Элизабет Бир - Machine

I wouldn’t have done anything so foolish. Even ridden by my guest ayatanas, I was the one in control—whatever you might have seen on your late-night three-vee. Reality is seldom as melodramatic as entertainment. On the other hand, reality is much more random, arbitrary, and dangerous than fiction, and it’s my job to understand that to exact tolerances. Feeling like you’re the protagonist of your own story doesn’t guarantee you’re going to make it to the final act of anybody else’s.

I wouldn’t have done anything foolish. But it was kind of Sally to take the distraction of temptation away. You’ve only got so much executive function, and it wouldn’t hurt to have all of it to process whatever life-or-death situation I was about to find myself in.

Was already in, if I were being honest with myself. I could feel the chill working its way through the insulation at the joints of my hardsuit. A round sort of ache settled into the bones of my hands and elbows as the cold began to saturate them, reminding me that my time in this environment was limited.

Well, work would help to keep me warm. I nerved myself and stepped farther into the darkness.

I made sure the interior airlock door closed itself behind me. The thing about airlocks is that they’re only effective tools for retaining atmosphere when both halves are engaged. I drifted through the empty reception bay, straining my senso for any sign of life, movement, even clutter.

I picked up a whole lot of nothing. Cargo nets festooned the bulkheads, empty as the webs of hungry spiders.

It was a regular arachnid famine around here, from what was—so far—a cursory inspection. But as I drifted cautiously toward quarters, I wondered who in the wide flat spinning galaxy would waste fuel, standard months of their life expectancy, and other consumables running around in an empty fast data hauler.

The information Afar had been carrying—and was named for—was his most valuable commodity as well as his raison d’être. Faster-than-light communication required faster-than-light ships to take messages from place to place, and the galaxy was big. The automated relay of transponders and packets worked, but like any hub-and-spoke system it relied on connections happening in the right order, and on regular patterns of shipping moving in more direct lines.

It could take ans for the mail to get from one isolated node to another if the relays broke down, and even if they didn’t you could never be entirely sure of when your message would reach its destination. Data haulers weren’t resource-light, but they were a direct route.

Because they weren’t resource-light, this emptiness was weird. Unless the data Afar was hauling was critical to lives or infrastructure in an emergency sense, a ship like him would normally stick around a port long enough to pick up some stuff. So his empty bays gave me a perfectly justifiable wiggins.

There was so much about this situation that wasn’t quite right.

Most heavy rescue situations are extremely straightforward. They are scary. There are often fires, or blown vessels, or explosions, or terrible collisions to deal with. There will nearly always be people screaming, if there is any atmosphere for them to scream into.

There’s rarely a creepy, echoing silence and a dearth of anybody to rescue. Especially not on two ships, at the same time.

I followed Sally’s map deeper into the syster vessel. We carry a full range of schematics and plans for nearly every production-line vessel and some of the custom jobs, going back over a hundred ans. I couldn’t reliably pull you up a schematic for anything pre-Synarche, like Big Rock Candy Mountain —you’d need an archinformist for that—but Sally is big and powerful and we don’t haul cargo or data. Just casualties. Which means there’s lots of room in her for not only Sally herself, but ayatanas like the ones I was wearing now, medical information on every known species, and quantities of engineering data.

The last thing—along with Sally’s reconnaissance and the drones flanking me like Odin’s ravens plus an understudy—was the reason for my confidence that I was headed in the right direction if I wanted to find people. Sally said so, and until I saw evidence that Afar had been significantly altered from spec, I was going to trust Sally’s information. Besides, her drones had already been here.

Crew quarters were right where they ought to be. It had been so long since anything had gone predictably right that finding them left me with a silly little buzz of satisfaction.

I paused outside the hatchway. The hatch was open and the decompression doors hadn’t triggered, both of which were in line with the general intact state of the vessel. The space beyond the hatchway echoed the sound of my movements, though there weren’t any footsteps in freefall. It was so quiet in Afar that the rustles and clicks of my movement in the hardsuit resounded.

Sound carried differently in Afar’s methane atmosphere. It sounded weird to ox-based me, but made the part of me wearing the methane-based ayatanas homesick. There was one sound that wasn’t just my own sounds, reflected, or the pings and creaks of any ship in space. It wasn’t familiar to me, but my ayatanas recognized it.

Breathing.

I took a moment to be doubly certain I wasn’t leaking any dangerous radiation, either heat or visible light, and let myself drift inside.

I found the crew, Sally.

There they were, as promised, five spiky, multi-limbed, refractive, partially transparent living snowflakes. According to Sally’s information, this was the full ship’s complement.

I was relieved to confirm with my own eyes, more or less, that they weren’t splattered (did Darboof splatter? I supposed they might melt) all over the bulkheads. I would not have been so certain of my fast crew count if they had been.

Each of them floated in what the ayatanas informed me was an attitude of restful repose, drifting on a tether near the cubby bunks I had last—remotely—seen them collapsed against. They showed no immediate signs of injury. As I moved closer, my senso showed me the subtle, glittering movements that accompanied their respiration. All of them were breathing in rhythm, which was not—I checked—typical of this species when cosleeping.

I found the casualties. If they are casualties. Commencing exam. They all seem to still be alive.

Copy, Sally said, and left me to it.

I detached Sally’s drones now that I was confident I’d located the crew and the drone information was accurate. I hadn’t wanted to say anything to Sally without evidence, but given Helen’s somewhat delusional state and whatever had happened to Afar—not to mention Sally’s own memory lapses—I’d been harboring a few concerns about whether Sally’s remotes were providing us with accurate information.

What the Well was Afar doing out here empty, anyway?

Sally, are you finding any packets in Afar’s memory?

They would be easy to spot, being encrypted, with—virtually speaking—colorful address labels. Nobody likes the mail getting lost in the shuffle.

He doesn’t seem to be carrying anything, she said. Well, some transponder packets. Some of the same ones we have, which tells me he passed a few of the same waypoints on the way out.

So he came from Coreward. Interesting.

Why would a ship like Afar head out from the Core on more or less the proper vector to get to Terra, a major population center, and not bring any stuff with him? It was wasteful—the disgust I felt at that was something else I could share with my ayatanas—but obviously, as ambulance crew, I could also imagine an emergency so serious that it would bring everybody who heard the call at a dead run.