One of his pets had almost opened one of the airlocks before he had jumped in to stop it. Paul had been fighting him for control of the communications suite. Salome had flown wobbling drones through the compartments of the Aegean, opening and closing doors and attacking walls with the cutting torches. All just harmless fun, he assured himself, and yet they had reacted swiftly to his attempts to cut them off. He closed one virtual opening and they squeezed through another, multi-tasking in a way that he – and, eventually, the entire human crew – couldn’t match. In order for them to do the jobs he would need them for, he had been trying to get them to understand the idea of a virtual environment, somewhere that would be workspace, communications suite and interface if they could only perceive it as they did the physical space around them. He had watched generations simply fail, reacting to light and touch and changes of temperature, but stubbornly refusing to make the leap to that abstract level. And then, without him doing anything in particular, without any obvious prompt or warning, Salome was in the system, and the rest all followed, tank after tank of them teaching each other somehow. Abruptly they could all do the virtual exercises, but they weren’t content with that. They expanded their virtual presence as they would their physical one, reaching out to see where the space went, and there they encountered the ship’s systems. And the ship’s systems, of course, connected to the rest of the ship, the air-filled bit that he and the other humans lived in. He hadn’t considered that the bulk of the Aegean would be just a further extension of their online playground.
Senkovi and the others had worked for hours at damage control, finding that the invertebrate test subjects had grasped certain principles of the computer system with sufficient force that they could not be pried loose. A running battle between mammal and mollusc had raged, but the Aegean was a vast and complex beast and there were no convenient bottlenecks to stave off the invaders from inner space. The octopi had the same untethered access as the human crew, and they were playfully pulling everything apart.
He lowered his crate of toys towards the ship’s centre-line until it was just drifting, then he followed after it. The readouts from his HUD told him that the temperature here was dropping, but he had evacuated the space around the tanks so that their heat would take longer to diffuse outwards. This, of course, was the main reason he had stayed behind, out of contact with the human race. He was going to try and save his pets, and he didn’t want Han and the others to laugh at him, to recast him from eccentric to pathetic. But, just like the dog lover who goes back into the burning building to save little Floofums, he was going to try and keep some of his experimental subjects alive until the ship came back online.
Baltiel will want them all dead, he knew, but he could handle Baltiel. He would go against Baltiel if he had to, a full-on war in heaven of angry messages cast across the void.
The nearest tank had shattered, as had the next two. The denizens had, like Senkovi, been too clever for their own good and found some physical egress, and now he’d killed them by evacuating the chamber. He hardened his heart and pushed on until he found one that was intact. His suit lamps shone in, and he saw motion inside, not fleeing the light but approaching it, because the octopi had learned to associate light with entertainment, and the sudden dark and quiet must be profoundly disconcerting for them.
‘Hi, Salome.’ His voice was loud in his own ears. An alien eye stared at him from within the tank, the skin around it ruffled into angry spikes, awash with red and black pigment as Salome told him precisely what she felt about being denied net access. Senkovi manhandled a heating unit out of the crate and attached it to the tank side. With luck it would keep the water viable until the system was back up. Then he went to the water pump and fumblingly installed a battery unit to keep circulation going, independent of the ship’s own mechanisms. Again, it was a stopgap measure. He went on to the next tank.
He wished he could talk to Han, but he’d cut himself off entirely from their shuttle. He hadn’t wanted to be bothered by their constant enquiries after his safety. He was Disra Senkovi, the man who was an island. Right now he felt his shores eroding. He wanted them to ask, so that he could be aloof and not answer. Floating in the dark in the bowels of a dead ship, surrounded by the living and the dead of his mollusc pets, it was a terrible time for self-knowledge to kick in. There was nobody but the octopi, though, and he felt they were judging him. He was their higher power, after all, who should have ensured they didn’t steal so much fire from heaven that they ended up burning everything to the ground.
He went from tank to tank, restoring warmth and circulation wherever he found live contents. At least a third were already non-viable, either because of the fatal ingenuity of the occupants or because he was too slow. He had thought of the ship as a tomb before, and now it was.
And still the ship was restoring its system, the naive curiosity of the octopi purged from it, and he had hours yet before he could even get a progress report. His own suit was still toasty, but eventually the ship’s warmth would start to leach away and he would learn if he had enough batteries to overcome his own hubris. He settled down beside Paul’s tank, anchored himself there and turned off his lamps to conserve power.
***
Baltiel waited for the alienness to strike him, stepping from the shuttle’s airlock onto the surface of Nod. They could have jockeyed down close enough for the automatics to line up a tunnel between ship and habitat, and Baltiel had nixed the idea because of the slim chance that a slip might have damaged one or the other. In truth, though, he had wanted this: the first foot put down onto another living world, the feel of the atmosphere clenching about him, the gravity, the colour of the sunlight . . .
And he stood there at the foot of the ramp and there was nothing, almost nothing. So, it wasn’t Earth; neither had the artificial gravity of the Aegean been, or the orbiting module (which had never quite matched its parent ship, for no reason they could ever find). The orange-red of the sun was compensated for by the visor display of his helmet. He could look across the flat expanse of the great salt marsh, all its rivulets and pools and rocky ridges, out to the great darkness of the sea, and he might just be at a somewhat unattractive beach back home. The suit was insulating him from everything; not just a potentially hazardous atmosphere and the radiation of an alien star, but the smells, the sounds, the unalloyed sights that would make it all real. It might just be an underwhelming simulation.
But we’re here. And perhaps it will come yet, waking to a new rhythm, seeing the life first hand.
The others were backing up behind him so he set off, a proud stride no matter how he was feeling about it. Or as proud a stride as the cumbersome suit would allow. Even with its servos smoothing his movements he felt he was lumbering like some antique movie monster. Lante, Lortisse and Rani followed him, a little shambling convoy over the rocks. The going was slippery and uneven; their boots were constantly locking in place, soles moulding to fit the terrain. It was an undignified first parade for humanity, but at least the onlooking aliens were unlikely to take much notice. Baltiel stopped short of the habitat, waving Lante to enter and check that internal conditions matched up to the installation’s readouts. He would be last in, he decided. He would stand out here and take in the landscape, and hope for that feeling to hit him.