Nellie and the Nanites - Bk3 - Ch.11

Chapter Eleven

Crystals, Samples, and Regrets.

Lucy was finally satisfied after almost an hour of tinkering. She had run over a dozen simulations on her latest design and was now confident that their suits would block the energy, whatever it was. 

“It’s almost reminiscent of Transit Energy,” Lucy explained. “It isn’t that, but it is close. I’d almost call it the potential or chaotic energy, but none of that is right. It’s more like an energy type that reacts with the physical world as if the energy could be converted into other energy types at random, and sometimes it behaves as if it is matter.”

“I thought you couldn’t convert energy into matter?” Nellie asked, already out of her depth. There was only so much you could learn from old textbooks and New Scientist magazines, and she had forgotten half of that, at least.

“You can, just not in any useful amount,” Lucy said simply, “Not in any way that matters. You can get a pair of subatomic particles with a lot of effort, and the universe started with one massive energy-to-matter conversion. But us? We can’t.” She flicked her fingers, and Nellie got an energy signature on her implant. “This stuff seems to do it, but I have no idea how. All I do know it that the shielding in our suits will block it in all the simulations. Still, I’d rather test that theory in practice a few times before any of us get hit.”

“So no walking into strange energy fields,” Nellie grinned.

“I’ve also added the signature to our early warning protocols, just in case we don’t notice it,” Lucy said with a tight-lipped smile. “Shall we?” 

The crystal lab was separated into several different areas, and it seemed they were studying a different version of the crystal in each one. The first lab was some kind of sound lab, with the crystals set up in front of a device that seemed designed to send resonant frequencies into the things. Several had been smashed, but it was telling that force waves were etched into the thick walls. It seemed the soft golden crystals were able to amplify sound waves in a way that looked like it could be extremely unhealthy to anyone nearby. 

The core of the resonator looked melted, so they didn’t get anything from it, and tried the next lab along. 

The more labs they checked, the worse the crystals seemed to be. There seemed to be a coloring or form that made the crystal interact with everything from sound to magnetism, and even some that had melted the walls of the room.

The final room that they checked was… something else.

“Ostie,” Nellie groaned. “What are these things?”

The walls of the room were etched with words carved into the plaster, some of them still with bits of a bloody fingernail or claw in them. They were dried and desiccated but still very much there.

A corpse sat in a chair right in front of one large crystal, hands hanging loosely at her sides, having died in front of her work.

They carefully laid her back on the floor, and Nellie felt it was pretty clear she had died of blood loss. The front of her uniform was black with dried blood, the skin on her face was shredded to ribbons, and both of her eyes were missing. Nellie looked around the room while Lucy ran a detailed scan of the corpse, looking for other damage. 

“She died of hunger,” Lucy said quietly.

“Not blood loss?” Nellie gestured at the front of the uniform.

“No,” Lucy shook her head. “The wounds were infected, which means she lived after doing that to herself.”

“Are you sure she did?” Nellie countered. “The fingers are torn, but that could have been from the walls.”

“No,” Lucy said simply. “She had begun to digest her own organs when she died. That is advanced hunger, the kind you die from.”

“What happened in this place?” Nellie said with a shiver of disgust. “Was it all the crystals?” 

“I don’t see how,” Lucy shrugged. “They are weird, sure, but there are a lot of strange things in the universe. I don’t see the crystals being that different except for that energy we saw earlier.”

They continued the search, but the lab was a hundred percent focused on the crystals. While there was tech around here and there, Nellie insisted they leave it all in place. The idea that she might inadvertently take something back aboard the Bly, or the Bly’s Rest, was horrifying. Trapped in a confined space with that energy… no thanks.

Lucy agreed the crystals, while strange, were not worth taking. Sure, they had amazing properties, but all of them were things they could already do with existing tech, and with the nanites, their version was smaller already. The fascination that the I.E.S. had with the crystals argued they had more secrets to tell, but Nellie was happy to seal the lab behind them and call it a day.

While they were walking back to the elevator, Nellie wondered if the crystals had anything to do with the Clutch. Maybe that was how their technology worked.

From what Lucy said, most technology was pretty much the same all across the universe. A circuit board was a circuit board, after all. Some societies made them round, some square, some hexagon, but the shapes and components were all pretty standard. The same laws of physics, heat dissipation, and usable design applied to the whole universe at the end of the day. 

