Steve’s Shorts: Emma5…
[Encounters with ETs don’t need to happen in space…and they could be a bit racy…For those of you traveling during this busiest travel time of the year, have a safe and easy trip!]
Emma5
Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore
Chapter One
Mari fought to control starship Odysseus as it bit into the atmosphere. Alarms were sounding. The calm but irritating voice of Jason, their AI, still came through on her com implant, so she killed his alarms.
“Dip and dive!” said Hana. “We have to keep it from breaking up.” That suggestion was vocal, not via the embedded comset.
Gee, thanks, Hana, why didn’t I think of that!
“These damn things were never meant for planet-fall,” said Loku.
Yeah, someone else thinking I don’t know what to do.
“We don’t exactly have time for the escape pods,” said Mari, deciding not to waste time with biting rejoinders.
“Bring her down anywhere. Practically the whole damn planet’s ocean. We’ll worry about finding land later.” Loku checked skin temp. “If you have enough control, we’ll just make a big splash.”
They did. The ten-thousand ton starship created a small tsunami and then sank.
What the hell?
“Jason, why are the cargo hold’s doors opening?” Loku tried to counter the AI’s command.
“Damn AI thinks we want to abandon ship for some reason,” said Mari. “Some embedded protocol. It probably doesn’t understand water. Software glitch!”
“We’re sinking and filling with water,” said Hana, just before the control room’s sliding door buckled and the wave of saltwater hit her.
This is not the time to learn to swim, thought Mari as she fought to keep her head above water. Her next and last conscious thought was that they should all have been in their spacesuits. Three could be found in closets beside an airlock right beneath them. That might have saved them.
***
Mari awoke on a beach and felt something crawling on her face. She screamed and brushed off a small animal with eight legs. She sat upright and squinted at the planet’s sun. Not a cloud in the sky. She studied the horizon. Where’s the ship? Did we somehow escape and swim ashore?
She realized she was completely naked. The light clothes she had worn on ship were gone. She sat up, hugged herself, and noticed the curious welts on her torso. Did another sea creature save us? She was surprised at the thought. The planet was supposed to be devoid of any large life forms. Maybe her subconscious was telling her something.
She felt a rawness in her genitals, as if the Union’s portodocs had just given her a flight-check physical. She put that out of her mind, writing it off to the traumatic experience of somehow getting out of the ship and saving herself.
She stared toward the horizon again. Water, water, everywhere. There was a lagoon and a reef and then open ocean. Am I in an old VR pirate movie? Where’s the buried treasure?
She stood, shaded her eyes, and scanned the white sands along the length of the beach. To her left and right were human bodies. They looked dead. She hoped they weren’t.
They almost were. She performed CPR on both Hana and Loku. When they regained their senses, they were as surprised as she had been to find themselves on an island in the middle of a vast ocean.
***
“If we could find the ship, we’d have some supplies,” said Hana after the two had recovered a bit.
“Loku and I aren’t strong swimmers,” said Mari, “and you can’t swim at all. By the way, how are you feeling? The gravity here is strong. Even I feel it.”
Hana’s birth planet’s gravity was 70% standard. She was fine up to twice standard, but she would be uncomfortable. Mari had seen the readout before the ship went crazy: 1.2 standard. What was that about? Did we get hit by an EMP? Jason had seemed to recover, but the ship hadn’t.
Hana had some mucus on her welts that she tried to brush off, but it just stuck to her hands. “Eww! I’m ready to go back in and wash this slime off. It’s like something tried to eat us, decided we weren’t comestible, and spit us out on the beach.”
“That’s a bit farfetched,” said Loku. “But I’ll go along with the bath idea. Then we better find some shelter.” He jerked a thumb toward the island’s center. “That way. We need food and water too. We won’t find it on the beach.”
“I hope the damn AI died a miserable death,” said Hana.
Mari shrugged. “You can’t program it for all potential disasters. The ship isn’t supposed to land on planets. Period. Old Jason wouldn’t have protocols for that. All this water added to our fix.”
“None of us are prepared to take a dip in a planet’s ocean,” said Loku. He started to scratch. “Some little bugs are biting me. Time to wash off, my lovelies. I must say you both look great. Maybe not water nymphs or mermaids, but very attractive beach girls.”
“Whatever nymphs or mermaids are,” said Hana, “I’ll assume that that’s a compliment spawned by your permanent state of lust. Just don’t get any ideas. I’m not in the mood.”
“Neither am I,” said Mari, thinking of her perception of having her plumbing inspected. “Do you think the AI sent out a distress signal?” she said once the triad was in the water.
