The Wolf Itself (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 1)

by mikel evins

  As soon as we were strapped in, Kestrel levitated the sled, and Chief Verge and Chief Engineer Burrell came in to attach and adjust weights to move the sled’s centroid around and stabilize it. They fastened heavy gyros to it at a couple of places. We really didn’t want it to tumble when Kestrel flung us out into space.

  They double-checked all the fittings and the environment systems and the little engines that would provide the final stage of our velocity matching. They poked at the membranes that would provide a congenial environment for the biologicals, popping them out and checking them, letting them deflate and stow themselves.

  Chief Engineer Burrell was a youthful woman with ivory-colored skin, thick black hair cut very short, and black eyes. She had the pointed ears and almond-shaped eyes that were so common in Jove system, the reason that Reds liked to call them ‘elves.’ She was older than she appeared, a fact that showed in the lines around her eyes and in her subtle sense of humor. She knew maintenance procedures for mechs and biologicals as well as I did, so it was a comfort watching her double-check our attachments and ports.

  After a few minutes it seemed the two chiefs were satisfied. They withdrew from the cargo bay and left us floating.

  “Ready for a thrill ride?” Jaemon said. His voice on the Fabric channel sounded as natural as if he were standing right next to me, speaking into my microphones. We heard a slight hiss as Kestrel’s pumps evacuated the bay. The membranes popped out around our couches and inflated, giving each of us a small, independent environment. I swiveled my head, locking my cameras on each of the others in turn. They seemed less concerned than I felt, which was a little odd, considering I was the only one on the sled who could survive in open space without a membrane.

  We were all bound tight by our acceleration mesh, hardly able to move. Sled control—what there was of it—would be through Fabric links. I had the primary pilot’s controls, not that there would be all that much piloting to do.

  “Thirty seconds,” said the Chief over the link. The big bay doors cracked open and withdrew silently to either side. We could see a faint glare, a telltale sign of Kestrel’s gasherd. Beyond the membrane was only black. The ocean of stars was washed out and made invisible by the bright lights of the cargo bay.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  I tried not to think about the tolerance calculations. Surely, Kestrel would perform to spec. Everyone else seemed to have unshakeable faith in her.

  “Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.”

  I pointed my cameras forward. The sled began to move. The motion was perfectly smooth, without a trace of a bump or scrape.

  I thought about motion sickness. Logically, I should be unable to experience it, though I knew all about it from my training. Some of my sensations seemed very much like it. It made me wonder idly if my model line was capable of hypochondria. I didn’t check my manuals. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know at that particular moment.

  We moved slowly through the gasherd, our sled’s membranes merging with it temporarily and smoothing our exit. We slid out of the cargo bay to hang suspended alongside Kestrel, a soap bubble in space, rotating into alignment for the launch, tail of the sled pointed toward the ship’s torch, nose toward the impact shield.

  Now the stars were visible, an infinite sea extending in all directions. Beyond Kestrel’s intricate shape Saturn loomed, half its disk in shadow. It wasn’t as bright or clear as Kestrel’s display had made it. Its rings were a pale aura. There was nothing else, just the vast, iridescent, jellyfish shape of Kestrel and our tiny sled suspended next to it, hanging together in the planet’s tenuous glow. The ship’s various membranes reflected the dim light softly, suggesting a complicated gossamer shell, emphasizing Kestrel’s jellyfish aspect. The intense magnetism of the ship’s exterior manipulators tugged at the sled’s membranes as well as her own, elongating them a little.

  Kestrel eased us backward down the length of her drive spine, closer and closer to the white fury of her jet. A hundred meters from the blast shield, she stopped us. The whole ship was laid out before us, a foreshortened behemoth. It was like looking up the trunk of a vast tree to a starry sky, the tree’s crown a translucent aura.

  The launch came all at once, whipping us along Kestrel toward her distant bridge, parallel to her spine. The invisible weight of acceleration mashed us all into our webbing, drawing uneasy groans from the others.

