'I remember you said so at the meeting,' Nancy commented, 'but you didn't tell us exactly what happened.'
He shrugged. 'Mostly it just… glowed a bit. And Merrick seemed to be able to pick up some kind of signal coming from it through her implants.'
Nancy and Ray eyed at each other at the mention of Merrick. 'Now there's a weird fish,' commented Ray. 'How much do you know about her?'
'I know she was implicated in that whole, ah, thing that happened on Redstone,' he replied, trying hard to sound casual. 'But shouldn't we be heading out?' he asked, nodding towards the nearby row of pressure doors.
'Not just yet,' said Nancy. 'We're going to be-'
A rumbling alert sounded, three quick blasts like a horn; signifying a jump alert.
'Jumping in just a minute,' Nancy finished with a grin. 'Then we can go out.'
Ty nodded, relieved at the fortuitous change of conversation. When they finally got outside, several specialized spider-mechs were already waiting for them, with toolkits attached, floating a few metres above the hull. The Hyades Cluster now hung in the void far behind the frigate, a distant burst of fireworks caught in one eternal instant.
Ty found he wasn't feeling as nervous as he had expected. In fact, being outside the hull felt no worse than standing on the surface of some clade-world. All he had to do was make sure he didn't make the mistake of thinking of the ship as a huge metal tower with him clinging to its-
Whoops. Vertigo hit Ty, and he focused hard on the hull itself, taking several deep breaths and holding on to them.
Flat ground. That's flat ground underneath you, he told himself, over and over.
Once the attack subsided, he gazed back along the hull, towards the flat dome of a shaped-field generator, only a few metres away. Apart from defensive purposes, these devices were primarily used to deflect interstellar debris that might otherwise tear through the hull. If he relaxed his eyes just a little, he could even pick out the faint sparkle of the combined energy fields surrounding the entire frigate.
Just beyond the field generator rose the first of a forest of drive-spines, curving up and outwards from the hull itself.
'Will you look at that,' said Willis, his voice sounding flat and close inside Ty's helmet. 'All that way in less than a second.'
'It's not such a big deal,' Nancy replied. 'Coreships did it all the time.'
'Well, yeah, but…'
But Ty knew what he meant. You didn't see or feel anything when inside a coreship; it was the same rocky sky held up by pillars you looked at, wherever in the galaxy you might actually happen to be. Being able to step outside and see where you were could be an awe-inspiring experience.
'All right,' said Nancy, suddenly all brisk efficiency. 'I had to lead a bunch of repair crews the last trip out, so just follow my lead and do what I tell you, and it'll all be fine.'
'What about the spiders?' asked Willis. 'Couldn't we just run them from inside the frigate and get them to do the work?'
'We tried that,' Nancy replied, 'but there's always something finicky that needs a pair of hands to deal with. But, with any luck, the spiders will still end up doing most of the work. Now check your HUDs for the schedule.'
Ty dutifully brought up his suit's display, which indicated a list of repairs to be made, ordered by priority.
'That's three drive-spines in need of immediate repair, all on this section of the hull,' said Nancy. 'Follow me.'
Ty used lanyards, coiled silver lines that shot out of the rear of his suit just below the air tanks and attached themselves to the hull. All he had to do was lean one way or the other and the lanyards would carry him along at a couple of kilometres an hour, rapidly retracting or reaching out to grip the hull in a steady rippling motion. As Willis and Nancy did the same, Ty was reminded of how comical the lanyards looked, as if each of their suits had suddenly grown spindly cartoon legs.
Nancy had slaved the spiders to her own suit, so that they followed a short way behind her, propelled on tiny puffs of gas.
They soon reached the first drive-spine. In that brief, barely measurable moment when a craft passed through superluminal space, electrical systems often failed and the molecular bonds of the hull began to crumble at the extremities. Nobody knew what would happen to a ship if it stayed in superluminal space for a few seconds longer, but Ty strongly suspected that it would disintegrate entirely.
At the base of the first drive-spine was a tangle of power cables leading inside the hull, ultimately terminating at one of the plasma conduits. Some of the cables had worked loose, which was easy enough to fix.
The drive-spine arching above them looked grey and dusty towards its tip, like it had become badly corroded. Ty could see where a panel had come loose about halfway up, exposing naked circuitry beneath.
'Ray, will you go ahead and take a look at the other spines?' suggested Nancy. 'We only need two pairs of hands for this one, and it might speed things up if we know what else we're going to have to deal with, okay?'
'Uh… sure,' said Willis, after a moment. 'Are you sure you wouldn't rather-'
'No, I wouldn't,' she replied, just a little bit too sharply. 'Besides, myself and Nathan need to talk over some of the… some of the technicalities.'
Uh-oh, thought Ty.
'Yeah,' said Willis, sounding far from pleased. 'Yeah, I'll do that.'
'Thanks,' said Nancy.
'Yeah. You kids have fun,' Willis grumbled.
Ty watched as he moved away across the surface of the hull, dragged along by his suit's smart lanyards, whipping in and out.
A moment later a one-to-one channel request was transmitted to Ty's suit, and he accepted it with a sinking feeling.
'Quite something, isn't it?' asked Nancy. 'The view, I mean.'
'Yes, quite so,' Ty replied. 'How have you been, Nancy?'
Things had been cordial in the safe-house, but it was best, he felt sure, to nip this in the bud. Corso had warned him to stay away from the rest of the crew, and he had little doubt how the Senator might react if he discovered Ty had once been sleeping with the Mjollnir's head of security.
'Good enough,' Nancy replied. 'Kind of crazy how we both wound up here, yeah?'
'I guess so,' he replied, finding himself suddenly stuck for words.
A silence followed, seeming deeper and wider than the void around them. Ty felt an urgent need to fill it. 'I think it was a surprise for both of us,' he said, and then laughed.
Nancy's own laugh sounded more than a little forced. 'Yeah,' she said. 'About that.'
'About what?' Were they ever going to get these repairs done?
'About us. Back on the… back on that last trip. That whole thing.'
'It's all right, Nancy,' he said. 'I don't think either of us was looking for much more than-'
'No, it's not that. I mean, that's what I was going to say, right? There's no expectations, since I don't think we thought we'd ever see each other again.'
'No,' he replied, 'I guess not.'
'But… we are here, and maybe we won't make it back. Yet I don't know if there's any of us wouldn't rather be somewhere else.'
But you still have a choice, Ty almost said. Every step he had taken was either due to a gift from providence or through a desperate clutching at life. The alternatives had been stark: stay in Unity and risk execution, or board the Mjollnir and take his chances with the Emissaries. So here he was.
'I guess not,' he replied. 'I won't bother you, Nancy, if that's what you're afraid of
She came closer. 'That's not what I meant.'
Something in the tone of her voice made it clear she was struggling to find the right words. Nancy was, Ty had found, not the type to reveal her feelings except in the most intimate of circumstances.