Chapter 1
Callie floated, feet hooked
over a handrail in the observation deck, and looked through the viewport
at the broken ship beyond. The wreck hung motionless, a dark irregular
shape – a bit of human debris where no such debris should be. Was this a
crisis, or an opportunity? Every unexpected event could be one or the
other, and sometimes they were both.
The dead ship was long and
bullet-shaped, pointlessly aerodynamic, apart from a bizarre eruption of
flanges, fins, and spikes at one end that looked like the
embellishments of a mad welder. The wrecked craft was far smaller than
Callie’s own ship, the White Raven, a fast cruiser just big
enough for her crew of five people (or four, or maybe six, depending on
how you defined “people”) to live comfortably along with whatever
freight or prisoners they had to transport. If the White Raven was a family home, the wreck was more like a studio apartment.
Ashok
floated into the compartment, orienting himself with tiny puffs of air
that burst from his fingertips and heels – showy and unnecessary, but he
had a gift for turning simple things into engineering problems he could
solve in complicated ways. He hovered with his head near hers, sharing
her view – though it probably looked a lot different to him. “Oh
captain, my captain.”
She glanced at his complex profile and grunted. “You got new eyes?”
He shook his head. “These are wearables, not integrated. I’m giving them a test run before I implant them.”
“That’s almost cautious, by your standards.”
He
grinned, insofar as he was physically able. One of the lenses on the
array attached to his face rotated and lengthened toward the viewport.
“So do we get to crack the mystery ship open and see what’s inside?”
She went hmm, pretending she hadn’t already decided. “Last time I let you clamber into a wreck, you lost an arm.”
Ashok
held up his current prosthetic. The translucent diamond housing
revealed glimpses of the mechanical motion within as he flexed his hand,
which was really more like a nest of tiny, versatile manipulator arms.
“That was just an opportunity for an upgrade, cap. I say we fly over
with torches and cut a hole and poke our heads in and look around.” No
surprise there. Ashok believed in radical self-improvement, and every
mystery was a potential upgrade in waiting.
“I like the enthusiasm,
Ashok, but we’re still factfinding. This doesn’t look like any human
ship I’ve ever seen, and it doesn’t look like a Liar vessel, either,
despite all that weird shit on the stern. Didn’t the Jovian Imperative
try to solve its toxic waste problem by launching tubes full of poison
randomly into space? What if this is one of those?”
“Space is big, so
throwing bad stuff into it wasn’t such a terrible idea, as far as
terrible ideas go. But that’s not a waste container – our sensors
sniffed it thoroughly. No toxins or bad radiation. Besides, your boy
Shall just identified the vessel.”
“He’s not my boy,” she said, but she was too interested in the wreck to put much growl into the ritual denial. “So what is it?”
“Once
Shall filtered out all the weird stuff welded to the ship’s ass, the
profile matches a model in the historical database.” Ashok lifted his
chin, which, unlike the rest of his head, still looked like a baseline
human’s. “That, captain, is a goldilocks ship.”
Callie frowned. He might as well have told her it was a Viking longboat or an Apollo module. “From the bad old days? Before we had bridge generators?”
“A
genuine old timey antique. It’s gotta be about five hundred years old.”
Ashok gave himself a little spin, changing his orientation so she was
looking at his feet, because actually being still for any length of time
was outside his considerable skillset.
“A goldilocks ship. Wow. Weren’t they propelled by atomic bombs?”
“Pretty
much, yeah, at least the first wave, and this was one of the earliest
models launched. Looks like it’s had some modification since then,
though. The goldilocks ships were no-frills. They didn’t go in for
decorative S&M spikes.”
“Maybe a pirate crew found it and tried to make it look more badass?”
“That ship is old, cap. No pirate would want it for anything other than scrap, or to sell to a collector.”
“So
what’s it doing here? Goldilocks ships aren’t supposed to come back.
That’s the whole point. They took one-way journeys, way out, trips of
desperation and exploration. Now five hundred years later it’s just
floating in trans-Neptunian space? By cosmic terms it’s practically back
where it started.”
Ashok nodded. “That’s the big juicy mystery. No
way that ship came back from anywhere, right? It’s not like they had
Tanzer drives back then. They weren’t zipping around the galaxy. Unless
they found a bunch of plutonium lying around on their colony planet and
built more bombs to stick up the ship’s butt, there was no coming back.”
“No
mystery at all, then, Ashok. This is just as far as they got. The crew
took off on their brave voyage, reached the edge of our solar system,
suffered some critical failure, and… that’s it. Nobody ever expected to
hear from the goldilocks ships again, so no one went looking.”
