I asked, “But from what?”
“If I knew that,” the shipmind responded dryly, “it wouldn’t be much of a distraction, would it?”
That was when the hull began to sing.
CHAPTER 26
IT STARTLED ME BUT DID not at first surprise me. It had been a long time since I heard Singer belting out opera or show tunes or classical metal, music that used the full range of his synthesized voices, but it wasn’t as if his singing had been an unusual thing. I paused in my work a moment to appreciate the music and noticed that the constable on duty in the command cabin seemed unsettled by it.
Opening my mouth to reassure them, I realize that I was unsettled too. The song I heard was no relation to human voices or familiar instrumentation.
In a word, it was… alien.
It was also pretty, and it scared the ever-loving shit out of me. The cats flat-out hated it. So much so that Bushyasta woke up and sat bolt upright on her haunches, ears pinned back and forelegs dangling. Her little head swiveled as she tried to pinpoint the source of the noise—but the noise was omnidirectional.
Bushyasta’s eyes, I noticed, were bright green, flecked with amber. I didn’t usually get to see them enough to have remembered how striking they were.
Mephistopheles, as always more direct in her methods (and a creature of action), zipped around the observation deck twice, putting holes in my calf as she ricocheted off me in huge, low-gravity bounds before bolting to refuge under one of the ledges near the windows that might have been benches or might have been plant stands.
The music was not so much atonal as layered in weird harmonies and intervals that didn’t quite mesh. Or maybe they worked, and it was just that they were so very different from my experience and expectations. The hull reverberated and chimed and the music grew. It had patterns within it, but not rigid ones. Instead, they were the various and periodic patterns of speech, of solar systems, of biological systems, of galaxies.
“Music?” Connla asked. “Are we on hold?”
Bushyasta, in the most exuberant burst of energy I had ever seen her betray, swarmed up my leg and huddled into my arms. She buried her face in the crook of my elbow and shivered piteously.
“Damn it, Singer,” Connla snapped, “you’re scaring the cats.”
“It’s not me,” Singer said.
“Music,” I said.
Every sentient head in the room swiveled toward me.
“Music,” I said again, excitedly. “Talk! Sing! I think the star is talking to us.”
“By setting up a sympathetic vibration in our hull?” Connla asked.
“It’s all Koregoi tech,” Singer said, following my line of thought. “How am I supposed to know what they thought was a reasonable means of communication?”
“Well, fix it,” I snapped.
“If it was easy, I would have done so already.”
The closest constable clutched the back of a seating frame, looking faintly nauseated. If their species became nauseated, which I suppose is questionable. My own hands were over my ears, but the vibrations crept up my leg bones, so it didn’t help much.
Friend Singer, Cheeirilaq said, poking a mandibled head through the hatchway with fine disregard for decompression risk, can you perhaps… turn it down somehow?
“I can… render the hull less elastic,” Singer said dubiously. “That will lower the amplitude of the vibrations. It might raise the frequency to uncomfortable levels.”
“Be expedient,” I said. “Just do it.”
A faint shudder of separation rang the Prize’s hull like a stroked glass bell as the sound hammering all of us faded somewhat. I stared up at the dome in time to catch a glimpse of two silvery motes surrounded by minuscule white coils sweeping away from us, headed outsystem. A moment later there was a coruscating blur as they folded space-time and were gone.
“What the Well was that?” Connla asked. “What’s that that just left the ship?”
“It’s a tiny little drone. Two tiny little drones,” said the closest constable.
“A couple of probes going back the way we came, I warrant,” I said tiredly.
“Shit,” said Connla eloquently. “That fucking pirate. Letting her friends know we’ve arrived.”
Cheeirilaq waved antennae. The good news is that we now have a better idea of Farweather’s whereabouts. Constable Grrrs, with me.
It vanished out the hatch, and Grrrs was right behind it. I wanted to be in hot pursuit as well. I longed to be with them, going after Farweather. I wanted to shout “Watch for traps!” as they scrambled out the door. But of course, of all the beings on the ship, Grrrs probably needed the warning less than any except for Murtaugh, and Murtaugh wasn’t going to be running after anything for a while, no matter how much they might want to. So I just wished Grrrs luck, from little blue hooves to quivering antennae, and forced myself to let it go.
“That singing.”
“Yes,” Singer said. “I am confident that you are correct and that it’s an attempt at communication. The problem is, what is it saying? And if it is, say, a passphrase—how do we give them the countersign?”
“And is it a welcome,” Connla said, “or a warning?”
“I’m going to go with warning.” I was still standing closest to the windows, so I was the first to notice that there was more light emerging from that dim red star suddenly. I pointed. Singer drew Connla’s attention as well, and my shipmate crossed to stand at my elbow. I couldn’t get used to all this moving in two dimensions and how awkward it was.
Bushyasta was still cuddled into the crook of my arm, but at least she’d stopped shaking when the noise abated somewhat. She’d probably replace it with tiny, mellifluous kitten snores presently.
Singer hit the magnification. Connla and I stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the night unravel.
Hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, the enormous constellation of objects we’d come all this way to investigate began to peel itself apart. Not all at once. But starting at the point closest to the Prize, and moving around the sphere in a stately ripple, the glassy charcoal-colored plates of the top orbital shell peeled off like a fruit skin and zoomed toward us. I stepped back involuntarily as the dull, grimly red sun extended a searching finger comprised of myriad comparatively infinitesimal scales out toward us.
“Yup,” Connla said. “That looks aggressive to me.”
“Maybe they’re just coming to say hi?”
“Figure the odds,” Singer said.
I refrained from pointing out that figuring the odds was his job. Instead, I said, “Do you think they’re asking for a countersign?”
“The code?” Singer asked. “That could be what it’s meant to give us, right? If it’s not just a string of words.”
Connla said, “Assuming this is all sort of some plan. And not a random sequence of coincidences we’re fitting to a pattern.”
“If we were led here,” I retorted, “I’m going to assume it was for a purpose. Singer, about that code—”
“I’m not entirely sure it is a code,” he said. “Or if it is, that we have the right key. I ran the scan through every permutation I could think of; brute force operations where cleverness failed. Counting forward, counting backward. Offsets and reversals. It doesn’t give me anything but strings of nonsense. And moreover, the whole mess is problematic because frankly, some of the integers that would seem to indicate which word on the page to use are higher than the number of words on any page! I tried various ways of compensating for this, such as counting through again—several times, if needed. I tried counting onto the next page. I tried counting to the end of the page and counting back, fan-fold style, I tried—” He made a sound like an exasperated sigh. “That list of words was the best I could manage. At least they seem thematically linked.”