“But these didn’t. Or not quite fast enough.”
All three of us were silent for a moment, contemplating being explosively decompressed out of a ship while it was inside folded space. Would you even feel anything? Would you have time to be scared?
I shook my head, trying to mix my wits together. “And the lights are probably on a timer. So . . . sure. The ship blew, somehow? And having blown, the safety interlocks belatedly kicked in and it just shut itself down and waited?”
“How would it blow that fast? It’s big. Lot of atmosphere volume.”
I touched the next hatch. Opened it.
Looked out through a doorway over a precipice into nothingness and brilliant, folded stars.
CHAPTER 4
I FORGOT THE PAIN IN MY afthands for a moment, and was fiercely grateful for the intensity of the gravity pinning them to the corridor floor. Because I was leaned out precariously over the Empty, and my stomach felt like it was dropping into it. I leaned on the hatch, which also dragged me forward. My upper body was weightless, while my lower body was heavy—in the most peculiar, spine-stretching way. I stabilized the hatch door, relaxed my grip, and let the hand drift. Then slowly, with my core muscles, I reeled myself back in.
The beam of my headlamp vanished into blackness, revealing nothing. Beyond its light, though, I could discern what must be the vast bubble of emptiness at the heart of the alien ship—and that the far side of it was open to space. There, framed in darkness, was the shimmering platinum band of the white coils, and there were the streaked rings of lensed light: the twisted images of stars and the whole long arm of the Milky Way.
I turned off my headlamp. It didn’t illuminate anything, and the reflection off the hatch and the hatchway weren’t helping my adaptation to the darkness.
I waited for a few moments, staring into the darkest corner I could find, then turned back to the walls of the great open hold.
Now I could make out some shapes lining the bulkheads of the enormous blankness before me. There was nothing in the center of the emptiness, though I could dimly make out the irisation where petal-like covers would spiral in to close the hold. They were open now, and I had a sickening sensation I knew where the ship’s atmosphere had gone when she had blown.
Where the atmosphere had gone, and all her crew. And anything not nailed down inside the ship. And anything that might have been stored in here, as well. All sailed out through this cavernous cargo space, and the wide-open bay doors beyond.
I could feel Singer and Connla monitoring my senso, but neither spoke. None of us, I supposed, could find much to say in light of the awfulness I’d just discovered. How had it happened, though? Misadventure?
Sabotage?
Everything was gone. Except for whatever lined the edges of the hold, because that was fixed into place. Those were the shapes that had drawn my attention. Something reflective, perhaps transparent. Modules or egg-shapes, each about as big as a two-passenger ground vehicle, say. Cargo containers, probably. Their reflective surfaces caught the starlight and held it still.
I leaned out around the edge of the hatchway, and turned my headlamp on again.
Like endless strings of green glass beads, they arrayed the edges of the hull. There were hatchways, all closed, every ten meters or so, tesseracting the surface of the hold. Between them were those ranks and stacks of cargo containers. In some places they were stacked multiple modules deep. All identical, except for the swirls of indigo and emerald and teal that might have been markings indicating their contents. . . .
No.
The containers weren’t green, I realized. The malachite and indigo colors reflected through transparent modules from the cargo inside.
“I have to get off this ship,” I said, nausea rising in my gut for reasons that had nothing to do with vertigo. “I have to get off this ship now.”
Suddenly, I understood the mutilated Ativahika, in orbit around this small, artificial heavy spot in the universe; I understood why both things had been stuck out here in the middle of nowhere when something went terribly wrong; and I understood why the ship was so big, and so empty in the middle. I started backing away, leaving the hatch open, all my pity for the former crew replaced with horror and the raw, animal need to escape an abattoir.
“Haimey?” Connla said.
Singer was silent. I could feel his revulsion, too, procedurally generated but as real as mine. He’d figured it out as well.
“Haimey,” Connla repeated. “Your vital signs are very distressed. Do you require assistance, or can you self-extract?”
“Oh, I’m leaving,” I choked. I couldn’t turn my back on the things in the hold, so I kept backing away. I felt the next hatch behind me, groped through it. “You try to stop me.”
“All right.” Soothing voice.
He bumped me, remotely, or Singer did, and suddenly I felt my atavistic terror cool. The revulsion didn’t change in the slightest.
Connla said, “Be careful. Don’t hurt yourself extricating. What’s wrong?”
There are places in the wide galaxy where all sorts of exotic “luxuries” are considered indispensable despite—or perhaps because of—the simple fact that they are rare, or difficult to obtain, or ethically deranged. There are people who operate out of the Freeport bases and concealed colony worlds to meet those needs and drive that demand.
This wasn’t a pirate ship, exactly. Nor was it a smuggler, though it was a ship that doubtless operated out of a Republic of Pirates Freeport, because no one in the Synarche would give this kind of abomination home. And now I knew we had to bring it back to the Synarche.
Because it was a crime scene. The whole ship was a crime scene.
“It’s a factory ship,” I told him. “They killed that Ativahika, Connla. And they were rendering it down for asura.”
“Asura?” Connla asked. Spartacus didn’t have much of an illegal drug culture.