“You
think that ship spent the past five hundred years drifting among the
iceballs out here and nobody noticed? With all the surveys and mining
vessels tagging everything even halfway interesting?”
Callie
shrugged. “You said it yourself. Space is big. The ship was just
overlooked. What’s the alternative?” The idea of this enigmatic ship
breaking down centuries ago was comforting, in a way, because failure
was common, plausible, and non-threatening, unlike most of the other
possible explanations.
Ashok wasn’t having it. “I don’t know what the
alternative is, but there’s something else going on here. Who made all
those modifications? Space vandals drifting by with buckets of epoxy and
loads of sheet metal? Outsider artists among the asteroids?”
“Seems unlikely.”
“And what about the energy readings? Parts of the ship are still warm.”
“I know. They were made to run a long time, the goldilocks ships. Some of them are still completing their journeys. Could just be some old systems ticking along in the midst of critical failures.”
“Nah,
these readings are weird, cap. The whole thing is weird.” Ashok sounded
quite chipper about it, as he did about most things. “It’s a mystery.
Mysteries are great. Let’s peel it open and see if it’s wrapped around
an enigma.”
“I hate mysteries,” Callie said, not entirely accurately.
“You always think it’s going to be a box full of gold, but usually it’s
a box full of spiders.”
Ashok made a noise that might have been a snort in a baseline human. “And yet you always end up opening the lid, don’t you?”
“What
can I say?” Callie unhooked her feet and pushed off toward the doorway
leading deeper into the ship. “I like gold more than I hate spiders.”
“Launching
magnetic tethers.” The voice in Callie’s headset had the clipped tones
of someone who’d grown up under Europa’s domes, which meant it was the
navigator Janice, and not the pilot Drake – he was from one of the
Greater Toronto arcologies, populated mostly by the children of
Caribbean immigrants, and his accent was a lot more melodious to the
captain’s ear.
Watching from the window in the airlock, her angle was wrong to see the metal tethers bursting from the side of the White Raven,
but seconds later Janice said, “Contact. Connection secure.” Janice
didn’t have a particle of romance in her soul, which was a good quality
in the person who was supposed to tell you where you were going and
where you’d been.
As soon as the airlock unsealed and yawned open,
Ashok launched himself out, snapping a carabiner on to one of the steel
lines that now attached the White Raven to the dark wreck a scant
thousand meters away. He would have spacewalked without any safety gear
at all if Callie had allowed it: he liked spinning to and fro in the
void with nothing but puffs of compressed air to get him back home, but
Callie insisted on a modicum of safety in her crew, at least in micro
terms. On the macro level, she sent them into danger all the time, with
herself at the front of the line. Space had a billion ways to kill you,
so you prevented the ones you could, and didn’t waste time worrying
about the ones you couldn’t. If you got hung up on a little thing like
the terror of the unknown, you might as well head down a cozy gravity
well and become whatever people were down there. Wind farm technicians?
Organ donors? Crime scene cleaners?
She attached her own line behind
Ashok’s, following at a suitable distance as he pulled himself along the
tether toward the wreck.
They made the journey in near silence, the only sound her own breath in her helmet. They didn’t need to talk. The White Raven
did a lot of contract security work for the Trans-Neptunian Authority:
skip-tracing, investigation, fugitive recovery, chasing down smugglers.
They dabbled in freight and salvage work when other jobs were lacking.
She couldn’t count the number of times she and Ashok had crept silently
up on a ship, not exactly sure what they’d encounter when they arrived.
Neither one of them had died yet, though Ashok had come close a few
times. If they ever perfected mind uploads, he’d be even more reckless
with his physical wellbeing: he’d doubtless jump at the chance to stop
half-assing it as a cyborg and go full robot.
They reached the wreck,
the dark curve of its hull smooth and cold before them, the towering
spikes all over the stern looming like a misshapen forest. Ashok’s voice
spoke in her ear, close as a lover. (What a terrible thought. She
wasn’t that hard up for companionship. She had access to useful
machines that didn’t come with Ashok’s cheerful obliviousness attached.)
He thumped the side of the wreck with his prosthetic fist. “The hull
looks intact. I’d like to get a look at that mess they’ve got where
their nuclear propulsion system should be. I guess you want to check out
the interior first, though?”
