Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

Then we assume they don't like the taste of people either.

Hah, Leslie. On the other hand, it wasn't a half-bad point. There was no reason to think that an alien pathogen would find anything tasty about humans. And if it did… well, frankly, Charlie's nanosurgeons might protect him from any ill effects. Assuming anything got through the suit. And in any scientific endeavor there is the element of risk.

He tapped Jeremy's arm, automatically bracing himself with a strap to account for the reaction. Jeremy looked up and hung the sampler on his belt. “Ready?”

“As I'll ever be.”

Charlie made sure his suit radio was live and said, “Lieutenant, we're moving out.”

“Copy.”

Together, they glided aft, toward the air lock.

Charlie went first. Peterson had matched velocities with the shiptree so evenly that he didn't need his attitude thrusters; he just checked the carabiner on the safety line clipped to Jeremy's suit, made sure the line was playing freely through the retractor, and jumped. There was no relative velocity between the Gordon Lightfoot and the alien vessel; Charlie sailed easily across the empty space and landed exactly where he'd aimed, with a firm grip on a whorl outlined in lime-green lights.

Up close, they looked exactly like firefly lights, but their texture — through the suit — was as hard as that of the surrounding hull. He stopped only half a second before he pressed the bubble of his helmet against the whorl. That might not be wise, Charlie.

Not that wisdom had ever really been his strong point. “I'm over,” he told Jeremy. Unnecessarily, but Jeremy would wait for verbal confirmation anyway, in case his grip was no good.

“I'm on my way,” Jeremy replied. Charlie didn't turn his head to look, just firmed his grip on the hull and waited. A faint tug on the safety lines, a light shock of impact through the hull of the shiptree, and Jeremy was beside him. “First step's a lulu,” the linguist said.

“You aren't kidding. That air lock's big enough for two at a time, I think.”

“I don't like the idea of that. I'll go first,” Jeremy replied. “I have the atmosphere kit.”

“There's no atmosphere in there yet. And if the lock cycles with one of us inside and one of us out, we lose the safety lines. And possibly damage the air lock and piss off the natives.”

“You have a point.” There was a silence, and for a moment Charlie thought Jeremy was going to ask Richard's opinion. Or Wainwright's. Although the captain had been completely silent so far, Charlie had no illusions that she wasn't watching, breath held. She might look cool and reserved, but he knew a professional facade when he saw one. Charlie waited. Jeremy sighed over the radio and said, “All right, then. Side by side.”

They released their grips on the shiptree's hull on a count of three and kicked off lightly, shadows cast by the Gordon Lightfoot 's floods expanding as they drifted back. Attitude jets reversed their trajectory and brought them in a looping half-arc, swish into the wide-open air lock like a free-throw basketball.

The shuttle's floods were arc-light white, the diffuse glow inside the shiptree the calm, friendly gold of late-afternoon sun. Charlie glanced around as he and Jeremy fetched up against the interior wall of the air lock. The blue-green bioluminescence didn't persist inside the hull. Here, instead, the curved bulkheads bowed together, chambered and knobbed like the inside of a turtle's shell, and each veined ridge glowed sunshine gold.

“Pretty,” Jeremy said. “That's not a color we get much in bioluminescence on Earth, is it?”

“No,” Charlie answered. “It looks like a full-spectrum light. I'm going to take some swabs of the walls. Where do you suppose the inside door is?”

“I think we'd better let the aliens handle cycling the air lock,” Jeremy answered, allowing himself to turn slowly at the end of his tether, scanning the walls of the vaguely spherical chamber. “I'd hate to purge the ship by accident, even if I could find the controls, and there's no guarantee they have anything like our concept of safety interlocks. Doesn't look as if they ever intended there to be gravity in this, does it?”

“No.” Charlie busied himself opening the plates and sterile swabs. “It'll take some time to culture these, of course. A week or ten days. And I guess we'll want to get some samples of this and that back to the Montreal to run through the mass spec.”

“Lieutenant Peterson, you'll run these back for us when we've got them ready?” Jeremy didn't need to change frequencies to speak to the shuttle, or the Montreal . Their entire conversation was on an open channel.

“That's why they sent me along, Dr. Kirkpatrick,” she answered. “As long as you're certain there's no danger.”

“Never say never,” Charlie quipped, stowing a swab in a sterile baggie and running his glove along the bulkhead. “I wonder if this feels as much like walnut paneling as it looks.”

“I wonder how it stands up to the extremes of cycling between space and the internal environment, if it's wood.”

“Nanosurgeons,” Charlie answered, more dryly than he'd intended. “Also, in the very least, the shiptree of Mars wasn't wood. Not exactly.”

“But enough like wood that you called it a tree—”

“What the heck else would you call it? Oh, hey.” As his gloves snagged on a rough patch. “There's something different here. A stained area, and the wood fibers are raised.”

“Diseased?”

“Maybe.” Charlie tugged his hand free, cautious of the suit's material. The area was a bit sticky, too, as if it were oozing sap. A bit of the bulkhead seemed to shift with his movement. “Ooops.”

“You're not a very reassuring person to explore an alien ship with, Charlie. What did you do?”

A shift in the quality of the light alerted him, a shadow falling across his back as the irising door cut the Gordon Lightfoot 's floods. “Um. Triggered the air lock?”

“Dr. Forster? Dr. Kirkpatrick?” Peterson's voice, simultaneous with a Leslie-flavored burst of worry in the back of Charlie's brain.

“We're good in here,” he said, as the wall opposite began to unfurl from its central ridge like a flower bud spiraling open. “We seem to be allowed in…”

When the shiptree's atmosphere touched his suit, his helmet frosted over like a beer glass on a humid day. Jeremy cursed. “Can you see anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“Turn up your suit heaters,” Richard suggested. “Did you get the atmospheric sample?”

“As soon as I can read the dials, Dick.” Jeremy's tone absolved his words of irritation.

Charlie worked on clearing the surface of his helmet immediately in front of his face, curls of frost drifting from the creases of his suit and melting into jeweled droplets as they did. “I'd say there's some moisture in the atmosphere—”

“Hah.” A pause. “Eighty three percent humidity. Yeah, that's some. It's a warm room temperature in here.”

“Oxygen?”

“You could light a match, but you might scorch your fingers — let's put it that way. Lots of carbon dioxide, too. A little light on the nitrogen, heavy on the argon by our standards. This shows particulate matter, not to excess. Pollen or dust?”

“We'll know when we get the filters under a microscope,” Charlie said. Water beaded his faceplate, but he could see the open interior door clearly once he knocked it away. Drifting globules spattered against the air lock's walls, leaving behind a pattern of wet round dots that were rapidly absorbed. “If this is like the one on Mars, there will be a ladder type projection to use for traction when we get into the corridor.”