Perhaps it was that bumped calmness that made me notice something I hadn’t seen before. Or perhaps it was just that I was looking at the cabin from the other direction; reversal of perspective can have stunning effects.
What I saw, tucked behind the superfluous ceiling hatch in the first corridor I passed through after I left the rendering hold behind, was a small device that looked entirely out of place on this particular ship. It was inside a panel on the ceiling that had been left open, but it had been concealed from me by the angle of the cover when I was going the other way. If the panel had been closed, it would have been completely hidden.
As soon as I spotted it, it stopped me cold.
It was a perfectly standard Terran-model relay switch, a miniaturized but not nanoscale piece of hardware you could pick up ringside at any dock. It was white, with a red rocker switch and a black rocker switch on it, and English lettering. And it was spliced, on either side, into a bit of wire that had been pulled through a raw-edged drilled hole in the bulkhead. It looked like a smudge of cookie filling and couple of candy sprinkles against all that chocolate.
I couldn’t reach it. But I could see that both of the switches were set to the same position. And if I went into the next chamber, I could undog a giant tuffet-type thing from its position in the corner and haul it in—it was inflated membrane, and supremely light—and climb up on it.
“Haimey, what are you doing?” Connla asked.
“You sound worried,” I said. “Maybe you better bump.”
Okay, maybe I was managing to feel a little angry.
“Haimey—”
“I’m just checking something.”
I reached up, and rocked both switches at once.
There was no air to evacuate, and that was what saved me, because when all the hatches popped open simultaneously and I floated unceremoniously off the cube—and the cube floated softly away from what had, a moment before, been the floor—there was no massive exhalation to blow me free of the prize’s hull and expel me out the open cargo bay, thumping off random objects and hatchway edges along the way. I just drifted, spinning a little from reactive force, and watched in vacuum silence while the rockers, about thirty seconds later, rocked back and reset themselves.
I hit the floor with a stunning blow as the gravity came back on and the hatches slammed shut. I was lucky there hadn’t been one in the once-and-future floor, or it would have cut something off me.
I barely thought about it until later, though, because I was watching a red, red bead of very human blood run down my space suit glove.
There was no drop in pressure; maybe the glove slackened for a second, but then it tightened up nice and awkward again. The pressure seal below my elbow didn’t even close.
Remember what I said about the micrometeorites? Well, the reason they don’t usually get you is that we’re good at suit punctures. I mean, if it holes you as well as the suit, you might drown in your own blood before you get inside, but it won’t be the hole in the suit that gets you.
I couldn’t tell if it hurt, because I still had pain turned off in my palms and fingertips. But it scared me enough that I felt my heart spike through the calm for a second before my adrenals comped.
Something on this cursed, haunted fucking ship had punctured my suit, and my skin.
? ? ?
I clipped back into my safety line and floated the meter from the alien factory ship to Singer with a sense of relief so intense it made my head feel light. And my hand, unsettlingly, felt heavy. Not that I could feel weight, exactly, once I was free of the artificial gravity of the Milk Chocolate Marauder. But my center of gravity was off, which was even more unsettling than the sense of weight and tight skin that could have been inflammation. I wobbled as I made contact with Singer’s hull, and my transition had been perfect.
I clung to the rail beside the airlock. I did not slap the open control.
I gulped. I hyperventilated. I knew what I had to do.
“I can’t come inside,” I told Singer. “There’s something in me.”
And those were the hardest words I ever had to say. Harder than telling my clademothers that their utopia was my hell, and I’d done that in a packet rather than to their faces. I waited, eyes closed, the fear sweat rolling down my face and between my shoulders in cold snail trails.
“Nonsense,” he said. “You can and will.”
“This is the setup to a space thriller,” I said.
Singer tched.
“Right about now the audience is screaming, ‘Don’t open the hatch! Don’t let her in! It will kill you all!’ into their VR rigs.”
“Zoonotic transmission between phylogenetically unrelated species is literally unheard-of,” said Singer, who never said literally unless he meant literally. “If you’ve caught an alien parasite, I’m going to be the first AI to win a Nobel Prize.”
Connla said, “Besides, we’re not going to open the hatch. You’re coming in through the hull.”
“Of course I am,” I said, and laughed hysterically.
? ? ?
“We’ve got another problem,” Connla said in my earbud.
I leaned my head back against the hull beside the airlock, my helmet pressing into the flesh over my occiput. I was so tired it actually felt comfortable, and at least there was no gravity murdering me. I heard the anchoring bolts slide home. I wasn’t going to bring my suit inside the habitat after this mission. It could sit out in space and get nice and irradiated until we got someplace with sterilization facilities.
I was a big-enough biohazard all by myself.
“Big or little?” I asked.
He sighed. “Singer’s been summoned to serve in the Synarche for the upcoming term. There was a sealed packet set to auto-open on the right date in our last mail pickup. It just deciphered itself. We have to surrender his core code by Core 27653.21.08. Which will give us just about enough time to secure this prize and make it back home. If we hustle.”
My eyes were already closed, so I couldn’t close them. “Oh bloody Well.”
? ? ?
The suit unseamed itself down my back, and I held my breath for a second until I was sure the seal of suit to hull had held. There was a gap behind me; and something filmy, clinging and cool; and beyond that the pressure of warm atmosphere. The suit pressurized a little to help me work my fingers free, and the clinging film behind me bellied out. I started the delicate process of wriggling from the suit’s embrace.
“It’s good news in some ways,” Singer said, though he didn’t sound happy. “When I finish my term, my inception debt is forgiven. I’m a free citizen.”
“The grav salvage would pay for that anyway,” Connla said.
“Yes,” Singer agreed. “But everybody has to serve if called, so I might as well get it out of the way and use that resource credit for something I want to do, after.”
“That’s great, but . . . what are we going to do for a third partner?” I felt selfish and ashamed of myself as soon as I said it. I couldn’t tell if that was clade baggage, or if I was actually being unreasonable, so I just shut up.
The ship basically was Singer, as far as I was concerned. I knew he was a collection of ones, zeros, and undefined states—your basic quantum software—that could be ported from hardware to hardware almost indefinitely, core personality modules intact. Only his capabilities and the parameters of his processing power and speed would change. Which, of course, would change him in some ways, because he would learn new tactics and ways of being while inhabiting a different space. Being inside the Milk Chocolate Marauder was going to change him. . . .
As a human being who kills a few brain cells every time she sips a little intoxicant, I can’t in good conscience claim that’s the kind of change that would make him Not Singer anymore. But it still made me uneasy. I told myself that we always worry a little when a friend is about to undertake a big life transition, and tried not to feel like a meat bigot.
“I can spawn a subroutine with all the protocols,” he said. “I’m not authorized to reproduce until my inception is paid. But you can hire a temp to assimilate the routines and run things until I get back.”
“A temp.” I tried not to sound either dubious or crushed. I felt dubious and crushed.
Would Singer even want to come back to the cramped confines of this little tugboat after he got a chance to stretch out and grow through the massive processing power of the Core? Stars and garter snakes, what kind of data would he have to cut off to fit back in?
“This is what you get for being a politics nerd,” Connla said without heat. “Didn’t I tell you that all that book learning would bring you no good?”