Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  Phoshtha’s head dipped and curled as she turned around, seeking danger. Shtirk wasn’t visible; she must be on guard. Tananareve sensed no obvious threats, barring, perhaps, a whistling just at the edge of her hearing.

  Phoshtha wriggled to meet her. “Thisther knows computers-speak,” she said. “King of computers = persons. Will write thrust program for us quick, person-comp-adept, she is. Are you sick?”

  “Was injured,” Tananareve said. “Not sick. Am healing.” Both spoke in Bird talk, its trills and rolled vowels chiming like a song.

  “Is well we know.”

  The curved side of the cargo drone slid up with a high metallic whine. Green verdant wealth. The drone was filled, jammed with vegetation—live plants standing forth in trays, rich hanging streamers. Lights in the curved ceiling glared like suns. Thisther continued to work, and suddenly trays were sliding out and falling. Half the trays had piled up on the deck when it stopped.

  “Keep some plants. Air for us while we travel,” Phoshtha said. She wriggled away.

  Lau Pin jog-hopped in the light grav, springing over to help Tananareve. “You okay? Shall I carry you?”

  “I’m fine. What’s that whistling?” It was loud and now had a low rumble to it.

  “We need to get aboard,” Lau Pin said, glancing around at the snake teams at work. “Quick.” He tried pulling her along by her belt, desisted when he saw her pain.

  Tananareve walked over to a copper-hued wall, leaning against its warmth. The finger snakes chattered in their jittering bursts and oozed across the platforms with wriggling grace. She studied them amid the noise, and … let herself go.

  She was back in the leafy wealth she had grown up in and, yes, knew she would never see again. She allowed her head to tilt back and felt her spine kink and lapse as it straightened and eased. Amid metal and ceramics, she thought of green. This odd construction they were moving through, a weird place bigger than planets, had its own version of green paradise … and was the only reason she had survived in it. The vast, strange canopies with their chittering airborne creatures; the stretching grasslands and zigzag trees; animals so odd, they threw her back into her basic biology—they were all natural in some way, yet … not. Someone had designed their setting, if not their species.

  Those sprawling lands of the Bowl had been tolerable. These mechanical labyrinths below the Bowl’s lifesphere were … not. She had seen quite enough, thank you, of the motorized majesty that made such a vast, rotating artifact. Rest, that was her need now. She had to descend into blissful sleep, consign to her unconscious the labors of processing so much strangeness.

  She let go slowly, head lapsing back. Easing was not easy, but she let herself descend into it, for just a moment before she would get up again and stride off, full of purpose and letting no soft moments play through her … Just for a while …

  “Looks like the male is finished playing with the controls,” Lau Pin called.

  Dimly she sensed the snakes moving by her. Thisther wriggled into the hold … then Phoshtha and Shtirk.

  Tananareve came out of her blissful retreat slowly. Voices echoed odd and hollow around her. Lead infected her legs; they would not move without great strain. She made herself get unsteadily up onto two uncertain feet. Clouds in her mind dispelled slowly—something about green wealth, forests of quiet majesty, her parents …

  She made her chin snap up, eyes fluttering, back on duty … and slowly turned to survey the area. Where’s Beth?

  Clouds still grasped at her. Breathe deeply, keep it up.

  Tananareve strode off to check around some angular buttress supports. No human about.

  The snakes had crawled into the ship, fitting somehow into open spaces. Lau Pin jogged to join them. He glanced back at her, waved a hand, turned, went away.…

  Still there were clouds. She listened intently as she tried to put one small foot in front of the other. Remarkably difficult, it was.

  Rumbling, sharp whistling, chatter. Tananareve walked a bit unsteadily back toward the ship. Her vision was blurred, sweat trickling into her eyes and stinging.

  The great curved door closed in Tananareve’s face.

  “Hey,” Tananareve said. She stopped, blinked. Clouds swept away on a sudden adrenaline shock—

  “Wait!”

  The drone slid out of line and away, slow at first, then faster and faster.

  “Dammit!” she shouted. “Damn—” She couldn’t hear herself over a whistling roar. Hot air blasted her back.