Callie had an elemental aversion to
slicing holes in hulls. That skin of metal was all that divided a bubble
of life and air inside from the emptiness all around outside, and she’d
spent her adult life living in places where a hull breach meant panic
at best and death at worst. “Janice, are we sure there’s nobody
alive on this thing?” Janice wasn’t just the navigator: she also ran
their comms and squeezed every bit of useful information out of the
ship’s sensor array.
“You can’t prove a negative, captain,” she said.
“But if there’s anyone on board, they aren’t transmitting or receiving
any communications, and we did everything short of knocking on the door
and yelling ‘Hello, anybody home?’ You two could try that next. There is a strange set of energy signatures, so some systems might be functional. Could be life support. No way to tell from here.”
Callie’s
executive officer Stephen, who was also the ship’s doctor, joined the
conversation, his voice a sedate rumble. “I’ve been doing some research.
If the ship really has been out here since the first wave of goldilocks
ships took off in the twenty-second century, the crew could still be
alive, in cryosleep.”
“Oh, damn. They still used cryosleep back
then?” People didn’t do a lot of centuries-long voyages anymore – the
bridges had made such projects seem pointless, for the most part – but
there were better options for human hibernation nowadays, with stasis
fields and induced zero-metabolism comas. Cryosleep was a lot less
reliable, from what she’d learned in history class, and could have
short- and long-term neurological impacts on those who went through the
process… if they could be successfully thawed out at all.
“Somebody
made modifications to the ship and left it here, though,” Ashok said.
“The original crew, or someone else. The joyriders could still be on
board. Maybe it’s Liars. You know they like to tinker with things.”
“Do
they now? You don’t say.” Drake’s accent was melodic, but there was a
spiky edge to his tone that made Callie wince. Ashok was tactless
because he was clueless, not malicious, but it took a special failure of
compassion to talk about Liars that way when Janice and Drake were on
the line. They’d experienced the Liar predilection for technological
improvisation firsthand.
“Settle down, children,” she said. “Mommy’s working now.”
Stephen
chuckled over the comm. When it came to running the crew, Callie was
the stern disciplinarian, and he was the deep well of patience. She
pressed her gloved hand against the side of the ship, imagining she
could feel the cold through the thick layers of fabric and insulation.
“If there’s someone awake on this boat, they had ample chance to
announce themselves. See if you can get inside the nice way first,
Ashok, but if not, slice away.”
Ashok floated close to the hull,
sliding both his gloved hand and his unprotected prosthetic one around
the airlock until he found a panel he could pry open. Filaments sprouted
from his mechanical hand, and he hummed to himself over the open comms
channel as he tried to convince the ship’s ancient and rudimentary
control systems that he was authorized to open the door. “Ugh. This is
like trying to punch soup.”
Callie considered. “Punching soup would
be pretty easy. Assuming it wasn’t too hot. I’ve punched lots of things
worse than soup.”
“Yes, fine, but punching soup wouldn’t accomplish much, is what I’m saying… ah. There it is. Have I told you lately that I’m a genius?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t usually listen when you talk.”
“I’m
really sad the door opened for me. I’ve got a new integrated
laser-torch I wanted to try out in the field. Maybe next time.”
The
hatch unsealed, and Ashok grabbed a recessed handle and hauled it open.
Callie turned on her helmet light and looked into the airlock beyond.
Ashok gasped – it was almost a shriek – and then coughed to cover it.
“I
thought they were bodies for a second, too.” Callie watched a couple of
old-fashioned, bulky gray spacesuits float in the airlock, but they
were empty, their helmets hovering nearby. Callie unhooked from the
cable, clambered into the ship, and deftly stowed the suits out of the
way in the sprung-open locker they’d probably escaped from. Ashok came
in after her, and then sealed the door.
“We’re inside,” she told the comms.
“Your heart rate’s up a bit,” Stephen said. “Is the ship full of space monsters?”
“I assume so. How are Ashok’s vitals? I thought he was going to faint when we saw a vacuum suit float by.”
“Ha ha.” Ashok peered around the dark with his multi-spectrum lenses.
“His
vitals seem fine, but since he installed those hormone pumps to
regulate his physiological responses, it’s impossible for me to tell
what’s going on with him based on his suit data. He doesn’t need a
doctor, he needs a small engine repair shop.”
Ashok was normally
happy to trade banter, but he could focus when the need arose, and he
was working on the control panel for the interior airlock door now.
“There’s pressure on the other side, cap. I’ll sample the air, see if
it’s breathable.”
“Ugh. I might leave my helmet on anyway. These little ships always smell like recycled farts.”
