Machine

CHAPTER 7

WHATEVER IT WAS, EVEN IF it had been on the cargo manifest, the cargo manifest could not have done it justice—or remotely prepared me for the reality. When I entered the unpressurized cargo hold, I had to stop for a moment to contemplate the object inside as its shape filtered through my readouts and Sally’s senso projections.

I couldn’t see it by ambient light because there wasn’t any, and I didn’t dare make any even though I didn’t think any unshielded Darboof would be wandering around in here: the environment was space with a roof over it, and they couldn’t endure hard vacuum and near absolute zero any better than I could. There are cold and hostile environments, and then there are really cold and hostile environments.

(At least my suit’s heat exchanges were whining less now that I was insulated by vacuum. The problem, as long as I stayed out of Afar’s heat-sucking atmosphere, wasn’t going to be getting too cold, but overheating inside my hardsuit because of that extra insulation.)

I couldn’t take the chance of using any radiation other than heavily filtered ultraviolet to scan the space. Even if I had been willing to, my Darboof ayatanas quailed at the idea. It would be like aiming a microwave gun into a room you thought was, you know, probably empty, and pulling the trigger.

So I relied on my senso and the drone transmissions, and what the senso showed me was astounding.

The low-intensity EM image Sally constructed showed that the cargo was not a single solid object, but a sort of pod on struts, propped in the center of the space. I couldn’t see color, obviously, but the texture was smooth and enameled-looking. Parts of the object had a magnetic signature. And the whole thing reminded me of an arachrab from home: The struts—they were legs, they had to be legs—were curved and jointed in the same way. The pod—the body—was held at the center of eight of those legs, and their feet were evenly braced around the bulkheads of the hold.

I could have imagined that it was organic. Not in the carbon-based sense, but in the evolved-on-its-own sense. But it had the presence of a vast and brooding machine.

The drone reported no life signs, so I assumed that a machine was exactly what it was. Not a little machine. Not like my exo. Not a pile of microbots like the other machine. And not a big machine with a simple, direct purpose, like Sally.

This machine—I didn’t even know where to begin looking at it, never mind describing it. It was cryptic, enormous, of enormity. It had a weight and a charisma in that black space.

It looks alive, I said. Actually, it looks cybernetic. Are these Darboof smuggling alien mechanical sea monsters?

I joked, but I found myself wondering. Space monsters?

I mean, I felt fairly confident that the craboid was a machine. But there were entities that went through most of their life cycle in space. They didn’t generally have legs. Maybe something could have evolved to survive an atmosphereless world, however….

Life is a pretty stubborn thing. Weirdly so, given how fragile it can be.

Not according to the drone, Sally answered. The drone continues to read no sign of any known metabolic processes. No metabolic products. There’s a space inside that could potentially have an atmosphere, though, or be used as a vehicle. But not the thing itself. The thing itself is a machine.

I should trust my instincts more.

Could it be some kind of a mechanical… parasite? There were organisms on various worlds that could control the behavior of a host. Some were commensal—symbiotic. Some… were not commensal. Could that explain the odd behavior—odd lack of behavior?—of Afar, and of Helen and the machine once Afar docked?

It looks like combat armor, said Loese.

I had worn hardsuits in both military and civilian designs. In fact, I was wearing one right then. I snorted impolitely at her.

Not real combat armor, she said. Like a mech suit in Science Ninja Alliance.

Loese likes those stylized immersive three-vees with the very exaggerated interfaces. And yes, now that I thought about it, the image of the space-crab-robot thing I was studying did have that kind of menacing glossiness.

My very low-power UV lidar imaging system was clicking away, supported by the efforts of the drone. An image of the cargo space around me resolved, shimmered.

Handholds—appendage-holds—ran along the bulkheads. They didn’t look like the handholds my species built, but their purpose was obvious. I used them to haul myself along the curve of the wall until I got to the craboid’s nearest foot.

