Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide Volume V

Machine Language-1

Machine Language

by Sherry D. Ramsey

Sherry D. Ramsey is a writer, editor, publisher, creativity addict and self-confessed Internet geek. She writes for all ages, and she loves mysteries and magic as much as she loves spaceships and aliens–so much that she often smooshes them together in interesting ways. Sherry lives in Nova Scotia with her husband, children, and dogs, where she consumes far more coffee and chocolate than is likely good for her. You can visit her online at www.sherrydramsey.com; keep up with her much more pithy musings and catch glimpses of her life on Twitter and i********: @sdramsey.

Yuka pushed the joystick control forward with her right hand, sending the remote rover probe scuttling down the side of a grassy hill. With her left hand, she zoomed the rover's camera out for a better view of the entire valley. The mechanical fingers of her prosthetic left arm responded slower than she would have liked, so the camera panned out in jerky starts and stops. She glanced down at the pale green "skin" covering the hand and sighed. She wouldn't even care so much that it didn't look like a real hand if only it worked better.

The rover's camera revealed yet another deep, thickly-forested valley waiting at the bottom of the hill. Trees like overgrown funguses stretched tall, spindly fingers toward the low-hanging cloud cover. Yuka squinted at the screen. The vegetation changed from one valley to the next, and these trees were different again, sprouting lacy, white, leaf-like growths along their trunks and branches. At the very top, they brightened to orange and wove together in a dense canopy like a mushroom cap. She took her hand from the joystick and made a quick note on her tablet.

"Something interesting?"

Yuka jumped at the voice so close behind her, and her prosthetic hand jerked on the camera control. The joystick spun, and the image on the screen darted to one side, blurring. It refocused on some tall, bluish grass to the left of the rover.

"Not really, ma'am. Just comparing the trees from the last valley."

"I don't see trees on your screen." Subchief Caterzina Sano's voice was accusing as she bent over to peer at Yuka's screen.

"I just—" Yuka bit off the explanation. Sano wouldn't want to hear it. "I'll readjust the camera, ma'am."

"Just get the rover down into the valley and take your readings," Sano said. "Don't waste time. We can't afford it."

She turned and strode off before Yuka could say anything else. Yuka ground her teeth. She knew there was no time to waste in exploring this planet, but she was doing her best.

At thirteen years old, it wasn't like she'd been trained for this sort of thing. She sighed, flexed her mechanized fingers a few times, and maneuvered the camera around to the front again. She set the rover rolling and bumping down the oddly-colored hill.

The bumping didn't bother Yuka, because she couldn't feel it. She sat at a console aboard the UECS Strelka, the colony ship limping toward this planet they'd named Sulis. She wasn't supposed to be doing this job. She wasn't even supposed to be awake. And she certainly wasn't supposed to have lost her left arm in a near-catastrophic accident. One that left the Strelka off-course, heavily damaged, and missing more than half of the crew and colonists who'd been in coldsleep on the decks below.

But there was no time to worry about supposed to. There was only the way things are now. That meant figuring out if they could survive on this planet they had managed to find, and what part of it offered them the best chance.

"She sure doesn't like us," Arten Ikanez said from the console a few feet away. He was a few years older than Yuka, a skinny boy with shoulder-length dark brown hair and an always-worried face. "Do you think it's these?" He pointed to his legs. From the knees down, Arten had green-skinned prosthetic legs and feet, like Yuka's arm. They dangled from the chair seat, falling just a couple of inches short of the floor, and he waggled them comically. In spite of everything, he and Yuka were some of the lucky ones. They'd survived the accident and suffered injuries the ship's medical systems could actually deal with. Many more had died in the collision with the asteroid, or been too badly injured to survive long once their coldsleep pods shut down and they awoke.

A few, like Subchief Caterzina Sano, hadn't been injured at all. But there weren't many Fulls, like her, on the ship now. Almost everyone had needed something repaired or replaced after the accident. Yuka had woken from coldsleep to find her left arm completely replaced, her parents gone, and the Strelka in a critical situation. There hadn't been much time to feel sad yet.

"I don't think she likes anybody, even the other Fulls," Yuka said in a low voice. "If we settle on this planet, I want a habitat as far away from hers as I can get."

If they didn't settle on this planet...but Yuka wouldn't think about that. Everyone knew most of their fuel had vented in the accident.

Sulis wasn't the most welcoming place, but it was the only planet they'd had the fuel to reach. A rocky world with a sharp axial tilt that meant extreme seasons and wild weather for much of the planet. In the temperate areas, high mountain crags stretched up to the limits of the breathable atmosphere, creating deep valleys and lowlands between them—biomes almost completely separated from each other. Although plants and other creatures had developed here, their isolation had created a wide diversity in the strange types of life that called the planet home. So far, they'd found no evidence of highly evolved, intelligent life on Sulis, which was a good thing for the hopeful colonists.

The remote rovers could move faster than the lumbering, damaged colony ship, so they'd been sent ahead to explore the planet. Yuka and a handful of others operated them, discovering what they could about their chances of survival on the surface. They'd learned that the air, although thin, was breathable in the valleys, and the water would be drinkable with treatment. Now they had to find out what else already lived here, if they'd be able to grow plants in the soil, and what other dangers might face them on the surface.

