In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  It matched Tyson’s mood perfectly.

  TWENTY

  Thuk masticated absently on the flavorless protein-stick hanging from his mandibles. One of the larger farm compartments in the ship’s thorax had been corrupted with rotting light before they’d been able to head it off. They’d lost two entire gim crops, and although the humans’ rotting-light-eating bacteria had worked a minor miracle cleaning up the mess, it would still take a moon to grow a new crop from scratch to harvest.

  They still had fresh greens and flowers, but no living source of protein. So, the harmony was stuck with survival rations for the time being. At least these new sticks had the advantage of being merely tasteless, as opposed to actively gut-churning as previous incarnations had been.

  It was, by any reasonable measure, the least of their problems. But food meant morale onboard a ship, and one could damn near plot a graph of harmony satisfaction to the quality of available food. When one slipped, the other was guaranteed to follow. The longer the harmony went without something wriggling to crush between their mouthparts, the darker their mood would become.

  Thuk held up the half-eaten, unappetizing twig and tossed it into a composter, careful to ensure no one saw him do it. If it wasn’t good enough for their derstu, it soon wouldn’t be good enough for any of them, not a situation he needed to encourage just then. He continued down the central spinal tunnel toward the Chusexx’s guts where he was supposed to meet a propulsion attendant who had made an impassioned plea to have the derstu come quietly and alone at once over a private line. Thuk had no idea what he was walking into, but at this point, he just went with the flow and hoped for the best.

  “Derstu,” the earnest attendant said as he arrived at the cavern he’d been summoned to, “thank you for coming. You didn’t have to.”

  Thuk sized up the attendant. A strong-back warrior caste like Kivits, missing a leg that had yet to grow back. Their shoulder stripes marked them as a group head, but they weren’t among the top-level leadership. Whatever they had to say, they were bypassing two levels of seniority to say it.

  “A harmony loses its tune if every voice isn’t heard.”

  “That is very wise, Derstu.”

  “And you are?”

  “Lynz, Derstu.”

  “Lynz. What happened to your leg?” Thuk pointed at the stump and the artificial sap protective layer the healers had slapped over the top of it to keep infection at bay.

  “Lost to an emergency hatch when the order came down to seal off the rotting-light corruption after the explosion.”

  An order Thuk had given. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. If it hadn’t closed when it did, I’d be dead already, along with everyone in my cavern. It’s my own fault for not being quick enough. Those things shut faster than I realized. The healers say it should grow back out in three or four molts anyway.”

  Thuk gestured approval with his midhands. “I’m impressed you returned to work already.”

  “It’s my work that I wanted to speak to you about, Derstu. Please, come this way.” Lynz took off down a side tunnel at an impressive gait for someone dealing with a missing leg. Thuk followed. “As you know, we’ve been running integrity tests on the annihilation fuel spools we had to replace after the accident.”

  “How is that proceeding?”

  “On schedule, just. But, I came across something in my inspection. Something that should not be.”

  Thuk felt the air chill. “We seem to be getting awfully close to the outer skin.”

  “Indeed. We’re going outside.”

  “We are?”

  “We are.”

  “Between the shells, or…”

  Lynz wiggled his shoulders in the negative. “All the way outside.”

  “How exciting…” All Xre ships, and likely human ships as well, were wrapped in double shells, an inner shell that acted as a pressure vessel for all the habitable caverns, and an outer shell that acted as a backup and mounted the heavy armor and the rotting-light sponges. A null space between them provided cold storage and access to much of the machinery for maintenance attendants. These null spaces were usually left unpressurized, but at least they weren’t exposed to the high-energy shooting gallery that was the vacuum environment inside a solar system.

  Thuk was not particularly fond of sticking his thorax in the universe’s face and daring it to run him through with a micrometeorite. Lynz reached into a storage box and came out with a pair of masks and lung packs.

  “We’re not doing full hardsuits?” Thuk asked.

  “No need, we won’t be outside for very long, and it’s not like they slow the pebbles down enough out here to matter anyway.”

  Thuk clicked his mandibles in agitation, but did not protest as Lynz helped position his mask and checked the seals. Amber lights inside his face shield display assured him everything was working properly. He reciprocated for Lynz, then double-checked the mouths and ears inside their kits to make sure they had solid communication. Belt tethers and sticky sandals followed, and moments later they were inside the lockout getting ready to go “all the way outside.”

  Xre bodies had evolved tough, but not even the original mound-builders had any idea just how tough they were. The overlapping layers of their shells made them impervious to vacuum. As the air was pumped out of the lockout, the only difference Thuk could feel was a slight bulging.

  With the air reprocessing capacity of their mask and lung packs rated at the better part of a day, the only limiting factor for their time outside was the cold. But the cold of outer space was a funny, counterintuitive thing. Vacuum was by itself an incredible insulator. Without an atmosphere to facilitate either conductive or convective heat transfer, all that remained was radiative. An object in vacuum took a surprisingly long time to cool to the ambient temperature, a length of time that extended further in the case of Xre, which generated some of their own internal heat.

