The Deadliest Moop

They’d been about to power down for the day when dumbass Sven pulled in the squid.

The Anna Marie had been dragging the high orbits, 100,000 klicks up, working the fringe because Cap had gotten nervous going any shallower. Ian had thought him a pansy-ass until the Carly Renee doing a 75k pass took an old Soviet spy satellite right across the beam and blew up. Cap might be a schmuck, but his hunches paid off—good or bad—and he ran a slick tiller, too.

Besides, Ian had to admit, it was Cap’s crabber. His call.

They’d been pulling in good sets the past week, the pots catching lots of debris, most of it crap, but sometimes you got decent stuff—a few artifacts there, maybe some high-grade metal here.

Asshole that he was, Captain could guide a crabber neat and smooth in a high-velocity orbit, easing the Anna Marie right up to a patch of moop—material out of place, but wasn’t that everything?—and throw out the pots just right so they’d scoop it up without shredding them. Some crabbers liked to take debris straight into the hold, but Cap said some crabbers liked to die, too. He’d used pots, always used pots, and if a chunk came in too fast, you’d lose a big cage of high-density, photodegradable plastic and not your dang ship.

Cap might run the ship, but Ian ran the deck, he and Todd on the grapples, Sheila on the boom crane, and newbie Sven there in the sorting belt. Guy had an eye for stuff, Ian thought, and could flick through moop as fast as it came in, and not even miss a shiny. Sometimes new guys worked out okay from the start.

You had to move fast on deck, out in that big steel cage fifty meters long and twenty-five meters square. Rack ’em and stack ’em, that was the trick. Ian and Todd pulled in the pots with the grappling hooks, big harpoons on steel cables, Ian on the dorsal and Todd on the pectoral. You shot the hooks, hoped they caught because you only had one pass, and started reeling in the pot as soon as the baby caught. Cap stood there behind an observation port, counting pots and making sure they didn’t miss a set.

“What good does it do cleaning up orbits if you add to the moop?” Cap always said. Ian knew better than to point out the pots would turn to plastic dust inside of a year. Cap didn’t always like to hear logic. Pots cost money, anyway.

Sheila pulled in the pots with the boom crane and damn, that lady had a smooth touch. The pots came in with a little momentum—too fast and you’d ram it right through the port and wouldn’t Cap like that? Shelia had to slow the pots down and slide them into the bay, rack ’em and stack ’em, oh yeah, baby. Once the pots got racked, poor old Sven had to dump them and sort them. Rack ’em, stack ’em, dump ’em, sort ’em, that was the drill.

Todd had just grabbed his last pot and Ian was passing his set on to Sheila. Ian had gone on private comm to Todd trying to figure out if they should go help Sven sort or just let him sweat, but Sheila caught on to them—she couldn’t read lips, but she saw them talking—and shook her head and held up five fingers. Yeah, Sven had to come in on five, he’d been in his Deimos suit too long, they all had, but Sven was at the stern closest to the sun and catching most of the rays. Give the guy a hand, she meant and didn’t have to say it.

“I got me something,” Sven said over the loud hail. “It ain’t aright.”

They’d remember that phrase later, up before the tribunal. Ain’t aright.

The Anna Marie had left the Lagranges six weeks ago, out to fish a big gnarly patch of moop 100k up from earth. Cap liked to say he’d been in it since the first lottery, when the old freighters hauling nickel ore from the asteroids first came back to earth orbit and found damn near every high-altitude satellite blown up by photodegradable-plastic cluster bombs.

Everyone blamed the Chinese, but no one could pin it on them, not enough to start a hot war. Crabbers liked to talk about a secret bonus if anyone ever hauled in a smoking gun, something to nail the Chinese and get the Nations pissed off enough to stop the Chinos once and for all. But that was just crabber talk, really. Funny how that worked out anyway, Ian thought. Real funny. The Nations ponied up the bucks to hire the crabbers to clean the debris, and what with tariffs on the Chinese and all, huh, the Chinos paid most of it, so it all worked out anyway.

