Senso also told me that there were glossier sections in the pod, which I was starting to think of as a hull. They were black, too, but the luster made me think they were not so much opaque as opaqued, like my helmet. They were small, and the plating around them looked thick. Reinforced. Like window frames, around armored windows. Or like—given their size—one-way mirrors over maneuvering cams.
Was this thing a vehicle of some kind? Optimized for maneuvering in hostile environments? An armored all-terrain vehicle?
Something designed to protect the occupant for long duty in extreme cold, or heat, or whatever?
Sally, what’s the temperature in there?
There’s not much atmosphere inside it, she said, based on vibratory tests with the drones. But the pod is hollow, and the interior volume of the capsule is about twenty-three cubed meters.
I did a quick visualization exercise and decided that was more than enough space for an adult human, though it might get cramped after a while. Does it have life support?
There is some machinery that looks like compressors, filtration, and so forth. It’s carrying a water supply. And supplies of carbon and nitrogen. There is a mini fusion plant, batteries, and power access. Those are all quiescent now. The water has been allowed to freeze; the tank it’s in was either partially empty, or is designed to allow for expansion.
H2O. Now there was a surprise. That was a rock, as far as the Darboof were concerned. And a durable rock at that.
But if you had hydrogen dioxide, carbon, and nitrogen, you had the basic components of life support for a water-solvent ox-respiring syster. Like Rhym, or Hhayazh. Or me.
If it was a suit of environmental armor, a piloted walker of some sort, it sounded like a pretty pleasant way to get around, depending on what the upholstery was like. Especially with the interface between my exo and the hardsuit chafing at my left knee and my underarms, and the infiltrated cold from before still making my joints hurt, and the undissipated heat of now causing sweat to pool against my waist seal and slide down my ass crack and inner thighs. I could get used to a nice big capsule you could move around in, with lots of legs for scurrying. There was probably a set of manipulators stowed away on the outside somewhere. Like one of those antique deep-sea submersibles, except a much sexier design.
… with fishhooks all over it.
Those sure looked designed to break things.
What if Loese is right and it’s a war machine? Sally, what if Afar was smuggling weapons?
What if it’s a cage? Tsosie asked. An enviro unit for a prisoner? Or a transported animal?
Hhayazh actually sounded a little distressed when it said, What kind of prisoner is so dangerous it has to be transported in a pod inside a cold cargo bay in a ship with such an exotic environment?
I shook my head. One that isn’t in there anymore.
Sally wouldn’t hear my brains rattle, but she would pick the motion up through the senso. She said, If you’re right, the prisoner has escaped, so I hope it’s not that. Crew, do you think it’s dangerous to bring it back to Core?
Hard not to, when we’re bringing the whole ship, said Rhym.
We could jettison it, Tsosie said dubiously.
Judiciary is going to want a look at this thing, I guarantee, I answered.
You’re the tactician, Dr. Jens. Tsosie’s faith warmed me. Or maybe it was the hardsuit’s environmental control finally giving up. Can you think of a means by which to mitigate risks?
If I could get a link with the machine, we could talk to its computers. Maybe one of the drones—
Before you ask, Sally said, no, I don’t have coms with that machine.
We’ve been working together too long. Does the vehicle use an obsolete protocol? In theory, communications protocols used by systers when building their kit were supposed to be cross-compatible. In theory.
Ships and stations managed to talk to each other pretty well. But I would need as many appendages as a Rashaqin to count the number of times we’d dragged some poor sentient back to Core General in part because their space suit had stopped talking to other space suits, and somebody had gotten hurt out there.
Negative. As far as I can determine, it doesn’t use any protocol. In fact, the whole thing is so EM- and radiation-shielded that the best sensor data we’re getting from it is lidar and magnetic resonance. So I can’t even find any indication that it has a personality simulator in there, let alone an AI core.
Well. That’s weird. Why would you get into a pod you couldn’t communicate in or out of?
