And hope the bloody octopuses don’t follow us, thinks Meshner, keeping the words unspoken. At the same time he is aware that Fabian is literally bristling with unexpressed emotion, and he guesses it’s probably anger because Viola’s new pet project casts a long shadow on their own.
And he is also very aware of her ‘It is plain to me’ comment, because Portiid science has no problems with making bold claims and only later dismantling them. It is how their academics jostle for dominance amongst themselves. Viola cannot know a tenth of what she claims, but she has decided to make this the cornerstone of her gameplan, and perhaps she is right: getting out of the system with whatever they can grab is probably not the worst idea in the universe right now.
Nobody has mentioned Helena and Portia and the outside possibility that they are still alive and captives somewhere. The overwhelming technological superiority of the locals consigns any thoughts of rescue into the ‘doomed heroics’ category and neither Human nor Portiid nature is quite so in love with its own myth.
Meshner looks about him: Fabian, unhappy; Viola plainly not caring what Fabian thinks – or Meshner himself – but cocking an eye at Zaine; Zaine nodding. Motion carried.
There is an interesting pause before Kern responds, as though she too was hovering near the ‘nay’ camp. At last she concedes, though, her potential veto unused.
‘Connect to the active system and download whatever it has,’ the spider instructs. ‘And then we can work out how to get past the natives.’
‘Who may take a lot more interest in us if they work out we’re stealing from this place,’ Meshner puts in. ‘Their first attack came when we said we were human – their second, when they caught us responding to this signal. Whatever they’re so touchy about, this is the heart of it.’
Viola’s response, a couple of dismissive taps, is rendered by Artifabian as: ‘Even so.’
Meshner wrestles with the nearest console, finding his hands still tremble a little. Kern seems to second-guess him, in the end, showing him a record of her contact attempts using a variety of Old Empire protocols.
It’s not recognizing us. He read some of the old Gilgamesh records once, something most Humans do when they are young, trying to reconnect with their receding origins. The situation here is weirdly parallel to when the ark ship had first encountered a dormant Kern, save that in this case Kern is on the outside.
‘Play something of its own back to it?’ he murmurs, because that had worked for his ancestors. Instead, Kern drops into a deeper level of communication, system-to-system handshakes and deep-access protocols.
A volley of emotions ambushes him: surprise, disappointment, opportunism. Meshner grips the console, dizzy, trying to catch up with his own cognitive processes to discover why he feels like this. Even as he tries to master himself, the sensations bleed into Kern’s thoughtful noise. ‘Hmm.’ A human utterance from a computer system full of insects. ‘I had contact. It acknowledged me. Then the signal stopped.’
‘Infiltrate them,’ Viola directs.
‘There is nothing to infiltrate.’ Kern’s human voice sounds puzzled, which rings a perfect twin to the puzzlement Meshner hosts, as though he and the system are in sympathetic lockstep. ‘I can find no trace of any system there. The transmission has stopped, but there is no open port, no live network. It’s as though an operator was manually sending the material and has now ceased. But if there is anything within the station to be aware, it is now aware of us.’
‘Have the drone find some manner of live conduit on the surface,’ Viola says, her movements skittish.
‘The power use readings are curious,’ Kern notes, illustrating that curiosity with examples on the screens. Some solar collectors are still in operation, a mix of the Old Empire’s ancient, robust technology and some kind of photosynthetic coating used by the octopuses, which in itself seems efficient enough to be worth taking a sample of. They are jury-rigged, cobbled together with lots of loose ends and blind alleys, but routing power to some source inside. Now the signal is gone, nothing on the hull seems to be turned outwards. There is no electronic back door Kern can exploit.
The Lightfoot is closing on the station now, easing into a matching orbit. The large drone Kern currently has out there is joined by some diminutive siblings which quickly find rents in the hull sufficient to allow them inside. Their limited light and range of vision give the crew a vertiginous look at the interior: ancient walls, metal overlain with shrivelled biotech, a chaos of two technologies, or rather two far-distant branches of the same technological tree. Fragments and particles drift everywhere, so that the pair of little drones cause a chaotic whirl of collisions everywhere they go, radiating outwards through the vacuum and out of sight of their lamps. Worry clutches inside Meshner, as though the ripples of the drones’ approach might warn some predator lurking inside.
‘I am following the power traces,’ Kern remarks flatly. The drones find an ancient doorway, an iris seized half-open, and bob through it. The next area was recently buttressed, shimmering with tatters of membrane, cluttered with a profusion of machinery that just seems to have been piled up and stuck together. All of it looks both new and not designed for human use. One wall is stippled with holes through which the system’s sun glitters on the bristling ice that lines half the chamber.
There is a closed door in one wall, seemingly intact. The drones jockey about in front of it, trying to find how it might open. ‘Design suggests an airlock – or potentially a water-lock, given the preferences of the most recent occupants. There’s no active terminal I can detect,’ Kern reports. ‘Whatever is beyond this, though, that’s where the power is being routed.’
‘Go outside and find another way in?’ Meshner suggests, but his words are lost in an announcement from Zaine:
‘The pings we’re getting from the locals are more intense now. We’re detecting ship movement towards this orbit. Maybe not an attack fleet but I wonder if they’re working themselves up to it.’
‘They didn’t seem to need much working up the last few times.’ Fabian’s translated words successfully come over as bitter. ‘They just did.’
‘Then they’re getting themselves into a position where if they just do, they’ll be able to make it stick,’ Zaine tells him exasperatedly. ‘So, if we’re doing something here, Viola, we should consider we have a limited time.’
‘Door controls are manual only,’ Kern states, and Artifabian twitches and rattles off across the crew quarters towards its own airlock. It is configured as a Portiid, after all, which entails certain physical competencies. At Viola’s insistence Fabian scuttles up to a console, standing by as backup pilot should one be necessary. Meshner just sits back and watches the view from Artifabian’s cameras, feeling oddly proprietory. The arachnoid remote is one of his and Fabian’s team, after all. It’s almost as if he’s contributing.
Kern carefully adjusts the ship’s velocity and proximity to the station, feeding the data to Artifabian. The airlock door is open and their destination is still distant, the size of a thumbnail in the robot’s view. Fabian reports sullenly on trajectory, performing backup maths. Artifabian has limited manoeuvring jets, but most of the legwork, so to speak, will be done the old-fashioned way. Meshner watches stress tolerance readouts push limits as the robot ratchets in its third pair of limbs.