Shipstar

Twenty-two

“These snakes are incredible,” Beth said to Karl. It was pleasant to have time to relax and just watch without feeling endlessly responsible. She had gotten used to that on the Bowl.

“If you’d asked me before I saw them, I’d have said more like improbable.” Karl could not take his eyes from the screen. “Hard to see how evolution worked out skills like this.”

They were watching some aft zone electronic repairs carried out in the narrow spaces near the magnetic drive modules. The snakes wriggled into spaces that would have taken her and Kurt hours to unsheath, disconnect, monitor, diagnose, and fix.

Karl called to them, “Go left at the condenser bank. They’re cylindrical drums with oil valves on the upper side, colored yellow. Then spin open the double diode—they’re the blue plates.”

The Maintenance Artilect took this from Karl’s mike and translated it into the sliding vowels and clipped sharp notes that made up the finger snake language. On the screen they both watched the snakes make the right moves. They each had a tool harness that they plucked small instruments from. With these they deftly inserted, turned, levered, and adjusted their way through one task after another, with speeds almost impossible to follow. The interior cameras were tiny light pipes and gave barely enough definition to make this work. All the while, the ship hummed on and occasional thumps and surges hampered the work. SunSeeker’s magscoop was operating close to its shutdown threshold already, and repairs while operating were the bane of all ships—but it had to be done.

Beth was out of her depth here—hell, I’m a field biologist!—but regs said nobody worked alone on ship maintenance, ever. Flight deck officers were full up, conning SunSeeker as close in to the Bowl’s atmosphere levels as they could, while still grabbing enough plasma from the star as they could. Just maintaining flight trajectories while watching for bogies was burning up all their attention.

Beyond tending to the hydroponics, certifying the air content, and helping turn algae into edible insects and porridge, Beth had nothing more to do. She helped a little with the preliminary “fault tree” analysis of this maintenance run, but that meant mostly giving instructions to the Artilect, which plainly knew far more than she did about what she was supposed to be doing. So she used a wise saying she’d learned from Cliff: Never pass up a chance to shut up.

Which was harder to do than she had thought. “Uh, can I help?” she asked for maybe the eighteenth time.

“No, I got it.” Kurt never took his eyes from the screens, and his headphones whispered constantly with updates from the Artilect. “Going well.”

Man of few words, bless him. At least Karl didn’t ask her over and over about living on the Bowl, like the rest of the watch crew.

The snakes wriggled some more, did scrub procedures on some parts, and with surprising speed got a discharge capacitor line back up to specs—part of the booster system that allowed them to amp their magscoop when needed. “Okay,” Kurt said, “come on back out. You guys need a break.”

The snakes dutifully turned and started on their tortured way back out of the engine labyrinths. “Amazing what they can do,” Kurt said, nodding his head. “Makes me wonder how we got by without them.”

“Barely,” Beth said.

“You’re bio, how did smart snakes ever evolve? They sure didn’t Earthside.”

“Something about their home world, one of them said. It had plate tectonics gone wild, crazy surface weather, storms that would take the paint off metal. So smart life stayed underground.”

“How about earthquakes? Volcanoes?”

“Their world had ‘bands of furious turmoil,’ they said—their language has considerable poetic power. Their landmasses butt against each other, kind of like Earth, with its baseball seam wrapping around the globe. Stay away from those, and life underground is somewhat easier, they learned. Where are you from?”

“Gross Deutschland. You?”

“Everyplace, mostly away from California—after the Collapse, we had plenty of migrants from there.”

“Okay, snakes got smart, but mein Gott they are wonders at handling mechanics.”

Beth grinned. “Look, we don’t even know why we’re relatively hairless, compared with the other apes. Why we walk on two legs and can outrun anything over distance. Why we’re so damn good at mathematics, at music—you name it. So understanding where an alien species came from is hopeless.”

The finger snakes came wriggling out of the narrow cap passage into the drive’s innards. Ordinarily she and Kurt would’ve used smart cables to get in there, running them with a control panel. To her astonishment, the snakes broke into a high, wailing song—chip chip, duooo, rang rang, chip, duoo duoo. Not entirely unpleasant, either. At least it did not last long. Then they formed a “wriggle dance” as Redwing called it, arcing over each other and forming intricate curves that included bobbing in and out of the circle, rolling over and doubling up to make O’s, then back into the throng—still singing, though less shrill. They finally ended up standing halfway erect on their muscular tails, their fingers wriggling at the dumbstruck humans in comradeship—or so whispered the Artilect in Karl’s ear.