It seemed to be… a foot. A spider foot. Only gigantic.

Sensors indicated that it was constructed of metal, ceramics, and some very durable resin compounds. It had some ferrous content. It looked smooth and sculpted, flat-bottomed, with hooked barbs projecting on all sides. It was bigger around than the span of my arms.

The bulkhead of the cargo hold was faintly dented from the pressure of the foot braced into it. I set my back and hands against one of the appendage-holds and shoved the foot with my boots, extending my legs as strongly as I, exo, and hardsuit together could manage.

My machines couldn’t budge this machine. I didn’t even feel it give, or sense any tiny scraping through the hull. The machine was wedged into the hold as solidly as if welded there. As if it had been designed to climb into a cargo space and make itself functionally a rigid part of the ship’s structure.

Maybe it had. The central pod, or capsule, or habitat, was suspended in the midst of a reinforced framework—the spider-crab legs—that seemed to have been rigged up to brace and protect it. It was too far away from the cargo bay bulkhead for me to inspect very well.

That couldn’t stop me from drifting up to it for a closer look.

Hey, crew, I said, stick a memo on the calendar to look into who sent Afar out here, when we’re back in touch with civilization.

Fast packets didn’t just fly around the galaxy empty, and I kept coming back to that. Okay, so Afar wasn’t empty: he had been hauling… this thing.

Whatever this thing was for.

I followed the line of the nearest leg with the softest pulses of my jets. The central pod wasn’t precisely spherical. It was teardrop-shaped, and I was slightly kitty-corner to its round end. I sidled around until I was facing the round part dead-on, exactly at the midline. There were no legs attached to this end, and that seemed significant. It had no portholes, and it had none of the smaller manipulators I would expect if it were, for example, the kind of war-suit that Loese suggested.

Sally’s drones zoomed around me on a rising helix, then broke off to swirl around the teardrop-shaped part of the machine. Sally forwarded their feeds to me. I felt, rather than heard, the small clicks as they settled onto the machine’s surface.

Loese’s comment about combat armor was still niggling. I stretched my hardsuit’s sensors, but there were no visible weapons, and no obvious ports that weapons could slide out of.

If I were going to put a door in something like this, the underside is where I would put it. I let myself float, frowning behind my opaqued faceplate, and studied the apparently featureless surface with all the tools at my command, since it was too dark in the hold to use my eyes.

The pod was not entirely featureless. It had some small, uneven swellings, little bumps that bent backward in a manner that resembled fairings. They looked like they might grow up to be barbs like the ones on the feet, given good nutrition and time. There were differences in texture on its surface. Sally used my hardsuit to bounce another low-powered UV laser off the carapace. The results told me that if I could have seen it with my eyes, the machine would have been black, the whole thing, with a satin shine and blue and red overtones on the edges. Pretty, in a monstrous sort of way.

Senso also told me that there were glossier sections in the pod, which I was starting to think of as a hull. They were black, too, but the luster made me think they were not so much opaque as opaqued, like my helmet. They were small, and the plating around them looked thick. Reinforced. Like window frames, around armored windows. Or like—given their size—one-way mirrors over maneuvering cams.

Was this thing a vehicle of some kind? Optimized for maneuvering in hostile environments? An armored all-terrain vehicle?

Something designed to protect the occupant for long duty in extreme cold, or heat, or whatever?

Sally, what’s the temperature in there?

There’s not much atmosphere inside it, she said, based on vibratory tests with the drones. But the pod is hollow, and the interior volume of the capsule is about twenty-three cubed meters.

I did a quick visualization exercise and decided that was more than enough space for an adult human, though it might get cramped after a while. Does it have life support?

There is some machinery that looks like compressors, filtration, and so forth. It’s carrying a water supply. And supplies of carbon and nitrogen. There is a mini fusion plant, batteries, and power access. Those are all quiescent now. The water has been allowed to freeze; the tank it’s in was either partially empty, or is designed to allow for expansion.

