Finders, Keepers: Survey Team Eta

 "So how does it work, Bob?"

"I'm not entirely certain. I can say this much: you can't see it."

"...okay?"

"No, I mean it's like it's unseeable. Not like something that isn't there or an effect that doesn't register in the visible part of the spectrum, it's more like it takes the visible part of the spectrum and cancels it out."

"How is that useful? Is that useful?" Amelie fought the urge to drum her fingers. Bob was on the surface of the planet, ranging in circles from his lander, while Amelie monitored him and conducted larger, grosser surveys from orbit. There were two other landers on the surface, and they were all linked to each other via a small constellation of relays they had established for the purpose. Bob had been the second to report in, after four hours on the surface.

"It appears to be a kind of stasis field."

"And now you're talking science fiction."

"I promise I'm not. It's weird enough that this thing even works, I think I've figured out the power source which, if the way its weight behaves is any indication, might be a microsingularity."

"A quantum black hole?"  She would have to dig into the phrase "the way its weight behaves" at some point, she was sure.

"Yup."

"Okay, that alone would win you some kind of physics prize. But tell me why you think it's powering a stasis field."

"Because I can't touch the unseeable place. I've done everything up to trying to whack it with a hammer and I can't make contact. It's a really thin region, like a nothingth of a millimeter, around what appears to be plain cast iron.

"When I hit it with the hammer, it makes no noise whatsoever. The hammer just stops. No sound."

"All...righty." She definitely wasn't drumming her fingers now, because she had started tapping notes into her station.

"I know how it sounds. But I found the end of this artifact, I swear to you it looks like a little ring of metal around a hole floating in the air. And I can tell it's iron because my magboots stick to it.

"But the field doesn't actually wrap all the way around it, see? I shine my light into the circle and it's just a black hole, I can't see the bottom. But I can see like a couple of millimeters back from the edge of the circle, the field seems to emerge out of the iron surface, inside and outside, and goes down inside the hole. And that does make a noise when you hit it. But it doesn't make a sound like a little circle of iron, it makes a noise like something a lot bigger."

"I've walked all the way around this thing and it's shaped like a really long pipe, or maybe a bottle. About ten meters long. It gets bigger as it goes toward the closed end. I can feel its shape because my hands run into something and don't go any further, but there's nothing to see, see?"

This sounded too amazing. They had found a cratered battleground above which hugely advanced races had fought a war and, aside from picking through blasted-apart junk that was mostly recognizable in human terms, they hadn't been finding a lot. Granted, the gold scavenged from the aliens' control systems was far from worthless but damn. Thirty-three tons of gold is thirty-three tons. Their acceleration had been cut by nearly a fourth.

Thirty-three tons of gold was valuable, no denying.  Its value as a precious metal was essentially zero anymore; precious metals weren't precious except for the fact that they were hard to come by.  Tons of gold were eminently useful on a practical scale, though it couldn't represent even the tiniest fraction of what those warring races had cost her own species.  Earth, rendered uninhabitable, was merely collateral damage.  Two opposing fleets of interstellar spacecraft hurling energies and projectiles back and forth at each other, losing ships all the while, never slowing down, and so much fire had rained down from Earth's skies that humanity's population had been reduced to just a hundredth of what it had been.  A population of billions, reduced to millions.

The following years - years of endless winter - had reduced them even further.  A few hundred million had become a few tens of millions.  Humanity had been bombed, population-wise, back to the Stone Age.

"So what do you reckon it is?"

"I couldn't say. If I had to hazard a guess right now with nothing else to go on, I'd say it was a gun barrel whose bursting pressure was artificially increased to infinity."

"Infinity?"

"That, or something close to it. I'm telling you, this little circle of metal floating in the air is only about a millimeter thick, if it were something I could grab hold of with my hands I'm pretty sure I could break a piece of iron this size. And hitting it with my hammer should just shatter it.

"But hitting it with everything I had, I got back nothing."

"Huh."

"If it's a gun, I can't imagine how you'd load it, or even if they were loading it with projectiles. Maybe it's a muzzleloader on a grand scale, I don't know. Maybe they pump energy into it from the muzzle and it somehow accumulates until it's time to fire and boom.  Maybe they could turn off the stasis and it's a breech loader. I don't know."

"Okay, that definitely sounds like something we should pick up, if only to try to figure out how it's powered. What would we do with a gun? We're not fighting anybody."

"Oh, I know. But I was wondering what we could do with an engine that had no upper limit on pressure or temperature."

Amelie thought. And thinking about it, thirty-three tons of gold became a small fraction of what her ship and crew would be able to move.

