Machine

CHAPTER 11

I DID WANT TO GO, BUT unfortunately I felt the press of responsibility toward less medically interesting duties. Regretfully, I took my leave of my old friend. I stopped by my on-hospital quarters and showered and dressed in scrubs and a lab coat, then headed toward the office of my other old friend, Master Chief O’Mara, the head of ox sector’s Emergency Department. My boss.

I sent them a message requesting an urgent appointment and got an immediate confirmation. My door is open.

As I walked, I thought about the patient who shared O’Mara’s title—Dwayne Carlos, the master pipefitter. I sent a note to Rilriltok while I was thinking about it, asking that—if Sally was in port—I be allowed to be present when he rewarmed Helen’s crew members. I felt like I owed them that, having brought them in from the cold. If they lived, and considering where they came from, it would probably be comforting if the first face they saw on wakening was a human one.

O’Mara’s office was centrally located in the ox-sector Emergency Department, and Sally had come in on one end, so I had some traveling to do. It wasn’t quite far enough away to catch a lift, but it did take almost fifteen standard minutes of weaving through my fellow professionals and their patients in corridors to arrive. When I did, the door was standing open, though there was a sound-dampening privacy field in place.

I ducked through quickly—nobody lingers under a decompression door—and was surprised to find that two members of my crew had beaten me here. And additionally surprised that neither one of them was Loese. I’d come here without discussing it with any of them, O’Mara hadn’t mentioned their presence, and if anybody was consulting with the master chief, I’d expect it to be the person who had been most involved in investigating the sabotage.

Tsosie nodded in greeting as I entered, and Dr. Rhym wriggled their tendrils. O’Mara waved me to a seat. They were a blocky medium-complected human with cropped graying red hair. A pair of positively prehensile eyebrows were the only thing at odds with the general squareness of their face, features, and their massive squareness of frame.

They looked like a retired prizefighter. They were a retired prizefighter—Judiciary zero-G boxing subchampion three years running, before I’d worked with them. They were also the person who kept the ox-sector Emergency Department of the largest hospital in the galaxy purring like an only slightly dyspeptic cat.

“Are you here to report the sabotage, Dr. Jens?” they asked, when I’d settled.

The faint hum of the privacy barrier reassured me. What did not reassure me was Tsosie’s expression of shock. I assumed the sudden retraction of Rhym’s tendrils also indicated surprise, but I wasn’t certain.

I looked at Tsosie. “I assume from the look on your face that you hadn’t gotten around to telling them yet?”

Tsosie looked over at O’Mara. “We’d barely sat down when you walked in. Loese got here first?”

I rubbed my hands until I caught myself. O’Mara’s brain was as sharp as their physique was lumpish. I was too late: I saw their eyebrows flicker as they looked down. They didn’t say anything about it.

O’Mara shook their head.

I said, “That’s not like you. You’re not surprised. And you’re not angry.”

O’Mara rumbled, “Well, there’s no point in trying to hide any of this from you. The grapevine will fill you in before you get the first scuff on your station shoes. We’ve had some… odd occurrences in your absence. So when all three of you showed up needing to talk urgently…”

“Odd.” Tsosie wasn’t really asking a question. He wasn’t really not asking one, either.

“Environmental leaks. Contaminated medication. Nobody’s been harmed yet, but if it keeps up it’s only a matter of time.”

“And you think this is intentional.”

“I do,” O’Mara said. “Unfortunately. What happened on Sally?”

“Coms failed.” I looked at Tsosie.

“Coms failed while Llyn and I were on the generation ship.”

“Basically the worst possible moment,” I agreed. “If Sally and Loese hadn’t managed a patch job, Tsosie and I might not be here, because the situation over there got dicey very quickly.”

“Tell them about falling through the hull,” Rhym suggested.

“What?”

I held up my hand. Knuckles swollen. I put it down again quickly. “It’s all in my afteraction,” I said. “Which is already filed, and I bet Tsosie’s is, too.”

Tsosie studiously examined his fingernails, hiding a smile. Nobody wants to be the bad kid when O’Mara’s at the head of the classroom.

