Was already in, if I were being honest with myself. I could feel the chill working its way through the insulation at the joints of my hardsuit. A round sort of ache settled into the bones of my hands and elbows as the cold began to saturate them, reminding me that my time in this environment was limited.
Well, work would help to keep me warm. I nerved myself and stepped farther into the darkness.
* * *
I made sure the interior airlock door closed itself behind me. The thing about airlocks is that they’re only effective tools for retaining atmosphere when both halves are engaged. I drifted through the empty reception bay, straining my senso for any sign of life, movement, even clutter.
I picked up a whole lot of nothing. Cargo nets festooned the bulkheads, empty as the webs of hungry spiders.
It was a regular arachnid famine around here, from what was—so far—a cursory inspection. But as I drifted cautiously toward quarters, I wondered who in the wide flat spinning galaxy would waste fuel, standard months of their life expectancy, and other consumables running around in an empty fast data hauler.
The information Afar had been carrying—and was named for—was his most valuable commodity as well as his raison d’être. Faster-than-light communication required faster-than-light ships to take messages from place to place, and the galaxy was big. The automated relay of transponders and packets worked, but like any hub-and-spoke system it relied on connections happening in the right order, and on regular patterns of shipping moving in more direct lines.
It could take ans for the mail to get from one isolated node to another if the relays broke down, and even if they didn’t you could never be entirely sure of when your message would reach its destination. Data haulers weren’t resource-light, but they were a direct route.
Because they weren’t resource-light, this emptiness was weird. Unless the data Afar was hauling was critical to lives or infrastructure in an emergency sense, a ship like him would normally stick around a port long enough to pick up some stuff. So his empty bays gave me a perfectly justifiable wiggins.
There was so much about this situation that wasn’t quite right.
Most heavy rescue situations are extremely straightforward. They are scary. There are often fires, or blown vessels, or explosions, or terrible collisions to deal with. There will nearly always be people screaming, if there is any atmosphere for them to scream into.
There’s rarely a creepy, echoing silence and a dearth of anybody to rescue. Especially not on two ships, at the same time.
* * *
I followed Sally’s map deeper into the syster vessel. We carry a full range of schematics and plans for nearly every production-line vessel and some of the custom jobs, going back over a hundred ans. I couldn’t reliably pull you up a schematic for anything pre-Synarche, like Big Rock Candy Mountain—you’d need an archinformist for that—but Sally is big and powerful and we don’t haul cargo or data. Just casualties. Which means there’s lots of room in her for not only Sally herself, but ayatanas like the ones I was wearing now, medical information on every known species, and quantities of engineering data.
The last thing—along with Sally’s reconnaissance and the drones flanking me like Odin’s ravens plus an understudy—was the reason for my confidence that I was headed in the right direction if I wanted to find people. Sally said so, and until I saw evidence that Afar had been significantly altered from spec, I was going to trust Sally’s information. Besides, her drones had already been here.
Crew quarters were right where they ought to be. It had been so long since anything had gone predictably right that finding them left me with a silly little buzz of satisfaction.
I paused outside the hatchway. The hatch was open and the decompression doors hadn’t triggered, both of which were in line with the general intact state of the vessel. The space beyond the hatchway echoed the sound of my movements, though there weren’t any footsteps in freefall. It was so quiet in Afar that the rustles and clicks of my movement in the hardsuit resounded.
Sound carried differently in Afar’s methane atmosphere. It sounded weird to ox-based me, but made the part of me wearing the methane-based ayatanas homesick. There was one sound that wasn’t just my own sounds, reflected, or the pings and creaks of any ship in space. It wasn’t familiar to me, but my ayatanas recognized it.
Breathing.
I took a moment to be doubly certain I wasn’t leaking any dangerous radiation, either heat or visible light, and let myself drift inside.
* * *
I found the crew, Sally.
There they were, as promised, five spiky, multi-limbed, refractive, partially transparent living snowflakes. According to Sally’s information, this was the full ship’s complement.
I was relieved to confirm with my own eyes, more or less, that they weren’t splattered (did Darboof splatter? I supposed they might melt) all over the bulkheads. I would not have been so certain of my fast crew count if they had been.
Each of them floated in what the ayatanas informed me was an attitude of restful repose, drifting on a tether near the cubby bunks I had last—remotely—seen them collapsed against. They showed no immediate signs of injury. As I moved closer, my senso showed me the subtle, glittering movements that accompanied their respiration. All of them were breathing in rhythm, which was not—I checked—typical of this species when cosleeping.
I found the casualties. If they are casualties. Commencing exam. They all seem to still be alive.
Copy, Sally said, and left me to it.
I detached Sally’s drones now that I was confident I’d located the crew and the drone information was accurate. I hadn’t wanted to say anything to Sally without evidence, but given Helen’s somewhat delusional state and whatever had happened to Afar—not to mention Sally’s own memory lapses—I’d been harboring a few concerns about whether Sally’s remotes were providing us with accurate information.
What the Well was Afar doing out here empty, anyway?
Sally, are you finding any packets in Afar’s memory?
