I made myself stop thinking about how it could have been worse, because things were bad enough. Singer flipped our ring ninety degrees, lowering our profile. The other vessel’s bubble brushed past, but through some miracle or skill in the other crew we didn’t make contact. Still, their bit of space and our bit of space were folded in different directions and moving at different speeds, and dragging one through the other didn’t make for comfortable weather.
Our little tug shuddered with proximity, and the relative tinny silence of space continued to be shattered by the alarm. I heard the unmistakable scritching of claws into carpet as the ship’s cats attached themselves to the nearest wall. Bred and born in space, they knew how to manage themselves. I latched down too, wrenching an ankle as my afthands clutched wildly. I swung away from center like a barn door, almost losing my grip and my orientation to become a projectile within the command cabin myself.
“Haimey!” Singer yelped. “A little help please!”
“Reverse?” Connla asked. “Go Newton?”
He meant, let the ship bob back up to the surface of space. I stabilized myself and turned off the pain. I’d fix the ankle later. “Where the hell are they?”
He twisted his head—meaningless, but reflex. “I don’t know! They’re gone! Maybe they went past?”
What the hell are they? And what are they doing here?
We were still in white space, folding the fabric of the universe around us, but we weren’t moving fast. You could stay still. It was possible to throw a little fold of space-time around yourself like a vampire vanishing into his swirl of cloak. But as long as we were behind the scar, we couldn’t see out, and nobody outside could see in.
“Dock,” I said, not believing it even as I felt my own lips moving.
“Dock? With whom?”
“With the salvage target, Singer! Get us next to whatever’s inside that scar! Behind it, by preference, so if anything swings through the bubble from the same direction, it’ll hit them first!”
Give an AI this; our white bubble meshed seamlessly with the dead fold surrounding the hulk, and an instant later we had visual. It was a big one: I gasped out loud. The metal in the hull alone would make the trip worth our while, if we could figure out how to get it home. I was only the third-best pilot on the ship—I had Bushyasta and Mephistopheles beat, at least—but even I could already identify a few technical difficulties.
“Stop gawking,” Singer said, bringing us around under the target. We were coasting within the big ship’s fold now—a little farther out of the line of disaster. But not home with our boots off yet.
Because even with our oversized white coils flipped longitudinally, we were inside the big ship’s ring.
I ducked back into the interface and busied myself casting around for ripples that might show me the direction and velocity of the ship whose bubble we’d bumped into. If I got lucky, I might be able to spot it through gravitational lensing—one of the tiger-eye bands of radiation ringing our bubble might show a ripple as their bubble concentrated light—or at least see a disturbance in the fold where it had tossed space-time around when it left.
There was nothing. It was gone again, and maybe they’d been as freaked out by the contact as we were and ducked away hard. If they hadn’t scared themselves as badly as they’d scared us, that begged the burning question: Had they been expecting us? Following us? Or had they just been on their way to somewhere else, and we had both been the victims of a statistical miracle, our white bubbles colocating?
That they might be the law didn’t worry me too much, as we weren’t doing anything illegal. There was such a thing as pirates, though—and rival salvage operations, some of which might not be as ethical as we were about claim jumping.
Or maybe a lot of people had paid our source for the location of this derelict.
Had they bumped us on purpose, trying to scare us off? We might not have noticed them sitting very still, waiting. There wasn’t a lot of light out here, and the dead Ativahika sure was a great distraction. We had been out of transition long enough that they might have developed a good idea of our v. A sufficiently crazy cowboy pilot or shipmind just might have gotten the idea to scare us off with a bump. My own standards of risk assessment were . . . a little more conservative, I’m afraid to say, but some people around here think I’m a stick-in-the-mud.
