by Alex Oliver
"Item nine in my plan," the doctor said, reaching over his back for the bag he was carrying. "Was of course to pack hand-holds for you too."
"And some water?" Yas delved into the bag with great hope, but apart from the holds it contained nothing interesting to him, just components, a scalpel, and several rolls of bandage and suture.
"Water is not a factor in navigating corridors. It is extraneous, extra, surplus to requirements."
Just the mention of water had Yas swallowing again. But he smiled with determination and told himself that the repair labs had water on tap. If the doctor could manage without legs, he could manage for a little while with dehydration.
"Is it safe out there?"
"Insofar as the invaders have returned to their ship, yes," the doctor said, pulling himself up to the door with arms that had all the piston-like mechanical strength of carbon-steel. He latched one hand-hold to the wall, held on to it and reached back to pull Yas out by the arm. Yas dangled briefly over the five hundred meter drop to the inner hull before he swung his own holds to the deck and activated the grip. Painstakingly, with aching arms—on Yas's part—and sparking wires on the doctor's, they inched their way down toward the spinal elevator shaft.
"Who attacked us?" Yas asked. "I didn't think we'd have pirates all the way out here on the fringe of the galaxy."
"Data incomplete; no conclusion possible." The doctor swung down tirelessly as the piece of machinery he was. "But historical re-enactors, I would have said, if their ship had not been..."
"If their ship had not been what?"
The doctor turned up his face to watch Yas follow him, and the emergency lights tracked star patterns through the network of cracks on his faceplate. "I hesitate to say. I believe my sensors may have been malfunctioning. I wish you to have the data raw so I may recalibrate."
That wasn't ominous at all.
Yas's arms were ready to drop off by the time they reached the elevator and fell into it. But he said nothing; he was well off in comparison to the doctor. Punching in the directions for the repair lab, he sank back against the floor with a sigh of relief. There was something to be said for being afraid for himself, hurting for himself. It kept the other reasons why he might be afraid out of his head.
"Can you sense anyone out there?" He asked the doctor when the lift's cab slid to a halt.
"Can you?" it said, dismissively.
He couldn't. Now they were out, the Raggy felt like a ghost ship. The gurgle of coolant through the pipes was the only sound they didn't make themselves—the excessive heat did seem to be easing now.
Silently, the walls and ceiling rearranged themselves as a quiet force picked the entire ship up and reorientated it. When it had finished, down was down again—they stood on the floor in what seemed slightly more than one gee. And still there was no sound of movement at all.
"Do you know of anyone who can toss a ship around like this?" Yas asked. His own briefings certainly didn't.
"Data necessary before analysis," the doctor said, motioning for Yas to go ahead of him. “And repair essential before data collection.”
Yas took a deep breath and stepped out of the elevator into the atrium of the repair labs. Keva would have been in here when the intruders came, and there had obviously been a fight—the door was torn off its hinges and the walls were scorched black. The rain of blood came back to him as he stepped into the lab, hoping not to find the cyborg engineer dead.
But the lab was empty. Anything left on the tables had been swept to the floor. A hand-print in the metal edge of a bench which lay on its side by the door suggested it had been lifted and tossed. Bloodstains marred the floor beneath it, but there were no bodies.
Yas went straight for the molecular printer and dialed up a glass of water, which he drank in three swallows, watching as the doctor dragged himself onto the repair bench. Yas took a second drink and then printed a ration bar and swallowed it in three bites before he thought about tackling the repairs. He had to give his body something, if only to stop his hands from shaking.
"Well?" the doctor asked, once he was lying in the gully of the steel table like the piece of precision engineering he was. "Ready?"
"Yes, sir." Yas fed the glass back into the demolecularizer. "What should I do?"
Under the doctor's direction, he located the bin of spare parts and brought over replacement legs. They were modular in design, attaching to universal joints at the knees and the hips with a simple magnetic latch. But the doctor's hip-sockets had been wrenched out and there was nothing for the legs to snap to.