If there was anything you could trust, it was the radiation shielding on a Darboof ship. A species that needed more protection from most of the EM spectrum would have a hard time evolving, because the background radiation of the cosmos and whatever radioactive rocks were baked into their homeworld was likely to kill them.
On the other hand, this machine could be a vehicle, designed so you could take it on any ship, and there were radiation eaters and other hot weirdies who left fissionable material scattered around.
I don’t think that walker is standard tech. Synarche tech, even, though it’s a big Synarche. There’s nothing like that aesthetic and design in my databases. So possibly it has perfectly fine coms. I can’t get a carrier. I’ve had no problem getting into Afar’s systems, though, as you can see.
Did you find Afar’s shipmind yet? I stared at the machine, and I had the eerie sensation that its glossy black eyespots stared back at me.
Maybe? I’m… honestly not certain. There are those iterating backups. And there is data. But he’s not…
He’s unresponsive, Rhym said. If he were an organic life-form I’d say he was down at the bottom of the coma scale for whatever species he happened to be.
In other words, we were at an impasse and I needed to break it. We could still tow the whole vessel back to Core General and let them sort it out—and I suspected we were going to wind up doing that—but safety precautions were part of my remit as well.
We could weld the craboid in place. But if it tears itself loose it’s a risk to Afar’s crew. We could jettison it, assuming we can get it to let go of the cargo hold, and tow it separately. It’s not that big. But it could operate on a remote signal, and if it suddenly turns aggressive in white space we’ll all have a huge problem.
Sally said, Yeah, I’m going to flag that one as unsafe practices. Even if we don’t exactly have a safety protocol in the docs for towing illegally parked armored walkers home.
Sally was so deadpan that I laughed harder than the joke warranted. Which meant that I sprayed saliva on the inside of my face mask. It was still opaqued, but the little spit globes did crazy refraction tricks against the heads-up graphics Sally was feeding me. Dammit.
“Kurukulla on a clamshell!”
Status? Tsosie and Sally asked at once. I didn’t usually blaspheme. It’s not nice to invoke other people’s deities.
I laughed. I just spit on my plate. It gives me an idea, though. What if we fill the cargo bay with foam?
With… foam?
Sure. I tapped my arm. It didn’t make any noise in the vacuum, but inside the suit I heard it. Rigid insulating foam. We fill the available space with it, and run a Faraday cage around the inside of the cargo bay so nobody can trigger the arachrab—the walker—from outside. We foam one of the drones in with it so we have immediate telemetry. If it wakes up, we’ll know.
Silence followed for a few moments. Rhym was the first to break it. Given our current resources and needs, I don’t see an immediate flaw in this plan. If the machine is totally quiescent, it might be overcautious…
But, said Camphvis, we can’t leave the patients here. And I’d rather be overcautious than torn apart by Hhayazh’s mechanical cousin.
Hey! Hhayazh said. That doesn’t look anything like me!
Fewer legs, said Tsosie. But it kind of does.
* * *
In descending order of priority, my jobs were to keep my crew safe, keep myself safe, and s
ave as many lives as possible.
I didn’t feel unsafe. My crew weren’t at risk right now. Afar’s crew members were stable and getting some metabolic support now that I had that set up. They’d need additional care on the trip home, but that could be done while we were en route.
My senso link to my team told me everything was working out in terms of getting control of Afar and slaving his drives to our own, which meant we wouldn’t even have to risk a physical connection between the two ships. Always dicey, though salvage operators did it regularly. Tow truck drivers are a crazy lot of starfuckers, and as somebody who jumps out of perfectly good starships I feel like I’m qualified to comment: I have been involved in the retrieval and rescue operation on more than one salvage op gone bad in my time.
It would be embarrassing to have to be rescued ourselves. And of course my concern was all about professional pride.
As if she had been party to my thoughts, Sally said, We’re ready to start turning Afar. Please make sure you are braced for a change in vector and velocity, Llyn.