“People
on ice probably don’t fart too much, but suit yourself.” The airlock
hissed as the pressure equalized, and after a few minutes a light above
the door turned green and there was a whoosh of seals
unfastening. After the inner door swung open Ashok entered a dim
corridor, his helmet light shining on blank gray walls, and he held up a
finger like someone planetside trying to feel which way the wind was
blowing; there were sensors embedded in his prosthetic digits. “Hmm. A
little oxygen-rich for my taste, but if we don’t play with any open
flames, we should be OK.” He unhooked the latches on his helmet, removed
it, and took a tentative breath. “Smells fine. Not as good as the
spinwise gardens on Meditreme Station, but it’ll do.”
Callie took off
her own helmet and sniffed. The air was stale, but fine. It didn’t
smell like death or burning, which she found reassuring. “I guess it
won’t kill us.”
Ashok glanced at her. “Your nose is a feat of
structural engineering, cap. I bet you can smell all the way out to the
asteroid belt.”
“That’s big talk coming from a one-armed man with a
computer stuck to his face.” She tapped the side of her admittedly
considerable nose. “This is the Machedo family pride. Signature of a
noble lineage. Some say it’s my best feature.”
“Everything is somebody’s fetish.”
“Do you think making fun of your captain’s nose is a good idea?”
“No, but it’s no worse than my other ideas. Like poking around in ancient spaceships full of zombie space suits.”
The
banter and insults were a form of whistling in the dark. For Callie,
every disabled, drifting, battered, or broken ship was a reminder of the
fate that could await her own crew if she made the wrong decision, or
ran into a situation where bad decisions were the only ones available.
Ashok
took the lead, his light sweeping back and forth across the corridor to
illuminate every step. He was doubtless peering around with other, more
advanced senses, too, so they might get some warning if there were
nasty surprises lurking. “Shall managed to find some old interior
schematics for ships like this. There’s only one set of living quarters,
since the crew was mostly expected to be frozen, with the ship waking
one of them up for a day every year or so to do a manual check of the
systems. Most of the space is given over to supplies – seeds and embryos
and communications equipment, tools, crude old-school fabricators.
Maybe we can find a collector interested in obsolete pre-Liar
technology.” He stopped by a closed metal door. “The cryochamber is
through here.”
Callie hit the button by the door, but nothing
happened, not even the whine of a mechanical failure. The ship was
pulling power from somewhere, for something, but apparently not for
opening doors. Ashok shrugged, then worked the fingers of his prosthetic
hand into the minuscule crack where the door met the wall. He could
exert a startling amount of pressure with those fingers, and the metal
squealed and shrieked as it slid forcibly along its groove and
disappeared into the wall. The room beyond wasn’t entirely dark: a faint
blue glow shone off to the left. Most of the cryopods were dark, but
the instrument panel on the last one in the row was illuminated.
“Do
you think they made the pods look like coffins on purpose?” Ashok took a
step inside. “As a way of getting the people inside used to the idea
that they were probably going to die on the trip?”
There were six
pods, each roughly rectangular and big enough to hold a human, but they
didn’t make her think of coffins. They reminded her more of big chest
freezers – which, in a way, they were. Five of the pods were open and
empty, which gave her a chill right up her spine and into her backbrain.
She couldn’t help but imagine dead crew members, blue-skinned, frost
rimed on their faces, lurching through the black corridors of the ship,
eager to steal the heat of the living.
“There’s someone on ice over
here.” Ashok stood by the last container, its glowing blue control panel
casting weird shadows on his already weird face. “Most of the power on
the ship has been diverted to maintaining life support and keeping this
pod functional, I think.”
Callie joined him and looked into the pod.
There was a window over the inhabitant’s face, and the glass wasn’t even
foggy or covered in ice, the way cryopod windows inevitably appeared in
historical immersives. Artistic license. The figure inside was a petite
woman with straight black hair, dressed in white coveralls. She looked
like a sleeping princess (peasant garb aside), and something in Callie
sparkled at the sight of her. Uh oh, she thought.
“Can we wake her up?” she said. Not with a kiss, of course. This wasn’t a fairy tale, despite the glass casket.
Ashok
shrugged. “Sure. We can try, anyway. The mechanisms all seem to be
intact, and Shall says the diagnostics on the cryonic suspension system
came back clean. Want me to pop the seal?”
“Let’s get Stephen over
here first in case she needs medical attention.” Callie activated her
radio. “XO, get suited up and come over. We’ve got a live one on ice.”
