Yellow and red lights flashed on the pilot's console like a small office's pathetic holiday display.
"Status!" Lisa ordered.
"We're down safe and sound," Brax replied. "Just a few minor problems."
"Minor problems? We almost crashed!"
"Crashed? No. More of an abrupt landing, really. The landing gear deployed in time."
As Lisa recalled, this was after a tense moment of uncertainty and a considerable amount of metallic groaning, but she saw no point in mentioning that. They were down safely, and the ship was in one piece, but judging by the flashing lights, a number of things would need repair before they could hope to lift off again. Assuming they had everything they needed, those repairs would take time, and they would probably have to do some of the work outside of the ship. She needed to know if they would be able to do so unmolested. Those pig-nosed things could still be out there.
She unclipped her safety harness. "Sims, screen on. Do a visual sweep of the surrounding area."
Their landing lights brightly illuminated the rectangle of pavement on which they parked. Bodies, debris, and small fires littered the ground around them. Larger fires still burned behind them in the part of the archaic city that stood outside the walls, but all of the attackers who could still move, appeared to have fled. She saw none within visual range of the cameras, in any case.
The image panned slowly forward to reveal that the nose of the ship was only about fifteen meters from the city's eastern gate. She reluctantly admitted to herself that Brax had done a good job putting them down. Despite his lackadaisical attitude about most things, he was a good pilot.
"What were those creatures?" she said softly, not expecting an answer.
"Orcs," Brax said with just a hint of a smile.
He couldn't possibly be enjoying this!
"Orcs?" she challenged. "You mean like in some stupid fantasy story?"
"Hey! Not all of them are stupid. Some are pretty good."
"Okay, sorry. This is really stressing me out. I suppose there's no reason we can't call them orcs, and maybe they do look a bit like the ones from movies or whatever, but orcs aren't real. Those can't be orcs." She glared at her pilot as a warning not to disagree.
"If I may, Commander," Doc said. "I'd like to ask Sims to search the library files to see if it can tell us anything about them."
She nodded. What could it hurt?
"Sims," Doc said. "Scan the bodies around the ship and let us know if you can find any correlates in fact or fiction."
"Working," Sims acknowledged in its customary emotionless voice. After a pause of only a few seconds, it continued. "The closest match is a fictional creature from a role-playing game reference manual initially published two hundred and three years ago. The creatures are known as orcs. Would you like additional data from that reference?"
"I'm sure that must be a coincidence," Lisa said. "I don't know what this place is, but I know it's not a game."
"I agree," Doc said. "But it does seem to have inexplicable parallels. I find that…curious."
"I wouldn't worry too much about the orcs," Brax said. "They're only one-hit-die monsters."
His persistence in speaking gibberish was not helping her mood.
"What is that supposed to mean?" Lisa retorted. "They die if you hit them once?"
"Uh, no. It means their hit points are determined by the roll of…" His explanation slowed when it came upon the spikey roadblock of his commander's annoyed glare. He made a quick detour. "Well, I guess in this situation it just means that they're not nearly as tough as those dragons we saw earlier. They're really only dangerous in large numbers."
"How many are there out there?" Sandra asked nervously.
"Based on infrared sensor readings, one thousand, two hundred and twelve of the creatures retreated into the woods during the time the ship has been here." Sims replied. "An additional four hundred and eighty-four bodies are lying in and around the area. It is uncertain how many of these belong to the same species."
"Someone must be driving them," Brax said. "Orcs don't normally cooperate in numbers like that. Their clans are more likely to fight one another."
"Listen," Lisa said. She already had more than enough of his fantasy nonsense. They needed to approach the situation rationally. "The creatures on this planet may look like they're out of one of your stu…they may appear similar to things from an old role-playing game, but they can't be, and we shouldn't base our assumptions of them on a game manual."
Brax nodded sheepishly.
"Okay, then. Let's try to find out what actually is going on. The first thing we need to do is observe and try not to jump to any unwarranted conclusions."
"Okay, but—"
"But what, Brax?" She crossed her arms, daring him to say the wrong thing. Being a head shorter and about half his weight, it was like a Pekingese facing down a Great Dane. The big dog metaphorically backed away.
"Well, I don't want you to get mad or anything, but the, um, orc-like things may be mostly nocturnal."
"And you think this why?" she said, tapping her foot.
"Um, well, because they were attacking at night, and they started running when I first turned on the landing lights?" he offered hesitantly, as if presenting a suggestion for her approval.
