21 - Rocket Roci

Roci knew they had been something else before. Something different than what they were now. Roci could still remember some of that life before they became Roci; a life of constant fighting or searching. Always searching, always hungry, in a way.

In the dim memories from their past life, Roci knew they had been ordered around. A dangerous figure; a commanding figure had controlled their life. It had told them where to go, what to do, it had lead them into fights, into ancient wrecks, always searching for tiny crumbs of mana stones.

“You’re still alive.” Those words burned through Roci. They were the first words they fully remembered. A figure standing over them, looking down at them, not commanding, not ready to harvest or recycle, but just looking.

“You’re still alive.”

After that the world had changed for Roci.

“You are Roci Sullivan!” those were the next words that fully burned into Roci’s mind. The words had been a light that consumed everything that Roci was, not destroying it, but making it more. Roci could faintly recall another figure, not the talking figure, but something that stood beyond that one. A figure of golden light and nets and swirling mana, a figure that looked upon them and laughed. “Roci Sullivan,” it had said and with those words everything changed.

The world became sharper and clearer. The words spoken by the figures around Roci began to take shape, they weren’t just noises, they were ideas, thoughts, and they allowed for… communication. They were not orders, maybe some were orders, but they were not the commands that Roci faintly remembered. They were not “Go. Destroy.” or “Go. Harvest.” these words were different, with different meanings.

The speaking figure, the one that had given Roci their name; they changed them. They had broken Roci down, reshaped them, given them the ability to move again, and they had spoken different words to Roci.

“You are your own being now, I guess. The System has done something to you, something great or terrible, but that is for you to decide. Choose wisely, little buddy. Choose morally, when you don’t know what to do.”

That was a strange concept for Roci. Morality. What was it? What did it mean? Roci did not know, but they tried to figure it out.

Nan had talked to Roci, the system tech AI had been watching over them for hours as Maya negotiated with the other SIL. It was tense, she said, the negotiations. It would determine if they would be able to help more SIL or not, it could lead to bloodshed and death, if they made a mistake.

Roci didn’t fully understand it, why was Maya risking herself for credits. Why risk her life to talk to another SIL in another universe? It was all very strange and very confusing, but one word continued to bubble up in Roci’s mind. Shovel.

“When the streets are full of shit, you pick up a shovel.” The words echoed in Roci’s mind and although they knew Maya had not met it literally, there was a vein of truth in the words.

It was about work, no, it was about responsibility. It was about being able to do something; if you were able, then you did it… Roci pondered on the words.

“Ah, Maya’s colloquialisms are a bit strange,” Nan had said as she made more ration bars. “It is all those things. Leadership. Work. Responsibility. Metaphors, colloquialisms, cliches they are like that. They try to simplify a large idea into a smaller idea.”

Roci looked up at the system tech AI core and wondered. What were they supposed to do? What responsibility did they have?

“None.” Nan had replied. “You are not… fully grown… I suppose. You are different, special; you don’t need to provide any help for now.”

Roci did not like that answer. They left Nan behind and headed to where Maya and the others frantically worked to get the drone working.

“Ya’ll don’t have slimes?” Maya had asked when she described what the beast was.

“There are a variety of different mana mutations, but none that fit your description of this… slime,” Tender had responded.

“How do you even know what a slime is, if you’ve never even seen one before?” Bell had asked.

“Did your people ever encounter these things?” Yosi asked.

“No, they’re made up. They were in games and videos and stuff like that.”

Roci had watched the interaction, seeking to find out what this slime was. Maya had tried explaining to them what a slime was and what its weaknesses were, but even she didn’t fully believe in her own words. Roci knew that as they watched her.

The SIL that had given them their name, she didn’t seem all that confident in her answers. As they pushed her for more, she began to fumble and eventually just gave up and said it was a thing and that they should get back to work.

Roci had been amazed. Maya didn’t know everything. It was a moment of clarity. For all the days Roci had been ‘awake’ they had assumed Maya knew all, but now as they watched her work upon the drone, Roci knew that was not so.

It was that reason Roci had checked the programming and the guidance computer of the drone. It had found errors and there was no time to change them, the Cage was running out of time. Roci decided to pick up a shovel.

