The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "Take us in towards the top of the wedge," Marcus datavised. "There's a series of darker rectangles there."

  "Will do," she responded. The MSV's chemical thrusters pulsed in compliance.

  "Do you see the colour difference near the frayed edges of the shell?" Schutz asked. "The stuff's turning grey. It's as if the decay is creeping inwards."

  "They must be using something like our molecular binding force generators to resist vacuum ablation," Marcus datavised. "That's why the main section's still intact."

  "It could have been here for a long time, then."

  "Yeah. We'll know better once Wai collects some samples from the tower."

  There were five of the rectangles, arranged in parallel, one and a half metres long and one metre wide. The shell material below the shorter edge of each one had a set of ten grooves leading away down the curve.

  "They look like ladders to me," Antonio datavised. "Would that mean these are airlocks?"

  "It can't be that easy," Schutz replied.

  "Why not?" Marcus datavised. "A ship this size is bound to have more than one airlock."

  "Yeah, but five together?"

  "Multiple redundancy."

  "With technology this good?"

  "That's human hubris. The ship still blew up, didn't it?"

  Wai locked the MSV's attitude 50 metres above the shell section. "The micropulse radar is bouncing right back at me," she informed them. "I can't tell what's below the shell, it's a perfect electromagnetic reflector. We're going to have communication difficulties once you're inside."

  Marcus disengaged his boots from the grid and fired his pack's gas jets. The shell was as slippery as ice, neither stikpads nor magnetic soles would hold them to it.

  "Definitely enhanced valency bonds," Schutz datavised. He was floating parallel to the surface, holding a sensor block against it. "It's a much stronger field than Lady Mac's. The shell composition is a real mix; the resonance scan is picking up titanium, silicon, boron, nickel, silver, and a whole load of polymers."

  "Silver's weird," Marcus commented. "But if there's nickel in it our magnetic soles should've worked." He manoeuvred himself over one of the rectangles. It was recessed about five centimetres, though it blended seamlessly into the main shell. His sensor collar couldn't detect any seal lining. Halfway along one side were two circular dimples, ten centimetres across. Logically, if the rectangle was an airlock, then these should be the controls. Human back-ups were kept simple. This shouldn't be any different.

  Marcus stuck his fingers in one. It turned bright blue.

  "Power surge," Schutz datavised. "The block's picking up several high voltage circuits activating under the shell. what did you do, Marcus?"

  "Tried to open one."

  The rectangle dilated smoothly, material flowing back to the edges. Brilliant white light flooded out.

  "Clever," Schutz datavised.

  "No more than our programmable silicon," Antonio retorted.

  "We don't use programmable silicon for external applications."

  "It settles one thing," Marcus datavised. "They weren't Kant, not with an airlock this size."

  "Quite. What now?"

  "We try to establish control over the cycling mechanism. I'll go in and see if I can operate the hatch from inside. If it doesn't open after ten minutes, try the dimple again. If that doesn't work, cut through it with the MSV's fission blade."

  The chamber inside was thankfully bigger than the hatch: a pentagonal tube two metres wide and 15 long. Four of the walls shone brightly, while the fifth was a strip of dark-maroon composite. He drifted in, then flipped himself over so he was facing the hatch, floating in the centre of the chamber. There were four dimples just beside the hatch. "First one," he datavised. Nothing happened when he put his fingers in. "Second." It turned blue. The hatch flowed shut.

  Marcus crashed down onto the strip of dark composite, landing on his left shoulder. The force of the impact was almost enough to jar the respirator tube out of his mouth. He grunted in shock. Neural nanonics blocked the burst of pain from his bruised shoulder. Jesus! They've got artificial gravity. He was flat on his back, the exoskeleton and manoeuvring pack weighing far too much. atever planet the xenocs came from, it ]lad a gravit ' field about one and a half times that of Earth. He released the catches down the side of his exoskeleton, and wriggled his way out. Standing was an effort, but he was used to biober gees on Lady Mac-, admittedly not for prolonged periods, though.

