They sat behind Lieutenant Peterson in the second row of crew chairs in the Gordon Lightfoot, leaving the copilot's chair beside her empty. The panoramic forward windows on the shuttle showed a broad slice of space, far more expansive than the triple-thick airplane windows with their rounded corners back in the passenger compartment.
Charlie's gauntleted hands tightened on the shatterproof crystal of his helmet. At least if the shiptree slapped the Gordon Lightfoot out of the sky, Leslie would know everything he did. There'd be no foolishness with final transmissions and telemetry and black boxes—do shuttlecraft even have black boxes?
“Yes,” Richard said in his head. “And they also have me, these days. And relax. The shiptree never did anything about the unmanned probes we sent.”
Neither did the birdcage. And the probes didn't try to find a way inside, he answered, but he forced his hands to ease around his helmet. A moment too soon, because Peterson set the autopilot and lifted her own helmet off the carrier beside the pilot's chair. “Hats on, gentlemen,” she said. “I suppose I should thank you two for getting me out of the office again, shouldn't I?”
Jeremy laughed, a hollow sound amplified by the dome he was settling over his head. The gold-impregnated glass caught the shuttle's interior lights, making him look as if he wore a Renaissance angel's halo over his faded gingery hair. Basset-hound eyes, drooping at the corners, and a long hollow-cheeked face completed the illusion of an old master's work, disconnected in time and place. Charlie seated his own helmet and checked the latches, then checked Jeremy's. Jeremy leaned forward to inspect Peterson's, and Peterson went over Charlie's seals.
“Leslie must be furious he isn't here for this,” Jeremy said, as Peterson seated her hands on the yoke again. Charlie, who had started his shuttle cert but never finished it, noticed that she engaged the dead man's switch when she did so.
“He's spitting.”
Jeremy was silent for a moment. “I'm missing Patty's testimony.”
Thanks, Charlie, Leslie said. I'm quiet and well behaved, and you're telling Jer lies about my behavior? See if I buy you a beer when we get back to Earth.
It was meant to ease the lump in Charlie's throat when he thought of Leslie out there somewhere, drifting. It didn't. What makes you think they're ever gonna let us go back to Earth, Les?
Leslie's laughter almost sounded real. Then they'd bloody well better start shipping up some fucking beer.
Charlie snorted, fogging the inside of his helmet, and rolled his eyes as he switched on the climate control. “All ready back here,” he said, out loud, so Peterson could hear him.
“Right,” she said. “We're going in.”
The shiptree grew slowly and steadily in size as they slid up on it. Charlie already knew the lights weren't portholes. Like all the contact team, he'd studied telescopic images and the data from the unmanned probes. He knew that the hull of the vast structure — the autonomous space-faring vegetable, as he had described the hulk he and Fred Valens had explored on Mars — was comprised of a substance not all that different from cellulose reinforced with monofilamental carbon fiber. Buckytubes: the same substance that had been engineered to make the beanstalks possible — but the buckytubes in the shiptree's hull were grown, theoretically, not manufactured.
Unless the nanosurgeons had built them, reworking the Brobdingnagian shape from whatever it had once been, into a starship. Always a possibility.
And in another fascinating twist, the conductive carbon filaments in the shiptree's hull were sheathed in a substance analogous to myelin, and interconnected via organic transistors — carbon filament diodes, which Gabe said were nearly identical to the ones used in humanity's own early experiments with nanochips, before the Benefactor tech had rendered Earth's nanomachine research obsolete.
Charlie's hands closed on the arms of his acceleration couch, the jointed gauntlets pressing creases into the flesh of his fingers as the Gordon Lightfoot braked on a long smooth arc and came about, paralleling the kilometers-long hull of the shiptree. Firefly green and neon-tetra blue, the lights rippled in response to the passage of the smaller ship.
“Do you suppose she's hailing us?” Jeremy, his voice dulled and echoing through the helmet. He hadn't turned on his radio.
“It's as good a guess as any,” Charlie answered. “I think that's bioluminescence, which means that it's likely either for communication or for luring prey. Of course, a critter evolved for space would find light an efficient signal.”
“You don't think the ship is the intelligence, do you?”
Charlie shrugged. “Why not? It's possible, and it shows up in enough science fiction that way. The one we found on Mars looked like it had something very much like the VR cables our pilots use, though. Admittedly…”
Richard's voice, through external speakers so Jeremy and Peterson could hear him. “Those ships were so many eons old that we can only speculate how much the species that designed them have changed.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Thank you, Dick.
Jeremy nodded inside his helmet, and started talking before Charlie could remind him to speak out loud. “Well, which leaves us with the following question. They — it — never exhibited any kind of semaphoring behavior at the unmanned probes. Do you think it knows we're out here?”
“I can feel them,” Charlie said. “It stands to reason that they can feel me.”
“And the probes didn't have red and green running lights,” Leslie added, over the speakers rather than inside Charlie's head. “If we're theorizing that the shiptree uses bioluminescence to communicate, and its lights are all at the green and blue and indigo end of the spectrum, maybe it's seeing the Gordon Lightfoot's green running lights as a friendly wave hi.”
“You never thought to shine a spotlight on it?” Charlie couldn't be quite sure, but he was reasonably sure that Jeremy was rolling his eyes.
“I'm a biologist,” Charlie said. “This is why we hired you guys.” He craned his neck to get a better look at the whorled shell gliding by under the Gordon Lightfoot's floodlights, emerging from darkness before and disappearing into darkness again behind, outlined by its own rippling glow and the trembling silver-gray threads of whatever it was that trailed off the smooth hull between them. It was like the hulk of some long-submerged wreck revealed and then vanishing in the lights of an exploratory submarine. He could have seen it more plainly in the holoscreens, but there was something about the evidence of his own eyes that tightened his throat and made breathing an effort.
“Lieutenant,” Jeremy said, “can you dim our lights?”
“Dim them? Or shut them off?”
“Well, all the way off. But just flash them a few times.”
“Damn, look at that thing; it's got no symmetry at all, not bilateral or radial. It's just kind of there.”
“It's got a fractal pattern, though,” Richard pointed out. “The smaller whorls build to larger whorls and then larger ones. The whole thing looks like a giant toboggan if you squint at it.”
“How are you managing to squint, Dick?” Charlie shot back, drawing a laugh from Jeremy. The AI was right, though. It was as apt a description as the one that had come to Charlie, of water-worn driftwood. “You know what it reminds me of?”
“Coral,” Jeremy said promptly, and Dick said “Gypsum crystals, only curved.”