Truth was, Cap came in on the second lottery, after a dozen freighters kinda missed the learning curve and became one with the moop. Plus, well, the Anna Marie had been a hog anyway, and though Cap wouldn’t say it, the reason he’d never won the first lottery was, well, because the old girl hadn’t arrived quite in time for it.

Sometimes late was better than first, particularly when first meant never. Boom.

The Nations paid good money to clear the orbits. With five-hundred-million tonnes of shredded moop whipping around Earth, most of it no bigger than a half meter, hardly anyone wanted to risk coming up out of gravity. You could send out a robot freighter and cross your fingers, but living cargo? Leave it to the military jocks.

Until then, no one had figured out how to make space habitats profitable, and who wanted to live in a pressurized can when you could set your foot on solid earth—or Luna? Even a cold-ass, dark corner of Antarctica beat out space. Air, water, gravity: there was a lot to like about that, even at eighty below.

The Satellite War changed all that. You had all these spacers stuck in orbit, all the solar power in the universe, and as soon as the crabbers started hauling in moop, plenty of good quality building material. Snag it, haul it to the Lagranges and dump it, and there it stood out of harm’s way and ready for some tinkerer to start building away. A couple of old crabbers who’d had one close call too many built a smelter, started inflating big aluminum balloons, and quicker than you could say “shore leave,” you had Dutch, the crabbers paradise, named after the old Aleutian port, of course.

They called it the squid ’cuz that’s what it looked like: a torpedo-shaped cylinder with fifteen wriggly arms that unrolled five meters long after Sheila dumped it out of the cage with a bunch of other moop onto the sorting belt. The body wasn’t more than two meters, if that, clean and shiny and not pitted like it would have been if it had been in space for longer than a decade. Pretty much everything in orbit had been up there at least a decade, and the squid should have been pockmarked or sandblasted from millions of micrometeors—only it hadn’t.

Ain’t aright for damn sure.

Sven pulled the squid off the belt into a bin. Ian and Todd had to swim over to Sven and keep the belt moving. Moop stuck to it, little teeth around the half-round pipe moving stuff along. Sheila dumped the last pot and the three of them finished the sorting—nothing more of consequence, just lots and lots of dull gray fragments—all the time eyeing that squid. Sven had sorted a few shinys, nice clean pieces of steel, but that squid held their attention, for all sorts of dang reasons.

Ian ran through the list in his head:

A) It was intact.

B) It didn’t look like anything in space they’d ever seen, and all they hadn’t, courtesy of endless watches browsing Gilbert’s Catalogue of 100,000 Satellites and Other Orbital Debris.

C) And, oh yeah, it was intact.

“What you dickheads starin’ at?” Cap yelled over the loud hail.

Ian looked over at the observation deck. Cap, nice and comfy behind thick Lexan, saw him standing there, hands on hips. “Got us an anomaly, Captain,” he said. You never said Cap to his face.

“Anomaly?” Cap asked. He moved a camera on a boom arm out over the salvage bin, scanned it up and down. “Bring it in,” he said.

“Uh, Captain…” Sheila started to say.

“Bring it in.”

She glanced over at Ian, and he nodded. He was deck boss, he’d take the grief.

“Captain, Nations protocol calls for an anomaly to be quarantined,” Ian said. That meant tagged and bagged and left on deck for some Nations investigator to handle. Good idea, Ian thought.

“Bring it in,” Cap said.

“I’m gonna have to log a protest,” Ian said. That was the union rule, too. If your captain made a bad decision, you covered your ass by making a protest.

“So logged. And Deck Boss?” Captain banged the thick port. “Bring it in.”

That would be the second dumb thing they did: bringing in the squid. The first dumb thing had been catching it in the first place, or not dumping it once they realized what they had. But, you know, it looked all shiny, they’d say later. That was the thing about crabbing: you saw so much dull gray junk that the shiny stuff made you want to reach down and pick it up, like bright blue sea-glass on a white beach.

Idiots. They brought it in.

Cap had the sense to keep the squid sealed in the big garage lock, strapped at six points, those weird tentacles flopping loose in zero gee. The crew floated in through the little airlock in the tunnel running along the spine of the ship. They looked out at the squid through a nice thick viewport, still in their suits, Sheila standing by at the panic button, ready to slam shut the port shutters should anything get hinky.

