Alien Artifacts

by Seanan McGuire

  Rivets pinged from the wall; the front of the ship was tearing open. She had seconds. Lyssa crammed the helmet over her head, fumbling with the heavy seals. It was an old-style helmet, designed to click into a full-body EVA suit. It would buy her time, but not much. She glanced over at the bridge door. It wasn’t going to open, not with a pressure loss on this side—they’d lose the rest of the ship.

  A familiar calm spread over her, sweeping panic aside. Death happens, as Jem used to say. If you’re breathing you’ve got options.

  She’d have to go out and come in through a regular airlock.

  She pushed off the wall to the console and flipped open the emergency release. Above the airlock, a window of reinforced perspex exploded out into space. All sound dropped away but her own breath, her blood in her ears. Her skin tingled as the pressure dropped to zero and her suit compressed to compensate. The helmet would give her a few minutes of air at best. She darted over to the hole and pushed herself out into the black.

  Outside, the void sucked everything away. Lyssa grabbed for the ladders that skirted the sides of the ship, pulling herself close, keeping her breaths light. The running lights picked up pieces of ship spinning away: the drill, the docking clamp, chunks of hull. She ducked as a piece of shrapnel bounced off her face shield, clenching her awkward grip on the ladder against the emptiness behind her.

  Her head prickled, like electricity under her scalp—she was losing oxygen. She pulled herself along the ladder to the closest airlock, where the tiny cluster of habitable modules separated the cargo bay from the engine core. Her vision fuzzed gray at the edges as she pumped the manual override to cycle the airlock from outside, and the red light blinked, counting down the cycle. She floated, gently twisting, focusing on keeping hold of the ladder as the gray closed in further on her vision.

  The asteroid swung into view. Beyond the wreckage speared a massive hexagon, a green so dark it was almost black against the ruddy rock. The end sheared off unevenly, and smaller hexagons bubbled from the sides, like a galactic tourmaline. The core of her chilled just to look at it.

  Thoughts tried to form. She could feel them in her head, like blocks that wouldn’t fit together. The rock, the ship, the green. Static sparked in her ears, stuttering the sound of her breath.

  That is your brain shutting down. Get in the airlock.

  She stared down at the ring of metal she grasped. The light was green. Green like the hexagon, but bright. There was something she had to do. Twist the ring. Each movement swept over her mind like it would wash her out into the gray. She swung out as the hatch opened, limbs floating like they belonged to someone else. She willed herself into the chamber, tugging the door shut.

  It wasn’t finished. The thing she had to do, it wasn’t done. She had a pinhole through the gray, now. She had to find something. Her face itched, and she wiggled in the helmet. Her pinhole found a mark, a stain, inside with her in the helmet. A triangular edge, old-brown and smeared. Her thoughts bubbled “blood,” and she tried to remember what that meant.

  * * *

  The green spear hung in her mind in the dark, like it was drawing her in. Panic flooded her: she was dying, they were all dying. Close the airlock, get inside. Lyssa struggled to breathe, fought against the lead holding her limbs, swam against the void—

  Opened her eyes to the sterile white of the ship lab.

  Her thoughts jammed. She was inside the ship, not dying, strapped into the wall, oxy-mask on her face. She sucked air in slowly, forcing the panic down, and gripped the padded wall behind her for reassurance. This is what’s real. She shook her head, trying to banish the other thoughts.

  Jazz and Ori floated opposite, their backs to her while they discussed something on the scanner in hushed voices. All three crew were crammed into the room that served as their infirmary, the comm station, and general operations area. Lyssa frowned. Why weren’t they fixing the ship?

  She wriggled herself free, dislodging equipment, and ran a mental damage assessment. They’d lost the nose of the ship at least—the bridge, the nav, and comms. So they couldn’t go anywhere or call anyone until that was fixed. It would take weeks for anyone to respond to a distress beacon out here. But Jazz and Ori, pouring over images on the scanner, didn’t seem concerned; if anything, they were excited.

  “It has to be military.” Ori traced the smooth green shape with her fingers. “Look at it. It’s so sleek.”