I kept one eye on the salvage prize, but with the bulk of my attention spent a few more moments on scanning, rechecking our records of the contact and the moments before and after. It was something to do, even though Singer could do it better, but both of us kept coming up empty. That brought me back to the idea we had both just been the victims of terrible, coincidental timing. That sort of thing happens every once in a while, even though space is so unimaginably vast it’s staggering to think of the odds. But they’re no worse than the odds of, say, the sort of planetary impact that provided Earth with a moon.
Space is vast. But time is long, so there’s a lot of it for unlikely things to happen in.
Terra does have a moon. And so on.
Anyway, I couldn’t find that damned ship anywhere. We had a record of the contact, but all it showed me was a blurred flash of a quicksilver ring and a ship whose hull was mostly white. No port or species designation was visible, which didn’t mean they were pirates. I could see about a third of the front and port side of the hull, and not everybody paints their name in the same place. We hadn’t caught a transponder ID, but a brushing contact like that—we might only have been in the same universe with them between pings.
It was hard to think with the derelict looming over us, anyway. Singer was a dashing-enough little craft, his plated sliver of a hull dotted with sensor arrays and painted a cheery green and blue. His derrick and towing array, usually kept folded, were bright orange, with stripes in ultraviolet paint to catch the attention of species that were blueshifted by human standards. But I found myself imagining how he would look dwarfed by this behemoth if I were standing outside, and shook my head.
“You’re not having any luck finding the other ship either?” I asked.
Connla’s ponytail went all directions, but mostly side to side. I wasn’t sure if the text was “Go find out for yourself” or “I’m not sure,” but the subtext was that he was busy, and answering questions was not a productive use of his time currently. Singer—of course—was doing most of the flying. But Connla and I both liked to feel at least a little more useful than the cats.
Slightly.
Hey, it could happen.
“It’s the Admiral,” Singer said ominously. “He’s coming to get you because you didn’t eat your vegetables.”
I laughed. Pirate boogeymen didn’t hold any terrors for me.
I was so distracted staring at the derelict that I was surprised by the little shiver through Singer’s surfaces that told me the derrick had been deployed.
“We’re behind the derelict as requested,” Connla said. “And I’ve got a cable on them. What’s the next step?”
“Singer?” He was better at math than I was. “Enter it here, or try to splice into it?”
“If you want to spacewalk in a warp bubble, I’ll make sure to have record functionality online so we can send your last moments to your clade survivors.”
“Hah. They’ve disowned me.”
“It’s not too big?”
Division of labor: Connla flew. I figured out structural tolerances.
I looked back out at the damned thing speculatively. I didn’t think it was a human ship, though we’ve got some funny cultures, and those funny cultures come up with some funny designs. Its hull color was a sort of chocolate brown, and didn’t match exactly from plate to plate. It had some markings in cream, and some more in yellow, and that contrast made me think that its previous owners might see in spectra similar to ours.
However, that wasn’t a color human-type people usually painted ships—we went for whites, or grays, or bright colors that stood out against space. P
irates liked black, both for the obvious reasons of concealment and probably because it made them feel like badasses, and I expected their egos needed all the shoring up they could get.
It was a pretty typical shape for a deep-space ship with no intention of maintaining gravity; Singer has a little room on a counterweighted stick we can spin around the main spindle to generate centripetal force so we can work on our bone density. We use the other end for storing cargo, or water usually.
This vessel didn’t look like it either rotated in its entirety, or had any bits and pieces that might rotate in their turn. It was roughly spherical—a lot of Alcubierre-White ships are, or cigar/needle-shaped, because of the shape of the field that surrounds them. It was so damned big, though: I wondered what it used for fuel. Antimatter?
The thought of being in the same quadrant with an unattended antimatter bottle gave me an uncomfortable shiver. So I adjusted my chemistry and stopped thinking about it. Then I had an uncomfortable shiver about adjusting my chemistry so reflexively. You can’t win.
The target had made a fold in space-time, pushed a wrinkle up in front of itself and stretched the universe out behind, and gotten stuck there. That was the flaw we’d slipped into. And it was the trap we needed to get out of, now.