  * * *

  “Wait!” Beth Marble shouted. She could feel the acceleration building. The finger snakes were wrapped around support pillars, and her crew were grabbing for tie-downs. She found handholds and footholds while thrust pulled massively at her.

  She wailed, “Tananareve!”

  “She was sick,” Phoshtha said, recessed eyes glittering. “Thrust would have killed her. She would have slowed us.”

  “What? You let—” Beth stopped. It was done; handle the debriefing later, in calmer moments. The snakes were useful but strange.

  They were accelerating quickly and she found a wedge-shaped seat. Not ideal for humans, but manageable. There was little noise from the magnetics, but the entire length of the drone popped and ponged as stresses adjusted.

  Lau Pin said, “I have SunSeeker online.”

  “Send Redwing our course. Talk to him.” Beth couldn’t move; she was barely hanging on to a tie-down bar. “Use our best previous coordinates.”

  “Okay. I’m having it compute from the present force vectors.” Lau Pin turned up the volume so others could hear. “Lau Pin here.”

  “Jampudvipa here, bridge petty officer. Captain Redwing’s got some kind of cold, and Ayaan Ali is bridge pilot. What’s your situation?”

  “We’re on our way. It went pretty much as we’d planned. Hardly anything around on the way but finger snakes. We’ve got three with us. Uh … We lost Tananareve Bailey.”

  “Drown it,” the officer said. “All right. But you’re en route? Hello, I see your course … yeah. Wow. You’re right up against the back of the mirror shell.”

  “Jampudvipa, this drone is driven by magnets in the back of the Bowl. Most of their ships and trains operate that way, we think. It must save reaction fuel. We don’t have much choice.”

  Some microwave noise blurred the signal, then, “Call me Jam. And you don’t have pressure suits?”

  “No, and there’s no air lock. No way to mate the ships.”

  A pause. “Well, Ayaan says she can get SunSeeker to the rendezvous in ten hours. After that … what? Stet. Stet. Lau Pin, we can maybe fit you into the bay that held Eros before we lost it. If not … mmm.”

  Lau Pin said, “The finger snakes don’t keep time our way. I think it’s longer for us. I’ll make regular checks and send them.”

  “We’ll be there. And you all need medical assistance? Four months in low gravity, out in the field—yeah. We’ll have Captain Redwing out of the infirmary by then, but it only holds two. Pick your sickest.”

  “Would have been Tananareve.”

  * * *

  The drone was gone. The system’s magnetic safety grapplers released with a hiss. Tananareve stood in the sudden silence, stunned.

  A high hiss sounded from a nearby track. She turned to find a snake to stop the drone, call it somehow—and saw no snakes at all. All three had boarded the drone. Now the shrill hiss was worse. She stepped back from the rising noise, and an alien ship came rushing toward the platform from a descending tube. It was not magnetic; it moved on jets.

  Tananareve looked around, wondering where to run. The ship had a narrow transparent face and through it she could see the pilot, a spindly brown-skinned creature in a uniform. It looked not much bigger than she was and the tubular ship it guided was enormous, flaring out behind the pilot’s cabin. The ship eased in alongside the main platform, jetting cottony steam. Tananareve wondered what she should do: hide, flee, try to talk to—?

  Then, b
ehind huge windows in the ship’s flank, she saw a tremendous feathered shape peering out at her, and recognized it. Quick flashing eyes, the great head swiveling to take in all around it, with a twisted cant to its heavy neck. She gasped. Memor.

  THREE

  Redwing looked out across the yawning distances, frowning.

  Far down, there were all the artful graces of land and sea, suspended before a warming sun like a rich, steaming dish offered on a steel-hard plate. Everything was larger, grander, and strange.

  The Bowl seas were light blue expanses larger than Jupiter, bounded by shallow brown edges. Across those ran arcs of grand wave trains, immense ripples that must roll on for years before finding a shore. At finer resolution, sediment plumes of tan and chocolate spread across shallow seabeds, feeding kelp straits of festering ripe green. Rumpled hill ranges were larger than Asia. Never driven by continental drift, these crosshatched the vast lands, carved by rivers that could cut no farther than the Bowl’s hull. Indeed, he could see places where wind or water had worn away the living zone, leaving patches of rusting metal. Under close-up, he and Karl watched teams repairing such erosions.