  He stuck his fingers in the first dimple. The gravity faded fast, and the hatch flowed apart.

  "We just became billionaires," he datavised.

  The third dimple pressurized the airlock chamber; while the fourth depressurized it.

  The xenoc atmosphere was mostly a nitrogen oxygen blend, with one percent argon and six percent carbon dioxide. The humidity was appalling, pressure was lower than standard, and the temperature was 42 degrees Celsius.

  "We'd have to keep our SII suits on anyway, because of the heat," Marcus datavised. "But the carbon dioxide would kill us. And we'll have to go through biological decontamination when we go back to Lady Mac."

  The four of them stood together at the far end of the airlock chamber, their exoskeleton armour lying on the floor behind them. Marcus had told Wai and the rest of the crew their first foray would be an hour.

  "Are you proposing we go in without a weapon?" Jorge asked.

  Marcus focused his collar sensors on the man who alleged he was a hardware technician. "That's carrying paranoia too far. No, we do not engage in first contact either deploying or displaying weapons of any kind. That's the law, and the Assembly regulations are very specific about it. In any case, don't you think that if there are any xenocs left after all this time they're going to be glad to see someone? Especially a space-faring species."

  "That is, I'm afraid, a rather naive attitude, Captain. You keep saying how advanced this starship is, and yet it suffered catastrophic damage. Frankly, an unbelievable amount of damage for an accident. Isn't it more likely this ship was engaged in some kind of battle?"

  Which was a background worry Marcus had suffered right from the start. That this starship could ever fail was unnerving. But like physical constants, Murphy's Law would be the same the universe over. He'd entered the air-lock because intuition told him the wreck was safe for him personally. Somehow he doubted a man like Jorge would be convinced by that argument.

  "If it's a warship, then it will be rigged to alert any surviving crew or flight computer of our arrival. Had they wanted to annihilate us, they would have done so by now. Lady Mac is a superb ship, but hardly in this class. So if they're waiting for us on the other side of this airlock, I don't think any weapon you or I can carry is going to make the slightest difference."

  "Very well, proceed."

  Marcus postponed the answer which came straight to mind, and put his fingers in one of the two dimples by the inner hatchway. It turned blue.

  The xenoc ship wasn't disappointing, exactly, but Marcus couldn't help a growing sense of anticlimax. The artificial gravity was a fabulous piece of equipment, the atmosphere strange, the layout exotic. Yet for all that, it was just a ship; built from the universal rules of logical engineering. Had the xenocs theselves been there, it would have been so different. A whole new species with its history and culture. But they'd gone, so he was an archaeologist rather than an explorer.

  They surveyed the first deck, which was made up from large compartments and broad hallways. The interior was made out of a pale-jade composite, slightly ruffled to a snake-skin texture. Surfaces always curved together, there were no real corners. Every ceiling emitted the same intense white glare, which their collar sensors compensated for. Arching doorways were all open, though they could still dilate if you used the dimples. The only oddity were 50-centimetre hemispherical blisters on the floor and walls, scattered completely at random.

  There was an ongoing argument about the shape of the xenocs. They were undoubtedly shorter t
han humans, and they probably had legs, because there were spiral stairwells, although the steps were very broad, difficult for bipeds. Lounges had long tables with large, rounded stool-chairs inset with four deep ridges.

  After the first 15 minutes it was clear that all loose equipment had been removed. Lockers, with the standard dilating door, were empty. Every compartment had its fitted furnishings and nothing more. Some were completely bare.

  On the second deck there were no large compartments, only long corridors lined with grey circles along the centre of the walls. Antonio used a dimple at the side of one, and it dilated to reveal a spherical cell three metres wide. Its walls were translucent, with short lines of colour slithering round behind them like photonic fish.

  "Beds?" Schutz suggested. "There's an awful lot of them."

  Marcus shrugged. "Could be." He moved on, eager to get down to the next deck. Then he slowed, switching his collar focus. Three of the hemispherical blisters were following him, two gliding along the wall, one on the floor. They stopped when he did. He walked over to the closest, and waved his sensor block over it. "There's a lot of electronic activity inside it," he reported.

