And shadows everywhere: webs and jigsaws cast by a hundred dim lanterns decorating the tips of antennae or the latches of access panels or mounted as porch lights around the edges of half-forgotten emergency airlocks. Sengupta had turned them all on and maxed them all out but they were waypoints, not searchlights: they didn’t so much illuminate the darkness as throw it into contrast.
No matter. Her drone didn’t need light to see.
She’d eschewed the usual maintenance ’bots that crawled spiderlike along the hull, patching and probing and healing the scars left by micrometeorites. Too obvious, she’d said. Too easy to hack. Instead she’d built one from scratch, remote-printed it on the fabricator still humming away in the refitted Hold: decompiled one of the standard bots for essential bits of lanthanum and thulium and built the rest from the Crown’s matter stockpile like Yahweh breathing life into clay. Now it made its painstaking way over a landscape of struts and conduits, shadows and darkness overlaid with false-color maps on a dozen wavelengths.
“There!” Sengupta cried for the fourth time in as many hours, and then “Fuck.”
Just another pocket of outgassing. By now Brüks had learned not to worry about the myriad leaks in the hull. The Crown of Thorns was a sieve. Most ships were. Fortunately the holes in that mesh were pretty smalclass="underline" it would take years for the internal air pressure to decline significantly, barring a direct hit from anything larger than a lentil. They’d die of starvation or radiation sickness long before they had to worry about asphyxiation.
“Felching hell another leak I swear…” Sengupta’s voice trailed off, rebooted: “Wait a second…”
The telltales looked the same to Brüks: the faintest wisp of yellow on infrared, the kind of heat a few million molecules might retain for a moment or two after bleeding out from some warmer core. “Looks like more microgassing to me. Smaller than that last one, even.”
“Yeah but look where it is.”
Along one of the batwing struts where the droplet radiator sprouted from the spine. “So?”
“No atmo there no tanks or lines either.”
One long arm swept through the near distance, like the candle-lit vane of a skeletal windmill. Another.
Sengupta played with herself. Her marionette picked a careful route through dark jumbled topography. Something hunkered on the hull ahead, its visible outlines buried in shadow. Infrared showed nothing but that diaphanous micronebula dissipating across the hull.
Can’t cloak thermal emissions, Brüks remembered. Not if you’re an endotherm. “That’s not enough of a heat trace—”
“Not if you’re a cockroach. Plenty big enough if you can shut yourself off for a few decades…”
“Just LIDAR it.”
Sengupta jerked her head back and forth. “No chance nothing active there could be tripwires.”
It can’t be her, Brüks told himself. I saw her burn… “What about StarlAmp?” he wondered.
“I’m using StarlAmp we just gotta get closer.”
“But if she’s tripwired against active sensors—”
“Proximity alert I know”—Sengupta nodded and tapped and kept her eyes on the prize—“but that would be active too and I could pick it up. Plus I’m hiding a lot.”
She was: the ’bot’s eye saw struts and plating more often than shadows within shadows. Sengupta was keeping her head down on approach. At the moment they could see nothing but the looming face of some small grated butte dead ahead.
“Right around the corner now this should do it.”
The drone farted hydrogen and drifted gently out of eclipse. Still nothing but faint amorphous yellow on infrared.
On StarlAmp, though: a silver body, legs straight arms spread, wired against the side of the ship. Boosted photons rendered the body in fragments: ridges of mirrored fabric glinting in thousand-year-old starlight, creases that swallowed any hint of mass or structure. The spacesuit was a patchwork of bright strips and dark absences, the shell of some tattered mummy with half its bandages ripped away and nothing at all underneath. But the right shoulder shone pale and clear: the double-E crest boasting the unsurpassed quality of Extreme Environments, Inc., protective gear; a name tag, programmable for the easy identification of multiple users.
LUTTERODT.
It can’t be, Brüks thought. I saw her, she was dead, her faceplate was in pieces. She was not unconscious. She was not stunned. That was not her I saw pounding on the hatch, awake again, running for her life, too frantic to notice that she’d awakened in someone else’s suit. It was not Lianna we left to burn, it was Valerie. It was Valerie. We abandoned no others who were not already dead.
We did not do this.
Sengupta was making noises somewhere between laughter and hysteria: “I told you I told you I told you.
“Not stupid at all. She knows what she’s doing.”
Out there all this time, Brüks thought. Hiding. I would never have found her. I would never have even looked.
Maybe Portia’s hiding, too. Maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough.
“We have to tell Jim,” he said.
“Will you look at that,” Moore remarked.
Lianna’s spacesuit flickered on the dome, a snapshot taken before Sengupta had pulled the drone back for fear of setting off alarms. Not that a live feed would have been any more dynamic.
“It’s Valerie it’s fucking Valerie—”
“Apparently.”
It can’t be, Brüks thought for the thousandth time, the voice in his head weaker with each iteration. By now it was barely whispering.
“I told you we can’t trust—”
“She seems harmless enough for now,” the Colonel remarked.
“Harmless are you felching crazy don’t you remember what she—”
Moore cut her off: “There’s no way that suit could support an active metabolism all the way back to Earth and there’s no sign of any kind of octopus rig. She’s gone undead for the trip home. Probably expects to revive and jump ship when we dock in LEO. Waking up earlier wouldn’t accomplish anything except using up her O2.”
“Good then I say we give the bot some teeth and go scrape her off the hull like a goddamn barnacle while we got the chance.”
“By all means, if you think she hasn’t set up any defenses against just that scenario. If you’re certain the hull isn’t booby-trapped with a nanogram of antimatter set to blow a hole in the ship if anything disturbs her. I assumed you realized that she’s smart. You certainly pulled your drone back fast enough.”
That gave her pause. “Whadda we do then?”
“She’s waiting for us to dock. So we don’t dock.” Moore shrugged. “We jump ship and let the Crown burn up on reentry.”
“And then what surf back through the atmosphere on top of a passing comsat? If I was supposed to pack a shuttle nobody told me.”