Who would you be if you came back?
The astrogator who flew into the Well and came back without getting spaghettified.
It sounded like a children’s reel.
“Right,” I said, holding my sparkling, galaxy-studded hand up in front of the equally sparkling night before us. “Time to spacewalk, and all.”
Because we had no boom, we grappled the Koregoi ship and matched velocities with her. I went over on a clipped cable, like one of those planetary things where you slide down a long line on a carabiner, and you’re going really fast because you’re under acceleration? I hear people do it for sightseeing. And for fun. When I landed on the hull, at least there was something ferrous enough in the structure to help me stick, so that was a benefit.
Nothing even vaguely resembling a hatch was visible on that hide, smooth and blocky and strangely curved as some exotic fruit.
“Any idea how I get in there? Is there even an ‘in there’ to get to?”
“Well, it isn’t solid through,” Connla said. “Sensors show lots of open space inside.”
I ran my glove over the surface.
I discovered in passing that while the patches of different visible color didn’t seem to indicate any additional qualities, the stripes that were evident in more energetic wavelengths had a slightly different texture, which was interesting.
I decided to explore that for a while. Maybe they were tactile, and my clue for getting inside would be in my sense of touch.
Well, it was a nice guess, anyway.
The damn thing was big. I kept walking around on it—well, crawling around on it, three points of contact at all times—and I hadn’t even come close to circumnavigating it yet. I wasn’t sure how much luck I was likely to have randomly knocking on the hull and looking for hatches, either.
I tried following the stripes and whorls around; tried poking at the various colors and color combinations in a bunch of patterns (I had hopes for the Fibonacci strings); and generally making enough of a nuisance of myself that if there had been anybody inside, they probably would have come out to yell at me to get off their damn lawn, you meddling sentients, and honestly I couldn’t have complained.
“Repeated sequences?” I asked Singer, standing up and stretching my spine out, making sure there was ox in my tanks and that both of my feet were firmly magnetized to something ferrous.
“It all looks pretty random,” he answered sadly.
“This is more fun in three-vees.”
Connla laughed. “It’s more like one of those problem-solving games where you have to keep moving stuff around until you find the right pattern.”
“Yeah, I always hated those,” I grumbled.
I ran my gloves over the plates again, feeling the change in textures snagging at the fabric. And I had what might be described as a minor epiphany.
Textures.
Densities. Or at least, functional densities? Artificial densities?
Patches that were exerting more gravity than they should have been, in other words, which I was picking up through the Koregoi senso that had infiltrated my skin.
The information on the surface of the ship was encoded in how heavy parts of it were.
So if I didn’t know how to get in… maybe my parasite did.
I kept my magnetized boots on the hull, but I shut down the electromagnets in my gloves so I wouldn’t be distracted by those tugs and pulls. It would probably feel different, right? Something inside my skin, as opposed to something I was wearing on the outside? But it probably wouldn’t hurt to reduce the noise in the system.
I held out my arms, waving my forehands around like a damaged windmill, and realized that I could feel something, indeed. The variations were too small for the navigation trick I’d used to be effective—I couldn’t just close my eyes and feel the shape of space because the scale was… well, not below my limit of perception, but lost in the scale of everything else. But moving my forehands in circles, I sensed the artificial variations in the surface of the ship, and—walking slowly, careful of my safety line—found a place where the artificial gravity marked out a kind of bull’s-eye on the hull of the Koregoi ship.
Artificial gravity.
In everything that had happened since we’d encountered the Milk Chocolate Marauder, I’d almost forgotten that that was what we were dealing with here. Something paradigm-changing, a technology that would revolutionize the Synarche’s understanding of how the universe worked, give us access to whole new theoretical universes that I didn’t even begin to have the knowledge to understand. I could feel Singer’s excitement, though—he understood. Well, this would make up for losing the Milk Chocolate Marauder.
“Got something here,” I said, and felt as much as heard Connla exhale. “Now how do I get it open?”
“Let me see if I can manage to talk to it yet,” Singer said. “Well, not talk. I still can’t find a shipmind in there. But if I can get a protocol and figure out how—”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to chill out while you work on that.”
I sat down on the hull beside the bull’s-eye and magnetized my butt.
The Synarche ships were close enough now that I could see them with the naked eye, mostly because of their visible movement against the backdrop of stars and Well and gas and twisted light spiraling down the Milky Way’s tub drain.
That was my new life, coming to meet me.
I tried to feel resigned. At least we would be safe from pirates soon.
That thought got me checking the senso again, seeing if I could feel Farweather or any of her folks around. Maybe I was getting paranoid. Would they really risk chasing us all the way into the Core? I mean, they had everything we had. And the Milk Chocolate Marauder. And it was patently too late to keep us from giving information to the Synarche.
There was no percentage for them in coming here. Just like there was no percentage for me in going there.
And I had much more immediate problems than a Sexy Pirate, anyway.
“Get me in here before they show up, would you?” I asked Singer plaintively.
“I’d like a stronger negotiating position too, you know. Ah, wait, look now.”
An aperture appeared before me.
I don’t mean the door irised, or an airlock hatch slid aside, or some bit of plating dropped into the gap behind it and moved off. I mean it appeared: One moment I was frowning through my faceplate at the unforgiving hull, wondering if the ancient astronauts went in for annoying logic riddles. And the next instant, the hull in front of my face was evaporating before my eyes, as fast and dry and completely as a liquid nitrogen spill. I braced for evacuating atmosphere to blow past me—or blow me off the ship—but there was no rush of escaping air and no sense of pressure whatsoever.
“Well,” Singer said in my ear. “That had no good reason to sublimate like that.”
I peered through the gap. The interior was lit, and it didn’t look like an airlock. I could see fairly far down what I assumed was a corridor before it curved out of sight. “Did you happen to get a spectrograph while it was doing that?”
“It’s not made of anything exotic. And it seems to have been precipitated back into the hull. Possibly that explains the roughened texture that you noted. Do you want to send in a probe?”
I felt brave. And impatient. Before Singer could tell me no, I extended my gloved hand and shoved it right through the gap.
“Haimey!”
“What?” I said. “It’s like a probe.”
Singer’s anger was as much scientific outrage as fear for my safety. “And you’ve just contaminated the interior of that alien ship with your skin cells and our atmosphere and an incalculable amount of cat dander.”