Oh, wow.
Based on cellular damage, everything had been killed by something along the lines of a gamma ray burst. Basically a huge surge of radiation, more than enough to kill instantly. I knew that because not only had the animals been killed but their intestinal flora (or the local equivalent) had been killed at the same time. There was no bloating, no rotting from the inside out. I had to make some assumptions, using terrestrial analogies, but I was pretty confident that they would be close enough.
I also noted how few carcasses we’d found. The specimens were all small, in odd, inconvenient places, or in poor condition, even for dead bodies. I was pretty sure that 99% of the fauna were unaccounted for.
Without decomposition to provide a clue, I couldn’t immediately tell how long ago this had happened. But wear and erosion on the carcasses and dead trees gave me some indications, as did an analysis of the number of forest fire tracks with no new growth. I estimated somewhere between fifty and a hundred years ago.
I sent the biological drones off to check another couple of points on the planet, especially a point as close to antipodal to this location as possible.
[Emergency! Hostile activity!]
“What? What’s happening?”
[One of the roamers is under attack]
“Get the drones to do point-focused SUDDAR pings. I want as much detail as you can get.”
[Done]
I dissolved my VR and cranked up to maximum frame rate. The video feed was real-time. It showed a window from the perspective of the roamer that was under attack, and another from the perspective of the second roamer. The first roamer seemed to be infested with mechanical ants. As I watched, the roamer was being eaten—metal parts thinning and dissolving.
“Guppy! Blow both roamers. Self-destructs, now!”
Guppy didn’t argue or question. The video feeds disappeared.
“And firewall our device comms. I doubt those things had time to finagle the encryption keys from the roamers, but why take chances?”
I turned to the SUDDAR analysis, which was just assembling over the desk. To one side, Guppy had brought up the video record received from the roamers.
I played back the video record first. The first roamer had opened a container or locker or something. It appeared to have activated the ants. Whether that was a defensive reaction, or the ants just considered the roamer to be a resource to be acquired, was anyone’s guess. I doubted there was really much practical difference. Either way, the ants had started to disassemble the roamer. The SUDDAR point-scan showed that they were separating it by element. They didn’t seem interested in the plastic and ceramic components.
I didn’t regret blowing up the roamers. I certainly couldn’t have brought them back with the possibility of one of those ants coming along for the ride. And, silly as it was, I’d read and seen enough science fiction in my day about advanced technologies taking over the communication system and getting into the computer. That’s me we’re talking about, after all.
I can build more roamers.
Where did the ants get their power from? I scanned the ship again and found that about half of the ants that had survived the roamer suicides were now still. I didn’t know if they were dead or just on standby.
I decided to scan at five-second intervals to see what they were up to. Strangely, every time I scanned, more ants became active. The hell? I cut off the SUDDAR scans for a full minute. When I did another scan, about a quarter of the ants were inactive. Oh, hell. I stopped scanning for five minutes, then did a quick scan, with as low power as I could manage. Sure enough, most of the ants were inactive.
Dammit! They’re powered by the SUDDAR beam. It was my scans that reactivated them.
Well, that was a fine pickle. Any attempt to find out what they were doing would power them up. But that meant that the aliens had found some way to beam power through subspace and use it at the receiving end. I needed to examine those ants.
I waited an hour, then sent a single one-centimeter roamer in. No way an ant could piggy-back undetected on a roamer only slightly bigger than itself. The roamer picked up a couple of ants and brought them out of the hulk. I had prepared a couple of small coffins for the ants, filled with a plastic goop. The roamer stuffed the ants into the goop, then added the hardener. I now had ants under glass, more or less. While they might be able to cut their way out of those, I hoped they couldn’t do it before I completed a scan.
I brought my two drones in close, and they did the most intense and high-precision close-in scans of which they were capable. That would produce almost a molecular-level map of the ants. I watched in fascination as the ants both powered up and produced little cutters from their front appendages. Fortunately they couldn’t move, so all they did was drill a couple of holes in the plastic. Good to know.
I detonated the roamer–can’t be too careful–and retired to my treehouse to ruminate.
***
I had completed my survey. There was no sign of a civilization on this planet, so the wreck was definitely alien. The aliens had come in, presumably killed all life with some kind of radiation weapon, mined the star system, collected the carcasses, then left. There were a lot of assumptions in there, but it fit the evidence.
The scan of the ants had shown some interesting technology. I was already setting up simulations to test some of it.
The scans of the hulk didn’t have any huge surprises. It appeared to be run by an A.I. or AMI of some kind. It had a fusion reactor. It had a SURGE drive. It had a SUDDAR transmitter. However, the SUDDAR unit seemed designed to transmit power to a tuned receiver as well as using the SUDDAR as radar. I’d taken detailed scans of that for further study.
Maybe the aliens had come and rescued the crew and left the hulk. I doubted that. There didn’t really seem to be any accommodation for anything biological. It was probable that the ship was completely A.I. Was this civilization biological at all? The fact that they’d collected all the carcasses hinted at an answer, and not one that I liked at all. I could only think of one reason to bother collecting all that protein.
And was this a one-time event? Or were they raiding systems on an ongoing basis? If so, which way were they heading? I certainly wouldn’t want this fate to befall the Solar System, even if there weren’t any humans left. The dolphins and chimps still deserved their chance.
I felt a pang of disappointment as visions of meeting Vulcans or Asgardians evaporated. This was more like an Alien scenario. As first contact situations went, this one sucked.
Like it or not, I had to bring the other Bobs into this. Which brought up another problem. At this distance, I couldn’t send a message back to Bill. I would need the space station for a transmission, and I would need the raw materials in order to build one. The ore contained in the hulk, even adding in the hulk itself, wasn’t enough.
I would have to leave.