Stephen
groaned. He didn’t like EVA. He preferred sitting in a contoured
acceleration couch and listening to old music, and only showed real
enthusiasm for physical activity during his religious devotions. “Isn’t
it bad policy for the captain and the executive officer to leave the ship at the same time?”
“He’s
right.” Drake’s voice was amused. “With both of you off the ship,
leaving me and Janice unsupervised? We could get up to anything. The
only thing keeping me from crashing us into the nearest icy planitesimal
is your strong leadership. Janice, hold me back.”
Callie clucked her
tongue. “It’s only a thousand meters, Stephen. I think we’ll be OK.
Ashok and I will finish checking out the ship while you come over.”
Their
survey didn’t take long. The cargo area was a mess – the seed banks
seemed fine, but the refrigeration for the more fragile biological
specimens had failed. They both put their helmets back on, because the
stench was bad in there. There was no sign of the missing crew members.
“What
the hell happened here?” Callie floated in the dim cargo hold, scanning
the walls. It looked like an ugly, irregular hole had been cut in the
ceiling and subsequently patched.
“The crew went somewhere, woke up,
welded a bunch of crap all over their stern, one of them got back on
board, set a course for Trans-Neptunian space, and went back into
hibernation.” Ashok fiddled with the buttons on an ancient fabricator,
meant to build machine parts on a colony world the ship had never
reached. “The ‘what’ is pretty clear. The how and why are totally
mysterious, but if we can wake up the ancient ice mummy back there,
maybe she’ll have some answers.”
“She’s more like Sleeping Beauty,” Callie said. “Mummies are gross.”
“Beauty, huh? You see something you like back there, cap?”
“Shut up. She’s a thousand years old.”
“Five hundred, tops, and she doesn’t even look it.”
“Shut
up double.” She waved him away. “See if you can get any sense out of
the ship’s computer, especially the navigation system, and try to find a
crew manifest. It would be nice to know where this ship’s been… and who
our sleeping beauty is.”
“I’d rather see what’s going on with the propulsion system. Engines are way more fun than cartography and human resources.”
“You
can tinker after you gather intel. Shoo. Do as you’re told.” She
returned to the cryochamber, where Stephen had arrived and was now
stooped, examining the control panel on the one active pod. “What do you
think?” she said. “Is she going to survive?”
Her XO shrugged.
Stephen was a big man, and his default expression was doleful, so he
tended to resemble a depressed mountain. “She’s frozen. We’ll see what
happens when we thaw her out.” He activated something on the panel, and
they both stood back as the cryopod rumbled, the lid sliding down and
icy vapor pouring out in a condensing plume of fog.
“The system
should be warming her up now.” Stephen seldom sounded excited, and he
was hardly vibrating with enthusiasm now, but he did sound
interested: for him, that was the equivalent of jumping up and down with
glee. “These cryogenic procedures are barbaric – they’re on par with
bloodletting and trepanation, medically speaking – but from what I’ve
read, after she’s returned to a reasonable temperature, her heart will
be jumpstarted with electricity or adrenaline or both. Apparently the
initial reaction can be quite dramatic–”
The sleeper screamed and
jolted upright, clouds of vapor eddying around her. Some collection of
straps and restraints around her waist and legs kept her from floating
up out of the pod, but her upper body was free. She stared around, eyes
wide, then reached out, grasping Callie’s gloved hands in her bare ones,
and pulled the captain close.
“First contact!” she shouted, loud enough to make Callie turn her head away. “We made first contact! I had to come back, to tell everyone, to warn you, humanity is not alone–” She stopped talking, her mouth snapping shut, and then her eyes rolled up and her body sagged.
Callie squeezed the woman’s unresponsive hands. “Is she dead?”
Stephen
floated closer, removed his gloves, and touched the woman’s throat.
“No, there’s a pulse. The jolt that started her heart shocked her into
consciousness, but it wasn’t enough to keep her awake. There are a lot
of drugs in her system. Some were keeping her healthy while she was in
hibernation, and some are trying to bring her metabolism and other
systems back up to baseline. She’s going to be sluggish for a while.
I’ll examine her more thoroughly back on the White Raven, but I
don’t see any immediate cause for concern.” He paused. “For someone born
in the twenty-second century, she’s doing quite well.”
Callie let go of the woman’s hands and pushed herself away from the pod to float near the center of the room, considering.
“So.” Stephen peeled back the sleeper’s lids and shone a light into her eyes. “After she wakes up, do you want to tell her we’ve known about the aliens for three hundred years, and her first contact bombshell is old news?”
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