  The deserts were huge, too. Tan lands of grass went on over distances greater than the Moon was from Earth, with only dots of green beckoning where an oasis sprouted. Sprawling dry lands ended where water found its way to make moist forests. Storms spiraling in immense white-bright pinwheels churned with ponderous energies, raking across deserts larger than planets, and over forests so deep, no one could ever walk out of them.

  How did anyone design a thing like this? A vast trapped atmosphere, oceans the size of planets, lakes like continents, yet no real mountains—maybe that was a clue. Of course, putting an Everest on the Bowl would make it lopsided and complicate dynamics. There could be no plate tectonics and so no volcanoes, but how did this biosphere circulate carbon and water? On Earth, a complex cycle a hundred million years long did the job. As well, Earth’s tectonic ranges forced air over and around them, generating the moving chaos humans called weather. The Bowl’s dwellers did not suffer from mountain wind shadow, or the combing winds that raced through narrow passages. Mountains made for stormy trouble on Earth. The Bowl was a milder place than planets could be.

  But why build a whole contraption like this, when you could just move to Florida?

  The question wasn’t just rhetorical. If he could fathom what built such a thing, and why, he might have a clue about how to deal with them.

  Ping. His autosec reminded him of lunch.

  He thought of it as the mess, very old school, but Fleet said it was a Starship Wardroom. He sat as usual for Meal 47, his current choice: classic turkey dinner, rich cream sauce and cranberries. He made himself not think about the simple fact that it was all made of ingredients centuries old; after all; so was he.

  He had kept mistaking what Mayra Wickramsingh said at every meal: Nosh for me, it sounded like. After she and her husband, Abduss, went down in the disastrous descent to the Bowl, he had looked it up. The Linguist AI had a transform function, so it learned even through his mushy pronunciation; the AI found it was an Indian phrase, naush faramaiye, meaning “please accept the pleasure of savoring this meal,” which seemed like bon appétit to Redwing. Suitable. “Naush faramaiye to you all,” Redwing said, bowing his head. The crew bowed back. Clare looked puzzled.

  “Cap’n, I’m having trouble with the Artilect coherence,” Jampudvipa said.

  Redwing still used AI as a shorthand for the shipboard systems that patiently oversaw operations, since that’s what everybody called them when he was growing up. But Artilect was the actual Fleet term, since integrated artificial minds constituted a collective intellect. It was useful to think of the systems as different people, engaged in a constant congress, discussing the ship’s current state. “What’s their problem?”

  “They want to go back into full scoop mode.”

  “In a solar system? We can’t get the necessary plasma densities.”

  “I know.” Jampudvipa shrugged. “I think they’re showing mission fatigue.”

  “Have you tried to give them some shut-eye time, one by one?”

  “They resist it.”

  “Enforce it. Tell them they need a psych reboot, only make the language prettier.”

  This got rueful laughs around the wardroom table. “Diplomacy—not our strong suit,” Clare Conway said. She was more personable than most pilots, one of the reasons she had made the crew. Redwing had gone through her file while making his selection of whom to revive.

  Ayaan Ali frowned. “It is serious problem, Artilect coherence. They start to disagree, to have their own ideas—trouble.”

  “They want what’s impossible,” Karl Lebanon said. He folded his hands and leaned back against a bulkhead. As general technology officer, he shepherded Artilects through daily problems, plus a dozen other jobs. “We can’t go back to interstellar mode.”

  Clare sipped her coffee. “They have to adjust our ramscoop intake in ten-second intervals, to optimize. That burns their attention reservoir, makes their duty cycles long. Stresses them pretty hard.”

  “We’re getting system clash in our magnetic scoop system,” Karl said. “It’ll tire the Artilects and we’ll start getting torques, surges, inductive effects that wear down our gear.”

  “Same small-scale coil problem?”

  “Yeah. The system’s pretty stressed. Never made for this kind of low-velocity maneuvering. We can’t get into the magneto components to adjust them.”