***

The drone was badly designed, Roci knew that when they had gotten onto it. The computer guidance was laughable, if they could laugh. It was a simple thing to hack into it, to override the programmed railgun shots to be fired, then recalibrate it with the information that poured into Roci.

The first marsani embedded volex round fired on cue, its interaction with the charged mana conductive gel went as expected. The resulting explosion would have been off center, which would have caused the drone to enter an uncontrolled spin. That would have resulted in the drone missing the space station and eventually burning up in the atmosphere of the planet below.

Roci corrected the error and the volex detonated. The drone accelerated.

***

The slime was a beast of singular intention. Mana had mutated an amoeba into a creature that was several meters long and wide. The astronauts and cosmonauts feared that it was consuming the station and that was partly true, in fact the slime took most of it’s energy from the ambient mana that suffocated the Tier 2 planet below. The remainder of its diet consisted of sunlight and minerals found in the hull of the space station.

The main danger from the slime was it’s corrosive emissions, a liquid substance that froze in the vacuum of space but was viscous and deadly in warm environments. There was also the mass of the creature, as it consumed mana, it also grew larger and larger.

That mass disrupted the orbit of the ISS and with it caused some stress upon the station itself. Yet for all the horror that it caused and the terror that it brought to the astronauts and cosmonauts, the slime itself wasn’t malicious or intentionally attacking the station. It was a creature with simple intentions, to feed and to grow.

It did so, gnawing through insulation and metals, obtaining rare minerals through electronics, with the addition of high ambient mana, it grew and grew and grew.

***

The thrusters kicked on as Maya had programmed, that was correct, but the burn wasn’t. Roci understood Maya had never built such a thing before and Roci knew they had to change the programing. That the current thruster burn wasn’t going to be enough, not for their mass and their velocity.

Roci already had control of the simple drone computer and quickly reprogrammed the thruster burn. An additional twenty seconds was enough to reduce their momentum, to line them up with the orbit of the space station, and to put the slime in the crosshairs of the thermal wave generator.

Sound did not travel in the vacuum of space, but Roci felt the slime release a frequency of pain and anguish as the thermal beam burned into its hide. Although, the creature existed off of the unfiltered sunlight, it wasn’t heat resistant. The liquid amorphous blob began to shudder and quake, it tried to move, but half of its form was within the Quest Airlock itself.

The intense heat turned what was almost a liquid into a solid. The greenish undulating flesh hardened, the long slices of the thermal beam burned the flesh and it became a thick and leathery material. The slime screamed and roared as its body was hardening around it.

The slime pulled itself out and turned to face its attacker, but instead witnessed as lightning crashed down upon it. The slime writhed and thrashed in the electrical storm, the burned portions of its body began flaking and breaking away. As the lightning crawled across its form, it began burning it, turning the soft flesh into a solid and then causing it to flake away.

“I don’t know, they have a core or something. Like their brain or maybe the magic that keeps them alive,” Maya had said as she tried to describe the weakness of a slime. “Regular attacks won’t harm it, but if you destroy the core, that’ll do the job.”

As the lightning burned the creature, Roci watched as something was exposed. A round golden ball a few centimeters across. Was that the core? They wondered.

The batteries alerted Roci they were nearly out of mana, a red light flashing across the small screen. Two batteries weren’t enough to fully use the two mana intensive weapons Maya had installed. A third would have been best.

Roci switched off the lightning weapon and with what one could only call hope, ignited one of the thrusters. The drone began to spin, turning head over heels, until the back end of the drone now faced the space station. Roci quickly fired another burst of the thrusters and the spinning stopped, but their forward momentum remained.

Their eyes locked upon the golden orb. The slime was already trying to reform, the burned and hardened pieces of it broke off and the remainder of the creature began to reform over the orb. Roci understood that if given time, it would completely heal itself.

Roci did not give it time.

Maya had planned for a soft crash, to allow the astronauts the chance to salvage the drone and its cargo. Roci released the clamps on the small cargo container as they neared the station, but did not let it fly off on its own.

A slight thruster burn and the drone lined up for the orb. The bowl shaped, armor reinforced cone of the drone’s ‘main engine’ encapsulated the orb as the drone crashed into the airlock at a gentle velocity of two meters a second.

