I did a quick visualization exercise and decided that was more than enough space for an adult human, though it might get cramped after a while. Does it have life support?
There is some machinery that looks like compressors, filtration, and so forth. It’s carrying a water supply. And supplies of carbon and nitrogen. There is a mini fusion plant, batteries, and power access. Those are all quiescent now. The water has been allowed to freeze; the tank it’s in was either partially empty, or is designed to allow for expansion.
H2O. Now there was a surprise. That was a rock, as far as the Darboof were concerned. And a durable rock at that.
But if you had hydrogen dioxide, carbon, and nitrogen, you had the basic components of life support for a water-solvent ox-respiring syster. Like Rhym, or Hhayazh. Or me.
If it was a suit of environmental armor, a piloted walker of some sort, it sounded like a pretty pleasant way to get around, depending on what the upholstery was like. Especially with the interface between my exo and the hardsuit chafing at my left knee and my underarms, and the infiltrated cold from before still making my joints hurt, and the undissipated heat of now causing sweat to pool against my waist seal and slide down my ass crack and inner thighs. I could get used to a nice big capsule you could move around in, with lots of legs for scurrying. There was probably a set of manipulators stowed away on the outside somewhere. Like one of those antique deep-sea submersibles, except a much sexier design.
… with fishhooks all over it.
Those sure looked designed to break things.
What if Loese is right and it’s a war machine? Sally, what if Afar was smuggling weapons?
What if it’s a cage? Tsosie asked. An enviro unit for a prisoner? Or a transported animal?
Hhayazh actually sounded a little distressed when it said, What kind of prisoner is so dangerous it has to be transported in a pod inside a cold cargo bay in a ship with such an exotic environment?
I shook my head. One that isn’t in there anymore.
Sally wouldn’t hear my brains rattle, but she would pick the motion up through the senso. She said, If you’re right, the prisoner has escaped, so I hope it’s not that. Crew, do you think it’s dangerous to bring it back to Core?
Hard not to, when we’re bringing the whole ship, said Rhym.
We could jettison it, Tsosie said dubiously.
Judiciary is going to want a look at this thing, I guarantee, I answered.
You’re the tactician, Dr. Jens. Tsosie’s faith warmed me. Or maybe it was the hardsuit’s environmental control finally giving up. Can you think of a means by which to mitigate risks?
If I could get a link with the machine, we could talk to its computers. Maybe one of the drones—
Before you ask, Sally said, no, I don’t have coms with that machine.
We’ve been working together too long. Does the vehicle use an obsolete protocol? In theory, communications protocols used by systers when building their kit were supposed to be cross-compatible. In theory.
Ships and stations managed to talk to each other pretty well. But I would need as many appendages as a Rashaqin to count the number of times we’d dragged some poor sentient back to Core General in part because their space suit had stopped talking to other space suits, and somebody had gotten hurt out there.
Negative. As far as I can determine, it doesn’t use any protocol. In fact, the whole thing is so EM- and radiation-shielded that the best sensor data we’re getting from it is lidar and magnetic resonance. So I can’t even find any indication that it has a personality simulator in there, let alone an AI core.
Well. That’s weird. Why would you get into a pod you couldn’t communicate in or out of?
If there was anything you could trust, it was the radiation shielding on a Darboof ship. A species that needed more protection from most of the EM spectrum would have a hard time evolving, because the background radiation of the cosmos and whatever radioactive rocks were baked into their homeworld was likely to kill them.
On the other hand, this machine could be a vehicle, designed so you could take it on any ship, and there were radiation eaters and other hot weirdies who left fissionable material scattered around.
I don’t think that walker is standard tech. Synarche tech, even, though it’s a big Synarche. There’s nothing like that aesthetic and design in my databases. So possibly it has perfectly fine coms. I can’t get a carrier. I’ve had no problem getting into Afar’s systems, though, as you can see.
Did you find Afar’s shipmind yet? I stared at the machine, and I had the eerie sensation that its glossy black eyespots stared back at me.
Maybe? I’m… honestly not certain. There are those iterating backups. And there is data. But he’s not…
He’s unresponsive, Rhym said. If he were an organic life-form I’d say he was down at the bottom of the coma scale for whatever species he happened to be.
In other words, we were at an impasse and I needed to break it. We could still tow the whole vessel back to Core General and let them sort it out—and I suspected we were going to wind up doing that—but safety precautions were part of my remit as well.
We could weld the craboid in place. But if it tears itself loose it’s a risk to Afar’s crew. We could jettison it, assuming we can get it to let go of the cargo hold, and tow it separately. It’s not that big. But it could operate on a remote signal, and if it suddenly turns aggressive in white space we’ll all have a huge problem.
Sally said, Yeah, I’m going to flag that one as unsafe practices. Even if we don’t exactly have a safety protocol in the docs for towing illegally parked armored walkers home.
Sally was so deadpan that I laughed harder than the joke warranted. Which meant that I sprayed saliva on the inside of my face mask. It was still opaqued, but the little spit globes did crazy refraction tricks against the heads-up graphics Sally was feeding me. Dammit.
“Kurukulla on a clamshell!”
Status? Tsosie and Sally asked at once. I didn’t usually blaspheme. It’s not nice to invoke other people’s deities.
I laughed. I just spit on my plate. It gives me an idea, though. What if we fill the cargo bay with foam?
With… foam?
Sure. I tapped my arm. It didn’t make any noise in the vacuum, but inside the suit I heard it. Rigid insulating foam. We fill the available space with it, and run a Faraday cage around the inside of the cargo bay so nobody can trigger the arachrab—the walker—from outside. We foam one of the drones in with it so we have immediate telemetry. If it wakes up, we’ll know.
Silence followed for a few moments. Rhym was the first to break it. Given our current resources and needs, I don’t see an immediate flaw in this plan. If the machine is totally quiescent, it might be overcautious…
But, said Camphvis, we can’t leave the patients here. And I’d rather be overcautious than torn apart by Hhayazh’s mechanical cousin.
Hey! Hhayazh said. That doesn’t look anything like me!