  The screen was full of images of the asteroid and the green hexagonal spear, alongside EM spectrum levels and a host of other readings.

  “Shouldn’t we be fixing the ship?” Lyssa grabbed the floating instruments, tucking them back into their pockets on the wall.

  “You’ve been out for two hours,” Jazz replied without looking at her. “We’re sealed up tight, but we don’t have the parts to get her running. Yet.”

  “Any response to the distress beacon?” They could get lucky, after all. Find someone close by.

  There was a pause, just a second too long. Jazz said, “It’s not military, we’d have been shot down before we got anywhere near. It’s corporate.”

  “They’d have sent a comm packet, sent a ping out before we hit. There’s nothing in the logs,” Ori replied smoothly.

  Lyssa gaped. You haven’t sent a beacon. You’re leaving us stranded so you can raid the damn asteroid. And he didn’t even have the decency to deny it, to make excuses. Even in an emergency, they were talking around her like she didn’t exist. She pushed off the wall to interrupt.

  “It didn’t send any signal,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “In fact the ship couldn’t pick it up at all.”

  “You sure?” Jazz laid the sarcasm thick, half-turning. Lyssa held herself rigid. It hadn’t been her fault, she would not back down, and if he was holding off sending a beacon for the chance at profit, she didn’t owe him a thing. Jazz’s gaze darted over her, as if he didn’t want to see her. “Did you check the—”

  “Yes, I checked the proximity flags, I checked everything.” Lyssa shut her mouth sharply. “I’ve been piloting for eight years,” she said, with this was not my fault implied. Jazz humphed air out of his lungs, and Lyssa snapped.

  “Look, we’re six weeks out, in open territory. Who in their right mind builds an illegal outpost where there’s nothing worth having? And builds something invisible to ship sensors in an active mining zone? Generally you don’t want people to crash into your space ports.”

  Jazz’s mouth twitched in a proto-smile. “Then what? Adventure hotels?”

  Lyssa peered closer at the images, feeling the pull in her mind again. “No EM readings, and the spectrum can’t even pick out the alloys. And look at the shape of it. We don’t build stuff like that.”

  “We who?”

  “I don’t think it’s human.” Her own words rebounded in her ears and hollowed her out. Not human. She wondered why she felt so sure.

  “You say that like there’s anything else out there,” Jazz scoffed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ori sniffed. “It’s a military base. They didn’t fire in case it gave them away.”

  “Well,” Lyssa searched for something diplomatic. Ori was almost talking to her. “There’s no heat signature. They’d have to vent heat somewhere, if there was something living in there.”

  “Hmm.” Jazz rolled the sound around his throat.

  “We need to tell people about this,” Lyssa said. “Another civilization, we need to get people looking out at the stars again.” The hollow feeling spread out through her body, down to her fingers, shrinking her. Suddenly, the ship, the solar system was so incomprehensibly small.

  “If it’s empty, could be something there worth the time,” Jazz mused. “I know some people’d sell it as alien tech, whatever it is.”

  “Are you spaced?” Ori gaped at him. “Think of the wars it would start.”

  “Think of the wars it would stop,” Lyssa said.

  “Think of the money we’re leaving on the table,” J
azz snapped. He caught Lyssa’s shocked face, and shrugged. “Daikokuten’s crippled, it’s going to cost half a space-port to fix, assuming we can find the parts to repair her and get home.”

  “What about insurance?”

  “Told you,” Ori muttered.

  “You don’t have—you’re kidding?” Lyssa’s head spun. “How did you even dock without insurance?”

  “We had it when we docked,” Jazz muttered.

  “What?”

  He exploded. “They wanted us in dry-dock for post-claim clearance. Three weeks. Three weeks! No jobs, no pay. And the Schiaparelli cabin fees are a rort; I might as well sell the ship. We didn’t have the cred.”

  “So take a shuttle to Earth, wait it out. There’s always dock-work.”

  Ori snorted, and shot a look Lyssa couldn’t read at Jazz. “Typical.” She pushed off the wall and shot out into the crew quarters.

  Lyssa spread her hands in the universal what-did-I-say gesture. Jazz glowered.

  “Earth-born.”