“How are the Darboof patients doing?” I asked. As a section chief, O’Mara would have access to that information. And I wasn’t changing the subject or being nosy. They were my patients, too, and I cared.

O’Mara unfocused, refocused, frowned. “Stable,” they said. “A team’s working on them, and the AI team is running a core-out diagnostic on Afar. Did any of the ancient humans make it?”

“We don’t know yet,” I answered. “Dr. Rilriltok is the physician in charge. It’s scanning DNA so we can have spare parts ready before we thaw them out. The peripheral is being treated by Zhiruo. Master Chief, I have some… social concerns.”

“Your patients are nasty atavistic humans full of nasty atavistic ideas?”

I nodded. “The AI is also kind of nasty and atavistic.”

“Is that going to interfere with treating them? Or hypothetically doing a turn-and-burn to get another batch, if we need you to?”

“Master Chief,” I said, wounded. “I’m a professional. And I care about their well-being. They’re sentient creatures, after all.”

O’Mara sparkled with humor, a disconcerting expression on such a solid lump of a human form. “Perhaps even sapient?”

I laughed. It eased the tension. “Given time. So, about the sabotage—”

“Ours or yours?” O’Mara asked.

“Ours, for the moment.” Even my forearms ached. It was unfair: I’d been getting enough rest and eating carefully, dammit. Well, I’d have a dia or two off before the next run, per regulations. I could spend it floating in a nice warm neutral buoyancy saline tank. “You’re going to investigate?”

“We’ve got a Judiciary security team on the way to Sally now. I want to look at it before I put her back to work on researching the… thing you found inside Afar.”

“Yes,” Tsosie said. “About that—”

“Yes,” O’Mara interrupted, as if they were agreeing. “Why don’t you and Dr. Rhym go supervise that? Or, even better, get some rest and exercise. I’ve got some catching up to do with Llyn here.”

Tsosie shut his mouth. He might argue with O’Mara. But the stakes would have to be a lot higher, I think.

So he got up, and as he got up he winked at me. I rolled my eyes. We both knew O’Mara was not my type.

I didn’t miss that, as Tsosie and Rhym left, the door that had been open irised shut behind them. O’Mara watched them leave so intently that I turned my head, too. Just in case there was something interesting or edifying going on. I heard the click of the air seal before they turned back to me and spoke again.

“Well,” O’Mara said. “Why don’t you look into it for me?”

“Me? The sabotage?”

“You.”

“Yours or mine?” I answered, risking teasing them a little.

“Both. What are the odds they’re not connected?”

I stretched my legs out and leaned back in the chair, trying to make it look like I was relaxing.

“I’m not a detective.”

“You’ve got a decan of Judiciary experience. I know you and trust you, and you can talk to the medical staff as an equal without putting their backs up or making them feel like they’re under suspicion, which is a feat no Judiciary personnel can manage. Also, I’m not the boss of any of the Judiciary personnel. I’m your boss. And I’m telling you to.”

“And I’ll be going back out on Sally as soon as she’s resupplied. And repaired.” My face got warm. I’d forgotten that she needed repairs. I guess that “hypothetical” turn-and-burn had indeed been strictly hypothetical.

Then I put my left fingertips against the center of my forehead and pushed gently. “Aw, Well.”

O’Mara steepled their hands on their desktop and watched me, head cocked. Waiting.

I said, “I don’t think anybody on my crew was the saboteur, if that’s why you got rid of Tsosie and Rhym.”

“What do you think of your new pilot?”

“I like her,” I said. “Don’t know her very well yet. But she does her job and fits in.”

“Hmm,” they said. “And the rest of the crew?”

“Solid. But I just told you that.”

“I’ve known you since you were an ensign.” O’Mara got up and walked to the dispenser. They printed a cup and filled it with water. I expected them to knock it back, but they brought it to me along with two white tablets. “If you weren’t beam-straight, Llyn, I’d have noticed by now.”

“Have I told you about my ex-wife?”

