Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 2

PROXIMITY KLAXONS SHRILLED UP MY nerves, simulating physical pain. Not incapacitating, but demanding action. Connla had moved toward me. Now he kicked toward the controls, but I knew already what we were hearing. Another vessel’s white bubble had just brushed ours. The interface made the intruding ship a sharp pinch on my skin, an elbow in my ribs.

One brush of its white coils on Singer’s and we were all dead: our chemical processes failing—if not simply our covalent bonds. We were insanely fortunate that it hadn’t unfolded space-time when it was pointed directly at us—or directly at the thing we’d come to salvage, though that might have been safe for now inside its fold in space.

I’m not sure that anybody had ever run the experiment to find out, and I sure didn’t want to be the one to science that.

Space isn’t empty. The Big Sneeze—some people call it the Enemy, but I’ve always been uncomfortable personalizing—is scattered with particles, some with mass and some without. Some of these particles are in the area before a ship in white space: the space that gets folded, compressed, made smaller. They get swept up in the bubble, and accelerated to match the relative velocity of the ship.

When the ship decelerates, and the fold collapses—unfolds, snaps open—the particles don’t decelerate. Or they do, in that they reenter normal space-time, but at relativistic speeds, and with equivalent energy. They’re released in an energetic outburst.

Very energetic indeed.

An Alcubierre-White drive ship reentering normal space, in other words, is a particle cannon, and there is no way to make it not be. We all just try very hard, all the time, to make sure that cannon is aimed in a safe direction when it’s discharged. Because anything in the ship’s line of deceleration will be blasted into oblivion by massively blueshifted high-energy particles and gamma radiation.

A ship coming out of white space is a weapon that fires automatically, without any regard for the target. So its pilots and its shipmind have to provide that regard.

And if the other guy hasn’t filed a flight plan, or isn’t where he was supposed to be… well, he’s too dead to care about the fatalities, which are applied to his pilot’s record and licensure, not yours. If the incoming pilot and shipmind made that mistake? They won’t be flying again. Not to mention having to live with the responsibility of having murdered all souls aboard the target craft.

Out here, where you wouldn’t expect to find another vessel and there isn’t likely to be a world or a star or basically anything that will care about a sudden particle bombardment, we sometimes get a little sloppy.

I made myself stop thinking about how it could have been worse, because things were bad enough. Singer flipped our ring ninety degrees, lowering our profile. The other vessel’s bubble brushed past, but through some miracle or skill in the other crew we didn’t make contact. Still, their bit of space and our bit of space were folded in different directions and moving at different speeds, and dragging one through the other didn’t make for comfortable weather.

Our little tug shuddered with proximity, and the relative tinny silence of space continued to be shattered by the alarm. I heard the unmistakable scritching of claws into carpet as the ship’s cats attached themselves to the nearest wall. Bred and born in space, they knew how to manage themselves. I latched down too, wrenching an ankle as my afthands clutched wildly. I swung away from center like a barn door, almost losing my grip and my orientation to become a projectile within the command cabin myself.

“Haimey!” Singer yelped. “A little help please!”

“Reverse?” Connla asked. “Go Newton?”

He meant, let the ship bob back up to the surface of space. I stabilized myself and turned off the pain. I’d fix the ankle later. “Where the hell are they?”

He twisted his head—meaningless, but reflex. “I don’t know! They’re gone! Maybe they went past?”

What the hell are they? And what are they doing here?

We were still in white space, folding the fabric of the universe around us, but we weren’t moving fast. You could stay still. It was possible to throw a little fold of space-time around yourself like a vampire vanishing into his swirl of cloak. But as long as we were behind the scar, we couldn’t see out, and nobody outside could see in.

“Dock,” I said, not believing it even as I felt my own lips moving.

“Dock? With whom?”

“With the salvage target, Singer! Get us next to whatever’s inside that scar! Behind it, by preference, so if anything swings through the bubble from the same direction, it’ll hit them first!”