Then, with good-bye hails, they went off to eat in the algae pits, where a repast cooked up by Beth earlier awaited.

Karl said, “They’re so coordinated. As if it was completely natural for them.”

“You mean instead of how humans do it—drill, train, discipline, drill some more?”

“Pretty much. The snakes—look at them, off to their home in the biospace. All together, chattering … Some species are better at collaboration than we are. How come?”

“We’re pretty new at it. About two hundred fifty thousand years ago Earthside, group hunting became more successful than individual hunting. That started the logic of shared profits and risks. Penalties kept alpha males from dominating. There emerged a kind of inverted eugenics: elimination of the strong, if they abuse power. And the cooperators won out.”

“Wow, you know this stuff. It’ll be fun seeing you work out all the aliens on the Bowl.”

Beth opened her mouth to say something modest but … he’d brought up what she’d already missed. Back onboard, but dreaming at nights of the Bowl. “Uh, yes. Look, it’s time for that self-cook in the mess,” she said.

Fred was talking while he pounded a wad of bread dough. Physical work opened him as well as anyone could, so Beth tried to pay attention. “I kept wondering, y’know. The Bowl map shows Earth as of the Jurassic period, when all of the biggest dinosaurs emerged. Y’know, apatosaurs and so forth. I think I finally have the sequence right.”

Beth nodded while she did her own kitchen work. He slammed the dough down and punched it for punctuation. “A variety of intelligent dinosaurs emerged first. Oof! They must have been carnivores. They invented herding. Uh! For millions of years they must have been breeding meat animals for size. Ahh!”

He looked around and realized that nobody was listening except Beth. “You mean all those theories about dino evolution are wrong?” This was interesting to her but apparently not to the others. The crowded kitchen buzzed with low conversation as they worked on aspects of dinner. Fred’s jaw closed with a snap. She knew the pattern—if people didn’t listen, he didn’t talk.

Karl handed Beth a handful of roasted crickets that reeked of garlic. “Try these. Crunchy.” He had pitched in with the cooking before she even got to the ship’s mess.

“Yum,” she said. Next came a basket of aromatic wax worms ready to cook. She tossed aside black ones: that meant necrosis. “They go bad fast; hell, I harvested them two hours ago,” she apologized. “The rest are pupating—just right.” Deftly she peeled back their cocoons and tossed them into the electric wok.

Captain Redwing came in and watched, standing straight and tall, smacking his lips slightly. “Wax moth larvae, a gourmet favorite.” The crew laughed, because he always pretended to like the food in the mess, no matter how implausible that was. Or else he ate alone in his cabin. After their last culinary disaster, a motley mashed-up dish everyone disliked and called Stew in Hell, he went on dry rations alone.

Karl turned and swept brown roasted crickets up, salted them—salt was easy to extract from the recycler—and with head tilted back, trickled them into his mouth. “How come when you have less to eat, it tastes better?”

“Less is more,” Redwing said. Everyone around him raised eyebrows. “Look, we’re in a tough spot, carrying forward maneuvers nobody trained for—” He nodded at Karl, Beth, Ayaan Ali. “—and exploring a big thing nobody even imagined. We’ve got to do with less until we see our way out of this.”

Everyone nodded. Redwing finished with, “So on to Glory—and let’s eat.”

The moth larvae weren’t all done. The crew watched the chubby white larvae sway and wriggle in delirious fits as the heat took them. Insect protein was simple to raise on algae and, if well cooked, had a zest that the rest of the menu lacked. Fresh from a skillet, they had a kind of fried fritter some called “pond scum patties” to go with them. The ship couldn’t afford the room or resources to raise muscle and sinew. Some crew came from the North American Republic and weren’t used to insect food, or else from experience regarded it as beneath their standards. A few weeks’ exposure to the stored rations usually fixed that. Some things, like the trays of gray longworms, few could bear to look at. Those Beth thought it best to grind into a paste for a fake pancake.

Beth spread the larvae into a frying pan, where they fell into a fragrant, fatty goo Ayaan Ali had made. They squirmed as they sizzled and then went still. She stirred them, thinking Amazing what you’ll eat when you have to … and then recalled things she had gratefully ingested when she had to on the Bowl. Sometimes, admittedly, while deliberately not looking at them …

A zesty aroma rose from the crusty larvae and as soon as she set them out, crew descended on them.

Redwing had saved a morsel for this moment, and now trotted out from his personal stock a bowl of—“Honey!”

That made the dish work. Everyone dug in. “As insect vomit goes,” Karl said, “not at all bad.”

