The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  It wasn’t words, and whatever it was, it drowned out the voices of the other miners, who were currently arguing over whether his skiff was salvage, and whether they should come to his assistance if it was. He’d been trying to organise his addled thoughts enough to warn them off. Now he vibrated his membranes and managed a croak that sounded fragile even to his own hearing. “Who is it? What do you want?”

  That bleat again, or a modestly different one.

  “Are you the alien? I can’t understand you.”

  With pained manipulators, Stormchases managed to unfasten his restraints. He dropped from them harder than he had intended; it seemed he couldn’t hold onto the rack. As his carapace struck the forward bulkhead, he made a disgruntled noise.

  “Speak Language!” he snarled to the talker as he picked himself up. “I can’t understand you.”

  It was mostly an expression of frustration. If they knew Language, they wouldn’t be aliens. But he could not hide his sigh of relief when a deep, coveted voice emerged from the talker instead.

  “Be strong, Stormchases,” the Mothergraves said. “All will soon be well.”

  He pressed two eyes to the viewport. The clouds around his skiff were bright in the sunlight; he watched the encroaching shadow fall across them like the umbra of an eclipse.

  It was the great, welcome shade of the Mothergraves as she drifted out of the sky.

  She was coming for them. Coming for him.

  It was no small thing, for a Drift-World to drop so much altitude. For a Drift-World the size of the Mothergraves, it was a major undertaking, and not one speedily accomplished. Still, she dropped, flanked by her attendant squadrons of flyers and younger Mothers, tiny shapes flitting between her backs. Any of them could have come for Stormchases more easily, but when they would have moved forward, the Mothergraves gestured them back with her trailing, elegant gestures.

  Stormchases occupied the time winching in the sail-net containing the alien object. It was heavy, not buoyant at all. He imagined it must skim through the atmosphere like a dart or a flyer—simply by moving so fast that the aerodynamics of its passage bore it up. He would have liked to disentangle the object from the shroud, but if he did, it would sink like a punctured skiff.

  Instead, he amused himself by assessing the damage to his skiff (catastrophic) and answering the alien’s bleats on the talker somewhat at random, though he had not given up on trying to understand what it might be saying. Obviously, it had technology—quite possibly it was technology, and the hard carapace might indeed be the equivalent of his own skiff—a craft, meant for entering a hostile environment.

  Had it been sampling the storm for useful chemicals and consumables, as well?

  He wondered what aliens ate. What they breathed. He wondered if he could teach them Language.

  Every time he looked up, the Mothergraves’ great keel was lower. Finally, her tendrils encompassed his horizons and when he craned his eyes back, he could make out the double row of Mates fused to and dependent from her bellies like so many additional, vestigial tendrils. There were dozens. The oldest had lost all trace of their origins, and were merely smooth nubs sealed to the Mothergraves’ flesh. The newest were still identifiable as the individuals they had been.

  Many of the lesser Mothers among her escort dangled Mates from their bellies as well, but none had half so many as the Mothergraves . . . and none were so much as two-thirds of her size.

  In frustration, Stormchases squinched himself against the interior of his carapace. So close. He had been so close. And now all he had to show for it was a wrecked skiff and a bleating alien. Now he would have to start over—

  He could ask the Mothergraves to release his groom-price to a lesser Mother. He had provided well enough for any of her sisters or daughters to consider him.

  But none of them were she.

  He only hoped his sacrifice of resources in order to rescue the alien had not angered her. That would be too much to bear—although if she decided to reclaim the loss from his corpse, he supposed at the very least he would die fulfilled . . . if briefly.

  The talker squawked again. The alien sounds seemed more familiar; he must be getting used to them.

  A few of the Mothergraves’ tendrils touched him, as he had so long anticipated. It was bitterest irony now, but the pleasure of the caress almost made it worthwhile. He braced himself for pain and paralysis . . . but she withheld her sting, and the only pain were the bruises left by his restraints and by impact with the bulkheads of the tumbling skiff.

  Now her voice came to him directly, rather than by way of the talker. It filled the air around him and vibrated in the hollows of his body like soft thunder. To his shock and disbelief, she said words of ritual to him; words he had hoped and then despaired to hear.

  She said, “For the wealth of the whole, what have you brought us, Stormchases?”

  Before he could answer, the talker bleated again. This time, in something like Language—bent, barely comprehensible, accented more oddly than any Language Stormchases had ever heard.

  It said, “Hello? You us comprehend?”

  “I hear you,” the Mothergraves said. “What do you want?”

  A long silence before the answer came. “This we fix. Trade science. Go. Place you give us for repairs?”

  The aliens—the object was a skiff, of sorts, and it had as many crew members as Stormchases had eyes—had a machine that translated their bleaty words into Language, given a wise enough sample of it. As the revolutions went by, the machine became more and more proficient, and Stormchases spent more and more time talking to A’lees, their crew member in charge of talking. Their names were just nonsense sounds, not words, which made him wonder how any of them ever knew who he was. And they divided labour up in strange ways, with roles determined not by instar and inheritance but by individual life-courses. They told him a great deal about themselves and their peculiar biology; he reciprocated with the more mundane details of his own. A’lees seemed particularly interested that he would soon Mate, and wished to know as much about the process as he could tell.

