From this angle, and this distance, I could see a lot more markings on the derelict’s hull. They were in creams and lighter browns on the varied tasty colors (milk chocolate to 80 percent cacao, roughly approximated), intricate and imperfectly repeated enough to look like writing—and the whole thing was starting to make me hungry.
Chocolate is one of Earth’s most popular exports, it turns out. Humans almost everywhere love it, and even a few other species who don’t find its chemistry toxic.
We seem to be the only creatures in the galaxy who can stand the smell of coffee, though.
“So how do I get from here to there?”
Singer said, “I don’t know, jump?”
“Machine thinks he’s witty,” I said.
“Meat thinks she could get along without me.”
I made sure my safety line was connected. Then I jumped.
Stepped, really—it wasn’t far enough for a real good bouncy bound. The alien hull was metallic and magnetic, though I was cautious about using any strong magnetism when I didn’t know what was behind the hull plates and what I could be activating, deactivating, initiating, or just plain moving around. But there was no inertial difference between me and the ships, and nothing to pull me away from the hull, and if I was stupid or incautious enough to push myself off with some precipitate movement, I had jets. And Singer would never let me hear the end of it.
Connla would just smirk.
Singer, for good or ill, was incapable of smirking.
Anyway, I made solid contact easily—it hadn’t taken more than a whisper of effort to push me this far. Rookies always overexert in micrograv.
The surface was a little rough under my gloves. Not enough to be a hazard, but there was some extra friction, and it made moving around on the hull that much easier. The safety line played out behind me.
“I wonder if this is what they used instead of handholds.”
“Maybe they had hairy spider-hook feet.”
Connla has a thing about spiders. They’re a Terran animal, a little predatory eight-limbed arthropod, and he loves them. Would probably keep one as a pet, but I told him that either it would eat the cats, or the cats would eat it.
(His response: “They’re not big enough to eat cats. I don’t think?”)
I scuttled across that rough-surfaced hull like 50 percent of a spider, making sure I maintained points of contact with three limbs every time I moved the fourth. The afthands really come in, well, handy for this sort of stuff.
I had spotted a likely hatch-like object—or at least an aperture of some sort—a few meters away, and it seemed like my best course of action was just to head for it directly and see what I could figure out from staring at it.
The great thing about space ships is that, by and large, they are designed to be really easy to get your ass into in a hurry, with all kinds of obvious and brightly colored emergency devices on their airlocks. So if you’re having a stroke, or you’re suffocating in your own flatulence, or your helmet is filling up with drinking water, or some other ridiculous humiliating space disaster is about to turn you into a “I knew a guy who died in the stupidest way on EVA” story, you have a fighting chance of getting inside blinded and deoxygenated so your crewmates can pry your helmet off.
It’s never getting holed by a micrometeorite that gets you, outside of 3Vs. It’s always some nonsense like suffocating on a piece of padding that’s come loose inside your helmet, or being blinded by a free-floating bubble of algae puree and jetting yourself into a ramscoop.
So most species make it damned easy to get back inside when you’re half-incapacitated. Everybody’s got a survival instinct in Darwin’s big, bright universe.
Human ships, for example, usually have these bright red wheels that really stand out from their surroundings in a nice, self-evident manner. As with most really hostile environments, people in space don’t generally focus on keeping out strangers. They figure they’ll let ’em in if they need it, and sort out the details afterward. With a bolt prod if necessary.
Even these guys, with their real focus on earth tones, had gone for a startling ochre on what I took to be their emergency control. It looked about right: heavy, manually operated, not easy to jostle. A big lever-and-slide assembly with a striking resemblance to one of Victor Frankenstein’s electrical switches was painted nice, bright orange, and seemed to be designed so that an atmosphere-deprived sentient flailing in panic and possibly about to embark upon the Longest Fall might have a chance to latch on to it, brace themselves, and give it a heave.
I studied it for a minute. “What do you think, Singer?”
“It looks like a switch.”
I also thought it looked like a switch. And it looked like the sort of switch that you would turn over and slide and then pull back against—like the biggest sliding bolt on the biggest relief module door in the history of sentientkind. If you were a blue whale who for some reason found yourself in need of a sit-down toilet with gravity in a somewhat seedy space station bar, this would be the sort of thing you’d use to hold it closed while you did your business.
Not that the hatch cover was whale-sized. Just the sliding bolt apparatus.
I decided to take a chance on fundamental interactions after all and braced both my magnetized afthands under a low elevated bar that seemed designated for that purpose (hoping that it wasn’t some part of the structure that would retract violently if and when the hatch triggered, amputating my aftfingers and forcing my suit to seal ten smallish leaks in a hurry), bent myself forward against the pressure of the suit, and grasped the thing we were both pretty sure was a handle.
“Here goes nothing.”
It went.
There was resistance, but it was the well-oiled sort of resistance you get from a big piece of intentionally stiff machinery. Something you didn’t want flopping around inertially during a sudden course correction, say. That in itself also wasn’t a hint as to how long the derelict had been here. Metal things tended to hold up pretty well in space. Especially if you folded them away in a white bubble, where they tended not to get holed by micrometeorites or pounded on by solar radiation. Nice and cozy, really. Sort of like a safe.
