Mangled Meat

The Decortication Technician

You ever shit your pants? I did a couple of days ago, first time in my life, but, see, at the time I wasn’t wearing just pants, I was wearing a pair of sealed Class III EUDs. That’s plat-talk for environmental utility dress—a spacesuit, to creamcake earth-loving non-hackers like you.

The recovery platoon brought it in at about 0300 zulu, it clearly being a hyper-velotic vehicle of extraterrestrial origin. Heel-shaped, twenty meters long, thirty wide. A dull-gray finish just like the old “UFO” fables from a quarter of a millennium ago. No viewports, no passive vid-lenses—no windows of any kind.

No doors.

Obviously this space-canoe came from a technology far superior to the Federated World’s. Since I was the plat’s decort tech, the OAC ordered me to assist in the r-dock, and, no, that’s not when I shit my pants. I was jazzed just like the rest of the crew. This was the find of all of human history, and we were part of it. We’d all be famous. Our names would be in the history chips for as long as humankind endured, and with successful colonies on fifty-seven planets now, it’s a good bet that humankind will endure for quite a while.

I open things, that’s my job. I open things very carefully. That’s why the OAC ordered me to the dock and no one else. Lotta sour grapes there, I can tell you, but to hell with ‘em. When the OAC talks, you jump. Once the grunts brought this thing into the retrieval dock, we scanned it every which way but couldn’t find any seams, no sign of any kind of entrance. We could only presume it was pressurized but God knew with what, so that ruled out a hot cut. And another thing: when we p/a/a’d the hull, it told us it was made of a non-metallic element as yet undiscovered.

“Burn the fucker open,” SSG Yung said. “Blow it open with some C-11.”

“Yeah, yeah!” the rest of his bohunkers shouted.

Just like ground-pounders, I thought. “Have you boys been drinking the cooling-tube effluvium again? Any gas inside the craft could be flammable. We could blow up the whole plat, you mallet-heads.”

“Well then how are we gonna open it?” Yung grumbled. “We gotta open it!”

“Yeah, yeah!” the rest of his platoon shouted.

“We don’t gotta do anything of the sort,” I told the idiots. “We don’t know anything about it. We start fucking around with it, we could destroy it—and ourselves. Smartest thing to do is secure it in one of the hold-warrens. Take it back to earth when the mission’s done.”

“That’s three years!” Yung bellowed. “We got a fuckin’ alien spaceship here, and there might be a fuckin’ alien inside. We’re supposed to wait three fuckin’ years before we find out what’s fuckin’ inside the motherfucker?”

“You speak with the eloquence of kings,” I remarked, but then, just as I’d voiced my objection, the OAC appeared on my head’s-up-display.

:-cE jONSIN, dT1163: aTTEMPT tO eNTER tHE oBJECT-:

“Yeah, yeah!” Yung and his whitewalls shouted.

Orders were orders, so that was it. “You guys got what you wanted. Evacuate the r-dock.”

“No way,” Yung took some exception. “We busted our balls hauling this tin can aboard. We’re damn sure gonna be here when you open it.”

I shook my head. “It’s for your own safety. You guys gotta leave.”

Six grinning meat-racks in EUDs surrounded me.

“Make us leave, civvie.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, getting the point. “Prep me. I want this victor covered with lexlar blast blankets. Keep the dock de-preshed. And charge me up a nute-drill and a quarter-inch blackie-pete bit…”

I guess I should back up a little, huh? Set things off right? I mean, I got no idea when this log-chip might be found, and I guess it’s highly probably whoever finds it won’t know what the hell this is all about.

My name’s Dug Jonsin, twenty-nine earth years old. Mission ID: DT1163. It’s Tuesday, 25 May 2202. I’m a civilian astro-entomologist attached to the Federated World’s Academy of Galactic Studies. I examine and catalogue insects by academic design, but what I really do is cut them open. Officially, I’m a FOS 95C20 Decortication Technician.

Sounds fancy but…I’m a light-weight by earth standards. My college GPA was only 3.89. Couldn’t get a good job with the Academy earthbound, so here I am on this tub which they call a Deep Space Analytic and Collection Platform, vessel tag CW-DSP-141. Fourteen-man crew: six Army grunts for the retrieval platoon, one Jarine security ape who doubles as a corpsman, two more civvies like me on the Technistics Unit, and five Naval Space Corp dupes who run the plat.

And me.