  The aliens sealed themselves in small flexible habitats—pressure carapaces—to leave their skiff, and for good reason. They were made mostly of water, and they oozed water from their bodies, and the pressure and temperature of the world’s atmosphere would destroy them as surely as the deeps of the sky would crush Stormchases. The atmosphere they breathed was made of inert gases and explosive oxygen, and once their skiff was beached on an open patch of the Mothergraves’ back for repairs, just the leakage of oxygen and water vapour from its airlocks soon poisoned a swath of vegetation for a bodylength in any direction.

  Stormchases stayed well back from the alien skiff while he had these conversations.

  Talking to the aliens was a joy and a burden. The Mothergraves insisted he should be the one to serve as an intermediary. He had experience with them, and the aliens valued that kind of experience—and when he was Mated, that experience would be assimilated into the Mothergraves’ collective mind. It would become a part of her, and a part of all their progeny to follow.

  The Mothergraves had told him—in the ritual words—that knowledge and discovery were great offerings, unique offerings. That the opportunity to interact with beings from another world was of greater import to her and her brood than organics, or metals, or substances that she could machine within her great body into the stuff of skiffs and sails and other technology. That she accepted his suit, and honoured the courage with which he had pressed it.

  And that was why the duty was a burden. Because to be available for the aliens while they made the repairs—to play liaison (their word)—meant putting off the moment of joyous union again. And again. To have been so close, and then so far, and then so close again—

  The agony of anticipation, and the fear that it would be snatched from him again, was a form of torture.

  A’lees came outside of the alien skiff in her pressure carapace and sat in its water-pois
oned circle with her forelimbs wrapped around her drawn-up knees, talking comfortably to Stormchases. She said she was a female, a Mother. But that Mothers of her kind were not so physically different from the males, and that even after they Mated, males continued to go about in the world as independent entities.

  “But how do they pass their experiences on to their offspring?” Stormchases asked.

  A’lees paused for a long time.

  “We teach them,” she said. “Your children inherit your memories?”

  “Not memories,” he said. “Experiences.”

  She hesitated again. “So you become a part of the Mother. A kind of . . . symbiote. And your offspring with her will have all of her experiences, and yours? But . . . not the memories? How does that work?”

  “Is knowledge a memory?” he asked.

  “No,” she said confidently. “Memories can be destroyed while skills remain . . . Oh. I think . . . I understand.”

  They talked for a little while of the structure of the nets and the Mothers’ canopies, but Stormchases could tell A’lees was not finished thinking about memories. Finally she made a little deflating hiss sound and brought the subject up again.

  “I am sad,” A’lees said, “that when we have fixed our sampler and had time to arrange a new mission and come back, you will not be here to talk with us.”

  “I will be here,” said Stormchases, puzzled. “I will be mated to the Mothergraves.”

  “But it won’t be”—whatever A’lees had been about to say, the translator stammered on it; she continued—“the same. You won’t remember us.”

  “The Mothergraves will,” Stormchases assured her.

  She drew herself in a little smaller. “It will be a long time before we return.”

  Stormchases patted toward the edge of the burn zone. He did not let his manipulators cross it, though. Though he would soon enough lose the use of his manipulators to atrophy, he didn’t feel the need to burn them off prematurely. “It’s all right, A’lees,” he said. “We will remember you by the scar.”

  Whatever the sound she made next meant, the translator could not manage it.

  The award-winning “Diving into the Wreck” novella marked the first step in a large journey for New York Times bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She’s written many other award-winning novellas in the series, as well as the novels Diving into the Wreck, City of Ruins, Boneyards, Skirmishes, The Falls, and The Runabout. The next novel, Searching For The Fleet, will appear in September 2018. She’s working hard on the ninth and tenth novels in the series. When she finishes those, she’ll return to her massive Retrieval Artist universe. A eight-book saga in that universe has just been released in a single ebook boxed set—almost 2,000 pages long. She’s a Hugo Award-winning editor and writer, who has been nominated for most of the awards in the sf and mystery fields. She writes under several pen names as well. The public ones are Kristine Grayson and Kris Nelscott. To find out more about her work go to kriswrites.com. To find out more about Diving, go to divingintothewreck.com.

  DIVING INTO THE WRECK

  KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

  We approach the wreck in stealth mode: lights and communications array off, sensors on alert for any other working ship in the vicinity. I’m the only one in the cockpit of the Nobody’s Business. I’m the only one with the exact coordinates.

  The rest of the team sits in the lounge, their gear in cargo. I personally searched each one of them before sticking them to their chairs. No one, but no one, knows where the wreck is except me. That was our agreement.

  They hold to it or else.

  We’re six days from Longbow Station, but it took us ten to get here. Misdirection again, although I’d only planned on two days working my way through an asteroid belt around Beta Six. I ended up taking three, trying to get rid of a bottom-feeder that tracked us, hoping to learn where we’re diving.