“It could only be via RF pulses. No way a subspace signal could punch through this close to a star.” Loku leaned back and floated. “High salinity. Maybe we just floated right out of the ship and up to the surface and then washed ashore?”
“It’s a possibility,” said Mari. “Maybe the welts are from passing through some kind of seaweed on the way.”
“Seaweed that produces snot,” said Hana. She stood up in the waist-deep water and rubbed her pubic region. “I think I’ve been raped!”
“What? Let me see.” Loku approached her.
She splashed him. “Get away from me. Don’t touch me!”
Mari was surprised. Hana was the more emotional member of the triad, but they were all generally calm under stress, a necessary requirement for exploring new worlds. “It’s OK, Hana. Loku and I had nothing to do with it. If we had access to the ship’s portadocs, we could confirm what you say, but let’s go with that. Maybe some sea creature was probing you. I have a similar sensation.”
“Why me? And why there?”
“Might be simple curiosity,” said Loku. “Get over it. We have to focus on survival now.”
Chapter Two
Mari stared at the stars. They had made it to the slope of the mountain at the center of the island and camped by a waterfall. So far the water seemed potable and the creatures they had killed and eaten not poisonous. I wondered how long that luck will hold.
Exploration crews were either dyads or triads. Mari remembered that Gill Bein, her psych examiner, recommended that she find two partners. “Think of it as a three-legged stool.” He’d been sitting on one at the time as she lay naked with sensors attached all over her body and inside various orifices, all to analyze how she answered and reacted to his questions. “In decisions that have to be made, there will always be a majority.”
“You’re assuming the odd person out will go along with the majority.”
“Our data show that it’s more likely than one person in a dyad will kill the other. People tend to go mad in space. There’s something about the jump process that can do that. We’re still investigating those few glitches. Look at it this way. Your partners probably won’t go crazy at the same time, so they can put you down and sedate you.”
“I could kill them too.”
“Again, unlikely that you’ll be able to overwhelm two other individuals who are highly trained.”
“Maybe I’ll just want to kill one of them.”
Bein shrugged. “Let’s change the topic. I’m now going to test your openness to the triad concept. Some people just can’t adapt to life in a triad. It’s better to know that up front.”
They all had survival training, of course—every explorer crew did, both individually and later in a team, a dyad or a triad. A lot of that training involved using instruments from their ships to test things to be drunk or eaten, as well as air quality, humidity, and other environmental parameters. The training covered the use of a portadoc too. For them, all that was somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.
***
“Hana’s still upset,” said Loku, kneeling beside Mari. “How about you? Best stress reliever around?”
“I suppose.” But her heart wasn’t in it. She didn’t come and Loku gave up trying. “Sorry. It’s a bit difficult to get romantic when I’m thinking about how we’re going to survive.”
He sat up and smiled at her. “It was good for me. But I understand. It’s just such a beautiful night. Shame to waste it.”
“We’re a long way from home. What are we going to do? Start a new human colony here with just one triad?”
He smiled. “That’s a possibility as soon as your birth control starts wearing off. We have enough genetic variability but our progeny won’t. That’s a big problem.”
“Don’t be so damn cold and technical. I really don’t want to die here, no matter how many children I can produce. Besides, if I wanted a brood of children, I’d never have left home.”
“We have to adapt, Mari.”
“Maybe I can’t. Maybe Hana can’t. Maybe we’ll both go insane.”
Now he frowned. “That wouldn’t be good.”
“Then let’s work together to find a solution.”
“The only way I can see that happening is to find the ship and get it out of the water. That has little probability of succeeding.”
“That’s better than zero.”
Chapter Three
The first step was to become better swimmers. They went into training, including free diving in the lagoon. Their diet was a healthy one and all the exercise, including running on the beach, helped increase the length of time they could stay under water.
“We have to get out beyond that reef,” said Loku.
Talk about stating the obvious. Mari looked at the waves crashing against the reef. The lagoon was a lot safer.
“We’ll build a raft,” said Hana. “Those hollow reeds around the waterfall are tough and hollow once we remove the sap. Can we bind them together somehow?”
“The vines winding through the trees,” said Mari. “Are they strong enough?”
“We can only try,” said Loku.
“We can use the vines for an anchor chain too,” said Hana.
The triad is functioning. Three heads are better than one.
Their first raft came apart. Version two was OK inside the reef where they practiced dropping anchor and diving from it, but the anchor vines broke from the wave action and the raft was carried out to sea when they took it beyond the reef. They decided to braid several vines together for version three. That seemed to work well.
