by J. Boyett
“Well, then, our first step should be to register that claim ourselves,” said Fehd.
“I already did that.” One could hear in Burran’s voice that he considered it obvious that he would have done so. “There was no conflicting claim.”
Fehd spoke with cautious relief: “So, as long as we don’t find a settlement?...”
“This ship by itself would have no basis for a claim,” confirmed Burran.
“Wonderful!” Fehd turned from Burran back to Madaku, seated across from him. “In that case, we better get the extraction process prepped.” And he launched into a discussion of their equipment and how it should be dispersed among the planet’s cloud of orbiting planetoids.
But Burran interrupted them: “Wait!” Fehd and Madaku stared at Burran in surprise. He glared back at them in disbelief, and said, “Before we start dispersing the equipment and getting preoccupied with the mineral sifts, we need to head around the planet and take a closer look at this ship.”
Ah. It was a security thing. Madaku thought the life of a security specialist must be a frustrating one: all those years of training, and then most of them never encountered a dangerous situation in their whole lives. And if anyone did attack them the Canary’s AI would take defensive and evasive action a lot faster than any of its human complement could. The only one among them who truly had to face danger was Willa, when she put on the intuition bowl and hooked herself up to the hyperface: not physical danger, but the terrifying prospect of never finding her way back to her conscious mind, of ending as a drooling meat-sack whose identity was forever misplaced. Not for the first time, Madaku speculated that this risk imbalance was probably a cause for stress in her relationship with Burran.
And yet she grinned at the three men and said, “I don’t guess I could just hyperjump us over to the other ship?”
Fehd smiled tightly, a surely-you-jest smile. “It’s only a ten-minute ride,” he said. “It seems like an extremely dangerous risk just to shave off a few minutes.”
“I was only kidding, of course,” she replied, as if Fehd were being silly. Then she couldn’t help adding, “Though I bet I could do it.”
Madaku stared at her. He believed she was serious—he believed that if Fehd in some fit of insanity had given his consent, she would have gone through with it. Why anyone would want to court the miserable wild distress that intuiters were plunged into, Madaku couldn’t imagine; not to mention that it would be inconceivably dangerous, performing such a tight jump whose start-point and end-point would be in such close proximity to each other, as well as to so many massive bodies.
For the first time since Willa had come out of the bowl, Burran was smiling. It was a difficult smile to read, though. Studying his lover, he said, “She really could, you know. She’s the best intuiter in the galaxy.”
The notion that the Canary had just happened to wind up with the best intuiter in the galaxy was a bit too rich to swallow, thought Madaku; but whatever, the hyperbole of a lover, and all that.
He still didn’t think Burran was good enough for her, but he had to admit they made an interesting couple: with Burran being one of the only people he’d ever met who viscerally believed in danger, and Willa the only one who courted it, even in jest.
Fehd got them back on track. Almost as if he were humoring Burran, he said, “You think this ship could be a threat, Burran?”
“Anything could be a threat. If there’s a crew aboard, and it’s not connected to a settlement, and it’s not here to prospect, then why is it here? For all we know, they could be bandits, hiding out.”
Even Willa had trouble not making a face at that one. Space-bandits were exceedingly rare, and none of them had ever encountered any, nor met anyone who had. However, they did occasionally exist. With a bare hint of mockery, Fehd said, “You think they may be bandits? In that case, maybe we ought to give them a wide berth.”
Burran tensed his mouth. “Except that, if there are intelligences on board that ship, they probably already know we’ve seen them. If they don’t want to be found, that could create problems for us. Anyway, I didn’t say they were bandits, I only pointed out that’s one possibility among many. More likely, the ship is a derelict. I’m not picking up much from inside—it has your basic scramblers installed. But, to judge by the radiation traces along its thrusters, I’d say it’s been here a long time.”
Fehd rubbed his smooth chin thoughtfully. “Of course, they could be in suspended animation....”
