Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

The hulking cargo-handler nodded, started to move off with the secure robopallet. “Do I refile these, or—?”

“Not where they belong. Put them in the holding cage for damaged cargo and pull their lading chips.”

“But then the manifest updating system won’t read them, will show them missing.”

“That’s the idea. Now hurry.”

The pilot ran an implant scanner over the pale, unmoving cargo chief, detected the Russlavic-standard transponder-biorelay in her left tricep. She zipped down that sleeve, then removed a small gray container and a circular scalpel from her own breast pocket. She swiftly scooped out the device located in Agnata’s arm, and dropped it into the container, which was half filled with a nutrient medium surrounding a pulsing EM emitter. It was a sophisticated underworld method for keeping a biomonitor from signaling complete failure — until the emitter’s battery ran out, at least.

Agnata moaned softly, one hand rising toward the red hole that had been cut into her arm.

The pilot’s assistant returned with two new cryocells on the secure robopallet. “I’ll load those,” she said, “you take care of her.”

“Take care—?” He stopped, probably comprehending, but not wanting to.

“Yes. We’re going to take her with us. But it would be needlessly cruel to dump her into vacuum while she’s still alive. Take care of her with that.” The pilot nodded at the livestock stunner, started guiding the robopallet toward the outer bay, their lighter, and their rendezvous at the Slaasriithi ship.

“But I–I’ve never killed a woman.” The assistant’s massive shoulders were slumped.

The pilot rolled her eyes. “You’ll get used to it. Now get going; we don’t have a lot of time.”

* * *

When their armored shuttle came about for nose-first docking, Caine was not immediately certain he was looking at the Slaasriithi shift-carrier. Although it was clearly formed from metals and composites, it did not look mechanical. “It’s so smooth,” he wondered aloud. “It almost appears as though—”

“—as though it was grown, not built or manufactured,” Ben Hwang finished, nodding.

Sukhinin stared sidelong at the two of them. “Gentlemen, I do not pretend to have much grounding in the life sciences, but of this I may assure you: that vehicle is not some great space-plant.”

Downing grinned. “No, but I suspect Slaasriithi metallurgy — probably material sciences in general — employs entirely different processes than ours. Hopefully,” he finished, glancing at Caine and Hwang, “that’s part of the information you’ll bring back home.”

Caine nodded, looked for the complicated and diverse structures found at the bow of any human shift carrier but saw none of them. Instead, a large silver sphere capped the keel: almost certainly the command and control section. Starting just behind it was a stack of toruses which resembled a keel-enclosing sleeve of immense, brushed-chrome donuts. They were set off at points by symmetrically arrayed metallic or composite bubbles, and even smaller bean-shaped objects.

As they watched, one of the donuts split into two half-rings. Each half was pushed outward slowly from the keel by what appeared to be self-extruding composite-filament shafts. Once at full extension, the donut halves started rotating around the keel.

Downing shook his head. “Well, that’s a different way to create a gravity-equivalent environment.”

“Look at their cargo containers,” Hwang added, pointing back toward the waist of the craft. “Like something bees would build.”

Instead of the heavily built cargo frames and docking cradles of human shift carriers, the Slaasriithi craft used various permutations upon honeycombs and hexagons. The keel was, itself, a cluster of hexagonal shafts: it was as if the Giant’s Causeway of Ireland had been reformed into a kilometer-long pole. Shorter hexagonal sections, probably cargo containers, were affixed along its length, reprising the keel’s own shape. The sections were subdivided into segments, each juncture joined and reinforced by a substance akin to the composite, which had extruded from the hull to deploy the half-donut rotational habitats. And aft, where a human ships’ drives, power plants and even fuel tanks tended to accrue in boxy agglomerations, the Slaasriithi ship was distinguished by symmetric clusters of spheres, all seamless and perfect.

“It doesn’t look real,” Riordan murmured.

“Yes,” Downing agreed. “It has a rather impressionist feel to it. Something Magritte might have imagined.”

Hwang was smiling. “I wonder what our ships must look like to them?”

“Great angular monstrosities,” Sukhinin pronounced, then pointed. “This should be interesting.”

Caine and the others followed the vector implied by his index finger. The tug carrying Caine’s and Ben’s hab mod was approaching the bow of the Slaasriithi ship, cruising slowly past the fat silver toruses.

Halfway toward the large silver sphere at the bow, one of the smaller spheres began moving out from the keel. The tug angled sharply towards it, maneuvered so that the human hab mod — a comparatively inelegant tin can — was poised next to the aft surface of the sphere. It held that position.

Caine scanned the rest of the Slaasriithi ship: no other motion. No ROVs or other craft were on their way to help with the attachment of the module — which was looking damned near impossible.

Until Ben Hwang chuckled. “Well, that’s an odd way to dock a module.” He pointed.

Six small, equally spaced extrusions were emerging from the rear of the sphere, reaching to make contact with the hab mod.

Caine stared. “Is it growing the docking interface?”

Hwang frowned. “I don’t think it’s growing, at least not the way we’d mean it. But it seems the Slaasriithi have materials that synergize mechanical and biological properties. Look: those extrusions resemble the racks holding their cargo tubes in place: six parallel ribs projecting backward from the vertices of a hexagon, with secondary extrusions stretching between them. When they’re done, they will have woven a basket around our hab mod.”

Sukhinin nodded, stood away from the gallery window. “We are nearing the point where we shall release your transfer module to a Slaasriithi tug, and I am thirty minutes overdue for my final conference with Consul Visser. Doctor, Caine: I wish you the best of luck and safe travels. Richard, you shall continue to brief me on local intelligence matters during our return trip?”

“I’ll be right behind you, Vassily.” As Sukhinin exited, Downing turned to Riordan and Hwang. “Well, chaps, I can’t say I envy you.”

Caine hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “You mean because we’re sailing off into the great unknown on the SS Magritte ?”

Richard smiled. “Well, that too. But truth be told, I was thinking of traveling with Gaspard. Beastly duty, that.”

Hwang smiled. “I’m sure we shall manage.” He put out a hand. “Safe travels home, Richard.”

As Downing shook Hwang’s hand, Caine found himself unable to keep thoughts of “home” under the tight control he had exerted since being roused from cold sleep only seventy-two hours earlier. Images of Elena Corcoran — and their son, Connor — displaced what his eyes were showing him. “I’d like to get home, too. Pick up where I left off with Elena. Start being a father to Connor.” Pushing aside the sudden homesickness, Caine stuck out his hand as well, did not care, at least momentarily, that Richard Downing hardly deserved a fond farewell from him.

But when Caine mentioned the lover and son he had left behind, Richard glanced away quickly, feigned interest in the now fully loaded — or would that be encysted? — habitation module. “They’ll be ready to launch your transfer module any minute now.” He let his eyes graze briefly across Riordan’s. “Safe travels, Caine.”