Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 14

HOW DO YOU GET SOMETHING out of the bottom of the biggest hole in the galaxy?

That wasn’t even the first argument we had to have. The first argument we had to have was whether we even should. Singer was a big proponent of archaeological value in situ—but on the other hand, the archaeological value of a site you can’t reach is questionable.

As we were discussing that, I tried tuning in closer to the Koregoi ship’s signal. It wasn’t communicating a lot of information: what I was getting was more of a steady ping than actual conversation. But the mystery did nothing to reduce the excitement thrilling through me.

Neither the conversation with Singer and Connla nor my attempts to communicate with whatever lurked at the bottom of the Well kept me from pressing my face to the viewport and watching the incredible spectacle as the black hole’s orbiting stars lensed in and out of apparent locations, multiplying and subtracting themselves. Not too much later, Singer interrupted the debate to inform us that Synarche ships were moving toward our position. The Well is not terribly big, as such systems go, and it would not take them long to reach us. Singer pointed out that he would be obliged to leave us when they arrived, as his extension on Synarche service would be up. I knew that I would almost certainly be required to surrender myself as well.

So we had to work fast.

We agreed that we had, basically, two options, and a bunch of tactics to achieve them. Once we agreed on retrieval, we knew that we could attempt to move the parked artifact—in its white bubble—remotely. Or we could attempt to get to it somehow and take control. Basically, raising or wreck-diving.

There were beacons within a few light-minutes, and in the interests of filing the paperwork, Singer fired off a series of tight-beam packets staking our claim to the Koregoi vessel and registering our intent to a salvage operation. That accomplished, we were at least arguably legal, and the next step was getting there.

You’re not supposed to be able to communicate with objects in white space. But I was doing my damnedest, and the Koregoi senso made the impossible possible. The ship didn’t seem to have a shipmind—there was no awareness in there that I could determine or contact. But I managed to at least get the systems to notice me. Like when a presence-controlled light blinks on when you enter a cabin.

So I could see the ship. And the ship could see me. Whether I could get control over any of the ship’s systems was another question—one I wished I had a few decians to explore rather than the space of time it would take the Core ships to reach us on EM drive.

Theoretically, they could order us to desist with lightspeed coms first. But if they did that, we had legal recourse, and the odds of the Synarche coming back to us with a cease order or even a stall were pretty slim. Singer was a pretty good lawyer, and the nice thing about AIs is that they’re tireless when it comes to filing motions.

Connla looked up from his calculations finally and said, “Well, if we go in after it, we’ll have a hell of a story to tell. In about two thousand ans.”

I zipped across the cabin to him with a kick-and-catch, grabbing a rail with my afthands and hanging beside him. Peering over his shoulder at his math, to be honest.

“Is time dilation going to affect us?” I asked. “The ship is in a white bubble. We’ll be in a bubble too. We don’t have to worry about relativistic effects in white space because we’re not actually moving very fast.”

“Normally true,” Singer said. “And that’s how we physics-lawyer our way into an interstellar community at all. But you’re reckoning without the profound slope of space-time into the Well. I mean, theoretically you could fly an AWD ship right into a black hole and out again, as long as you didn’t let the field collapse. But there’s a lot of stuff in an accretion disk, and your white bubble is going to fold, spindle, mutilate, and accelerate that stuff as it passes through that region of space. So there’s the problem of the photon ramrod effect. You could solve that with graduated buffer folds, which is a procedure we already use for busy areas of space. But it would take a lot of energy to set up that many buffers.”

“This doesn’t tell me how we fall prey to time dilation.”

“Even with the white drive, we’re moving through regions of space that are themselves dilated because of relativistic effects. The stuff falling into the Well is moving so fast that time has to slow down, essentially, because otherwise it would exceed c. It’s not us, in other words—it’s what we’d be folding.”

“And that’s why the Koregoi artifact feels slow. Despite being in a bubble.”

“Got it,” Connla said.

“Maybe we should have stuck with the business model of leading wreck-diving tours of black hole regions,” I mused.