“It may have been there a long time,” Burran repeated. “If the readings are correct, the ship’s been there derelict long enough that it would be pushing the limit of any suspended-animation technology that the Registry has on file. And it may have already pushed far past it.”
“If the crew’s dead, the ship’s scrap.” Now Fehd sounded excited. “Is the boat interesting?”
“I haven’t been able to find a match for it in the Galactic Registry,” said Burran.
There was a moment’s stillness from the other three. Now, that was unusual.
Not unheard-of, though. Madaku recovered and said, “So it’s probably a custom job. And if it really never was registered, I guess that would lend credence to Burran’s theory that there’s something nefarious about it.”
“That’s not my theory,” Burran testily corrected. “I just pointed out it’s a possibility.”
Madaku pretended Burran hadn’t said anything. “I’m interested in seeing the specs from the unknown ship. I’ll call them up after we’re done here. Go ahead and send me any special observations you’ve made, as well.”
The three men were nodding at each other, hinting with their body language that they were all ready to adjourn, when Willa said, “Hey, but wait a minute.”
Madaku realized guiltily that without noticing he had preemptively dismissed anything she might have to say, which was the kind of thing he was always silently accusing Burran of doing. “Yes, Willa?” he said. “What do you think?”
She was giving all three of them a funny look. “Let’s not forget that they’re not necessarily a threat, or salvage. They could also still be alive and be stuck out here. Right? There could be people aboard, in trouble. Especially if they’re at the upper limit of suspended animation’s effectiveness.”
The guys all shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Willa looked at them all quizzically. Plainly, it never would have occurred to her to put salvage opportunities ahead of the lives of others; the idea must be completely foreign to her, if she was having so much trouble realizing that was what the guys had done.
“You’re right,” Burran was saying. “Don’t worry, babe—we’re going to go over there and check it out.”
Maybe she really was a superior creature, Madaku thought, with a kind of schoolboyish yearning. But he knew that was nonsense. It came down to circumstances. All the Canary’s crewmembers hailed from patriarchal cultures, in which men were generally trained to be harsh and competitive, while women were encouraged to cultivate empathy and tenderness. Such conditioning made it easy for women like Willa to impress men like Madaku, Burran, and Fehd with their angelic natures.
Madaku knew that was all there was to it and it was nothing special. Yet he still got all gooey-eyed around her, anyway.
***
They cruised to the other side of the planet to check out the ship. The AI had been instructed to prioritize the energy shield and to keep the evasive programs ready, almost as a formality. Also as a formality, they double-checked that their own scramblers were functioning, to discourage anyone aboard the other ship from looking through them and seeing the Canary’s interior. Of course, anyone rude enough should be able to bypass them. Since the Canary crew were planning to board in a rescue/salvage mission, this constituted one of the few occasions on which it was acceptable for their AI to try to break through the other ship’s code scramblers. It had already done so, to do a sweep and insure that there were no biologicals aboard in immediate danger. But even if their AI had ma
naged to garner significant data, almost everything it would have learned via that hack would have been compartmentalized in a part of its memory banks that would be very difficult for the Canary crew to access, as per the Registry’s civility guidelines. The crew would be told only about dangers to themselves, or about biologicals in danger aboard the derelict.
Any other precautions would have seemed superfluous, and they brought the Canary right in close.
“They do have scramblers engaged,” said Madaku, his eyes on the tablet he held rather than the natural view of the ship in the sunlight out the window. “But according to our AI it’s moot, since the data leaking from their AI is so fragmented and distorted that the interior of the ship is basically opaque.”
“It takes a long time for AI’s to decay like that,” said Fehd. “And computers live a lot longer than people anyway.”
Willa stared at the other ship, with an intense expression that was almost a frown.
Well might she frown. They had no way to look into the hyperspace dimension and study the ship’s hyperdrive. But its realspace specs were formidable. At the center of the ship was a very large box-shaped compartment, which presumably contained the cargo bays, living quarters and any other personal areas. Fanning out from that, in a shiny X, were four massive realspace thrusters. And attached to the thrusters, apparently wired through them to amp up their firepower, were what looked like energy weapons.