I got a breath, finally, a full one, though it tasted like vomit. “Devashare. They’re manufacturing devashare. The real stuff. That’s a hold full of illegal organohallucinogens out there.”
♦ ♦ ♦
I felt a lot less bad for the dead crew of the Milk Chocolate Marauder as I made my way—hastily, but cautiously—toward the exit. And a lot more like they had gotten exactly what was coming to them. An uncharitable thought. But it’s been noted for generations that karma is a bitch.
I was moving quickly, and I was not checking for further evidence of misadventure as I had been on the way in, because I was feeling pretty satisfied with my deductions, even though we hadn’t figured out yet what caused the blow.
Connla and Singer had taken firm control of my chemistry, so I was calm. I knew I’d be angry later that they hadn’t asked, but right now, I was too full of my own natural anxiolytics to feel pissed. I hated it when somebody else told me what to feel.
Perhaps it was that bumped calmness that made me notice something I hadn’t seen before. Or perhaps it was just that I was looking at the cabin from the other direction; reversal of perspective can have stunning effects.
What I saw, tucked behind the superfluous ceiling hatch in the first corridor I passed through after I left the rendering hold behind, was a small device that looked entirely out of place on this particular ship. It was inside a panel on the ceiling that had been left open, but it had been concealed from me by the angle of the cover when I was going the other way. If the panel had been closed, it would have been completely hidden.
As soon as I spotted it, it stopped me cold.
It was a perfectly standard Terran-model relay switch, a miniaturized but not nanoscale piece of hardware you could pick up ringside at any dock. It was white, with a red rocker switch and a black rocker switch on it, and English lettering. And it was spliced, on either side, into a bit of wire that had been pulled through a raw-edged drilled hole in the bulkhead. It looked like a smudge of cookie filling and couple of candy sprinkles against all that chocolate.
; I couldn’t reach it. But I could see that both of the switches were set to the same position. And if I went into the next chamber, I could undog a giant tuffet-type thing from its position in the corner and haul it in—it was inflated membrane, and supremely light—and climb up on it.
“Haimey, what are you doing?” Connla asked.
“You sound worried,” I said. “Maybe you better bump.”
Okay, maybe I was managing to feel a little angry.
“Haimey—”
“I’m just checking something.”
I reached up, and rocked both switches at once.
There was no air to evacuate, and that was what saved me, because when all the hatches popped open simultaneously and I floated unceremoniously off the cube—and the cube floated softly away from what had, a moment before, been the floor—there was no massive exhalation to blow me free of the prize’s hull and expel me out the open cargo bay, thumping off random objects and hatchway edges along the way. I just drifted, spinning a little from reactive force, and watched in vacuum silence while the rockers, about thirty seconds later, rocked back and reset themselves.
I hit the floor with a stunning blow as the gravity came back on and the hatches slammed shut. I was lucky there hadn’t been one in the once-and-future floor, or it would have cut something off me.
I barely thought about it until later, though, because I was watching a red, red bead of very human blood run down my space suit glove.
There was no drop in pressure; maybe the glove slackened for a second, but then it tightened up nice and awkward again. The pressure seal below my elbow didn’t even close.
Remember what I said about the micrometeorites? Well, the reason they don’t usually get you is that we’re good at suit punctures. I mean, if it holes you as well as the suit, you might drown in your own blood before you get inside, but it won’t be the hole in the suit that gets you.
I couldn’t tell if it hurt, because I still had pain turned off in my palms and fingertips. But it scared me enough that I felt my heart spike through the calm for a second before my adrenals comped.
Something on this cursed, haunted fucking ship had punctured my suit, and my skin.
♦ ♦ ♦
I clipped back into my safety line and floated the meter from the alien factory ship to Singer with a sense of relief so intense it made my head feel light. And my hand, unsettlingly, felt heavy. Not that I could feel weight, exactly, once I was free of the artificial gravity of the Milk Chocolate Marauder. But my center of gravity was off, which was even more unsettling than the sense of weight and tight skin that could have been inflammation. I wobbled as I made contact with Singer’s hull, and my transition had been perfect.
I clung to the rail beside the airlock. I did not slap the open control.
I gulped. I hyperventilated. I knew what I had to do.
“I can’t come inside,” I told Singer. “There’s something in me.”
And those were the hardest words I ever had to say. Harder than telling my clademothers that their utopia was my hell, and I’d done that in a packet rather than to their faces. I waited, eyes closed, the fear sweat rolling down my face and between my shoulders in cold snail trails.
“Nonsense,” he said. “You can and will.”
“This is the setup to a space thriller,” I said.
Singer tched.
“Right about now the audience is screaming, ‘Don’t open the hatch! Don’t let her in! It will kill you all!’ into their VR rigs.”
“Zoonotic transmission between phylogenetically unrelated species is literally unheard-of,” said Singer, who never said literally unless he meant literally. “If you’ve caught an alien parasite, I’m going to be the first AI to win a Nobel Prize.”
Connla said, “Besides, we’re not going to open the hatch. You’re coming in through the hull.”
“Of course I am,” I said, and laughed hysterically.
♦ ♦ ♦
“We’ve got another problem,” Connla said in my earbud.