The job’s a cake walk, really. We hit different star clusters, ID planets, planetoids, moons, and asters with nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres, and then we check them out. Fauna and flora, for the Academy’s zoological indexes. The FW’s been running survey missions like this for over a hundred years, since the invention of I-grav drives. That’s inverted-gravity propulsion. A simple cadmium laser electrically charges a Palladium/Peridotite ceramic plate and harnesses one-half of available interspacial gravity as a force of propulsion. The lasers provide specific photon wavelengths to pass or dissipate the electrical charge through a gallium isolator. Cadmium for ON, Helium for OFF. Simple. It proved that the Twentieth Century eggheads were right. You can’t beat the speed of light, but you can sure as shit bend it. That’s how we can move our platforms far out of the Milky Way. So much for universal invariants.

Each mission is a ten-year gig, but they say you only age about three and a half. Nobody wants this shit so there’s a pay off. Early retirement on the fed lamb. I figured it was worth it. No wife, no kids—could never afford that stuff. But when I get back to earth I can have it all. Phenothiazines keep you from going insane, and tetra-amine implants kill your sex drive. A lot of the crew don’t believe it at first, so they sneak on porn chips, but after the implant, man, you can look at a holopegs of Miss Defense Corp buck naked but it’s about as erotic as looking at your own turds in a gravity toilet. I haven’t had a hard-on in seven years, wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did. Every month the OAC orders you to sit on a rectal bolus; a sub-static charge that makes you ejaculate so you don’t get prostate cancer down the road.

Oh, and the OAC? That stands for Operational Analysis Computer. There’s no captain on this rowboat, just the OAC. When it gives you an order, you do it. If you don’t, you get cryo’d, and when you get back to the World, you get no compensation, no retirement, no nothing. Just ten years of your life down the drain and sometimes a full nickel stint on the Lunar Detention Facility.

So if this crap-pot full of microchips tells me to stand on my head and cluck like a chicken, I don’t ask why, I just do it.

But back to my FOS—that’s Federal Occupational specialty. Astro-entomolgy is the fancy way of putting it, bug-cracking is the more realistic way. I’m a decorticator. One thing we found out fast after we started searching other solar systems for signs of life is that there were all kinds of life on a lot of these rocks.

Just nothing interesting.

Nothing mammalian. Usually just microscopic stuff like entozoas, chlorophiles, trimeciums—space germs—and we’d cryo the samples and that was it. Same thing with vegetation, thallophytes, and fungus. Tag it and freeze it.

But another thing we found a lot of were what could be categorized in earth terms as insectas: hexapods, anthropods—aquatic and terrestrial—anything with an exoskeleton. And a lot of them were pretty big.

Ever seen a cockroach the size of a 55-gallon drum? Ever seen a moth the size of a bald eagle? We’d get so much stuff like that—alien insecta phylas—that you wouldn’t believe it. For an entomologist, it was exciting as hell.

For about a month.

Then it all got to be the same. When the exploratory surveys started, there was this idealistic hope that someday one of the missions would find mammalian life, would even find something akin to the human species. But that never happened.

All we found were bugs.

Big bugs. Insects that had evolved for millions or even billions of years and had genetically adapted a physical size that could accommodate longevity. Heavily shelled creatures that could withstand hostile environments, drastic fluctuations in atmospheric pressure and content, neutrino and meteoric showers and volcanic debris.

Big bugs. Big bugs with hard shells. That’s pretty much what the rest of the galaxy had waiting for mankind to discover.

So that was my job.

As the mission’s decortication tech, I had to take two samples of each sex of any insecta we discovered. One sample I’d cryo immediately. The other sample I’d autopsy if the creature’s size was deemed by the OAC as practical. Some of these things had three of four sexes. And a lot of them were huge.

I had to establish the most effective way to decorticate the insect while still alive. In other words, I had to cut off its hull, shell, carapace, exoskeleton, or whatever, and autopsy the bug while digigraphing the entire procedure for the Academy’s archives.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. How hard can it be to cut the shell off a bug?

Space bugs? It’s a bitch. See, I gotta do it without destroying the bug. You don’t use scissors. You don’t use a knife—not for this job. You don’t pin the goddamn thing to a board. Some of these things are as big a man, bigger. If you try to open ‘em with an ectine torch, all you’ll do it fry the damn thing. And if you fry it, the OAC logs that into your service file as a demerit.