“Any progress figuring out what language that is?” I exhaled with effort, and felt the switch click. This definitely seemed to be its upright and locked position.
“If it is a language, you mean?” Singer replied. “I’ve got a subroutine on it, but frankly, we’re a long way from a data core, and we’re not carrying complete data on syster languages. We don’t have enough storage to hold all that and also have room for Connla’s improv jazz collection, 1901 to 2379.”
“You leave my Duke Ellington out of this,” Connla said.
“How are you going to fly it by wire if you can’t talk to it?”
“Well, I’m seeing no sign of a shipmind in here at all. So unless one wakes up when you go inside, I’m figuring I’ll just purge the operating system and write it a new one. There should be plenty of room in there to stretch out and run the necessary operations. I can get it done fast.”
“Are you going to spawn a subself?”
“Can’t,” he said regretfully. “It would be easier, but who can afford the licensing fees?”
I leaned on the switch, now a giant bolt, and slid it slowly and majestically down. Looking at it as it clicked into place, I had a sudden thought. “Hey, guys? Do you think this ship is really big just because the systers that built it are really big?”
I could feel Singer thinking about it through the shared sensorium. I couldn’t, you know, exactly read his silicon mind. But when he really got going on something, he pulled resources, and you could feel it kind of like a heaviness, or an itch.
“You know,” he said, “that’s not a bad idea, really.”
The hatch under my feet dropped smoothly and silently—without even a grating sensation through the metal beneath my feet—into the dark space of the airlock below.
♦ ♦ ♦
I hung there by my afthands, still braced under the bar, while my eyes adjusted. There had been no puff of escaping atmosphere around me. I was pretty sure it was a lock—a room, a good-sized room—with nothing in it except what could have been a couple of control panels on the bulkheads, sized for adult hands if I were a four-an-old, and another great big hatch on the opposite wall from the one I’d just fallen through.
“Any atmosphere in this thing?”
“It’s cold,” he said. “Dead cold. If there’s air in there, it’s frozen to the walls.”
That might make opening the interior hatchway a little difficult, if it were the case.
“Sealing the outside lock.”
I floated myself over to the other one. My suit lights were tuned to cast a diffuse glow. I’d been operating under Singer’s floods before, with my own lights mostly serving to fill in my shadow. I brightened them. The hatch seemed pretty straightforward—this one had a slightly less dramatic-looking latch than the one that faced the Big Sneeze, more like an old-fashioned deadbolt that I needed two hands to turn—and so I pounded on the hatch a couple of times with my afthands while holding on to the lock with my fores. If there was anybody still alive in a suit on the other side, they’d have some warning I was coming: they’d feel the vibration through the hull. And if there was atmosphere ice all over the other side, and it was brittle enough, I might flake some off.
“Here goes nothing,” I said. I turned the bolt, and heaved the door toward myself, since there were visible hinges and they were on the side facing me. I personally would have gone with both doors opening in, because decompression is a monster, but there might be a slam-down safety interlock, or some nice foam or something to fill the airlock if it blew.
Or . . . maybe there weren’t any additional safety features, since when I opened the lock, there was no sign of atmosphere inside at all.
I peered through the hatch, into a long, tall, wide, dark corridor, empty of everything—even air. Nothing moved in it. “Atmosphere seems to have been evacuated,” I said.
Connla replied, “That’s a bad dia at work.”
I unclipped my safety line, and fixed it to the sliding bolt handle where it wouldn’t interfere with operation.
“You’re telling me.”
I grabbed the holds on one side of the hatchway, it being a stretch for me to reach both. Whether they were designed for hands or tentacles or what-have-you, time would tell. There sure were a lot of them.
I dropped through the hatch face-first, giving myself a little push to accelerate gently along the corridor.
I nearly broke my ever-loving neck the instant I did it. Because there was gravity inside. A lot of gravity—enough to turn my elegant, aerobatic slide into an undignified tumble. I got my forehands up and caught myself as I hit the floor just beyond the airlock, skinning my palms on the inside of my suit. That stung, and the bactin the suit sprayed on the tiny wounds hurt more. It did keep me from slicking up the inside of my gloves with blood all over, however, and I was inside, and I hadn’t actually done myself a cranial or spinal injury in the process. So that was something.
I pushed myself to my knees. Yep, hands really stung. I turned that off too and told my senso to remind me about that later, when it also reminded me to fix my ankle.
Well, this was turning into a party.
“Haimey?!” Connla sounded worried. “Status?”
“Squiggle me rightwise,” I told him. “There’s gravity in here.”
“But it’s not spinning.”
I heard him realizing what an obvious thing he’d just said in the silence a second after he said it, and we both decided by mutual silent acclaim to let it slide. “Yeah,” I said. “And this thing isn’t massive enough to be generating it that way, and anyway the corridor is, if my dead reckoning is correct, at more or less right angles to the center of mass. So it’s artificial, right? Generated somehow.”