  Hoping for loot.

  I’m not hoping for loot. I doubt there’s something space-valuable on a wreck as old as this one looks. But there’s history value, and curiosity value, and just plain old we-done-it value. I picked my team with that in mind.

  The team: six of us, all deep-space experienced. I’ve worked with two before—Turtle and Squishy, both skinny space-raised women who have a sense of history that most out here lack. We used to do a lot of women-only dives together, back in the beginning, back when we believed that sisterhood was important. We got over that pretty fast.

  Karl comes with more recommendations than God; I wouldn’t’ve let him aboard with those rankings except that we needed him—not just for the varied dives he’s gone on, but also for his survival skills. He’s saved at least two diving-gone-wrong trips that I know of.

  The last two—Jypé and Junior—are a father-and-son team that seem more like halves of the same whole. I’ve never wreck dived with them, though I took them out twice before telling them about this trip. They move in synch, think in synch, and have more money than the rest of us combined.

  Yep, they’re recreationists, but recreationists with a handle: their hobby is history, their desires—at least according to all I could find on them—to recover knowledge of the human past, not to get rich off of it.

  It’s me that’s out to make money, but I do it my way, and only enough to survive to the next deep space trip. I don’t thrive out here, but I’m addicted to it.

  The process gets its name from the dangers: in olden days, wreck diving was called space diving to differentiate it from the planet-side practice of diving into the oceans.

  We don’t face water here—we don’t have its weight or its unusual properties, particularly at huge depths. We have other elements to concern us: No gravity, no oxygen, extreme cold.

  And greed.

  My biggest problem is that I’m land-born, something I don’t confess to often. I spent the first forty years of my life trying to forget that my feet were once stuck to a planet’s surface by real gravity. I even came to space late: fifteen years old, already land-locked. My first instructors told me I’d never unlearn the thinking real atmosphere ingrains into the body.

  They were mostly right; land pollutes me, takes out an edge that the space-raised come to naturally. I gotta consciously choose to go into the deep and dark; the space-raised glide in like it’s mother’s milk. But if I compare myself to the land-locked, I’m a spacer of the first order, someone who understands vacuum like most understand air.

  Old timers, all space-raised, tell me my interest in the past comes from being land-locked. Spacers move on, forget what’s behind them. The land-born always search for ties, thinking they’ll understand better what’s before them if they understand what’s behind them.

  I don’t think it’s that simple. I’ve met history-oriented spacers, just like I’ve met land-born who’re always looking forward.

  It’s what you do with the knowledge you collect that matters and me, I’m always spinning mine into gold.

  So, the wreck.

  I came on it nearly a year before, traveling back from a bust I’d got suckered into with promise of glory. I was manually guiding my single-ship, doing a little mapping to pick up some extra money. They say there aren’t any undiscovered places any more in this part of our galaxy, just forgotten ones, and I think that’s true.

  An eyeblink is all I’d’ve needed to miss the wreck. I caught the faint energy signal on a sensor I kept tuned to deep space around me. The sensor blipped once and was gone, that fast. But I had been around enough to know that something was there. The energy signal was too far out, too faint to be anything but lost.

  As fast as I could, I dropped out of FTL, cutting my sublight speed to nothing in the drop. It still took me two jumps and a half day of searching before I found the blip again and matched its speed and direction.

  I had been right. It was a ship. A black lump against the blackness of space.

  My single-ship is modified—I don’t have automatic anythings in it, which can make it dang
erous (the reason single-ships are completely automatic is so that the sole inhabitant is protected), but which also makes it completely mine. I’ve modified engines and the computers and the communications equipment, so that nothing happens without my permission.

  The ship isn’t even linked to me, although it is set to monitor my heart rate, my respiration rate, and my eyes. Should my heart slow, my breathing even, or my eyes close for longer than a minute, the automatic controls take over the entire ship. Unconsciousness isn’t as much of a danger as it would be if the ship were one-hundred-percent manual, but consciousness isn’t a danger either. No one can monitor my thoughts or my movements simply by tapping the ship’s computer.

  Which turned out to be a blessing because now there are no records of what I had found in the ship’s functions. Only that I had stopped.

  My internal computer attached to the eyelink told me what my brain had already figured out. The wreck had been abandoned long ago. The faint energy signal was no more than a still running current inside the wreck.

  My internal computer hypothesized that the wreck was Old Earth make, five thousand years old, maybe older. But I was convinced that estimation was wrong.

  In no way could Earthers have made it this far from their own system in a ship like that. Even if the ship had managed to survive all this time floating like a derelict, even if there had been a reason for it to be here, the fact remained: no Earthers had been anywhere near this region five thousand years ago.

  So I ignored the computerized hypothesis, and moved my single-ship as close as I could get it to the wreck without compromising safety measures.

  Pitted and space-scored, the wreck had some kind of corrosion on the outside and occasional holes in the hull. The thing clearly was old. And it had been floating for a very long time. Nothing lived in it, and nothing seemed to function in it either besides that one faint energy signature, which was another sign of age.