  Kestrel’s bridge came up fast. Just before we reached the lower decks there was another heavy weight that threatened to twist my limbs from their sockets and crush them into the ship’s spine, and we were thrown away at an angle, narrowly missing the base of the ship’s superstructure. All at once, Kestrel shrank to a dot, flashing away into the distance.

  The crush of acceleration ended, and with it all sense of motion.

  “You’re up, Lev,” said Jaemon, his voice a little shaky.

  “All right,” I said. “Are you okay? Is everyone okay?”

  Each of them mumbled something affirmative. I double-checked their vitals. Stressed, but no sign of injury.

  “Okay,” I said, tapping the Fabric link to the rockets. “Here goes nothing.”

  4.

  Once Kestrel had vanished to a bright dot I fired the little engines on the sled to trim off our final differential velocity. In a few hours we could look forward to a firsthand look at Autolycus, or what was left of her. Nothing was visible yet, nor would it be until we were much closer. The derelict was dead in space and black as pitch.

  Esgar Rayleigh’s head blossomed into enlarged existence in front of the sled.

  “Everybody okay out there?” he said.

  “We’re good,” said Jaemon.

  “Glad to hear it, Big Man,” said Captain Rayleigh. “You all have fun on your little camping trip and don’t forget to write.”

  “Looking for mementos now, Little Man,” said Jaemon. “Lev’s on the helm and we’re cruising.”

  Angier muttered something caustic.

  “What’s that, Angier?” Jaemon said.

  “Is Angier griping?” the Captain said.

  “I dunno,” said Jaemon. “Hey Angier, are you griping?”

  “Buzz off,” said Angier darkly.

  “Oh, good,” said the Captain. “Now I can relax. Everything’s normal.”

  “Har har har,” said Angier. “Captain Comedy.”

  Jaemon said, “We didn’t blow up or fly into bits or anything. I think we’re all right.”

  “The day is young,” said the Captain.

  “I love your optimism. You have fun at Arnessen Station, you hear?”

  “Is it too late to trade places?” the Captain said.

  “Too late, Little Man. We’ll go get you some buried treasure.”

  “My crew’s enough for me. Bring them back whole and I’ll buy you a nice dinner.”

  “What, you mean that brown stuff down in the galley?”

  “Finest cuisine for thousands of kilometers.”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  5.

  “I can see it,” I said.

  “Really?” Mai said. She jetted close to me and looked in the general direction my face was pointing. “Where?”

  We were floating about half a kilometer from the position of Autolycus. Saturn was a vast presence behind us. Even this close, the derelict was nearly invisible.

  “Look that direction. No, a little more to the right and down…there. Now look for where you can’t see stars.”

  “Oooohhh” she said.

  “You two done with those generator mounts?” Jaemon said, jetting up next to us. Angier was out of sight around the other side of the tent. It had blown up much bigger than I’d expected. From inside it felt bigger than Kestrel’s cargo bays.

  “They’re good to go, Sir,” said Mai.

  “Okay, get ‘em running. What are you two ooohing and aaahing about?”

  “Doctor Lev showed me where the derelict is,” Mai said. “You can see it.”

 
“Whereabouts?” Jaemon said. He clapped his hand on my shoulder and the contact started me turning slowly. My jets automatically stabilized me.

  I showed him where to look and he said, “Ooooh,” sounding just like Mai.

  “For cryin’ in the beer,” said Angier. “I’m coming around there to get a look.”

  “Nah, you can’t,” said Jaemon.

  “What? Why not?” He sounded outraged.

  Jaemon laughed. “Just yanking your chain, you big crybaby. Come on around. Lev’s got us a visual on our bogey.”

  The rendezvous with the derelict had been mercifully uneventful. I had monitored the burn of our little rocket engines all the way in, cutting them precisely at the millisecond I was supposed to. Miracle of miracles, a quick local scan had turned up the beacon signal less than a thousand meters away. It was rock steady. Our velocities matched perfectly. Kestrel and Chief Verge had done their jobs without fail.