“Damn,” Connla said. “Does that mean that somebody has figured out how gravity works? Because otherwise it’s still got to be pretty hard to manufacture.”
And Singer said, “Koregoi.”
CHAPTER 3
THIS ISN’T A KOREGOI SHIP,” I argued, struggling up. I hate gs. My joints ached, instantly. I swear I could feel myself being compacted like a nugget of refuse. “It’s new, for one thing.”
Well, I didn’t know how new it was. But I’d interfaced senso of Koregoi wrecks—everybody did, if they had any kind of education—and seen one with my own eyes in a museum, and they did not look like this. They were . . . plastic. Not in the sense of being manufactured from petrochemicals, because they were also proof against just about every possible form of damage known to the systers, or us, but . . . extruded-looking. Or possibly grown. Not manufactured-looking, not full of square corners and round arcs and similar architectural detritus of species who have a fetish for regular geometry.
Nobody knew very much about the Koregoi: not even the oldest systers were old enough to have histories of them. We didn’t even know if the Koregoi were one thing—one species—or a lot of different things, such as multiple ancient forerunner species. They had left structures on a few worlds, and derelict ships and architecture here and there around the galaxy. We didn’t know how they had done what they had done, or what they had been like, or where they had gone when they had vanished. If they had vanished, and not just . . . died out somehow. There were physical remains from a dozen places that might be Koregoi bodies, or might not. So the Koregoi—the people who came before us—might have been one civilization, or fifteen. It was a blanket term for all of it.
What we did know was that they had apparently had technology that nobody in the galaxy could touch, todia. Like artificial gravity, which engineering people like me but much fancier than me had deduced the Koregoi had, because of the arrangement of the wrecks we’d come across. After millennians of abandonment, mostly crashed on planets, none of the technology had been salvageable enough to be back-engineered.
Some of their artifacts had been discovered in apparently working order—maybe—but they tended toward solid-state designs with mysterious functions and operation. There was a Koregoi hoverdisk in the Galactic History Museum at the Saga-star system in the Core. It was a thin metal plate, covered in arcane and beautiful carved symbols, that as near as anybody could tell just sat there a half meter off of any surface that exerted a reasonable gravitational attraction and slid frictionlessly and inertialessly one way or another when you pushed it.
Nobody had been able to figure out how it worked. Or duplicate the effect. And it had been discovered by the Synarche while my species was still devoting its innovative capabilities to building a better stone hand-axe.
And yet, here I was in a ship. A ship with working artificial gravity, and I had the skinned palms to prove it.
Whatever syster had built this vessel was a lot bigger than us, anatomically speaking, but they liked their circular hatches and square locker doors just as much as we did. And the tech, from what I could see of the corridor, wasn’t that far in advance of a perfectly nice, three-decan-behind-the-times, well-maintained little ship like Singer. I mean, this was a much more elaborate vessel, obviously, meant to house more crew and make longer hauls—but it was full of hand controls and touch pads and other perfectly recognizable elements of running a ship if you didn’t want to be completely screwed and adrift in space if your shipmind started going buggy or your senso link went down.
I dogged the hatch behind me, which is a reflex so deeply bred in spacer bones I almost forgot to mention doing it. Everything tied down and tidy, always, unless you are actually eating it right this second, or using it to screw something to the wall.
My afthands were already starting to bother me by the time I was done. The suit’s gloves were designed for grabbing, not walking, and let’s be honest here: walking on afthands in gravity is uncomfortable even with proper shoes, though you do get used to it and it’s not enough of a drawback to
keep anybody from getting their feet refitted. If you’re in space full-time, they’re basically useful unless you’re on station and out-wheel, and how often is anybody on station?
How often do you find gravity out here, anyway? I had my hind limbs fixed basically the instant I left the clade, and I’ve never regretted it. That walk down that corridor, though, was the closest I’d ever come.
“Guys,” I said, looking around. “I think the gravity is a retrofit.” It was pretty significant gravity, too—I was guessing by how heavy and awkward I felt, and how my suit was digging in everywhere, that it was a little bit over an Earth-standard, which I’d rarely endured.
I was going to tire out fast and we all knew it.
“Hmm,” said Singer. “I see what you mean.”
One of the things I loved about working with Singer was that even if he’d figured something out before I did, and hadn’t pointed it out, he never felt the need to mention it once I figured it out for myself. Some shipminds can be a little lordly and insecure. Of course, a lot of those shipminds probably wouldn’t sign into a tugboat on a salvage detail so they would have the opportunity to see as much of the galaxy as possible while paying off their inception.
Anyway, I knew he had noticed, or was noticing, all the same little details I had: that the locker doors that around this accessway were lined up as if horizontal led toward the center of the ship, not down toward the floor. And there were locker doors in the floor, too, and carpet all over everything.
“Who the heck can just install gravity in an existing ship, though?” I blinked sweat off my lashes. At least it just flicked off onto my cheek and faceplate instead of floating around inside my helmet until I managed to bump it up against the absorbent lining. “I mean, who can install gravity, period? If it were that easy, we’d all quit floating around except when it’s convenient.”
Ancestral Night Page 4