Some societies used a base ten system, some eight, but they all counted the same thing is the point, from what Nellie could understand of Lucy’s explanation.

If the Clutch really were an exception to that rule, which was likely given their complete lack of recognizable tech when scanned, then something like the crystals would make sense. Without the need to make a circuit board and a program to run on it, the crystals might have lent themselves to a whole different approach to problems. 

It would be more like an art than a science, more free-form and less controlled, but it would still be just as exact when it mattered. The jamming field they had already encountered proved that.

All Nellie knew for certain as they stepped onto the shimmering silver disk and descended further into the facility was that she was more and more nervous about what lay beneath them.

===<<<>>>===

“Putain!” Nelly swore as the first door they opened off the next level down showed an autopsy lab, complete with a splayed open specimen still on the table. Still, they went inside and began a search. There turned out to be two separate autopsy areas, the second featuring restraints. “I see a single I.E.S ship, and I am blowing it out of the sky, no questions asked,” Nellie muttered to herself as they examined the entity on the table. A dead Grey, this one with its head cut open and the brain dissected and sitting in sad little sections pressed between large sheets of something halfway between plastic and glass. 

It was sick, and the restrained arms and legs spoke to something that she didn’t even want to think about. 

She silently swore to herself that the next facility they came across, Nellie would be bringing a flamethrower with her. 

Lucy calmly examined the slices, one after another.

“It looks like they were examining the brain structure but not with any kind of focus. I’m not sure why they needed to know all this, but I hope they didn’t get it.” Lucy sighed and went back to the first body. “This one, they were looking at organs responsible for digestion. It’s a rare Brackta hybrid,” She pointed to one desiccated bit of flesh that looked just like all the others, “This organ is responsible for adapting the Brakta’s system to other environmental hazards, like heavy metals or poisons.” Lucy frowned and went over to a large set of draws, pulling them open one after another.

“What is it?” Nellie asked. 

“They could have got most of this from medical texts,” Lucy said again. “I don’t know why they would bother to do this when they could just open a book.”

“But you have an idea, right? You have that look.” Nellie said with a small smile.

“I am an AI,” Lucy sniffed. “I don’t have looks.”

“So I’m wrong?” Nellie asked.

“No, but…”

“Hah!” Nellie chuckled. “So, care to share the idea with me?”

“All I can tell is that they wanted to do tests on organs from several different species,” Lucy said with irritation on her face, “The only reason I can possibly think of is that they wanted to try and recreate the organs somehow. Anything else, well, I’d rather not say unless we get something to prove it right.”

They moved on, finding the door on the other side of the hall was more of the same, but the subjects were different. The rooms on that side had two tables in each, with an animal on about half of them. 

Nellie recognized the bulldog-like creature on one slab as the same as they had fought off on the sand during one of the rescue missions. It seemed like they were only interested in the way the tendons on the back legs, the rest seeming to be untouched.

“Why is everything dried out?” Nellie asked suddenly. “Why did nothing in this place rot?”

“I have no idea,” Lucy admitted. “I can only assume the air was dry, and the place must have lacked bacteria?”

The more they looked, the more mysteries they seemed to find, which was the opposite of what Nellie had hoped. However, it did at least confirm that the I.E.S. was examining real-life specimens of various creatures and doing it in what she assumed was a quite out-of-the-way place, given that it was outside of system space. She had no idea why they were working on a shopping list of parts from various creatures, and thanks to them using their own language on everything, none of the papers they found proved to be very enlightening. 

The selection of subjects seemed to be pretty random as well, from the bulldog-like creatures to something that looked like a bundle of snakes all tied into a ball but was apparently a single creature. 

After two hours, she was beyond ready to leave the grisly sight behind her when she noticed a strange drawing on a bit of paper in the pile she had just searched.

“Lucy, what is this?” She asked. “It kind of looks like that energy signature.”

Lucy looked it over and growled, her eyes flicking to the various specimens before she seemed to go still for a second.

“Hybrid species,” Lucy said when she unfroze. “It has to be.”

“Hybrids between what?” Nellie asked, feeling her lip curl in distaste. 

“Everything,” Lucy threw her arms in the air. “They want a bit of this and a bit of that, all to make something completely new.”