They laughed. O’Mara had a good laugh, when you could pry it out of them. “I’m not talking about your romantic proclivities. You believe in this place. We’ve got a pretty decent Goodlaw, but it’s first loyalty is to the Synarche. Yours is to Core General. Why wouldn’t I use you?”

I set the tablets on the desk and sipped the water.

They sat back down, extending one thick finger to point at the pills. “As a doctor, I’m prescribing those.”

“You’re not my doctor.”

“Your hands look like you’ve been at the heavy bag. I assume you haven’t been at the heavy bag. I’d fiddle with your tuning if I thought Linden would let me. Since I can’t, take the meds before your joint capsules explode or something.”

“Supervisory abuse,” I said, but I swallowed the tablets. They were bitter. “All right, I believe in this place. Do you know why I don’t think it was anybody on Sally’s crew?”

“Hit me,” they said.

I looked down at my knuckles, flexed my free hand, and got a second guffaw. “Somebody set a device on a timer, and then somehow hacked Sally so that she didn’t notice the device, didn’t notice the timer, and couldn’t remember the sabotage had been done after it happened. If Loese hadn’t figured it out and routed around the damage old-school, I’d be drifting along in the wake of a slowly accelerating generation ship for a really long time.”

O’Mara sucked their lips for a long moment. “You’re saying an AI was involved, to be able to hack Sally’s programming.”

Hands wide, I shrugged. The water in my cup sloshed but didn’t spill over. “I’m saying we’ve got an awful lot of damaged shipminds all of a sudden. But Sally—that was set up before she got close to the other two.”

We contemplated each other in silence. Rogue AIs were the stuff of scary three-vees, not real life. I was the first one to crack and change the subject.

“While we’re on the topic of shipminds, who sent Afar out there?”

The master chief, if possible, looked even grimmer. “Judiciary is trying to find out. There was no filed flight plan. Or if there was, it’s been deleted, but the military archinformists think they’d be able to spot that.”

Sometimes, you have to break the tension. “Hey, can I get one of those antigravity belts like Rilriltok is wearing? Taking the pressure off won’t hurt my pain levels, either.”

“I’ll put you on the list,” they said. “We’ve mostly gotten through the staff whose lives would be in danger if they caught a full g, so it should happen pretty quickly. Oh, that reminds me. You need to talk to the Administree as soon as possible. They would like a personal visit, please.”

“O’Mara!”

They busied themselves with the displays inside their desk. “I’ve got another appointment in three minutes.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

They shook their head. “Starlight doesn’t confide in me. So, as I mentioned before, I’m going to ask Sally to take the lead on investigating the object in Afar’s hold.”

“Yes, that puzzled me.” I shook my head. “She’s not an engineer.”

“No,” they said. “But she’s been exposed to whatever Afar and”—they got the unfocused look people get when they’re consulting their senso—“Helen were exposed to, and I want her in port where she can be kept under observation for a while. And where her crew”—they poked a finger at me and waggled shaggy eyebrows—“are safe. The repairs to her coms system are going to be a little complicated, you understand.”

“I understand we’re being grounded, and you’re fibbing to my ship about why.”

“Good. You’re paying attention.” They settled back and folded their arms. “Llyn. One old military mammal to another. I’m worried about the sabotage. I’m worried about Sally. I’m worried about this weird ancient AI and its weird ancient peripherals and its ten thousand corpsicles. I’m worried about why there’s a thing that might be a warbot in the cargo hold of a methane fast packet without a filed flight plan. I’m worried about why Afar isn’t talking to anybody, and neither is his crew. I need you here.”

I chafed, and they knew it. I also owed them, and they knew that, too. And the pills were working, which made it hard to stay as grumpy as I wanted.

“All right,” I said. “But you owe me, this time.”

“Saving your life was all in the line of duty,” they said, mildly.

“What about taking a kid from a backwater world and giving them a chance at their dream job?”

“You’ve been a commanding officer,” they said.

“Under very limited circumstances.”

They smiled. “Well, as you will learn if you continue to advance, identifying and nurturing talent is all in the line of duty, too.”

I could have pointed out that nurturing anything was not my strong point. But it seemed like a good exit line, so instead, I left.