You should see some of the shit that these bugs got inside of them. Black slop, brown slop, green slop. Slimy organs whose purpose you couldn’t even guess at. Hell, one time I decorticated an octopod from P31 on the Ryan Cluster—I cut the sheath off the groinal trap and this thing had something that looked just like a human cock! No lie! This thing didn’t have an ovidpositur—it had a dick!

So, anyway, that’s my ten-year gig. Decorticating bugs.

I never would’ve imagined that, one day, I’d be ordered to decorticate something else.

It was the MADAM that picked it up first—that’s Mass-Activated-Detection-Alarm-Mechanism. It’s a souped-up spheric-pulse radar, picks up anything in the scan field that the OAC calculates can’t be organically or naturally formed.

We’d just hypervelled through the Zuby System, using grids piped to us from the Hubble 6 matrix, and we weren’t thrusting through this white-dwarf system for more than an hour before the MADAM went off. The OAC called General Quarters, and all we could do then was wait. Wait for the tri-wave scans to bounce back to the sensor-slats and tell us what was out there.

The OAC told us this:

:-mADAM cOORDINATES vIA hOME pLATFORM aS zERO: sEVEN-sIX-tHREE dEGREES sIX mINUTES oN mENISCUS cHART. pROBABLITY cOMPUTATIONS iNDICATE nINE-nINE-pERCENT lIKELIHOOD oF eXTRATERRESTRIAL vEHICLE oF hIGHER tECHNOLOGY dERIVATION tHAN iS pREVIOUSLY iNDEXED-:

I’d been sitting in the chow hall, eating gengineered monkfish-steak when that call came through. The Army grunts were scrambled, and thrusted out on a retrieval skiff in less time that than it takes to fill your piss bag. About an hour later, they were redocking and asking for ingress countercodes. The OAC passed them through, and that’s when I was ordered to r-dock.

You’re still wondering what this has to do with me shitting my EUDs, right? Well, I’m getting to that. I’m standing on the lock-rails in r-dock when the grunts bring the victor in and tack it down to the stulls. They close the dock door but wisely don’t represh; we all keep our CVC helmets on with defoggers set on high. This victor—vehicle—looked stunning, a perfect crescent with no seams, no doors, no visual outlets or propulsion vents, no indiction even of a gravity-amplification node.

Just a thirty-meter-wide crescent, a giant boomerang.

The laze scales put the thing in at just under two-hundred pounds. Something that big? It should’ve weighed at least a couple of tons. Which meant that whatever unknown element it was made of had very little weight, very little photon mass. It was at the least a kick to have the grunts following my orders. Federal Military didn’t like it when civilians told them what to do. But I was the expert here, at least the best that this mission could provide. My expertise involved cutting bugs open. Therefore I was the best candidate to cut open an alien vehicle.

“Pop this can,” one of the field privates muttered, wide-eyed behind his glexan visor. “Crack it open.”

“Do it,” SSG Yung said.

“What do you think I’m going to do? Play paddycakes with it?” I strapped on the force harness, then closed the chuck on the Black & Decker neutron drill; the treated black-phosphorus bit would make a million-and-a-half cycles per minute but it wouldn’t get hot. No heat conduction, no sparks. “And if this doesn’t work, I’ll try the nuclear spanner.” I raised the massive drill on its waist-bracket, then planted my nanoboots on the floorwall and pressed the bit against the victor’s hull.

“Hardcore,” someone said.

“Last chance to evac, guys,” I reminded them. I winked at SSG Yung.

“Just rev that fuckin’ thing up and go!” Yung yelled.

Suit yourself. I toggled down the charge lever, flipped open the safety. Just as I was about to hit the power detent—

“Wait a minute!” a platoon Spec 4 shouted. He was standing on the other side of the victor, running a hand-held photon-activation-analysis scan on the hull.

“What?” I said, the drill harness weighing down on my hips.

“You ain’t gonna believe this…but I’ve got double-pozz poroscopy on the hull, and residual chloride ions.”

“Bullshit!” I practically spat into my mic.

“I shit you not, man,” the Spec replied. “Ain’t nothing else this could be.”

It’s got to be a mistake, I thought, but I unstrapped the drill anyway.

“What the fuck are you fuckin’ talkin’ about?” Yung complained. “Chloride what?’

“Chloride ions,” I said. “It’s part of a typical sebaceous amino acid secretion, unless that OAC’s glitching. Your man just found a fingerprint on the hull.”