  The tent worked just as well. A single touch on a small control pad at one corner, and the mattress-like bundle had swelled into a huge black ball. It was much bigger than I had anticipated. It swelled and swelled until I felt sure it was going to burst and leave us floating out in space with no shelter or provisions. It stabilized at last, though. Then we connected the Fabric feeds and hooked up the portable generators. We attached ourselves to it with thin safety filaments. Our camp was made. Now all we had to do was survey the hulk.

  “Listen,” said Jaemon, “I don’t want any of you to go jetting over there, okay? We don’t know what kind of shape it’s in.”

  “Pssshhh,” Angier said. “After a hundred years, what have we got to worry about? Ghosts?”

  “How about shrapnel?” Jaemon said. “We don’t know why it’s hanging dead out here. Maybe something blew up. There could be sharp fragments floating around. You want to find that out by jetting into one and getting your lungs punctured? Or radiation. Maybe it’s dead out here because of a containment failure.”

  “Ahhh...” Angier said, waving one hand dismissively.

  “Point is, we go in slow and careful, and we go in together. Anybody sees anything funny, and I mean anything, you tell us, okay?”

  He looked around at each of us in turn, staying focused on Angier until he said, “Yeah, yeah, okay. I got it, already.”

  “Good. If I get you guys killed, Esgar will make me do all your jobs. Now let’s split up the work. We’ll go over in a group, nice and careful. Mai, Angier, and I will make quick trips down the long axis of the ship, just a quick visual survey. Pay attention, now, when we do that. I don’t want anybody moving out of sight, okay?”

  “What’s the Doc going to be doing?” said Angier.

  “Lev, see if you can find a good place to run a trickle of power into the derelict. If you can transfer enough power into the ship’s own systems, maybe we can get it to do a sensor survey for us. If not, just take a capacitance image. It won’t be great, but it’ll give us some idea what we’re dealing with.”

  “Oh sure,” said Angier. “Give the cushy job to the mech.”

  Jaemon turned and looked Angier up and down.

  “You got a power generator on you I don’t know about? Maybe hidden up your butt? You want to go over there and find a plug on that hulk to stick up there? No? Okay. Then do the job I gave you. And Angier?”

  “What?” Angier growled.

  “If I actually played favorites the way you’re implying, then you’d have to be pretty dumb to antagonize me like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Angier muttered under his breath.

  “All right, anybody else have anything interesting to say? Fine. Let’s get over there. Angier, since you’re so ambitious to get all the plum assignments, you can take point.”

  “What about the shrapnel?” he squeaked.

  “Don’t run into any. If you do, tell us about it. Get moving, Big Fella.”

  “All of you switch your visual range to show microwaves,” I said. “I’ll make a pulse as we move toward it. You should be able to see if there’s any debris.”

  “Good thinking, Lev,” said Jaemon. Angier mocked him silently. Mai watched him, tipping her head curiously. Jaemon just chuckled and shrugged, catching my eye.

  We closed on the dead craft silently. It was much smaller than Kestrel, but it was a torch, just the same. With the radar pulses bouncing off it we could just about make out its shape, a kind of faceted cigar with radiator vanes wrapped around it.

  Jaemon had been right. There was debris. We approached it from the starboard side of its nose and a little below. In the strobing of the radar pulse it looked like a flower with petals of hull material. An explosion of some kind had taken off the nose. Shreds and shards of the hull were scattered wide. We eased through the debris at a crawl, tapping at fragments gingerly, wary of sharp edges. The others’ suits would seal small cuts by themselves, and my skin was metal, but we weren’t taking any chances.

  “Weird,” said Jaemon. “Looks like it blew from the inside.”

  “Yes,” I said. “My models agree. Someone set off a charge just a few meters behind the nose assembly and blew it off.”

  “Where is it?” said Mai.

  “Where’s what?” said Jaemon.

  “The nose assembly.”

