by mikel evins
Bowls and cups don’t work. You have to use bulbs and squeeze tubes. Furniture doesn’t work. You have to velcro yourself down to avoid drifting into something or someone.
It all sounds a bit funny until the first time you get a blob of hot coffee in your eye. It took a little time to get the zero-G discipline properly under control before we started planning operations, but after a couple of days on station, we had more or less adapted and settled down. No one walked anywhere. Everyone floated.
“Lev,” said the Captain on the local Fabric channel. “Could you come up to the bridge, please?”
“Certainly, Captain,” I said. “I’ll be right up.”
I left the consulting room of Kestrel’s compact infirmary and floated toward the main lift. Mai skimmed past me in an arc and tossed me a happy greeting as she went by. She was in her usual royal blue tunic. I felt ungainly, like a barge wallowing its way upstream. Mai was a speedboat.
Just a couple of months before we had all watched breathlessly as she had negotiated her way up the spiral ramp on the ship’s bridge with meticulous focus, carrying a cup of coffee in her manipulators for the Captain. Now the tables were turned. Mai, having long since mastered the manipulators, zoomed gracefully into the lift and equally gracefully held it for me as I lumbered ponderously along the companionway.
“Where to, Lev?” she said, as I boarded the lift.
“Bridge,” I said.
“Me too,” she said. “Don’t forget to grab the rail.”
I blinked at her.
“Oh,” I said, and took hold of the safety rail. She signaled Kestrel that we were ready. The lift car moved and, thanks to Mai’s warning, I did not bang my knees embarrassingly on the floor or land on my face as it accelerated.
The lift shaft ran the length of Kestrel’s spine. The ship’s layout was simple: a straight spine two kilometers long. A dozen crew decks stacked one atop the next, all shoved up at the front end of the ship beneath a domed impact shield and graphene skirts that made Kestrel look something like a jellyfish. Four cargo bays (it could have been two, or six, or twelve), threaded on the spine in a cross shape beneath the crew decks. At the far end of the spine, the blast shield, and beyond it, the drive assembly, where Kestrel turned common gases into incandescent fury that bloomed hot and white from her tail.
At the top of the lift shaft, beneath the impact shield and the ship’s bridge, we disembarked on the bridge maintenance deck. It was a garage-like space as big as the ship’s bridge, but with a lower, flatter ceiling and an assortment of ducts, conduits, junction boxes, instrument-maintenance bays, and toolboxes arranged around its circular deck. We crossed toward the circumference of the deck and took the spiral ramp at its edge up to the bridge.
“Welcome to the bridge,” said Kestrel as we emerged. Her voice was warm and deep and feminine.
“Thank you, Kestrel,” I said. “And how are you this shift?”
She chuckled. “Well, thank you. Don’t worry about me.”
Captain Rayleigh was in his command chair at the center of the bridge—or rather, he was mostly above it, one hip making tenuous contact. A half-empty bulb of brown coffee floated near his head. He offered it wary glances from time to time.
“There you are,” he said as I floated up the ramp with Mai. “I wanted you to look at this stuff and tell me what you think.”
He gestured and Kestrel opened a large display volume over our heads that showed us Angel of Cygnus in all her glory. Mai glanced up at it, then zoomed over the rail between the bridge’s inner and outer rings and landed at her duty station. She did something for a moment with her station, looking here and there and once touching a spot with her nose, then she turned to watch the Captain and me.
Kestrel’s bridge, like all her decks, was circular. The impact shield formed a domed roof over our heads, and the entire ship was below us. The Captain’s command chair occupied a slightly elevated spot in the center of the bridge with helm stations in front of him and auxiliary stations behind. Half a dozen additional duty stations were arranged on either side of the central bridge, at the edges of the circle.
The dome of the ceiling provided a useful overhead display volume, which Kestrel normally filled with a faithful reproduction of the space that she saw outside her. The effect was the same as if someone had lopped off Kestrel’s nose just above the bridge and left her open to space.
The image of Angel of Cygnus floated in that space, looking much as she must have really looked if we had been floating in open space outside Kestrel’s hull. She was a long, slender, delicate-looking thing with a huge elliptical paddle blade at one end and a stack of white rings threaded on her spine at the other. For scale, Kestrel showed an image of herself floating alongside. If Angel was a paddle, Kestrel was a mosquito hovering next to the paddle.
“You want me to tell you what I think?” I said. “I think she’s a beautiful ship, elegant and majestic.”
“Not what I meant,” said the Captain, “but thanks for the review. No, I wanted you to look at the habitats.”
He gestured and Kestrel zoomed closer to the stacked rings on the handle of the great paddle. There were four of them wrapped around Angel’s spine. They were white at first glance, but a closer look revealed the transparency of their hulls on the top sides, facing toward the distant paddle blade. The atmosphere inside was brown and murky. Some of the habitats were browner than others, but they all looked grim.
“We saw this before,” I said. “When we communed with the Cold Ones.”
“Yes we did,” said the Captain. “But now we have to plan an expedition. Take a good look and tell me what I need to do to keep my people safe.”