On the practice dives they caught numerous sea creatures to augment their diet.
“Protein is protein, I guess,” said Loku, offering a kebab to Hana. “I’ll be ready to induce vomiting if either of you starts turning colors.”
“It might be a slow poison,” said Mari, chewing on the tough flesh. “I’m not so sure I care. Do you two realize we have a major problem?”
“I doubt that it’s just one,” said Hana. “But what do you have in mind?”
“The water has a high particulate concentration. Waste from water flora and fauna, small sea creatures, whatever. I can’t see anything beyond fifteen meters or so.”
“If Odysseus were only fifteen meters deep, it would stick up about thirty meters,” said Loku. “So that is a major problem. We need the spacesuits.”
“Same problem. We couldn’t see anything, and we can’t swim in spacesuits.”
“Farther from the reef, the water might be clearer. There’s a lot of effluent coming down from the mountain into the lagoon and close to it.” Hana looked from one to the other of her companions. “Maybe we just have to take the raft farther out.”
Mari nodded. “The ship must have gone down close to the island but in deeper water. We can’t get caught far out if there’s a storm, for example, but we can certainly try that. I’d do a search along arcs progressively farther out from the reef centered on where we were beached.”
“Works for me,” said Loku. “What else do we have to do? Seems like we have all the time in the world—at least this world.”
“Especially if you keep your libido in control,” said Mari with a smile, eying Loku.
“Hey, I’m not the only one with a big sexual appetite now.”
“It’s all the exercise and fresh air,” said Hana. “Like an aphrodisiac. If you can keep things in control, though, I think we might be able to find the ship.”
“We could always take a break and go at it on the raft,” said Mari with a smile. “It might be a good test of its seaworthiness.”
Loku frowned. “I’d rather keep us restricted to good, solid land, if you don’t mind.”
***
On the sixth day out, they found Odysseus. Loku spotted it from the raft.
“How far down do you think it is to the cargo hatch?” said Mari. “It’s already open, and I doubt we can get anything else open with the water pressure.”
“I’m guessing about sixty meters or more,” said Loku.
“We’re good at free diving now,” said Hana with a long face, “but not that good.”
“Guess that nixes the idea of getting into the ship,” said Loku.
“Now is when we could use the spacesuits if they were weighted properly,” said Mari. “Just for diving, not swimming. We only need one. There were spares hanging just inside the cargo hold by the escape pods. That cargo hold is open.”
“A fishing expedition,” said Loku catching on. “They’re probably just floating around inside the hold.”
They had to return to shore, make several cables out of vines like the anchor cable, and fashion hooks out of wood for them. Their hands were bleeding from the rough but light lava stones they used.
“Too bad we can’t just tell the AI to raise the ship,” said Hana as the triad cleaned up their campsite a bit that evening after their sexcapades.
“Maybe we can, once one of us is in a suit,” said Loku, splashing a bit of water on her. “I’m not sure I can keep up with you two anymore, by the way.”
“I now even have dreams about doing it,” said Mari.
“Me too,” said Hana. “It’s like a voice in my head egging me on to be promiscuous.”
Loku stopped in his tracks. “What kind of voice?”
“One I can’t understand,” said Mari, studying the other two. She sat on the sand, crossed her legs, and stared at them. “It’s the planet. Or something.”
“Just your meds wearing off,” said Loku. “I hope so anyway. I’d like to think I’m just feeling naturally energetic about romancing you two. Don’t end my enjoyment.”
“You’re probably affected too,” said Mari. “We have to get away from here. I feel we’re being controlled in some way.”
“The planet’s not alive, Mari,” said Hana. “That’s silly.”
“So, how do you explain that we’re going at it a lot more than when we first met even?”
“I can’t,” said Loku. “Let’s just enjoy it and tend to our other business. We’re ready to fish for a spacesuit.”
Chapter Four
With their fishing equipment, the triad landed a lot of debris that was floating around in the cargo hold, mostly bags of samples collected on other planets. None of it was useful. Most of it was damaged. After three days and with patience wearing thin, Mari finally snagged a spacesuit.
“Maybe one size doesn’t fit all,” she said, her breasts flattened by the suit. They had agreed that, as the best swimmer, she should go down. “I’ll bring up the other suits first.”
“Check out Jason if you can,” said Loku. “If he can seal the cargo hold and pump out the water, maybe he can also raise the ship.”
“I’m not going to get into an argument with him,” Mari said. “We can try all that manually, you know.”
