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.
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.