Give an AI this; our white bubble meshed seamlessly with the dead fold surrounding the hulk, and an instant later we had visual. It was a big one: I gasped out loud. The metal in the hull alone would make the trip worth our while, if we could figure out how to get it home. I was only the third-best pilot on the ship—I had Bushyasta and Mephistopheles beat, at least—but even I could already identify a few technical difficulties.

“Stop gawking,” Singer said, bringing us around under the target. We were coasting within the big ship’s fold now—a little farther out of the line of disaster. But not home with our boots off yet.

Because even with our oversized white coils flipped longitudinally, we were inside the big ship’s ring.

I ducked back into the interface and busied myself casting around for ripples that might show me the direction and velocity of the ship whose bubble we’d bumped into. If I got lucky, I might be able to spot it through gravitational lensing—one of the tiger-eye bands of radiation ringing our bubble might show a ripple as their bubble concentrated light—or at least see a disturbance in the fold where it had tossed space-time around when it left.

There was nothing. It was gone again, and maybe they’d been as freaked out by the contact as we were and ducked away hard. If they hadn’t scared themselves as badly as they’d scared us, that begged the burning question: Had they been expecting us? Following us? Or had they just been on their way to somewhere else, and we had both been the victims of a statistical miracle, our white bubbles colocating?

That they might be the law didn’t worry me too much, as we weren’t doing anything illegal. There was such a thing as pirates, though—and rival salvage operations, some of which might not be as ethical as we were about claim jumping.

Or maybe a lot of people had paid our source for the location of this derelict.

Had they bumped us on purpose, trying to scare us off? We might not have noticed them sitting very still, waiting. There wasn’t a lot of light out here, and the dead Ativahika sure was a great distraction. We had been out of transition long enough that they might have developed a good idea of our v. A sufficiently crazy cowboy pilot or shipmind just might have gotten the idea to scare us off with a bump. My own standards of risk assessment were… a little more conservative, I’m afraid to say, but some people around here think I’m a stick-in-the-mud.

I kept one eye on the salvage prize, but with the bulk of my attention spent a few more moments on scanning, rechecking our records of the contact and the moments before and after. It was something to do, even though Singer could do it better, but both of us kept coming up empty. That brought me back to the idea we had both just been the victims of terrible, coincidental timing. That sort of thing happens every once in a while, even though space is so unimaginably vast it’s staggering to think of the odds. But they’re no worse than the odds of, say, the sort of planetary impact that provided Earth with a moon.

Space is vast. But time is long, so there’s a lot of it for unlikely things to happen in.

Terra does have a moon. And so on.

Anyway, I couldn’t find that damned ship anywhere. We had a record of the contact, but all it showed me was a blurred flash of a quicksilver ring and a ship whose hull was mostly white. No port or species designation was visible, which didn’t mean they were pirates. I could see about a third of the front and port side of the hull, and not everybody paints their name in the same place. We hadn’t caught a transponder ID, but a brushing contact like that—we might only have been in the same universe with them between pings.

It was hard to think with the derelict looming over us, anyway. Singer was a dashing-enough little craft, his plated sliver of a hull dotted with sensor arrays and painted a cheery green and blue. His derrick and towing array, usually kept folded, were bright orange, with stripes in ultraviolet paint to catch the attention of species that were blueshifted by human standards. But I found myself imagining how he would look dwarfed by this behemoth if I were standing outside, and shook my head.

“You’re not having any luck finding the other ship either?” I asked.

Connla’s ponytail went all directions, but mostly side to side. I wasn’t sure if the text was “Go find out for yourself” or “I’m not sure,” but the subtext was that he was busy, and answering questions was not a productive use of his time currently. Singer—of course—was doing most of the flying. But Connla and I both liked to feel at least a little more useful than the cats.

Slightly.

Hey, it could happen.

“It’s the Admiral,” Singer said ominously. “He’s coming to get you because you didn’t eat your vegetables.”