  The others gathered round.

  "Are they extruded by the wall, or are they a separate device?" Schutz asked.

  Marcus switched on the block's resonance scan. "I'm not sure, I can't find any break in the composite round its base, not even a hairline fracture; but with their materials technology that doesn't mean much."

  "Five more approaching," Jorge datavised. The blisters were approaching from ahead, three of them on the walls, two on the floor. They stopped just short of the group.

  "Something knows we're here," Antonio datavised.

  Marcus retrieved the CAB xenoc interface communication protocol from a neural nanonics memory cell. He'd stored it decades ago, all qualified starship crew were obliged to carry it along with a million and one other bureaucratic lunacies. His communication block transmitted the protocol using a multispectrum sweep. If the blister could sense them, it had to have some kind of electromagnetic reception facility. The communication block switched to laserlight, then a magnetic pulse.

  "Nothing," Marcus datavised.

  "Maybe the central computer needs time to interpret the protocol," Schutz datavised.

  "A desktop block should be able to work that out."

  "Perhaps the computer hasn't got anything to say to us."

  "Then why send the blisters after us?"

  "They could be autonomous, whatever they are."

  Marcus ran his sensor block over the blister again, but there was no change to its electronic pattern. He straightened up, wincing at the creak of complaint his spine made at the heavy gravity. "Okay, our hour is almost up anyway. We'll get back to Lady Mac and decide what stage two is going to be."

  The blisters followed them all the way back to the stairwell they'd used. As soon as they started walking down the broad central hallway of the upper deck, more blisters started sliding in from compartments and other halls to stalk them.

  The airlock hatch was still open when they got back, but the exoskeletons were missing.

  "Shit," Antonio datavised. "They're still here, the bloody xenocs are here."

  Marcus shoved his fingers into the dimple. His heartbeat calmed considerably when the hatch congealed behind them. The lock cycled obediently, and the outer rectangle opened.

  "Wai," he datavised. "We need a lift. Quickly, please."

  "On my way, Marcus."

  "Strange way for xenocs to communicate," Schutz datavised. "What did they do that for? If they wanted to make sure we stayed, they could have disabled the airlock."

  The MSV swooped over the edge of the shell, jets of twinkling flame shooting from its thrusters.

  "Beats me," Marcus datavised. "But we'll find out."

  Opinion on the ship was a straight split; the crew wanted to continue investigating the xenoc ship, Antonio and his colleagues wanted to leave. For once Jorge had joined them, which Marcus considered significant. He was beginning to think young Karl might have been closer to the truth than was strictly comfortable.

  "The dish is just rock with a coating of aluminium sprayed on," Katherine said. "There's very little aluminium left now, most of it has boiled away in the vacuum. The tower is a pretty ordinary silicon-boron composite wrapped round a titanium load structure. The samples Wai cut off were very brittle."

  "Did you carbon date them?" Victoria asked.

  "Yeah." She gave her audience a laboured glance. "Give or take a decade, it's 13,000 years old."

  Breath whistled out of Marcus's mouth. "Jesus."

  "Then they must have been rescued, or died," Roman said. "There's nobody left over there. Not after that time."

  "They're there," Antonio growled. "They stole our exoskeletons."

  "I don't understand what happened to the exoskeletons. Not yet. But any entity who can build a ship like that isn't going to go creeping round stealing bits of space armour. There has to be a rational explanation."

  "Yes! They wanted to keep us over there."

  "What for? what possible reason would they have for that?"

  "It's a warship, it's been in battle. The survivors don't know who we are, if we're their old enemies. If they kept us there, they could study us and find out."

  "After 13,000 years, I imagine the war will be over. And where did you get this battleship idea from anyway?"

  "It's a logical assumption," Jorge said quietly.

  Roman turned to Marcus. "My guess is that some kind of mechanoid picked them up. If you look in one of the lockers you'll probably find them neatly stored away.

