Monkey Suit
Alastair Reynolds
A lighthugger is a four kilometer spike of armour and ablative ice. That’s a lot of surface area to search for a lost crewman. Especially when the hull is a craggy, knotted labyrinth of jagged ornamentation and half-abandoned machinery, a place you could lose an army in, let alone a single hull-monkey.
My suit was the second best on Formantera Lady for hull operations, and it still took me three days to find Branco. We were a year out from Yellowstone and moving so close to the speed of light that the ship was flying through a storm of radiation and relativistic dust. I went out there time and again, only returning inside when the flux was on the point of frying either my suit or me. It was lonely, dangerous work. I could barely communicate with the rest of the crew, so for most of the time I was working with only stars and static for company. Having crawled my way back to the lock, I’d swap out as many of the damaged systems as I could before returning outside. The medichines in my body worked overtime dealing with the cumulative radiation exposure. Still I climbed back into the sweat-bucket of the suit and went outside again, over and over again.
And then—about a hundred metres above the starboard engine spar—I found him.
Branco was dead. It only took a single glance to confirm that. Under the one gravity thrust supplied by our C-drives, our ship had become a needle-sharp tower. Branco must have been on the long climb back to the lock when one of the hull’s encrustations had snapped off. It was only a small sliver of material, but it had daggered down with enough force to impale him. A million to one chance of it happening, and another million to one chance of him being in the wrong place when it did.
He had been standing on a ledge, and the spike had pinned him into place like some rare specimen of shiny-shelled beetle. It had entered his armour in the chest, just below his helmet connecting ring, emerged through the small of his back, and then penetrated the ledge, fixing him into position. He must have been looking up when it happened, leaning back to get a better view. Perhaps he’d felt the spike break off, the snap transmitted through the fabric of the ship, through the soles of his boots, into the suit. Branco had been supremely attuned to the moods of the ship, the way the hull rumbled and mumbled with varying stress loads. It was entirely possible that he had been responding to a subliminal signal, a warning premonition that would have by-passed conscious thought.
I must have stared in wonder at the spectacle for many minutes, horror mingling with astonishment. Of all the myriad ways for a human being to die in space, I doubted that Branco had ever contemplated this particular ending. Losing his footing, falling into the drive wake…being hit by a speck of interstellar debris…but not this. Not being impaled by the ship he had known and cared for since his recruitment. It wasn’t just wrong. It was savagely, cruelly wrong, as if the ship had been saving up this spiteful act for centuries.
I couldn’t just leave him there, of course. Having pinpointed his location, I returned inside, made temporary repairs to my own suit, then gathered cutting and hauling equipment and went outside again. I secured Branco with traction lines, then lasered through the spike, where it had pushed into the ledge. Then I dragged Branco, his suit, and the remains of the spike back to the lock.
Formantera Lady had lost a good crewmember, a man who had served it well. I had lost a man who had befriended me and helped my adjustment into shipboard life. Yet, as tragic as that was, I couldn’t avoid the realisation that his death had pushed me one rung up the hierarchy.
Branco had been chief hull-monkey. Now it was me.
“Fix the suit,” Captain Luarca said.
I blinked surprise. “Fix the suit?”
“You heard me, Raoul. Branco had unfinished business. You know what he was doing down there? Checking out a stress indication on the engine spar. I still need to know that engine isn’t going to snap away when we load it.”
We knew that Branco had reached the engine spar, even if he hadn’t made it back. He’d gone out with a full load of stress probes, and there’d been none on him when he came back inside. He must have sunk and drilled them before starting on his return journey, but with the recording systems on his suit fried by radiation, we couldn’t be certain.
“I can make modifications to mine,” I said. “Layer on some more armour. Harden the servos, build in more duration. We were planning to do it anyway.”
Luarca looked as skeptical as the plastic mask of her face allowed. She was one of the more extreme Ultras on the ship, but I had become adept at reading her expressions.
“How long?”
“A few weeks. Maybe a month.”
It was five days after Branco’s death. We had opened the suit and removed what was left of him. The Ultras had picked through the red slurry for anything mechanical that could be salvaged for further use. Then they’d put his remains into a coffin and ejected him into space, ahead of the ship. In fifty thousand years he’d be one of the few human artefacts to reach intergalactic space.
“I can’t wait weeks or months,” Luarca told me. “Not when we have another suit almost ready for operations. That spike left most of the unit undamaged, didn’t it?”
“There are still two massive holes to plug, through several layers of armour and insulation. And it took out dozens of circuits, air and coolant lines. He’d been reworking the plumbing for decades. It’s a rat’s nest.”
“I’m willing to bet it’ll take you a lot less time than bringing the other suit up to spec.”
“I thought about dismantling the suit, reconditioning the parts, stripping out some of the redundancy, putting it back together again…”
“So you could pretend it was a different suit, not the one he died in?”
She could read my face at least as well as I read hers. “Maybe that has something to do with it.”
“Ultras have their superstitions,” Luarca said. “But re-using a dead man’s suit isn’t one of them. We’ve a saying, in fact. A suit’s just another vessel. You wouldn’t have any problems about riding in the shuttle, just because Branco happened to use it once, would you?”
“It doesn’t seem like quite the same thing.”
“A question of degree, that’s all. You’ll adjust to our ways eventually, if you know what’s good for you.” Her jewel-like eyes clicked into close focus. “You do, don’t you?”
“I hope so.”
She placed one of her prosthetic claws on my shoulder. The touch was gentle, superficially reassuring, but I knew there was a power in those articulated alloy fingers that could crush bone.
“You were fortunate to leave Yellowstone when you did. Definitely more fortunate than the millions left behind, dealing with the Melding Plague. The last few transmissions we received, before the timelag became too acute, were distressing. Even for us, accustomed to a certain detachment from planetary affairs. But we’re all still human beings, aren’t we?”
It was a rhetorical question, and I knew better than to answer it directly.
“I appreciate my good fortune. I’m still grateful to you for recruiting me to the Formantera Lady. And I’ve no intention of letting down the ship.”
“Good, because we need that bill of health.” She lifted her cold alloy fingers from my shoulder. “I’ve no intention of waiting months to get it, either.”
Branco’s suit was a map of his life. Every significant incident had been recorded in a tiny cameo, painted onto the metal carapace in laborious, loving detail in the long hours when he wasn’t on-shift. Until now, with the broken suit spread before me, I’d never really had a chance to study those tiny pictures or guess at how they fitted together to form a narrative. Here was a battle scene, bulbous suited figures on the surface of an asteroid, fighting other bulbous suited figures against a sky of bright vermilion. Here was a ship burning from inside, against a star-wisped clutch of blue supergiants. Here was a picture of two fearsome cyborgs engaged in an arm-wrestling match, with onlookers crowding around them in some spaceport bar. I recognised one of the combatants as a much younger Branco, before time and space turned him into the man I’d met during my recruitment. How much of this was true to life, how much was exaggeration and invention, I had no idea, nor any great desire to find out. I had liked Branco and he had been kind to me, and it seemed right to treat these luminous figments as if they were truthful.