“Are those blasters as strong as it looks like they’d be?” asked Fehd.
“Hard to tell,” said Burran. Watching his still, attentive expression, Madaku couldn’t tell if the big energy weapons made Burran feel apprehensive, or envious, or what. “Doesn’t look like they were fooling around, though.”
Burran studied the readouts another few seconds, then said, “Madaku, what the hell is that hull made of?” He highlighted the bizarre readings so that they were emphasized on Madaku’s tablet, as well. “You ever seen this stuff before?”
Madaku had already noticed. “No,” he said, staring at the read-out. The thrusters and thruster-wings, which seemed not to originally have been part of the same design as the main core, were made of fine but not particularly exotic material. But the main body of the ship, under the encrustation of antennae and other add-ons, was a different story. “It looks indestructible. And the sensors can’t pierce it, to see what’s inside.” He uploaded the specs, and felt the bottom drop out of his belly. “This alloy is not in the Registry!”
Fehd breathed out slowly. Burran said, “Gods damn, this is one exotic ship.”
“You see the stump of debris there?” said Madaku. “I think that’s where the subspace antenna used to be mounted. Maybe it got knocked off by one of these asteroids; maybe it happened in some sort of accident shortly after they arrived. If they lost their hyperdrive and their subspace antenna, they would have been stranded out here, unable to call for help.”
They stared for a silent moment at the vessel. It rotated slowly on its axis as it drifted in orbit. For a moment, they saw the top plane of the thruster-wings flat-on and illuminated by the sun. Hundreds of inscriptions were stamped in black all the way down the wing, all in different scripts. There were even a couple of scripts Madaku recognized as non-human, which was noteworthy since so few intelligences besides humans and their AI’s used anything that could properly be called writing.
“Anybody able to read any of that?” asked Fehd.
They watched the thruster wing as it drifted around. Just before the writing was gone from view, Burran said, “There—that one’s in Krigian, I can read that. It means something like, ‘heart made of iron.’ ‘Ironheart,’ I guess.”
They waited. The next thruster wing rose silently into view, flat-on and facing the sun. It, too, was stamped with black-on-white inscriptions, in different writing systems.
They studied it. Willa pointed: “That’s in Perse, my grandmother spoke that. I think it says ‘Ironheart’ too, but it’s hard to tell—it’s weird. Maybe it’s Old Perse.”
“And there it is in Pung-tao,” Fehd noted. “‘Ironheart.’”
And as the third wing rose they could all see it again, this time emblazoned in Old Galactic, just one more inscription among hundreds or thousands: “Ironheart.”
“Hand me a tablet,” said Fehd. He took it without bothering to notice who’d given it to him and began calling up ships named Ironheart. Hundreds of thousands had been uploaded to the Galactic Registry over the millennia, but so far none was turning up that matched this one’s specifications.
“Ironheart,” said Burran, feeling the word in his mouth. “That’s a good name for a boat.”
Willa didn’t take her eyes off the strange new ship; her only response was an expression of distaste.
“How’s it look inside, Madaku? Any luck garnering some knowledge from the distorted data leaks?” asked Fehd. They might not be able to look through the hull, but they should be able to pick up enough stray data leakage from the ship’s AI to access the ship’s own knowledge about its contents. Even with the data corruption, the Canary AI ought to be able to glean something useful; and once it had satisfied itself that Ironheart was salvage and ergo the Canary’s property, it would share that knowledge with the crew.
“Like I told you, our AI claims that what it can see is distorted. But it looks like vacuum inside.”
“A dead ship,” said Fehd, almost to himself; then, looking at his tablet again, he said, “So all these inscriptions are collated, and they do all say ‘Ironheart,’ except for a couple languages that aren’t in the Registry.”
“Aren’t in the Registry?” repeated Madaku. “Well, they must be made-up, then.”