I reached out through the senso to my ship as I walked around the wheel, dodging systers of every conceivable size, ox-compatible physiology, and morphology. Hey, Sally I heard they have you investigating the craboid.

As long as I’m stuck here, she said. It keeps me out of trouble. You know what they say about idle hands turning to farming drama.

I don’t think they say that about AIs.

It’s true, she agreed. Because when we don’t have enough work to do we generally wind up creating a more logical and egalitarian system of governance and resource allotment, or something similarly boring. Anyway, I’ve been working on getting some access to the craboid’s systems, and I think we can probably use electromagnetism to manipulate its superstructure.

You’re going to try to move it?

We are, she confirmed. Want to come and help? You might have some insights. We might all learn something.

My other duties weren’t currently pressing. Sally was grounded; the archaic humans were frozen solid; Helen was getting care from the best cyberdoc in the hospital. Tackling the job the master chief had given me was going to require sitting down and focusing my concentration to read a lot of case reports, and I didn’t want to tackle that until I’d had some time to process our conversation.

Am I avoidant? Very well then, I am avoidant. Also, sometimes I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.

Sure, I said. I’ll bring some EM induction patches.

Afar was docked in the methane section, which meant I had to suit up to get there no matter which way I went. I returned to Sally to pick up my own hardsuit rather than choosing from whatever was in the lockers. She seemed eager, and bored, and not too distracted by monitoring her own repairs.

She was empty of our team except for Hhayazh, the current duty officer, who was backup-supervising the crew of repair bots. Sally usually would have done it alone, but since Sally’s memory and perceptions were going to be in question until the repairs were complete, Loese and Hhayazh had decided to take turns sitting with her.

Just to make sure nobody snuck any more unauthorized aftermarket modifications into our ship. Such as bombs. Or Trojan horses.

Hhayazh followed me to Sally’s rear airlock and helped me into my suit. I didn’t need anybody to spray me with additional insulation todia, because I wasn’t going into the methane environment, and the irradiated vacuum of Core space was significantly less hostile than a balmy beachfront property on Darbo. I seemed to recall, now that I was thinking about it, that there were some methane-breather colonies on a major moon in Terra’s system. I should look into that; maybe Afar did have a reason to be on that vector. If he could have reasonably run across Big Rock Candy Mountain by accident while dropping out of white space to check and adjust course, that was one less intractable mystery to worry about.

The archinformists had said that it was likely Afar’s flight plan had not been deleted, or they would know. I would have to talk to O’Mara and ask if it was possible that Afar’s flight plan had been filed and had gotten lost somewhere, or was hung up at a packet beacon somewhere out in the galactic halo, waiting for the piggyback that would bring it to us in the Core.

It made me feel better to contemplate that there might be an easy explanation. Whether that was denial and self-delusion or refusing to fall prey to conspiracy theories, only time would tell.

Hhayazh finished my precheck and patted me on the shoulder with a bristly appendage. “Be safe out there.”

“I’m just going for a little walk around the wheel. Nothing to it.” I stepped into the airlock, and in a matter of moments I was looking at the outside.

This time the jump down to the surface would have been only a couple of meters. Rotational force would tend to fling me off the side of the hospital the instant I let go, however, so rather than waste maneuvering fuel, I climbed down a ladder. Space is a much better place for being cautious and pragmatic than flamboyant, even if it isn’t nearly as much fun as what you see in the three-vees.

Having reached the surface of the docking ring, I clomped across it until I got to a lift branch. It angled sharply, but my magnetic boots made it easy to walk right up the inside, and spin helped to hold me there. The farther I got up the arch, the heavier I was, because the structures farthest from Core General’s hub were spinning the fastest. Every so often, a lift zoomed past beneath my feet, shivering the whole tube. Above my head, crystal panels showed green and greeny-violet leaves outlifted toward the light of the Core.

It’s not every dia that you get to go for an EVA stroll around the outside of a gigantic space station. In short order, the branch I had been climbing joined the lift trunk. I paused at the top—or, from my perspective, the bottom—to take in the view.