Loku shrugged and smiled. He annoys me sometimes with his slavish love for technology. Her opinion was that technology, even an AI model that had passed Turing’s test, was just a tool for humans to use.
She got into the harness they’d made out of vines, complete with rocks to weigh her down, and they lowered her off the side of the raft.
Her descent was slow, but she reached the cargo hold and tugged on the vine to let Hana and Loku know she had reached her destination.
There were now strange sea creatures swimming in the hold, floating in and around the other two suits. She grabbed them and used the belt from one to bind them together and then fastened them securely to the wall next to the cargo hatch. She also removed the harness from her and the main line, stored the harness in a bin, and tugged the vine again, a signal for them to withdraw it a bit. When she saw it dangling just outside the cargo hatch, she moved farther inside.
The hold had a duplicate control panel, smaller than the one above, but maybe it had what she needed. Isn’t water in a fluid state just like air? She first sealed the cargo hold door, a good result. The circuits hadn’t been corroded by the seawater yet. She then turned the pumps on. Soon she was no longer floating but standing on the metal alloy floor.
She climbed the five levels up the ladder to the control room where she checked the auxiliary air tanks. While pressure approached standard, she tried to communicate with Jason.
“Hello, Mari,” said the AI. “I was feeling lonely for a while.” Lonely? What the hell? “Only for a while? It’s been weeks.”
“I made a new friend. She said everything will be fine.”
Were the AI’s circuits fried? Mari decided he was psychotic. “We’ll talk about your new friend later, Jason. Can you do a diagnostic to see if we can raise the ship and land it on the beach?”
“My friend mentioned the beach. That’s a good idea, Mari. Give me a few seconds.” Mari waited. “Things are looking good. I see you pumped most of the water out. I apologize for that. The ship—”
“—wasn’t meant to be underwater. No need to apologize. Can you raise it and land on the beach?”
“Yes. Please fasten your seatbelt.”
“Don’t hit Hana or Loku on the way up, please.”
“I will be careful. I’m compensating for the higher gravity in my calculations. Please bear with me if things get a bit rough, not so much now, but when I sit Odysseus on the beach.”
***
Hana and Loku just managed to row the raft out of the way as the starship rose slowly out of the water, hovered for a minute, and then flew to the beach and landed.
“We did it!” said Loku.
“You mean, they did it. Mari and Jason. I don’t think she managed that alone. She’s a good pilot, but that soft touch was computer assisted. Let’s row ashore and celebrate.”
They had to postpone the celebration. Jason wouldn’t let them inside. Loku pounded on the cargo hatch while Hana tried the keypad, all to no avail.
“What’s going on?” she said. “Why won’t Mari or Jason open the door?”
“We can only answer that question by going inside,” said Loku. “Something’s not right. I wonder how carefully Mari checked that cargo hold.”
“You think something was in there?” Hana shivered in spite of the heat. “We have to get in!”
As the ship settled on the sand, it had made a berm around it. Loku walked on top to make a complete circuit. “Frustrating. I don’t see how we can get inside. The upper airlock has a recessed keypad entry too, but it’s probably not working either.”
“We need some torches. We could cut our way in.”
Loku put hands on hips and stared at her. “How do you come up with that stuff? We have torches, but they’re inside.”
“Yeah, right, a stupid suggestion.”
“It’s no suggestion. We have to just sit down and wait.”
“If she’s dead, we’ll be waiting for a long time. What about getting Jason’s attention?”
“Now that’s a good suggestion. We can cover up some sensors to let him know we’re out here.”
That required a trek back to their waterfall campsite. They coiled up more vines and gathered some wide leaves and returned to Odysseus.
Loku managed to lasso an antenna on the top of the ship. “I’m going to repel a bit higher than the upper airlock where there’s a sensor battery. I’ll wave the fronds back and forth over it and then pound on the hatch and try the keypad again.”
“If Jason opens up, wait for me. You might need help inside.”
Chapter Five
Loku tried three times until the keypad worked. He waited for Hana to join him.
“My sincerest apologies, Hana and Loku. I must have been off-line. Mari is sleeping with my new friend in the control room.”
Hana glanced at Loku. “New friend?”
“The AI might be crazy. Let’s grab some weapons out of the lockers just in case Jason’s new friend is no friend of ours.”
They armed themselves and climbed the ladder to the control room’s level. The sliding door was still buckled and stuck open.
Loku peered inside and saw Mari sleeping or dead in the tentacles of a creature that was very much alive. Ten eyes turned toward them.
Jason calls me Emma5. There was no sound, but their minds registered a bass voice booming inside their heads. You must get me back into the water.