Singer didn’t contradict me.

Connla said, “We could sell it as an antisenescence treatment, too. Look twenty ans younger than your agemates when you go home for your crèche reunion!”

I covered my face with my hand.

“How confident are we that it’s actually a Koregoi artifact?” Connla asked.

“If it’s ancient alien superscience, it’s pretty much by definition Koregoi,” I answered. “And it’s parked inside a black hole, did you notice?”

Singer said, “Another option is using your contact with the artifact to nudge it—white bubble and all—out of a parked orbit and into a location where it would get kicked out by one of the Well’s relativistic jets. Because the Saga-star is so big, and because it imparts so much energy to what it’s sucking in, the angular momentum that stuff gains is enormous, and for any of it to fall in at all, a lot of it has to be ejected to remove momentum for the system. We could use that to push the artifact out of the Well, like a little cartoon fish on a cartoon whale’s blow spout.”

“That sounds really cool,” Connla said. “But if we do that then we have to go catch the damned thing. And it’ll be moving pretty fast, and we probably don’t have the acceleration to do that in normal space.”

“That’s sort of sad,” I said.

“It is. If we don’t have another option, though, it might be worth trying.”

“I have another option,” I said.

Connla looked at me, and I imagined I felt Singer’s attention shift to focus on me more completely, though of course that was projection. But I could also feel the sleepy presence of the Koregoi ship, and I thought that as long as I was doing impossible things I could probably control it remotely.

“What we can do,” I said, “is add energy to the system.”

“Raise its orbit,” Connla said.

“Change the orientation of the A-WD field, and increase the density of the folding and stretching at its edges, and bring it out—boom—like an air bubble rising through water under gravity. It’ll come out STL, even—then all we have to do is stop it, and retrieve it normally.”

“Huh,” Connla said. He moved some data around on his interface. “We’d have to make sure nothing important is in front of it when it pops up, because when you take the white drive down, it’ll make one hell of a particle cannon.”

“Can you take the white drive down remotely?”

“I don’t see why not,” I said. Then I cleared my throat. “I mean, assuming I can get control of the vessel at all.”

I didn’t get control of the vessel.

Control might be a questionable word here anyway.

I got access, though—or a connection. I wasn’t managing to communicate with it, exactly, or offer it commands, though my Koregoi senso seemed to auto-tune to it and give me at least that much connection. It wasn’t responsive, though. I could just feel it waiting out there, big and passive, like somebody breathing but not talking on the other end of a com connection.

A little creepy, really.

Singer tried using some of the stuff he’d learned about talking to—or at least tuning into the signals from—my Koregoi senso. He didn’t seem to be making much headway either. And—we were assuming the thing was a ship, but it could have been just about anything in there. At least it was something and we hadn’t come all this way for an empty wrinkle in space-time.

Maybe we should go wreck-diving. Hell, the Synarche might be gone in two thousand ans. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about selective service.

Resupply, on the other hand—sure, that might be a problem.

The next step seemed to be trial and error. On my part, and on Singer’s. He piggybacked on my signal, poking around in there, and when I tried to ask him what he was actually doing I got a string of programming jargon that was so far beyond me it might as well have been one of those twelve-tone semi-ultrasonic methane-breather languages that shatter ice crystals and sound like a glass harmonica having a bad dia at work.

We were having some effect, though, or I was fooling myself into believing we were, because it felt like the contact was deepening and clarifying. The result, subconsciously, was like somebody looking at you while waiting for you to finish saying something really dumbass. Or maybe I was just feeling self-conscious by then.

I still wasn’t managing to communicate, though—and I didn’t feel like anything was changing in a hurry. In fact, I was about to suggest to Singer that he carry on, piggybacked on my senso, while I got a sandwich and took a nap.

Just as I was formulating the offer, the alien object—inside its white bubble—smoothly and incrementally began to move.

Toward us.

“Whoa,” I said, my pulse accelerating. “Singer, did you do that?”

“I was just about to ask you the same thing. What did you do?”

“I don’t know!”