They would be easy to spot, being encrypted, with—virtually speaking—colorful address labels. Nobody likes the mail getting lost in the shuffle.
He doesn’t seem to be carrying anything, she said. Well, some transponder packets. Some of the same ones we have, which tells me he passed a few of the same waypoints on the way out.
So he came from Coreward. Interesting.
Why would a ship like Afar head out from the Core on more or less the proper vector to get to Terra, a major population center, and not bring any stuff with him? It was wasteful—the disgust I felt at that was something else I could share with my ayatanas—but obviously, as ambulance crew, I could also imagine an emergency so serious that it would bring everybody who heard the call at a dead run.
The problem was that if there had been such an emergency, Core General could hardly have avoided being informed about it. Hospitals are generally up on all the worst news.
There’s something else, Sally said. Afar’s storage is full, but it’s all encrypted. It looks like maybe iterating backups of his code—
Can you decrypt it?
Not immediately. But I can start.
Make sure of your firewalls, I said, needlessly. It probably came across as condescending, in retrospect. Sure, meatform, teach an AI how to program.
I sent the drones off to do one more survey and recon. Just because we had the right number of crew members didn’t guarantee that we’d found everybody on board. Or even that these were the five they were supposed to be.
It’s a galactic constant. Everybody is bad at paperwork.
My own responsible choice was to stay here and start triage and prep the patients to survive transport—and perhaps begin care—while the drones finished off the search part of the search and rescue. Then I could double-check their work and maybe check out that cargo bay with signs of construction that Sally had mentioned.
I moved toward the nearest of my
patients.
Darboof have three genders. Despite that, they still manage to reproduce by budding. Nature gets up to some weird and wonderful things.
None of these were visibly pregnant, at least. One less thing to worry about.
The one nearest me was not arousable by any of the usual means, including pain stimulus. (The tool for checking this in most of these methane systers looks like a glass tuning fork, by the way.) Its crystalline eyes responded to my IR pen with reflexive sparkles as the facets tuned themselves, but that didn’t wake it, either. Neither did my careful touches with the tools I used to keep my insulated body as far from it as possible as I performed the necessarily somewhat superficial exam.
Results were all within tolerances.
What I had was a living, seemingly healthy, perfectly nonresponsive person. A delicate crystalline entity whose neurology relied on its entire body being a functioning superconductor, whose limbs articulated by means of electromagnetic currents. Its energy metabolism was so exotic by Terran standards that I’d hate to try to explain the full details of it to anyone even while wearing the relevant ayatanas.
Well, I told Sally, drunk on a little relief that this seemed to be a straightforward rescue with nobody dead, they’re not conscious, but they appear stable. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with them, but I’m not a diagnostician. My recommendation remains that we provide life support, bring the whole ship back to Core General with the patients in situ, and let the methanogen ED and ICU sort it out. It’s mysterious, but it doesn’t seem dangerous, and the problems of moving five fragile, comatose, unsuited systers across vacuum—and into inadequate life support on you—suggest that leaving them right where they are remains the course of action most likely to preserve life.
I concur— Sally started a sentence she never got to finish, because the drone that had been exploring the cargo bays pinged to remind us that there was something in one of the open holds. The drones would like to remind you of the existence of anomalous cargo, which is not recorded on Afar’s cargo manifest.
Is it likely to explode immediately?
It’s not… ticking.
Great, I said. Then I’ll stick to the plan, get these five resting comfortably, then go investigate.
CHAPTER 7
WHATEVER IT WAS, EVEN IF it had been on the cargo manifest, the cargo manifest could not have done it justice—or remotely prepared me for the reality. When I entered the unpressurized cargo hold, I had to stop for a moment to contemplate the object inside as its shape filtered through my readouts and Sally’s senso projections.
I couldn’t see it by ambient light because there wasn’t any, and I didn’t dare make any even though I didn’t think any unshielded Darboof would be wandering around in here: the environment was space with a roof over it, and they couldn’t endure hard vacuum and near absolute zero any better than I could. There are cold and hostile environments, and then there are really cold and hostile environments.
(At least my suit’s heat exchanges were whining less now that I was insulated by vacuum. The problem, as long as I stayed out of Afar’s heat-sucking atmosphere, wasn’t going to be getting too cold, but overheating inside my hardsuit because of that extra insulation.)
I couldn’t take the chance of using any radiation other than heavily filtered ultraviolet to scan the space. Even if I had been willing to, my Darboof ayatanas quailed at the idea. It would be like aiming a microwave gun into a room you thought was, you know, probably empty, and pulling the trigger.
So I relied on my senso and the drone transmissions, and what the senso showed me was astounding.
The low-intensity EM image Sally constructed showed that the cargo was not a single solid object, but a sort of pod on struts, propped in the center of the space. I couldn’t see color, obviously, but the texture was smooth and enameled-looking. Parts of the object had a magnetic signature. And the whole thing reminded me of an arachrab from home: The struts—they were legs, they had to be legs—were curved and jointed in the same way. The pod—the body—was held at the center of eight of those legs, and their feet were evenly braced around the bulkheads of the hold.