Ayaan Ali asked Karl, “Done with that flight analysis?”

Karl barely slowed his eating to say, “Realigned the simulation, yes. Fitted it to isotope data from the scoop over the last century.”

Beth asked, “Meaning?”

Ayaan Ali said, “We’re still trying to understand why the scoop underperformed. It might help us fly it now in this low-plasma-density regime.”

Redwing said casually, “How’s the detector mote net working?”

Beth knew this was one way Redwing liked to turn social occasions into a loose staff report meeting. Certainly his approach made hearing tech stuff flung about a tad more appetizing.

Ayaan Ali gave herself an extra helping of sauce—much needed, since to Beth the woman seemed rail thin and low energy—and crunched up some more insect delicacies before saying softly to the others, “Karl and I deployed, on the captain’s direction, the diagnostic fliers we’d planned to use when we came into the Glory system. They would give us a good three-D map of the mag fields and solar wind when we came in.”

Redwing said, “So I decided we could send them out on a short leash. They can tell us details about the plasma turbulence, density ridges, things that we can’t get a good reading on inside SunSeeker’s mag cocoon.”

This, too, was a Redwing method—let the crew know there was logic behind his orders, but do so ex post facto. Playing along, Beth asked, “Short leash?”

Karl said, “I’m pretty sure we can reel them back in. They’re marvels, really, size of a coin but able to propel themselves by using tiny electric fields that let them sail on magnetic energy, to sense plasma and measure waves, and report back in gigahertz band. We’ve got them spread over a big fraction of an astronomical unit, sniffing out ion masses and densities, picking up plasma waves, the whole lot.”

Beth was impressed with SunSeeker’s abilities and kept quiet while the others kicked around their lingo. They loved their gadgets the way ordinary people cherish their pets. The thousands of “smart coins” sending back data were working well. That they could be fetched back, told to return home for reuse—amazing stuff. Plus they had useful results right now.

Ayaan Ali waved one of her augmented fingers, and a 3-D vision snapped into view, sharp and clear above their table. Hanging in air, it showed schematics of the Bowl in green, with SunSeeker a tiny orange dot swimming above it. The ship had to stay below the rim of the Bowl to avoid the defensive weapons there. But it also had to skate above the upper membrane that held in the Bowl’s atmosphere. That left a narrow disk of vacuum for SunSeeker to navigate, riding the plasma winds that came direct from the star. But more important, they got plasma spurts from the traceries and streamers that purled off the yellow-colored jet. The churning jet was big in the 3-D view, a slowly twisting nest of luminous threads that drove forward. As the crew watched the display, it shifted smoothly, since the Bridge Artilect tracked human eye movements to display what interested people. They witnessed the jet narrowing further as it flowed out, then piercing the Bowl cleanly at the back, through the Knothole and out into interstellar space.

Deftly Ayaan Ali pointed to the safety zone disk where SunSeeker flew and the 3-D dutifully expanded until they could see bright blue dots swimming in a grid formation all across the huge expanse. They were sprinkled over a distance of about an astronomical unit and when Ayaan Ali waved her hand, they answered with momentary violet flares, a ripple slowly expanding away from the ship’s position.

“They report in steadily, each staying a good distance from the others. We get plasma signatures in ample arrays. The coins feed on the plasma itself and change momentum by electrodynamic steering.” She could not restrain herself, beaming. “Beautiful!”

Karl nodded. “And they got good news, in a way. Remember, before we sighted the Bowl, our scoop underperforming? Turned out it was eating a lot more helium and molecular hydrogen than ordinary interstellar space has. Some of it got ionized by our bow shock and then sucked into the main feeder.”

“Ah, but it doesn’t fuse—got it,” Fred said. This was the first time he had spoken during the entire meal, and everyone looked at him. “Hard to tell from inside the ship that it wasn’t getting the right food.”

Beth didn’t see, but wasn’t afraid to ask, “So?”

“Those useless ions slowed us down, just pointless extra mass—and not fuel.” Fred dipped his head, as if apologizing. “Sorry if I get too technical. My obsessions don’t translate well.”

Everyone around the table laughed, including Redwing’s rolling bark. “Don’t put down your assets, Fred,” Redwing said. “Even that dinosaur idea.”

Beth appreciated Redwing’s methods but wanted to move this along, so she asked, “So our drive’s okay? We’re managing to keep it flying in interplanetary conditions, after all—which it was never designed to do.”

“That’s what the smart coins tell us. We’re actually getting more plasma than we would if we were in near-Earth space,” Karl said. “The jet snarls up some, so we get a bit more blowoff plasma from it.”

