Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

Nobody had been able to figure out how it worked. Or duplicate the effect. And it had been discovered by the Synarche while my species was still devoting its innovative capabilities to building a better stone hand-axe.

And yet, here I was in a ship. A ship with working artificial gravity, and I had the skinned palms to prove it.

Whatever syster had built this vessel was a lot bigger than us, anatomically speaking, but they liked their circular hatches and square locker doors just as much as we did. And the tech, from what I could see of the corridor, wasn’t that far in advance of a perfectly nice, three-decan-behind-the-times, well-maintained little ship like Singer. I mean, this was a much more elaborate vessel, obviously, meant to house more crew and make longer hauls—but it was full of hand controls and touch pads and other perfectly recognizable elements of running a ship if you didn’t want to be completely screwed and adrift in space if your shipmind started going buggy or your senso link went down.

I dogged the hatch behind me, which is a reflex so deeply bred in spacer bones I almost forgot to mention doing it. Everything tied down and tidy, always, unless you are actually eating it right this second, or using it to screw something to the wall.

My afthands were already starting to bother me by the time I was done. The suit’s gloves were designed for grabbing, not walking, and let’s be honest here: walking on afthands in gravity is uncomfortable even with proper shoes, though you do get used to it and it’s not enough of a drawback to keep anybody from getting their feet refitted. If you’re in space full-time, they’re basically useful unless you’re on station and out-wheel, and how often is anybody on station?

How often do you find gravity out here, anyway? I had my hind limbs fixed basically the instant I left the clade, and I’ve never regretted it. That walk down that corridor, though, was the closest I’d ever come.

“Guys,” I said, looking around. “I think the gravity is a retrofit.” It was pretty significant gravity, too—I was guessing by how heavy and awkward I felt, and how my suit was digging in everywhere, that it was a little bit over an Earth-standard, which I’d rarely endured.

I was going to tire out fast and we all knew it.

“Hmm,” said Singer. “I see what you mean.”

One of the things I loved about working with Singer was that even if he’d figured something out before I did, and hadn’t pointed it out, he never felt the need to mention it once I figured it out for myself. Some shipminds can be a little lordly and insecure. Of course, a lot of those shipminds probably wouldn’t sign into a tugboat on a salvage detail so they would have the opportunity to see as much of the galaxy as possible while paying off their inception.

Anyway, I knew he had noticed, or was noticing, all the same little details I had: that the locker doors that around this accessway were lined up as if horizontal led toward the center of the ship, not down toward the floor. And there were locker doors in the floor, too, and carpet all over everything.

“Who the heck can just install gravity in an existing ship, though?” I blinked sweat off my lashes. At least it just flicked off onto my cheek and faceplate instead of floating around inside my helmet until I managed to bump it up against the absorbent lining. “I mean, who can install gravity, period? If it were that easy, we’d all quit floating around except when it’s convenient.”

“Or fun,” Connla put in.

I ignored him.

“Well,” he went on, “obviously, the former operators of the Milk Chocolate Marauder .”

I ignored him some more.

Singer said, “So you suppose they’re using dark gravity to do that, somehow? And if they can use dark gravity to manufacture weight in their interior, do you suppose they can use it to maneuver?”

I had more immediate concerns. “Do you suppose the bridge is at the center of that thing?”

“It’s where I’d put it,” Singer agreed, seeming to consciously rein in the very theoretical physics.

I forced myself to start moving again, trying not to listen too hard to the sound of my own breathing in the suit. My ox supply was great, though I was burning through it faster than I liked because I was out of shape for being under gs. I was just psyching myself out for some reason. A few seconds of self-contemplation—and continued progress down the corridor, which was about to end in a choice of three hatches—and I figured out why.

My headlamp flickered over surfaces. There was no general interior lighting, which might have been a design choice, a power interrupt, or a technical flaw. On the other hand, the gravity was working, and that had to use energy, right? And I could see readout lights blinking and flickering on panels here and there. And here and there, small task lights burned over surfaces as if the crew had just left them on when they went home.

“This is creepy.”

“It is a salvage operation.” Connla was on a roll.

“No, seriously. There’s no reason for this ship to be dead like this.”

“What do you mean?” My business partner could make the switch from dragging me to dead serious in microseconds.

I got to the choice of hatches and picked the one in the middle. There was a sensor—an old-fashioned mechanical gauge—built into it, and I guessed that the fat umber line on the top that the needle was resting on was the “no air pressure beyond this point” warning, because the rest of the lines shaded from that color to a delicious-looking creamy dark chocolate shade. These guys liked linear latches and linear readouts, apparently.

And apparently I really needed to do something about my blood sugar.

I tongued a yeast tablet from my helmet dispenser. The guys would just have to listen to my crunching, and my voice getting powdery, until I washed it down.

“The ring is intact; there’s no sign of external damage; and the interior is… It looks good, guys. Really good. Pristine. There’s power.”

“Just evacuated,” Singer said, meaning the atmosphere rather than the people.

“And no bodies,” Connla helped.

“And no shipmind,” Singer said. “I’m working on cracking their language. Probably easier and faster to learn it than to write and install a new OS.”

“Less buggy anyway,” Connla said.

I would like to say that I paused a moment to be impressed that Singer was debating whether it was faster to learn an entire alien language or just rewrite all of their code, but I was actually kind of used to Singer after a decan or so and I had a real tendency to take him for granted. In retrospect, we couldn’t have been luckier in our shipmind, though.

I said, “That’s part of it. It does look evacuated. Both ways. Speaking of which, I’m going to try the middle door.”

“Middle door. Check,” Connla said.

“No lights. No air. No, as you said, bodies. No damage. No people. No floating stuff. No mysterious stains on the upholstery. It looks like it just got out of a port after a nice retrofit, steam cleaning, and maybe a new paint job a standard week ago. And then somebody loaded it up, brought it out light-centads from anywhere somebody might reasonably be going, and… parked it here. And then abandoned ship. In white space.”

“Well,” Singer said, also helping, “the gravity works.”

“I wish I were in the same room with you, so I could throw a pencil at you.”

“Digital pencil.” Connla snickered.

“ The Flying Dutchman, ” Singer said.

I opened the middle hatch. Remember the hatch? Right, I opened it.

Another airless, unlit chamber beyond. This looked like a rack room, standard issue—extra-large. There were cozy, padded indentations in the walls and floor, with tethers to hold you there. Only about three-fourths of them were oriented so as to be usefully horizontal, however, and sleeping in a third of those would involve being walked over.