  Lyssa held her ground. “Yeah, I am. So?”

  “That’s what she means. She was born on Mars, in Martian gravity, we both were.” His lip twisted. “Scrums like us don’t get Earth visas. They don’t want us filling up their hospitals with heart failure and broken bones.” He pushed himself out after Ori. “You nearly got yourself killed today. Stay here and recuperate.”

  “While what?”

  Jazz paused in the hatchway. “While we go check out the military base or whatever it is.”

  “You can’t leave me behind! I’m not even injured!”

  “Pretty sure I run this ship.”

  “You can’t search that whole place with two people, it’ll take forever.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Jazz said grimly.

  Lyssa gritted her teeth. She wasn’t going to rise to that. “It’ll go faster with three. You might find more loot.”

  “Not if we’re busy saving your arse.”

  “You don’t trust me not to screw up.”

  “So don’t screw up staying here.” He slid the inner hatch down, shutting her in. Lyssa pelted the blood pressure cuff at the door. It bounced impotently off the wall and into the emergency helmet from the bridge. Lyssa snatched both out of the air, jammed the pressure cuff into its pocket on the wall and then clung on to the helmet, suddenly dizzy.

  Partial asphyxiation takes a toll. She breathed carefully, calmly, staring at a fixed point of brown in the helmet.

  No wonder Jazz didn’t want to send a beacon. Without insurance, he’d have to hock the whole ship just to pay for the retrieval. But a three-week post-claim clearance…they only did that if you had a major incident, like losing a crew member, or massive damage to the ship.

  She’d seen the ship before they left; there hadn’t been any recent repairs. She flipped the helmet over, tracing the brown stain that reached from the edge of the visor and pooled where the ear would rest. Her blood chilled.

  At least that answered why a steady crew like this had suddenly needed a pilot. Their previous pilot was dead. And the government had forced them straight back out in the ship that killed them. No time to breathe or mourn. No wonder Ori acted like Lyssa didn’t exist: she was a reminder of who they’d lost.

  Lyssa shuddered, her body threatening to purge. She’d had her head inside that thing, inside the helmet their last pilot had died in. She’d almost died in the same damn helmet.

  A cacophony filled her mind: blood and smoke and cries for help, pulling Jem from the rubble. How many near-misses do you get?

  But that’s how they were treating her: as the fake replacement. Can’t be trusted to survive.

  Lyssa hauled the hatch open.

  This job had been it, she’d thought. As close as she could get to the real stars, close enough to pretend it was enough. But now there was finally something bigger, something more than humanity’s tiny pocket, and she’d be damned if she was going to be sidelined because of a ghost.

  * * *

  Lyssa pulled herself out the airlock, the EVA suit pinching at her fingers. Jazz and Ori had trained all the ship’s running lights on the structure, lighting up the great hexagonal spear with bright circles of green. It was almost the size of a shipping port, and the light seemed to penetrate it like a gem. The sheared-off tip was in fact hundreds of hexagons locked together, like the Giant’s Causeway cliffs back on Earth.

  Two flimsy tethers hung from the ladder of the Daikokuten to a shadowed area of the structure: Jazz and Ori were already inside. Lyssa flicked her comm on but kept her mic muted.

  “—shouldn’t have taken on someone so green,” Ori was saying.

  “Let up a bit would you, she’s doing fine,” Jazz replied. “I saw the readings, even Tye would have had trouble.”

  Lyssa pulled herself gently toward the structure, clamping her mouth shut so the questions wouldn’t bubble out. So Tye had been the previous pilot.

  “Tye would have asked for help.”

  Jazz snorted. “What ship were you on?”

  There was a pause, then, “Sorry,” from Ori.

  “Not your fault.”

  “Not yours, either,” she said softly.

  Lyssa frowned. She’d missed something about that exchange. A look, or a shift in the mood.

  Greenness now blocked out the void, and Lyssa could see the tiny hatchway they’d cut through, a neat plug of not-quite-metal clamped against the side of the structure. The tethers ended here. Lyssa pulled herself inside.