“Custom-built biology?” Nellie asked.

“As good a way of putting it as any,” The AI looked dispirited. “The sectors don’t allow this kind of stuff. Which is probably why they are here.”

“Why would they bother?” Nellie asked finally. “I mean, they have that shape-shifting fuck-head who became me, so why go to all this trouble?”

“I have no idea,” Lucy admitted. “But let’s search the rest of this place and turn it all into a puddle before we go.”

“There’s an idea I like,” Nellie smiled for what felt like the first time in hours, “But we leave that crystal lab untouched.”

“Agreed,” Lucy said as they headed for the elevator again.

===<<<>>>===

The elevator opened onto a single room, barely fifteen feet across, with a single large bit of machinery in the center. Just for a change, it didn’t seem to be something horrific, which Nellie felt was a refreshing change of pace. 

Lucy shrugged and stepped back onto the elevator.

“What?” Nellie asked. “Do you know what it is?”

“A collector array,” Lucy said. “This place must be older than we thought. No one has used them since I was locked away.”

“What does it do?” Nellie hesitated but got back on the elevator with Lucy.

“It kills things,” Lucy said simply. “I’m guessing it is what drained the area around here, trying to keep the power on for all these years. It gathers everything in the environment, pulls absolutely anything into itself, and reconfigures itself to use it as fuel. They were all the rage for about twenty years. A self-sustaining power source you could put anywhere… until everywhere that had one started to notice a dead zone around their generators. I’ve never seen it as bad as this place was, but it would have just kept running until there was literally nothing left.”

“So we got nothing?” Nellie asked.

“We won’t know until I get a good look at the tech we are planning to take,” Lucy said gently. “If nothing else, this proves the I.E.S. left here a long time ago.”

“So they aren’t likely to come back and clean up? Hide the evidence or whatever,” Nellie asked tensely. 

“They never bother to hide evidence,” Lucy grimaced. “They are the biggest bastards in the universe, and they know it.”

A few minutes later, they emerged into the late afternoon sunshine, and it felt like crawling out of a cave and into sunlight for the first time in weeks. Lucy concentrated on the large nanite cubes they had brought with them while Nellie picked up a bit of the dead, ashy dirt and let it trickle through her fingers.

“Hey, Lucy?” She called, not looking up.

“Yes, Nell?” Lucy called back distractedly.

“How come the collector didn’t run off the stuff inside the facility?” It had been bugging her, especially the ingots full of materials. 

“It is programmed to ignore the facility area; why?” Lucy asked.  

“How many ingots would it cost us to put some life back into this soil?” Nellie asked.

“Well,” Lucy thought for a moment. “Quite a bit, but if we offset it by mixing in some from an area nearby… it might work.”

“Let’s do it,” Nellie grinned. “I want to wipe this place off the map for good.”

Even with all the nanites on board and a half-dozen Centrum units, it took well into the night before the changes started to be visible. The dead bodies were left far beneath the surface, while the materials used in the base were converted into ingots and transferred to the surface. It left a gaping hole in the center, with the crystal lab on the very bottom, still sealed and untouched. The dead soil collapsed almost instantly, but the nanites were unaffected by it. 

Slowly, under the lights of the Resurgence, a bit of color returned to the soil, with centrum units carrying blocks of soil from the surrounding area to add to the rapidly diminishing pile of strange ingots.

Around sunrise, they loaded a respectable amount of the recovered technology on board while the rest was sealed into a nanite-made capsule that they mounted below the shuttle before lifting off and finally heading back to the Bly’s Rest.

Nellie had barely left the atmosphere when she saw a streak of fire heading for the colony.

“Resurgence to Bly’s Rest,” Nellie waited for the few seconds of signal delay to pass. 

“Roger Resurgence,” Vey’s voice answered her. “We read.”

“I’m seeing a ship entering colony airspace.” She waited again, swearing to set up a relay as soon as possible. Living on a planet had gotten her too used to instant radio replies.

“Roger, that Resurgence. I can confirm that it is the Last Chances; she finally made it back here.” Vey replied with a false cheer in his voice. 

“Understood, Rest. We are on our way, full burn.” Nellie flicked the comm line closed. 

It seemed the next thing to worry about had arrived before she even had time for a cup of HyperDrive.