Noa drew in a breath. “I see. Then it is because I happened to be here that you asked me to stay back.”
“That is not what you thought, a moment ago?”
She shook her head. “I thought…” She swallowed. “I thought you would be angry.”
He glanced at the recycling mouth. “I see.” Then he stood properly. “This way. We have a meeting to finish and less time now than I thought we would have in which to finish it.”
She had slowed him down. Noa could feel her cheeks heating as she followed him back across the office, around the desks centered in the room. He didn’t go back into the big room, though. He pushed open the door to the Captain’s office and held it aside for her. “Hurry up,” he said shortly.
His brusqueness confirmed her minor role as a suitable by-stander. It reassured her. She moved into the Captain’s office with a nearly steady heart.
The other two who had been asked to remain were sitting in chairs opposite the huge desk occupying most of the space. Noa recalled their names. Paderau Zingle and Bannister. Zingle had her arms crossed, although she seemed to be relaxed enough.
Bannister, the astro-physicist, was speaking to the Captain, who sat on the other side of the desk. “If what holed us came from outside the ship, then that puts us in an awkward position,” Bannister said, wrinkling his big nose.
Noa stood close to the door behind the pair of them and listened.
“You mean, it raises uncomfortable questions about what we’re doing to stop it happening again?” Captain Owens’s voice was smooth and mellow.
“That, too,” Bannister said. “Masud, the splinter I gave you…?”
Magorian pulled something from his pocket and put it on the table in front of the Captain. Then he stepped back to the side, too.
Owens studied it, but didn’t touch it. “This created the hole?”
Zingle shook her head, making her hair clamps jingle. Her hair was pinned to her head with tankball clamps, keeping the flaming red curls out of the way for work. Most women did some version of clipping, clamping or tying. Noa found it easier to keep her hair short. Zingle, though, was a big woman and not particularly feminine in appearance. She would favor longer hair to compensate.
“That came off whatever made the hole,” Zingle said. “It’s perfectly safe. We irradiated it and scoped it. It’s solid and quite inert.”
Only then did Zsoka Owens reach out to pick up the splinter. Her lips parted. “It’s metal!”
Bannister nodded. “Turn it over and look at the broad, flat side.”
Owens did so, then peered closer. “Is that…a seam?” she asked, with wonder in her voice.
“A welded, sealed seam,” Bannister confirmed.
She looked up. “That would make this part of our ship, then? Ottman was right? It was an object under pressure?”
“It’s not ours,” Zingle said with complete certainty make her voice almost flat. Noa admired her for her confidence, in the face of a doubting captain and a troubled Chief of Staff.
“Why not?” Magorian asked sharply.
Bannister answered. He didn’t look at Magorian. He looked at the Captain. “It’s not plasteel. It’s steel.”
Noa could feel her mouth popping open as the Captain’s had done. “That’s impossible,” she said, very quietly. “There’s no steel left inside the ship.”
Zingle glanced at her. “It is impossible, for some very interesting reasons. As soon as I saw what it was, I presumed that the metal was from us, just as Ottman claimed, only from outside the ship.”
Captain Owens gave one of her full and beautiful smiles. It was just as dazzling in person as it was on screens. “Pretend I am not an engineer for a moment.”
Noa said, “In the last three hundred years, since we perfected the growing of plasteel, we have slowly replaced the original steel components inside the ship for plasteel—except the bulkheads and hull, of course. They are what is left of the original ship. They are the ship.”
Captain Owens looked at Zingle.
“Yes, that is correct,” Zingle said. She glanced at Noa. “Most people are not aware of that, though.”
Noa shrugged. Her face was burning again. “I have a friend who studies metals and plasteels to make jewelry. She told me.” She pointed at the splinter that Owens was turning over and over. “That could not have come from inside the ship, because there isn’t any steel left to break off. If something made of steel broke loose, it would be part of the wall of the ship itself and we wouldn’t be talking about a little hole. Two little holes.” Noa swallowed. “We wouldn’t be talking at all.”
“Quite right,” Bannister said crisply. “For the same reason, it isn’t a part of the outside of the ship, the way Zingle thought it might be…and for additional reasons that are irrefutable.”
“Go on,” Owens said, putting the splinter down.
“It’s a matter of physics,” Bannister said, rubbing his nose. “Very simple physics, actually. Stuff you learned when you were still waist-height. The Endurance is moving through space at fantastic velocity. I don’t remember the actual rate. I know it’s a high percentage of the speed of light and it took nearly seventy years to complete acceleration. Remember putting beads in an open box and pulling the box, when you were a kid?”
“All the beads rammed up against the back of the box,” Owens said, with a reminiscent smile. “Until you pulled the box very slowly.”
“Inertia,” Bannister said, with a sharp nod. “The beads stay where they are once you have the box moving and you can drag it along faster and faster as long as you don’t accelerate too swiftly. We’re the beads, of course. Slowing down will take us another seventy-plus years, when we get close to Destination.”
“And that means the hole was not caused by something outside the ship breaking loose?” Magorian prompted.
