Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

A faint shudder ran through the ship as we dropped out of white space and into reality. My sensorium flickered and resolved, matching what appeared in the forward port—stars, a glaring sun, the frame of a gate marker placed in a Lagrangian point so ships already maneuvering through the system could avoid collisions with ships dropping out of white space. We’d come in neat, but hot. Really hot, despite everything.

Hot, and nearly out of fuel.

“Singer,” I said, “can you compute a docking trajectory, please?”

“I can,” the AI answered in his usual mellifluous tones. (“When you can sound like anything you like, why not sound like something pleasant?”) “But are you sure you really want to go over there?”

He was teasing, of course. See above, nearly out of fuel—though I think none of us was really sanguine about the trade opportunities available in this slightly dodgy backend of nowhere.

“We could use an air exchange,” Connla said reasonably. “I know it’s not a concern for you. But we apes do like our oxygen.”

We were moving fast, but at least we were within lightspeed communication range that wasn’t longer than a human lifetime. So I got on the horn and sent out a personally voiced feeler and a request for help. Sometimes it helps to remind them you’re not a drone.

“This is a salvage tug, Terran space ship registry number 657-2929-04, inbound with Pilot Connla Kuruscz, Engineer Haimey Dz, a shipmind, and two nonsentient pets aboard. We request braking assistance, and—”

“No docking assistance,” Singer said.

“Over,” I said, and dropped the transmit. “No dock?”

“I don’t want to owe them any more than we have to,” Connla said, suddenly serious. “Singer and I can handle it.”

As we decelerated, he and I both drifted into contact with the couches we had previously been belted to, but had to all intents and purposes just been floating beside. The cats were already snug in their cushioned accel pods, despite Mephistopheles’s protests. Bushyasta might have woken up when we netted her in? I’m not sure.

I sweated. Weight began to press on my legs and arms.

“Salvage tug registry number 657-2929-04, Kuruscz and Dz, braking assistance, confirmed, over,” a voice came back.

I lifted my hands against the uncomfortable pull of acceleration to indicate to Connla that I released negotiations—and the ship—into his and Singer’s command.

Funny story, but the coincidence of our last names ending in the same letter is what led two such disparate types as Connla and myself to meet and team up in the first place. It’s a long story involving being sorted onto the same team for a pub quiz.

We used to call ourselves Team Zed. It sort of fell out of use after we had built up a decan of better reasons to feel like a family, but it still gets a wink and a grin every once in a while.

This was not going to be one of those times. The tense line of his shoulders, with no reason I knew of for it, made me wonder if he’d been arguing more than recreationally with Singer.

Well, one of the things you learn about sharing a small space with strong personalities you can’t escape from is to practice your boundaries even if you’ll never be really good at them. If it was any of my business, somebody would tell me about it eventually.

I sensoed the system tugs coming up alongside.

Alcubierre-White ships coming in hot is a not-uncommon occurrence, and I wasn’t worried. Nothing in space is ever really standing still, so all vectors and accelerations are, not to put too fine a point on it, relative. Our goal wasn’t so much to slow down , exactly, because a station in orbit around a primary is whipping along at a pretty good pace, depending on the season, the ellipticality of the orbit, and the size of the star and the station’s distance from it. Also on whether it’s parked in a Lagrangian point, or in a secondary orbit around a world or satellite—in some smaller and older systems, there’s only one station, and the spaceport is actually attached to the platform at the top of the El. It’s convenient for trucking, because stuff can go up and down the line out of the local well and straight onto transport without having to be bussed around locally first.

But having all your eggs in one basket like that would make me nervous, if I were a groundhugger. What happens if the El comes down, and takes the spaceport with it, and there’s no way for disaster relief, even, to get insystem except for pod drops or some such primitive travesty? I mean, okay, if a skyhook fell on your head you would have real problems anyway—climate change, punctuated equilibrium, global-catastrophe existential-level problems.

But not being able to get water and toilet paper wouldn’t help with those.

Anyway, Downthehatch wasn’t one of those, thank Albert. I watched the tugs—drone tugs, operated by shipminds with limited processing allotments, poor things—match v with us. They didn’t have pilots, so they didn’t worry too much about pulling gs. It seemed as if we were rapidly overtaking them, but before we came in between them they punched it. We crawled into position and they matched us, then hung beside us port and starboard as unmoving as if we were all welded together.

Having matched us, they grappled us, and started the burn to drag us down.

The EM drive, which we used for slow maneuvering, didn’t burn anything—but it couldn’t brake or accelerate us as fast as the AWD. We wouldn’t run out of fuel, using the EM drive, but if we hadn’t been able to yell for help from the tugs, we would have been a long fifty ans or so dropping our v and coming back around to meet the station.

I watched nervously, tracking the fuel used as their burn turned us, then slowed us to something closer to maneuvering speed.

We were still moving faster relative to the station than I was comfortable with when Singer hit the release and I floated off my couch. We were no longer changing v .

“We have to validate for the fuel anyway,” I said.

They both ignored me.

The station was not yet in sight ahead, and we had plenty of time to kill before we caught up with it. Of course this meant that Singer and Connla started arguing about the nature of consciousness again. (I’m sorry, “discussing.” Connla tells me that being clade-bred, I think spirited discussions are arguments long before there’s any arguing going on.)

I tuned them out for a while and looked around for the local primary. It was bright yellow, and off to the left.

When I tuned back in, Singer was ending a paragraph by asking, “By those standards, am I a real intelligence? Am I just a sufficiently complicated and randomized construct that I adequately simulate an intelligence? Or am I just a mock-up?”

“Aw,” I said. “You’re ghost in the machine enough for me, Singer.”

“You could ask the same thing of me,” Connla replied, more infinitely amused than infinitely patient with the existential crises of inanimate objects. “Most human philosophy for as long as human philosophy has been recorded seems to be concerned with pretty much the same question. If free will is an illusion, do I exist? Or do I merely think I exist?”

I sighed. “Is there any functional difference?”

“Is that the worm Ouroboros eating his tail I see?”

“You bumped your psychopathy up, didn’t you?”

He smiled generously. “Of course I did. I’m flying. Can’t be distracted by doubts.”

His hands moved over the screens, gently and flawlessly stroking transparent display and contact surfaces. Singer could do it all, of course—and would, when it came to the incredibly delicate work of matching velocities with the station—but there was some pleasure to be had in manual control while it was possible.