“Who’s paying?” asked Sorrel.
Airey clapped Klom on the shoulder. “Why, Klom of course. He’s the one who saw the unknowable face of the deva. He’s the one who’s going to get rich!”
The gangboss for Klom’s shift was a Quetzal from Muntjac, named Rapaille. The amputation of Rapaille’s wings necessitated by a clumsy curandero after a barroom brawl had long ago left the avianoform ill-tempered and unforgiving. As meager compensation for his lost wings, Rapaille spent every last spare taka and paisa to adorn his priapic cockscomb with a variety of gaudy baubles. Today, setting out for their first foray to the Vixen hulk, Rapaille wore several sparkling garnets and a lozenge of nightmare amber piercing his fleshy ruff.
Aboard one of the wallowing, unroofed ocean transports, still docked, Rapaille marshaled his workers, a motley pack of hard-limbed bmisers representing a dozen heterogeneous races. Mounting one of the grimy seats to command more attention, Rapaille commenced a small speech. His beak clacked between syllables, and his narrow orange tongue stabbed the air.
“Listen closely, you scuzz-buckets! This ship has already been partially stripped by its former owners. They’ve taken most of the furnishings and fixtures. You won’t find any old nesting materials to sniff, nor any dainty female undergarments to hug to your bosom.”
An anonymous voice called out, “How about wings? Any chance of glomming a pair of those onboard?”
Rapaille scrunched his beady eyes and gurgled wordlessly, before regaining his self-control. “Quiet! The next wisecrack will earn someone a lost shift! Pay attention! It is equally unlikely you’ll discover any valuable personal trinkets or artwork, although I don’t rule out a few overlooked nanosculptures or parasite jewelry. So you might as well just forget about such easy booty. Any individual performance rewards will come from the neat and speedy accumulation of well-known structures. We’re after control ganglia, matter-modems and entertainment nodes, for instance. Nexial splitters pay well too. Several teams have already been dispatched to handle the disentanglers and decoherers. Other groups have been assigned the bridge. But aside from those areas, we have free access to the rest of the ship. Our goal is to finish over the next few months at the same time as the others, so that we can all move on to breaking up the hull itself. Do you all have your downloaded ship schematics?’’
Several breakers held aloft their industrial-grade readers, battered boxes good for little more than displaying pre-formatted audiovisual files. No ensouled devices were to be found on Asperna, at least among the lower castes.
“All right, then! Take your seats, and we’ll be off!”
Before Rapaille could step off his own bench, Klom pushed forward through his fellows to confront the gangboss. Strapped across Klom’s massive torso were various prybars, clamps, spreaders, holdfasts, desiccant packs and other tools. Slung in a holster at one hip was his bulky watercutter.
Even atop his seat, Rapaille found himself staring at Klom’s chest rather than his face, until he raised his scale-rimmed eyes. “Yes, our big empty-headed man-ape from Chaulk. What do you want?”
“Are we allowed to go into the decommissioned areas?”
Rapaille let out a tweet of amazement. “The decommissioned areas? What are you interested in? Dust and bones? Faded signage and outmoded tech? Slavering senescent slop? That’s all you’ll find there!”
Klom blinked once, then said, “Are we allowed to go into the decommissioned areas?”
The Quetzal screeched in frustration, his wing stubs twitching beneath his embroidered shirt. “Go anyplace you want, you unreasoning curdled egg! But you’ll never earn more than base pay if you persist in this foolish strategy. And my own bonuses will fall accordingly!”
Klom said, “I will be going into the decommissioned areas then.” He sat down, occupying two seats.
Muttering, Rapaille signaled liftoff to the transport’s pilot—a diminutive Melungeon with one tendril wrapped around a joystick and five others free for the separate controls. The transport lost mass until it floated half a meter above the waves. Surging forward through a channel opened in the baffles, the craft headed toward the Vixen ship. The Great Sun and the Lesser Sun raised the temperature of the air to a comfortable, shirtsleeve level. By the time the Least Sun arose, rendering the muggy atmosphere tropical, the breakers would be taking their lunch deep within the hulk.