"You'll have to remove everything below the waist and replace it," the doctor said blithely. "My pain sensors are off, so hammer like a hammerhead shark if you need to."
The waist decoupled with several bolts, and the wires of the nerve pathways had to be detached first. Yas began nervous that he would do more harm, a little squeamish. But once he had started it was like servicing any machine. Even if it was one who gave him slightly tart praise and advice as he went. Once he had got over the idea that he was reassembling a person, finding the right spanners was the most difficult part.
Meanwhile, the doctor had plugged himself into the ship's main computer for diagnostics and for updates on what was happening outside. "Ah," he said, as Yas finished detaching his ruined lower-body and shouldered the replacement pelvis onto the table. "Sensors at least recorded the capture. Let me play it to you, and tell me what you see."
One of the nearby screens came alight with a star-scape of the very edge of the galaxy. The Milky Way squirmed right across the center of the screen in a flattened dome of light beyond which it seemed there was nothing but ultimate darkness. And out of the darkness came a paw.
Yas hissed, dropping his spanner. His heart drummed in his ears as he bent to pick it up, his eyes fixed on the unbelievable image.
It blotted out the disk of the galaxy behind it—a black cat's paw with claws that glimmered like diamond. As it came out of the darkness, more of it was revealed like a hole in the stars. The shape of a panther, but a panther the size of Australia. Yas closed and rubbed his eyes, incredulous, and when he opened them it was to see a second impossible cat next to the first.
They had... he balked at the impossibility of it. They had golden harnesses around their shoulders, and from the harnesses a tracery of rope stretched back to the golden bars of a—
"I don't believe it," Yas exclaimed.
"You don't believe what?"
"It can't be a cart."
But that was what it looked like. The vessel being pulled by the cats was square and blocky and hung in the void of space on gargantuan glowing wheels that turned slowly as he watched.
"Describe the cart?" the doctor asked. Yas guessed that the doctor's perception check was going about as well as his was.
He shook his head. "It looks, I don't know. Primitive. I mean, the wheels are solid, and the golden sides of the thing look like they've been carved out of wood."
It was the most ridiculous sight. To Yas's eye, the cats seemed to be alive. They moved like the felines he had seen in the zoo, their pointless tails waving against the stars like dust-clouds and their blue eyes focused disquietingly on the Raggy. But to the ship's sensors they registered more as engines, putting out a wide spectrum of power readings and a puzzling lack of mass. The chariot read like a space station. Despite the open top, a forcefield—or perhaps its own gravity—seemed to be holding down an atmosphere. There might be cities down there, with barracks in the wheels and God-knows-what in the main body of the craft.
"I mean, am I seeing things?" Yas asked, turning back to clipping the doctor's lower body back in place. It went in easily, which was good, because he could not stop thinking of the glimpse he had seen of the disappearance of Dezba's ship. This vessel that messed with gravity? Could it have been the temporary mass that had disarranged the planets around it? Could this be where she was?
He lifted the doctor’s right leg to its socket with hands s
o sweaty it almost slid out. Then the left.
"Tell me if it's what you're seeing too."
The doctor took his time to snap nerve and power cables to his legs and rotate the feet and knee joints. He sat up slowly and pushed himself off the table to standing. By the time he had retrieved a new face-plate from its bin, Yas was ready to scream, not knowing whether what he felt was hope or despair.
"Tell me!"
The doctor's human face flickered to life as he replaced the plate. It was grave, concerned, maybe even sympathetic, and Yas wanted to tell him to switch it off and just be honest.
"I see a giant chariot pulled by cats," the doctor said at last. "Felines, felicitations, felis catus—possibly panthera. Which is a scene straight out of Norse mythology. The possibility that this is a database glitch is remote, since you see it too."