“That star isn’t behaving like a main-sequence one, either,” Redwing said. “I had the Astro Artilect look into it. It says we got the spectral class wrong at first because of the hot spot—it swamped some spectral lines. But as well, the whole jet formation active zone makes the star act funny.”

Ayaan Ali asked, “You mean those big solar arches we keep seeing? Big billowing loops. They dance around the hot spot, and every week or two they blow up in huge, nasty flares.”

“Right,” Karl said. “Those help build the jet, somehow—I really don’t see how to build so stable a pillar of plasma from the storm at its feet. Those storms give the jet its power and blow off other plasma, too. The jet’s base storms also spatter out a big, highly ionized solar wind—which helps us scoop up more fusion fuel, too.”

Beth nodded, feeling more than a bit out of it. “Pleasant to have some good news for once.”

Redwing said quietly, “So the smart coins tell us we have some room to maneuver. Good indeed.”

Smiles all round. Fred nodded enthusiastically.

A new flight deck officer Beth didn’t know well, one of the recent revivals, came into the mess. “Captain, we’re getting a tightbeam laser signal from the Bowl. Did a translation in digital format. It’s in Anglish. Visual’s cutting in and out. But we can tell who it is—it’s Tananareve.”

Twenty-three

As he sat waiting for the signal to stabilize, Redwing recalled the hammering noise that worked through the ship’s plates in the trial run, as acoustics bled from the ramscoop magnetic fields into the marrow of their bones. At the departure reception, a president of one of the major ship builders said lightly of the din, “To me, it’s the sound of the cash register.” It had been a major achievement not to deck him right there.

And even better later, when the medical teams were putting him under, to reflect that when he next opened his eyes, the ship builder would be dust.

Now the background rattles and pops and long rolling strums were second nature. He listened all the same, as a captain should. Now he heard a crackling and a carrier hum. Then “—hope this gets through.”

To Redwing, Tananareve’s smoke-and-whiskey voice said she had been through a lot, but the timbre of it spoke of her resolution. The screen was blank, but audio came with little pips and murmurs in the background, perhaps static, perhaps the background noise of some alien place.

“How goes it?” he said.

After a delay of only five or six seconds, her shaky voice answered carefully, “It goes.”

Then she coughed. “They … they here want me to talk to you about cooperating on a message. You’ve seen the feed from Glory, right?”

He saw a bottom-screen crawl line from the bridge comm system say they had picked up the full feed. The screen flickered, and then suddenly an image of Tananareve snapped into full color view. Against a black rock background, she looked haggard and pale but her eyes flashed with flinty energy. Nothing more in view. Her clothes were the field-issue pants, shirt, and jacket she had gone down in, looking beat up and patched. She also wore an odd gray shawl around neck and shoulders. There was dirt on the left side of her jaw and scratches along the neck. Overall she looked worn down.

“Yes, we have. Very odd,” Redwing said. Best to be guarded. He knew her captors were listening and wished one would step into view. He hungered for a feel of what these aliens were like.

“The Folk, these aliens call themselves, they want to work, to, uh, collaborate with us—with you, Captain—on making a message. Something to send to Glory.” Her eyebrows rose on you, and Redwing wondered what that meant.

Something in her voice had roughened, maybe from being in the field so long. It was Anglish with the corners knocked off. She laughed suddenly. “The civilization at Glory, they seem to think we’re running the Bowl. My, um, mentors, they want to leave it that way. Keep themselves in the shadows, at least until they know something about Glory. But they need our help for that.”

“Outstanding. What do they want to say to the Glory Hounds?”

“Captain, they’re still fighting about that. They’ll have to talk to us first.”

“That’s it? What about Cliff’s team?”

He could see conflict flicker in her face. So could Beth and Karl, sitting behind him, judging from the way they stirred in their seats. They were in Redwing’s cabin because he wanted to keep this first transmission from the aliens, after months of silence, from the rest of the crew. It was always a bad idea to let crew see policy being made, especially if it was on the fly, as this might have to be. “I … don’t know anything … about that.”

Her hesitations told more than the words. She was probably trying not to let the Folk know how much she knew. Then, to confirm his hunch, she very carefully gave him a wink with her left eye. Left: something wrong. A common code in visual reporting, all across the Fleet. Right meant things were right but more was to be said.

“So why don’t they let Cliff’s team go? And you?”

Hesitation, a side glance at whatever was directing her. “They need me as translator.…”

“And Cliff’s team?”