H₂O. Now there was a surprise. That was a rock, as far as the Darboof were concerned. And a durable rock at that.

But if you had hydrogen dioxide, carbon, and nitrogen, you had the basic components of life support for a water-solvent ox-respiring syster. Like Rhym, or Hhayazh. Or me.

If it was a suit of environmental armor, a piloted walker of some sort, it sounded like a pretty pleasant way to get around, depending on what the upholstery was like. Especially with the interface between my exo and the hardsuit chafing at my left knee and my underarms, and the infiltrated cold from before still making my joints hurt, and the undissipated heat of now causing sweat to pool against my waist seal and slide down my ass crack and inner thighs. I could get used to a nice big capsule you could move around in, with lots of legs for scurrying. There was probably a set of manipulators stowed away on the outside somewhere. Like one of those antique deep-sea submersibles, except a much sexier design.

… with fishhooks all over it.

Those sure looked designed to break things.

What if Loese is right and it’s a war machine? Sally, what if Afar was smuggling weapons?

What if it’s a cage? Tsosie asked. An enviro unit for a prisoner? Or a transported animal?

Hhayazh actually sounded a little distressed when it said, What kind of prisoner is so dangerous it has to be transported in a pod inside a cold cargo bay in a ship with such an exotic environment?

I shook my head. One that isn’t in there anymore.

Sally wouldn’t hear my brains rattle, but she would pick the motion up through the senso. She said, If you’re right, the prisoner has escaped, so I hope it’s not that. Crew, do you think it’s dangerous to bring it back to Core?

Hard not to, when we’re bringing the whole ship, said Rhym.

We could jettison it, Tsosie said dubiously.

Judiciary is going to want a look at this thing, I guarantee, I answered.

You’re the tactician, Dr. Jens. Tsosie’s faith warmed me. Or maybe it was the hardsuit’s environmental control finally giving up. Can you think of a means by which to mitigate risks?

If I could get a link with the machine, we could talk to its computers. Maybe one of the drones—

Before you ask, Sally said, no, I don’t have coms with that machine.

We’ve been working together too long. Does the vehicle use an obsolete protocol? In theory, communications protocols used by systers when building their kit were supposed to be cross-compatible. In theory.

Ships and stations managed to talk to each other pretty well. But I would need as many appendages as a Rashaqin to count the number of times we’d dragged some poor sentient back to Core General in part because their space suit had stopped talking to other space suits, and somebody had gotten hurt out there.

Negative. As far as I can determine, it doesn’t use any protocol. In fact, the whole thing is so EM- and radiation-shielded that the best sensor data we’re getting from it is lidar and magnetic resonance. So I can’t even find any indication that it has a personality simulator in there, let alone an AI core.

Well. That’s weird. Why would you get into a pod you couldn’t communicate in or out of?

If there was anything you could trust, it was the radiation shielding on a Darboof ship. A species that needed more protection from most of the EM spectrum would have a hard time evolving, because the background radiation of the cosmos and whatever radioactive rocks were baked into their homeworld was likely to kill them.

On the other hand, this machine could be a vehicle, designed so you could take it on any ship, and there were radiation eaters and other hot weirdies who left fissionable material scattered around.

I don’t think that walker is standard tech. Synarche tech, even, though it’s a big Synarche. There’s nothing like that aesthetic and design in my databases. So possibly it has perfectly fine coms. I can’t get a carrier. I’ve had no problem getting into Afar’s systems, though, as you can see.

Did you find Afar’s shipmind yet? I stared at the machine, and I had the eerie sensation that its glossy black eyespots stared back at me.

Maybe? I’m… honestly not certain. There are those iterating backups. And there is data. But he’s not…

He’s unresponsive, Rhym said. If he were an organic life-form I’d say he was down at the bottom of the coma scale for whatever species he happened to be.