The foot stopped. "Okay. That makes sense. We'll leave them on. Does anyone else have any other observations or suggestions?"
"I have a question," Sandra said.
Lisa sighed. "I'm loaded with them. What's yours?"
"Are we safe here? I mean, we're almost up against the wall. The things on the other side could drop rocks on us or something."
Lisa hadn't considered that, but Sandra was right. The orcs—or whatever—were not the only potentially hostile aliens around.
She turned her attention to the main view screen. "Sims, give us a view of the top of that wall."
The image on the screen shifted to a view of the crenellations. A long line of curious faces stared down at them over the edge.
"Those look like normal people," she said. After a moment of consideration, she amended that. "They look like humans, anyway."
They did, albeit oddly dressed and not overly well groomed ones. None seemed eager to drop anything on them. Their wide-eyed, nervous expressions suggested they were scared—or at least apprehensive.
"They look like they'll probably leave us alone for a while," she said, hoping it was true.
"I doubt they have anything that could hurt us much," Brax said. "Our outer hull is a heat-resistant ceramic composite, and it's tough enough to deflect small objects at high velocity. We'd hear it if they dropped a rock on us, or even something like boiling oil, but I doubt it would do any serious damage."
"Good to know," Lisa said. "Speaking of the ship, what's its status?"
"Oh, right. I meant to mention that. We've got red lights on the gyroscopic stabilizer and six of the VTOL thrusters. There are yellows on all the landing gear. Those, we may be able to clear just by cleaning and lubricating the mechanical components."
"And the rest?"
"Fixable. We should be able to fabricate replacement parts using the onboard printers."
When components fail, which they tend to do when it is most inconvenient, the crew of a ship in space cannot simply call for overnight delivery of a replacement, and they can't keep spares of every part of the ship in a bin somewhere. In the early years of spaceflight, engineers determined that the logical solution was to equip all long-range spacecraft with onboard 3-D printers. Sims would have specifications on file for all of the ship's standard components along with repair procedures. Lisa had made sure they were provisioned with enough raw stock to fabricate a few spare parts, if needed. It was an old ship after all, but she had not foreseen the possibility of requiring a major repair on a technologically backward planet. She berated herself for the oversight, realizing even as she did so that it was unreasonable. No one in their right mind could have foreseen something like this.
; A neuron in one dark corner of her brain frantically tried to attract her attention with another concern, but it went unnoticed because Brax mentioned something else.
"Commander. We'll need to go outside to do some of the repairs. The maintenance drones will need to, anyway."
"Right. I assumed we would. That could be a problem if the locals are hostile, although for now they seem content just to look at us. Judging from their appearance, the environment shouldn't be a concern, but we should check anyway." She knew that just because the city dwellers looked human didn't mean they were.
"Sandra, what do the sensors tell us about atmosphere, temperature, and airborne microbes?"
The communications officer examined the sensor readings from her console. "Other than the smoke, there's nothing that seems disagreeable. It's like a summer night at home out there."
"Home?"
"In my case, Philadelphia."
"Good. I'm from Orlando. Summer nights there can get pretty hot and steamy. At least working outside shouldn't pose a problem here, provided the natives don't object."
"I'll have Sims start on building parts then, all right?" Brax said.
"Let's have it check everything first and make sure we're not missing anything important. We may need to prioritize what we fix if we don't have enough stock in our stores for it all.
"Sims, run a diagnostic analysis of all ship systems, subsystems, and components. Return a list of recommended repairs and an estimate of time and resources required. Compare this to the stock on hand and report any projected shortfalls. Display results on the main screen."
"What diagnostic level do you desire?" the ship's AI said.
"Preliminary, for now. Don't take anything off-line."
"Working."
Lights on the various panels around the bridge blinked as the scan progressed. Lines of text soon began to appear on the main screen.
"Why do we have all these failures?" Sandra said, watching the preliminary data scroll up the screen. "I thought this ship had been refurbished."
"Only the life support, sensors, and spaceflight systems were," Lisa said. "The mission profile did not have us getting anywhere near a planet, let alone a habitable one, so the atmospheric flight and landing systems were left as is. I guess the bean counters considered them an unnecessary expense."
"Bastards."
"Don't worry, Sandra," Brax said. "It's all fixable. See? Sims says we have what we need, so far. It'll just take a couple of days."
The adequacy of the stock for the printers came as good news, and Lisa felt relieved because she had personally seen to their provisioning.
"We may as well snoop on the neighbors some more," she said. "We're eventually going to have to meet them. Sims, keep working on the diagnostics, but switch the main screen to an exterior view. I want another look at the top of that wall."