  "Some automated systems are definitely still working," Schutz said. "We saw the blisters. There could be others."

  "That seems the most remarkable part of it," Marcus said. "Especially now we know the age of the thing. The inside of that ship was brand new. There wasn't any dust, any scuff marks. The lighting worked perfectly, so did the gravity, the humidity hasn't corroded anything. It's extraordinary. As if the whole structure has been in zero-tall. And yet only the shell is protected by the molecular bonding force generators. They're not used inside, not in the decks we examined."

  "However they preserve it, they'll need a lot of power for the job, and that's on top of gravity generation and environmental maintenance. Where's that been coming from uninterrupted for 13,000 years?"

  "Direct mass to energy conversion," Katherine speculated. "Or they could be tapping straight into the sun's fusion. Whatever, bang goes the Edenist He3 monopoly."

  "We have to go back," Marcus said.

  "NO!" Antonio yelled. "We must find the gold first. When that has been achieved, you can come back by yourselves. I won't allow anything to interfere with our priorities."

  "Look, I'm sorry you had a fright while you were over there. But a power supply that works for 13,000 years is a lot more valuable than a whole load of gold which we have to sell furtively," Katherine said levelly.

  "I hired this ship. You do as I say. We go after the gold."

  "We're partners, actually. I'm not being paid for this flight unless we strike lucky. And now we have. We've got the xenoc ship, we haven't got any gold. What does it matter to you how we get rich, as long as we do? I thought money was the whole point of this flight."

  Antonio snarled at her, and flung himself at the floor hatch, kicking off hard with his legs. His elbow caught the rim a nasty crack as he flashed through it.

  "Victoria?" Marcus asked as the silence became strained. "Have the satellite arrays found any heavy metal particles yet?"

  "There are definitely traces of gold and platinum, but nothing to justify a rendezvous."

  "In that case, I say we start to research the xeoc wreck properly." He looked straight at Jorge. "Flow about you?"

  "I think it would be prudent. You're sure we can continue to monitor the array satellites from here?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. Count me in."

&nb
sp; "Thanks. Victoria?"

  She seemed troubled by Jorge's response, even a little bewildered, but she said: "Sure."

  "Karl, you're the nearest thing we've got to a computer expert. I want you over there trying to make contact with whatever control network is still operating."

  "You got it."

  "From now on we go over in teams of four. I want sensors put up to watch the airlocks when we're not around, and start thinking about how we communicate with people inside. Wai, you and I are going to secure Lady Mac to the side of the shell. Okay, let's get active, people."

  Unsurprisingly, none of the standard astronautics industry vacuum epoxies worked on the shell. Marcus and Wai wound up using tether cables wrapped round the whole of the xenoc ship to hold Lady Mac in place.

  Three hours after Karl went over, he asked Marcus to join him.

  Lady Mac's main airlock tube had telescoped out of the hull to rest against the shell. There was no way it could ever be mated to the xenoc airlock rectangle, but it did allow the crew to transfer over directly without having to use exoskeleton armour and the MSV. They'd also run an optical fibre through the xenoc airlock to the interior of the ship. The hatch material closed around it forming a perfect seal, rather than cutting through it.

  Marcus found Karl just inside the airlock, sitting on the floor with several processor blocks in his lap. Eight blisters were slowly circling round him; two on the wall were stationary.

  "Roman was almost right," be datavised as soon as Marcus stepped out of the airlock. "Your exoskeletons were cleared away. But not by any butler mechanoid. Watch." He lobbed an empty recording flak case onto the floor behind the blisters. One of them slid over to it. The green composite became soft, then liquid. The little plastic case sank through it into the blister.

  "I call them cybermice," Karl datavised. "They just scurry around keeping the place clean. You won't see the exoskeletons again, they ate them, along with anything else they don't recognize as part of the ship's structure. I imagine they haven't tried digesting us yet because we're large and active; maybe they think we're friends of the xenocs. But I wouldn't want to try sleeping over here."