Monkey Suit

A lighthugger is a four kilometer spike of armour and ablative ice. That’s a lot of surface area to search for a lost crewman. Especially when the hull is a craggy, knotted labyrinth of jagged ornamentation and half-abandoned machinery, a place you could lose an army in, let alone a single hull-monkey.

My suit was the second best on Formantera Lady for hull operations, and it still took me three days to find Branco. We were a year out from Yellowstone and moving so close to the speed of light that the ship was flying through a storm of radiation and relativistic dust. I went out there time and again, only returning inside when the flux was on the point of frying either my suit or me. It was lonely, dangerous work. I could barely communicate with the rest of the crew, so for most of the time I was working with only stars and static for company. Having crawled my way back to the lock, I’d swap out as many of the damaged systems as I could before returning outside. The medichines in my body worked overtime dealing with the cumulative radiation exposure. Still I climbed back into the sweat-bucket of the suit and went outside again, over and over again.

And then—about a hundred metres above the starboard engine spar—I found him.

Branco was dead. It only took a single glance to confirm that. Under the one gravity thrust supplied by our C-drives, our ship had become a needle-sharp tower. Branco must have been on the long climb back to the lock when one of the hull’s encrustations had snapped off. It was only a small sliver of material, but it had daggered down with enough force to impale him. A million to one chance of it happening, and another million to one chance of him being in the wrong place when it did.

He had been standing on a ledge, and the spike had pinned him into place like some rare specimen of shiny-shelled beetle. It had entered his armour in the chest, just below his helmet connecting ring, emerged through the small of his back, and then penetrated the ledge, fixing him into position. He must have been looking up when it happened, leaning back to get a better view. Perhaps he’d felt the spike break off, the snap transmitted through the fabric of the ship, through the soles of his boots, into the suit. Branco had been supremely attuned to the moods of the ship, the way the hull rumbled and mumbled with varying stress loads. It was entirely possible that he had been responding to a subliminal signal, a warning premonition that would have by-passed conscious thought.

I must have stared in wonder at the spectacle for many minutes, horror mingling with astonishment. Of all the myriad ways for a human being to die in space, I doubted that Branco had ever contemplated this particular ending. Losing his footing, falling into the drive wake…being hit by a speck of interstellar debris…but not this. Not being impaled by the ship he had known and cared for since his recruitment. It wasn’t just wrong. It was savagely, cruelly wrong, as if the ship had been saving up this spiteful act for centuries.

I couldn’t just leave him there, of course. Having pinpointed his location, I returned inside, made temporary repairs to my own suit, then gathered cutting and hauling equipment and went outside again. I secured Branco with traction lines, then lasered through the spike, where it had pushed into the ledge. Then I dragged Branco, his suit, and the remains of the spike back to the lock.

Formantera Lady had lost a good crewmember, a man who had served it well. I had lost a man who had befriended me and helped my adjustment into shipboard life. Yet, as tragic as that was, I couldn’t avoid the realisation that his death had pushed me one rung up the hierarchy.

Branco had been chief hull-monkey. Now it was me.

“Fix the suit,” Captain Luarca said.

I blinked surprise. “Fix the suit?”

“You heard me, Raoul. Branco had unfinished business. You know what he was doing down there? Checking out a stress indication on the engine spar. I still need to know that engine isn’t going to snap away when we load it.”

We knew that Branco had reached the engine spar, even if he hadn’t made it back. He’d gone out with a full load of stress probes, and there’d been none on him when he came back inside. He must have sunk and drilled them before starting on his return journey, but with the recording systems on his suit fried by radiation, we couldn’t be certain.

“I can make modifications to mine,” I said. “Layer on some more armour. Harden the servos, build in more duration. We were planning to do it anyway.”

Luarca looked as skeptical as the plastic mask of her face allowed. She was one of the more extreme Ultras on the ship, but I had become adept at reading her expressions.

“How long?”

“A few weeks. Maybe a month.”

It was five days after Branco’s death. We had opened the suit and removed what was left of him. The Ultras had picked through the red slurry for anything mechanical that could be salvaged for further use. Then they’d put his remains into a coffin and ejected him into space, ahead of the ship. In fifty thousand years he’d be one of the few human artefacts to reach intergalactic space.

“I can’t wait weeks or months,” Luarca told me. “Not when we have another suit almost ready for operations. That spike left most of the unit undamaged, didn’t it?”