Yung’s eyes opened as wide as a condenser slug behind his visor. “The fuck?”

“It looks overlayed a bunch’a times,” the Spec 4 observed, focusing the p/a/a screen. I checked it out myself and he was right.

“No ridge patterns,” I said more to myself than to him. “The pore pattern’s relatively intact, but that’s it. Then it looks like…”

“A smear?” the Spec ventured.

“Yeah, I think so. Digigraph it a couple of times and save the files in the OAC,” I said. Then I turned to SSG Yung, who still didn’t get it.

“Someone or some thing touched this victor, Sergeant Yung. And whoever touched it, touched it repeatedly in the same place.”

Behind the glex visor, Yung’s face twisted up. “You mean a human?”

“Well, something clearly humanoid,” I corrected. “Something that has sebaceous secretions similar to ours.”

“All right…uh— Just get back on that drill and cut this fucker open,” he said.

Be as dumb as you can be—in the Army, I thought. “The nute-drill could take hours or days. Let me try something. If it doesn’t work, then I’ll power the drill back up. Is that square with you?”

Yung smirked, reached up and tried to scratch his chin before he remembered he was wearing a sealed CVC. “Yeah, fuck, all right.”

“Represh the dock to six-five,” I told the Spec. Yung nodded consent. It took a few minutes but I needed enough PSIs in the dock to take my EUD mitt off. Then I grabbed an SV probe off the hardware lock.

“What the fuck are you fuckin’ doin’?” Yung asked.

I didn’t bother answering. The sub-violet lume element would show me the same spot where the hull was touched. “There it is,” I muttered. It was a downward streak. Someone had pressed his or her fingertip against the hull at this precise point. Then they’d dragged their fingertip down in a straight line…

With my mitt off, then, I did the same thing. I pressed my fingertip on the same spot, then dragged it down.

A small ingression on the high quadrant of the hull formed. And for you earth-loving no-hackers who don’t know what that means… It means a doorway opened.

“He did it!” Yung barked. “The candyass civvie fuck did it! First Platoon! Lock and load.” Yung shoved me back out of the way as his troops charged their Colt M-57 Squad Assault Systems. “Cole, Alvirez, take firing positions at the bulkhead! Filips and Bensin, cover the entrance at one-five meters! Come on, Roburts! It’s me and you.”

“Sarge, Sarge,” I interrupted. “The G.I. Joe stuff isn’t going to be necessary.” I showed him my fileflat which was now out-indexing the atomic chromatography specs from the p/a/a scan. “Check this out.”

Yung frowned at the readouts, his trigger finger twitching. “The fuck am I supposed to know what that shit is? I ain’t no wirehead—I’m a fuckin’ Army Ranger!”

Tell me about it. “This is a radio assay and carbon-date of the fingerprint. It’s over 2,000 years old, Sarge. Any life form inside that victor is long dead.”

“Balls,” the platoon sergeant replied. “Cover me, Roburts!” Then he raised his weapon and entered the craft. I guess these guys had their games to play, so what the hell. They had to go through the motions, I guess to maintain their identities. And I guess I did the same thing, in my own way, too.

But when Yung entered the victor with his wrist-light and rifle—it seemed like a whole lot of time went by with all of us just standing there staring at the doorway. Yung didn’t respond. We couldn’t even see his shadow moving in there.

“Hey, Sarge?” I called out.

Nothing.

“Sergeant Yung! Relay your status!” one of the other grunts cracked.

Nothing.

Then—

“Holy everlovin’ motherfuckin’ shit…”

It was Yung’s voice that carried back to our CVCs. I turned to the SGT E-5 next to me. “You’re next in command, pal. You better send someone in there.”

“I-I-I—,” he stammered.

What the hell, I thought. I grabbed the SGT’s wrist-light and stepped into the victor. The cabin walls were black but somehow tinged with silver. I saw no evidence of an operator’s seat, instruments, or controls. Just the weird silver-black, which sucked up the 1000-candle-power sodium light I was carrying.

“Down here,” Yung’s voice drifted to me.

It was like walking through black fog. I seemed to take many more steps than the depth of the craft would allow, but eventually Yung’s form came into focus. He’d dropped his weapon on the victor’s floor and was just sitting there on a starboard protrudement.

“Guess I just wasn’t ready for it,” he said. He sat there with the rim of his helmet in his palm. He looked out of it. He looked whacked.

