I—or my methanogen memory-passengers—had been braced in anticipation, so I got the wincing and blinking over quickly and reasserted control.
The universe was very beautiful. I looked out through the lock into the darkless night, and the hugeness of the galaxy took my breath away.
We flew abeam of Afar, a little in advance of him in order to avoid his coils, and his hull seemed to gather and scatter all the brilliant starlight. The ship was windowless and reflective in deference to the radiation sensitivity of his crew. He bore no markings that fell into my visual spectrum. I spotted the closest airlock anyway, or rather Sally picked it out for me in senso.
It wasn’t that bad a jump. Sally and Afar were functionally motionless—their speeds and trajectories matched—and I had my navigation jets, so even if I miscalculated slightly, I could do a burn and fix it. Not that Sally would ever let me miscalculate. Our artificially intelligent friends are good at math.
So, I aimed myself at SPV I Bring Tidings From Afar—and I launched.
My trajectory was good. I nailed the v, despite having to allow for both the mass and power of the hardsuit and the mass of my insulation—and I didn’t even have to use Sally’s calculations to do it. There’s no arc in space—okay, that’s not perfectly true, but you know what I mean—and it had taken me a while to get used to moving under these conditions. You aimed where you were going—or ahead of it, if the target was moving faster than you—and didn’t worry about gravity pulling you down.
Back in Judiciary, we used to razz each other mercilessly if we didn’t get our trajectory quite right and had to waste jets. I know some of my medical colleagues think I’m a hot dog because of that, but old habits—and points of pride—die hard. After twelve years in the military and nine at Core General, most of it spent jumping out of perfectly good starships, I had gotten pretty good at this.
I was sailing right at Afar’s front door when he slowly, erratically, began to roll away from me. The distance between us, which had been closing, began to open.
Afar’s EM drive did not produce a visible signature, so—like all Synarche vehicles that were not Judiciary ships—he was equipped with signal lights along the arc of his hull. They blazed now, pulsing through a spectrum of visible light and into the ultraviolet and infrared, so it looked to me as if ripples of rainbows and darkness were crawling in bright lines along his hull.
“Crap,” I said into my suit mike. “I need to catch him. Sally, can you—” Senso took my words straight to her, as if I had subvocalized.
Afar was a fast packet, a data hauler. Not much in the galaxy could outrun him, but Sally could keep up.
A Judiciary Interceptor could outrun Sally. The Freeport pirate types probably had ships that could. A few of them. Maybe.
I couldn’t, though, in my little hardsuit using reaction mass to move around. Not if Afar decided to really get his legs on. Or fold into white space, obviously.
Burn hard, Sally answered. I will not let you fall.
Hhayazh’s “voice” came through the senso, my first indication that the flight nurse was monitoring me. Hhayazh was one of the most conscientious sentients in the known galaxy. Ambulances are not for fuel efficiency. We’ve got you.
Is Afar supposed to be scooting away like that? Don’t you have control of those drives?
I do have control of the drives. Afar himself is still unresponsive, Sally said. The ship might be executing an automated debris avoidance routine? It doesn’t look like evasive maneuvers.
It didn’t look like evasive maneuvers. It was stately, and while he was accelerating, he wasn’t pulling away as fast as he might. I burned. Chasing a runaway starship in a hardsuit like a lunatic.
This one was going to get around the cafeterias.
My heart thudded against the back of my ribs. I could lie and say it was an unpleasant sensation, but the truth is, I love this sort of thing. If he gets much more v I can’t catch him!
I know, Llyn. There’s some weird code here. I need to route around it—
Don’t slow him down, I said. I’m already correcting.
—there. That should do the trick.
The iridescent warning lights faded away, and Afar stopped accelerating. With that taken care of, it was easy enough to correct for his maneuvers—even with my limited fuel and the limited power of my maneuvering jets. I decided not to waste fuel braking, and came in hot but under control. My boots made contact with Afar’s hull a little bit back of where I wanted to be, and a little bit ventral, but three running steps (clang, clang, clang) braked me, and brought me in line with the airlock that I’d been aiming for.
There was enough force in my contact that it put a little spin on Afar, but my electromagnets held me in place until he stabilized himself. Sally, do you think that was an attempt to ditch me?
Just reflexes, I think, she answered.
I was glad the Darboof used ferrous material in their construction. It wasn’t guaranteed, with some of the extremophile systers. What you thought of as a liquid and what you thought of as a metal were strongly influenced by the sort of environment you grew up in.
At least these folks agreed with my species that oxygen was not a rock. That was potentially something we had in common… though oxygen was a lot closer to rockhood where the Darboof came from. And sometimes it was snow.
I didn’t have to glance over my shoulder to feel Sally correcting her own position, resuming her post.
I covered the distance between my landing and the hatch in under a standard minute. Afar didn’t roll or yaw again. Maybe he wasn’t trying to shake me off.
It would have been scary if I’d missed Afar, but not tragic. I had decent maneuverability in the hardsuit. And if it came right down to it, Sally could have come and gotten me. As Hhayazh had mentioned, her requisitions didn’t stint on fuel.
So I couldn’t count what Afar had done as a murder attempt. Especially since we still had no evidence that the shipmind was aware, or even alive, in there.
A little reluctantly, I folded up my incipient grudge and popped it into my proverbial hip pocket for later contemplation. I knew I had a tendency to take things personally. As Sally had suggested, Afar’s sudden roll was almost certainly the result of him not being awake to cancel out some automated evasion routine.
I was not, I told myself firmly, about to break into an extremely exotic and dangerous environment, surrounded by a starship that was trying to kill me.
Having reached Afar’s forward airlock, I passed inside. The lock functioned perfectly well once I entered the rescue overrides, which was almost a disappointment. I’d sort of been looking forward to the challenge of breaking in if Afar’s recalcitrance had continued.
Well, Sally had already gotten her drones inside.
They were waiting for me as I paused inside the interior door. My hardsuit was armor, and it—like the external hull of SMV I Race To Seek the Living—was liberally marked with the Caduceus, the Healing Leaf, the Blade of Life, the Red Crescent, the White Shell, the White Star, and every other galactic symbol of healing and nonviolent assistance recognized by the syster species of the Synarche. Optimized for recognition in diverse visual spectra.