“There are still two massive holes to plug, through several layers of armour and insulation. And it took out dozens of circuits, air and coolant lines. He’d been reworking the plumbing for decades. It’s a rat’s nest.”

“I’m willing to bet it’ll take you a lot less time than bringing the other suit up to spec.”

“I thought about dismantling the suit, reconditioning the parts, stripping out some of the redundancy, putting it back together again…”

“So you could pretend it was a different suit, not the one he died in?”

She could read my face at least as well as I read hers. “Maybe that has something to do with it.”

“Ultras have their superstitions,” Luarca said. “But re-using a dead man’s suit isn’t one of them. We’ve a saying, in fact. A suit’s just another vessel. You wouldn’t have any problems about riding in the shuttle, just because Branco happened to use it once, would you?”

“It doesn’t seem like quite the same thing.”

“A question of degree, that’s all. You’ll adjust to our ways eventually, if you know what’s good for you.” Her jewel-like eyes clicked into close focus. “You do, don’t you?”

“I hope so.”

She placed one of her prosthetic claws on my shoulder. The touch was gentle, superficially reassuring, but I knew there was a power in those articulated alloy fingers that could crush bone.

“You were fortunate to leave Yellowstone when you did. Definitely more fortunate than the millions left behind, dealing with the Melding Plague. The last few transmissions we received, before the timelag became too acute, were distressing. Even for us, accustomed to a certain detachment from planetary affairs. But we’re all still human beings, aren’t we?”

It was a rhetorical question, and I knew better than to answer it directly.

“I appreciate my good fortune. I’m still grateful to you for recruiting me to the Formantera Lady. And I’ve no intention of letting down the ship.”

“Good, because we need that bill of health.” She lifted her cold alloy fingers from my shoulder. “I’ve no intention of waiting months to get it, either.”

Branco’s suit was a map of his life. Every significant incident had been recorded in a tiny cameo, painted onto the metal carapace in laborious, loving detail in the long hours when he wasn’t on-shift. Until now, with the broken suit spread before me, I’d never really had a chance to study those tiny pictures or guess at how they fitted together to form a narrative. Here was a battle scene, bulbous suited figures on the surface of an asteroid, fighting other bulbous suited figures against a sky of bright vermilion. Here was a ship burning from inside, against a star-wisped clutch of blue supergiants. Here was a picture of two fearsome cyborgs engaged in an arm-wrestling match, with onlookers crowding around them in some spaceport bar. I recognised one of the combatants as a much younger Branco, before time and space turned him into the man I’d met during my recruitment. How much of this was true to life, how much was exaggeration and invention, I had no idea, nor any great desire to find out. I had liked Branco and he had been kind to me, and it seemed right to treat these luminous figments as if they were truthful.

But now the suit was a wreck, and just to repair it meant ruining many of his paintings. I had to plate over some, weld over others. I thought of all the time he had put into them and felt myself complicit in an act of vandalism against his memory. But Branco wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, I told myself. He’d have wanted me to make the best use of the suit.

The mechanical repairs turned out to be the easiest of all. After sealing the punctures, I was able to restore pressure integrity and get the life-support mechanism working again. Air and thermal control came back on line without much difficulty. I got the waste recycler operational with only a little more effort. Confident that the suit would be able to keep me alive almost indefinitely, I then turned my attention to the motive power sub-systems, ensuring that the servo-motors were still functional and receiving energy. One by one I tested the limb joints and verified that the suit was still capable of moving itself. This was vital because the bulky, hard-shelled contraption was much too cumbersome to be operated by muscle power alone. For the kind of repair work Branco had often been engaged in, massive power-amplification had been essential.

But something still wasn’t quite right. When I finally sealed myself into the suit—telling myself that it was only my imagination that the suit still smelled of Branco—I couldn’t get it to move.

That wasn’t quite true. The suit moved, but only sluggishly. I had to start moving an arm or a leg before the suit responded and followed my lead. I recalled watching Branco traverse the hull with almost balletic grace, moving fluidly and quickly, and knew that what was missing here was something more than my own inexperience with this particular suit. The servo-motors were all good, and the power distribution and command lines were all functioning.

That meant the problem was in the volition box.

