Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

“Well, I’m seeing no sign of a shipmind in here at all. So unless one wakes up when you go inside, I’m figuring I’ll just purge the operating system and write it a new one. There should be plenty of room in there to stretch out and run the necessary operations. I can get it done fast.”

“Are you going to spawn a subself?”

“Can’t,” he said regretfully. “It would be easier, but who can afford the licensing fees?”

I leaned on the switch, now a giant bolt, and slid it slowly and majestically down. Looking at it as it clicked into place, I had a sudden thought. “Hey, guys? Do you think this ship is really big just because the systers that built it are really big?”

I could feel Singer thinking about it through the shared sensorium. I couldn’t, you know, exactly read his silicon mind. But when he really got going on something, he pulled resources, and you could feel it kind of like a heaviness, or an itch.

“You know,” he said, “that’s not a bad idea, really.”

The hatch under my feet dropped smoothly and silently—without even a grating sensation through the metal beneath my feet—into the dark space of the airlock below.

I hung there by my afthands, still braced under the bar, while my eyes adjusted. There had been no puff of escaping atmosphere around me. I was pretty sure it was a lock—a room, a good-sized room—with nothing in it except what could have been a couple of control panels on the bulkheads, sized for adult hands if I were a four-an-old, and another great big hatch on the opposite wall from the one I’d just fallen through.

“Any atmosphere in this thing?”

“It’s cold,” he said. “Dead cold. If there’s air in there, it’s frozen to the walls.”

That might make opening the interior hatchway a little difficult, if it were the case.

“Sealing the outside lock.”

I floated myself over to the other one. My suit lights were tuned to cast a diffuse glow. I’d been operating under Singer’s floods before, with my own lights mostly serving to fill in my shadow. I brightened them. The hatch seemed pretty straightforward—this one had a slightly less dramatic-looking latch than the one that faced the Big Sneeze, more like an old-fashioned deadbolt that I needed two hands to turn—and so I pounded on the hatch a couple of times with my afthands while holding on to the lock with my fores. If there was anybody still alive in a suit on the other side, they’d have some warning I was coming: they’d feel the vibration through the hull. And if there was atmosphere ice all over the other side, and it was brittle enough, I might flake some off.

“Here goes nothing,” I said. I turned the bolt, and heaved the door toward myself, since there were visible hinges and they were on the side facing me. I personally would have gone with both doors opening in, because decompression is a monster, but there might be a slam-down safety interlock, or some nice foam or something to fill the airlock if it blew.

Or… maybe there weren’t any additional safety features, since when I opened the lock, there was no sign of atmosphere inside at all.

I peered through the hatch, into a long, tall, wide, dark corridor, empty of everything—even air. Nothing moved in it. “Atmosphere seems to have been evacuated,” I said.

Connla replied, “That’s a bad dia at work.”

I unclipped my safety line, and fixed it to the sliding bolt handle where it wouldn’t interfere with operation.

“You’re telling me.”

I grabbed the holds on one side of the hatchway, it being a stretch for me to reach both. Whether they were designed for hands or tentacles or what-have-you, time would tell. There sure were a lot of them.

I dropped through the hatch face-first, giving myself a little push to accelerate gently along the corridor.

I nearly broke my ever-loving neck the instant I did it. Because there was gravity inside. A lot of gravity—enough to turn my elegant, aerobatic slide into an undignified tumble. I got my forehands up and caught myself as I hit the floor just beyond the airlock, skinning my palms on the inside of my suit. That stung, and the bactin the suit sprayed on the tiny wounds hurt more. It did keep me from slicking up the inside of my gloves with blood all over, however, and I was inside, and I hadn’t actually done myself a cranial or spinal injury in the process. So that was something.

I pushed myself to my knees. Yep, hands really stung. I turned that off too and told my senso to remind me about that later, when it also reminded me to fix my ankle.

Well, this was turning into a party.

“Haimey?!” Connla sounded worried. “Status?”

“Squiggle me rightwise,” I told him. “There’s gravity in here.”

“But it’s not spinning.”

I heard him realizing what an obvious thing he’d just said in the silence a second after he said it, and we both decided by mutual silent acclaim to let it slide. “Yeah,” I said. “And this thing isn’t massive enough to be generating it that way, and anyway the corridor is, if my dead reckoning is correct, at more or less right angles to the center of mass. So it’s artificial, right? Generated somehow.”

“Damn,” Connla said. “Does that mean that somebody has figured out how gravity works? Because otherwise it’s still got to be pretty hard to manufacture.”

And Singer said, “Koregoi.”

“THIS ISN’T A KOREGOI SHIP,” I argued, struggling up. I hate gs. My joints ached, instantly. I swear I could feel myself being compacted like a nugget of refuse. “It’s new, for one thing.”

Well, I didn’t know how new it was. But I’d interfaced senso of Koregoi wrecks—everybody did, if they had any kind of education—and seen one with my own eyes in a museum, and they did not look like this. They were… plastic. Not in the sense of being manufactured from petrochemicals, because they were also proof against just about every possible form of damage known to the systers, or us, but… extruded-looking. Or possibly grown. Not manufactured-looking, not full of square corners and round arcs and similar architectural detritus of species who have a fetish for regular geometry.

Nobody knew very much about the Koregoi: not even the oldest systers were old enough to have histories of them. We didn’t even know if the Koregoi were one thing—one species—or a lot of different things, such as multiple ancient forerunner species. They had left structures on a few worlds, and derelict ships and architecture here and there around the galaxy. We didn’t know how they had done what they had done, or what they had been like, or where they had gone when they had vanished. If they had vanished, and not just… died out somehow. There were physical remains from a dozen places that might be Koregoi bodies, or might not. So the Koregoi—the people who came before us—might have been one civilization, or fifteen. It was a blanket term for all of it.

What we did know was that they had apparently had technology that nobody in the galaxy could touch, todia. Like artificial gravity, which engineering people like me but much fancier than me had deduced the Koregoi had, because of the arrangement of the wrecks we’d come across. After millennians of abandonment, mostly crashed on planets, none of the technology had been salvageable enough to be back-engineered.

Some of their artifacts had been discovered in apparently working order—maybe—but they tended toward solid-state designs with mysterious functions and operation. There was a Koregoi hoverdisk in the Galactic History Museum at the Saga-star system in the Core. It was a thin metal plate, covered in arcane and beautiful carved symbols, that as near as anybody could tell just sat there a half meter off of any surface that exerted a reasonable gravitational attraction and slid frictionlessly and inertialessly one way or another when you pushed it.