The crossing of the kilometer of open water by Klom’s craft and its mates resembled the engulfment of a school of minnows by a leviathan. The minor-city-sized disabled starcruiser—with the waterline halfway up its height, and its lower portions resting on the seabed—thrust out artificial peninsulas and lesser promontories. Once into its shadow and embrace, the transports assumed the insignificance of ticks on the hide of a Dominikono widestrider. Additionally, the ancient interstellar vessel seemed to be reradiating all the immeasurable chill it had accumulated over its millennia of high vacuum service.
It would take the gangs nearly a year to finish stripping the interior of the craft, and another six months to disassemble its hull. Of course, the whole process could have been accomplished in a fraction of that time by employing sufficient swarms of self-replicating majestatics. But such technologies—along with ensouled machines—were forbidden to anyone not at least a fourstrand. And the fourstrands and other galactic elites were both relatively small in number and disdainful of performing any such “labor,” even distanced by layers of autonomic supervisors. With the fecund and subservient twostrands so handy, it only made sense to keep them profitably occupied.
The Yards at Aspema not only saw ships come in, but also go out, as salable constituent pieces. Brokers arrived and departed continuously, both from offplanet and from other parts of Aspema, leaving with cargoes for a hundred thousand destinations. Workers in the warehouse and sales end of the Yards felt their positions to be superior to the gritty, effortful tasks of the breakers and sorters, and a rough caste system existed, further fragmented into various levels according to the perceived crudity of assignments.
Klom’s boat arrived at a sloping paw of the inorganic leviathan. Far, far above them, a different portion of the starliner formed a concave roof. A shoulder of the starliner constituted a distant wall running roughly parallel to the arm. A chaotic illumination came into this partial gallery as sunlight refracted from the bouncing sea.
The Melungeon shut down the lifting units, then secured the transport by a cable to a handy U-bar on the Vixen vessel. The breakers utilized the fractally porous surface of the starcraft’s skin as handholds and toeholds to climb up several gently sloping meters of wall, their tools racketing against each other. Once aboard this small leg of the starliner—broad enough to host a ballgame—they waited for Rapaille’s commands.
“Follow me, you wittolds! The nearest port is just a few minutes’ walk in this direction.”
The paw sloped upward, the roof sloped down, and the shoulder angled in, rendering the passage more tunnel-like the further the breakers progressed.
Klom marched at the head of the line, looking about with a kind of patient curiosity. He had taken apart a dozen ships so far in his career at the Yards, and he fully expected to take apart a few dozen more, before he got too old for the work. Each ship possessed its own personality. Klom assumed that by the time he was done breaking down this vessel, he would know good-sized portions of it as intimately as he knew his mother’s house in Chaulk. Paradoxically, the ship would no longer then exist to be known. Such conundrums did not bother Klom.
Faded Vixen script, each character tall as a man, ran across this segment of the deck. Klom turned to the breaker next to him, a blue-haired, ice-skinned fellow named Nyerephar, a mixed-breed Human and Pinemarten from Frostholm. Nyerephar had a reputation as an intellectual, given his predilection for offshift downloading into his reader of novels of interspecies romance, many of which originated with the Vixens.
“What do these words say, ’Phar?”
Nyerephar smoothed his long ju
tting whiskers before replying. “It could be the ship’s name. Yes, that’s it, I’m sure. This is the ship’s name.”
“And what is the ship’s name, Thar?”
“‘Caution Discharge Zone.’”
“Thank you for telling me this.”
Soon the breakers arrived at the port. Standing outside in front of the entrance was an enormous matter-modem: a cube with one mirrored face.
Delivered earlier from the Yards, the teleportation device stood ready to receive any unliving object carved from the ship. Its mates, tunable at will, stood ashore, near the sorting lines. Very useful devices, integral to the functioning of most economies of the Indrajal, the matter-modems were subject to two major inconvenient limitations. They only operated over planetary distances, and they were death to anything living that attempted transit.
Now the matter-modem, sensing their presence, activated itself. Fed from the other end, a fleet of lifting sledges came thru the mirror face. Each breaker stepped up to take a floating sledge for carrying booty.