"Norse mythology?" Yas was not familiar. His family had been on Nahasdzáán for three hundred years, that was more than enough time for Earth's history to become mostly irrelevant to him.
"According to primitive societies of the Viking age." The doctor reproduced someone else's sneer. "The goddess Freya drives a chariot pulled by cats. It would accord with the dress and behavior of the people who boarded us."
He flipped the screen-view over and showed Yas a record of the invaders pouring into the Raggy's corridors as though they were pouring off a longship. Humans, certainly, with long, braided hair, wearing chain mail and welded helmets with spectacle masks. He caught—with relief—the fact that they were fighting to capture the crew. Watched Captain Harcrow take down four of them with his blaster before he was driven into a net on a cross corridor. Keva got seven, and was downed at last by a bolt of light from the tip of a spear.
"Pretend Vikings," the doctor said, dismissively. "Some reclusive colony has taken its admiration of its ancestors too much to heart, I feel."
But Yas rewatched the capture with eager eyes and an almost painful hope like a ball of nails in his chest. If this was the ship that had been behind the disappearance of Dezba and her crew, and if their practice was always to capture and not kill, then...
"She might be in there, alive. My sister might be alive!"
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Chariot
Though Yas fought to get more information out of the sensor array, the chariot continued to be mostly opaque to all their probes. "Stuff is happening in there," he conceded eventually, "But I can't see what clearly enough to make any sort of map. We're going to have to go over and physically look for them on the ground."
"The vessel is approximately the size of Mercury," the doctor objected. "Assuming a population density equivalent to the Ragnarok, the chance of randomly running into our own crew members? I hate to say 'astronomical' in this context, but..."
Yas was still new to the Raggy, but the ease with which he pulled up a guide to the nearest airlock reassured him. "There'll be maps on board. An on-board computer we can hack. Or at the very least people we can get to tell us. It has to be better than sitting uselessly over here and watching."
The doctor withdrew its power and information cables from the wall and tucked them back into their covered compartments. It looked oddly mismatched, with everything below the waist shiny and everything above faintly dusty and covered in the nicks and dents of wear. Its face bore laughter lines around its eyes, but as it was pasted on to an aluminium head, the laughter lines just looked like false advertising.
"You don't need the face, you know," Yas said. He'd been told frequently that his lack of tact was an issue that would hold him back from higher command, but right now tact seemed like the coward's way. "Did you choose it? Because it doesn't seem like you."
The face smiled reassuringly. The doctor gave an electronic snort that sounded like the rattle of pins in a tin. "You organics have to accept the divergent and mismatched parts of yourself," it said. "Why should I not? The face is for your convenience, not for mine. It is supposed to provide a 'human touch.' And it was your psychologists who felt it was necessary. I am neither sensible nor sensitive about it."
"I guess," Yas admitted. He wondered if it had had this discussion with the rest of the crew, or if he was the first one to try to think of it as a real person with its own choices. None of which was relevant right now. "Well, you do what you feel right, I guess. Are you ready?"
"I am. I point out that I am in fact your superior in rank and therefore you should be answering to me."
Yas paused with his hand hovering over the lift buttons. Huh. Maybe he wasn't as free of prejudices as he had thought. It had not occurred to him to take orders from it, rather than the other way around.
"But I am optimized for medical decisions and ruled out of most command subroutines, so I will follow your lead for now."
"That's cool," Yas said, rubbing a hand through his hair, a little shaken in his self-belief and vowing to remember this as a lesson. "I guess you don't need a space suit?"
"No, but I will wear one so that there is a spare to be given to another crew member."
Down to the B deck airlock, and into the suiting up area they went. Here, enough suits for each crewman were ranged on racks about the walls, where the ship's computer could continuously check on their safety. Yas took down the largest--obviously made so that it would slip over Keva's exoskeleton--and helped the doctor into it before he donned his own. Though the computer verified a correct use, they checked each other's seals nevertheless. One couldn't check too often.