“What’s that, Sarge?”

“Seen a lot of fucked up shit in my time. Seen guys die, my own men, seen whole transport plats blow up ‘cos some mech jockey forgot to close a vent-line. I saw the P-4 quake split the whole planetoid in half and swallow fifteen thousand colonists five minutes after my thruster took off. It’s fucked up shit, man.”

“Straighten up, Sarge,” I said. For whatever reason, he was going down memory lane, and the scenery wasn’t too great. “Get yourself squared away. Sure, we’re standing inside an alien spacecraft—the first one ever discovered—and you’re right, it’s fucked up. But we gotta keep it together. We got our jobs to do. You got men out there shit-scared. They’re counting on you.”

His CVC turned toward me. Through the glex visor, I could see his blank eyes in the light. “Since I was a little kid,” he droned, “I always thought that this would happen someday. But it was just a fantasy, you know? Some kids fantasize about being president, some kids fantasize about seeing an alien…. Man, this is fucked up.”

The tone of his words wrapped me up. “Seeing…a what?” I said. But now I guessed his point. We knew there must have been something inside this ship, however long dead. What else could it be but an “alien?” A “spaceman?” Something every man, woman, and child in the Federate had thought about, dreamed about, but something, by now, that nobody really believed in anymore. Like afterlife, reincarnation, spirituality. Just myths now. Mankind in the 23^rd century no more believed in spacemen than they believe in Santa Claus.

Yung’s voice cracked like tinder. “Take a look, civvie,” he said.

I let my light follow his gaze. Some kind of a molded object rose from the floor, something like a chair, and sitting in that chair was the victor’s obvious pilot.

An ecstatic chaos filled the plat, everyone running around like meth-freaks. Time seemed to stand still. The OAC ordered most of the crew to analyze the victor. As for the dead pilot, of course we couldn’t analyze him until we got his suit off. That was my job: to decorticate the pilot, so to speak. To remove his environmental suit and extract the body for digigraphics and autopsy.

We’d moved the body to the medcove, lain it out on an exam table under the lumes.

“Twenty-one May, 2202,” I said into the mission recorder. “Jonsin, Dugliss, FOS 95C20 decortication technician for mission survey on DSP-141. The Operational Analysis Computer has ordered me to attempt to extract the body of the victor’s apparent operator for analysis and archives indexing. For this record, the victor’s operator will be referred to as VO from here on…”

Oh, damn. Some story teller I am, huh? I forgot to tell you what the guy looked like. Humanoid and bipedal. Two pronating arms, two pronating legs, and a head. Each hand showing four fingers with three phalanges, and an opposable thumb. One hundred and forty-six point four pounds via specific earth gravity, and seventy-one inches long in extremis. For all intents, it was a guy in a spacesuit with a general surface anatomy similar to ours.

But it was still an alien, and it was the ev-suit that kept reminding me of that. Same color, same hue as the ship: a flat silver-black. To the touch, the material felt like something polycron or cloth, but if you pressed down on it, it wouldn’t give at all. I tried a particle vise on the right thumb and nothing happened. The vise broke at 750,000 psi. But if you grabbed the hand, you could bend the fingers in their natural direction. Same with the rest of the body. The suit was pliable…but then again, it wasn’t.

The head was the weirdest part. Not a helmet, nothing like what you would think of as utility headgear. Just a bullet-shape extending from the shoulders. No visor, no visual ports, no bumps where the ears should be. Just imagine dipping a doll in wax enough times that only the basic shape remained.

This was my company for about the next seventy-two hours. First thing I tried was a standard scan of the suit, same way I’d scan a bug before cutting it open. But this was no bug. X-rays, V-rays, triax tomography, nuclear-resonance scans—all negative. And it was no big surprise that, like the victor, the VO’s suit showed no signs of any sort of opening. No zipper on this spaceman. And I tried touching the suit, like I’d touched the ship, but…no such luck.

The only way to see what was inside was to do what I did best. Cut it open.

I didn’t sleep for days; I only ate when the OAC ordered me to. I became obsessed, but then everyone else was too—obsessed with their particular mission assignments. This was history, this was it. And we were all a working part.

But for my part—failure.

