Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

I hope the carabiner gates are up to the strain of the shoulder attitude jets.

Jeremy's tall enough that we had to get him one of the extended suits. Not as bad off as Gabe; his had to be special ordered, and if he was army still and not mission-vital, they probably would have just left him dirtside and gone and got somebody else.

Just my dumb luck they didn't. I check the seals on Jeremy's suit and helmet — he ducks to give me a better angle — and I pat him on the shoulder when he straightens. “Check me out, please.”

“Sorry.” He runs gloved fingers over all my seals, visual inspection and then the tactile one, pressing each catch to make sure it's locked. He fumbles a little. Not too bad.

“You okay, Doc?”

“Cold feet,” he jokes, and it cracks me up, because we're on the sun side of the Buffy Sainte-Marie, and if anything the hide of the little ship would be hot to the touch. If we could touch her. “Everybody all set?”

I expect they are, but that's not my question to answer. “Everybody ready for the air lock?” I hear a chorus of ayes, and see one nod out of the corner of my eye. “Out loud, please, Les.”

Charlie's old hat at suit drill, of course, even if he's not got an EVA cert. He smirks at me through the bubble of his helmet; I don't catch his eye, look at Leslie instead. “I can't hear your head rattle in a vacuum, Les.”

“All set,” he says, tilting his head like he's blushing, but his skin's too dark to tell. “Ma'am.”

I open the air lock hatch, and we step into a bare, white-walled steel room no bigger than an express elevator. My air already smells like tin and a little bit like sweat, which makes me appreciate how fresh the air on the Montreal is. Those vegetable gardens do the trick, I guess. Corporal Letourneau dogs the hatch behind us, and I turn — full turn in the suit, because your helmet doesn't move with your head — and give them the once-over. Every one of them has a grip on a Jesus handle; I check. Every one of them also has lights glowing green-means-go on the locking ring of his or her suit. “Last chance to chicken out.”

Silence.

I didn't really think anybody would.

I turn back around and slap the hatch open one-handed, hanging on pretty damn tight with the other, myself, so I don't tumble out into all that nothing like a milkweed seed blown from the pod. Leslie gets blown into my back and somersaults past me, but Lieutenant Peterson was wise to that and she's got both hands on the bar, so he pitches up against the end of his line and they don't go tumbling out like two weights tied to a rope and flung.

“Right,” the lieutenant says, hauling Leslie back into the air lock for no good reason except that we can all hear him breathing — panting — over the suit mike. “Now that we have the drama out of the way, shall we step outside?”

Despite my instructions, Les nods again, the bobbing movement visible inside his helmet, and the lieutenant takes him out first. I run rearguard with Jeremy, and Charlie and the corporal go in the middle. The Buffy Sainte-Marie hangs behind us like a white-lit Christmas ornament on a black velvet dropcloth.

I imagine we must look a strange, stringy sort of centipede from the pilot's perspective. He'll keep the shuttle here, stationary with regard to the birdcage and about a klick away, until either the Benefactors dispose of us or we return. When I turn over my shoulder to look back at him, I can see the shiptree outlined as a twist of brighter, bluer lights against the stars, and I wonder if we're starting with the right aliens first. Of course, there's no easy way to get inside that one.

It's a slow, silent procession — six of us in formation like pallbearers miming an invisible coffin. The lieutenant's slaved our maneuvering jets to her own controls, so we follow in an orderly fashion — even those of us with no clue what we're doing.

Like any of us have a clue what we're doing anymore.

A kilometer sounds pretty far, but really, it's no distance at all. Two laps around a footrace track. You can run that far in a few minutes if you're in decent shape. The Montreal herself is close to three kilometers long.

We cover the distance in twenty minutes flat, in silence except for the occasional murmured instruction over the suit radios, and the thrilled, terrified rattle of our hearts. I'm waiting for some response, some acknowledgment. Some change in the steady, erratic flicker of the silvery teardrops from one place to another across the width of the birdcage. Some indication of whether to continue forward or move back.

I haven't been so roundly ignored since the time when Leah was twelve and she wouldn't talk to me for three days because I refused to help her run away from home so she wouldn't have to share a room with Genie anymore.

The good news is, she had nothing on emotional blackmail compared to her dad, or she almost might have broken me. I took her camping instead. A girl knows what it's like to need to get out of town once in a while.

Hey Richard.

“Jenny?”

You with me, sport?

“I wouldn't miss this for the world.”

I don't suppose you have a theory about what those birdcage aliens are?

I feel him shrug, and then his voice comes over my suit radio instead of inside my head. “The master warrant officer wants to know if this particular alien intelligence has any theories about what those other alien intelligences might be like,” he says.

“Whatever they are, they're swimming around in space bare-assed,” Charlie comments, his voice made tinny in transmission. “I don't think those are suits.”

“Could they be remotes? Waldos?” Jeremy, and he twists his upper body inside his suit to look at me, as if I have any idea whether he might be right or wrong. “Some sort of nanotech construction?”

“The probes couldn't tell,” Charlie says. “And when we tried to bring a sample back for analysis, all we got was nanotech and hydrogen.” We're close enough to see them clearly now, without magnification. The aliens are featureless gleaming spheres until they move, and then they stream out from a rounded bow to a trailing point.

“That's weird,” Richard says. “There's no drag. No air resistance to push them into a teardrop shape.”

“That's why I think those are the aliens,” Charlie answers. “That looks like an adaptation to moving through fluid.”

“Or atmosphere?” Leslie asks.

“Technically, atmosphere is a fluid, in the fluid dynamics sense,” Dick says.

I keep my damned mouth shut. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, etcetera, etcetera. Charlie, bless him, has no dignity. “I wonder where something like that grows up. Dick?”

“You're wondering if I have a theory where they evolved?”

“I'm wondering if you have a theory what they're made of.”

“I'd say they're probably patterns of electrical impulses in some sort of supercooled, possibly superconductive colloid. They carry a nanomachine infestation, but while I can sense those machines, I can't piggyback their operating system the way I can the ones you bred, Chuck. They're even farther out of my ambit than the Chinese nanonetwork.”

“Not only do we not speak their language, or have any kinetics in common, we can't even hack their computers.” Jeremy touches the override on his thigh, adding a little more thrust to what the lieutenant gives him, and drifts to the end of the line that binds us together. I compensate for the gentle tug; he makes a smooth job of it, overall.

Peterson draws us up a few short yards outside the birdcage, and we spread casually apart. Not too far, though; there isn't any safety in numbers, but the reptile part of our brains can't be made to believe that, no matter how many millions of years of evolution we layer over it.