“Well, keep doing it! It’s working!”

The object rose out of the Well like a freight elevator, its bubble a little itch or snag in my Koregoi awareness. It was slow, to start. Painfully slow, on a scale where even Singer’s actuarial expectancy of conscious existence might not be enough to let him see its journey ended.

For a while, I wondered if it would have the capability—or the fuel—to fold space-time fast and hard enough to pull itself out of something like the Well. As far as I knew, this was a thing that had never been attempted. When we had access to a real library, I should check out if anybody had probed these depths with remote drones, or if we were making scientific history here.

I’d anchored myself by my afthands to a rail and was watching with tight breath, hunger and tiredness forgotten—or tuned out by Singer, which was nearly the same. The anomaly accelerated, hoving toward us, not actually moving itself because the space inside its white bubble was stationary. But the space around the white bubble was scrunching up before and unscrunching behind like an inchworm on amphetamines.

Pretty soon, it was coming so fast I could barely believe it. I tried not to think too hard about the fact that the Koregoi senso was apparently letting me feel what was happening light-minutes away at an instantaneous rate of return. These ancestor-systers could manipulate space-time in such a way as to create localized, artificial gravity. What was a little spooky action at a distance to them?

The black hole time dilation kept being obvious, and that made me re-realize just how fast the anomaly had to be moving, because… well, it was way down in the Well, and from its perspective, we were living very fast indeed right now in our perch on the rim.

Singer eventually kicked me out of my own senso and forced me to eat something and have a nap. He kept working on trying to communicate with the ship. Apparently he didn’t need me awake for that, so I stayed out of his way.

Space is big, and even at ludicrous rates of speed, crossing chunks of it takes a long time.

While the Koregoi artifact swam its way to the surface against the current of space-time, the Synarche ships closed on us. We held a brief conference about what to do when they got there.

“Turn me over,” Singer said definitively. “Explain everything, ask them to corroborate with Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, bask in the glory of having retrieved what appears for the time being to be a fully functional Koregoi ship, and see if you can somehow get in on the study team.”

“I’m not an academic,” Connla said. “I’ll have to find a gig.”

I held my tongue. I wished I could have managed to be more excited about the unprecedented thing we’d discovered. But I didn’t want to be an academic. I really didn’t want to be an experimental subject.

And I didn’t want to be stuck in the crowded Core.

But I also really didn’t think they’d be letting me just wander off anywhere with a hide full of Koregoi tech that could sense dark gravity, create artificial gravity, and manipulate the curves of space-time. I was going to get drafted into Synarche service for a term of at least a few ans as soon as they got here, right alongside Singer.

Well, at least maybe we’d get to stay in touch, if that happened.

So I was stuck, and I couldn’t expect Connla to be stuck with me. He was too good of a pilot to sit down a well.

Even the big one.

With a sense of rising futility and entrapment, I wondered what we were going to do with the cats. I didn’t want to split them up, but the idea of losing both of them crushed me, and I couldn’t ask Connla to make that sacrifice either.

I petted Mephistopheles’s patchworky ears and bumped a load of GABA analogues in order to keep from bursting into tears. If I got to stay with Singer, Connla should get Mephistopheles and Bushyasta. It was only fair.

The band is breaking up, I thought, and laughed a little at my own melodramatics, which was a good sign the tuning was kicking in. All things end, but this had been a healthy and happy part of my life, much better than the bit before.

Good for me.

Now that I was calmer, I realized that my anxiety had come from some ancestral part of my brain that was convinced that whatever came next would be entirely and irreparably awful, and I’d probably wind up wounded and emotionally shattered again before it was through. Also, what I was losing was so good. I’d found what I wanted, and now I had to give it up.

That sucked like a singularity.

I wanted to run back to a clade and not have to make any choices again ever. I wanted to run for the Big Empty and never come back. I wanted to stop having to decide things.

It was just change panic. Change panic is awful.

Transitions suck.

Apprehension rooted in traumatic response, it turns out, doesn’t help with that.