I braced against the handholds. Once the v is stable, would you foam up Tsosie and Hhayazh and send them over? I want to start treatment on the crew.
Absolutely. I’m checking to see if Afar has a way to talk to the… arachrab?
Walker thing?
Let’s stick with craboid, Loese said. What’s an arachrab, anyway?
She could have looked it up. But I guess she was flying the ship or something, so I told her. Or started to, anyway: Sally interrupted as I was getting to the part about the music.
Maneuver concluded.
I nudged myself away from the bulkhead and drifted back from the craboid. It didn’t move. I oriented to the same attitude and plane as (what I had arbitrarily decided was) the front of the walker. It did have an odd aesthetic. I couldn’t figure out if all those weird, rose-prick barbs were functional or decorative. Maybe if I knew what syster had built it, I would have a better idea what their function was. Or at least I would know who to ask.
Maybe whatever built this thing thought rose prickles were pretty.
Sally, can you get these cargo bay doors open?
Working, she answered. Also figuring out how to fab a few hundred thousand liters of packing foam, given the materials at hand.
Big air spaces? I suggested.
You’re very funny.
CHAPTER 8
SINCE I HAD DECLARED AFAR safe for operations, Tsosie and Hhayazh suited up, insulated themselves, and crossed over to Afar to begin treating the patients while I was heading back to Sally to get warm, and cool, and basically regulate my body temperature and get a sandwich and a nap. Once they were safely aboard and setting up life support for the crew, Sally finished asserting her control of Afar’s systems.
While she worked, I wrote a letter to my daughter.
The relief vessels arrived while we were still filling Afar’s hold with foam. We gave them all the data we’d collected on Afar, on the generation ship, and on the precarious balance of the lives inside her. The newcomers included Sally’s sister ship, Ruth (Synarche Medical Vessel I Salve Harsh Wounds With Mercy, which I felt was one of the more awkward efforts of the poetical ship-naming corps). The ships and their crews got busy exploring and mapping the rest of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and—to Helen’s relief and agitation—setting up a kind of bucket brigade to get another load of cryo chambers shifted.
As for us, as soon as we finished muffling the craboid in packing peanuts, we turned back toward Core General.
We punched it, flying home as fast as a data packet and an ambulance ship could go. Which was fast: the only speedier ships in the Synarche were Judiciary Interceptor-class vessels.
Despite our rate of travel, that return trip would take a while. Not because we’d come very far, in terms of stitching through white space. I mean, sure, we were somewhere way out in the Sagittarius Arm, rather farther than we usually ventured from the hospital, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that we were moving extremely fast in the real universe, having had to match v with Big Rock Candy Mountain to catch up with her in the first place.
Zooming along as we were, a good chunk of the non-white-space return journey would be spent in dumping v: slowing down so that we didn’t streak through the Core in a relativistic blur before passing out the other side, still smoking. I mean, inasmuch as anything can streak through a structure tens of light-ans across.
Nobody really likes it when you tear through their pleasant residential neighborhood at a rate of several astronomical units per hour.
We’d have to dump v around gravity wells again, the same way we’d gained it outbound. Also, we could make up for a lot of it by coming up on the Core from the right direction. If we looped around and chased the Core’s direction of travel through the larger universe, it would be easier to match relative velocities.
We were actually—in real terms—quite close to Terra right now. I felt a pang of melancholy at how long it had taken Big Rock Candy Mountain to travel such a little distance. That poignancy was replaced with unease when I remembered that even that little distance was two or three times as far as it should have come.
There were entirely too many mysteries surrounding this little rescue mission.
Nevertheless, I regretted the missed opportunity to visit the human homeworld while we were in the neighborhood. I had never been there.
Spacers don’t feel a lot of nostalgia for places, usually. But I wasn’t born in space.
