The stalker didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the tether, unfastened it from its anchor, then grasped the handrail with both hands and swung herself out of the air lock. She pulled her legs up to her chest, bracing against the side of the docking node, tensing her arms. Somatic memory and military-spec inertial navigation mods told her she was pointing at the chapel. She unrolled her fingers from the grab bar and extended her legs in a single smooth motion. An uncontrolled jump in zero gee would be fatally unstable, but this wasn’t uncontrolled. As with any modern person, the stalker’s musculature put out considerably more power than a Fragile hominid when push came to shove; nearly a thousand joules went into her thrust.
Five seconds passed; then ten. The stalker was not idle. She swiftly tied a noose in the end of the guide tape, widening it to almost two meters in diameter as she drifted, the tubes and pipes and ducts and radiators of Taj Beacon falling away beneath her feet. There was no leverage, and she had no way of orienting her head to focus on the chapel, but she knew where it was and where she expected it to be. She tied off the other end of the tape to her belt, then spread the noose wide and gently shoved it away from her, keeping a loose hold on the tape.
Ten seconds. Then twelve. A shadow drifted across her legs, bringing abrupt cold. A modern person (or a zombie in a person’s body) could survive and function in vacuum for whole minutes, but if she missed the chapel, she would drift indefinitely. (If nobody found her, her brain would eventually go into hibernation. After a few days, freezing would do its damage, and only her soul-chip backup would be recoverable. And after a few years, cosmic rays would take their inevitable toll . . .)
None of these matters were of any concern. The only thing that mattered to the stalker was her target.
There was a gentle tug at her waist as she was brought up short by the tautening lasso. The chapel’s thrusters supplied rippling jolts, seconds apart, pulling her sideways. Like a pendulum on the end of a long cable, she swung toward the octagonal wall of the sanctuary, toward relative safety and the continuation of her mission.
Reincarnations
I had no downtime for the first thirty-one hours and sixteen minutes of the voyage. During that time, the chapel gingerly maneuvered, using cold gas thrusters, until it was almost twenty kilometers from the beacon station. Our departure was sluggish, of necessity: both for internal shakedown and to ensure that when the deacon activated the drive, it wouldn’t fry the neighbors.
The chapel was not designed to undergo radical changes of orientation. Archaic in design, it followed a model for temples that could trace its origins back many thousands of years, to a time when the Fragile thought themselves the only human beings and had yet to lift their vehicles into the skies of Earth. Many of its internal structures were picturesque, ramshackle, and distinctly suboptimal for surviving a redefinition of the local vertical without damage. This might have been a matter of vital living tradition, but I am sure I can’t be the first person to question the wisdom of building spacegoing structures to a stone-age plan from the bottom of a gravity well!
Dennett spent little time making me feel at home; he showed me an unfurnished cell—I would have time to customize it to my own requirements later, but was only able to leave my bag there for now—then took me to a locker full of cleaning supplies, handed me a talking box, and said, “Do what it tells you to—if you have questions, ask. The process will familiarize you with the layout of the chapel. Once we are under way, I’ll have Father Gould sort you out with some remotes.”
“Uh, right . . .” But he was already disappearing in a flapping black chaos of robes. “Box? Talk to me?”
“Hello! I am vehicle maintenance logbook four. Are you my new operator?”
I thought for barely a moment. “I suppose so. Deacon Dennett just gave you to me.”
“Initializing. Initializing . . . registered. What should I call you?”
I rolled my eyes. Like a retina, the talking box was clearly too small to have much of a brain of its own, but designers love to prettify their user interfaces with spurious tricks that waste time and cause confusion. “I’m Krina. Where should I start? What functions do you track?”
“I coordinate cargo maintenance and handling! Krina, on the wall to your left, fourth shelf up, there is a cleaning kit. Krina, Mausoleum Companionway Three is sixty-nine hours overdue for cleaning. Also, because we are in prelaunch State Two, it is necessary to inspect the fixtures, fittings, and skeletons in Mausoleum Companionway Three for acceleration safety. On the wall to your top, fifth bin along, there is a restraint package and glue gun. Please take the cleaning kit and please take the restraint kit and please take the glue-gun kit and proceed to Mausoleum Companionway Three . . .”
It was one way to pass the time, I suppose.
The chapel was divided into two zones: the “aboveground” structures—a steeple-spired building constructed from stone blocks, held together with mortar, framed by a skeleton of carved tree trunks, containing various items of a devotional or religious nature—and the “belowground” structures: reaction-mass tankage, reactors, mass drivers, radiation shielding, telemetry, and everything else that pushed the chapel along and kept the mission running.
Of course, nothing was quite as it appeared. The stone blocks had aerogel cores as light as soap bubbles and as strong as diamond; the “mortar” was a foamy aggregate of mechanocyte flesh wrapped around polyfullerene cables, ready to heal micrometeoroid damage. The “timbers” were bonemetal structures with marrow techné cores. If it had a brain and a mind to animate it, the chapel would be a person: But the Church of the Fragile doesn’t approve of xenomorphs, and so they condemn their missions to wander the cosmos in anencephalic bodies.
My initial duties were strictly confined to the inhabited areas of the “aboveground” side of the mission: My unskilled labor was adequate for polishing the bones in the ossuary, but I would be the first to admit that I am not up to tending a fission reactor, tuning the neutron converters that turn its output into useful power, or monitoring the mass flow through the heat exchangers that keep it from melting. Bone-polishing was boring work, but I suppose I was lucky to have it; a vehicle that wasn’t so intimately constructed around the physical-scale factor of the Fragile or maintained by people prejudiced against xenomorphs would have been better advised to employ a smaller, lighter kind of person.
To start with, the talking box had me clean Ossuary Crypt Two, a job which might normally have fallen to one of Dennett’s animated skeletons, except that I would need to learn what I was doing before I tried directing a bone robot through the elaborate routine. OC2 was a low-roofed tunnel—if we hadn’t been under microgravity I would have found it claustrophobic—walled with a knobbly basket-weave of leg and arm bones. Some of them were new enough to still be pale brown, but most had been bleached by time and cosmic radiation. Streaks of verdigris stained the edges of the fine holes that had been drilled through them and threaded with copper wire. They’d all been rendered mildly radioactive by that unfortunate reactor excursion, and when I dimmed the lights, the phosphorescent varnish they were sealed in flickered and sparkled charmingly, announcing their secondary decay. A baroque architrave of skulls surrounded the safety portal at the end of the crypt. For all that the architecture seemed morbid to me, in Church doctrine it bespoke the dignity of age and the cosmic importance of the mission. The former owners of these bones had lived long and fulfilling lives within the edenic decks of the cathedral; it was their will and destiny that their relics be shipped to a new star system, there to claim the nearest Earth-like world for unmodified Fragile Humanity.