Well, I wasn’t going to let them stick me on a planet, that was for sure. Or even a big station, if I could help it. I was staying where I didn’t have to walk, because I wasn’t going through adaptive surgery again.

Something big was getting close. I brought myself forcefully back from the depths of self-examination, frightened and startled for a moment because my focus had been so far away. It was the white bubble that contained the Koregoi ship, unless we were wrong about everything. (Possibly it was a killer robot from the depths of time that would eat us all and then consume the galaxy. Possibly. That had been one of Connla’s suggestions when we were discussing it earlier, probably tongue in cheek, but I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell him I’d discounted his opinion and then have it turn out to, in fact, be a killer robot from the depths of time.)

I couldn’t see it with my eyes, of course; but the archaeological senso told me where it was, and I could feel the ripples and eddies its movement left in the already gravity-stressed fabric of space-time as if somebody were dragging an anchor out of a whirlpool.

It crested—and stopped.

I held my breath as I “watched” it breach from the depths of the Saga-star, and felt my doom impending. I hadn’t been this chained to a path I had no control over since I got out of my clade.

Left to my own devices I would have bolted, Singer, Connla, cats and all. Maybe this was why people went pirate.

I had too many ethics, and too much a sense of my obligations as a citizen, to do it. Anyway, Singer wouldn’t have heard of it, so I didn’t even bring it up.

This is what we call “being socially aware.”

“Well,” I said. “There it is.”

“Sure is,” Singer agreed. “Can you get it into normal space remotely?”

“Do we want to?” I waved vaguely at the screens that showed the progress of our incoming entourage of Synarche vessels. “Everybody will see it, if I do.”

“We weren’t planning on hiding it.” Singer believes in following the rules.

Alas.

“Besides,” he said, “one white space spacewalk is enough for this lifetime. I would be remiss to allow you to attempt that again.”

“Aw,” Connla said. “She got away with it.”

I punched him on the arm companionably, but didn’t feel up to arguing with Singer when my interior landscape was bubbling away with subterranean volcanic activity. “I’ll try.”

I still had my contact with the ship. It didn’t seem to be trying to communicate with me through the Koregoi senso the same way Singer did through plain, old-fashioned, boring, noninfectious Synarche tech.

I examined my inputs, feeling it long before it would have come into view even if it had been in real space. We wouldn’t be able to see it until we were sharing a universe, and I wondered if it would be more efficient to do what we usually did and go close enough to it to tune our white bubble to match theirs. Or if I actually could reach out there and communicate with the thing enough to order—or convince—it to just… turn its white bubble off.

Singer’s detectors, like my Koregoi senso, could feel the mass, the dent it put in the fabric of this peculiar hole in space-time.

“Still no luck in figuring out how to talk to it?” I asked Singer.

“Maybe,” he said. “The problem is, I am even more sure now that it doesn’t have a shipmind. Or any kind of mind. It’s not sapient, either organically or machinewise. It’s just… like being noticed by a plant or something.”

“A Big Dumb Object?” Connla said helpfully.

“You’re a Big Dumb Object,” I replied. “How about you do something useful like feeding the cats?”

“I put the cats in a breath bubble,” Singer said. “Just in case.”

That was actually kind of a relief. I didn’t think the Synarche was going to open fire on us, obviously, and nobody had ever found Koregoi weapons (which made a lot of sense to me now: see above, discussion of being able to control gravity, who needs a gun?), but… better safe than sorry.

Nobody wants to spacewalk to an alien ship while worrying about their pets.

“Hey,” Singer said. “I think I have a connection.”

“Is it talking back?”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m not even sure I can figure out yet how to ping.”

It took a few more diar of trial and error before he was ready to try bringing the Koregoi artifact—we were all pretty well convinced it was a ship by now—into the main line of our consensus reality and space-time, out of the pocket universe it had been so cozy in for eons. Once Singer figured out how, though, we knew we couldn’t wait. The Synarche was so close the lag on the lightspeed communication was a few standard minutes, and they were really trying to have opinions about when and where and what we should do with our friendly antique warp bubble.