Core General swooped and bulged over my head, incomprehensibly huge, like a world looming over my shoulder. Beneath my feet, beyond the silvery band of the trunk, the Core danced with all its millions of stars. Even though I was partially in the shadow of the trunk, my hardsuit cooler whined with the strain of so much insulation.

My exo gave me a squeeze, reminding me that the extra acceleration wasn’t helping my joints any. I tore myself from the spectacle and kept on walking toward the station’s nadir. Sally could handle this on her own. But I admit: even with all the mysteries stacking up, I was curious about this one.

It was easy to spot Afar, even in the distance. His cargo doors were open and a swarm of drone tenders moved around him, pulling the packing gel loose in wide chunks and long foamy strands. I could have tapped into the output of one of them, but I wanted to get a look at the craboid with my own eyes—and not a lot of senso—before we brought it inside.

Another ladder got me down to the cargo bay in time to watch the last of the packing material peeled away. Now that I was looking at it in person, the craboid seemed even bigger and spikier than I remembered. As I climbed up to it, a cloud of drones arose like flies off a corpse, leaving the clean-picked-looking carapace of the walker behind.

Now we only had to get Sally talking to it, assuming there was anything in there to talk to. Or controlling its electronics, if it was just a drone.

I had magnetized some specialized equipment to the outside of my hardsuit in areas that would be out of my way until I reached for them. Here in the shadow of the hospital and the cargo doors, my suit’s heater took its turn to complain. Still better than being inside, with Afar’s gelid atmosphere leaching all the warmth out of me.

I peeled a set of induction patches off my hardsuit and applied each of them separately to the craboid’s chassis, scrambling around it to get them as close to opposite one another as possible. The drones had withdrawn to a safe distance: Linden was paying attention, then. I followed suit, climbing down to the edge of the cargo hold and using one door for cover.

“Clear,” I told Sally.

“Active,” she replied. “I’ll see if I can use the patches to access the thing’s processors.”

“It might have some.”

“Ugh,” she said, cheerfully. “I get enough of that from Hhayazh. Signal is getting through the patches, so that’s circumventing at least some of the shielding. If I can’t just talk to it, then I should be able to use electromagnetism to move it by brute force— Oh, hey, I already have an electronic handshake.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it acknowledges my contact. And, now that I’m past the shielding—that is an intense level of shielding, by the way!—it’s easy to talk to.”

“That was a little too easy.” I frowned.

“Standard Synarche protocols. At least I’m not going to have to write the code for this one.”

So it wasn’t some kind of weird alien spaceship parasite. It was just a surface vehicle with a super unsettling design.

Sure, that was a fine explanation.

“You don’t suppose this is some kind of exploratory vehicle, do you? Designed for ox breathers on a cold methane world?”

“Survey equipment?” She hrmed. “That would explain all the legs. Designed for any kind of terrain, and manipulating its environment, and even a bit of earthmoving, hmm?”

“Hmm,” I agreed.

“Okay, are you ready to bring it around to the machine bay?”

The craboid followed me out the open cargo doors, across Afar’s hull, and (using its own maneuvering jets) across the gap to Core General with no incident. Under Sally’s puppetry, it stumped along behind me like a weird pet, or like some sort of limpet monster from a poorly produced horror three-vee.

It did not, however, pry the hospital apart, or punch through the hull with a needlelike proboscis, or behave in any sort of an uncivilized manner at all. It walked behind me, climbing courteously through the machine bay airlock when Sally directed it to, then settling down on the deck and resting quietly there while we set up the isolation zone.

“Can you convince it to give us an atmosphere sample?” I asked Sally.

“There’s no airlock, and I can’t get the pressure door to respond,” she answered. “That appears to require some sort of manual override failsafe code which I can’t quite crack. There’s no AI in here: it’s just a machine.”

“A vehicle, not a person.” Disappointment has a metallic tang.

“Vehicles can be persons, as you know perfectly well,” Sally replied tartly.

I supposed it was better to imagine the craboid empty and waiting than to picture it as home to a lonely and terrified presence that might be in there peeking between their appendages in bewilderment, presuming they had both peekers and appendages to peek through.