I laughed. Pirate boogeymen didn’t hold any terrors for me.

I was so distracted staring at the derelict that I was surprised by the little shiver through Singer’s surfaces that told me the derrick had been deployed.

“We’re behind the derelict as requested,” Connla said. “And I’ve got a cable on them. What’s the next step?”

“Singer?” He was better at math than I was. “Enter it here, or try to splice into it?”

“If you want to spacewalk in a warp bubble, I’ll make sure to have record functionality online so we can send your last moments to your clade survivors.”

“Hah. They’ve disowned me.”

“It’s not too big?”

Division of labor: Connla flew. I figured out structural tolerances.

I looked back out at the damned thing speculatively. I didn’t think it was a human ship, though we’ve got some funny cultures, and those funny cultures come up with some funny designs. Its hull color was a sort of chocolate brown, and didn’t match exactly from plate to plate. It had some markings in cream, and some more in yellow, and that contrast made me think that its previous owners might see in spectra similar to ours.

However, that wasn’t a color human-type people usually painted ships—we went for whites, or grays, or bright colors that stood out against space. Pirates liked black, both for the obvious reasons of concealment and probably because it made them feel like badasses, and I expected their egos needed all the shoring up they could get.

It was a pretty typical shape for a deep-space ship with no intention of maintaining gravity; Singer has a little room on a counterweighted stick we can spin around the main spindle to generate centripetal force so we can work on our bone density. We use the other end for storing cargo, or water usually.

This vessel didn’t look like it either rotated in its entirety, or had any bits and pieces that might rotate in their turn. It was roughly spherical—a lot of Alcubierre-White ships are, or cigar/needle-shaped, because of the shape of the field that surrounds them. It was so damned big, though: I wondered what it used for fuel. Antimatter?

The thought of being in the same quadrant with an unattended antimatter bottle gave me an uncomfortable shiver. So I adjusted my chemistry and stopped thinking about it. Then I had an uncomfortable shiver about adjusting my chemistry so reflexively. You can’t win.

The target had made a fold in space-time, pushed a wrinkle up in front of itself and stretched the universe out behind, and gotten stuck there. That was the flaw we’d slipped into. And it was the trap we needed to get out of, now.

We couldn’t just hook it up, tow it out, and exit in tandem because there would be a few moments in which part of the ship was inside the fold, and part was out—which is bad for ships, and the people inside them.

Hell, maybe the interloper was another salvage operator, and they’d taken one look at how big the prize was, figured there was no way we could lift it, and gone off to get help or a bigger white drive. Our white bubble was a third of a kilometer, and that wasn’t big enough.

“We need a solution.”

Connla shrugged. “As long as we take it slow, overcoming the inertia to get it moving shouldn’t be a problem.”

“We can’t pull them free of their bubble, though—we’ll need to collapse it rather than exiting in tandem. Because they’re too big to get our bubble around them no matter how far we stretch the coil. Which also means I don’t know how we’ll get them home. Maybe steal their coil?”

“Been practicing your space welding?”

“We are inside their bubble now,” Singer pointed out. “We can use our own white drive to unfold space, and when we’ve pulled them free, we should all fall back to the surface together.”

Connla thought about it for roughly a standard minute and said, “I don’t see any unacceptably dangerous flaws.”

“Only acceptably dangerous ones?”

He grinned. Secretly, I sort of like his Spartacan bravado. When it’s not getting us into fights in station bars.

I said, “Let’s grapple it and unfold space-time from the inside, then.” I shivered in anticipation, and told myself it was silly. This was just a variant on what we usually did—what we always did—but somehow this time felt as if it should be different. Because of that lurking ship. Because this thing was so damn big. “We’ll go inside once we’re Newton again.”

“It’s big. Once we take it out of white space, how do we get it back in again?” Connla asked.

“I’ll splice our drive to its rings once we’re back in Newtonian space and we figure out its power source,” I said. “We’ll just use Singer as a backup generator. Then we all move together.”

