Do No Harm Read online

“Hey, if it’s blue ice then it might literally have been shot in the shitter!” The joke had been old and obsolete on Earth, but somehow, the Azure colony prided itself on remembering obscure Earth trivia, such as the fact air conveyances used a blue chemical in the wastewater, and the sanitary holding tanks would quite often leak “blue juice” which would freeze at high altitudes.

  “Quiet back there! We’re matching tumble and spin. Hold on to your lunch.” Captain Elick grinned to herself at the knowledge that Cavanaugh—the one making the blue ice joke—had a sensitive stomach. The next fifteen minutes involved rapid acceleration and deceleration, accompanied by sudden changes in direction, all to a soundtrack of retching over the comm. At the conclusion, LaFanto sat back and clasped his hands behind his head.

  “Done, Captain.” Their position with respect to the…yes, frankly, shot-to-shit ship—alliteration intended—was stable, although the distant starfield was in motion.

  Captain Elick commed Kazimatsu, the head of the SAR—salvage and rescue—crew. “We’re stable. You can try the docking collar, but, frankly, you may just want to EVA and enter through one of the holes.” LaFanto had maneuvered the workboat so well that Extravehicular Activity would consist of little more than a short jump from the workboat’s open cargo bay to any of the massive holes in the derelict ship.

  The response came back in Kazimatsu’s soft voice. “Acknowledged, Captain. Be advised, we had to inflate one of the rescue balls so Cavanaugh could clean out his helmet.”

  Elick laughed, but very carefully ensured she wasn’t transmitting when she did so. “Understood, SAR. Move out at your discretion.”

  For the next two hours, Elick and LaFanto stayed on-station, keeping the workboat in matching orbit and orientation with the derelict. The SAR crew had that long to find survivors, salvage any workable tech, and decide whether the ship was salvage or scrap. Once the time was up, they had just enough reaction mass to nudge the hulk away from the shipping lanes. They were fortunate it had not appeared in the stargate emergence area, although why it had appeared almost in front of the stargate was a mystery. The gate master had been queried, but the most they could get in answer was that it was not possible and the instruments at Azure Colony were faulty. Snotty bastard.

  “Yo, Boss? It is ice. There’s ice all over everything. There are no obvious controls, just a bunch of smooth panels. So far I’ve only seen one or two lights behind the ice.” Cavanaugh seemed a bit more subdued after losing his lunch earlier. “Just about everything in here is bent, too, just like you’d see from a depth charge. I think this was a completely water-filled ship.”

  “An aquatic race?” Elick hated to intrude on the SAR crew’s communication, but she needed to ask Kazimatsu. “Do we know of any water-world Galactics that would have their own ships?”

  “Selroth and Bakulu,” he answered. Thirty years ago, he’d been an enlisted spacer on the Mirai Maru, the first Human-owned starship, which had been purchased at the cost of Japan’s entire strategic reserve of uranium and niobium. He was Azure’s resident “Old Man” and expert on the Galactic races. “Selroth are mercenaries; they might have an all-Selroth crew, but this doesn’t look like a merc ship. It has—or had, anyway—weapons, but it doesn’t seem to have the capabilities you’d expect for assault or blockade. The Bakulu have their own ships, but their shells are like miniature ships in their own right. Some should have survived. There’s no sign of either.”

  “Boss, I don’t recognize this ship type,” another voice said over the comm. “I think I’m at what should be the bridge, though, if the ship design is consistent. It’s smashed all to hell. What Cav said earlier about depth charges? Yeah, this place looks crushed.”

  “Any sign of crew?” Kazimatsu asked.

  “None. I even thought to look inside some of the larger ice masses. There’s nothing here.”

  “Boss? Captain? Cavanaugh here. We may have something.”

  “Something” turned out to be a large interior chamber somehow isolated from the overall destruction. There was a gap between the spherical chamber and the sections surrounding it. The inside edges of the surrounding bulkheads were damaged, but the sphere within seemed untouched.

  “This was isolated from the rest of the ship. Probably an air gap or vacuum bottle to absorb the hydrostatic forces that wrecked the rest of the ship.” Kazimatsu panned his suit cam over the object. “Mass sensors say it’s hollow but filled with fluid. If there’s anybody left from the crew, this is our best bet.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Three

  The chemoreceptors were based on the Scientist’s own taste receptors. Granted, they were located on the undersides of his arms and not the oral spaces, but they still essentially “tasted” the salt and sulfur content of the surrounding water. If the system was intelligent, it might have been frustrated by constantly varying concentrations, but all it needed was one hundred time units of consistent mineral concentration in order to release the locking mechanism. The designers had even included visual indicators on the outside of the chamber to aid rescuers in determining the optimum mineral content: charged molecules of sodium, chloride, sulfur, and hydrogen in the exterior fluid caused electrical currents to flow through different circuits, generating multiple colored lights, depending on concentration.