It wasn’t going to happen: we needed to get home—to our real home, not my ancestral one. And work didn’t offer a lot of time to mourn, because Helen was having a hard enough time leaving her ship behind that I wished there were a way to sedate androids. Peripherals. Whatever.
There wasn’t, though, short of a computer virus.
One thing about space travel: even when you’re in a hurry, it takes a long time to get where you’re going, because everything is extremely far away. And ships are mostly self-maintaining, though the shipminds do get bored if you don’t give them people to talk to. Or at least they say they do. We’re unpredictable compared to AIs, or so I’m told, and therefore amusing. We make great pets.
I understood. I missed having cats on Sally. Most human ships have some kind of pet—cats, or domesticated rats, or something similar: small and adaptable. But, for all the obvious reasons, pets were a liability on an ambulance.
Still, organic and inorganic sentiences both required some environmental enrichment to make space travel tolerable.
Hobbies, I mean. I’m talking about hobbies.
I imagine that a lot of novels get written by long-haul pilots. And games programmed. And songs and scripts developed. I knew a guy back in the Judiciary who knitted and did cross-stitch, but mostly people stick to more digital forms, or ones requiring only a limited number of supplies rather than an elaborate stash on a limited consumable budget. Trust my insider knowledge when I tell you that the only thing more frustrating than running out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran is being the shipmate of somebody who has run out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran.
I’m not as creative as some of my shipmates have been. I don’t make anything. I have a ukulele, which is a nicely compact instrument that doesn’t require too much sound baffling to be played inside a hull. And mine is not some priceless antique made of real Terran wood or anything. It’s a soundbox and neck printed out of nice, dense polymer, with old-fashioned strings that make noise by vibrating and causing echoes, and pegs to tune it. It has a bridge and a nut and no audio pickups at all. If we had to take it apart for consumables, Sally could print me another one as soon as we got back to port and filled our hoppers again.
That’s never happened yet, though. Space is scary. But not scary enough to eat my uke.
Not yet, anyway.
More importantly, I’m an okay-enough player that my shipmates don’t mind. Especially since I make sure I don’t
practice all the time.
That’s what VR games are for.
The sandbox-style ones are best for long trips, because you don’t run out of things to do. There are always more flowers to pick or butterflies to milk or coins to grind. My current favorite is probably kind of too much like my daily life to really count as recreation: it’s Orphan Queen, where you explore an abandoned space ship and find Mysterious Things. Well, that’s my favorite unless my favorite is the historical Fascism and Facsimile. But Melusine is great, too, especially the content tranche where you’re climbing around inside the giant clock in the palace walls. I have to play them all in single-player mode, unless Tsosie is in the mood, because you can’t exactly get a real-time network across hundreds of light-ans. I do some play by packet, too, which gets me some interaction outside of the ship’s community, even if it’s asynchronous.
I like my coworkers. But if you’ve never been trapped in three hundred and fifty cubic meters with five other sentients, I invite you to try it before you judge how far I’m willing to go to talk to somebody else once in a while. Loese and Tsosie have families; Hhayazh and Rhym have in-species social associations. I keep in touch with my daughter, Rache, but she’s at that age where she wants to prove her independence and autonomy, so I don’t find out much about what’s going on. And I get the sense that Rache feels I’m kind of an absentee parent, which… okay, fair.
Her other mom and I don’t talk much anymore.
The packet games are slow. I’ve been playing one particular one since I was in the Judiciary: it’s gotten through almost a whole week of game time now.
It’s nice to have the continuity through my life, however.
This trip, I didn’t get as much roleplaying done as I might otherwise. We were bending light with our speed, Sally putting her overclocked white coils to the test, the warp-striated bands of starshine from the galaxy outside our bubble scrolling past in a steady flicker. We must have passed pretty close to a star at one point, because it got so bright outside I thought we had somehow reached the Core much in advance of our ETA. Afar’s shielding held up, though, and his crew kept right on breathing.
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