We’re way beyond hinky already, Ian thought. Light-years.

Sheila ran a scanner on a little boom arm over the squid, the scanner’s big camera recording away down to macro, mapping every pit, scratch, dit, and dot. It ran into the hot spectrums, too, temperature and radiation, all that stuff.

“We’ll blow it if it’s at all hot,” Cap swore, the first sensible thing he’d said since “bring it in.” Only sensible thing so far.

Thing was, the squid whistled clean, no radiation and cool as space, just like pretty much any hunk of moop short of an old satellite nuclear reactor. Well, nothing above background. As Sheila ran the scanner over the squid proximal and distal, dorsal and ventral, her hands moving the robocam along like she was petting the thing, a display showed the topography of the damn squid. Little tiny laser beams bounced back and forth, mapping its texture down to nanos.

“Nothing,” Sheila said.

They glanced up at the display. Anything out in space more than a month would have micropits from all that dust slamming into it—steel, metal, plastic, you name it. Flying through space was like glass shooting through a sandblaster, and with the big orbital bang, there was a heck of a lot of sand to blast.

“What do you mean, nothing?” Cap asked.

“I mean, nothing. Whatever the hell that thing is made of, it’s polished smooth down to the molecular level,” she said.

“Huh,” Cap grunted.

They all looked at each other. When Cap grunted, it usually meant he was about to do something stupid.

“Blast it,” he said.

“What?” Sheila asked.

“Shoot it. The plasma cannon?” He waved his hand up at the smooth-bore plasma cannon all crabbers carried. They had one fore and aft, on gimbals, and one in the hold. Idea was if a big chunk of moop was going to get personal with the Anna Marie, you’d blast your way through it. Same idea if something came into the hold too fast: blast it back out.

Sheila didn’t even have to look at Ian for him to say it. “Captain, with all due respect…” he said.

“Oh, hell, you pansies. So logged. I’ll do it myself,” Cap said.

He stepped over to the cannon rig, strapped himself in, and gripped the two pistol handles. The cannon swiveled around out there in the hold, business-end turning down, and Cap pulled the triggers.

Was that the second or third dumb thing Cap did? Ian thought. He was losing track.

The plasma cannon really didn’t shoot plasma. It used plasma to shoot moop, random bits of shredded crap like shotgun pellets, an old-fashioned kinetic gun. Kaboom. The bolt of pulverized metal and hot gas roared down in a nice little narrow cone toward the squid. Anything else it would have blown to bits, or at least dented severely.

Only, well, the blast bounced off the squid, a nice billiard shot, out and away at the same angle it had hit, which was a good thing, because the shot had come from fore and got reflected aft, right at the outside docking bay doors.

Sven lost his newbie stripes right then for what he did, and if they made it to Dutch, the crew definitely was going to buy him a night’s drinks. Damn kid slammed his hand fast on the panic button that blew the aft door open, irising away in little metal leaves like an old-fashioned camera shutter. He’d later say it was just damn luck he hit the green button and not the red.

And Sheila, even though her hand hovered over the port shutters, never even touched the button. She was going to buy the first round, Ian thought. Second and third, too.

The blast still nicked the inside edge of the door as it opened up out of the way, but the door panels had a little give and could be pressured up enough to compensate. If the door had blown, they would have been hosed. No docking garage, no big airlock. No airlock, no way to haul in moop. No moop hauled in, what was the point? They’d have to limp back to Dutch, get repairs, and then go back out and reset their pots.

“As I was saying, Cap,” Ian said.

Cap gave him a hard look, but shut up. Guy knew when not to push it—you could give him credit for that.

Still, it was data, Ian thought. Now they knew why nothing pitted it, why however long it had been in space nothing had dented, scratched, or marred its pristine surface.

“Fucker has a damn force field,” Todd said.

“Ya know,” Cap said. “I think it would be a good idea to quarantine the squid.”

But it was too late for that.

Later, at the tribunal, after they’d all been hauled up one by one to make their depositions, and then one by one again to go through any discrepancies between testimony, they all agreed on only one thing: The squid came alive. What happened after that none of them could agree. It might have helped if the radiation blast hadn’t blown the camera, too.