I felt a gentle prodding in my attention and accepted the control that the Captain offered me. I drove our camera view in an impossible orbit around Angel of Cygnus, peering into through the transparent hulls of the habitats.
Each ring was made of six sausage-shaped modules connected end-to-end. They were mounted on giant gimbals, arranged so that the modules could rotate on their axes.
“Those gimbals,” I said. “Does that mean the rings can rotate?”
“To simulate gravity,” said the Captain. “Yeah, it does. Under power the modules hang the way you see them. When the drives are off, I guess the rings are supposed to spin and the modules are supposed to rotate so that centrifigual motion simulates gravity for the people inside.”
“They aren’t spinning now,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Probably one reason it’s so murky in there. No gravity to keep the water and sediment on the ground where it belongs.”
Long shafts like the spokes of a wheel connected the rings to Angel’s spine. Their ends attached to the junctions between modules. I zoomed on one junction and could see that the spokes were long transparent tunnels lined with metalwork.
A couple of the modules contained what looked like city centers. Some contained residential buildings set on what looked like parkland. Some seemed to be industrial. The parkland modules were murkier than the urban and industrial ones. A couple of modules were so murky I could hardly see anything in them.
“It looks bad,” I said.
“I can see that it looks bad,” said the Captain. “How bad?”
“It looks like all the plant life is dead or dying. We know the crew is dead, or at least missing. I don’t like the looks of those darker modules at all. It looks like the air is full of, well, mud, basically. There’s no sign of frost anywhere, and there’s a human being alive in it, so it must be reasonably warm. That means that with that much dead stuff and moisture, and with nothing cleaning things up, it’s basically a big sewer in there.”
“Germs and all?”
“At least,” I said. “Actually, when it comes to pathogens, it might be worse than your typical sewer. I assume there are about twelve hundred dead people in there decomposing, among other things.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” He looked away, gazing into some inter
nal distance.
“What do you think about sending you and Verge to get the survivor? Wait, more than two. Let’s add Yarrow and—who’s the new mech in Engineering?”
“Cheerfully Pyrite?” I said.
“That’s right. Py.”
“Three mechs and an Ionian,” I said.
“Nobody who can catch anything from that muck,” he said.
I thought about it and then nodded.
“Seems sensible,” I said. “Jaemon will be disappointed.”
“Me too,” said Mai. “I was hoping I could go.”
The Captain shrugged.
“You got to go into the death trap last time,” he said.
“So did I,” I said.
4.
Before we jumped across from Kestrel to Angel of Cygnus we set up Cargo Bay One as a quarantine bay. The Cold Ones dropped a set of specifications into Kestrel’s memory and we used them to fab an enclosure. It came out of the fab as a milky rounded cube about half a meter on each side.
Jaemon and I floated it along to the cargo bay, whose huge doors were open to the stars with only the gasherd keeping the atmosphere in. We put the cube in the middle of the bay, as its instructions advised.
We touched it to activate, then went back through the hatch into the companionway. The white cube hissed and swelled and inflated itself until it had coated the interior of the bay from wall to wall.
The membrane covered the interior hatch, looking just like the exterior gasherd. We pushed through it to get inside and it worked like the gasherd, too, but a little slower. It allowed us to ooze through, feeling like we were passing through an oil bath, to float in the bay and admire the shiny new surfaces. It looked like someone had painted a layer of sugar glaze over the deck and bulkheads.
Jaemon wandered over to the exterior doors and poked at the gasherd.
“Nice,” he said. “It looks just like the gasherd. Feels like it, too, only a little stickier, maybe.”
“Slower to push through, you mean?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“I think that’s because it has to work harder than the gasherd. It’s looking for microbes, not just air molecules. The analysis is probably more complicated.”
Jaemon shrugged.
I had on our standard spacegoing armor of skintight scales with composite frames on the joints. The scales were dark blue on my back, and cream-colored on my front. They made me look like a blue lizard.
Chief Officer Verge arrived at the Cargo Bay and floated outside the hatch. She was wearing the same type of armor.
“Come on through, Verge,” said Jaemon. “What are you waiting for?”
She said, “One doesn’t enter an apartment without an invitation.”
Her voice was melodious and feminine and oh, so correct.
Jaemon said, “Verge, it’s the cargo bay.”
17 Actinium Converges was her full name. She was a chrome egg shape about twice the size of a bowling ball, with intricate markings on her surface. Weightlessness didn’t bother her. If anything, it removed a minor obstacle. She was as deft in her use of manipulators as Mai—perhaps moreso, considering that she normally used them in place of arms and legs.
She pushed her way through the quarantine membrane into the bay and floated over to us.
“You remembered your armor,” Jaemon said.
“Of course I remembered my armor,” Verge said, a little peevishly. “I am not senile.”
“Unclench, Verge,” Jaemon said, grinning at her. “I’m just making conversation.”
There were maneuvering jets mounted on all the frames, and membrane generators on our belts. The jet frames made Verge look like a Fabergé egg that had been designed to celebrate some spooky holiday.
Able Spacer Cheerfully Pyrite pushed her way through the membrane into the bay, followed by Able Spacer Yarrow. They had on the same armor.
