Just to make sure nobody snuck any more unauthorized aftermarket modifications into our ship. Such as bombs. Or Trojan horses.
Hhayazh followed me to Sally’s rear airlock and helped me into my suit. I didn’t need anybody to spray me with additional insulation todia, because I wasn’t going into the methane environment, and the irradiated vacuum of Core space was significantly less hostile than a balmy beachfront property on Darbo. I seemed to recall, now that I was thinking about it, that there were some methane-breather colonies on a major moon in Terra’s system. I should look into that; maybe Afar did have a reason to be on that vector. If he could have reasonably run across Big Rock Candy Mountain by accident while dropping out of white space to check and adjust course, that was one less intractable mystery to worry about.
The archinformists had said that it was likely Afar’s flight plan had not been deleted, or they would know. I would have to talk to O’Mara and ask if it was possible that Afar’s flight plan had been filed and had gotten lost somewhere, or was hung up at a packet beacon somewhere out in the galactic halo, waiting for the piggyback that would bring it to us in the Core.
It made me feel better to contemplate that there might be an easy explanation. Whether that was denial and self-delusion or refusing to fall prey to conspiracy theories, only time would tell.
Hhayazh finished my precheck and patted me on the shoulder with a bristly appendage. “Be safe out there.”
“I’m just going for a little walk around the wheel. Nothing to it.” I stepped into the airlock, and in a matter of moments I was looking at the outside.
This time the jump down to the surface would have been only a couple of meters. Rotational force would tend to fling me off the side of the hospital the instant I let go, however, so rather than waste maneuvering fuel, I climbed down a ladder. Space is a much better place for being cautious and pragmatic than flamboyant, even if it isn’t nearly as much fun as what you see in the three-vees.
Having reached the surface of the docking ring, I clomped across it until I got to a lift branch. It angled sharply, but my magnetic boots made it easy to walk right up the inside, and spin helped to hold me there. The farther I got up the arch, the heavier I was, because the structures farthest from Core General’s hub were spinning the fastest. Every so often, a lift zoomed past beneath my feet, shivering the whole tube. Above my head, crystal panels showed green and greeny-violet leaves outlifted toward the light of the Core.
It’s not every dia that you get to go for an EVA stroll around the outside of a gigantic space station. In short order, the branch I had been climbing joined the lift trunk. I paused at the top—or, from my perspective, the bottom—to take in the view.
Core General swooped and bulged over my head, incomprehensibly huge, like a world looming over my shoulder. Beneath my feet, beyond the silvery band of the trunk, the Core danced with all its millions of stars. Even though I was partially in the shadow of the trunk, my hardsuit cooler whined with the strain of so much insulation.
My exo gave me a squeeze, reminding me that the extra acceleration wasn’t helping my joints any. I tore myself from the spectacle and kept on walking toward the station’s nadir. Sally could handle this on her own. But I admit: even with all the mysteries stacking up, I was curious about this one.
It was easy to spot Afar, even in the distance. His cargo doors were open and a swarm of drone tenders moved around him, pulling the packing gel loose in wide chunks and long foamy strands. I could have tapped into the output of one of them, but I wanted to get a look at the craboid with my own eyes—and not a lot of senso—before we brought it inside.
Another ladder got me down to the cargo bay in time to watch the last of the packing material peeled away. Now that I was looking at it in person, the craboid seemed even bigger and spikier than I remembered. As I climbed up to it, a cloud of drones arose like flies off a corpse, leaving the clean-picked-looking carapace of the walker behind.
Now we only had to get Sally talking to it, assuming there was anything in there to talk to. Or controlling its electronics, if it was just a drone.
I had magnetized some specialized equipment to the outside of my hardsuit in areas that would be out of my way until I reached for them. Here in the shadow of the hospital and the cargo doors, my suit’s heater took its turn to complain. Still better than being inside, with Afar’s gelid atmosphere leaching all the warmth out of me.
I peeled a set of induction patches off my hardsuit and applied each of them separately to the craboid’s chassis, scrambling around it to get them as close to opposite one another as possible. The drones had withdrawn to a safe distance: Linden was paying attention, then. I followed suit, climbing down to the edge of the cargo hold and using one door for cover.
“Clear,” I told Sally.
“Active,” she replied. “I’ll see if I can use the patches to access the thing’s processors.”
“It might have some.”
“Ugh,” she said, cheerfully. “I get enough of that from Hhayazh. Signal is getting through the patches, so that’s circumventing at least some of the shielding. If I can’t just talk to it, then I should be able to use electromagnetism to move it by brute force— Oh, hey, I already have an electronic handshake.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it acknowledges my contact. And, now that I’m past the shielding—that is an intense level of shielding, by the way!—it’s easy to talk to.”
“That was a little too easy.” I frowned.
“Standard Synarche protocols. At least I’m not going to have to write the code for this one.”
So it wasn’t some kind of weird alien spaceship parasite. It was just a surface vehicle with a super unsettling design.
Sure, that was a fine explanation.
“You don’t suppose this is some kind of exploratory vehicle, do you? Designed for ox breathers on a cold methane world?”
“Survey equipment?” She hrmed. “That would explain all the legs. Designed for any kind of terrain, and manipulating its environment, and even a bit of earthmoving, hmm?”
“Hmm,” I agreed.
“Okay, are you ready to bring it around to the machine bay?”
The craboid followed me out the open cargo doors, across Afar’s hull, and (using its own maneuvering jets) across the gap to Core General with no incident. Under Sally’s puppetry, it stumped along behind me like a weird pet, or like some sort of limpet monster from a poorly produced horror three-vee.
It did not, however, pry the hospital apart, or punch through the hull with a needlelike proboscis, or behave in any sort of an uncivilized manner at all. It walked behind me, climbing courteously through the machine bay airlock when Sally directed it to, then settling down on the deck and resting quietly there while we set up the isolation zone.
“Can you convince it to give us an atmosphere sample?” I asked Sally.
“There’s no airlock, and I can’t get the pressure door to respond,” she answered. “That appears to require some sort of manual override failsafe code which I can’t quite crack. There’s no AI in here: it’s just a machine.”
“A vehicle, not a person.” Disappointment has a metallic tang.
“Vehicles can be persons, as you know perfectly well,” Sally replied tartly.
I supposed it was better to imagine the craboid empty and waiting than to picture it as home to a lonely and terrified presence that might be in there peeking between their appendages in bewilderment, presuming they had both peekers and appendages to peek through.