“And as for Cliff, they don’t know where he is.” A right-eye wink this time. What could that mean? That the Folk knew something but not enough to use?

“So if we work with them on a Glory message, what do we get?” It was time, he judged, to put something on the table. Let them go first.

“You are all welcome down here. There is plenty for us.” She said this straight, no inflection, staring straight at the camera as if this were a rehearsed line.

“Thanks, but mostly we want supplies for the ship. And information.”

“I believe they want to help with ship repairs.” Again the straight stare, no eye movement.

“We don’t need repair. We figured out that we’d been fighting their jet backwash for a century. Once we’re full up on ship stores, we’ll be on our way.”

For the first time, she showed a darting, skeptical squint of the eyes. “That isn’t what they have in mind.”

“Tell them we will exchange delegates, perhaps. We can’t house more than one or two—”

“They want you, Captain, for negotiations in person.”

“Not until they release you and Cliff’s people. They’ve been in the field a long time, need medical and some R and R. You, too, Tananareve.”

“I believe they have something more … lasting … in mind.”

“Such as?”

“They mentioned a generation or two. Enough time. They say, for species to get to know each other.”

“I’m a ship officer with orders to carry out. I’m conveying colonists to Glory and cannot change mission.”

Hesitation, side look, pursed lips. “I … gather they like to sort of collect species, to live here, to work with them.”

“I can’t spare people. Colonizing a whole planet takes teams, and they’re barely big enough as it is. Cut our numbers and then downstream both halves—those we left with you, and those we took—would get inbred.”

A pause, her eyes dancing, looking off to the side. “They … they say they find us very interesting.” The flat way she said it told him that she was also not saying a lot, and he would have to guess it. But what?

There came a sudden voice, swift chippering sounds underlaid by deep notes, as if someone was speaking in two tones at once. Redwing thought it was the first truly alien thing in this transmission—speech built like a symphony, with several elements rendering part of the message in different sliding tones, sometimes highs and lows scampering over each other. Some notes rang hollow, others full. Yet all this was also oddly resonant, as if the play of words—if the screeches, grunts, trills, and mutters were that at all—made a larger work of greater scale.

He really wanted to see who made that voice. The six-second delay was driving him nuts.

She considered for a moment, looking off camera, and then said slowly, “They welcome us with … total hospitality. We can live here. They will assign a huge territory to us and help us set up a civilization comparable to—” She paused. “—well, what we had Earthside.”

“Um,” Redwing said, keeping his face blank.

“And … from what I’ve seen, there are rules to keep this whole big habitat working. They impose … order. They’re very, uh, firm about that. Make a mistake here, and you could endanger the whole place.”

“Like any spaceship,” Redwing said. “Open a hatch the wrong way, and you die. Maybe everybody in crew dies.”

She nodded and her eyes slid briefly to her left, then back. “I think so. They do say we should know for the long run that there are generous upper limits on population. We could have territory bigger than Earth itself. Really, we could choose what part of this whole huge thing we wanted. I’d guess we’d probably want to be on the Great Plain, where it’s point eight gravs and pretty calm, I gather.”

“You make it sound pretty fine,” Redwing said in a flat voice, no inflection at all.

Her tongue darted out, and she looked uncertain. “It is, in its way.”

“We all have to come down? Leave the ship in some orbit?”

She paused. Redwing now sensed a presence near her, the target of her glances. Somehow from the small sounds of muffled movement, shuffles, and long slow breaths, he felt something nearby. The source of that strange voice, yes. Maybe more of them, several aliens watching, listening, no doubt knowing through their technology what he meant as soon as he said it. And what else would they get from this conversation?

“I … suppose so. They do want to study SunSeeker, they say. There are some aspects of the magnetic throat and drive they might be able to use. One of the Folk—a big one who seems in command, though it’s hard to tell, really—says the techniques we use may have been known a long time ago, and lost. So they’re interested.”

“Lost? How old is this Bowl?”

“They won’t say.” She frowned. “Maybe they don’t know.”

Beth and the others kept quiet as Redwing’s face furrowed with thought.

“And if we don’t like to stay long? And give over a lot of our people?”

“They say this aspect of our interactions is not negotiable. They must acquire some of us.”

“No deal,” Redwing said sharply.

“Then … there will be … suffering, they say.”

“We’ve come to threats pretty quick, haven’t we?” Redwing said with lifted eyebrows.

She gave him a quick nod. Then the screen went blank.

They sat in Redwing’s cabin a long time, watching to see if the signal came back on. It didn’t.