Breathing.
I took a moment to be doubly certain I wasn’t leaking any dangerous radiation, either heat or visible light, and let myself drift inside.
I found the crew, Sally.
There they were, as promised, five spiky, multi-limbed, refractive, partially transparent living snowflakes. According to Sally’s information, this was the full ship’s complement.
I was relieved to confirm with my own eyes, more or less, that they weren’t splattered (did Darboof splatter? I supposed they might melt) all over the bulkheads. I would not have been so certain of my fast crew count if they had been.
Each of them floated in what the ayatanas informed me was an attitude of restful repose, drifting on a tether near the cubby bunks I had last—remotely—seen them collapsed against. They showed no immediate signs of injury. As I moved closer, my senso showed me the subtle, glittering movements that accompanied their respiration. All of them were breathing in rhythm, which was not—I checked—typical of this species when cosleeping.
I found the casualties. If they are casualties. Commencing exam. They all seem to still be alive.
Copy, Sally said, and left me to it.
I detached Sally’s drones now that I was confident I’d located the crew and the drone information was accurate. I hadn’t wanted to say anything to Sally without evidence, but given Helen’s somewhat delusional state and whatever had happened to Afar—not to mention Sally’s own memory lapses—I’d been harboring a few concerns about whether Sally’s remotes were providing us with accurate information.
What the Well was Afar doing out here empty, anyway?
Sally, are you finding any packets in Afar’s memory?
They would be easy to spot, being encrypted, with—virtually speaking—colorful address labels. Nobody likes the mail getting lost in the shuffle.
He doesn’t seem to be carrying anything, she said. Well, some transponder packets. Some of the same ones we have, which tells me he passed a few of the same waypoints on the way out.
So he came from Coreward. Interesting.
Why would a ship like Afar head out from the Core on more or less the proper vector to get to Terra, a major population center, and not bring any stuff with him? It was wasteful—the disgust I felt at that was something else I could share with my ayatanas—but obviously, as ambulance crew, I could also imagine an emergency so serious that it would bring everybody who heard the call at a dead run.
The problem was that if there had been such an emergency, Core General could hardly have avoided being informed about it. Hospitals are generally up on all the worst news.
There’s something else, Sally said. Afar’s storage is full, but it’s all encrypted. It looks like maybe iterating backups of his code—
Can you decrypt it?
Not immediately. But I can start.
Make sure of your firewalls, I said, needlessly. It probably came across as condescending, in retrospect. Sure, meatform, teach an AI how to program.
I sent the drones off to do one more survey and recon. Just because we had the right number of crew members didn’t guarantee that we’d found everybody on board. Or even that these were the five they were supposed to be.
It’s a galactic constant. Everybody is bad at paperwork.
My own responsible choice was to stay here and start triage and prep the patients to survive transport—and perhaps begin care—while the drones finished off the search part of the search and rescue. Then I could double-check their work and maybe check out that cargo bay with signs of construction that Sally had mentioned.
I moved toward the nearest of my patients.
Darboof have three genders. Despite that, they still manage to reproduce by budding. Nature gets up to some weird and wonderful things.
None of these were visibly pregnant, at least. One less thing to worry about.
The one nearest me was not arousable by any of the usual means, including pain stimulus. (The tool for checking this in most of these methane systers looks like a glass tuning fork, by the way.) Its crystalline eyes responded to my IR pen with reflexive sparkles as the facets tuned themselves, but that didn’t wake it, either. Neither did my careful touches with the tools I used to keep my insulated body as far from it as possible as I performed the necessarily somewhat superficial exam.
Results were all within tolerances.
What I had was a living, seemingly healthy, perfectly nonresponsive person. A delicate crystalline entity whose neurology relied on its entire body being a functioning superconductor, whose limbs articulated by means of electromagnetic currents. Its energy metabolism was so exotic by Terran standards that I’d hate to try to explain the full details of it to anyone even while wearing the relevant ayatanas.
Well, I told Sally, drunk on a little relief that this seemed to be a straightforward rescue with nobody dead, they’re not conscious, but they appear stable. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with them, but I’m not a diagnostician. My recommendation remains that we provide life support, bring the whole ship back to Core General with the patients in situ, and let the methanogen ED and ICU sort it out. It’s mysterious, but it doesn’t seem dangerous, and the problems of moving five fragile, comatose, unsuited systers across vacuum—and into inadequate life support on you—suggest that leaving them right where they are remains the course of action most likely to preserve life.
I concur— Sally started a sentence she never got to finish, because the drone that had been exploring the cargo bays pinged to remind us that there was something in one of the open holds. The drones would like to remind you of the existence of anomalous cargo, which is not recorded on Afar’s cargo manifest.
Is it likely to explode immediately?
It’s not… ticking.
Great, I said. Then I’ll stick to the plan, get these five resting comfortably, then go investigate.
CHAPTER 7
WHATEVER IT WAS, EVEN IF it had been on the cargo manifest, the cargo manifest could not have done it justice—or remotely prepared me for the reality. When I entered the unpressurized cargo hold, I had to stop for a moment to contemplate the object inside as its shape filtered through my readouts and Sally’s senso projections.
I couldn’t see it by ambient light because there wasn’t any, and I didn’t dare make any even though I didn’t think any unshielded Darboof would be wandering around in here: the environment was space with a roof over it, and they couldn’t endure hard vacuum and near absolute zero any better than I could. There are cold and hostile environments, and then there are really cold and hostile environments.
(At least my suit’s heat exchanges were whining less now that I was insulated by vacuum. The problem, as long as I stayed out of Afar’s heat-sucking atmosphere, wasn’t going to be getting too cold, but overheating inside my hardsuit because of that extra insulation.)
I couldn’t take the chance of using any radiation other than heavily filtered ultraviolet to scan the space. Even if I had been willing to, my Darboof ayatanas quailed at the idea. It would be like aiming a microwave gun into a room you thought was, you know, probably empty, and pulling the trigger.