Rapaille triggered a Vixen wall control marked by a new slash of red spray paint, and the port hobermanned open. The black interior of the powerless ship beckoned like the afterlife. The breakers lowered their miners’ lamps onto their foreheads and switched them on, flooding the scene with actinic light.
“Rendezvous back here at twenty-nine hundred hours. And remember! This was a luxury vessel intended to pamper its patrons, not a Scryer dreadnought bristling with weaponry. Nonetheless, you can die just as swiftly from a falling girder as you can from an antipersonnel wasp!”
One by one, with Klom leading the way, the breakers stepped inside.
Klom grunted hoarsely as he completed his climb. Sweat rivuleted his skin, and a musty odor compounded of stale lubricants and malnourished organic units pumping out ketones made every breath an exercise in disgust.
The ship schematics on his reader had informed him that the ladder he had just topped ran for a kilometer and a half in a narrow shaft slicing through innumerable decks. The swiftest way to the closest decommissioned area, the ladder had seemed a gift when Klom stood at its base. But now, as Klom labored to catch his breath on a platform above 1500 meters of nothingness, the ladder appeared more like a poisoned fruit. Even Klom’s work-hardened muscles quivered from the gmeling ascent. Had his lifter fit into the narrow shaft, the ascent would have been trivial. Now, though, Klom was fatigued before he even began whatever labors awaited him.
Klom broke out his water bottle and a beancake. The water, sterilized by passage through a matter-modem, still retained the distasteful taints of decay and the metallic flavors of the marshes from which it was drawn. But this was the only drinking water available to the bustee- dwellers of Klom’s caste. After so many years in the Yard, Klom was inured to the taste. But he still recalled the pure waters of Lake Zawinul with each sip.
After consuming the last crumb of beancake, Klom stood and faced away from the shaft. The door at the end of the platform presented itself as his next challenge. Klom looked for some control similar to the one Rapaille had used outside, but no such mechanism showed. It did not take Klom long to decide to cut his way through.
The watercutter hanging from Klom’s belt was a simple pistol-shaped device with a second grip up front for two-handed use. Klom had wrapped tape around the butts for firmer purchase. He fitted a pair of scratched plastic goggles over his eyes, braced himself against a convenient strut, then triggered the cutter.
Out of its nozzle leaped a needle-thin jet of water possessing the destructive power of any stream of collimated subatomic particles, without any inconvenient radiation.
The closed end of the watercutter’s barrel was a tiny matter-modem synced to another resting in a deep-sea trench where the water was at several dozen atmospheres of pressure. Only breakers of Klom’s raw strength could handle this device, whose light weight and inexhaustibility were unmatched by any other cutting tool.
Klom inscribed a crude circle in the wall just big enough for him to crawl through. A salty mist enveloped him, making his footing and handholds tenuous. Practically at his elbow, the echoing drop into space awaited his first slip. But Klom coolly persisted. Finally finished, he kicked the circle of metal inward. Gaily colored fluids from severed conduits dribbled into the opening, where once, when the ship was under power, they might well have gushed. Klom squirmed through this mild dribble without concern.
On the far side, he found himself in a giant auditorium or ballroom or refectory, whose vast confines his headlamp barely illuminated. This room had been in active use right up until the end, but the decommissioned area lurked just beyond its remote wall.
Klom crossed the wide floorspace, the beam of his lamp picking out various columns and stubs of fixtures and some discarded artifacts which to a less ambitious breaker would have represented adequate salvage. But with Aireys tactics fixed firmly in his mind, Klom zeroed in on the mysteries of the long-sealed chambers.
A little searching revealed a door concealed behind a sagging arras that depicted the hunting of some spiny beast by a party of Vixens, the bushy tails of the hunters plaited with colorful streamers. The door—sealed with a blobby gasket of silicone—boasted a still-active glo-sign, but not in Vixen script. Half the letters in the independently powered message were dead with age, while the rest exhibited only a marginal brightness. But Klom could not have read the warning or advice even if active, so ancient and foreign was the script. So without any hesitation, he simply cut his way past it.