We couldn’t just hook it up, tow it out, and exit in tandem because there would be a few moments in which part of the ship was inside the fold, and part was out—which is bad for ships, and the people inside them.
Hell, maybe the interloper was another salvage operator, and they’d taken one look at how big the prize was, figured there was no way we could lift it, and gone off to get help or a bigger white drive. Our white bubble was a third of a kilometer, and that wasn’t big enough.
“We need a solution.”
Connla shrugged. “As long as we take it slow, overcoming the inertia to get it moving shouldn’t be a problem.”
“We can’t pull them free of their bubble, though—we’ll need to collapse it rather than exiting in tandem. Because they’re too big to get our bubble around them no matter how far we stretch the coil. Which also means I don’t know how we’ll get them home. Maybe steal their coil?”
“Been practicing your space welding?”
“We are inside their bubble now,” Singer pointed out. “We can use our own white drive to unfold space, and when we’ve pulled them free, we should all fall back to the surface together.”
Connla thought about it for roughly a standard minute and said, “I don’t see any unacceptably dangerous flaws.”
“Only acceptably dangerous ones?”
He grinned. Secretly, I sort of like his Spartacan bravado. When it’s not getting us into fights in station bars.
I said, “Let’s grapple it and unfold space-time from the inside, then.” I shivered in anticipation, and told myself it was silly. This was just a variant on what we usually did—what we always did—but somehow this time felt as if it should be different. Because of that lurking ship. Because this thing was so damn big. “We’ll go inside once we’re Newton again.”
“It’s big. Once we take it out of white space, how do we get it back in again?” Connla asked.
“I’ll splice our drive to its rings once we’re back in Newtonian space and we figure out its power source,” I said. “We’ll just use Singer as a backup generator. Then we all move together.”
Connla looked at me with respect, then grinned. “Hot damn. Okay, keep an eye out in case our company comes back. I’ll bring us down.”
If company did come back, and they were armed, there wasn’t much we could do about it, except for cut and run.
I didn’t feel Singer moving, but every time I looked at the alien ship, its hulk was a little bigger. We were winching ourselves toward it and it toward ourselves, and once we were close enough, we’d unfold space-time and boom, all would be right with the galaxy and we’d be back where the stars looked like stars and not water-tiger stripes of light.
Simple enough, in theory.
In practice, hair-raising. I ran my hand across my cropped black bristles of hair. Yup, they were standing straight on end.
Nobody would have appreciated the joke except for me, and anyway Singer was busy, so I kept it to myself and watched the crawling numbers on the proximity gauge, and the looming hull of the salvage, which my fevered primate brain was insisting was half a meter away, tipping over us, and going to fall on our heads and crush us at any instant.
That wasn’t helping anybody, so I bowed to the inevitable and did the responsible thing. I raised my GABA receptivity and calmed my adrenal glands down a little, leaving myself enough of an edge to be a little bit extra aware. And while I was doing that, like the proverbial watched pot (when was the last time somebody boiled water in a pot?), I looked away and looked back, and in the interim we’d stopped moving relative to the folds in space, so the stars had settled back into the sort of configuration that doesn’t look like fluorescent tigers wrestling.
I looked down along the distorted Sagittarius Arm of the great barred spiral that sprawled across the entirety of our southern horizon.
Yes, space doesn’t have directions, exactly, but let’s be honest here: prepositions and directions are so much easier to use than made-up words, and it’s not like the first object somebody called a phone involved a cochlear nanoplant and a nanoskin graft with a touch screen on it, either. So those of us who work here just pretend we’re nice and know better, and commend the nitpickers to the same hell as people who hold strong and condescending opinions about the plural of the word octopus.
The Milky Way was smeared by white space until it looked like a monstrous scythe, slicing through time. The salvage prize drifted alongside, anchored to our derrick, an enormous piece of engineering that seemed just as impressive, in its way.
