It’s not every dia that you get to go for an EVA stroll around the outside of a gigantic space station. In short order, the branch I had been climbing joined the lift trunk. I paused at the top—or, from my perspective, the bottom—to take in the view.
Core General swooped and bulged over my head, incomprehensibly huge, like a world looming over my shoulder. Beneath my feet, beyond the silvery band of the trunk, the Core danced with all its millions of stars. Even though I was partially in the shadow of the trunk, my hardsuit cooler whined with the strain of so much insulation.
My exo gave me a squeeze, reminding me that the extra acceleration wasn’t helping my joints any. I tore myself from the spectacle and kept on walking toward the station’s nadir. Sally could handle this on her own. But I admit: even with all the mysteries stacking up, I was curious about this one.
It was easy to spot Afar, even in the distance. His cargo doors were open and a swarm of drone tenders moved around him, pulling the packing gel loose in wide chunks and long foamy strands. I could have tapped into the output of one of them, but I wanted to get a look at the craboid with my own eyes—and not a lot of senso—before we brought it inside.
Another ladder got me down to the cargo bay in time to watch the last of the packing material peeled away. Now that I was looking at it in person, the craboid seemed even bigger and spikier than I remembered. As I climbed up to it, a cloud of drones arose like flies off a corpse, leaving the clean-picked-looking carapace of the walker behind.
Now we only had to get Sally talking to it, assuming there was anything in there to talk to. Or controlling its electronics, if it was just a drone.
I had magnetized some specialized equipment to the outside of my hardsuit in areas that would be out of my way until I reached for them. Here in the shadow of the hospital and the cargo doors, my suit’s heater took its turn to complain. Still better than being inside, with Afar’s gelid atmosphere leaching all the warmth out of me.
I peeled a set of induction patches off my hardsuit and applied each of them separately to the craboid’s chassis, scrambling around it to get them as close to opposite one another as possible. The drones had withdrawn to a safe distance: Linden was paying attention, then. I followed suit, climbing down to the edge of the cargo hold and using one door for cover.
“Clear,” I told Sally.
“Active,” she replied. “I’ll see if I can use the patches to access the thing’s processors.”
“It might have some.”
“Ugh,” she said, cheerfully. “I get enough of that from Hhayazh. Signal is getting through the patches, so that’s circumventing at least some of the shielding. If I can’t just talk to it, then I should be able to use electromagnetism to move it by brute force— Oh, hey, I already have an electronic handshake.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it acknowledges my contact. And, now that I’m past the shielding—that is an intense level of shielding, by the way!—it’s easy to talk to.”
“That was a little too easy.” I frowned.
“Standard Synarche protocols. At least I’m not going to have to write the code for this one.”
So it wasn’t some kind of weird alien spaceship parasite. It was just a surface vehicle with a super unsettling design.
Sure, that was a fine explanation.
“You don’t suppose this is some kind of exploratory vehicle, do you? Designed for ox breathers on a cold methane world?”
“Survey equipment?” She hrmed. “That would explain all the legs. Designed for any kind of terrain, and manipulating its environment, and even a bit of earthmoving, hmm?”
“Hmm,” I agreed.
“Okay, are you ready to bring it around to the machine bay?”
* * *
The craboid followed me out the open cargo doors, across Afar’s hull, and (using its own maneuvering jets) across the gap to Core General with no incident. Under Sally’s puppetry, it stumped along behind me like a weird pet, or like some sort of limpet monster from a poorly produced horror three-vee.
It did not, however, pry the hospital apart, or punch through the hull with a needlelike proboscis, or behave in any sort of an uncivilized manner at all. It walked behind me, climbing courteously through the machine bay airlock when Sally directed it to, then settling down on the deck and resting quietly there while we set up the isolation zone.
“Can you convince it to give us an atmosphere sample?” I asked Sally.
“There’s no airlock, and I can’t get the pressure door to respond,” she answered. “That appears to require some sort of manual override failsafe code which I can’t quite crack. There’s no AI in here: it’s just a machine.”
“A vehicle, not a person.” Disappointment has a metallic tang.
“Vehicles can be persons, as you know perfectly well,” Sally replied tartly.
I supposed it was better to imagine the craboid empty and waiting than to picture it as home to a lonely and terrified presence that might be in there peeking between their appendages in bewilderment, presuming they had both peekers and appendages to peek through.
“There must be some way to open it from the outside,” I said. “Otherwise you’d go EVA in a hostile environment and come back to discover you’d locked your keys inside.
“And then you’d die.”
“Yes, but whatever the code is I do not have it. It might be a DNA lock, for all I know. So it’s brute force all the way around,” Sally answered. “Want to have a go at it?”
The machine bay had a me-compatible atmosphere, but I didn’t bother deactivating out of my hardsuit, because I wasn’t through with it yet. While drones pitched a containment bubble around the craboid, I fetched a sampling drill from an equipment locker. The drill was too massy to stick to my turtle shell. It’d be in the way, and I didn’t want to carry it around.
By the time I was armed, I had to come back toward the craboid via the airlock built into the bubble. I made sure the interior flap was secured shut behind me before Linden pumped her own ox atmosphere out and pumped a nonreactive nitrogen atmosphere in.