The faces were still there. All of them appeared male, some with beards. Many of the men wore bullet-shaped helmets and held weapons or burning torches, which sent more sooty smoke into the night sky.
"Pike, halberd, short sword, morning star, crossbow, battle axe," Brax said as the camera scanned the line of men. "Oh, look! There's a catapult." This seemed to please him for some reason.
"Okay. Apparently you're the expert," Lisa said. "What can we infer from all this."
"Um, I don't see any firearms, but they definitely have iron and some steel. They look healthy enough, so they must have a fairly stable society and economy, including money and craft specialization. They're also sexists. No women soldiers. I'm guessing they're at a medieval level of social and technological development. They probably have some kind of king or lord mayor or something overseeing it all. They have a history of being attacked from the outside, but it doesn't happen often, or at least not recently."
"You get all that from seeing a line of scruffy men with old-fashioned weapons?"
"From that along with the layout of the city. They have those thick stone walls, which they wouldn't have built if they weren't worried about being overrun, but the city has spread out beyond them. They wouldn't build things outside of them if they were being attacked all the time."
"You know, that actually makes sense," Sandra said with a hint of surprise.
"Thanks. A lot of this is just like—"
"Please don't tell me you're basing your assessment on your experience with games and stories," Lisa warned him.
"Um, okay. I won't. Never mind."
"A partial diagnostic analysis of ship systems has been completed and a list of items requiring repair or replacement is now available," Sims announced.
"On screen," Brax said.
"Partial?" Lisa asked, and then realized why it would have to be.
"A complete analysis of all systems, as you requested, cannot be performed," the ship's AI said. "Several items integrated into the ship are not accessible by the Ship Management System."
"It must mean the BS thing," Brax said. "We're not looking too bad on the rest of this stuff, though. The scramjet's a surprise, but I suppose that hasn't been used in a while. That will need seeing to. We'll need it to break into orbit. Fortunately, a lot of what we need is just seals and gaskets and things like that. It looks like we have just enough raw stock."
Lisa barely heard him. Her mind was on what Sims had told them. She should have known. The Brane Skip technology was classified. Interfacing it with the ship's AI would be a breach of security, and it was a foregone conclusion that complete schematics for the thing wouldn't be in Sims' data banks. Still, best to find out for sure.
"Sims, how much access do you have to the Brane Skip device?"
"Limited. It can be activated manually from the command station. Data flow is one-way from the device to the ship's central data processor. No other information is available."
"We probably don't have to worry about the BS," Brax said. "It's new."
"It's also experimental, and in my experience that means buggy," she said, speaking as an engineer who had had to chase down several bugs on prototype equipment in the past.
Her training on the BS had been short. It amounted to pressing START and waiting. From the operator's standpoint, the prototype installed in the ship was supposed to be an on or off affair. The General Spaceworks scientists and engineers who built the thing, all of whom held top-secret clearances, had preset everything necessary for it to skip between branes. But there were two other menu options.
"I'm calling up the BS. I think it has its own diagnostic system."
The corporate logo again appeared on the screen. This time, she held her breath, hoped for the best, and selected TEST.
The screen responded.
TEST IN PROGRESS.
The result came quickly and justified the dread she had been feeling that nothing today would go the way she hoped.
TEST FAILURE ON KK TRANSITION MODULATOR.
TEST COMPLETE.
The screen returned to the three main options: START, TEST and ABORT. The START option was in red, indicating either that it was not available or that they were not in a place where it could be used safely. She quickly selected ABORT.
"What's a KK transition modulator?" Sandra asked.
"Beats the hell out of me," Lisa said. "But whatever it is, we need to fix it. We're eventually going to have to risk using that damn thing again if we're going to get home.
"Can we?"
"Fix it or get home?"
"Both."
"Maybe and I don't know. The only schematics I have of the BS device are like an exploded diagram for a news article. That's the only level of detail that isn't considered top secret, but it might point out where the KK transition thing is. If it does, I'm going to have Sims use one of the maintenance drones to tear the damn thing apart…I mean carefully disassemble it, locate that module, and see if we can reverse engineer it. Brax, get Sims working on fabricating the other parts we need."
"Already on it, Commander."
"Good. Sims, I'm going to m
y cabin to get my data pad. Have one of the maintenance drones meet me in the BS bay."
"Acknowledged, Commander."
"The rest of you try to get some sleep," she said. "Tomorrow, we'll consider calling on the neighbors."
~Chapter 6~