Gregory Benford: Shipstar

Additions and afterthoughts, he judged. Some reminded him of accumulated grime, touch-up attempts and insertions. Like the yellowing varnish on a Renaissance masterpiece, he thought. Strip away the accretions, and beneath is the original brilliance. Interstellar archaeology.

Karl deployed the smart flexi with an electric shock. Under a kilovolt surge the velvet blue shroud billowed out—so thin, he could see the gyrating hull grinding past in the distance. Starlight lit its eternal churn. A certain serenity enveloped the view, for the background was the eternal spread of stars. The approaching dot was for the moment nothing.

He had static-fixed the flexi to the Bernal ’s hull. Its sensors would follow inbuilt commands he could activate. Well, here goes …

The flexi popped open at the electro-command. Yet the micro sensors at the far end remained live and ready, he saw from his wrist monitor. The flexi bubble furled out as liquidly as a cape cast off a shoulder, though all this was in high vacuum, no gravity or atmosphere to command its dynamics. Such a thin fabric of layered smart carbon could be made and trained in the ship printers, but he had never tried anything this complex before. Now they had to use it to rescue Beth’s team from the big train car that came swarming up at them, the dot assuming a velocity a bit too high. Problems, yes. Perhaps not fatal, entirely. Yet.

Karl had not been thawed when SunSeeker shot through the Knothole, so all this gigantic architecture was new to him. He stared, momentarily lost in detail.

“Coming up on rendezvous prompt,” Jam sent on comm. “Bogie on vector grid.”

“Got it.” He eased the flexi controls, using both hands. For ease of manual operations, there were no left-handed crew on SunSeeker. Karl had made the crew cut because he was genuinely ambidextrous. In college he had made extra cash as a juggler.

“It’s coming up too fast,” Jam said urgently.

“I’ve got mag fields on, maybe I can push it off.” Karl ran the mag amplitude to the max. That was a stressor in a thick-hulled freighter like the Bernal; he could hear tinny ping s.

He was looking out a true port, not a screen. Living inside a starship with only screen views felt disconnected. There was something about capturing the actual starlight photons bouncing off the Bowl that made it more real. This huge thing had to have incredible strength to hold it together, he realized. SunSeeker had a support structure made of nuclear tensile strength materials, able to take the stresses of the ramjet scoop at the ship core. Maybe the Bowl material was similar. So he scanned the Bowl’s wraparound struts, the foundational matter, on the long-range telescopes on his bridge board. It was only a few tens of meters thick, pretty heavily encrusted with evident add-on machinery and cowlings. Which meant the Bowl stress-support material had to be better than SunSeeker ’s. What engineers they were.…

Jam said, “It’s braking. Must have some maneuvering ability.”

“I can see them,” Kurt said quietly. He ran his scopes to the max. There were windows in part of the hauler and human heads peering out at him. He had to admire them. They had made it through captivity, struck out across unknown alien territory, stolen transport, liberated themselves—and were coming back to the ship to report.

Jam said, “Ease them in. Careful.”

“I read their roll at near zero, yaw zero point three five, but correcting—and pitch seven point five degrees.” Kurt rattled off the numbers just to be saying something while he used hand controls to turn Bernal into a plausible alignment.

“Bearing in,” Jam said. “Just got confirming signal. Ha! As if anybody else were meeting us out here.”

“Aligned. Now’s the hard part.”

Center ball was smack on, horizontal bar of the crosshatch dead center with vertical bar, and the bulky burnished train car that looked like a shoe box came to rest in the Bernal rest frame. With both hands he triggered the flexi with an electrostatic burst.

The flexi skirted across the gap like an unfolding velvet blue scarf. It unfolded and clamped on to the boxcar metal around the simple air lock. It anchored and popped him a message: PRESSURE SEAL SECURED.

“Got it.” Kurt palmed the pressure valves, and air rushed into the flexi corridor between the ships. Of course, the craft weren’t perfectly matched. But the flexi compensated, extruding further lengths of itself to accommodate the vagrant torques and thrusts as the two spacecraft wobbled and rocked in the magnetic grasp. Pressured. Secure.

“The flexi’s working!” Jam’s words came compressed, excited. “Ayaan was right. Programming them to double-seal solved the pressure problem, straightened them out.”

The boxcar’s lock popped and he saw the first head appear, looking around. Beth he recognized from her photo.

“Tag ’em through.” It happened fast and he had to keep them aligned with the mag grapple. Kurt watched the people come out through the boxcar air lock. The flexi was so transparent, he could see them kick against the sides for momentum and glide through the channel into the Bernal. He counted them. But—

“What’s that with you?”

“Snakes,” Jam sent the audio through a direct link.

It was Beth. “Smart snakes. They helped us.”

“Trouble,” Kurt said to himself.

It was a rough ride, irritating for Memor. She was cramped in the rattling hot cabin, subjected to rude accelerations. Her pilot seemed to take relish in throwing them into wrenching swoops and pivots. Magnetic ships moved more smoothly, of course, but Memor had chosen a rocket vehicle: it would not have to hover so close to the outer hull of the World. Memor braced against the surge and wondered if her pilot could be among the disaffected. This might be a small way of expressing smoldering anger. Best make a note for future use?

Surely not. Veest Blad was of an Adapted species, but he had been with her for years, back before Memor became female. Veest was too smart not to be loyal.

“Ah!” And there, her prey were in sight. That limping one was Tananareve. And those ropy things the probes had seen, now wriggling into one of the cargo cars in a magnetic train, were finger snakes.

Treason! They must be assisting the escaping bipeds. Finger snakes were a useful species, but their adaptation to civilization had always been chancy.

The car’s side closed. The whole train lifted, eased away from the docks, and moved into star-spattered space.

Memor considered. She had the acceleration to catch the train. Could she shoot out the magnetic locking plates without harming those inside? But Asenath had forbidden that—and the primate Tananareve, Memor saw abruptly, was still standing on the dock.

Tananareve had been the language adept of this band, with many sleeps spent acquiring the Folk language. Thus, the most important, for Asenath wanted a speaking primate, for reasons unknown. But … the creature seemed ready to fall over. How far could she get before Memor claimed the rest of them and came back for her? Perhaps she would not even be needed … but wait—

“Veest Blad, land near the biped. Not too near. We don’t want her fried.”

“Yes, lady.”

So what was that about? Memor had countermanded her own decision. A moment’s brief look into her Undermind told her why. The abandoned female looked to be dying, and she was the one whom Memor had inspected, had trained, had grown to know. The others—perhaps they could be caught, perhaps they might all be killed by Memor’s overbuilt weapons, true—but they weren’t needed while Tananareve was here.