Most suits are capable of reading their wearer’s minds to some extent, anticipating movements before nerve-signals have time to reach muscle. A volition box goes further than that, though. It detects the readiness potentional, the rising electrical surge that happens in the brain several tenths of a second before we are consciously aware that we are about to do something. That gave the suit an edge, since it didn’t have to wait for Branco to know that he’d made a decision to move. It was tapping into his subconscious brain, bypassing the conscious part entirely. Tenths of a second might make all the difference in a crisis.

Not all Ultras are fond of volition boxes. They prefer the illusion of free will, the belief that their conscious minds are running the show. Branco either didn’t care, or cared more about getting the job done. It was the volition box that allowed him to skip and dance around the hull, like he was born to it. But now it wasn’t working properly.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised. A volition box has to train itself to read the precursor signals accurately, slowly adapting to the person inside. It does so by assembling a predictive model, what—back on Yellowstone—we’d have called a beta-level simulation. Instead of a piece of crudely automated machinery, the suit becomes a dancer, expertly attuned to its partner. And now I was expecting Branco’s suit, which over years and decades had adapted itself to him, to suddenly switch its allegiance to me. Obviously it wasn’t going to be that easy. It wasn’t that the volition box was resisting me, just that it was going to be a long time before it made the necessary adjustments.

My own suit didn’t even have a volition box, but swapping them wouldn’t have been an option anyway. The way Branco had modified his suit, switching one box for another would have been about as easy as performing a head transplant. If I’d had weeks or months I could have traced every dependency, but I simply did not have that time. Nor could I just switch the box out of the control loop and accept that the suit’s movements would lag a little behind my intentions. Branco’s augmentations were so convoluted that switching out the box locked the suit into complete immobility. Against my better judgement, I began to wonder if he’d actually made it purposefully difficult for anyone else to use the suit after him.

It occurred to me then, as it hadn’t done before, that there was a part of Branco still inside the box, maybe the last part of him that had any claim on life. By forcing the box to tune itself to me, rather than him, I’d be committing a kind of murder.

I could see Branco now, laughing at me for even thinking that way. And I felt faintly ridiculous that I’d even entertained the thought. The suit was a tool with his fingerprints on, that was all. Wipe them off, get on with the job in hand. All that remained of Branco was a dead body in a casket speeding towards Andromeda.

Yet no matter how much I kept telling myself that, I couldn’t stop thinking of the box as a holy receptacle, treasuring a tiny flickering spark, one that—with callous disregard—I was about to snuff out.

But I still had a job to do.

The climb from the nearest lock to the point where the starboard spar jutted away from the hull involved a kilometre and a half of nerve-racking descent. I’d seen Branco cross that kind of distance in half an hour, spidering his way down without a visible care, seemingly oblivious to the infinite, endless fall that would follow the slightest mistake. He knew the hull expertly, every ledge, fissure and crenellation, and his suit knew him just as well. Together the combination was almost magical. He seldom bothered with the cumbersome business of tethers and anchorages, preferring to place his trust in balance and the suit’s own musculature. Of necessity, my own descent was a much more protracted and inelegant affair. The suit moved, but each action was accompanied by a maddening timelag, as if the suit were a dull servant that needed to think hard about every command it was given. I used lines wherever possible, and because I did not yet know which ledges and handholds were secure and which were not, I placed as little faith as possible in the fabric of the hull. I reminded myself that even Branco’s knowledge hadn’t protected him in the end.

At last—it had taken nearly four hours of painful progress—I arrived near the engine spar. My relief at reaching my destination was tempered by the realisation that the suit was, if anything, becoming even less willing to accommodate my movements. I ran a check on the servo-motors, and they were all still operating within normal limits. So that couldn’t be the answer. Nor did there appear to be much wrong with the nervous system, which only left the volition box.

I didn’t know what to make of that. I could understand it not being well adapted to me at the start of the excursion, but I saw no obvious reason for it to worsen. If anything the suit should be slowly easing into the habits of its new wearer.

Fine; it was something to worry about when I got back inside. For now, I estimated that the rate of decline was not so rapid that I wouldn’t be able to complete my inspection and climb back. But the margins were tight and I didn’t have time to delay.

One thing I now knew: if Branco had reached this part of the ship during his inspection tour, he hadn’t seen fit to drill any holes. There’d been permanent sensors installed here once, but over time they had gradually fallen into disuse, creating one of several huge blindspots in the ship’s coverage of itself. I couldn’t see any sign that Branco had installed the replacement sensors he’d gone out with.

