So I relied on my senso and the drone transmissions, and what the senso showed me was astounding.
The low-intensity EM image Sally constructed showed that the cargo was not a single solid object, but a sort of pod on struts, propped in the center of the space. I couldn’t see color, obviously, but the texture was smooth and enameled-looking. Parts of the object had a magnetic signature. And the whole thing reminded me of an arachrab from home: The struts—they were legs, they had to be legs—were curved and jointed in the same way. The pod—the body—was held at the center of eight of those legs, and their feet were evenly braced around the bulkheads of the hold.
I could have imagined that it was organic. Not in the carbon-based sense, but in the evolved-on-its-own sense. But it had the presence of a vast and brooding machine.
The drone reported no life signs, so I assumed that a machine was exactly what it was. Not a little machine. Not like my exo. Not a pile of microbots like the other machine. And not a big machine with a simple, direct purpose, like Sally.
This machine—I didn’t even know where to begin looking at it, never mind describing it. It was cryptic, enormous, of enormity. It had a weight and a charisma in that black space.
It looks alive, I said. Actually, it looks cybernetic. Are these Darboof smuggling alien mechanical sea monsters?
I joked, but I found myself wondering. Space monsters?
I mean, I felt fairly confident that the craboid was a machine. But there were entities that went through most of their life cycle in space. They didn’t generally have legs. Maybe something could have evolved to survive an atmosphereless world, however….
Life is a pretty stubborn thing. Weirdly so, given how fragile it can be.
Not according to the drone, Sally answered. The drone continues to read no sign of any known metabolic processes. No metabolic products. There’s a space inside that could potentially have an atmosphere, though, or be used as a vehicle. But not the thing itself. The thing itself is a machine.
I should trust my instincts more.
Could it be some kind of a mechanical… parasite? There were organisms on various worlds that could control the behavior of a host. Some were commensal—symbiotic. Some… were not commensal. Could that explain the odd behavior—odd lack of behavior?—of Afar, and of Helen and the machine once Afar docked?
It looks like combat armor, said Loese.
I had worn hardsuits in both military and civilian designs. In fact, I was wearing one right then. I snorted impolitely at her.
Not real combat armor, she said. Like a mech suit in Science Ninja Alliance.
Loese likes those stylized immersive three-vees with the very exaggerated interfaces. And yes, now that I thought about it, the image of the space-crab-robot thing I was studying did have that kind of menacing glossiness.
My very low-power UV lidar imaging system was clicking away, supported by the efforts of the drone. An image of the cargo space around me resolved, shimmered.
Handholds—appendage-holds—ran along the bulkheads. They didn’t look like the handholds my species built, but their purpose was obvious. I used them to haul myself along the curve of the wall until I got to the craboid’s nearest foot.
It seemed to be… a foot. A spider foot. Only gigantic.
Sensors indicated that it was constructed of metal, ceramics, and some very durable resin compounds. It had some ferrous content. It looked smooth and sculpted, flat-bottomed, with hooked barbs projecting on all sides. It was bigger around than the span of my arms.
The bulkhead of the cargo hold was faintly dented from the pressure of the foot braced into it. I set my back and hands against one of the appendage-holds and shoved the foot with my boots, extending my legs as strongly as I, exo, and hardsuit together could manage.
My machines couldn’t budge this machine. I didn’t even feel it give, or sense any tiny scraping through the hull. The machine was wedged into the hold as solidly as if welded there. As if it had been designed to climb into a cargo space and make itself functionally a rigid part of the ship’s structure.
Maybe it had. The central pod, or capsule, or habitat, was suspended in the midst of a reinforced framework—the spider-crab legs—that seemed to have been rigged up to brace and protect it. It was too far away from the cargo bay bulkhead for me to inspect very well.
That couldn’t stop me from drifting up to it for a closer look.
Hey, crew, I said, stick a memo on the calendar to look into who sent Afar out here, when we’re back in touch with civilization.
Fast packets didn’t just fly around the galaxy empty, and I kept coming back to that. Okay, so Afar wasn’t empty: he had been hauling… this thing.
Whatever this thing was for.
I followed the line of the nearest leg with the softest pulses of my jets. The central pod wasn’t precisely spherical. It was teardrop-shaped, and I was slightly kitty-corner to its round end. I sidled around until I was facing the round part dead-on, exactly at the midline. There were no legs attached to this end, and that seemed significant. It had no portholes, and it had none of the smaller manipulators I would expect if it were, for example, the kind of war-suit that Loese suggested.
Sally’s drones zoomed around me on a rising helix, then broke off to swirl around the teardrop-shaped part of the machine. Sally forwarded their feeds to me. I felt, rather than heard, the small clicks as they settled onto the machine’s surface.
Loese’s comment about combat armor was still niggling. I stretched my hardsuit’s sensors, but there were no visible weapons, and no obvious ports that weapons could slide out of.
If I were going to put a door in something like this, the underside is where I would put it. I let myself float, frowning behind my opaqued faceplate, and studied the apparently featureless surface with all the tools at my command, since it was too dark in the hold to use my eyes.
The pod was not entirely featureless. It had some small, uneven swellings, little bumps that bent backward in a manner that resembled fairings. They looked like they might grow up to be barbs like the ones on the feet, given good nutrition and time. There were differences in texture on its surface. Sally used my hardsuit to bounce another low-powered UV laser off the carapace. The results told me that if I could have seen it with my eyes, the machine would have been black, the whole thing, with a satin shine and blue and red overtones on the edges. Pretty, in a monstrous sort of way.
Senso also told me that there were glossier sections in the pod, which I was starting to think of as a hull. They were black, too, but the luster made me think they were not so much opaque as opaqued, like my helmet. They were small, and the plating around them looked thick. Reinforced. Like window frames, around armored windows. Or like—given their size—one-way mirrors over maneuvering cams.
Was this thing a vehicle of some kind? Optimized for maneuvering in hostile environments? An armored all-terrain vehicle?
Something designed to protect the occupant for long duty in extreme cold, or heat, or whatever?
Sally, what’s the temperature in there?
There’s not much atmosphere inside it, she said, based on vibratory tests with the drones. But the pod is hollow, and the interior volume of the capsule is about twenty-three cubed meters.