Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

From that point on, everyone they passed was similarly suited up, and Holsten knew that the pace of breaking new ground was limited by the reserves of such equipment that the Gilgamesh carried or could manufacture. He and Guyen passed a dwindling number of engineers working on key systems, trying to restore the station’s basic life-support to the extent where they could declare this ring section safe for unprotected work. The banter and easy nature of the previous sections were gone, the work efficient and focused.

The next section they reached had gravity but no air, and they walked through a nightmare of intermittent lights and flashing warnings that threatened dire consequences in Imperial C. Engineers, faceless in their environment suits, fought to cure the ravages of time and work out where the old systems had failed, and how to work a repair around the ancient and intimidatingly advanced technology.

We’re walking back in time , Holsten thought. Not back to the days of the Old Empire, but back through the engineers’ efforts to restore the station. Once there would have been nothing here, no light, no atmosphere, no power, no gravity at all. Then came Lain, mother goddess in miniature, to bring definition to the void.

‘We’re crossing to the next ring. It has some power, but they’ve not got the section rotating,’ Guyen cautioned, his voice crisp over the helmet radio.

Holsten fumbled for a moment before remembering how to transmit. ‘That’s where we’re going?’

‘Indeed. Lain?’

Holsten started, wondering which of the three suited figures now in sight was the chief engineer. When Lain’s voice came over the com, though, it seemed to sync with none of their movements, and he guessed that she was probably elsewhere on the station.

‘Hola, chief. You’re sure you want to do this?’

‘You’ve already had people go over the section for active dangers,’ Guyen pointed out. That would be the first step, Holsten knew – the step he himself would never witness first-hand. Before anyone could start patching up the key systems, a crew would have to go into that lightless, airless place and check to make sure that nothing the ancients had left behind was going to try and kill them.

At least the station hasn’t been deliberately rigged to be like that . That had been the bane of the old astronaut-explorers of the past, of course. The ancients had gone down fighting – fighting each other. They had not been idle when it came to making their orbital installations difficult to get into, and often the traps were the last things still functioning on an otherwise dead hunk of spinning metal.

‘Chief, you’re going somewhere without basic life-support. It doesn’t need to be actively dangerous,’ Lain replied. ‘No end of things can go wrong. Who’s that with you, anyway? He’s not one of mine, is he?’

Holsten wondered where she was observing him from, but then presumably the internal surveillance had proved easier to restore than breathable air.

‘Mason, the classicist.’

A pause, then: ‘Oh. Hi, Holsten.’

‘Hello, Isa.’

‘Look, chief,’ Lain sounded bothered. ‘I said you needed someone to go with you, but I assumed you’d be taking someone who was trained for it.’

‘I’m trained for it,’ Guyen pointed out.

‘ He’s not. I’ve seen him in zero-G. Look, sit tight and I’ll come over—’

‘You will not,’ Guyen snapped angrily. ‘Stick by your post. I know you’ve got half a dozen people in the next section. Any difficulties and we’ll signal them.’ He sounded a little too insistent to Holsten.

‘Chief—’

‘That’s an order.’

‘Right,’ came Lain’s voice, and then, ‘Fuck, I don’t know what the bastard’s up to, but you look after yourself.’ It took Holsten a startled moment to work out that she must be transmitting only to him. ‘Look, I’ll send to the tripwire crew and tell them to keep an eye out. Call out if there’s any trouble, all right? Yes, the place has been gone over, and they’re working to restore full power and all the rest. But just be careful – and whatever you do don’t turn anything on . We’ve sent in a team for a first-stage survey of it, but we don’t know what most of it actually does. That ring looks like it’s set up for some sort of command-and-control, or maybe it’s just terraforming central. Either way, no pressing buttons – and you warn me if Guyen looks like he’s about to. You remember how to get a dedicated channel?’

To his surprise, Holsten found that he did, prodding at tongue controls that worked just like those in the mask the mutineers had put on him. ‘Testing?’

‘Good man. Now, you look after yourself, right?’

‘I’ll try to.’

It did not take long for the classicist’s dreams of becoming a space explorer to be cruelly dashed. The environment suits had magnetic boots, which was an idea that Holsten had just sort of accepted when he was a child watching films of bold space explorers, but which proved frustrating and exhausting to actually use. Simply gliding through the chambers of the station like a diver in the ocean also proved considerably more difficult than he had anticipated. In the end, Guyen – who could apparently clamber about the depthless spaces like a monkey – had to run a lanyard from belt to belt so that he could haul Holsten back when the classicist drifted helplessly away.

The interior of that ring – the furthest limit of their expansion through the station – was not properly lit up yet, but there were countless dormant panels and slumbering banks of readouts that glowed their dormancy softly to themselves, and the suit lights were enough to navigate by. Guyen was setting as swift a pace as he could, plainly knowing just where he was going. Holsten’s own ignorance in that regard was never far from his mind.

‘I have hijacked your suit camera,’ came Lain’s voice inside his helmet, ‘because I want to know what the old man is after.’

At that point Holsten was dangling after Guyen like a balloon, and so he felt he could spare some time for conversation. ‘I thought I was the old man.’

‘Not any more. You’ve seen him. I don’t know what he was doing on the way here, but it looks like he’s been around for years more than us.’ He heard her draw breath to say more, but then Guyen was slowing down, hauling Holsten closer and then touching him down to the wall so that his boots could get purchase; Lain’s voice said, ‘Oh, it’s that thing he likes, is it?’

There was a coffin there – like a suspension chamber with its head end built into the wall. Holsten knew that the station had come with a very limited suspension facility – as far as they had explored it – so it had not been intended for anyone to spend a few lifetimes here. Besides, what would be the point of all this room, all of the complex, sleeping machinery, just to preserve a single human body for posterity?

The pad on Holsten’s suit signalled that it had received new information, so he took it out, fumbling in his gloves, and managed to get the data up, seeing the first-pass survey of this room and its contents. The engineers had not known what it was, therefore had noted its basic features, recorded pictures, and moved on. They had also activated some of the consoles in the room, dumped some data for later analysis by someone like Holsten, then thought no more about it. These had been some of the files Guyen had wanted translated. Holsten called them up now, wondering how good his work on them had been. It had been complex technical stuff, even though it had been just a surface fragment of the knowledge locked in here.

Now he scanned those files again, the dense originals and his own computer-assisted translations, along with everything else the original cursory survey had recorded about this room. Guyen was looking at him expectantly.