“Oh come on,” I answered. “You know most of that got blown off in the airlock. What’s going on in there?”
The glove had about as many sensors on the outside as a human forehand, and they relayed to my sensorium and from there to Singer and Connla. But I didn’t trust what I was feeling, because I was feeling… warmth.
“Singer? You said this thing was cold.”
“It was,” he said. “Up until that hatch evaporated. Maybe they’re expecting you.”
“How can it be warm inside if it’s exposed to space?”
“That is an excellent question. I can detect no barrier.”
“Do you have access to the system yet?”
“I’m trying to get the keys to the operating system. Failing that, I think I can probably write one, though it’ll be a hot mess to begin with. And I don’t exactly want to purge everything that’s in there so I can colonize it. I’d rather figure out how their architecture is intended to function.”
“So you can subvert it.”
“I am what I am,” Singer said. “Has it bitten your hand off yet?”
“You’re in my senso,” I answered. “You tell me.”
You know, going inside might seem even stupider than sticking my hand through a hole that hadn’t been there a second ago. But if the Koregoi ship, or whatever might be in the Koregoi ship, wanted to do me harm, I was far more vulnerable out here in the arms of the Enemy as I could ever be once I was inside her hull.
“Haimey,” Connla said, accurately reading my intentions. “Haven’t you actually learned anything from last time?”
“Probably not,” I said, moving already.
CHAPTER 15
I GLIDED THROUGH THE HATCHWAY, AND suddenly fell. I tucked, striking the deck with my shoulder. Rolling, I ended flat on my back, a staticky circle of haze tunneling my vision. My diaphragm cramped, bright and sharp, and I could only keep straining to exhale, long after any air had left my lungs.
I thought I would pass out, but the cramp eased after a few moments.
Well, this was fucking familiar.
“Flush it down the Well,” I swore. “I hate gravity.”
The vanishing hatch reconstituted itself in a solidifying swirl of vapor. Reverse sublimation: just a little more Koregoi magic. I was too overwhelmed—and too focused on my job and its dangers—to let myself feel overawed. I rolled on my side, still breathing shallowly because I was afraid of triggering the cramp once more.
The inside of the Koregoi ship was of a piece with the outside. The same materials, from a preliminary examination, and the same seemingly random visible light colors that gave way to detailed ultraviolet markings. Some of these were on a much finer scale, and I assumed they were probably use-instruction markings of some sort: the usual warnings and notifications and technical specifications that most sentients living amid the deferred catastrophe of space tend to print on their delicate traveling habitats because you don’t always have time to look such things up in the midst of an emergency.
The corridor I was in was sinuous and sinusoidal, roughly square but with rounded corners and slightly, varyingly convex walls. Light was provided by long, luminescent streaks embedded into the various surfaces, seemingly at random.
The corridor was about three times as big around as an access tube designed for a human would be. Those random patches of ochre and mossy colors banded it, like the segments of a Terran earthworm. It twisted in a way that made me think it ran, itself, around other spaces inside the hull of the ship, and very probably around blocks of machinery and hardware, too. Not in any kind of regular, regimented way that would seem normal to a human engineer. But probably in a manner that was very efficient for packing things into spaces, if you could control the horizontal and the vertical.
I rolled onto my hands and knees, orienting myself. It seemed as if I could stand up comfortably in the corridor or service tube or whatever it was, so I did, trying to make sense of how it twisted around at seeming random. I took a step forward, balancing on my afthands, thinking sadly of how bruised my fingers were going to be again. It was enough to make a girl start thinking of getting herself restored to baseline.
I jest.
Nothing was going to make me start thinking of getting myself restored to baseline.
I walked forward a little bit more, expecting to feel the corridor sloping under me where it twisted. Instead, what happened was that the corridor reoriented itself as if it were spinning, my inner ear insisting that I was walking on a perfectly level surface with no angle, twist, or incline at all. This did not agree with what my eyes were telling me, and as a result my stomach lurched.
Singer helped me tune down the nausea, and I leaned one hand on the wall and closed my eyes until the hull stopped spinning.
“Well, that’s a terrible design choice,” I said.
I opened my eyes again, tried a few more experimental steps. Nope, still awful.
“Make a note,” I said. “The Koregoi did not suffer vertigo.”
“Maybe you should come back,” Singer said.
“Maybe you should crawl,” suggested Connla.
“Maybe you should do something anatomically improbable,” I retorted. Maybe if I looked down at my afthands while I was moving, it would be okay. I could stop every few steps and glance around to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
I probably wouldn’t get eaten.
Right?
Well, it did work, sort of. I didn’t get sick again, and I made forward progress, but since I didn’t know what I was looking for or where I was going, even progress was something of a Pyrrhic victory. I might be walking away from the thing I needed.
I was, however, officially in possession of the Koregoi ship for salvage purposes, which would do a lot to improve our bargaining position. And Connla’s economic situation. If he wound up on his own in the not-too-distant future, at least he wouldn’t be in a pile of debt because of fines and so forth.
And if Singer and I ever got out of Synarche service, we’d be in a good position as well.
I held on to that happy thought as I picked my way through the ship. It was ghostly, empty. Unlike the Milk Chocolate Marauder, there was the usual detritus of a shipboard life—mysterious alien artifacts that were probably chewing gum wrappers and condoms and shoelaces, or the moral equivalent. The archinformists were going to have a field dia with this place. I spotted a small enclosure with some unsettling plumbing that I was pretty sure was the head. When I investigated it, I managed to figure out how to make one of the fixtures make the sort of whooshing sound that generally indicates a vacuum disposal. Fitting my anatomy to it would be a different issue, but I didn’t intend to be sticking around that long.
The other fixture produced actual water—H2O—that seemed clean and uncontaminated to a quick field test.
Stop for a moment and just appreciate it. Actual water. Running water. In a ship that had been parked out behind a black hole for possibly millions of ans.
That left me with more of a sense of awe than anything else I had seen that dia.
It also told me that the Koregoi (or at least, these Koregoi) probably used good old water as a solvent in their biology. Just as I did. That was important and interesting. The ship’s atmosphere told me they breathed a tolerable mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and the usual accoutrements. I would bet I could survive where they came from.
Science! But there was no sign of aliens, dead or otherwise. There was just the mysterious warmth, and what Singer assured me would be a perfectly breathable atmosphere if my suit developed a catastrophic leak. Even so I was glad we’d gotten the new ones at Downthehatch.