Free Solaris Rising 2 by Ian Whates Page B

of thermodynamics as anything we had ever seen.
    Our shuttle had been decelerating smoothly for some time and now Osman reported needlessly, “Oregon ahead.”
    Just as there was no current need for our pilot to actually fly the vessel, as captain there was no need for me to give orders. A conclave of computers had already worked out the best approach, and our vessel ran through its paces nimbly as the state-sized asteroid grew and grew before us, until it filled our universe, until the naked eye could make out the sparse blue pinpricks of Anchorite, each in its crater. That was another observation of Veighl’s. The stuff seemed to grow best at impact sites, if ‘grow’ is the word. That was why she had set down on Oregon in the first place.
    Pelovska’s headset light was on, which told us she was communing with her Expert System implant, that was in turn taking advice from our Onboard. The light itself served no function beside the social – letting Osman and I know that her attention was away with the electronic fairies. In this case she was supervising our sensor arrays, bouncing signals off Oregon’s nearest neighbours to try for any sign of Veighl. By that time, our craft had matched velocity and rotation with the asteroid – so that we seemed, to our primate eyes, to be magically suspended above a stationary wasteland.
    “Ping,” she announced, deadpan. “Captain?”
    There was a moment’s silence before I was ready to catch that ball, because it was confirmation of what we had known all along, that Veighl had never left Oregon. I tried to form the words “rescue mission” in my head, but they wouldn’t come. “Let’s get them past the horizon and see what we’ve got. Generate a solution for coming down nearby if we want to – but not right on them.” Human social instinct prompted me to ask all sorts of other questions, to seek confirmation from her of what my own instruments could tell me just as easily. Principally: no signals, no signs of life. No surprises, therefore.
    Then Veighl’s craft was hauled over the shallow horizon, and Osman swore, and we simply coasted in silence for some time while the Onboard, devoid of either wonder or horror, made the necessary adjustments to stabilise the motion of the rock beneath us.
    Doctor Veighl had dodged the “is it life?” issue in her cursory report – and we would never hear the detailed one that she would have prepared back on Mother after processing her data. Veighl had talked about the life/not-life boundary, and whether we even had valid criteria to make the call – at what point self-replicating chemistry could be said to make the jump into something more akin to us than rocks. Her data showed her painstaking experimentation on the Anchorite, taking samples and watching its glacial growth.
    My first thought, unprofessional and yet unavoidable, was that the Anchorite had got its revenge.
    There was a crystal flower there, but it was a jagged crown of thorns nineteen metres across and at its heart was some of Veighl’s shuttle, embedded, part-metabolised, like a fly in a sundew. Everything from midway back towards the thrusters was either buried or just gone. Only six metres of nose, canted at a slight angle, stood proud of the hungry mass.
    We hung there above it, our stationary orbit re-established, and I numbly checked that our cameras were getting it all. Something terrible and sudden had happened here, that made a nonsense of all Veighl’s data, and I would keep transmitting a visual record of our mission in case terrible, sudden events came in twos. Still, I could not shake off the feeling that it would not help. Veighl had been in mid-transmission when this happened, cut off with no time to give a warning or to cry for help.
    “At least it was quick.” Until the others looked at me, I hadn’t realised that I had said this aloud.
    “Depending on how long life support lasted, or if it’s still active, there is a possibility that the