“Probably,” said Fehd. “More interesting for us is the fact that all the inscriptions use forms that were current well over a couple thousand years ago. Or more. Like, there’s Old Galactic, but no Standard Galactic. Between that and the interior vacuum and the radiation-cold thrusters, I’d say this is a mighty old boat, guys.”
“Probably not a lot of tech salvage, then,” said Madaku. “But don’t underestimate the profit to be gained from historical curiosities, especially in the markets of more primitive societies.”
“Sure, sure. I’m not worried about finding a buyer. Right now, to be honest, I’m more interested in going over and exploring just for the fun of it. Burran, any special concerns, weapons-wise?”
“Nah. Just by the book, is all. Bring along an explosive-based firearm and a knife, in case there’s a camouflaged enemy aboard with a hostile AI ready to sabotage our defenses.”
Madaku nearly rolled his eyes and almost made a joke about how it would be hard to find the never-used firearms, under the layers of dust. But then that third wing floated up into view again, and he felt a strange, unaccountable chill as again his eyes picked out those words, in Old Galactic: Ironheart.
Three
Madaku grabbed a doctor as they left for the little shuttle. There was one or two in every room of the ship—anyone could have grabbed it, but since it was a machine it fell more or less under his purview. The all-purpose, multi-species diagnostic and treatment tool weighed less than a kilo. He mag-clamped the gray metal rectangle to the thigh of his suit; it caused no encumbrance or noticeable weight, and once it was attached he stopped noticing it.
The three men took the little shuttle over to Ironheart, while Willa stayed aboard the Canary. Madaku, Burran and Fehd were all from worlds with strong patriarchal traditions, so there was an aspect of leaving the damsel behind while they went forth into possible, theoretical danger. Mainly, though, it was standard procedure to leave the intuiter behind when an away team went out. That way, if something happened, the pilot could have the ship primed to go by the time the team returned. Once every ten thousand times or so, something did happen that the hardware and AI’s couldn’t handle on their own.
Ironheart was a formidable name—Madaku didn’t recall having ever heard of a ship called that. As for the Canary, that was a traditi
onal name for mining ships. Madaku didn’t really know how the custom had begun. He thought a “canary” was a type of bird, and he knew that back in prehistory mining had probably been a dangerous and gloomy affair, in which humans had to break through layers of rock largely via muscle power and then spend large amounts of time in the subterranean dark. He thought of birds as pretty things, and imagined that naming a mining ship Canary had originally been a way to celebrate the bright and joyous ease that technology had brought to the mining process; but he really didn’t know. Undoubtedly the history of the name was all right there in the Registry. He’d always meant to look it up, but had just never bothered.
The shuttle darted through the vast silence. The three men watched Ironheart loom larger and larger till it filled the viewport.
“Look how beat-up it is,” said Fehd. “All that pitting and scarring.”
“An old ship,” murmured Burran. “Madaku, how much of that damage was inflicted here in the system?”
Madaku was already scanning to see whether the molecular traces left by the space rocks that had beaten the ship’s hull matched those of XB-79853-D7-4’s cloud of moons. “It looks like a lot of them do match,” he said. “Between those matches, and the cold radiation trace, I think it’s safe to say it’s been here a long, long time.”
They were already suited up in preparation for the vacuum they expected to find inside the derelict, but they hadn’t yet popped their visors closed. Fehd bounced on the balls of his feet, excited about his scavenge. “Hopefully the bodies won’t be too gruesome,” he said.
The shuttle’s autopilot found Ironheart’s airlock and pulled them up to it. The men waited to see whether the derelict’s circuitry was totally dead, in which case they would force the airlock open, or whether their presence would wake up an AI. (The AI that had been running for untold centuries might be decayed or insane, its mutative function having run out of control during all that time—the mutative function generally led to useful innovation only if it was periodically shepherded, instead of being left to run rampant. But there should be subprograms that had been lying dormant all this while and that would reboot upon being informed of the Canary crew’s arrival.)