“Hi,” said Py. “This the place? I’m ready to try this thing.”
“This is the place,” said Jaemon. “Come on over and let’s do a gear check.”
Py was a humanoid mech, like me, but from a different manufacturer. Her model line was a little smaller than mine, but a little more robustly built, and a little curvier. My carapace was a faint cyan tint; hers was closer to white gold with dark blue accents. The vac armor looked better on her than it did on me.
Yarrow said, “This is going to be so interesting.”
Yarrow was an Ionian. They’re often mistaken for mechs because of their metallo-ceramic bodies, but their nervous systems and a bunch of other internals are biological.
Yarrow was about my height and slim. E had golden skin, and eir face, not coincidentally, looked very much like the new face I had made for Yaug. Like other Ionians, Yarrow had glowing solid-colored eyes and indeterminate gender. Eir crest was of shiny white-gold bristles that stood up from the ridgeline of eir head and fell over to one side. Yarrow’s eyes were sky blue.
I noted that the vac armor looked better on Yarrow than it did on me, too.
“Ready for check-out?” Jaemon said. “Let’s do a jet check.”
We triggered firings of our jets that exercised them all at once, pulsing so that they held us in place.
“Okay, they check out,” said Jaemon. “Sidearms?”
We drew our light sidearms and checked batteries, tracking, and safeties. We didn’t expect any trouble, but it was an unknown environment.
“Armor,” said Jaemon.
We gathered in a circle and went around, each of us first running down a checklist on the person to the left, then double-checking the same checklist for the person on our right.
“They’re checked out, Esgar,” said Jaemon.
“Good,” said the Captain. “Kestrel will feed you the locator.”
There was a ping and a flash, and a bright green dot appeared, shining right through the mass of Kestrel’s hull. It was a locator beacon, feeding Oleh Itzal’s coordinates to us as a visual effect that went straight into our brains. We automatically jetted over to the gasherd to get a better look. The green dot was centered on a spot in the top habitat ring, about a quarter of the way around it.
“We’ve got it,” Jaemon said.
“Okay,” said the Captain. “You’re good to go. Verge, you’re in command. Go get us a survivor.”
5.
We jetted up against the gasherd and oozed through it until we were stuck to its outside. We peeled ourselves loose and floated.
It was only my second time in open space. The first time we had come face to face with a swarm of horrors and ended up blowing up a spacecraft to escape them. I looked at the stars and felt uneasy.
Behind us Kestrel loomed like a tower, her nose far above our heads, her skirts a diaphanous parasol dimly glimpsed far above, her fusion torch dark and silent far beneath our feet.
Angel of Cygnus was straight ahead, so big we couldn’t see her. She was twenty times longer than Kestrel and hundreds of times more massive. We saw her habitat rings in front of us, four donut shapes made of linked white sausages. Her main spine rose black and shiny through the center of the donuts, disappearing in the distance above and in the distance below. The spine looked like the steel supports of an ancient suspension bridge, all girders and cables and rivets. The only larger structure I had ever seen was the Equatorial Elevator on Mars.
Far in the distance over our heads we could just make out the dull red glow of the huge elliptical paddle at Angel’s nose, still radiating waste heat from when her drives were firing.
“Form up,” Chief Verge said. She sounded severe.
She drifted out from the gasherd a couple of meters and stopped to wait. We jetted into a diamond shape with the Chief at the front, Yarrow and Py at the left and right, and me at the rear.
“Good,” said the Chief. “We move.”
We jetted across the dark toward the habitats, trying to keep our formation tight and the Chief happy. I surreptitiously rotated my cameras up, down, left and right.
There were no surprises. There was a big, beautiful torch ship shrinking away behind me, a vast monument to the engineering expertise of the ancients looming in front of me, and the glittering spectacle of the universe all around. The Milky Way sprawled across one hemisphere of the sky, giving us celestial glory for a backdrop. If I looked at the sun, nothing more than a bright star out here in the Dark, I could just make out the faint yellow smudge of the Golden Way, the gold-tinted fog of millions of habitats between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
There’s no up and no down in zero G, of course, but it’s hard to persuade a brain of that when it’s spent its whole life in gravity. When I looked down at my feet and beyond them to infinity I couldn’t help feeling a thrill of vertigo. I told my equilibrium routines that I couldn’t fall, but I don’t think they believed me.
After half a minute or so the nearest habitat swelled and blocked our view and we made contact with a series of delicate clicks, our vac armor adhering to the surface. We pressed our feet against the hull and stood up, sticking out at crazy angles according to the curve of the hull where we connected.
A few meters away the white hull of the habitat turned transparent. I walked toward the transparency, peeling my feet loose and snapping them down again. I could see a little into the brown murk. Inside the module seemed to be a parkland. I could see a forest marching away into the distance, a broad footpath that marked the boundary of the forest, and the curving shore of a long pond. It was all shadowy and indistinct. There was no green in it, only lifeless black and gray. Tiny black motes drifted like ash and droplets of water adhered like condensation to the inside of the hull, distorting all I could see.