Sheila said she saw the squid roll over, open wide those fifteen tentacles, cut them loose and leave them behind like a lizard’s tail, and then jet away through the open hatch.

Todd said he saw the squid just squirt out, vanishing in a puff of plasma or something, “like a big stinky fart,” he said.

Sven said he didn’t see anything, that one moment the squid was there, the next it was gone, and who the fuck knew where it went?

Ian knew what he saw, though, because he was watching Cap. The squid opened wide its tentacles, sure. It dropped its tentacles and jetted away, Sheila had that right. Only when it opened up those long arms, its mouth, if that’s what you could call it, a row of fifteen teeth overlapping, that mouth opened up and out came a little silver sphere.

And Cap squeezed the trigger on the plasma cannon again. He’d deny it, said Ian had it all wrong, nothing like that had happened. It was what Sheila said and Todd said, the thing just disappeared.

No way, Ian thought. Cap fired, and the plasma cannon fired straight at the smooth silver orb. Maybe it had been a lucky shot. Maybe Cap knew exactly what he was doing, because when the plasma beam bounced off the orb, it bounced straight back toward the plasma cannon, all the energy coming at it meeting energy going back out, like two fire hoses blasting away at a soccer ball in between.

The orb fell back into the squid just as the squid slowly eased out of the docking bay, which was a good thing, a real good thing, because it blew up.

Not just blew up, though, like a big nuke or something going boom. It like vanished blew up, that’s what it did. One moment it was there and another moment it wasn’t.

Later, when he got really good and drunk, Ian puzzled it out. That silvery surface was like some sort of energy shell, nice and thin, he figured, surrounding whatever guts and mechanism worked away inside the squid. When the orb blew up, of course the energy inside got reflected back, the energy shell confining it, until all that energy got spent grinding up the squid’s inside, and the whole thing collapsed like a balloon. Ian swore he saw a little silvery dust where the squid had been, but maybe he hadn’t seen even that.

Years later, Ian ran into Cap at the crabber’s bar in Dutch, the Spacey Dawg.

“It was a bomber,” Cap told him after they’d finished most of a bottle of twenty-five-year Lagavulin single malt whiskey, and they were too drunk to care about talking about something they’d sworn never to speak about.

Nothing official had ever come out. There had been the tribunal, a lot of big Nations hoo-hahs reaming their asses out for not being so careful, especially Cap. Cap took all the blame, but he took it grinning, because he’d figured it out, figured out what he had done was awards time, except you didn’t give medals for things that no one acknowledged happened, even if it had saved earth from evil alien space monsters.

Funny thing was, even though the crew of the Anna Marie never crabbed again, what with bonus pay, a mysterious settlement that one day showed up in their accounts, and stuff like that, they did pretty well—well enough to afford bottles of single malt Scotch flown all the way up from Earth.

“Evil alien space monsters,” Cap said that night years later. “Think about it. If you were an alien race and you knew another intelligent race had become uppity with space-faring ships and stuff, you’d want to mine their home planet. Blow up satellites and ships, make the orbits hard to get through. Send in a bomber and keep mining the orbits until the other race gave up.”

“Yeah, right,” Ian said.

“Think about it,” Cap said again. “You know those arms the squid left behind? You ever think about what happened to them? No one ever told us, because the Nations don’t want anyone to know we’d been attacked by aliens. Cool stuff, those arms, that metal. Pretty tough, tough enough to make shields so ships can fly through moop now.”

“Huh,” Ian said, thinking about how clean that squid had been.

“Whatever,” Cap said. “It wasn’t Chinese. It wasn’t some supersecret terrorist group that blew the orbits the first time. It was aliens, some kind of probe that came into our solar system, saw what we were up to, and blew it all up. It would have blown us up, too, kept mining our orbits until we gave up and stayed on the planet. And we stopped it.”

“You really think so, Cap?” Ian asked him.

“Ah, what the hell do I know?” Cap said. “I’m just a dumb dingaling crabber. And I thought I told you never to call me ‘Cap.’ ”

“Sure thing, Captain,” Ian said, pouring out the last of the Lagavulin. “Buy you another bottle?”