  It was a hexagonal corridor, gray-green like the ocean, walls covered in tiny protuberances like intestinal villi that sprang back in place when pushed. They glowed softly in the corners of the hexagon, leading away to the left.

  Reacting to Jazz and Ori’s movement? Lyssa pulled herself experimentally into the dark, trying not to think too hard about the possible consequences of that on an alien vessel. The villi-light echoed her movement, glowing along the passage ahead of her. She followed it, away from where Jazz and Ori had gone.

  The corridor intersected others a few times; dark tunnels in all directions. Lyssa kept straight until the walls spread out into a room. Irregular depressions dotted the floor and walls equally, each with a harness above it, anchored at five points. Lyssa floated to the nearest and pulled at the harness, trying to guess the shape of its intended occupant from the straps and clips and joins: not a human shape. She pressed her gloved fingers against the depression—it was spongy, different from the villi. Her head spun, a chill climbing up through her gut, and she kicked off from the wall.

  Her mind cleared as she floated further into the room. There didn’t seem to be a designated floor or ceiling, this was definitely a structure designed for microgravity. A dark shape drifted ahead.

  “Are you seeing this?” Jazz’s voice cut in. Lyssa started, but they were nowhere in sight.

  “I don’t recognise any of this stuff,” Ori answered.

  “But look at the size of it. There’d be enough to take down a planet.”

  “Or trade an empire.”

  Cautiously, Lyssa floated toward the shape. The light from her suit played over something pale, but she couldn’t make sense of the contours.

  “It’s military, it’s got to be,” Jazz said. “A merchant ship would have, well, a ship. Places to hold trade. There are no docking ports. How would you get the stuff out?”

  “I think, maybe...” Ori’s voice grew distant. “Maybe she was right.” She almost whispered, “This isn’t one of ours.”

  Silence on the comm. As she drifted, Lyssa imagined that same hollow feeling flowing through them, the same realization that their world, with all the freedom and dangers of space, was a sand speck in a maelstrom.

  “We could sell it to the military.” Jazz’s voice struggled for his usual gruff tone.

  “If you tell anyone, there’ll be mass panic. We’ll be back in the inter-spacial wars again, Earth trying to claim Mars as a military outpost.”

  “And
we might finally get some decent research into things, like rad shielding.” Jazz’s voice had a bitter edge.

  “Bit late for that,” Ori said softly. “And I don’t think he’d say it was worth the cost.”

  “Cost? That’s what governments are for.”

  “The human cost, Jazz. Paranoia kills. People turn on each other.”

  “And if this is a misfired vanguard, we’ll be glad of it.”

  Lyssa could finally see it: a misshapen wad of flesh twice her size, all bulbous skin and tentacles, dead white. She froze as she bumped into it, unable to stop her momentum. The flesh was hard, frozen solid. It didn’t stir. She breathed deeply, lowered her heart rate. They’d opened the ship to space. Presumably the creatures needed an atmosphere to survive. Anything inside was already dead. Unless it had a suit. Or skin that could survive a vacuum. Lyssa shuddered.

  They could be behind a hatch, she realized. But she hadn’t seen a single door, and a sense within her said the life this structure had housed was long dead. A deep loss welled in her stomach, for the meeting of species that could have been; for the creatures themselves. Not at all the spindly-gray imaginings of the ages. Always so anthropocentric. She longed to have met them.

  But the thing remained inert, floating almost-tethered above a depression. Something like a cuttlefish, or other cephalopod, one large head-like bulge, with other, smaller bulges and a host of tentacles. Lyssa envisioned them propelling themselves along the hexagons, delicate tentacle tips finding the villi in the walls as leverage. She smiled softly. They would have been graceful.

  She pushed off toward another opening, another corridor, listening to Jazz and Ori argue whether Jazz was holding a weapon or a sculpture. The wonders of a larger universe now seemed lost on the pair as they narrowed back to themselves, and Lyssa pushed their voices out of her mind. The walls fanned out again, farther than before, farther than her light could penetrate, undulating in deep ridges, like shelves in a zero-gravity warehouse. Clear pods, coffin-sized, were set into every available surface, filled with liquid and a dark shape in each. With a sense of growing dread, Lyssa floated toward them.