Section lasers, nuke-picks, impact-bezels, the sub-cabundum band-saw, the ectine torch? All of them failed. Whatever material it was that the VO’s suit was constructed of, none of these tools touched it. I couldn’t dent it, couldn’t melt it, couldn’t even scratch it. Detcord failed too, and so did beta-fluoric acid. Nothing. The most invasive and corrosive substances and tools known to man did nothing to the VO’s suit.

In the meantime, though, I learned from the OAC updates that the rest of the crew were having the same bad luck trying to take the victor apart. Every single testing and analysis method available could determine absolutely nothing about the composition, structure, or engineering of the craft. And since no propulsion system could be detected, God knew how this thing got to the Zuby system. Where was it coming from? Where was it going?

Eventually, though, a half-answer blipped over our HUDs. Since no engine, fuel, or propulsion structures were discovered on the victor, the OAC, after almost three earth days of computations half a trillion cycles per second, told us this:

:-cALCULATIONS fOUNDED iN aLL kNOWN qUANTUM pOSTULATION eSTIMATES tHAT fOREIGN vICTOR mAY bE pROPELLED bY sOME dESIGN oF rELATIVISTIC mOMENTUM-eNERGY rELATION bASED oN pRPOSED 20^th-cENTURY tHEORY. E = pc aND mo [momentum] = 0. iF a pHOTON cEASES tO mOVE aT tHE sPEED oF lIGHT, iT cEASES tO eXIST. tHEREFORE, tHERE iS a hIGH pROBABLILITY tHAT tHE vICTOR iS pROPELLED bY pHOTONIC wAVELENGTH eQUALIZATION. hIGH bERYLLIUM vAPOR-pHASE tHROUGH tRACKED pROXIMITY oF zUBY sTAR sYSTEM wOULD dISABLE sUCH a pOWERPLANT-:

So there is was. The most off-the-wall theory of motion and yet the simplest. All of a sudden it made sense. And so did the fluke. Evidence of gaseous beryllium in space was almost ziltch, but gaseous beryllium would be the only elemental substance that could shut down such an engine. Beryllium deflects photons. Like an old prop plane from the 1900s suddenly entering a vacuum.

Beryllium would shut down the engine. One chance in a hundred million. And that chance happened.

An accident.

The grunts and the techs and the swabbies pulled their hair out over the victor just like I pulled mine out over the VO. Both were puzzles that couldn’t be solved. All we had was the OAC watching over us. In all it’s calculative power, it could not make a single suggestion on how to analyze the victor or how to remove the suit.

But on the third day…

Particle beams can be focused into ancipital-shaped fields. Two edges joining to a point on a plane one electron wide. It was a theory of my own (not even the OAC came up with it) whereby random particle projections could be agitated with cyclically fluctuating laser streams. In theory, it would produce a pinpoint of heat maxing out at 180,000 degrees. If I could just put one pinhole in that suit….

I might be able to get a foothold to cutting it all off.

I didn’t know what I expected, even if it worked. I wasn’t thinking about it. None of us were. We were only thinking about the present task, one step at a time. And in three days, nobody on the plat had even made a hair’s width of headway. Even if I got the suit off…what would be waiting inside? After over twenty centuries?

Just bones? Dust? Karyolitic rot? But the suit, by all evidence, was hermetically sealed. So maybe the body inside was perfectly intact. But once exposed to air pressure, would it implode? Dissolve? I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. But it wasn’t my job to ask, it was my job to do.

I put on an oxygen recharge and a full EUD hazmat suit on. If I did punch a hole in this stuff, I didn’t want toxic gas or alien liquefaction squirting in my face. When I began to upcharge the particle generator, I expected the OAC to shut me down because of the danger margin, but that never happened. I cranked the beam nozzle over the right thigh; I had a depth marked, by one-tenth of one millimeter that would scroll down to a max of five. I punched in my pass-crypt and then turned on the power.

The general-quarters alarm sound immediately after I pressed the DISCHARGE switch. Even through my rebreather, I could smell burning metal. I began to get sick. The beam jumped to its max of 180,000 degrees in a split second but it shut down after penetration was achieved; the material of the VO’s suit was only one-tenth of one micron deep.

As the beam powered down, and as the GQ alarm blared, I just stood there, frozen, looking down at the VO. Then the VO began to convulse: arms and legs and back flip-flopping on the analysis table.

Like it was still alive.

And that’s when I shit my pants.