Connla looked at me with respect, then grinned. “Hot damn. Okay, keep an eye out in case our company comes back. I’ll bring us down.”

If company did come back, and they were armed, there wasn’t much we could do about it, except for cut and run.

I didn’t feel Singer moving, but every time I looked at the alien ship, its hulk was a little bigger. We were winching ourselves toward it and it toward ourselves, and once we were close enough, we’d unfold space-time and boom, all would be right with the galaxy and we’d be back where the stars looked like stars and not water-tiger stripes of light.

Simple enough, in theory.

In practice, hair-raising. I ran my hand across my cropped black bristles of hair. Yup, they were standing straight on end.

Nobody would have appreciated the joke except for me, and anyway Singer was busy, so I kept it to myself and watched the crawling numbers on the proximity gauge, and the looming hull of the salvage, which my fevered primate brain was insisting was half a meter away, tipping over us, and going to fall on our heads and crush us at any instant.

That wasn’t helping anybody, so I bowed to the inevitable and did the responsible thing. I raised my GABA receptivity and calmed my adrenal glands down a little, leaving myself enough of an edge to be a little bit extra aware. And while I was doing that, like the proverbial watched pot (when was the last time somebody boiled water in a pot?), I looked away and looked back, and in the interim we’d stopped moving relative to the folds in space, so the stars had settled back into the sort of configuration that doesn’t look like fluorescent tigers wrestling.

I looked down along the distorted Sagittarius Arm of the great barred spiral that sprawled across the entirety of our southern horizon.

Yes, space doesn’t have directions, exactly, but let’s be honest here: prepositions and directions are so much easier to use than made-up words, and it’s not like the first object somebody called a phone involved a cochlear nanoplant and a nanoskin graft with a touch screen on it, either. So those of us who work here just pretend we’re nice and know better, and commend the nitpickers to the same hell as people who hold strong and condescending opinions about the plural of the word octopus.

The Milky Way was smeared by white space until it looked like a monstrous scythe, slicing through time. The salvage prize drifted alongside, anchored to our derrick, an enormous piece of engineering that seemed just as impressive, in its way.

I felt cowed and awed and all that jazz. Small. Insignificant before the wonder of the universe and the deepness of time and the ingenuity of the ancient engineers.

“Kind of makes you want to spit.”

Connla had drifted up beside me. Ponytail bobbing, pale face limned and shadowed from below across knifelike cheekbones by the light of the human race’s ancestral home. I didn’t swing that way, but under the circumstances, even I could appreciate that he was pretty.

“Makes me want to get a great big pen and write my name right across it,” I answered.

We looked at each other. In a moment of mutual accord, we turned and kicked over to our panels, starting the calculations we’d need to use our white field to counteract the bigger ship’s.

Singer, of course, came up with the bad news first. “It’s not going to work. They’re just too much bigger than us. All we’d do is shred both ships and everything in them between universes.”

Well, that wasn’t acceptable. Singer was where I kept my stuff.

“What if I jury-rig a remote?” I said. “Fly her by wire from here?”

“Not just fly her yourself?” Connla asked. “There’s an old naval tradition of prize crews.”

“We invented drones for a reason,” I replied dryly.

He laughed, not believing me for a minute.

“I want to go over,” I said.

“Of course you do,” Connla said.

“Your suit’s already checked out,” Singer added.

“I thought you were going to inform my clade if I tried to spacewalk in a white bubble.”

“Stay on the wire,” he answered, as tiredly as an AI can sound.

You can get used to anything. Even a spacewalk eventually gets routine.

And something that is routine doesn’t become less dangerous, but more. You take things for granted. You take shortcuts. Impatience and cutting corners: it’s the primate way. It got us down out of the trees and up to the top of the evolutionary heap as a species, which is a lot more like a slippery, mud-slick game of King of the Hill with stabbing encouraged than any kind of tidy Victorian great chain of being or ladder of creation.

