A low warning tone sounded.
Carol made a face as she studied the holoscreens. “Looks as if we are going to be entertaining a few visitors of our own,” she said, pointing at a small cloud of dots on the short-range scanner window in the main holoscreen. The cloud was growing closer to Dolittle by the second, decelerating rapidly.
“Still want me to do nothing?” Bruno asked.
Carol nodded. “Watch the ratcat ship.”
As the flock of aliens approached the kzin singleship, it began to move, maneuvering away with its reactionless drive. Extreme magnification showed a pale purple beam of light stretching from one of the tiny hydra shapes to the kzin spacecraft. The whole vessel glowed purple for a moment, then the slight aura faded.
The singleship halted and hung motionless in space. Long-range scanners showed that all electronic emissions from the kzin vessel had ceased. The droves of tiny shapes merged with it.
“As I mentioned,” Carol remarked conversationally, “I suspect it would be wise to do nothing.”
Bruno smiled without showing his teeth. “Hold that thought, Carol. Our visitors have arrived.” He gestured to a holoscreen window displaying a view of the external hull. Many-armed shapes swarmed past the cameras.
“Follow them with the hull cameras, please.”
Bruno set up a series of small windows in the holoscreen displaying the external hull of Dolittle. The windows showed weaving tendrils, rapid activity.
“Switch to infrared,” Carol said after a while. Perhaps the aliens would show up better in the longer wavelengths.
One by one, the windows went blank, showing the multicolored snowy display of holographic static.
“What happened?” she rapped.
“Hardware failure. They're doing something to the ship.”
Before Carol could say anything else, the external long-range scanners failed. Then weapons-status telemetry.
She unstrapped and floated over to a supply locker.
“What are you doing?” Bruno asked her, unstrapping himself and joining her.
“Going to suit up and try and convince the uglies on the hull to stop what they are doing. Force of my commanding personality, that sort of thing, you know.”
Her lover frowned. “You know that I can't Link right now, and you are better behind the console. Let me go outside. I need you at the console, to get us out of here if necessary.”
His glance speared her heart. For a moment, Carol was busy repressing her odd mix of maternal and sexual feelings that Bruno brought out in her. If they survived, she would take the confusion up with her autodoc psychiatric module at length.
“Go,” the Captain persona inside her finally said. “But be careful, Tacky,” her deeper self appended. “I need you, too.”
Bruno gave her a quick hug, and she efficiently helped him into his spacesuit.
“Oh,” Carol added conversationally, “you might want to take this, too.” She pressed an electron-beam rifle into his hands. Bruno took it awkwardly, then slung it over his shoulder.
The main computer reset itself, then fell to fifty percent processing capacity. More warning tones began to sound.
“You had better hurry,” Carol said softly, “while we can still cycle the airlock.”
Bruno started to dog his helmet shut and entered the airlock. He paused and turned back to Carol. She smiled at his look.
“I love you, too,” she said simply.
Carol kept a smile on her face until she heard the hatch close firmly. Then she blinked a few times to clear the tears that pooled in her eyes in the microgravity, and strapped back into her crash couch. After a moment she swept her hands across the main console, to see what systems remained responsive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Bruno opened the outer airlock door of Dolittle.
“Carol,” he whispered over the suit commlink.
“I'm here, lover.” Her voice buzzed in his headset.
“I'm leaving the airlock now. You getting video?”
“Affirmative.”
Bruno clumsily lifted himself out of the airlock and locked down his magnetic boots on the dark hull of Dolittle. The riot of distant stars all around him shone down indifferently. This was deep space, with no friendly sun for light-years.
Over to one side, as large as the full Moon seen from faraway Earth, shone the glittering lights of the alien vessel.
Their own ship was a dark blur. He tongued his video amplifiers, repressed a gasp. The aliens thronged the hull of Dolittle, too many to count.
“Are you getting this?” he breathed.
“Yes,” buzzed Carol's short reply.
The aliens stood perhaps a meter and a half in height. They looked like cat-o'-nine-tails bullwhips, overly thick handle down and whips flailing about like snakes. Each whip end unraveled in a fractal series of smaller tendrils, final fingerlets clearly adept at manipulation. The aliens wore ornate harnesses, studded with bulging pockets and metallic-looking triangular shapes. On a hunch, he tongued his helmet visuals to infrared IR and saw that the metal triangles were nearly seventy degrees warmer than the whip-aliens themselves.
Heat exchangers, like the spidery constructions on the moon-ship. This was confirmed when one of the aliens landed on the hull of Dolittle twenty meters from Bruno, arms down, and the triangular shapes on its harness blazed under IR to shed the heat.
Under infrared, the aliens were much more than black ropy shapes. Delicate traceries of relative warmth pulsed beneath their cold skin, like some sort of circulatory system. Portions of their alien anatomies were clearly intended to remain much colder than others.
Bruno watched one of the aliens remove a complicated shape from a pocket and touch it to an open section of Dolittle's hull. The shape smoothly changed shape and extended a questing projection, like a living thing. It thrust into what Bruno realized was part of Dolittle's main sensory net. That alien's heat exchangers glowed. Other aliens continued to enlarge the open section under study, methodically taking the hull apart with strange tools. Other aliens ran snaky arms and odd objects over the disassembled parts.
“Carol,” he whispered. “You still with me?”
“Right.”
“Looks like they are studying our electronics. That must be what is shutting things down.”
“You think they mean to shut us down?” came Carol's voice, peppered with static, but still soft in his ears.
“Doubtful. If they wanted to kill us, they would have quite a while ago. I just think they're curious.”
“So why aren't they paying attention to you?”
Bruno didn't say anything in reply. Several more of the aliens came over the curving hull of Dolittle, moving quickly in a series of somersaults. They crowded around the alien who had tapped into the shipboard sensory net.
Fascinated despite himself, Bruno watched IR patterns shift and change across their alien skin. Waving tendrils danced fluidly. Bursts of static hissed and crackled in his ears. Communications?
“Bruno!” Carol's voice was suddenly grim.
“I'm here,” he said, trying to sound calm.
“Life support just failed. I'm getting into my suit now.”
Bruno swore, his voice loud in his own helmet. He had to try and stop the aliens before they — even by mistake — managed to kill both of them.
He unslung the electron-beam rifle from his shoulder, lifted it carefully, and checked its charge. The telltales glowed green: a full charge. Bruno flicked the safety off.
“I don't know if you can hear me, and if you can, you probably don't understand me,” he told the cluster of many-armed shapes who were busily peeling still more of Dolittle's hull away. “But you have to stop what you are doing.”