  The life-boat—for that was its function now—was neither aware nor cared that the intelligent beings on the outside were mixing seawater and river water based on ice samples recovered from the wrecked spaceship. Any intelligent response could be handled by the occupant once the emergency protective system disengaged. The exterior fluid was not ideal, it had too high a concentration of volcanic by-products, and not quite enough salinity, but it was close enough, and the hatch that occupied the location of the former door to the Scientist’s quarters unlocked and the exterior water mixed with interior to dilute the anesthetic and wake-up the occupant.

  * * *

  There was light, and warmth, and gravity. The water tasted odd, a bit tangy, as if from a…he felt there should be a name for the taste, but the knowledge would not come. He floated for a moment and realized he was not completely immersed in water but was floating at the surface. Actually, not quite floating, but supported by something underneath. He moved his arms and detected a brief multi-frequency vibration in the air. He rotated one eye toward the source and saw a strange creature with surprisingly short, fat arms that were too few in number for one of his own kind.

  His own kind. What kind was that?

  He rotated his other eye and saw more of the creatures. Each seemed to have two arms down in the water and two arms supporting the platform beneath him. They had two eyes and several other openings on their head behind a single clear membrane, and what seemed to be a disgustingly long thorax between the pairs of arms. His chromophores were attempting to match the outer integument of the creatures but the biological imperative to attempt camouflage was not succeeding. The color caused extreme chromatic aberration in his vision receptors, a condition he seemed to think was called “yellow.”

  He realized that many concepts were bubbling to the surface of his thoughts, but none of them had any context or meaning. “Yellow” seemed to be associated with something in his vision, but it was only an abstract. He didn’t have any further context to which it referred. For that matter, he knew he was “he,” that he was himself, but wasn’t sure what that self was.

  Who was he?

  What was he?

  Who were these creatures and why was he among them?

  The creature nearest his head moved an opening behind the clear membrane and more air vibrations were detected.

  Sound, that was sound. The vibration could be interpreted and possibly understood, but he didn’t know how he knew that.

  With the same strange understanding, he realized the clear membrane and “yellow” integument was a protective suit. The being’s true integument was a different hue and could be seen through the clear protective membrane surround
ing the eyes and…mouth. He knew some beings had mouths with interior ridges for consumption of food. He also understood he had exterior ridges—a “beak” it was called—but it certainly was not near the eyes! That would put one at risk of being blinded in the process of eating!

  The creatures lifted the platform and passed him through an opening into open air. The drying effect of the overhead heat and light source was immediate, but the creatures quickly set him back down in the water under cover from the…sun. Yes, he was on a planet and had just been removed from something that had once been in…space.

  The creatures around him reacted to something, and he saw them all look back at the structure from which he had just been removed. Another creature stood in the…hatch and was waving its limbs and making vigorous air vibrations. Now that one had all of its arms completely out of the water, he could see that indeed, the creatures only had four arms instead of eight. Each was about four to five times as thick as his own, and they seemed strangely rigid except at the ends. The protective covering had been removed from the end of one arm and he could see five smaller appendages. He supposed that could mean they bundled several arms into a stronger mass when in the protective covering. He couldn’t tell if the arms—single or multiple—had taste receptors and grasping surfaces like his own, nor could he see any tentacles unless they, too, were bunched inside the covering.

  No, that was not true. The being high on the structure took off the covering over its eyes and mouth. There were a great many tiny tendrils on its head. Maybe they had tentacles, but they were extremely short and far too many. The strange part was that every other part of the being seemed appropriately sized except for the long thorax. The creature’s arms were about the same length as his own, the head was about the same size, but with smaller eyes that were recessed and seemed awkwardly placed too close together. There were more energetic vibrations, and he could see the creature jump from the structure into the water. A bright light issued from the opening on the structure.

  He felt a sharp pain in his head, and he descended into blackness.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Four

  The blackness began to lift again, and he found himself laying on sand in shallow water. The taste of the water was strange, but it seemed to be over-oxygenated. That was good, because in the shallows, he had to absorb oxygen through his skin. When fully immersed, he drew water over his gills and could extract about three times as much. Of course, the lower oxygen meant he had to keep activity to a minimum, so this was a good way to keep him confined, if that’s what the strange beings had in mind.

  Two of the beings were standing over the tank. From this perspective, they towered over him. Apparently, those over-large ventral arms enabled them to stay in their strange, upright posture. He couldn’t see any supporting frame to keep them that way. They had removed the outer integument, and he could see their eyes and head filaments as well as the distal ends of their dorsal arms. The latter ended in smaller appendages—much too short to be true arms or tentacles, but he could see one of them manipulating a device worn on one arm.

  The surface of the water rippled faintly with vibrations synchronized with the movements of their strangely flattened beaks.

  * * *

  “Exactly why did you spend the delta-vee to bring that thing down to the surface?”

  Administrator Frances Miller stood in front of Dr. Derek Bailey, the scientist in charge of the aquaculture rafts anchored a few kilometers offshore. She fiddled constantly with the chrono on her wrist, clearly impatient to get back to whatever the scientist had interrupted when he called her. “I mean, come on; look at it! It must mass several thousand tons? How much reaction mass did it take to soft-land it?”