“There must be some way to open it from the outside,” I said. “Otherwise you’d go EVA in a hostile environment and come back to discover you’d locked your keys inside.

“And then you’d die.”

“Yes, but whatever the code is I do not have it. It might be a DNA lock, for all I know. So it’s brute force all the way around,” Sally answered. “Want to have a go at it?”

The machine bay had a me-compatible atmosphere, but I didn’t bother deactivating out of my hardsuit, because I wasn’t through with it yet. While drones pitched a containment bubble around the craboid, I fetched a sampling drill from an equipment locker. The drill was too massy to stick to my turtle shell. It’d be in the way, and I didn’t want to carry it around.

By the time I was armed, I had to come back toward the craboid via the airlock built into the bubble. I made sure the interior flap was secured shut behind me before Linden pumped her own ox atmosphere out and pumped a nonreactive nitrogen atmosphere in.

I rigged the drill, set up a brace to hold it in position, and stepped back before triggering.

The bit was diamond grown around a nanotube lattice for tensile strength. It whined against the hatch, a sound that scraped through my magnetic soles and my eardrums to vibrate along my bones and make my back teeth ache. It would have been even worse inside the craboid, so it was just as well there were no passengers.

The idea was that I would drill a very small hole in the craboid, enabling me to get a sample of the atmosphere inside. Then we’d have a better idea of who might use such a thing.

I was a little concerned that the craboid might be programmed to take evasive or defensive measures. But it stood there and waited quietly while I worked to pry its carapace open.

Right up until the drill bit snapped.

A piece of bit ricocheted off the deck plates and the craboid while I, reflexively, cowered. I got lucky: it pinged off my hardsuit, then lodged in the flexible collar of the nitrogen bubble’s lock. No hiss of commingling or escaping atmosphere followed.

Sally was immediately in my senso, asking if I was all right.

“Fine,” I said. I touched my faceplate. The drill bit had taken a tiny, glittering chip out of it right in the most distracting possible spot, but it wasn’t cracked or cracking, and it hadn’t gone through and taken out my eye. So that was lucky, and the hardsuit would heal itself quickly. “The drill bit broke. That’s not supposed to happen. Even if the diamond shattered, the nanotubes should hold it together.”

I pulled the bit out of the collar material and examined the broken end. Under magnification, I could see that the nanotubes were sheared off a little above the surface of the bit. The stub, still gripped in the drill chock, showed the same damage. It looked like the tubes had been stretched slightly. The ends looked slightly deformed, as if they had been pulled apart rather than cleanly cut.

“That’s definitely not supposed to do that.” I hooked Sally into my senso feed and got Hhayazh with her. I let them use my eyes to inspect the damage. “It looks like something weakened the structure of the tubes.”

“Vibrations?” Hhayazh asked.

“Harmonics, you mean?” I frowned through the chipped faceplate. “Maybe? Well, nobody died. I don’t know how we’re going to sample that atmosphere, though.”

“Sally’s density readings give it a pretty standard oxygen saturation.”

“A little rare for my tastes, but yes,” I admitted. “Figuring out what the atmosphere is made of from how fast sound waves go through it is not as certain as actually getting your hands on a little bit of air and running a few tests, however.”

Hhayazh made one of its noises, the kind that might mean exasperation or might mean amusement. “Well, we could get out a laser torch—”

“I don’t want to be in the neighborhood if a cutting beam starts ricocheting around!”

“Fine, just wait for it to open up on its own. That seems likely.”

“Don’t get your ovipositor in a twist, Hhayazh.”

Through our connection, I sensed Hhayazh’s bristles waving like the cilia on a paramecium. “I’d parasitize you, but my offspring might grow up to have your sense of humor.”

“I thought your species didn’t eat sentients.”

It made the expulsion of air that was its species’s equivalent of a disgusted snort. “We don’t.”

I was framing a retort, still standing there with the snapped drill bit in my left hand, when around me the atmospheric pressure abruptly changed. A grinding sound followed, shivering through the bulkheads. I took a clanging, magnetized step back. Polymer stretched against me, arresting my movement.