  “Now that you mention it,” said Jaemon, “that’s a good question. Did it get blown into space? Or just blown apart?”

  “Who cares?” said Angier. “Long as we get the job done and don’t get our heads lopped off, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “Well, there could be useful information in the control systems, if they’re intact,” I said. “But they’re not.”

  Jaemon said, “You think the nose got blown apart?”

  “I do. Look there!”

  I pointed to the center of the flower of torn-up hull.

  “That’s an interior firewall. There should be a self-sealing hatch there and probably power conduits.”

  We moved carefully through the debris to the end of the craft, making contact with light taps of our gloves. Our suits switched on adhesion, and we stood, placing the soles of our boots against the derelict, distributed at crazy angles on the curve of its hull. I took a few tentative steps around the firewall surface.

  “Yeesh,” said Angier. “Can we all point the same way?”

  “He gets space sick,” Jaemon said.

  “Hatch here,” said Mai. “What was the name of this ship again?”

  “Autolycus,” I said. “It’s Greek.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Mai nosed around the end of the craft, letting her environment membrane transfer samples to her nose.

  “It stinks,” she said. “Smells like ozone and fire.”

  “Figures,” Jaemon said. “It blew up. Probably fried its electrical system at the same time.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “I can feel some eddies of current. I think there’s some functional circuitry here.”

  “Good,” said Jaemon. “You see if you can make contact with the ship’s nervous system and get it to do a quick survey for us. Angier, Mai, let’s skim on down the length of this baby and see what we find. Go nice and easy. There’s still debris all around us.”

  The three of them pulsed their jets and drifted lazily down the hull of the derelict.

  “Mai,” Jaemon said, “Stay a little closer. There you go. Don’t get out of sight, okay?”

  I poked around, tapping at the surface of the firewall. It made metallic ‘clinks’ that I could hear through my skin. The torn fabric of the ship’s hull rose around me like the petals of a black daisy, bent back and shredded by the force of the blast that had destroyed its nose. Why had someone blown off the nose of the ship from the inside? Who but the pilot could have done that, and why would the pilot even think of it?

  Any clues I might have gotten from the bridge were gone, randomized along with everything else it had contained. My answers were scattered chunks of metal and fullerenes, floating in a huge spherical cloud all
around us. I started to think about how I could maybe reconstruct things by doing a higher-resolution radar scan of all the debris and then projecting their trajectories backwards. Then I remembered I had real work to do—work that might actually turn up something useful.

  I poked around until I found the remains of a conduit with good electrical conductivity and started working on a splice.

  6.

  Once I got a rudimentary splice working, there wasn’t much to do but wait while I trickled some power into the hulk. Obviously, my little power reserves were never going to be enough to power up the ship’s systems, but I might be able to get its lowest-level daemons to respond to some queries, maybe enough to get a little basic survey data. That was the theory, anyway.

  While I waited and watched the diagnostics, I passed the time by running a simple Fabric search on the few thousand visible stars around us. I matched them to their computed distances. I built a model volume of their distribution around my position in space. I had to store it in a sparse logarithmic space to keep it from using unreasonable amounts of storage.

  The sensations I experienced as I arranged that model were interesting. I wondered if they were analogous to what biologicals call “awe” or “wonder.” We mechs can emulate many neurological functions of biologicals, but we can only guess what they actually feel like. They’re so complicated and multipurpose and self-intertwined that it’s always hard to know just how faithful our simulations are.

  Then I noticed something unexpected in the traces. All of a sudden there were a few thousand very small fluctuations in the current I was feeding to the hulk. I had no way to triangulate positions, but judging by the distribution of potentials, they were all very close to one another. They were fluctuating very quickly.

  “Jaemon,” I said into our Fabric feed. “I have something odd happening here.”

  “Report, Lev,” said Jaemon.

  “Multiple fast-acting current fluctuations. Unknown distance, but I estimate nearby. Contact made through the skin of the derelict. Fluctuations intensifying.”