It’s also deadly when you’re someplace where one mistake can kill not just you, but an entire station full of bakers and programmers and tugboat operators and their spouses and dogs and friends named Bob. Which is why people in dangerous jobs before AIs used to have checklists, and some of the ones in the most dangerous jobs still have checklists even though they have AIs and AIs don’t make mistakes, and it’s why we—Connla and I—have Singer.

He took me through the checklist. I wore the better of our two suits, which would be problematic for Connla if he had to come after me, but in all honesty we were in the habit of terrible laziness where the EVA suits were concerned. If we really had to use them both at the same time, we’d print up some new reinforcing bits for the not-so-good one, but in the meantime that material was better put to use as whatever else we were using it for on that particular dia. And frankly, where we generally wandered, if anything went wrong and we had to abandon Singer, we’d just be prolonging our deaths.

Now, some would say that life itself is simply a matter of prolonging one’s death, that being the inevitable end of creation. But there’s effort that’s worth it, and effort that isn’t, if you follow me here.

So I suited up, knowing that if I got in trouble I was in trouble, so to speak, and made sure my com and fox were working. If anything happened to me over there, even if I lost coms and senso somehow, Singer would at least be able to pick up the machine memories—ayatana—from my fox and find out what went wrong, theoretically.

Assuming they could retrieve my body.

Then I stood in the door, the way people about to do stupid things have stood since castles had sally ports and atmosphere craft had jump doors.

I let Singer cycle the airlock around me.

“Clear,” he said.

When the puff of crystals from the lock air freezing into snow cleared, I looked across a terrifyingly narrow gap at a curved, cookie-colored hull that seemed to go on forever in every direction. I could have reached out and touched it.

I felt instantly less ashamed about the screaming my primate brain had been doing back in the command cabin. This thing—this inscrutable alien object—massed so much more than Singer that I could not even begin to do the math in my head. And yet we were going to be moving it, and it was inert, and in the frictionless, weightless physicist’s heaven we call space, connecting two massive objects by a slender derrick was as good as welding them into a single unit unless you subjected the link to some strong shearing forces, which we had no intention of doing.

From this angle, and this distance, I could see a lot more markings on the derelict’s hull. They were in creams and lighter browns on the varied tasty colors (milk chocolate to 80 percent cacao, roughly approximated), intricate and imperfectly repeated enough to look like writing—and the whole thing was starting to make me hungry.

Chocolate is one of Earth’s most popular exports, it turns out. Humans almost everywhere love it, and even a few other species who don’t find its chemistry toxic.

We seem to be the only creatures in the galaxy who can stand the smell of coffee, though.

“So how do I get from here to there?”

Singer said, “I don’t know, jump?”

“Machine thinks he’s witty,” I said.

“Meat thinks she could get along without me.”

I made sure my safety line was connected. Then I jumped.

Stepped, really—it wasn’t far enough for a real good bouncy bound. The alien hull was metallic and magnetic, though I was cautious about using any strong magnetism when I didn’t know what was behind the hull plates and what I could be activating, deactivating, initiating, or just plain moving around. But there was no inertial difference between me and the ships, and nothing to pull me away from the hull, and if I was stupid or incautious enough to push myself off with some precipitate movement, I had jets. And Singer would never let me hear the end of it.

Connla would just smirk.

Singer, for good or ill, was incapable of smirking.

Anyway, I made solid contact easily—it hadn’t taken more than a whisper of effort to push me this far. Rookies always overexert in micrograv.

The surface was a little rough under my gloves. Not enough to be a hazard, but there was some extra friction, and it made moving around on the hull that much easier. The safety line played out behind me.

“I wonder if this is what they used instead of handholds.”

“Maybe they had hairy spider-hook feet.”

Connla has a thing about spiders. They’re a Terran animal, a little predatory eight-limbed arthropod, and he loves them. Would probably keep one as a pet, but I told him that either it would eat the cats, or the cats would eat it.