“What the beads in the box didn’t fully explain,” Bannister said patiently, “is that anything attached to the outside of the box comes along with us at the same speed. Even if it was to break off, it would still move at the same speed as us and in the same direction, because there is no force being applied to slow it down or make it change direction.” He moved his forefingers together through the air, then let one veer off very slowly. “Eventually it would drift away, as space currents and gravitational pulls had their effect. Only, for a good long while it would look as though it was simply floating next to us.”
“No pressure,” Noa murmured.
Bannister nodded again. “Exactly. In order to hole the ship through and through the way it did, the object had to have been moving at colossal speed. Maybe, even faster than us. Plus, it was moving in a direction that intersected ours. We just happened to be in the way.”
“You mean someone was shooting at us?” Captain Owens asked. For the first time, she showed more than gracious patience. There was a spark in her eyes and her voice rose with concern.
“No, no…not shooting.” Bannister pushed his hand through his hair. “They really should insist people learn a little more basic science,” he muttered. “Long before we get to specialize.”
“Granted, but that’s an argument for another time,” Magorian said. “Go on.”
“There’s a lot of junk in space,” Bannister said. “From micro particles, to space dust, to mini asteroids the size of your thumb, up to asteroids larger than planet-bound moons. Planet-sized asteroids, too. Some of them are made of rock, some of ice and some are made of metal. It’s all out there. That’s why Terra mined the Asteroid Belt in the Sol system. That’s where most of the metal came from that this ship was built from. All of that junk is floating around space.”
“It’s a wonder we don’t get hit more often,” Owens said.
“We do,” Bannister said simply.
Everyone looked at him, their eyes opening.
“The ship has force fields that fend off anything up to tankball size,” Bannister said. “Anything larger than that shows up on long range forward sca
nners and the ship steers around it.”
“I did not know that,” Magorian said, sounding winded.
“No one does,” Bannister said. “We’re victims of our own success. The ship has been efficiently steering us and fending off objects for hundreds of years, letting us get on with living inside it. The only reason I could tell you that much is because it’s part of our training. It’s part of the history classes we suffer through.” He held up his hand. “Before you ask, I don’t know what has changed that allowed us to be holed. Something has changed, though.”
Owens touched the splinter with her finger. “This steel was formed by an intelligence of some sort, yes?”
“It might,” Zingle said. “We need to analyze the metal further. What looks like welding and a seam might simply be molten slag running down a freakishly smooth face of a metal pebble. I’ve seen stranger things emerge from the plasteel ovens.”
“There’s not enough of the splinter to determine anything, except its components,” Bannister added.
“We should do that, at least,” Magorian said. “It might give us a direction for further investigation.”
Owens put her elbow on the desk and her chin on her fist. “How do we investigate further? How do we establish exactly what happened?”
Bannister grimaced. “The report that is about to hit your desk tomorrow will be full of ideas, most of them useless because no one is thinking about the outside of the ship. No one has had to think that way, for generations upon generations. Now, we must think that way.”
“Where do we start?”
“There are two things we should do,” Bannister said. “Both of them are near impossible.”
Owens looked grave. “Go on.”
Bannister held up his forefinger again, this time vertically. “One. Someone has to sit down and interrogate the navigation AI on the original Bridge. Ask the thing what is going on, why we were holed. I guarantee the AI knows what is happening out there.”
“And that is near impossible?” Magorian asked. “It seems relatively simple, to me.”
Bannister sighed. “The AI uses legacy coding. It’s an original component of the ship. It’s older than the ship itself, most likely, because it would have been trained in astro-physics and stellar navigation even as the ship was being built.”
“You mean, no one on the ship knows legacy coding at all?” Owens asked, sitting up.
Bannister shrugged. “Some of the organic coders might, but I doubt it.”
“Why?” Magorian said in the same sharp voice as before.
“It’s not an organic code,” Bannister said, sounding apologetic. “The stuff they write, these days, can mimic human intelligence. It’s far more useful than legacy code.”
“In effect, then, we have an AI that knows the answers and no one who can talk to it,” Owens summarized.
Noa cleared her throat. “I know someone who might be able to talk to it.”
Bannister laughed. “Really?”
Noa straightened her back. “Really,” she said flatly. “Lizette taught herself all sorts of coding stuff, everything she could find. She has always complained, though, that the coding institute keeps the most up to date developments locked up with them, which forces her to study outdated codes.”
“And she might have learned legacy coding because it’s freely available?” Bannister asked, sounding amused.
“You’d be surprised what the Forum Archives holds,” Noa said defensively. It had been Cai, the reader, who had switched them all on to the curiosities and bizarre data to be found there.
“Ask your friend,” Magorian said. “Find out if she knows the coding. Otherwise, we’ll have to go digging through the archives ourselves and assign a coder to learn the stuff. That will delay our answers for a good long while, yet it’s the most direct path to the answers we need. Bannister, you said there were two things we could do?”
Bannister nodded. “The second one is simple. Well, it will be when we solve a few issues around it.” He looked at the Captain. “We’re going to have to go outside and take a look around for ourselves.”