I felt cowed and awed and all that jazz. Small. Insignificant before the wonder of the universe and the deepness of time and the ingenuity of the ancient engineers.
“Kind of makes you want to spit.”
Connla had drifted up beside me. Ponytail bobbing, pale face limned and shadowed from below across knifelike cheekbones by the light of the human race’s ancestral home. I didn’t swing that way, but under the circumstances, even I could appreciate that he was pretty.
“Makes me want to get a great big pen and write my name right across it,” I answered.
We looked at each other. In a moment of mutual accord, we turned and kicked over to our panels, starting the calculations we’d need to use our white field to counteract the bigger ship’s.
Singer, of course, came up with the bad news first. “It’s not going to work. They’re just too much bigger than us. All we’d do is shred both ships and everything in them between universes.”
Well, that wasn’t acceptable. Singer was where I kept my stuff.
“What if I jury-rig a remote?” I said. “Fly her by wire from here?”
“Not just fly her yourself?” Connla asked. “There’s an old naval tradition of prize crews.”
“We invented drones for a reason,” I replied dryly.
He laughed, not believing me for a minute.
“I want to go over,” I said.
“Of course you do,” Connla said.
“Your suit’s already checked out,” Singer added.
“I thought you were going to inform my clade if I tried to spacewalk in a white bubble.”
“Stay on the wire,” he answered, as tiredly as an AI can sound.
♦ ♦ ♦
You can get used to anything. Even a spacewalk eventually gets routine.
And something that is routine doesn’t become less dangerous, but more. You take things for granted. You take shortcuts. Impatience and cutting corners: it’s the primate way. It got us down out of the trees and up to the top of the evolutionary heap as a species, which is a lot more like a slippery, mud-slick game of King of the Hill with stabbing encouraged than any kind of tidy Victorian great chain of being or ladder of creation
.
It’s also deadly when you’re someplace where one mistake can kill not just you, but an entire station full of bakers and programmers and tugboat operators and their spouses and dogs and friends named Bob. Which is why people in dangerous jobs before AIs used to have checklists, and some of the ones in the most dangerous jobs still have checklists even though they have AIs and AIs don’t make mistakes, and it’s why we—Connla and I—have Singer.
He took me through the checklist. I wore the better of our two suits, which would be problematic for Connla if he had to come after me, but in all honesty we were in the habit of terrible laziness where the EVA suits were concerned. If we really had to use them both at the same time, we’d print up some new reinforcing bits for the not-so-good one, but in the meantime that material was better put to use as whatever else we were using it for on that particular dia. And frankly, where we generally wandered, if anything went wrong and we had to abandon Singer, we’d just be prolonging our deaths.
Now, some would say that life itself is simply a matter of prolonging one’s death, that being the inevitable end of creation. But there’s effort that’s worth it, and effort that isn’t, if you follow me here.
So I suited up, knowing that if I got in trouble I was in trouble, so to speak, and made sure my com and fox were working. If anything happened to me over there, even if I lost coms and senso somehow, Singer would at least be able to pick up the machine memories—ayatana—from my fox and find out what went wrong, theoretically.
Assuming they could retrieve my body.
Then I stood in the door, the way people about to do stupid things have stood since castles had sally ports and atmosphere craft had jump doors.
I let Singer cycle the airlock around me.
“Clear,” he said.
When the puff of crystals from the lock air freezing into snow cleared, I looked across a terrifyingly narrow gap at a curved, cookie-colored hull that seemed to go on forever in every direction. I could have reached out and touched it.
I felt instantly less ashamed about the screaming my primate brain had been doing back in the command cabin. This thing—this inscrutable alien object—massed so much more than Singer that I could not even begin to do the math in my head. And yet we were going to be moving it, and it was inert, and in the frictionless, weightless physicist’s heaven we call space, connecting two massive objects by a slender derrick was as good as welding them into a single unit unless you subjected the link to some strong shearing forces, which we had no intention of doing.
Ancestral Night Page 3