(His response: “They’re not big enough to eat cats. I don’t think?”)

I scuttled across that rough-surfaced hull like 50 percent of a spider, making sure I maintained points of contact with three limbs every time I moved the fourth. The afthands really come in, well, handy for this sort of stuff.

I had spotted a likely hatch-like object—or at least an aperture of some sort—a few meters away, and it seemed like my best course of action was just to head for it directly and see what I could figure out from staring at it.

The great thing about space ships is that, by and large, they are designed to be really easy to get your ass into in a hurry, with all kinds of obvious and brightly colored emergency devices on their airlocks. So if you’re having a stroke, or you’re suffocating in your own flatulence, or your helmet is filling up with drinking water, or some other ridiculous humiliating space disaster is about to turn you into a “I knew a guy who died in the stupidest way on EVA” story, you have a fighting chance of getting inside blinded and deoxygenated so your crewmates can pry your helmet off.

It’s never getting holed by a micrometeorite that gets you, outside of 3Vs. It’s always some nonsense like suffocating on a piece of padding that’s come loose inside your helmet, or being blinded by a free-floating bubble of algae puree and jetting yourself into a ramscoop.

So most species make it damned easy to get back inside when you’re half-incapacitated. Everybody’s got a survival instinct in Darwin’s big, bright universe.

Human ships, for example, usually have these bright red wheels that really stand out from their surroundings in a nice, self-evident manner. As with most really hostile environments, people in space don’t generally focus on keeping out strangers. They figure they’ll let ’em in if they need it, and sort out the details afterward. With a bolt prod if necessary.

Even these guys, with their real focus on earth tones, had gone for a startling ochre on what I took to be their emergency control. It looked about right: heavy, manually operated, not easy to jostle. A big lever-and-slide assembly with a striking resemblance to one of Victor Frankenstein’s electrical switches was painted nice, bright orange, and seemed to be designed so that an atmosphere-deprived sentient flailing in panic and possibly about to embark upon the Longest Fall might have a chance to latch on to it, brace themselves, and give it a heave.

I studied it for a minute. “What do you think, Singer?”

“It looks like a switch.”

I also thought it looked like a switch. And it looked like the sort of switch that you would turn over and slide and then pull back against—like the biggest sliding bolt on the biggest relief module door in the history of sentientkind. If you were a blue whale who for some reason found yourself in need of a sit-down toilet with gravity in a somewhat seedy space station bar, this would be the sort of thing you’d use to hold it closed while you did your business.

Not that the hatch cover was whale-sized. Just the sliding bolt apparatus.

I decided to take a chance on fundamental interactions after all and braced both my magnetized afthands under a low elevated bar that seemed designated for that purpose (hoping that it wasn’t some part of the structure that would retract violently if and when the hatch triggered, amputating my aftfingers and forcing my suit to seal ten smallish leaks in a hurry), bent myself forward against the pressure of the suit, and grasped the thing we were both pretty sure was a handle.

“Here goes nothing.”

It went.

There was resistance, but it was the well-oiled sort of resistance you get from a big piece of intentionally stiff machinery. Something you didn’t want flopping around inertially during a sudden course correction, say. That in itself also wasn’t a hint as to how long the derelict had been here. Metal things tended to hold up pretty well in space. Especially if you folded them away in a white bubble, where they tended not to get holed by micrometeorites or pounded on by solar radiation. Nice and cozy, really. Sort of like a safe.

“Any progress figuring out what language that is?” I exhaled with effort, and felt the switch click. This definitely seemed to be its upright and locked position.

“If it is a language, you mean?” Singer replied. “I’ve got a subroutine on it, but frankly, we’re a long way from a data core, and we’re not carrying complete data on syster languages. We don’t have enough storage to hold all that and also have room for Connla’s improv jazz collection, 1901 to 2379.”

“You leave my Duke Ellington out of this,” Connla said.

“How are you going to fly it by wire if you can’t talk to it?”

“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.”