The Doppelgänger Brane

Captain O’Hara had been fighting heavy seas for about one hour when he grabbed the microphone and switched to the freighter’s frequency. “Ocean Progress, Ocean Progress, do you read me?” Then he waited for an answer, but he got no reply. Calling over his first mate, he gave instructions to continue trying to make contact with the freighter. Concerned about the waves crashing over the aft cable store where the Pod was located, he wished he could turn into the advancing waves, but that would delay his arrival time. The first mate finally made contact with Ocean Progress and the meeting place coordinates were made firm. The seas were calming as the tug covered its final 20 miles to the freighter, which was growing in size as they approached it.

Pulling aside the larger ship, O’Hara instructed the first mate to hold the tug position next to the freighter and just under its Union Purchase Rig.  The rig operator paid out cable to the tug for lifting the Pod. On the tug, two crew members approached the cable store hatch cover where they heard a chorus of high-pitched noises similar to many midget circular saws cutting wood at the same time. The men stopped, looked at each other, and then one of them got in touch with the captain on the tug’s old sound-powered headset. He said, “Captain, I’m not going to open that hatch. There’s something weird going on down there.” Just then the hatch cover disintegrated as if it had been cut into thousands of small pieces. The two men turned away from the hatch to run, but before they could take one step, several eight-legged lobster-like robots were clinging to their chests and faces, cutting huge pieces of flesh and bone from their bodies as blood squirted all over the deck. It took only a few seconds and the men lay dead, with their bodies cut to shreds. The robots started to pour out of the cable storage area and displayed incredible jumping power, much too fast to duck. In horror, crew members ran for their lives, but there was no escape.

The men on the Ocean Progress looking down from the rig couldn’t believe their eyes as they stood watching the bloody slaughter. That hesitation of just standing and looking was enough time for several of the incredibly fast robots to climb the rig cable and attack the onlookers. The rig operator immediately hauled in the cable, knocking several robots back down onto the tug’s deck. The robots immediately jumped up and began attacking the crew on the tug.

Captain O’Hara had witnessed the carnage from the start and was frantically sending a Mayday message, but it was obvious that help would never arrive in time. Within about ten seconds the robots had reached the bridge and killed him, leaving no one alive on the tug. The entire deck area of the tug was covered with blood. Meanwhile, chaos had broken loose on the Ocean Progress. Its radio operator was also sending a Mayday transmission. While the rig operator had stopped the robots from using the rig cable the ladder to the tug was still hanging over the side with about fifty robots rapidly climbing it. Some crew members tried to cut the ladder with an axe, but the first few robots near that deck level jumped on them, leaving no one to stop the flow of robots. The massacre continued until all the crew of the Ocean Progress had been butchered, then the two-hour statement that James Foster had been wondering about made sense as the batteries in the robots died as well as the robots. Just before that an ignition battery had been enabled so that the robots would explode doing additional damage and leaving nothing to examine. That process made one hell of a series of shattering noises for no one to hear and then eerie quiet, except for the sounds of the blocks on the overside rigging clanging against the hulls as the vessels rocked with wave action.