I rigged the drill, set up a brace to hold it in position, and stepped back before triggering.
The bit was diamond grown around a nanotube lattice for tensile strength. It whined against the hatch, a sound that scraped through my magnetic soles and my eardrums to vibrate along my bones and make my back teeth ache. It would have been even worse inside the craboid, so it was just as well there were no passengers.
The idea was that I would drill a very small hole in the craboid, enabling me to get a sample of the atmosphere inside. Then we’d have a better idea of who might use such a thing.
I was a little concerned that the craboid might be programmed to take evasive or defensive measures. But it stood there and waited quietly while I worked to pry its carapace open.
Right up until the drill bit snapped.
A piece of bit ricocheted off the deck plates and the craboid while I, reflexively, cowered. I got lucky: it pinged off my hardsuit, then lodged in the flexible collar of the nitrogen bubble’s lock. No hiss of commingling or escaping atmosphere followed.
Sally was immediately in my senso, asking if I was all right.
“Fine,” I said. I touched my faceplate. The drill bit had taken a tiny, glittering chip out of it right in the most distracting possible spot, but it wasn’t cracked or cracking, and it hadn’t gone through and taken out my eye. So that was lucky, and the hardsuit would heal itself quickly. “The drill bit broke. That’s not supposed to happen. Even if the diamond shattered, the nanotubes should hold it together.”
I pulled the bit out of the collar material and examined the broken end. Under magnification, I could see that the nanotubes were sheared off a little above the surface of the bit. The stub, still gripped in the drill chock, showed the same damage. It looked like the tubes had been stretched slightly. The ends looked slightly deformed, as if they had been pulled apart rather than clea
nly cut.
“That’s definitely not supposed to do that.” I hooked Sally into my senso feed and got Hhayazh with her. I let them use my eyes to inspect the damage. “It looks like something weakened the structure of the tubes.”
“Vibrations?” Hhayazh asked.
“Harmonics, you mean?” I frowned through the chipped faceplate. “Maybe? Well, nobody died. I don’t know how we’re going to sample that atmosphere, though.”
“Sally’s density readings give it a pretty standard oxygen saturation.”
“A little rare for my tastes, but yes,” I admitted. “Figuring out what the atmosphere is made of from how fast sound waves go through it is not as certain as actually getting your hands on a little bit of air and running a few tests, however.”
Hhayazh made one of its noises, the kind that might mean exasperation or might mean amusement. “Well, we could get out a laser torch—”
“I don’t want to be in the neighborhood if a cutting beam starts ricocheting around!”
“Fine, just wait for it to open up on its own. That seems likely.”
“Don’t get your ovipositor in a twist, Hhayazh.”
Through our connection, I sensed Hhayazh’s bristles waving like the cilia on a paramecium. “I’d parasitize you, but my offspring might grow up to have your sense of humor.”
“I thought your species didn’t eat sentients.”
It made the expulsion of air that was its species’s equivalent of a disgusted snort. “We don’t.”
I was framing a retort, still standing there with the snapped drill bit in my left hand, when around me the atmospheric pressure abruptly changed. A grinding sound followed, shivering through the bulkheads. I took a clanging, magnetized step back. Polymer stretched against me, arresting my movement.
Llyn, report, Sally snapped.
The inner flap of the isolation bubble was against my back. I couldn’t open it, because whatever happened, I was in a hardsuit and most of the staff and patients in Core General’s ox sector were each in their own equivalent of shirtsleeves. I had to keep my crew safe from whatever pathogens or poisons might be contained inside the walker. Not to mention the atmosphere.
“You were saying?” I grumped at Hhayazh. Then collected my irritation, and said, “The airlock seems to be opening.”
For no reason that any of us could detect, the hatchlike portion in the craboid’s belly had dropped down and was sliding to one side.
In a haze of decision paralysis, I froze. I didn’t know what might be coming out of the craboid’s belly hatch. I didn’t have the least idea if I was going to be confronted with a patient in need of care or a pissed-off soldier with a shock prod or a swarm of flesh-eating battlebots. Or all of those things simultaneously, for that matter.
I scrambled to come up with a response. The hatch glided open, spilling a warm, mellow golden light into the much less pleasing ambiance of machine bay lights filtered through isolation tent.
Something atavistic and planet-bred in me relaxed at the color of that light. It was foolish; it was illogical. And yet I found myself letting out the breath I had reflexively taken, and lowering the hand with the drill bit in it. I’d been holding it up like a sword, as if such a ridiculous weapon were going to be good for anything.
I felt confident that whoever liked that light liked golden beaches shimmering under yellow suns and long luminous slanted autumn afternoons. Whoever liked that light came from someplace like Terra, and I felt at home with them even before Sally said, “Well, that’s one way to sample an atmosphere.”
Smugly, she revealed an analysis that—once we deducted the nitrogen from our containment bubble—was only a few points off from her initial estimate. The craboid was (or had been, until it opened up) chock-full of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide—an atmosphere that might have been a copy of Terra’s in any number of geologic epochs.
