Beyond the Ice Limit

33

BARRY FRAYNE WAS tired. It was ten o’clock at night and the exo lab had been going almost nonstop since noon, when the long, string-like tentacle had arrived and Glinn had ordered Dr. Sax to prepare it for study. Frayne reported directly to Sax, and his lab contained the front-line workers, the prep guys, the bio grunts. Each guy—and as it happened they were all guys—was a specialist in a particular area of biological lab preparation. Under Sax’s scrutiny, they had done sections for microscope, TEM, and SEM studies; they had set up biochemical assays; they had done pre-dissections and dissected out unusual inclusions and organelles for analysis. All of this had then gone out to specialized labs elsewhere on the ship. They were, you might say, the heavy lifters, the prep cooks who got everything ready for the PhDs to work on.

Frayne at least had an MA, but the other three guys just had college degrees. Didn’t matter: they were all good at what they did.

The gross and fine anatomy of the tentacle, or root, or spaghetti, or worm—a lot of crazy nicknames had been proposed—was stunningly different from any biological organism Frayne had seen before. It was hard to tell whether it was even a plant or animal, or perhaps it was neither. It had cells, or membrane-enclosed packages with interior cytoplasm—that, at least, looked normal. Beyond that, nothing was recognizable. Inside the “cells” there were no normal-looking organelles, no nuclei, endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria, or Golgi bodies. Nor did the thing have the types of organelles you’d expect to see in plant cells: chloroplasts, dermata, vacuoles, or rigid cell walls. There were things inside the cells, of course, but they looked like complex inorganic crystals. They glittered like diamonds in the light of the microscope, and seemed to come in different colors, although that appeared to be iridescence or light refraction. Frayne had isolated a bunch and sent them off to be analyzed. He was curious to know what they were.

The narrow tentacle had no blood vessels that he could see, nor phloem or xylem channels for the movement of fluid. Instead, it had an incredibly dense and complex tangle of fine microfibrils like nerves or wires, wrapped in bundles. They were very hard to cut and seemed to be stiffened with something equivalent to plant cellulose, though of a different material, more like inorganic mineral than woody fiber. But what was strangest of all was that, when you really got down to it, there was nothing in the tentacle that actually looked like living tissue. It looked instead like an incredibly finely built machine.

Sax had been in and out, supervising the work. He knew she’d seen the same things he had—she must have. But she’d kept her thoughts to herself.

Now he finished up on the microtome, placed it on a slide, sealed it, labeled it, and slotted it into the holder. It was the last one, and they were almost through—as long as Sax didn’t come back with yet another last-minute request.

“Hey, Barry, take a look at this.”

Frayne looked up and walked over to where one of his co-workers, Waingro, was standing over the main length of tentacle, getting ready to slide it back into cold storage. The thing lay coiled like a thin rope in its shallow tray.

“What’s up?”

“Look at it. It’s shorter.”

“Of course it’s shorter. We’ve been cutting off sections.”

“No,” said Waingro. “I mean, before the last break we took, I could swear it was longer.”

While they were talking, Reece, another lab assistant, came over and stared down.

Frayne turned to him. “What do you think? Is it shorter?”

Reece nodded. “Yup.”

“You…you think someone swiped a piece?” Frayne asked. He was alarmed. They had locked the lab when they left for their last break, but they hadn’t locked up the tentacle. They weren’t working in sterile conditions—that would have been an unacceptable impediment to the speed being demanded of them. They were taking their chances that the thing didn’t infect them with some exotic disease or pathogen. But that seemed highly unlikely, given how far from human biology the thing clearly was. Still, when they left the lab, they always locked it as a precaution.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Reece. “Make somebody a hell of a souvenir.”

Frayne felt a swell of irritation. “Let’s take it out and measure it. We’d better be sure.”

Still gowned up and wearing latex, the four unlocked the specimen tray and removed the thing. It was hard and stiff, like a piece of cable. They kept it under refrigeration, but it sure didn’t look like it would deteriorate or rot if kept at room temperature. It wasn’t edible to any earth-origin microbes. And coming up from four hundred atmospheres to one didn’t seem to have altered it at all. The thing was, essentially, weird as shit.

Working with care, they laid it out on the long, stainless worktable, which had built-in measuring marks.

“Six hundred eighty centimeters,” said Frayne. He pulled a clipboard down from the wall and scanned it. “It was originally eight hundred and nine.” He started adding up in his head the pieces they had removed; thirty centimeters for sectioning; forty for dissection; ten for biochemical assays; five for miscellaneous.

“We’re forty-four centimeters short,” he said. He looked around. “Did anyone forget to log a removal?”

No one had. And Frayne believed them: they were all careful workers. You didn’t get to be on a project like this if your lab work was sloppy.

“Looks like someone couldn’t be bothered to make a request through ordinary channels. Liberated a piece for themselves.”

“You think they just came in and cut off a piece?” asked Stahlweather, the fourth assistant.

“What else am I to think?”

“But the lab was locked during break.”

“So? Lot of people have keys. Especially the ones who think themselves important enough not to have to follow the rules.”

Heads nodded all around.

“I’ll have to put in a report about this to Sax and Glinn,” said Frayne. “They’re not going to be happy about it. And this happened on our watch.”

“Maybe Glinn did it.”

“Or that asshole Garza.”

More nods. This was a likely explanation. And it would deflect blame from them.

Frayne looked around. “Time to close up shop. The top brass won’t like the fact that somebody liberated a piece of that thing. But you know what? We followed procedure. And you guys put in a good day—well done.”

“Speaking of liberation…” Reece climbed onto a stool and reached up to the top of a cabinet, slipped his hand deep out of sight. Waingro was smiling knowingly.

Reece produced a gallon jug of red wine. “I think we owe it to ourselves to have a little party.”

Frayne stared. “What, with that rotgut?”

“And what if Sax comes back?” Stahlweather asked. “Now that we’re at the work site, it’s ix-nay on any drinking.”

“Come come, the speakeasy is open for business. Sax isn’t coming back—not tonight.” Reece’s smile grew broader. He reached up again to the hidden store and brought down a bottle of brandy, another of triple sec, and a bag of oranges and lemons. “Sangria, anyone?”