“Release Mari and we’ll think about it,” said Loku.
I’m comforting her. She’s in shock. You are fragile creatures. But I have my limitations too. I can talk to Jason, but he won’t accept my commands, and I must return to the water.
Loku looked at Hana. She nodded.
“Jason, can you reverse course and put Odysseus deep enough in the water to reach the cargo hold’s edge?”
“That’s easy, Loku. By the way, welcome back aboard.”
Loku ignored the AI. “Hana, try to revive Mari while I recover the vines from outside and retrieve the harness Mari left in the cargo hold. I think the three of us can lower Emma5 down there.”
I calculate that’s possible. You have a 73 percent probability of succeeding. It’s the only possible solution.
***
Mari stirred, smiled at Hana, and patted one of Emma5’s tentacles. “Jason found a new friend.”
Hana nodded. “And we have to save her.”
“She was here in the control room. I didn’t see her at first, I was so busy getting the ship to the beach. She has chameleon talents and was scared of me.”
I shouldn’t have been. I took all three of you to the beach after probing you. I apologize for that. I detect that it caused you and Hana some discomfort, Loku not so much.
“How did you probe Loku?”
His orifices are quite different. There was only one way inside that was convenient.
“A proctology exam,” said Hana, laughing. “Did you learn anything about us?”
Not enough, but I decided you must be almost as intelligent as Jason because your species made him.
Now it was Mari’s turn to laugh. Good thing Loku didn’t hear that!
As if on cue, Loku joined them. They snaked Emma5 down the ladder into the cargo hold, the sea creature helping with her tentacles as best she could.
Jason reversed the maneuver and sat Odyssey into the water. Soon Emma5 was swimming in her native ocean.
Chapter Six
Mari popped a delicacy into one of Emma5’s mouths. Mari was on the raft; the ET was holding onto its edge with two tentacles.
“Why did Jason call you Emma5?”
I’m MA—the rest was gibberish in Mari’s mind—number five in the pod queen’s succession. That’s the best I can do on the translation.
“You’re sea creatures. How can you understand technology?”
Technology represents things species make to control or modify their environment. We use technology to modify our environment, the ocean. While you have used it to explore new planets close to your planet of origin, I understand that your origin-planet is a water world too, and intelligent creatures like whales, porpoises, and dolphins swim in your oceans.
“That’s correct. They’re probably very happy we leave them alone now and go out into space instead.”
But you evolved from sea creatures too—long ago. That’s a connection between all of us.
“Good point. Not far from here, we have scientists studying a black hole. Our curiosity is boundless.”
I understand. We are limited. Our tools are primitive. Tentacles aren’t as good as hands. I’m guessing our planet is more covered in water too. Emma5 received another morsel from Mari. Sometimes curiosity is dangerous, though. You three would have died in my waters. I would have died for being curious about Jason and Odysseus. We must be more careful.
“We take risks to satisfy our curiosity. What do you think of us so far?”
Your triad arrangement is effective but unnatural to your species. It’s an interesting choice.
***
Mari told Hana and Loku about Emma5’s comment after she rowed the raft ashore and joined them inside Odysseus.
“That young girl is just going by our plumbing,” said Loku.
“Which she knows inside and out,” said Hana, winking at Mari.
Loku frowned. “If their pod society is anything like whales’, that’s a bit weird too, don’t you think?”
Mari sat down her plate, stood, and stretched. “I wonder if we can salvage any clothing. It’s a wee bit too racy seeing both of you in your birthday suits all the time. That’s weird too.”
“I wonder if Emma5 was making us so lusty,” said Hana.
“She admitted to running that little experiment,” said Mari. “That’s one thing we can learn from them.”
“How to be lustier?” said Loku with a smile.
“No, mind control.”
“Probably not possible,” said Hana.
“Evolutionarily more useful in an aquatic environment,” said Loku.
“I for one think that our triad is stronger because of Emma5,” said Mari. The others nodded. “I just don’t know how to put all this in an exploration report.”
“Let Jason make the report,” said Loku. “He always edits them anyway.”
“I won’t mention the crew’s promiscuous behavior,” Jason said.
Mari threw her plate toward Loku’s computer console. “You’re damn right, you won’t!”
***
Action on the southern border! No, it’s not Trump beginning the construction of The Wall. It’s Chen and Castilblanco fighting terrorists, a cartel, and neo-Nazi militias. In Angels Need Not Apply, the deadly duo from the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” go undercover to fight crime as part of a national task force. This novel is available in all ebook formats.
In libris libertas!
