“Maybe send a drone first?” Sally said. She didn’t wait for my request, but zipped one right past me and made a right-angle climb toward the hatchway. I hadn’t even noticed it hovering behind my shoulder until it moved.
It passed through the hatchway. There followed a sharp electrical pop, and it passed through the hatchway again, this time in the opposite direction. Falling.
The drone struck the polymer over the deck plates with a thump.
I froze.
“I recommend that you don’t stick your head in there, Dr. Jens,” Hhayazh said.
“Thank you, Hhayazh. That sounds like excellent advice.”
“Can you see into the pod?” Sally asked. “What can you make out in there?”
“There’s a lot of glare, but it looks like a couch and a console. And some cargo space, which is empty, but there are straps. What are you picking up?”
“Nothing,” Sally said.
I stepped back away from the hatch, out of an abundance of caution. “But how is that possible?”
“The interior is still electromagnetically shielded. But this whole situation makes me uneasy. We’ve hauled a whole lot of weirdness back to civilization, and I’d really like some insight into how two ships and two crews were mysteriously disabled, and what exactly this walker is for. I don’t like mysteries.”
“I love ’em,” I said. “I like the satisfaction of solving them. I’m not feeling a lot of satisfaction right now.”
“Go get decontaminated,” Sally said. “I’m going to turn the craboid over to a research team. Let their drones get electrocuted for a while.”
CHAPTER 12
DECONTAMINATION WAS PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD. THERE are stalls all over Core General—near every equipment locker, and at every transition zone between environments. Sally herself is designed to decontaminate everything that comes in or goes out, if necessary.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to get my hardsuit irradiated. Just doused in a little antiseptic and scrubbed down, so it was over quickly. I returned to Sally, left my hardsuit in my locker, and argued her out of a rest period on the grounds that I was supposed to report to the Administree.
Reporting to the hospital administrator didn’t involve anything so commonplace as taking a lift to an office. There was a lift—funny how we still use such antiquated terminology in an environment with no up and nothing to lift against except spin, and for a transportation pod that goes in all sorts of directions—but where it disgorged me was back to the outermost layers of the station, far from the machine bay or even the docking stations.
This was not an office, but a park. An upside-down sort of park where the sky was underfoot and the grass grew over your head. One of the weirder things about getting your gravity from spin was that when I came out of the lift I had to walk down a curved ramp to the transparent outer layer of the station. Having accomplished this, I had the unsettling option of looking down past my feet at the outside, or even lying down and pressing my nose against the shatterproof lumium for a more comfortable angle.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t here to bask in the view. I was here to give a report, and I knew it. I had hopes of avoiding being called on the decking… but time would indicate whether I would get away with my hide intact. I didn’t know that I had done anything wrong, but getting a note from your boss that says “See me” is never a pleasant experience.
Core General’s administrator would not have fit in the office I mentioned before. To be fussily precise, they also did not fit entirely into the park. But a lot of them did, and the majority of their organs of sense and thought were concentrated here.
I stepped off the bottom of the ramp, walked a few steps over the whirling, vertiginous space below to free up the landing for anyone else coming or going, and craned my head back at the ceiling.
Or rather, at the whispering canopy of leaves largely obscuring the next-innermost onion layer of Core General. The leaves, shiny and green-violet, rustled as if there were a breeze behind them. I could make out the windows beyond, leading to levels inhabited by a variety of different species.
This far out and on this side of the hospital, they would all be carbon dioxide or other compatible metabolisms if they weren’t ox types like me, and they would all be species who could tolerate a certain amount of grav and rads. But that was where the resemblances between them would end. I could make out lights intended to mimic the illumination of a dozen suns without turning my head. Soft gold and pink were, to me, the most appealing, followed by the glow my eyes—being adapted to it—saw as a pleasant, neutral white. There were other colors—by my standards worse colors—actinic or merely unpleasant.
We ox breathers shared our habitat sector with not only the carbon dioxide metabolisms, but with a couple of weirdies who breathed nitrogen as well. (No, I don’t know how you use nitrogen as an energy catalyst: I’ve got enough to do keeping track of the various oxygen metabolisms I come in contact with daily.)
The section admin I was craning my head so far back to look up at was one of the CO2 breathers, albeit one without any lungs. Core Gen’s administrator for my bio type, as well as allied and complementary bio types, was a really, really, really big tree.
They might not have been the biggest tree in the galaxy. But then again, they might. They were a Vnetheshallan, from Shhele, and hospital rumor claimed they had come to the Core as a mere seedling. Their people, as a race, were mobile and vaguely humanoid in appearance in their younger instars. As they aged and became ready to reproduce, they returned to their homeworld, where they put down roots—literally—and generated seeds and offspring. And wrote a lot of poetry, created what their species considered great art, and so on.
All except for this one, who had put down roots right here. Or put up roots, or put in roots perhaps, because if you considered the direction of growth, their roots went toward the center of Core Gen and their leaves reached out, filtering light from all these endless stars to feed their hungry cells.
They had grown through and into the superstructure of the hospital. In a real sense, their body was Core Gen. Or at least a significant chunk of Core Gen, ox sector. (Carbon diox sector, from its point of view.)
Job security, I supposed.
I was apprehensive going in, to be perfectly honest. I’d never had an easy conversation with the being most of us jokingly referred to as the Administree. Their nervous system was not centralized into anything we mammals would recognize as a brain, and their thought processes were not linear in a sense most humans would recognize, but ran in multiple parallel tracks at once. Talking to them always made me feel like I was having an argument with a ball of coked-out snakes.
I mean, in a good way. But still.
“Hello, Administrator Starlight,” I said. “You wanted to see me?”
The tree’s name was not pronounceable, but it translated as Grows-in-Starlight, which was pretty and accurate. I knew that their fox would translate for them as mine translated for me. When they replied, their “voice” came through the senso clearly.
[Doctor/Coordinator Jens,] said Starlight. [Can you explain your professional choices to us?]
“You believe I made the wrong choice in staying on Big Rock Candy Mountain when Tsosie wanted to fall back?”
[Perhaps. Do you?]
“I’ve reviewed the ayatanas, mine and Tsosie’s. I can’t be certain, quite honestly. I believe I made a choice that worked out as well as any choice could have, under the circumstances.”