So Yuka rolled her rover around, exploring and gathering samples of plants, earth, and water to analyze. Until the rover's screen showed something that was absolutely, definitely, not a tree.

Yuka's first thought was that it was another Strelka rover, although she knew they were spread far and wide across the habitable areas of the planet, exploring. She was surprised to see another one but then even more surprised. It was not a rover.

It stood much taller than the squat Strelka rovers—probably almost five feet. Six insect-like legs sprouted from a square base, allowing it to walk smoothly across the rough terrain. Its tall, angular body rose from the dark metallic base, and an arm fitted with interchangeable tools hung down on each side. It wasn't at all humanoid-shaped, but an array of sensors and lights near the top looked almost like a face.

It moved toward a small pink lizard-like creature perched on a rock.

Yuka gasped and Arten turned from his screen. "What?"

She shook her head. "Nothing," she managed, keeping her voice casual. She didn't want anyone else to see this until she knew what it was. Maybe it was another robot explorer from the Strelka, and she didn't want to look like an i***t for not knowing that. She used her prosthetic hand to turn the rover's camera straight toward the other robot and zoom in as far as it could. Up close, it looked even more alien. Its surface shimmered with tiny, interlocking hexagon shapes.

Yuka almost told Arten then, but the pink lizard moved, and the strange robot veered off to follow. It turned away from Yuka's rover and scuttled smoothly into the cluster of trees at the base of the hill. It didn't return.

"Hey, you want to get something to eat once the shift is over?" Arten asked, breaking into her concentration. "It must be almost dinner time; my stomach's rumbling."

Considering their reduced rations, everyone's stomach rumbled a lot of the time, but Yuka didn't say that. She realized she'd been staring at the trees for far too long and nodded to Arten. "Sure, that'd be great."

She pushed the joystick, turning her rover to travel away from where the other robot had vanished. She set the rover's sights on a small pond about half a kilometer from its current position and sent it trundling in that direction. She'd collect some water samples before the shift was over, so Subchief Caterzina Sano couldn't accuse her of doing nothing, and then she'd put the rover into sleep and secure mode for the night while its tiny internal lab analyzed the samples.

And hope that when she came back to work in the morning, the strange robot would be long gone and never bother her rover again.

When their shift was over, Yuka and Arten shut down their consoles and followed the long, dim, echoing corridor to the cafeteria. If the voyage had gone according to plan, these corridors would have bustled—half the crew and colonists on board would be awake while the other half slept. Then the teams would have switched places halfway through the journey. Now there were not even enough of them, with everyone who was left awake, to fill the hallways. With so many of their food supplies destroyed in the accident, Yuka supposed that was just as well. Their power reserves were also low, so the corridor lights stayed dim on the couple of undamaged decks still in use.

As they walked—slowly, to accommodate Arten's slightly unsteady gait on his green-skinned legs, Yuka asked casually, "Are all of our rovers exactly the same? Would I recognize another one if mine saw it?"

"There shouldn't be two in the same location," Arten said. "But I think they're all alike. Except for the couple of submarine ones Gyllis and Malkan operate in the oceans."

Yuka nodded, her chest heavy with disappointment. "That's what I thought."

"Why?"

"Oh, no reason," she lied. "Just curious. I wonder what all the animals down there think of these new mechanical creatures running around."

"The good thing is, I don't think they think," Arten said with a grin. "So that leaves room for us."

Yuka was glad to reach their destination. The cafeteria was a beacon of light and sound. Even though food was rationed, everyone felt better after eating something, so at mealtimes conversation and laughter flowed in better supply than the food. The legacy of the accident was everywhere, though—artificial limbs like Yuka's and Arten's in a rainbow of colors. The med units had been forced to synthesize replacement skin and limbs from materials that were never intended for that purpose, so the survivors sported shades from green to blue to pale yellow and grey. No-one tried to hide their prosthetic parts, since almost everyone who'd survived had needed something replaced. Many colonists had mechanized hands, arms, legs and feet. Yuka's bunk mate Gyllis had sky-blue skin on the entire left side of her face and a glassy-looking left eye with a pinprick of red electronic glow at its center. Trawley sported a bald head the color of a sunflower where the skin of his scalp had been burned away.

Yuka and Arten picked up trays and collected bowls of pale, watery-looking soup and a handful of reconstituted bread nuggets. The soup smelled better than it looked, and Yuka's stomach rumbled as she filled a glass with water. Not exactly fresh—it had been recycled lots of times already. But it was still cool and drinkable. They found seats at a table with Gyllis, who scooted her chair aside to make room for Yuka.

Across the room, a voice rose in anger. Yuka spotted Subchief Caterzina Sano. She sat at a table with some other Fulls, none of whom looked very happy. The Fulls tended to keep to themselves, although Yuka knew one of the boys, Natil. Natil worked on the ship's computer systems, helping restore them as much as possible after the accident, and he'd helped her fix a problem with her rover's programming. He caught her eye and grimaced, looking like he'd rather be sitting at her table instead. He looked miserable. Yuka wasn't sure why the Fulls didn't mingle much with the rest of them; she wondered if they thought themselves better, since they were still whole, still entirely flesh-and-blood humans. But Natil didn't look like he thought that. He looked like a trapped animal.