  “Just under five kilotons, actually. One of the station engineers estimates at least four k-tons of water alone. It’s a ten-meter sphere, roughly speaking. Do the math, then add the mass of hull metal.” Bailey sighed. He looked at Miller’s long hair and loose clothing and already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask. “As for not opening it in space, have you ever tried to open a drinking bulb in zero-gee?”

  Miller started to speak, but Bailey held up a hand. He knew the administrator’s only experience with microgravity had been a brief exposure on the colony ship years ago.

  “No, I’m not talking about squirting it out of the drinking spout; I mean opening up the whole bulb. The water comes out in one glob, sure, but if you try to capture it, some of it escapes. You scoop up the floating bits, and they break up even more. No way were we going to fight with four thousand cubic meters of water.”

  “So, you put a spin on it and stick it in a gravity deck.” Miller’s simply didn’t have the experience to comprehend the problem.

  “Five kilotons of weight on the end of a swinging arm!” Bailey shouted. “We didn’t have any way to counterbalance it.”

  “Oh, so you just opened it here, in the middle of my colony?” asked Miller sarcastically.

  Bailey pointed to the quikplas structure around them. “I would hardly call this the ‘middle of the colony,’ given that we’re four klicks from the ’port and twenty-two from Landing City. Besides, it was easier to set up here at the Styx delta than to haul sea- and river water to LC.”

  “Why the mix? For that matter, how did you know there was even water in it?”

  “We analyzed the ice we sampled from the wreck. It was one percent saline, about the concentration of salt in a Human body. Compared to seawater, that’s a bit dilute. Earth’s seas are between three and four percent salt, while Azure’s seas are less than two percent. There’s more than a trace amount of sulfur in the ice we found as well. We got that from the Styx River.”

  Miller actually smiled. The farmers hated the volcanic runoff, but it made good fertilizer, and mineral extraction from the silt deposits promised to be key to the colony’s eventual economy. “Well, so much for that. Now give me the rest of the news. Was there anything on that ship we could salvage?”

  “I’ll have to get Kazimatsu to go over that with you.” Bailey pulled out his own slate to contact the head of the SAR team. “There’s nothing from the sphere. Apparently, as soon as Cavanaugh removed his glove, something detected his presence and slagged the interior. As far as what was salvaged in orbit, we found no electronics to speak of. Where there should have been computers, everything appears biological—at least there’s a mass of goo where circuitry would be. On the other hand, we were able to scavenge a lot of F11. The ship had four reactors, and they have an interesting design for buffers! Not much is usable, but we’re certainly learning a lot from the design of some components, especially the thruster nozzles…”

  * * *

  He was beginning to wonder if the creatures’ language was physical instead of light-based, like his own. It was clear they were communicating, the air vibrations were fairly typical of air-breathers, but the beings certainly waved their arms a lot.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Five

  He couldn’t remember anything, not voluntarily. When he tried to remember what he had been doing or how he got here, his memory was blank. He did not remember his name, the name of his people, or where he was from. On the other hand, he had plenty of knowledge of things not related to himself—he knew he was in water, on a planet, and that the beings he could see were totally new to his experience, even if he couldn’t remember prior events. There was a word or a phrase for this, but he couldn’t remember that either.

  He recognized the medallion one of the creatures was wearing was likely a translation pendant, despite the obvious ornamentation added to it. That being had long head-tendrils while the other had none. Interesting. Were they the same species or some sort of symbiotes? The non-tendrilled being moved to the side of the tank and started making mouth movements. He could detect subtle movements on the surface of the water from vibrations in the air, so it was probably trying to communicate. His kind—his kind?—communicated with light pulses and not air
vibrations, but he was still able to detect and interpret vibratory communication, and even reciprocate if necessary, by raising his head out of the water and making sounds with his beak and siphon. He didn’t know how he knew that. More mysterious memories, just nothing…autobiographical…that was the word.

  The being with the translator tried a number of languages. His mind could interpret some of them as words, but too many of them were impossible for him to replicate. The translation switched to a series of hisses and clicks.

  He recognized that one!

  “I…am…” There was something untranslatable, and then it continued. “…who…are…you?”

  Who was he? He knew he was not of the race that used this language. He didn’t even know the name of that race. He thrashed around slightly to raise his beak out of the water, but he was unsure of how to answer.

  “I…am…” he clicked but didn’t know how to continue. He didn’t know his name. But one word came to mind. “Self. I…am…me.”

  “Clicks and hisses. The translator can’t quite translate that last part. He said ‘I am…’ then a click, some sort of air movement and a stop.”

  He repeated the phrase, “I am me.” The sounds came out as “tah-click-ah-duh.”

  “T-odd? Todd? Your name is Todd?” The being with the translator looked confused.

  The translation was problematic. His beak and mouthparts were not designed to duplicate whatever language the device was using. There might be another way, though. He raised one of his tentacles. The tip contained chromophores and phosphorescent organelles that could be used to create flashes of light. He knew—again, with no understanding of how he knew—this was how he usually communicated. If the makers of the device knew of his people, perhaps the device could translate communication by light.