She was also wobbling for a more disturbing reason. There was a ship docked to the outside of her ring. One with white drives—a modern ship. A fast packet crewed by methane breathers: the one that had relayed the distress signal. Its—his, I checked my fox—name was Synarche Packet Vessel I Bring Tidings From Afar. Why in the Well he had docked with an ox ship, what he was still doing coupled to it, and why he wasn’t answering hails was a series of mysteries for which there was no answer in Sally’s databases.
And Sally, being a rescue vessel, has extremely comprehensive databases.
“Sally,” I asked my faceplate, “how’s our telemetry?”
“Pretty good, Llyn,” the shipmind answered. “We’ve matched velocity and vector, and we’re stable. Can’t do much about that spin.”
Good to know I wasn’t the only one worried about it.
“I’m in the door,” I said, which she already knew. But you’re supposed to maintain a verbal narrative. For the flight recorders and in case anything goes wrong and your crewmates don’t notice what you’re doing. It also lets them keep an eye on your checklists so nothing gets forgotten. Safety first. “Where’s Tsosie?”
His voice came through. “At the other door. Ready to go on your word, Llyn.”
He was the ambulance’s commander and senior trauma specialist, but I was the rescue specialist and this was my op. Rhym, our flight surgeon, outranked both of us as far as Core General seniority was concerned, but right now I was in charge of them, too. If we had to go to surgery, Rhym would become the authority figure.
It wouldn’t have made sense in a military outfit, so it had taken a while for me to get used to the way command shifted between team members. But it made sense for Sally.
“In three,” I said, and that many moments later we were sailing across the space between Sally and Big Rock Candy Mountain. As I stabilized, the apparent spiral of the generation ship smoothed out into a wheel so unnervingly that I wanted to slap a topologist.
Tsosie and I would have been a matched set, but Tsosie was trailing the sled that contained rescue supplies, portable airlocks, a laser cutting torch, and autostretchers. I had four drones limpeted onto my back beside the air tanks.
You can send back for stuff. But that takes time. Time isn’t always something you have when responding to an incident. We’re told to adapt, improvise, overcome. Perform the mission.
That part is not so different from what I did in the Judiciary. You do the thing that gets the correct result—within legal and ethical limits—and you fill out the paperwork later.
I like my job.
Sally fed me the telemetry through senso. Both Tsosie and I had jumped well. We used our jets to add v, so it seemed as if Sally were dropping behind while the turning wheel underneath us slowed. Soon, we were stationary relative to the surface, using our jets only to continue to course-correct into the curve of the ship’s habitation ring as we began to close the distance to it. We needed to get low, relatively speaking, because Sally would be coming around again soon.
“That looks like a decent spot,” Tsosie said, picking it out for me in the senso feed.
I studied the highlighted patch. It was flat and there were grab loops. I couldn’t see an airlock hatch, but some of the handholds and what I assumed were tether safeties led toward the interior surface of the wheel. You get a good sense of ship design in my business. I’d put airlocks there, where you wouldn’t have to deal with centripetal force on the way out or in.
“Let’s go around the corner,” I said. As soon as we touched the ship, the spin would start trying to throw us off. This was easier.
Tsosie followed my lead.
The inside surface of the wheel reminded me of the plated underbelly of some kind of legless lizardmorph. It was slightly concave, and though the concavity was a little uneven due to the broken cables, I assumed it had been intentional. Anything that made running around on the outside of your ship a little less profoundly hazardous was good. You never know when you’ll need to go outside and fix a lightsail or something, and space is awfully big.
Lose track of your ship for a few moments and you might never find it again.
We touched down lightly. Our mag boots latched onto the hull, and suddenly we were standing comfortably under about a third of a g.
Tsosie looked over and grinned at me through the faceplate. “Smooth.” He crouched down. “Do you know what I hate?” he continued, running his gauntlets over the hull.
“Do I care what you hate?” I asked.
“I hate it when you take a shit, right? And at the end of it there’s this little hard nodule—no, splinter, this little hard splinter of poo, all by its lonesome. And, you know, there’s no bowel movement behind it to push it out. It’s stranded there in your sphincter, and you can feel it but there’s nothing civilized you can do to get it out.”
“This conversation is being recorded.”
He shrugged.
“You could eat a carrot.” I lowered my head over the readouts on the backs of my hardsuit gloves.
“A what?”
“Carrot,” I said. “A sugary, edible root.”
“What’s that supposed to do, push it out the other end?”
“Nah,” I said. Then, “Well, sort of. If you’re experiencing hard little pellet feces, you’re constipated because you’re either dehydrated, or because you’re not getting enough fiber. Or both. Carrots have water and fiber. Eat carrots and you’ll get nice clean poops. If we lived on a planet, I’d tell you about apples—”
“What’s an apple?”
“What you eat every dia to keep the doctor away,” I said. “At least if your problem is an impacted bowel. Of course, if we kept doctors away, neither one of us would have anybody to talk to…. Oh, look. There’s the airlock.”
I walked toward it, boots clomping with each step. I could hear it through the contact with the hull and the atmosphere inside my hardsuit.
Tsosie followed. “Are you okay, Jens? You look kinda grayish.”
It was taking a fair amount of concentration not to wobble as I walked. “Food is not sitting so well.”
Tsosie grinned at me. He didn’t turn his faceplate toward me, but I could feel it through the senso. “I guess the potty talk isn’t helping.”
“I’m wearing too many ayatanas.” I had half a dozen recorded memory packets from various individuals loaded into my fox: drawing on their expertise for any clues about how to communicate with or help either the ancient humans that might be inside Big Rock Candy Mountain, or the methane-breathing systers aboard the docked, modern ship.
It was a plausible excuse for walking funny, anyway.
The airlock was a manual one, dogged with a wheel. The wheel was stiff with age and lack of maintenance, but I wear an exo for medical reasons. Between me, the exo, and the hardsuit’s servos I got the thing to grind free without having to throw myself on Tsosie’s mercy. I like to do things for myself, because I haven’t always been able to.
It makes me appreciate the small things. Such as being able to turn a sticky wheel.
“Deploying bubble,” Tsosie said.
I gave the wheel a turn or two, but didn’t undog it completely until Tsosie had set the bubble up, adhering the rim to Big Rock Candy Mountain’s hull. It wasn’t a full airlock. Once it was installed the only way out was to cut the membrane. But we had no way to gauge whether the airlock behind the hatch was pressurized, or even intact. Or if the interior door was open. We could explosively decompress part of the generation ship, if we weren’t careful.