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.