  Clare said, “A mechanical problem, fixable—but only if we could get a bot in the inductive chamber. Those we could maybe make, but present bot complement can’t do it. That choice set is not even in the partition menu.”

  “We can’t downtime them?” Redwing knew the answer but if he let people talk, they felt better. All three chimed in with their versions of the same hard fact: A ship designed to work at interstellar speeds was a bitch to control in planetary orbit, and have any actual maneuvering capability. The Artilects were taking the brunt of it.

  Redwing nodded as each spoke but ran his own inventory as well.

  By this time his knees were sending angry messages that they wanted a trial separation. His weight workout this morning had pushed the limit too far, again. A warning sign: When he overexerted, he was working out unconscious worries. So he concentrated on Clare’s detailed tech talk and focused outward, nodding and keeping his gaze on her while thinking about all the crew. They worked well together, as the Psych Artilect Adept predicted, before Redwing had wakened the new members. How well would they do when Beth’s team came aboard? Only four left out of six, but—the ship would get more crowded and irritations would begin to build. He had a time window before he would have to decide whether to get out of this entire situation and cast off into interstellar flight again or—what? Go down onto the Bowl in enough numbers to accomplish a resupply and … what? Too many unknowns.

  He let the crew run on for a while, noting that their uniforms were getting a tad messy, hair uncombed, beards a few days old. He would have to sharpen them up a bit, and now might be the time.

  At least this crew would look better then, when and if they got Beth’s team aboard. They’d have to double on berths. Working spirit and order would be more difficult. A clock would start ticking.

  He said mildly, “Officer Jampudvipa, with the Artilects going moody, should we be letting them run the bridge alone while we have lunch?”

  Blinks, nods. Jampudvipa looked rueful, mouth turning down, and got up hurriedly. “Yes, sir. They’re in collective agreement mode but—yes.”

  That let him focus on the others. “Beth’s team will be aboard in a few hours. That’s if we’re lucky and solve the problem we have to focus on now. Still, I want everybody spruced up—clean, shaven, bright eyed.” Nods all around, some repentant. He turned to Karl. “But the major problem is, how do we get them aboard?”

  “I’ve got her photos of the vehicle they’re in—bas
ically, a magnetic train car with locks facing outward, to vacuum,” Karl said. “But they don’t have their suits. The aliens, these ‘Folk,’ took those at capture.”

  “So…” Redwing let them think a moment. “Can we match velocities and run a pressured conduit?”

  “Not easily.” Karl’s mouth fretted as he thought. “We’ve got EVA gear, sure, but it’s one-man, for repairs.”

  “How about the Bernal?” Clare asked. “It’s for freight transfer, but we could maybe refit it for a fix-up flexi passage.”

  “I don’t trust anything flexi to stand up to torques and stretches,” Karl said. “If we try it, yes, Bernal is the best craft.”

  Redwing had used the repair bots to inspect SunSeeker’s hull soon after entering the Bowl system, and he privately agreed with Karl. In interstellar mode, their strong magnetic fields had kept the ship from the blizzard of neutral atoms and dust. SunSeeker was less effective dealing with erosions while it maneuvered at low thrust around the Bowl. The externals looked pitted and scarred now, and he wondered about whether the repair bots could spot flaws that could prove fatal in a personnel transfer. Or if the flexi would sustain pitting from random debris. A thousand questions nagged at him.

  Redwing said, “We could try a fit with our dorsal hatch. We’d have to rig some kind of docking collar.”

  This they liked. Redwing let them toss ideas around for a while as he tried to envision exactly how that configuration might work. Ayaan Ali had little to say, but he saw a quick widening of her eyes and nodded at her, holding up a hand to draw attention.

  “I … have an idea,” she said quietly. “But we must work quickly.”

  FOUR

  Beth watched the Bowl’s outer hull, a fast-forward world flittering by below the hard black of space. Even protrusions the size of skyscrapers were just passing gray blurs. In contrast, though the Bowl itself had a surface rotation speed in the range of many kilometers a second, the array of gas clouds and nearby suns hung still. Even high speeds on the interplanetary scale meant nothing to the solemn stars.