Llyn, report, Sally snapped.

The inner flap of the isolation bubble was against my back. I couldn’t open it, because whatever happened, I was in a hardsuit and most of the staff and patients in Core General’s ox sector were each in their own equivalent of shirtsleeves. I had to keep my crew safe from whatever pathogens or poisons might be contained inside the walker. Not to mention the atmosphere.

“You were saying?” I grumped at Hhayazh. Then collected my irritation, and said, “The airlock seems to be opening.”

For no reason that any of us could detect, the hatchlike portion in the craboid’s belly had dropped down and was sliding to one side.

In a haze of decision paralysis, I froze. I didn’t know what might be coming out of the craboid’s belly hatch. I didn’t have the least idea if I was going to be confronted with a patient in need of care or a pissed-off soldier with a shock prod or a swarm of flesh-eating battlebots. Or all of those things simultaneously, for that matter.

I scrambled to come up with a response. The hatch glided open, spilling a warm, mellow golden light into the much less pleasing ambiance of machine bay lights filtered through isolation tent.

Something atavistic and planet-bred in me relaxed at the color of that light. It was foolish; it was illogical. And yet I found myself letting out the breath I had reflexively taken, and lowering the hand with the drill bit in it. I’d been holding it up like a sword, as if such a ridiculous weapon were going to be good for anything.

I felt confident that whoever liked that light liked golden beaches shimmering under yellow suns and long luminous slanted autumn afternoons. Whoever liked that light came from someplace like Terra, and I felt at home with them even before Sally said, “Well, that’s one way to sample an atmosphere.”

Smugly, she revealed an analysis that—once we deducted the nitrogen from our containment bubble—was only a few points off from her initial estimate. The craboid was (or had been, until it opened up) chock-full of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide—an atmosphere that might have been a copy of Terra’s in any number of geologic epochs.

My pulse was still racing. I waited, trying to slow my heart without resorting to tuning. The biofeedback worked as long as I concentrated on my breath. In a few seconds, I had collected myself enough to try to peer into the spill of radiance and get a glimpse of the inside of the pod.

It was like trying to stare into the proverbial tunnel of white light. My vision swam; there was nothing within except brilliance. Maybe it was supposed to decontaminate the hatchway.

“Nothing’s coming out,” I said after a few minutes during which nothing had come out. “I’m going to go look inside.”

“Be careful,” said Sally, while Hhayazh muttered a comment about humans being too dumb to die.

“Hey, it’s my job to climb into questionable structures.” I stepped under the curved forward edge of the walker pod. I looked up, and peeked inside. At first, the light was too bright for me to see anything. “I’m going to poke my head up.”

“Maybe send a drone first?” Sally said. She didn’t wait for my request, but zipped one right past me and made a right-angle climb toward the hatchway. I hadn’t even noticed it hovering behind my shoulder until it moved.

It passed through the hatchway. There followed a sharp electrical pop, and it passed through the hatchway again, this time in the opposite direction. Falling.

The drone struck the polymer over the deck plates with a thump.

I froze.

“I recommend that you don’t stick your head in there, Dr. Jens,” Hhayazh said.

“Thank you, Hhayazh. That sounds like excellent advice.”

“Can you see into the pod?” Sally asked. “What can you make out in there?”

“There’s a lot of glare, but it looks like a couch and a console. And some cargo space, which is empty, but there are straps. What are you picking up?”

“Nothing,” Sally said.

I stepped back away from the hatch, out of an abundance of caution. “But how is that possible?”

“The interior is still electromagnetically shielded. But this whole situation makes me uneasy. We’ve hauled a whole lot of weirdness back to civilization, and I’d really like some insight into how two ships and two crews were mysteriously disabled, and what exactly this walker is for. I don’t like mysteries.”

“I love ’em,” I said. “I like the satisfaction of solving them. I’m not feeling a lot of satisfaction right now.”

“Go get decontaminated,” Sally said. “I’m going to turn the craboid over to a research team. Let their drones get electrocuted for a while.”