The space on the far side of the door, a corridor, was proportioned for creatures somewhat smaller than Klom. The big man had to hunch as he advanced. Dust lay thickly underfoot, and the air smelled of the slow disintegration of unnatural materials. The walls of the corridor were etched with shallow glyphs, as if the beings who had once traversed it had relied on tactile clues more than visual ones.
Some years ago, Klom had helped disassemble a Pingpank ship that featured similar carven icons, although much cruder. But the Pingpank had been extinct for five hundred years, and at the time of their disappearance had represented the degenerate offspring of a much more sophisticated race, the Marchwardens. If this were Marchwarden text, then the decommissioned segment of the ship had last been occupied over a millennium ago. Without any exo-inputs, even generations of invisible repair majestatics would be reaching the end of their preservation efforts.
Open arched doorways began to appear. Klom cautiously poked his head through each one. Most of the chambers were of moderate size, and easily scannable for booty. In one such, Klom found several crystal eggs harboring strange animated scenes flickering wispily in their centers. These he placed in a carrying pouch. But the majority of the chambers were utterly bare. Klom began to suspect that Rapaille’s harsh words held more accuracy than Airey’s optimistic encouragements. Nonetheless, he continued his search.
The corridor dead-ended at another door. Klom saltily sliced through it, the runoff from his cutter turning the dust at his feet to a thin river of mud.
Pushing the cut circle of metal clangingly inward, Klom was met by a gust of pungent atmosphere. He stepped warily inside.
Instantly Klom knew he had found a vivarium.
From the walls of the tall, extensive chamber hung a variety of suspensor-sacs, all of them, sadly enough, in various stages of decomposition. Klom walked over to the nearest such: the withered reticulated vesicle ripped apart easily under his big hands with a noise like shredding a few dozen thicknesses of paper, and a shower of skeletal fragments fell out, clattering noisily on the floor.
Klom kicked the bones in frustration. So far he had wasted nearly half a shift and discovered nothing to justify his efforts. At this rate, retirement with Sorrel to Chaulk seemed destined never to be more than a dream.
Wearily, Klom sat down and took out another beancake.
The majestatic that appeared hovering over his beancake resembled a thumb-sized golden bee. Klom jerked back, dropping
the food. The majestatic levitated the cake and flew ponderously off with it.
Klom jumped up and followed.
Clinging to the far side of a massive pillar, a live suspensor-sac served as the focus of a thick swarm of shining majestatics. The agravitic attendants ranged in size from dust particles to hummingbirds. They wreathed the sac in a life-supporting cloud. Already Klom’s lunch was being disassembled into its constituent nutrients to benefit the sac.
Why this one vesicle had survived, Klom did not know. Perhaps it had sent taps into the pillar supporting it, finding its necessary sustenance elsewhere, in the active portions of the Caution Discharge Zone. But whatever anomaly was responsible for extending its life beyond its mates, the sac represented a potential treasure.
Inside, a living mature being awaited rebirthing. For some unknown period, the metabolism of the concealed creature had been stepped down to nearly flatline levels, with interior majestatics tending to various cellular repairs as necessary. Given adequate resources, the upper time limit on sac containment had never been established.
Klom advanced on the sac, then stopped. He could not simply rip it open, he realized. How was he to get the vesicle to awaken and safely discharge its patient?
Filled with a fierce wanting, Klom hung his head and cudgeled his thoughts for a solution.
Suddenly his vision was obscured by a shifting haze. A portion of the turbulent majestatic swarm had englobed his head.
“Please,” said Klom aloud, “deliver your burden to me. This ship is dead. We are going to chop it up. Your charge will die.”
Spinning in arcane patterns, the majestatics seemed to consider Klom’s request, before rejoining the parent cloud.
Instantly, the vesicle began to undergo changes. Veins throbbed athwart its surface, swaths of livid color flowed across it like storms across a gas-giant planet, and a musky, urinous odor arose off it.
A split developed along the bottom ridge of the vesicle, widening quickly. The next instant clotted crimson and purple fluids gushed out, splashing Klom’s workboots, followed by the plopping thud of a body hitting the floor.
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