Элизабет Бир - Machine

The problem was that if there had been such an emergency, Core General could hardly have avoided being informed about it. Hospitals are generally up on all the worst news.

There’s something else, Sally said. Afar’s storage is full, but it’s all encrypted. It looks like maybe iterating backups of his code—

Can you decrypt it?

Not immediately. But I can start.

Make sure of your firewalls, I said, needlessly. It probably came across as condescending, in retrospect. Sure, meatform, teach an AI how to program.

I sent the drones off to do one more survey and recon. Just because we had the right number of crew members didn’t guarantee that we’d found everybody on board. Or even that these were the five they were supposed to be.

It’s a galactic constant. Everybody is bad at paperwork.

My own responsible choice was to stay here and start triage and prep the patients to survive transport—and perhaps begin care—while the drones finished off the search part of the search and rescue. Then I could double-check their work and maybe check out that cargo bay with signs of construction that Sally had mentioned.

I moved toward the nearest of my patients.

Darboof have three genders. Despite that, they still manage to reproduce by budding. Nature gets up to some weird and wonderful things.

None of these were visibly pregnant, at least. One less thing to worry about.

The one nearest me was not arousable by any of the usual means, including pain stimulus. (The tool for checking this in most of these methane systers looks like a glass tuning fork, by the way.) Its crystalline eyes responded to my IR pen with reflexive sparkles as the facets tuned themselves, but that didn’t wake it, either. Neither did my careful touches with the tools I used to keep my insulated body as far from it as possible as I performed the necessarily somewhat superficial exam.

Results were all within tolerances.

What I had was a living, seemingly healthy, perfectly nonresponsive person. A delicate crystalline entity whose neurology relied on its entire body being a functioning superconductor, whose limbs articulated by means of electromagnetic currents. Its energy metabolism was so exotic by Terran standards that I’d hate to try to explain the full details of it to anyone even while wearing the relevant ayatanas.

Well, I told Sally, drunk on a little relief that this seemed to be a straightforward rescue with nobody dead, they’re not conscious, but they appear stable. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with them, but I’m not a diagnostician. My recommendation remains that we provide life support, bring the whole ship back to Core General with the patients in situ, and let the methanogen ED and ICU sort it out. It’s mysterious, but it doesn’t seem dangerous, and the problems of moving five fragile, comatose, unsuited systers across vacuum—and into inadequate life support on you—suggest that leaving them right where they are remains the course of action most likely to preserve life.

I concur— Sally started a sentence she never got to finish, because the drone that had been exploring the cargo bays pinged to remind us that there was something in one of the open holds. The drones would like to remind you of the existence of anomalous cargo, which is not recorded on Afar’s cargo manifest.

Is it likely to explode immediately?

It’s not… ticking.

Great, I said. Then I’ll stick to the plan, get these five resting comfortably, then go investigate.

WHATEVER IT WAS, EVEN IF it had been on the cargo manifest, the cargo manifest could not have done it justice—or remotely prepared me for the reality. When I entered the unpressurized cargo hold, I had to stop for a moment to contemplate the object inside as its shape filtered through my readouts and Sally’s senso projections.

I couldn’t see it by ambient light because there wasn’t any, and I didn’t dare make any even though I didn’t think any unshielded Darboof would be wandering around in here: the environment was space with a roof over it, and they couldn’t endure hard vacuum and near absolute zero any better than I could. There are cold and hostile environments, and then there are really cold and hostile environments.

(At least my suit’s heat exchanges were whining less now that I was insulated by vacuum. The problem, as long as I stayed out of Afar’s heat-sucking atmosphere, wasn’t going to be getting too cold, but overheating inside my hardsuit because of that extra insulation.)

I couldn’t take the chance of using any radiation other than heavily filtered ultraviolet to scan the space. Even if I had been willing to, my Darboof ayatanas quailed at the idea. It would be like aiming a microwave gun into a room you thought was, you know, probably empty, and pulling the trigger.

So I relied on my senso and the drone transmissions, and what the senso showed me was astounding.

The low-intensity EM image Sally constructed showed that the cargo was not a single solid object, but a sort of pod on struts, propped in the center of the space. I couldn’t see color, obviously, but the texture was smooth and enameled-looking. Parts of the object had a magnetic signature. And the whole thing reminded me of an arachrab from home: The struts—they were legs, they had to be legs—were curved and jointed in the same way. The pod—the body—was held at the center of eight of those legs, and their feet were evenly braced around the bulkheads of the hold.

I could have imagined that it was organic. Not in the carbon-based sense, but in the evolved-on-its-own sense. But it had the presence of a vast and brooding machine.

The drone reported no life signs, so I assumed that a machine was exactly what it was. Not a little machine. Not like my exo. Not a pile of microbots like the other machine. And not a big machine with a simple, direct purpose, like Sally.

This machine—I didn’t even know where to begin looking at it, never mind describing it. It was cryptic, enormous, of enormity. It had a weight and a charisma in that black space.

It looks alive, I said. Actually, it looks cybernetic. Are these Darboof smuggling alien mechanical sea monsters?

I joked, but I found myself wondering. Space monsters?

I mean, I felt fairly confident that the craboid was a machine. But there were entities that went through most of their life cycle in space. They didn’t generally have legs. Maybe something could have evolved to survive an atmosphereless world, however….

Life is a pretty stubborn thing. Weirdly so, given how fragile it can be.

Not according to the drone, Sally answered. The drone continues to read no sign of any known metabolic processes. No metabolic products. There’s a space inside that could potentially have an atmosphere, though, or be used as a vehicle. But not the thing itself. The thing itself is a machine .

I should trust my instincts more.

Could it be some kind of a mechanical… parasite? There were organisms on various worlds that could control the behavior of a host. Some were commensal—symbiotic. Some… were not commensal. Could that explain the odd behavior—odd lack of behavior?—of Afar, and of Helen and the machine once Afar docked?

It looks like combat armor, said Loese.

I had worn hardsuits in both military and civilian designs. In fact, I was wearing one right then. I snorted impolitely at her.

Not real combat armor, she said. Like a mech suit in Science Ninja Alliance.