Outside the reinforced glass in the airlock door, they could see a slice of the great left wheel of the chariot. Raggy had been pulled into a locked position with her 'down' orientated to the hub of the wheel. The strange, glowing metallic material was barely two hundred feet away.
"Maybe we should take suits for everyone?" Yas suggested, dithering before entering the airlock proper.
"In planetary gravity? Do you suggest you could carry them all?"
That was a good point. Yas had been assuming that they could hold them together with nets and float them over, but 'over' was down from here, and he wasn't sure how they were going to get back up with only themselves to haul, let alone a half-dozen suits.
"Never mind. But we'll need a ladder."
Fortunately there was a rope ladder in the equipment silo. They carried it into the airlock together and hit the controls to close the inner door and empty the air. When the outer door opened it was like squinting into a sun. Yas's face-plate polarized automatically and he hung his legs out of the doorway while the doctor deployed the ladder. From this close, he could see carved detail on the face of the wheel--animal interlaced decorations the size of city blocks. The very rim of the wheel cut off the galaxy behind it like the sun coming up.
Something flickered between his feet, and looking closer he saw what might have been a train heading up from the hub to the rim of the wheel. His heart leapt. He had been wondering how long it would take to tramp from here to the open rim of the chariot. Would they have to walk for weeks, running out of air all the way? No, a train would improve everything.
Slowly, as they inched their way along the ladder, the surface of the wheel became clearer. It was covered in buildings. It was, in fact, one huge golden city, with lighted windows and traffic in a grid pattern across its plains. As they came down among the buildings, it was strange to look upward and see the Raggy surrounded by a thin blue sky just hanging there with a ladder like a hair dangling from its lower airlock. A huge scout ship should not just hover two hundred feet above ground, but it was.
The doctor tapped him on the faceplate when they landed on a surface that rang like bronze. "There is atmosphere," he said. "Expose your dermis to the oxygen. Indications are you may wish to move swiftly."
The air as Yas released his helmet smelled like spring flowers and just a hint of the sea. The temperature, after his stuffy suit, was blissful—bracing with a hint of chill.
A swift assessment of where they'd landed showed him single story dwellings fronting o
nto a magnetic track. Just opposite was one of the stopping places of the train they had seen. The dwellings were bronze to roof level, and above they were some kind of luminous straw. Straw huts? On a space-faring cart? It hurt his mind.
A little down the road, a kink in the walls proved the only hiding place he could see for the suits. They bundled them in there and headed for the train platform.
But the doctor had been correct. Obviously, one didn't descend from a space ship into a residential neighborhood without being observed. The moment they began to move off, the doors around them were thrown open. The people who came out seemed human enough. They were wearing rough woolen clothes in muted colors, leather boots and belts. Not exactly war-like except for the fact that they all carried weapons. Spears, axes, even a couple of bows.
Yas had not yet been issued an officer's stunner, and the doctor was forbidden not only by the NXA's rules but also by his oath from doing harm. They backed toward the train platform.
"This might have been a stupid idea," Yas admitted, somewhat heartened by the fact that no one in the crowd had shot him yet.
"That possibility is high." The doctor scoffed. "Shall I give the traditional greeting?"
"The what?" Yas asked. For all his frantic repetition of 'please come now, please come now' to the Yeis of the train, the line lay dormant behind him, and on the other side of the platform yet more natives were pouring out of their houses and workshops. They didn't look exactly angry, or shocked, though one or two were holding up children and pointing at the Raggy, as if the capture of spaceships was a novelty to them. But the weathered faces in the ring of weapons-bearers who were closing around Yas told him that the capture of people was nothing new. There were all sorts in the crowd, brown faces, black and white, women and men, but every one of them looked like they could handle themselves, like the weapons were not for show but had been long used and practiced.
The doctor raised his hands and a moment later, Yas followed. This might be a stupid idea, or it might just be the quickest way to find out what was going on.