Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“You could talk to the Campocs,” Drea whispered. “They might be able to contact Leropa. Or Reath might have a way to contact another Transcendent community, nearer to the Nord. For all I know there might even be a Transcendent or two on the Nord… ”

Alia knew that was too simple. Drea still thought of the Transcendence as a kind of comms network, as if the Transcendents themselves were nothing but monitoring stations, their eyes cameras. But the Transcendence was more than that. The Transcendence was literally beyond human imagination. Indeed Alia herself didn’t have the words to express it. The only way to understand the Transcendence, she thought sadly, was to be part of it, as she had been, and even if she never went back to it again, there would always be a gulf between herself and her sister.

But, she felt instinctively, the Transcendence was not a place to seek help at a time of human crisis.

At last Reath alerted them that their journey was over.

The ailing Nord was surrounded by a multitude of craft, compact or slender, robust or delicate. The crowding visitors had come to give aid, Reath assured the sisters. “Your Nord has many friends.”

“But at least one enemy,” Drea said bleakly.

As they approached, cautiously picking their way through the crowd of ships and darting shuttles, their view became clearer. And even from a distance, Alia could see the Nord had been grievously harmed. The squat cylinder that was the core of the Nord ’s architecture had survived — it would take the outright demolition of the ship to destroy that — but huge energies had been splashed against the hull, leaving blackened scars and deep notches cut into the Nord ’s blunt symmetry. Away from the ancient core the superstructure of habs, antennae, sensors, and manipulators was tangled, as if a great wind had torn through that fragile artificial forest.

Some of the Nord ’s ports were still functioning, at least. The semi-sentient machinery of the dock interfaced with the shuttle routinely, but a bit hesitantly, Alia thought. Perhaps machines could suffer shock, too.

The shuttle wouldn’t let them out until they donned face masks and gloves. Inside the Nord there were stretches of vacuum, and even where there was air it was likely full of toxins. With dread Alia pulled on her mask, the mask she had once worn to go into a Coalescence; it was terribly hard to have to don protective gear to enter your own home.

At last the hatches and locks slid open. A smell of burning washed over them, unfiltered by their face masks. And in the corridors, people in masks and gloves swarmed everywhere, cutting, patching, moving bits of equipment. The place was unrecognizable.

The sisters clutched each other. Alia had been determined to be brave, but even in that first moment her strength seemed to drain away. Drea was wide-eyed, unnaturally still, not even trembling — in shock, Alia thought.

There was no welcome for Alia and Drea: no message, no news, no words of reassurance, or confirmation of their fears. It was as if this damaged place had forgotten they even existed.

Reath tried to keep them focused. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “The Nord ’s in chaos. It’s only three days since the disaster. People are just too busy… Don’t worry. I know the way. Just follow me.” As he made his way out of the shuttle he stumbled and drifted until he got hold of a rail: his body plan was designed for planet-living, not for this microgravity scramble. But he gamely got his orientation, beckoned to the sisters, and began to make his way through the corridors.

Alia followed. Drea moved mechanically.

The damage inflicted on the Nord had been internal as well as external. Corridor walls had been sliced through and rooms had burst open, their contents scorched and smashed. Great energies had been loosed here, Alia saw with a sense of outrage, vast clumsy mechanical energies poured out in this fragile human place. And if it was distressing now, it must have been a lot worse before, she saw from the ripped-open walls, the splashes of blood on the floor: those first few hours must have been dreadful indeed.

But she was being selfish again, she thought with a stab of shame, thinking only of herself, and how she had been spared the worst of it. If she had been here, where she was supposed to be, perhaps more lives could have been saved.

They clambered up through the Nord ’s levels, heading for their home. Activity throbbed through the ship as partitions were patched, debris removed, fresh goods brought in. In emergency hospitals the wounded were arrayed in stacks, through which medic machines and human nurses drifted. The ship was badly hurt, Alia thought, but it was already recovering. But there were mortuaries, too, more arrays of bodies but full of ominous stillness.

Reath murmured, “I admit this is beyond me. I’m planet-born, an earthworm. Even on a planet the odd catastrophe strikes — an asteroid impact, a volcanic eruption, a quake. But at least the world survives; you can rely on that. Here, though, on this fragile ship, even while you were trying to save those around you, and cope with your own injuries, you had to try to stop the very fabric of your environment from unraveling around you. For if you failed…”

If they had failed, Alia thought bleakly, the Nord might have cracked open altogether, and tens of thousands of humans would have been sent scattering into the vacuum dark.

“You can see the patterns,” Drea said suddenly.

“What patterns?”

Drea pointed to an irruption through the roof of this corridor, a hole surrounded by smashed and distorted panels, and a matching hole at the angle of floor and wall. If you looked into one of those mighty gashes you could see how a crude tunnel had been cut through deck after deck, in rough straight lines. Peering down Alia thought she could make out the green of the Farm, even the hulking machinery of the Engine Room, far below.

Drea said, “They just came blasting through here, right through the fabric of the Nord. ”

Reath said, “The Nord must be riddled with these wounds. The scars of energy weapons, perhaps?”

“No,” said Alia. “Oh, weapons were surely used. But these tunnels are too wide.” Any ship-born, in any ship across the Galaxy, would have recognized such signs.

“The Shipbuilders,” Drea whispered.

For ship-born children across the Galaxy, the Shipbuilders were bedtime monsters. But they had at last come here. And in their voracious machines they had eaten their way through the soft body of the ship.

Reath watched this exchange, excluded from their tradition, his eyes narrow.

At last they arrived at the upper level, just beneath the hull, where their home had been. The delicate superstructure of the Nord had taken even more of a battering than its robust interior. Alia and Drea picked their way through a tangle of melted and snapped struts, fragments of smashed dome, bits of broken furniture and machinery. Debris floated about, unrestrained in the absence of artificial gravity, contained by an emergency force shield that shimmered over everything like a huge soap bubble. People picked their way through the rubble, searching, inspecting. The regular light globes had failed, and the few emergency lanterns cast long shadows everywhere, making the place even more of a visual jumble.

When the sisters reached their home, their worst fears were confirmed.

The ship’s hull had been smashed open here, leaving only a few drifting bits of translucent ceramic. The sisters pulled themselves through the wreckage, searching. Alia felt fragile, edgy. The conjunction of all this wreckage with shards of the familiar, with bits of stuff, fragments of furniture she thought she recognized, made this whole experience seem unreal.