Owens let out a breath. “No one has been outside the ship since it left Earth orbit,” she said. “I’m not even sure how we do that.”
“Whoever goes out there will need a pressure suit,” Bannister said. “They’ll need their own air supply, because there’s no air out there. That’s a problem, right there, because if there were ever any pressure suits on the ship, they were recycled a long time ago and I wouldn’t trust my life in one if they are still around. We’re going to have to build suits. Then we’re going to have to figure out how to get outside the ship, because that knowledge was lost a long time ago, too. Then we’re going to have to figure out how to stay alive while we’re out there.”
“If we have suits and air, won’t we just drift alongside the ship, as you said?” Zingle said, asking the very question Noa had wanted to ask.
“Until whoever is in the suit makes any sort of movement at all. Then they just drift away…and there’s no way to come back, once you do,” Bannister said.
“Tethers,” Noa said. “We could use tethers.”
Bannister stared at her. She could see his frustration in the tight curve of his jaw.
“It’s an elegant solution,” Magorian said.
“The simplest solutions often are elegant,” Owens added.
Bannister was still staring at Noa. “I don’t suppose you have a friend who knows how to work outside the ship, too?”
He was being facetious. Noa could feel the heat creeping up her throat as she fought to contain her indignation. She reminded herself that she was here in this room because Daniel had died and she had promised him she would find answers. “I don’t think anyone knows how to do that,” she said. “But I want to learn. I want to be the one who goes out there.”
Her stomach swirled uneasily. She was starting to sweat again.
Bannister snorted. “You?”
“I’m an engineer.”
“A mechanical engineer,” Zingle, the software engineer, said.
“Which means I get things done. You want someone out there who can use tools. The ship’s best analyst would be useless, anyway.”
“Another good point,” Captain Owens said, her tone calming. “The decision on who goes out there doesn’t have to be made right away. The challenge of building pressure suits must be met, first. Then we can decide.”
“It might be useful to keep Ms. Doria involved,” Magorian said in a soft tone meant just for the Captain. “She has a point about the use of mechanical engineers. Ottman is a closed mind. He would slow things down.”
Owens nodded. “Very well.”
Magorian turned to look at the three of them. “Thank you for your input. Zingle, see to the analysis of the splinter, would you? Bannister, set up a team to come up with a design for a pressure suit, as soon as you can. Days, not weeks, thank you.”
Bannister looked as though he wanted to protest. Instead, he nodded and sighed.
“Noa,” Magorian said. “Find out if your friend knows legacy coding. Report back to me in person, tomorrow.”
“I could find out right now, if I can use a terminal,” Noa said.
“Not now,” Magorian said. “You need to take the night to say farewell to your friend.”
Noa sighed. She had been trying not to think about how she was going to tell the others what had happened. Magorian had reminded her.
“What was your friend’s name?” Captain Owens asked.
“Daniel,” Noa said. “Daniel Merryn.”
“I will keep Daniel Merryn in my thoughts,” Owens said. “We will all be taking the night to reflect upon this day and what it means.”
Chapter Six
Noa didn’t have to tell anyone. News of the holing had passed through the ship with more than the usual speed of gossip. There were people walking through the Field of Mars, their heads craned to see the dark green square on the roof, which looked
small and insignificant from down on the floor. She could see them milling in the back alley as she crossed the open space in the middle of the Capitol markets, heading for the Midnight Garden.
It was earlier than usual, yet everyone was already seated around their pair of servery tables. No one was smiling and Ségolène’s face was wet with tears, on both sides, which made the scarring glisten.
“You heard,” Noa said, her heart sinking.
Cai pulled out the chair next to him and patted it. “It’s not your fault. The whole ship was talking about it and…well, he’s not here where he would normally be.” He gave her a hard hug and let her go.
Lizette handed her a glass with green tea and honey in it, with a small smile. “They say it was fast…?” Her voice rose, making it a question.
“I didn’t see it happen,” Noa admitted. “I saw him afterward and I know, now, how fast the object was moving. I think it must have been instantaneous.”
Ségolène drew in a breath that shook with sobs and raised her glass to hide her face. She sipped from it.
Peter hung his head. “Such a stupid way to go…” he muttered.
Cai put his reading board on the table and turned to face her more directly. “You said you know now how fast it was going. What does that mean?”
“It means I was just on the Bridge, in a meeting with the Captain and her chief of staff and some others.”
Everyone looked at her, showing disbelief or confusion.
“You were on the Bridge?” Peter repeated. There was a touch of awe in his voice. “You?”
Cai shot him a frown. “Let her explain,” he said shortly.
“Explain everything,” Ségolène said. “All of it.”
Noa lifted her tea. “I’ll need more of this, then.”
She told them all that had happened, from shortly before the holing, to finding them here in the Garden. At first, she tried to gloss over Daniel’s death and the moments she had spent crouched over his body, yet Cai in particular asked direct questions. Noa stopped editing herself and told them everything. It was easier that way. An odd relief flowed through her when she was done, too.
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