  It was for this reason when the door fell away and Thuk followed Lynz out into the black, he felt … nothing. Nothing at all. Not cold, not the subtle, easily forgotten swirl of air currents around sensory cilia imbedded in his plates. Nothing except a slight ache in the softer tissues of his joints. The river of the galaxy cut a wispy cloud across the perfect black of the sky. The system’s star was on the other side of the ship, but even if it had been directly overhead, it was far enough away that it would be just the brightest of the pinpricks of light cast against the black.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been naked outside a ship, but it was still a supremely unnerving experience.

  “Okay, Lynz, show me why you dragged me out here, and be quick about it.”

  “It’s a short walk this way.” They clipped the ends of their tethers into runner tracks built into the skin of the Chusexx’s outer shell, a backup in case their sticky sandals failed for whatever reason. Just behind them and overhead was the backmost of the four rings that spun the ship’s seedpods, and would again soon with any luck. They walked further back toward the ship’s annihilation fuel containers and its mighty fusion motors.

  Under full power, the rotting light coming from the motors and source energy chambers would be lethal in the span of a breath on this side of the conical shield. But the chambers and motors were running at idle as they coasted toward the treaty line, awaiting completion of their repairs, signs of which were everywhere.

  Soon, they were underneath the giant armored shell that protected the annihilation fuel containers from enemy fire and space rocks alike. Seven giant, perfectly spherical vessels suspended within the structure by shock-absorbing legs held back unfathomable amounts of potential energy. Several grains’ worth of it getting out of containment before its time had been enough to almost destroy the ship outright.

  It was a dangerous job they did for the Grand Symphony, out here in the dark ocean.

  “It’s just ahead,” Lynz said through the small mouth imbedded in Thuk’s mask.

  Thuk looked ahead to where the
attendant pointed. A work light bathed the area in a harsh white glow that contrasted almost painfully against the surrounding dark. Thuk recognized the components.

  “That’s one of the transfer coils,” Thuk observed.

  “Yes, Derstu. I was assigned to replace it after the acci … incident.” Thuk noticed the change in words, but said nothing.

  “As soon as we cut thrust, I was sent back out here to run integrity tests on the new installation. But that’s not what I wanted to show you. I’ve found something. On one of the other coils.”

  They passed the work light, and continued back closer to the edge of the shield and the cluster of fusion motors. Lynz stopped and flipped on a small illuminator on his mask.

  “Here.” He pointed at an exposed panel and the tree-trunk-thick transfer coil below. Thuk got himself into a better position and peered into the space.

  “What do you see?” Lynz asked, annoying Thuk to no small degree. He was not a trained maintenance attendant, but he looked anyway. As it happened, he didn’t need training. Thuk leaned into the space to run a claw down the perfectly straight channel that sliced through the metal and ceramic of the coil.

  “It’s been cut.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “This isn’t naturally occurring? A meteor or other debris?”

  “Impossible, look closer at the grooves. They’re too regular. Those are tool marks from a rotary saw. And here.” Lynz pointed a claw at four pockmarks on opposing sides of the coil casing, easily missed until they were pointed out. “Those are depressions left by attachment claws like what we use for mobile repair rigs.”

  “Was someone working on this coil during the repairs? Maybe started work on it accidentally thinking it was one of the ones that needed replacement?”

  Lynz wiggled his shoulders. “Not possible. I already checked the work logs. No one came this far back.”

  Thuk did not like where this was leading. “Walk me down this path, Lynz. What are you thinking?”

  “It’s speculation.”

  “So, speculate.”

  Lynz paused, hesitant to continue, or maybe just gathering his thoughts. “I think something was placed here, a device of some kind, either remotely operated, or set to an internal timeflow meter. I think it was programmed to cut this coil, then either fall away, or it was knocked loose by the explosion in the other coil.”

  “Then why didn’t this coil explode also?”

  “It nearly did. Another leaf deeper and it would have. If I hadn’t found it, the coil was sure to fail after a few days, at most.”

  A chill went through Thuk’s shell that had nothing to do with the surrounding temperature. They’d almost died all over again.

  “So this couldn’t have been done in harbor, then.”

  “No, it would have failed long ago. This happened within the last few days, almost certainly at the same time as the explosion.”

  Thuk almost asked why someone couldn’t have come out here and cut it themselves, why it had to have been a remote device, but caught himself. Under full power, anyone on the wrong side of the rotting light shield would be cooked inside their own shell long before they got here.

  “Why two?” Thuk asked instead.

  Lynz shrugged. “Backup? Or maybe they were intended to go off together, but fell just enough out of harmony that one coil exploded before the other and jarred this device loose before it could finish the job.”

  “And if they’d both gone off at once?” Thuk asked, pretty sure he knew the answer.

  “Cascading reaction, every other coil fails in series as the fail-safe cutoffs are overloaded, failures reach the chambers. One goes up and we…”

  “Are all dust,” Thuk finished for him. “Could the humans have done it?”

  “When were they close enough? Before they came over to help with the restoration, that is. Besides, that would require an incredibly in-depth knowledge of our systems.”