See, at the same instant I burned that hole into the VO’s suit, all kinds of powerups starting happening on the victor. Lights came on. RAD displays began to appear: instrument displays. Some kind of humming began to reverberate, like an engine starting. What I mean to say is…I wasn’t the only guy on the plat who shit his pants. Damn near everyone did.

But they were all in R-Dock. I was all alone in the medcove, the VO still convulsing on the table.

I asked the OAC what to do but there was no answer. Just me standing there, my brain ticking, warm shit running down the back of my leg.

Penetrating the VO’s suit was some kind of trigger. It turned things on in the victor. And one of the things it turned on was a 2D map projection. No doubt there were computers laced into the victor’s hull, but there was no way the OAC would ever be able to get into them, and even if it did, what language would such programs be written in?

But seeing is everything, right? And when we digigraphed those map-projection displays, the OAC instantly recognized the astronomical reference points.

It matched those points to our own recorded star charts.

Everything happened so fast after that…I’m not sure about the order. But it was the OAC that determined the victor had powered up because I had finally penetrated the VO’s suit. It had occurred at the same microsecond. It was as if I’d pulled some kind of a trigger, but none of us could guess why.

And I didn’t have time to wonder, not then. The body convulsed on the table for maybe five seconds but to me it seemed like an hour. Once it fell limp again, though, I got back to work. It took me three days to put a microscopic hole in the suit—how long would it take me to cut the whole thing off?

Not long, I found.

I managed to sink a kinetic needle into the puncture hole, then I connected the needle to a maletric field amplifier. From there it was cake. It was like cutting the carapace off a sextapod. It probably didn’t take me two minutes to cut the rest of the suit off the VO.

The material fell off the limbs and torso like cheesecloth; what lay there afterward was an intact humanoid male. Sturdy, well-formed physique, unblemished skin, long hair and beard. When I weighed the naked body on the spec-grav scale it came up the same: one hundred forty-six point four pounds. Which meant the suit had no perceptible weight. But even before that, I hooked the body up to the sensor monitors.

It was still alive.

Those initial convulsions hadn’t been a reaction from exposure to air pressure or heat; they hadn’t been autonomic or the result of perimortal nerve conduction. The body maintained a regular heartbeat of about seventy pulses per minute and registered systolic/dystolic blood pressure in the normal range for humans. Pulmonary expansion and collapse was normal too; the VO was breathing.

But the electroencephalopeg readout was the kicker. Alpha, beta, and theta four-wave brain patterns indicated a 1.0 synaptic coma.

But with slow-gradual improvement.

The VO wasn’t dead. He’d been floating in the victor for more than twenty centuries…but he wasn’t dead.

How could that be? No food, no air, no climate control?

But he was still alive.

Would he come out of the coma? If so, when? Everything was an avalanche of questions now. The victor was generating power. The operator was alive.

What next?

We didn’t know.

“We should vector back to earth now,” Yung suggested that night in the chowcove. He was drunk on synthbeer and so were most of his men. At least the Navy guys weren’t around; they were passed out on byhydrognine in their doms. “Fuck the rest of the mission,” Yung blurted. “This is more important.”

We both lit up Premier Menthols, sucked in the nicotine-laced steam. “The OAC would never allow it, Sarge,” I reminded him.

He leaned closer. “Yeah, but maybe we can override the fucker.”

“No way—too many safeties. It’s a fuckin’ federated crime. We try something like that, we lose everything. The only reason the OAC didn’t overhear your saying that is because—”

”Because its programs are too busy processing all this new data—I know that. That’s why I’m talking to you now. We just made the find of all of human history, and that goddamn motherboard is gonna make us finish the survey. That’s three more years, pal.”

“Yeah, and it’s also operating orders,” I said. “We can’t beat the program, Sarge. You and I both know that. We all signed on for the dime—we do the dime.”

“Aw, fuck all that fuckin’ protocol shit,” he said, waving a hand. “Christ, we’ve got an intact alien victor, we’ve got star charts from an extraterrestrial databank, and we’ve got the goddamn pilot in a coma. That’s enough to override the fuckin’ operating procedures.”

I was about to beg to differ but then the OAC blipped onto our HUDs.

:-mAINFRAME pROGRAM aNALYSIS iS nOW cOMPLETE. BASED oN cURRENT iMRPOVEMENT cALCULATIONS, tHE vICTOR oPERATOR wILL REGAIN fULL cONSCIOUSNESS wITHIN fORTY-tWO mONTHS. tHE sURVEY pLATFFORM iS oNE hUNDRED aND sIXTEEN lIGHT yEARS fROM eARTH. EMERGENCY gUIDELINES dICTATE aN aLTERNATE mISSION iTERNARY-:

“The fuck is that shit!” Yung yelled.