My pulse was still racing. I waited, trying to slow my heart without resorting to tuning. The biofeedback worked as long as I concentrated on my breath. In a few seconds, I had collected myself enough to try to peer into the spill of radiance and get a glimpse of the inside of the pod.
It was like trying to stare into the proverbial tunnel of white light. My vision swam; there was nothing within except brilliance. Maybe it was supposed to decontaminate the hatchway.
“Nothing’s coming out,” I said after a few minutes during which nothing had come out. “I’m going to go look inside.”
“Be careful,” said Sally, while Hhayazh muttered a comment about humans being too dumb to die.
“Hey, it’s my job to climb into questionable structures.” I stepped under the curved forward edge of the walker pod. I looked up, and peeked inside. At first, the light was too bright for me to see anything. “I’m going to poke my head up.”
“Maybe send a drone first?” Sally said. She didn’t wait for my request, but zipped one right past me and made a right-angle climb toward the hatchway. I hadn’t even noticed it hovering behind my shoulder until it moved.
It passed through the hatchway. There followed a sharp electrical pop, and it passed through the hatchway again, this time in the opposite direction. Falling.
The drone struck the polymer over the deck plates with a thump.
I froze.
“I recommend that you don’t stick your head in there, Dr. Jens,” Hhayazh said.
“Thank you, Hhayazh. That sounds like excellent advice.”
“Can you see into the pod?” Sally asked. “What can you make out in there?”
“There’s a lot of glare, but it looks like a couch and a console. And some cargo space, which is empty, but there are straps. What are you picking up?”
“Nothing,” Sally said.
I stepped back away from the hatch, out of an abundance of caution. “But how is that possible?”
“The interior is still electromagnetically shielded. But this whole situation makes me uneasy. We’ve hauled a whole lot of weirdness back to civilization, and I’d really like some insight into how two ships and two crews were mysteriously disabled, and what exactly this walker is for. I don’t like mysteries.”
“I love ’em,” I said. “I like the satisfaction of solving them. I’m not feeling a lot of satisfaction right now.”
“Go get decontaminated,” Sally said. “I’m going to turn the craboid over to a research team. Let their drones get electrocuted for a while.”
CHAPTER 12
DECONTAMINATION WAS PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD. THERE are stalls all over Core General—near every equipment locker, and at every transition zone between environments. Sally herself is designed to decontaminate everything that comes in or goes out, if necessary.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to get my hardsuit irradiated. Just doused in a little antiseptic and scrubbed down, so it was over quickly. I returned to Sally, left my hardsuit in my locker, and argued her out of a rest period on the grounds that I was supposed to report to the Administree.
Reporting to the hospital administrator didn’t involve anything so commonplace as taking a lift to an office. There was a lift—funny how we still use such antiquated terminology in an environment with no up and nothing to lift against except spin, and for a transportation pod that goes in all sorts of directions—but where it disgorged me was back to the outermost layers of the station, far from the machine bay or even the docking stations.
This was not an office, but a park. An upside-down sort of park where the sky was underfoot and the grass grew over your head. One of the weirder things about getting your gravity from spin was that when I came out of the lift I had to walk down a curved ramp to the transparent outer layer of the station. Having accomplished this, I had the unsettling option of looking down past my feet at the outside, or even lying down and pressing my nose against the shatterproof lumium for a more comfortable angle.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t here to bask in the view. I was here to give a report, and I knew it. I had hopes of avoiding being cal
led on the decking… but time would indicate whether I would get away with my hide intact. I didn’t know that I had done anything wrong, but getting a note from your boss that says “See me” is never a pleasant experience.
Core General’s administrator would not have fit in the office I mentioned before. To be fussily precise, they also did not fit entirely into the park. But a lot of them did, and the majority of their organs of sense and thought were concentrated here.
I stepped off the bottom of the ramp, walked a few steps over the whirling, vertiginous space below to free up the landing for anyone else coming or going, and craned my head back at the ceiling.
Or rather, at the whispering canopy of leaves largely obscuring the next-innermost onion layer of Core General. The leaves, shiny and green-violet, rustled as if there were a breeze behind them. I could make out the windows beyond, leading to levels inhabited by a variety of different species.
This far out and on this side of the hospital, they would all be carbon dioxide or other compatible metabolisms if they weren’t ox types like me, and they would all be species who could tolerate a certain amount of grav and rads. But that was where the resemblances between them would end. I could make out lights intended to mimic the illumination of a dozen suns without turning my head. Soft gold and pink were, to me, the most appealing, followed by the glow my eyes—being adapted to it—saw as a pleasant, neutral white. There were other colors—by my standards worse colors—actinic or merely unpleasant.
We ox breathers shared our habitat sector with not only the carbon dioxide metabolisms, but with a couple of weirdies who breathed nitrogen as well. (No, I don’t know how you use nitrogen as an energy catalyst: I’ve got enough to do keeping track of the various oxygen metabolisms I come in contact with daily.)
The section admin I was craning my head so far back to look up at was one of the CO2 breathers, albeit one without any lungs. Core Gen’s administrator for my bio type, as well as allied and complementary bio types, was a really, really, really big tree.
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