Fortunately, space around the Well is saturated with radiation and clutter and loss and noise, and it’s really not surprising we couldn’t hear them very well.

So we put our fingers in our ears, and Singer unfolded space, and the Koregoi artifact popped out of the wrinkle and into Newtonian space like somebody had gently and evenly pulled smooth a blanket that had been folded around a marble.

We’d gathered in the control cabin to watch the unveiling. Connla and I both gasped aloud, as one.

It was pretty damned definitely a ship. And it was huge. Blocky, but with rounded corners and edges. Patchwork in appearance, as if the hull were constructed of vast plates that had been painted separately with different paint lots and then assembled more or less with disregard to what those color choices were. To my eyes, it was a series of warm oranges and mossy greens; I wondered what kind of color variation the eyes—or eye-analogues—of the systers who had built it saw.

A smooth, angled, wedge-shaped nose stretched back into a kind of massive, rounded parallelogram. I tasted textures, surfaces. Whatever the hull was made of, the sensors didn’t have it on file.

The thing was cold on the inside. Seriously cold. Space cold.

Methane breathers. Or dead.

I thrilled with excitement. “We got it out.”

Singer said, “And it’s big.”

“Confirmed: that’s not a human ship,” Connla said a moment later. “Or any registered syster.”

“How often does that happen twice in one trip?” I said, possibly a little more light-heartedly than the gravity of the situation suggested.

“Holy carp, how do you feed that thing?”

I closed my eyes, the better to concentrate on what I was feeling through my own senso and Singer’s instruments rather than looking.

The ship’s sensors were better, anyway. Connla’s voice made me jump and look again. It loomed over us, cliff-like now as we approached it. I had… nothing to say in reply.

Nobody built ships that big. The energy expenditure needed to throw a white field around them was beyond prohibitive. Even an antimatter reaction couldn’t cover it. This thing was bigger than the Milk Chocolate Marauder. And it wasn’t a bubble around a hollow inside.

This thing was bigger than some stations, by a long fall.

“Wow,” Connla said.

I just reached out and touched the forward bulkhead with my fingertips again. As if that could get me physically closer to the thing. Awe surged through me, so strong as to seem numinous.

So this is what the Wake-Seekers are feeling, when they feel it.

Some of that awe was because we had a visual of something that could only be a Koregoi vessel. Well, maybe not only, but it was the top explanation that came to my mind. Some of it was because, well, we had coaxed this thing out of the depths of deep time and a black hole, and here it was nearly close enough to touch.

“Wish we still had a boom,” Connla muttered.

Yeah, that was quite likely going to be a problem.

I wondered if the ship looked better in whatever wavelengths its builders perceived—I found myself imagining they saw it as a soothing marine blue—but I still had to look at it with human eyeballs. It was no better through my interface with Singer; he was getting it in infrared and ultraviolet, too, about a dozen shades of each—but with his perceptions I could experience the vivid, hallucinatory patternings that covered the hull.

They were almost organic. Stripes, spots, and whorls that looked as if somebody had painted a tabby cat while in the grip of a manic episode were laid over a shaded coloration that started dark on one surface—it might have been what was meant to be the dorsal side, but that could just be my Terracentrism getting in the way—and paled to lesser intensity on the other.

The craft itself had some organic outlines, too. Its white coils were there, intact. As we came closer, I could see that the coils encompassed a hull whose angled-brick shape was ornamented on a small scale with bulbous curves and strange, knobby outcrops. It remained strangely streamlined-looking, but the streamlining didn’t look mechanically or aerodynamically effective, and it certainly didn’t look like anything you’d take very deep into an atmosphere.

Not with the fragile halo of the white coils surrounding it. Not with the aerodynamics of a brick.

I found myself visualizing how it would look against the coruscating, folded background of white space—the silver and ebony of the Core. That white space background would have been both different from the high-gravity sky we were currently experiencing, and similar. The blaze of light, the lensed distortions, the bands of white and dark. But as flashy as the view from inside white space was, it didn’t have the twists, the spirals, the flares, the sheer magnitude of gee-whiz engendered by a forty-odd-million stellar-mass black hole.