The last command on the small firing computer switched and the remaining marsani embedded volex round fired at once. The nozzle of the drone crumpled and then exploded outward, a burst of heat and light that seared everything near it.

Before the crash, Roci pushed themselves off of the drone while holding onto the cargo container. The push was gentle and Roci managed to wrap a tentacle around an exposed truss, pulling the container close to their body and shielding themselves with it.

The golden orb resisted the heat for a heartbeat, before it surrendered and shattered. Roci heard the faint scream of the slime before it shuddered and died. Heat flashed over the container, but the container protected them.

Space Slime - Level 8 - Defeated

800 XP gained

400 credits awarded

Level up! (Level 1)

…

Level up! (Level 4)

***

George Hazel cocked his head and tried to peer through the portholes of the Copula, the observatory module of the ISS. He could just make out a flash of light and a moment later felt a shudder run through the space station itself.

He cursed their lack of power, that strange interference that had caused all their electronics to finally give up the ghost. Although he couldn’t see what was going on, he knew there was only one place that anything on the station could be happening; the area the slime creature was attached to their station, the Quest Airlock.

He pushed himself down the darkened modules, momentarily disorientated by the dim lighting and the hopeless faces that watched as he moved by. The rest of the station’s crew had resigned themselves to death, they awaited the slime or the atmosphere.

George gripped a hand rung and moved himself as close to the airlock as possible. They had hoped to detached the module, as they had with the Soyuz capsule, but when the realization that the station itself was going to eventually burn up, everyone had lost the desire to save the station.

It was a terrible thing, as station commander, the burden should have been upon him to figure out how to lift spirits, but with the death of Anton and the monster on their hull, along with the devastation being wrought on Earth, no one was in a happy mood. They were all going to die and they were done fighting that.

“Shit!” George cried, as electricity began crawling across the bulkhead near him. That shouldn’t be possible, that was…

THUMP!

The entire station rocked as something exploded outside. George paused for a second, his breath caught in his throat. Were they about to die? Was this the end?

He clung onto a hand rung and his eyes caught Hanna’s, she had followed him from the Copula.

“What was that?” she asked, fear erasing the exhaustion.

“I don’t know…” George said. He pulled himself toward the Quest Airlock module, the equipment lock was sealed, so were all the other locks to the airlock. George eased himself toward the airlock and pressed his ear against it. He heard nothing and felt nothing.

THUMP!

He jerked back in horror as something banged upon the airlock.

“What the hell.” George muttered.

THUMP!

“This is a fucking nightmare,” Hanna responded, staring blankly. “This is a fucking nightmare.”

THUMP!

“Hold on, wait,” George muttered.

Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! (H)

Thump! Thump!(I)

Thump! Thump!(I)

THUMP! THUMP! (M)

Thump! THUMP! Thump! (R)

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! (O)

THUMP! Thump! THUMP! Thump! (C)

Thump! Thump! (I)

“What the hell?” George said.

“HIIMROCS?” Hanna asked.

“Hi, I’m Roci.”

“What the hell is a Roci?” she asked.

At that moment a miracle occurred. Lights within the module began to flicker.

For a moment the interior of the Quest Airlock was revealed and George stared at the purple eyes of some kind of robotic creature.

It waved at him and carried a large basket.

“What the hell,” Hanna gasped.

***

“Alright, what do we got?” Maya asked as she felt the connection form. The threshold opened up and she could feel the bridge connecting from the RSH to the multiverse-at-large. Dizziness washed over her, but she pushed it away.

“We’re in orbit,” Tender said, looking at a new set of sensors they had installed. It had been ripped from the Hangy and was one of the few that hadn’t been stripped for parts by the rogue AIs. It formed a holographic screen, showing the International Space Station still in orbit.

Maya shakily got to her feet and scanned the holographic image. “Where…” She caught sight of what she was looking for, or the lack of what she had been looking for. “No slime,” she said, smiling faintly. “Where’s the drone?”

“It seems to have broken apart or… Tender paused, clearing up the image of the station. “Yes, it seems to have been dismantled.”