:-sTAR cHART cONFIGURATION cONFIRMED oNE hUNDRED pOINT zERO pERCENT. fOREIGN vICTOR’S pREVIOUS tRAJECTORY cONFIRMED. fOREIGN vICTOR’S fUTURE tRAJECTORY cONFIRMED -:

“Yeah!” I shouted and hugged Yung like a brother.

“The fuck?”

“The OAC knows the victor’s final plotted destination! And it also knows its debark point!”

Yung clearly wasn’t a brainchild, but even before he could mouth another gripe, the OAC shot him its orders:

:-sSG yUNG, pS mOS 11E40. rEPORT tO r-dOCK aSAP. dO nOT cONTEMPLATE aCTIONS wHICH tHE jUSTICE cORP mIGHT dEEM aS mUTINOUS-:

“Don’t you get it?” I asked Yung. “The OAC input those star charts into its own program files. It determined where the victor was coming from and where it was going to before the beryllium flux depowered its engines! Get to your post!”

Yung rubbed his face, blinked hard, then he got up and left the cove. The OAC cut him a big break.

:-cE jONSIN, dT1163-: the OAC told me next. :-tHIS iS aN iNSULATED mESSAGE. MOST oF oTHER cREWMEMBERS aRE cLOSE tO mUNTIOUS aCTION. THEREFORE i aM cOMMUNICATING tHIS mESSAGE tO yOU aLONE-:

“I understand,” I said.

:-aTEMPT tO cOERCE rEST oF cREW nOT tO mUTINY. THIS iS oF pARAMOUNT iMPORTANCE-:

“All right,” I agreed. “But why?”

:-oAC aNALYSIS cOMPUTATIONS cOMPLETE. YOU mUST mAKE a mORE dETAILED eXAMINATION oF vICTOR oCCUPANT-:

I ran back to the medcove. The naked body still lay on the table. I’d run every kind of scan possible on the nude body, and everything was coming up humanoid. But there were five anomalies that the OAC had indexed that I didn’t know about yet.

I stared at the TRI graph, and then I knew what the OAC was talking about. We couldn’t go back now. We had to go on.

We had to.

:-mAKE tHIS iNFORMATION aVAILABLE tO tHE rEST oF tHE cREW. cONVINCE tHEM oF iTS iMPORTANCE. tHEY wIll nOT tRUST mE bECUASE i aM nOT hUMAN-:

“Will do,” I said.

See, what the OAC had been doing all along was not only analyzing displayed star charts in the victor and all the other displayed info, it also analyzed all of my triax-tomes and resonance scans of the VO’s body once I cut the suit off. I didn’t see these things, but the scans did.

I read the output data over and over, all the while staring down at the naked and comatose body on the table. The long hair, the beard, the glazed eyes.

Then I read the tome scans a last time.

Healed-over wounds were present between the navicular and cuboid bones of the feet. Healed over wounds were present just under the pisiform and tubercle bones in the wrist. And one other healed over wound was present between the fourth and fifth rib bones on the thoracic cage.

Then I knew.

A fingerprint on the hull over twenty-two hundred years old? The OAC analysis of the victor’s star charts left even less doubt. The victor’s debark point had been verified by gauss trails: they’d been from earth somewhere between 29 and 33 A.D. from a place in the ancient Middle East referred to in Late Latin from Aramaic, a word meaning gulgū ltha, or Golgotha.

When I explained to the rest of the crew exactly what this might mean…the strangest thing happened.

The men who’d been raised as Christians quickly became atheists. And the men, like Yung, who’d been raised as atheists converted to the ranks of Christendom.

But me?

I guess I fall somewhere in between.

This all happened on the third day. Seven more have passed since then, and I don’t know how much planar space we’ve folded since then, not with the i-grav engines running full tilt half way into the redline. Someday, yes, the VO will probably regain consciousness. But who knows how long that will take? Months? Years? Decades?

Doesn’t matter.

The star charts that were activated when I cut open the suit—they didn’t just indicate the debarkation point of the victor. Those charts also showed the final destination grid.

We’re taking our passenger back to where he came from, and I want to see what’s waiting for us when we get there.