  “Of course not.” Now, he was furious. They hadn’t almost died, they’d been meant to die, and only the thinnest reed of happenstance had prevented and allowed him to discover the truth. His worst, most outrageous suspicions about their assignment here and the reasons for their nonsensical songs from the Chorus were not the product of paranoia after all. Or rather, they were the result of entirely justifiable paranoia.

  “This is why you bypassed the rest of your group to come to me. You suspect one of them conspired. Who?”

  “I suspect no one, Derstu,” Lynz said quickly. “That would be wholly inappropriate and unjust. But, neither can I eliminate anyone from suspicion.”

  “A diplomat’s answer, Attendant Lynz.” Thuk came to a decision in an instant. He probably didn’t have the authority, but at the moment, he didn’t give a gim’s cloaca. “You are now in charge of all aspects of the damage restoration. You will sing directly to me on your progress and any other ‘discoveries.’”

  Lynz leaned back and held out his arms at a downward angle, signaling submission. “Derstu, I didn’t bring you here to usurp my highers.”

  “I know you didn’t. Which is why you’re perfect for the assignment. Daily songs, Lynz. And if anyone questions you or stands in your way, send them straight to me, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Derstu,” the attendant said in a tone that conveyed both resignation and no small amount of dread.

  “Can you fix the coil?”

  “Now that I know it’s broken, easily.”

  “Good. Do so. But right now, let’s return to the lockout. I’m getting cold.” As they marched, Thuk connected his mask’s link with the mind cavern. “Kivits? Are you there?”

  “I’m here, Thuk.” Oh good, they were back to names again instead of titles. “How may I serve?”

  “We need to hold a duet immediately. Actually, bring Hurg, too. We have a big problem.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “I’m not ready,” Elsa said as the pod sped along toward the Ageless auditorium at the heart of Methuselah’s entertainment district. Usually, it was the venue of choice for off-world bands and comedians making a stop on Lazarus along a multi-planet tour. Tonight, however, it would play host to thousands of Ageless shareholders, employees, contractors, Methuselah citizens, and interplanetary media for the company’s third-quarter stakeholder’s meeting.

  “You’ve already presented to the board,” Tyson chided. “Was that so bad?”

  “That was six holograms, not six thousand live bodies. I live in labs, Tyson. I don’t know if I’ve been in a room with that many people in my life. Much less with all of them looking at me.”

  “With the stage lights, you won’t be able to see past the second or third row anyway.”

  “That doesn’t help.”

  “Really? Always helped me in the beginning.”

  “Back when you still worried about what people thought about you?”

  “Well, yeah.” Tyson rubbed his chin. “I guess that was quite a while ago.”

  “Ugh. I swear if you weren’t funding my research, I’d slap the arrogant off your face.”

  “It would need to be a very hard slap. Any word on our … other project?”

  “You mean trapping Beckham?” Tyson nodded. Elsa’s face brightened conspiratorially. “I sent out feelers through some of my former classmates from grad school like you suggested and got a callback, complete with a new electronic routing address to Ceres, of all places.”

  “I thought he was on Mars?”

  “I suspect he has a ghost account and maybe even a love nest set up on Ceres. He’s going around a lot of backs to keep himself entertained, including his husband’s.”

  “Our playboy professor is married?”

  “His only visible means of support since losing tenure. Get a divorce and people will start asking questions about how he can afford his bubbler lifestyle, I imagine. Anyway, my old friend was an early conquest of his among our class, but she broke it off quick once she saw through his games. He’s been intermittently dogging
her ever since.”

  “She must have been memorable.”

  “She’s a goddess. I’m straight and I’d have a hard time turning down a chance to fuck her.” Elsa stopped, realizing what she’d said. Her cheeks flushed red, and she cleared her throat. “Anyway, she was only too happy to forward me the link address he uses to harass her, and I put it to good use.”

  “He replied to your offer?”

  Elsa shook her head. “Not yet, but with the coms delay, the very soonest I could’ve heard from him was the day before yesterday. And that’s assuming he has realtime access to it from wherever he is right now. If it’s a local net dropbox account, he may not see it until he’s back on Ceres. So I’m not really sweating it yet. Might not for a few weeks, really.”

  Tyson grimaced at the potential delay, but he knew she was right. There was no way to rush some things. In many ways, mankind had pushed out into the stars only to become reacquainted with old problems. Communication delays measured in weeks, bottlenecks, it was like they’d been uprooted from the Information Age and dropped right back into the age of sail.

  “Hey,” Elsa snapped her fingers. “Still with me?”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “Where did you go, just now?”

  “Nowhere, it’s just…” Tyson tugged at a lapel. “I’ve gotten some bad news recently, and I really need a win. Figuring out who’s behind the Teegarden attack would go a long way toward mitigating the damage coming down the pipe.”

  “You mean there’s more than just the pandemic and the Xre incursion?”

  “Oh yeah, a lot more.”

  “Like what?”

  “You can’t know, because technically, I can’t know for another few hours.”

  “And you’re not going to talk about it at the stakeholder presentation?”