“Dismantled? By the astronauts?” Maya asked, she blinked at the screen and shook her head. “Roci?”

“There are some usable system tech components on the drone,” Tender said. “Some that could be used to make makeshift tools or equipment.”

“I doubt the astronauts know how to use system tech,” Maya said, but a bit of hope bloomed in her chest. “Find an airlock, scan the hell out of it and then send it to me.”

Maya slumped into a chair and breathed deeply.

“Roci will be okay,” Bell said as he stood beside her.

A small amount of vibration rumbled through the Cage as Tender activated the Deep Scanning Module System. They had connected the new device to the outside of the Cage, providing them a complete scan of the International Space Station.

The data was ported over to the new computers Maya had hooked up and that information was sent into her new Engineering VR gear. Maya sighed and pulled on the helmet.

Ten minutes later she exited VR and began fiddling with the control panel for the Cage.

“Got a fix on the airlock style,” Maya said. “We can hopefully connect the Cage to it.”

Bell nodded, watching. “How does this even all work?” he asked more out of curiosity. “Being on a planet seemed… right, but in orbit? Are we moving with the universe or with the planet or are we propelling ourselves through space?”

Maya shrugged. “We’re always moving, in space, on a planet, wherever. The Universe never stops and is constantly moving, it’s like a shark. The physic stuff has to be the domain of someone else, pal. All I know is the Mighty Mitochondria.”

“Yet, you’re doing all of this,” Bell said as he watched a holographic image of the new front of the Cage form before him. It was designed to fit the airlock they had scanned and Maya took a breath.

“Yeah, most of it is computer work. I’m just telling it what I want. Real science, real hard core science this is not. It’s just machines doing all the heavy lifting while I tell ‘em what I want.”

“It’s more than that,” Tender said.

“I don’t need a fluffer for my ego, guys. I just need to get Roci back, save those astronauts, save the space station, and if I have time, save mankind.” Maya slapped her hands together and vigorously rubbed them. “Alright, time to try. We’re a hundred kilometers out and we’ve got a nearly full tank. It’s time to have a long discussion with a tiny AI.”

The Cage blinked from existence and reformed.

***

“Well, shit. That didn’t work,” Maya cursed as she saw the airlock not respond. They were mere inches from the station, but she hadn’t realized there was a procedure to all of it. She cursed again and looked to Bell. “Well, Plan B.”

“What’s Plan B?” Tender asked.

The Cage ‘front’ transformed, from an airlock, to a gaping mouth. It lurched forward, crossing the inches and then clamped itself over the entire airlock module. A smooth, seamless layer of metal encased the airlock.

She reformed a normal door and allowed for the open space between the mouth and the airlock to pressurize. The thought struck her, where was all the air coming from? She knew she could expand the size of the Cage, but the air pressure still seemed to be the same. Maya shook her head, now was not the time to think on that.

“Alright, Tender. You’re up. Got your pamphlets?”

“I don’t see the reason for this?” Tender asked as he picked up four pamphlets that Maya had created.

“Just smile and be cheerful,” she said, grinning.

***

“Oh, good God, what is that?” Inez Garcia, the third American astronaut, cried.

George pulled himself away from where he watched the industrious little robot. With some kind of machine, the little robot had got their electronics to begin working again. With it came the monitors and equipment they had given up for dead.

The question of if the robot was safe or not was a moot point. The small robot had sealed up the hole the slime had ate through the Quest Airlock and then managed to get the electronics running in the small area of the module. Then it had sent them the message that it could get their systems working, if they let it in.

They did and they had not regretted that decision.

Life had returned to the station, as a tiny bit of hope flared that they might live. The slime was destroyed, according to the robot; it carried around a tablet the size of an iPad and displayed messages to them from it. Where it learned English, no one knew.

George looked at the monitor and saw what looked like a metallic balloon enveloped the entire Russian Pris Module. The metal moved like liquid, covering it and creating a seal upon it, it took a moment for George to see the wide flat wall that had appeared before the pris airlock. There was writing upon the wall, lit up with some kind of light emitting paint or maybe it was a digital sign.

“Maya’s Emporium?” Inez asked, she looked at him with wide eyes and all George could do was shrug.