But since he hadn’t returned with them, where were they?

Making sure I was secure, and working against the dogged resistance of the suit, I drilled into the hull and emplaced the sensors I’d brought with me. They not only measured the integrity of the hull at the point where each was sunk, but spoke to each other to ascertain slow creepage due to spreading faults in the underlying material. One by one, the sensors bedded in and reported back to the readout on my helmet. The first few indications were reassuring, but I was careful not to jump to conclusions. If there was indeed a weak spot around this engine spar, I’d know soon enough. Sweat stung my eyes as I worked hard to complete the simplest movement. Perhaps I should not have been so confident about my ability to get back to the airlock. They could rescue me if I jammed here—my whereabouts were known—but that would mean cutting a new route through from the inside, and Captain Luarca would not be too pleased about that.

The last of the sensors reported in. Green on almost all the stress indications, with only one of the devices showing any hint of hull weakening. That was well within expectations. Whatever happened to Formantera Lady between here and her destination, there was no way this engine spar was going to snap off.

I’d done what I came to do. I called in to give the news.

“Integrity’s good, captain.”

“You’re sure?”

As always, the signal was so poor that it sounded like Captain Luarca was light years away, her voice fading in and out of a howl of static.

“Nothing that won’t hold until we reach Teton, and probably for a few more transits after that. There’s no reason for the crew not to start sleeping now.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said, letting me know that I’d presumed rather too much in issuing a recommendation. But she softened her tone by adding: “You did well, Raoul. Branco would have been satisfied.”

Satisfied, I thought. Not pleased, not proud. Just satisfied. She was right, as well.

“Now get back inside. The sooner we’re all dreaming, the happier I’ll be.”

“I’m on my way,” I said, trying to ignore the arduous task that lay ahead of me.

I surveyed my handiwork for one last time, re-checked the readouts on the sensors, then took a step off the ledge where I’d been standing.

Or at least, tried to. I was still secured, but the line should have spooled out enough to let me begin the ascent. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the suit wasn’t letting me climb. Whenever I tried to initiate the movement, it felt as though I was trying to wriggle inside a solid steel tomb. This was wrong. This was worse than wrong. Full paralysis had come on much faster than I’d anticipated. It was almost as if the suit had been waiting for me to complete the sensor checks before springing this on me.

“Captain Luarca,” I said. “We have a problem. I think the suit’s…”

But some instinct told me I was speaking into an unlistening void. I halted and waited for her response. It didn’t come back. She couldn’t hear me.

The suit wasn’t just freezing up on me. It had turned mute and/or deaf, severing my contact with the rest of the crew. Panicked, I wondered if this was how it had been for Branco. I’d assumed that he had been working quite normally until the spike hit him; that he’d only looked up an instant before it arrived, spearing down out of the blueshifted heavens. What if I was wrong about that? What if he’d been stuck in that position for hours and days, the suit refusing to move? He couldn’t have known that the spike was going to snap off, could he?

I forced calm. That wasn’t what had happened. This had been Branco’s suit until the end, the suit that had been his for most of his career on the ship. He’d painted it with love and affection. The volition box was making life difficult for me, but that was only because it had been so brilliantly, beautifully attuned to Branco.

Don’t blame the suit, I told myself. It didn’t kill him, and it’s not trying to kill you.

I don’t know how long it was before I tried moving sideways, instead of up. All of a sudden it was easier. Not as if the suit had suddenly decided to stop fighting me—there was still a lingering stiffness—but at the very least as if I’d found a path of least resistance. Perhaps the adaptive process was finally taking hold. But when I’d traversed sideways for several dozen paces, I was still unable to climb any higher. The suit was content to let me move in one direction, but not in another.

I think, even then, I felt a prickle of understanding.

Fighting the suit, trying to force it to let me return to the lock, would get me nowhere. Which left two possibilities. I could stay where I was, until such time as I was rescued. Or I could go where the suit allowed me.

Go, in fact, where the suit wanted me to go.

So I did. And it turned out that climbing down was even easier than moving sideways, and that there was a certain trajectory, a certain path, that was easiest of all. I followed it, still exercising great care, until it had taken me far beneath the engine spar. Still the suit wanted me to continue, even as the hull reached its point of maximum width and began to taper again, with the lighthugger’s blunt tail only a few hundred metres below. It was one thing to climb down a wall that was very steep; quite another to climb one that was actually leaning over from vertical. One slip, one miscalculation, and I’d see that wall rush past me, pulling gradually away until the ship had left me behind.