"Grab it." She tapped for general address. "Everybody, wrap it up. Bob found something good and we're taking it home, now."

A Light Snack: The Adventures of Human Gina

 "Oh, man! Something smells great." Gina stopped in her tracks and turned slowly, sniffing. "This way!"

 

Booj, a bulky resident of a moon of a Jovian primary, lumbered behind her. She couldn't pronounce what his species called itself. Alongside him was Erb, a Llobban she had met at something like this system's equivalent of the county courthouse. They had hit it off, she finding the Llobban interesting and kind of funny, and it - its gender still hadn't been determined - being starstruck at having met a celebrity. Gina had never had a hanger-on before, and was simply experiencing the experience for its own sake for the time being. She was famous, after all, and she was still enjoying it.

 

"Human Gina..." Erb said.

 

"Jeez, just 'Gina' is fine, you know."

 

"Yes, of course. Human Gina, these places are pretty popular. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet. Have you heard their advertisements?"

 

"Dang. You have ads?" She shook her head. "I had hoped being in a completely different star system might get me away from that."

 

"Oh, but the ads are why they're so popular. In fact this one is one of many. The advertisement song goes like this," and he raised his mouthparts and sang an eerie, ululating harmony all by himself, what sounded like three individual parts, as his many tentacles slapped a complex rhythm on the ground.

 

A couple of passersby took up the chant, adding what sounded like a full chorus to Erb's trio, and kept singing along until Erb had finished. That surprised Gina, who had never heard an ad jingle she wanted to hear again, let alone sing on its own merits, and especially not sing along extemporaneously on the street. Booj had been humming in his own basso rumble, too. Her translator made no attempt to parse meaning from the song. To her, it sounded like a traditional joik from her native Sweden on Earth, a sung musical style that didn't rely on words, just vocal sounds.

 

"Great, isn't it?"

 

"I reckon." Gina wasn't a fan of joiking. She looked around but the other singers had immediately lost interest as soon as the song had ended. "Is this really the place? Let's go in. It smells terrific and I'm starved."

 

- later –

 

Erb's four eyes all goggled at her. Booj looked uncomfortable.

 

"This is delicious." Gina tore into the cut of meat, sliced it along the right axis to puncture all the gas cells, wadded it up and stuffed the wad into her mouth. "What did you call it again? Wait," she added. "Translator record. Okay, tell me again." She burped.

 

Booj boomed something that the translator still hadn't worked out. "It is a kind of animal from the primary of my moon. They grow very large, a fully grown adult is about four kilometers long," the translator provided unit conversions automatically. "Fortunately the meat keeps a long time, it takes a couple of years to eat one entirely." He observed her plate. "This one might be gone sooner, though."

 

"Really? How so?"

 

"You have eaten enough food to sustain me for approximately twenty days."

 

"Serious?" Slice, wad, bite, chew, swallow. "I'm only just now starting to feel like I can stop eating. This stuff is not filling at all, you guys. Twenty days, really?" She burped richly. She had been burping almost continually throughout the meal.

 

Beyond Booj, Gina could see something that resembled a handsome Persian rug advancing toward them.

 

"Oi! You!" Ah, a language the translator already knew. "You've been here four hours."

 

"Yes, I have. The food is delicious!"

 

The rug wasn't mollified in the slightest. "You've been here four hours! You have been eating non-stop! You go home now!" It rippled angrily. She couldn't tell exactly where its speech was coming from, or even exactly where its mouth was. If it had a mouth.

 

"Hey, I thought this place was all you can eat. Erb said it was all you can eat."

 

"All it can eat, yes! All he can eat, yes!" The rug indicated Erb and Booj in turn. "Not all you can eat! You eat more than I can afford! You eat the entire undecipherable all by yourself! You go home now!"

 

Gina exchanged looks with Erb and Booj who, despite having evolved a few stars away from Gina and her forebears, nevertheless understood each other without having to say each other. Somehow shrugging its tentacles in a very human way, Erb got up first. "Okay, we're going." She burped.

 

"Thank God," the rug said. Gina wondered if the translator had gotten that right. It didn't sound quite like a unit conversion.

 

"Hey," she said. She grinned slyly at Booj, whose eyes widened. He had come to recognize that grin. "Do you think I could take some of this to go?"

 

The rug flapped. "No! Hell no! You go home now!" It devolved into untranslatable ranting until Booj had also risen to his feet, and all three were headed for the exit. "Wait!"

 

She turned back. "Yes?"

 

"You're famous, right?"

 

She looked at Booj, who shrugged. "I guess."

 

"Would you take a picture with me so we can put it on the wall?"

 

She was still enjoying it. "Sure."

 

And she burped again.