I could have imagined that it was organic. Not in the carbon-based sense, but in the evolved-on-its-own sense. But it had the presence of a vast and brooding machine.
The drone reported no life signs, so I assumed that a machine was exactly what it was. Not a little machine. Not like my exo. Not a pile of microbots like the other machine. And not a big machine with a simple, direct purpose, like Sally.
This machine—I didn’t even know where to begin looking at it, never mind describing it. It was cryptic, enormous, of enormity. It had a weight and a charisma in that black space.
It looks alive, I said. Actually, it looks cybernetic. Are these Darboof smuggling alien mechanical sea monsters?
I joked, but I found myself wondering. Space monsters?
I mean, I felt fairly confident that the craboid was a machine. But there were entities that went through most of their life cycle in space. They didn’t generally have legs. Maybe something could have evolved to survive an atmosphereless world, however.…
Life is a pretty stubborn thing. Weirdly so, given how fragile it can be.
Not according to the drone, Sally answered. The drone continues to read no sign of any known metabolic processes. No metabolic products. There’s a space inside that could potentially have an atmosphere, though, or be used as a vehicle. But not the thing itself. The thing itself is a machine.
I should trust my instincts more.
Could it be some kind of a mechanical… parasite? There were organisms on various worlds that could control the behavior of a host. Some were commensal—symbiotic. Some… were not commensal. Could that explain the odd behavior—odd lack of behavior?—of Afar, and of Helen and the machine once Afar docked?
It looks like combat armor, said Loese.
I had worn hardsuits in both military and civilian designs. In fact, I was wearing one right then. I snorted impolitely at her.
Not real combat armor, she said. Like a mech suit in Science Ninja Alliance.
Loese likes those stylized immersive three-vees with the very exaggerated interfaces. And yes, now that I thought about it, the image of the space-crab-robot thing I was studying did have that kind of menacing glossiness.
My very low-power UV lidar imaging system was clicking away, supported by the efforts of the drone. An image of the cargo space around me resolved, shimmered.
Handholds—appendage-holds—ran along the bulkheads. They didn’t look like the handholds my species built, but their purpose was obvious. I used them to haul myself along the curve of the wall until I got to the craboid’s nearest foot.
It seemed to be… a foot. A spider foot. Only gigantic.
Sensors indicated that it was constructed of metal, ceramics, and some very durable resin compounds. It had some ferrous content. It looked smooth and sculpted, flat-bottomed, with hooked barbs projecting on all sides. It was bigger around than the span of my arms.
The bulkhead of the cargo hold was faintly dented from the pressure of the foot braced into it. I set my back and hands against one of the appendage-holds and shoved the foot with my boots, extending my legs as strongly as I, exo, and hardsuit together could manage.
My machines couldn’t budge this machine. I didn’t even feel it give, or sense any tiny scraping through the hull. The machine was wedged into the hold as solidly as if welded there. As if it had been designed to climb into a cargo space and make itself functionally a rigid part of the ship’s structure.
Maybe it had. The central pod, or capsule, or habitat, was suspended in the midst of a reinforced framework—the spider-crab legs—that seemed to have been rigged up to brace and protect it. It was too far away from the cargo bay bulkhead for me to inspect very well.
That couldn’t stop me from drifting up to it for a closer look.
Hey, crew, I said, stick a memo on the calendar to look int
o who sent Afar out here, when we’re back in touch with civilization.
Fast packets didn’t just fly around the galaxy empty, and I kept coming back to that. Okay, so Afar wasn’t empty: he had been hauling… this thing.
Whatever this thing was for.
I followed the line of the nearest leg with the softest pulses of my jets. The central pod wasn’t precisely spherical. It was teardrop-shaped, and I was slightly kitty-corner to its round end. I sidled around until I was facing the round part dead-on, exactly at the midline. There were no legs attached to this end, and that seemed significant. It had no portholes, and it had none of the smaller manipulators I would expect if it were, for example, the kind of war-suit that Loese suggested.
Sally’s drones zoomed around me on a rising helix, then broke off to swirl around the teardrop-shaped part of the machine. Sally forwarded their feeds to me. I felt, rather than heard, the small clicks as they settled onto the machine’s surface.
Loese’s comment about combat armor was still niggling. I stretched my hardsuit’s sensors, but there were no visible weapons, and no obvious ports that weapons could slide out of.
If I were going to put a door in something like this, the underside is where I would put it. I let myself float, frowning behind my opaqued faceplate, and studied the apparently featureless surface with all the tools at my command, since it was too dark in the hold to use my eyes.
The pod was not entirely featureless. It had some small, uneven swellings, little bumps that bent backward in a manner that resembled fairings. They looked like they might grow up to be barbs like the ones on the feet, given good nutrition and time. There were differences in texture on its surface. Sally used my hardsuit to bounce another low-powered UV laser off the carapace. The results told me that if I could have seen it with my eyes, the machine would have been black, the whole thing, with a satin shine and blue and red overtones on the edges. Pretty, in a monstrous sort of way.
Machine Page 10
