…maybe I can reset the buggers. But I just have a suspicion….

      Alicia wasn’t so sure. That’s something the Captain should decide.

      It can’t wait, I told her. My own headaches had gotten worse in the last few hours as well. I didn’t tell her I was also starting to hallucinate a little…there were moments when I thought I was back on that HAVOC airship at Venus and I didn’t want to re-live that again.

      Alicia went up to the command deck while I poked around in the galley med cabinets for the coupler, the device we use to communicate with the ‘cytes. Eventually, I found it. I knew I had some training on the thing but I also knew I was rusty, so I went through the manual for a few minutes, to familiarize myself with the critters.

      Back at Gateway before the mission got underway, we all got respiratory boost—the respirocyte injections. Normally that means alveolar pumping. Mechs were inserted with a program to boost the efficiency and capacity of our oxygen-carbon dioxide exchange…the alveolar sacs. When it’s done right, you get a sizeable increase in anaerobic range…and the stamina of a racehorse. The docs said it would help us in our pressurized environment aboard Trident and give us additional lung capacity if we had to leave the ship for any reason. Nobody argued at the time.

      With the coupler, you could use rf and acoustic signals, depending on mode, to talk to the bots. They were like a little swarm buzzing around inside your chest; they weren’t supposed to be able to go anywhere else.

      I got the coupler working and had every intention of sending the OFF command to the bots inside Commander Skellen and Marta, and later me and Alicia, but I saw something with the coupler that gave me pause.

      I was getting unusual EM spikes from both of them, and from outside their pleural cavities, outside their chest. The signals were intermittent, first there, then not there, but some signals seemed to be coming from their heads. That shouldn’t be, I told myself. I studied the returns, checked the manual, couldn’t find anything that said this was normal, so I sent the OFF signal to shut down respirocyte activity in both Marta and

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