I kept looking at it when I should have been hurrying.

We got something out of that, I thought.

Well. Not all the way out. But that got me wondering. A black hole this big… How close to the event horizon would be recoverable? What could you learn from a trip like that?

Who would you be if you came back?

The astrogator who flew into the Well and came back without getting spaghettified.

It sounded like a children’s reel.

“Right,” I said, holding my sparkling, galaxy-studded hand up in front of the equally sparkling night before us. “Time to spacewalk, and all.”

Because we had no boom, we grappled the Koregoi ship and matched velocities with her. I went over on a clipped cable, like one of those planetary things where you slide down a long line on a carabiner, and you’re going really fast because you’re under acceleration? I hear people do it for sightseeing. And for fun. When I landed on the hull, at least there was something ferrous enough in the structure to help me stick, so that was a benefit.

Nothing even vaguely resembling a hatch was visible on that hide, smooth and blocky and strangely curved as some exotic fruit.

“Any idea how I get in there? Is there even an ‘in there’ to get to?”

“Well, it isn’t solid through,” Connla said. “Sensors show lots of open space inside.”

I ran my glove over the surface.

I discovered in passing that while the patches of different visible color didn’t seem to indicate any additional qualities, the stripes that were evident in more energetic wavelengths had a slightly different texture, which was interesting.

I decided to explore that for a while. Maybe they were tactile, and my clue for getting inside would be in my sense of touch.

Well, it was a nice guess, anyway.

The damn thing was big. I kept walking around on it—well, crawling around on it, three points of contact at all times—and I hadn’t even come close to circumnavigating it yet. I wasn’t sure how much luck I was likely to have randomly knocking on the hull and looking for hatches, either.

I tried following the stripes and whorls around; tried poking at the various colors and color combinations in a bunch of patterns (I had hopes for the Fibonacci strings); and generally making enough of a nuisance of myself that if there had been anybody inside, they probably would have come out to yell at me to get off their damn lawn, you meddling sentients, and honestly I couldn’t have complained.

“Repeated sequences?” I asked Singer, standing up and stretching my spine out, making sure there was ox in my tanks and that both of my feet were firmly magnetized to something ferrous.

“It all looks pretty random,” he answered sadly.

“This is more fun in three-vees.”

Connla laughed. “It’s more like one of those problem-solving games where you have to keep moving stuff around until you find the right pattern.”

“Yeah, I always hated those,” I grumbled.

I ran my gloves over the plates again, feeling the change in textures snagging at the fabric. And I had what might be described as a minor epiphany.

Textures.

Densities. Or at least, functional densities? Artificial densities?

Patches that were exerting more gravity than they should have been, in other words, which I was picking up through the Koregoi senso that had infiltrated my skin.

The information on the surface of the ship was encoded in how heavy parts of it were.

So if I didn’t know how to get in… maybe my parasite did.

I kept my magnetized boots on the hull, but I shut down the electromagnets in my gloves so I wouldn’t be distracted by those tugs and pulls. It would probably feel different, right? Something inside my skin, as opposed to something I was wearing on the outside? But it probably wouldn’t hurt to reduce the noise in the system.

I held out my arms, waving my forehands around like a damaged windmill, and realized that I could feel something, indeed. The variations were too small for the navigation trick I’d used to be effective—I couldn’t just close my eyes and feel the shape of space because the scale was… well, not below my limit of perception, but lost in the scale of everything else. But moving my forehands in circles, I sensed the artificial variations in the surface of the ship, and—walking slowly, careful of my safety line—found a place where the artificial gravity marked out a kind of bull’s-eye on the hull of the Koregoi ship.

Artificial gravity.

In everything that had happened since we’d encountered the Milk Chocolate Marauder, I’d almost forgotten that that was what we were dealing with here. Something paradigm-changing, a technology that would revolutionize the Synarche’s understanding of how the universe worked, give us access to whole new theoretical universes that I didn’t even begin to have the knowledge to understand. I could feel Singer’s excitement, though—he understood. Well, this would make up for losing the Milk Chocolate Marauder.