I leaned my head back against the hull beside the airlock, my helmet pressing into the flesh over my occiput. I was so tired it actually felt comfortable, and at least there was no gravity murdering me. I heard the anchoring bolts slide home. I wasn’t going to bring my suit inside the habitat after this mission. It could sit out in space and get nice and irradiated until we got someplace with sterilization facilities.
I was a big-enough biohazard all by myself.
“Big or little?” I asked.
He sighed. “Singer’s been summoned to serve in the Synarche for the upcoming term. There was a sealed packet set to auto-open on the right date in our last mail pickup. It just deciphered itself. We have to surrender his core code by Core 27653.21.08. Which will give us just about enough time to secure this prize and make it back home. If we hustle.”
My eyes were already closed, so I couldn’t close them. “Oh bloody Well.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The suit unseamed itself down my back, and I held my breath for a second until I was sure the seal of suit to hull had held. There was a gap behind me; and something filmy, clinging and cool; and beyond that the pressure of warm atmosphere. The suit pressurized a little to help me work my fingers free, and the clinging film behind me bellied out. I started the delicate process of wriggling from the suit’s embrace.
“It’s good news in some ways,” Singer said, though he didn’t sound happy. “When I finish my term, my inception debt is forgiven. I’m a free citizen.”
“The grav salvage would pay for that anyway,” Connla said.
“Yes,” Singer agreed. “But everybody has to serve if called, so I might as well get it out of the way and use that resource credit for something I want to do, after.”
“That’s great, but . . . what are we going to do for a third partner?” I felt selfish and ashamed of myself as soon as I said it. I couldn’t tell if that was clade baggage, or if I was actually being unreasonable, so I just shut up.
The ship basically was Singer, as far as I was concerned. I knew he was a collection of ones, zeros, and undefined states—your basic quantum software—that could be ported from hardware to hardware almost indefinitely, core personality modules intact. Only his capabilities and the parameters of his processing power and speed would change. Which, of course, would change him in some ways, because he would learn new tactics and ways of being while inhabiting a different space. Being inside the Milk Chocolate Marauder was going to change him. . . .
As a human being who kills a few brain cells every time she sips a little intoxicant, I can’t in good conscience claim that’s the kind of change that would make him Not Singer anymore. But it still made me uneasy. I told myself that we always worry a little when a friend is about to undertake a big life transition, and tried not to feel like a meat bigot.
“I can spawn a subroutine with all the protocols,” he said. “I’m not authorized to reproduce until my inception is paid. But you can hire a temp to assimilate the routines and run things until I get back.”
“A temp.” I tried not to sound either dubious or crushed. I felt dubious and crushed.
Would Singer even want to come back to the cramped confines of this little tugboat after he got a chance to stretch out and grow through the massive processing power of the Core? Stars and garter snakes, what kind of data would he have to cut off to fit back in?
“This is what you get for being a politics nerd,” Connla said without heat. “Didn’t I tell you that all that book learning would bring you no good?”
“Well,” I cursed. “I bloody hate politics.”
I continued backing out of my suit like an imago pulling itself millimeter by millimeter from the pupa. I got my arms free, and then my legs, and perched on the edge of the gap in the hull with my afthands to keep from floating around randomly. The film stretched against my back again, elastic and tough, sealing itself to me as the suit began to depressurize. The draft pulled me forward a little, but
I was securely anchored, and held my position while the isolation film covered my whole body, molding itself to the crevices between fingers, the curves of my flanks, the folds of my armpits and groin.
I closed my eyes to keep from looking down at my forehands. The right one still felt . . . different.
Planet-born folk reliably hate isolation film with a passion. It makes them claustrophobic. For me, it brought to mind the safe, comforting pressure of a suit or a sleeping pod. The bit where it closes across my eyes and nose and mouth is still a little rough—though it only lasts for a second before the oxy supply kicks in and the film across your face billows out taut and invisible, crystal-perfect to see though.
And then it was sealed and I was free, and the gap in Singer’s hull where the suit was anchored to the outside closed itself up, and everything was sealed up safe away from the Empty.
I tapped the wall to turn myself around.
“All right.” Connla floated over oh-so-casually. He was wearing a film too, which made me feel both rejected and relieved. Nobody likes to feel like a pariah. But nobody really wants to infect their friends with an alien space plague, either. It’s all about the compromise.
And owning your own shit, I suppose.
“Let’s see what it looks like,” he said. He anchored himself and held his gloved forehands out for mine.
I forced myself to follow his gaze down naturally, mimicking what a natural human who wasn’t freaking out completely would naturally do. I lifted my forehands inside their transparent film sheaths and laid them gently over his.
The right one still felt strange. Heavy. Warm. Not painfully so, just . . . heavier than it should have been. Or, I should say, it had more inertia. My hand felt dense—but not big, not swollen. Just massive. Unbalancingly so.
He gave me a gentle squeeze, and my eyes focused. It’s rare for Connla to touch anybody, because it’s discouraged where he comes from, and he always seems to let out some kind of deep metaphorical sigh of relief when he finally finds an excuse to. Even if there’s two layers of sterilization in the middle.
Ancestral Night Page 6