In other words, we were at an impasse and I needed to break it. We could still tow the whole vessel back to Core General and let them sort it out—and I suspected we were going to wind up doing that—but safety precautions were part of my remit as well.

We could weld the craboid in place. But if it tears itself loose it’s a risk to Afar’s crew. We could jettison it, assuming we can get it to let go of the cargo hold, and tow it separately. It’s not that big. But it could operate on a remote signal, and if it suddenly turns aggressive in white space we’ll all have a huge problem.

Sally said, Yeah, I’m going to flag that one as unsafe practices. Even if we don’t exactly have a safety protocol in the docs for towing illegally parked armored walkers home.

Sally was so deadpan that I laughed harder than the joke warranted. Which meant that I sprayed saliva on the inside of my face mask. It was still opaqued, but the little spit globes did crazy refraction tricks against the heads-up graphics Sally was feeding me. Dammit.

“Kurukulla on a clamshell!”

Status? Tsosie and Sally asked at once. I didn’t usually blaspheme. It’s not nice to invoke other people’s deities.

I laughed. I just spit on my plate. It gives me an idea, though. What if we fill the cargo bay with foam?

With… foam?

Sure. I tapped my arm. It didn’t make any noise in the vacuum, but inside the suit I heard it. Rigid insulating foam. We fill the available space with it, and run a Faraday cage around the inside of the cargo bay so nobody can trigger the arachrab—the walker—from outside. We foam one of the drones in with it so we have immediate telemetry. If it wakes up, we’ll know.

Silence followed for a few moments. Rhym was the first to break it. Given our current resources and needs, I don’t see an immediate flaw in this plan. If the machine is totally quiescent, it might be overcautious…

But, said Camphvis, we can’t leave the patients here. And I’d rather be overcautious than torn apart by Hhayazh’s mechanical cousin.

Hey! Hhayazh said. That doesn’t look anything like me!

Fewer legs, said Tsosie. But it kind of does.

In descending order of priority, my jobs were to keep my crew safe, keep myself safe, and save as many lives as possible.

I didn’t feel unsafe. My crew weren’t at risk right now. Afar’s crew members were stable and getting some metabolic support now that I had that set up. They’d need additional care on the trip home, but that could be done while we were en route.

My senso link to my team told me everything was working out in terms of getting control of Afar and slaving his drives to our own, which meant we wouldn’t even have to risk a physical connection between the two ships. Always dicey, though salvage operators did it regularly. Tow truck drivers are a crazy lot of starfuckers, and as somebody who jumps out of perfectly good starships I feel like I’m qualified to comment: I have been involved in the retrieval and rescue operation on more than one salvage op gone bad in my time.

It would be embarrassing to have to be rescued ourselves. And of course my concern was all about professional pride.

As if she had been party to my thoughts, Sally said, We’re ready to start turning Afar. Please make sure you are braced for a change in vector and velocity, Llyn.

I braced against the handholds. Once the v is stable, would you foam up Tsosie and Hhayazh and send them over? I want to start treatment on the crew.

Absolutely. I’m checking to see if Afar has a way to talk to the… arachrab?

Walker thing?

Let’s stick with craboid, Loese said. What’s an arachrab, anyway?

She could have looked it up. But I guess she was flying the ship or something, so I told her. Or started to, anyway: Sally interrupted as I was getting to the part about the music.

Maneuver concluded.

I nudged myself away from the bulkhead and drifted back from the craboid. It didn’t move. I oriented to the same attitude and plane as (what I had arbitrarily decided was) the front of the walker. It did have an odd aesthetic. I couldn’t figure out if all those weird, rose-prick barbs were functional or decorative. Maybe if I knew what syster had built it, I would have a better idea what their function was. Or at least I would know who to ask.

Maybe whatever built this thing thought rose prickles were pretty.

Sally, can you get these cargo bay doors open?

Working, she answered. Also figuring out how to fab a few hundred thousand liters of packing foam, given the materials at hand.

Big air spaces? I suggested.

You’re very funny.