Perhaps that’s what it wants of me, I thought. It’s going to lead me all the way down to the tip, and force me to step off into the void. Could a suit become so attached to its wearer that the death of that wearer actually pushes the suit into madness?

But the suit wasn’t mad. And I knew it when I saw the hull begin, quite unexpectedly, to curve inwards in the form of a circular crater. Something must have hit us. The crater was perhaps ten metres across—a tiny, almost insignificant dent compared to the scale of the ship. And it was even less shallow than it was wide. The suit led me to the edge of this depression, and I looked into its heart, with no idea in my head as to what I might find. Why had the suit brought me here? It was the least vulnerable part of the ship, the one region where an impact stood little chance of doing any damage. No one lived down in those levels, so even a depressurisation event wouldn’t have harmed any of the crew.

But then I saw what was in the middle of the crater, and I understood.

Something twinkled there. It was a little silver nugget, a chrome-plated pebble. But the pebble had begun to extend fine, silvery tendrils out from its core, tendrils that groped their way out before plunging into the fabric of the ship. I didn’t need to be told what it was. I hadn’t seen the effects of it with my own eyes, but I’d seen enough on the transmissions from Yellowstone.

Melding Plague. Some tiny flake of it had hit the ship, lodged in tight and begun to grow. It could only have happened during our departure from the colony, in the turmoil and chaos of the outbreak. There had been ships smashing into each other as they fled the parking swarm; habitats around Yellowstone ramming one another as they lost orbital control. We thought we’d got away clean, but at some point—before the engines had given us enough speed to outrun such things—this little speck had found Formantera Lady.

Left unchecked, it would transform the entire mass of the ship into something weirder and stranger than any Ultra had ever dreamed of. We knew, because we had picked up reports of it happening to other lighthuggers. And it wouldn’t stop at the ship. The plague made no distinction between machines and people. It viewed them with perfect equanimity, equal grist to its transformative mill. From me, with my blood running thick with medichines, to Captain Luarca, with her plastic mask and alloy fingers, we’d be none of us immune.

Fortunately for us, though, Branco had found the impact spot. I knew this because I could see where he had drilled and inserted the sensors around the crater’s perimeter. He couldn’t fight it, not there and then. But he could draw a margin around it, measure the speed with which it was eating his ship. And then return inside for the high-energy weapons and tools which could do something.

He must have been coming back inside when the spike took him.

Formantera Lady survived, of course. Once the suit had shown me the danger, it relinquished its fight. I resumed my climb, and was halfway to the door when communications were restored. I told Captain Luarca about the discovery. I chose my words very carefully.

Later, when the infection had been fusion-sterilised, and the rest of the tail swept for other spore sites (there turned out to be none), she took me aside and asked a question.

“You said ‘we’, Raoul.”

“I did?”

“When you called in. You said ‘we’ found something. As if there were two of you out there.”

“Branco led me to the infection site,” I said.

I waited for her to query this, to ask me to explain myself, but instead her plastic mask gave a nod of quiet understanding, as if I had told her all that was necessary. “The volition box,” was all she said.

I didn’t understand then, and I don’t understand now. The box was supposed to hold a model of Branco, a predictive simulation capable of anticipating his next move. Something like a beta-level, but only in the crudest sense. It couldn’t possibly have emulated him with enough thoroughness to know that he had unfinished business, a vital job that still needed to be done.

Could it?

“It was resisting me,” I said, still trying to think my way through what had happened. “Now it isn’t. I’ve taken the suit out again and it’s gradually becoming easier to use. It won’t take long, now. It’s learning quickly.”

It was not necessary to add the corollary, which was that my gain meant the guttering out of whatever part of Branco had still been trapped inside the volition box.

“He served us well,” Captain Luarca said. “Right until the end. We won’t forget him.”

“And the suit?”

“Just a vessel,” she said softly, as if speaking to herself. “That’s all.”

She was right, I suppose. But later, when I had enough confidence with a brush, I added a cameo that showed the last good deed he did for Formantera Lady: Branco standing on the hull, looking into the crater where the spore had lodged. The work wasn’t up to his standards, but I liked to think he’d have forgiven me for that.