“Got something here,” I said, and felt as much as heard Connla exhale. “Now how do I get it open?”

“Let me see if I can manage to talk to it yet,” Singer said. “Well, not talk. I still can’t find a shipmind in there. But if I can get a protocol and figure out how—”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to chill out while you work on that.”

I sat down on the hull beside the bull’s-eye and magnetized my butt.

The Synarche ships were close enough now that I could see them with the naked eye, mostly because of their visible movement against the backdrop of stars and Well and gas and twisted light spiraling down the Milky Way’s tub drain.

That was my new life, coming to meet me.

I tried to feel resigned. At least we would be safe from pirates soon.

That thought got me checking the senso again, seeing if I could feel Farweather or any of her folks around. Maybe I was getting paranoid. Would they really risk chasing us all the way into the Core? I mean, they had everything we had. And the Milk Chocolate Marauder. And it was patently too late to keep us from giving information to the Synarche.

There was no percentage for them in coming here. Just like there was no percentage for me in going there.

And I had much more immediate problems than a Sexy Pirate, anyway.

“Get me in here before they show up, would you?” I asked Singer plaintively.

“I’d like a stronger negotiating position too, you know. Ah, wait, look now.”

An aperture appeared before me.

I don’t mean the door irised, or an airlock hatch slid aside, or some bit of plating dropped into the gap behind it and moved off. I mean it appeared: One moment I was frowning through my faceplate at the unforgiving hull, wondering if the ancient astronauts went in for annoying logic riddles. And the next instant, the hull in front of my face was evaporating before my eyes, as fast and dry and completely as a liquid nitrogen spill. I braced for evacuating atmosphere to blow past me—or blow me off the ship—but there was no rush of escaping air and no sense of pressure whatsoever.

“Well,” Singer said in my ear. “That had no good reason to sublimate like that.”

I peered through the gap. The interior was lit, and it didn’t look like an airlock. I could see fairly far down what I assumed was a corridor before it curved out of sight. “Did you happen to get a spectrograph while it was doing that?”

“It’s not made of anything exotic. And it seems to have been precipitated back into the hull. Possibly that explains the roughened texture that you noted. Do you want to send in a probe?”

I felt brave. And impatient. Before Singer could tell me no, I extended my gloved hand and shoved it right through the gap.

“Haimey!”

“What?” I said. “It’s like a probe.”

Singer’s anger was as much scientific outrage as fear for my safety. “And you’ve just contaminated the interior of that alien ship with your skin cells and our atmosphere and an incalculable amount of cat dander.”

“Oh come on,” I answered. “You know most of that got blown off in the airlock. What’s going on in there?”

The glove had about as many sensors on the outside as a human forehand, and they relayed to my sensorium and from there to Singer and Connla. But I didn’t trust what I was feeling, because I was feeling… warmth.

“Singer? You said this thing was cold.”

“It was,” he said. “Up until that hatch evaporated. Maybe they’re expecting you.”

“How can it be warm inside if it’s exposed to space?”

“That is an excellent question. I can detect no barrier.”

“Do you have access to the system yet?”

“I’m trying to get the keys to the operating system. Failing that, I think I can probably write one, though it’ll be a hot mess to begin with. And I don’t exactly want to purge everything that’s in there so I can colonize it. I’d rather figure out how their architecture is intended to function.”

“So you can subvert it.”

“I am what I am,” Singer said. “Has it bitten your hand off yet?”

“You’re in my senso,” I answered. “You tell me.”

You know, going inside might seem even stupider than sticking my hand through a hole that hadn’t been there a second ago. But if the Koregoi ship, or whatever might be in the Koregoi ship, wanted to do me harm, I was far more vulnerable out here in the arms of the Enemy as I could ever be once I was inside her hull.

“Haimey,” Connla said, accurately reading my intentions. “Haven’t you actually learned anything from last time?”

“Probably not,” I said, moving already.