One thing I now knew: if Branco had reached this part of the ship during his inspection tour, he hadn’t seen fit to drill any holes. There’d been permanent sensors installed here once, but over time they had gradually fallen into disuse, creating one of several huge blindspots in the ship’s coverage of itself. I couldn’t see any sign that Branco had installed the replacement sensors he’d gone out with.
But since he hadn’t returned with them, where were they?
Making sure I was secure, and working against the dogged resistance of the suit, I drilled into the hull and emplaced the sensors I’d brought with me. They not only measured the integrity of the hull at the point where each was sunk, but spoke to each other to ascertain slow creepage due to spreading faults in the underlying material. One by one, the sensors bedded in and reported back to the readout on my helmet. The first few indications were reassuring, but I was careful not to jump to conclusions. If there was indeed a weak spot around this engine spar, I’d know soon enough. Sweat stung my eyes as I worked hard to complete the simplest movement. Perhaps I should not have been so confident about my ability to get back to the airlock. They could rescue me if I jammed here—my whereabouts were known—but that would mean cutting a new route through from the inside, and Captain Luarca would not be too pleased about that.
The last of the sensors reported in. Green on almost all the stress indications, with only one of the devices showing any hint of hull weakening. That was well within expectations. Whatever happened to Formantera Lady between here and her destination, there was no way this engine spar was going to snap off.
I’d done what I came to do. I called in to give the news.
“Integrity’s good, captain.”
“You’re sure?”
As always, the signal was so poor that it sounded like Captain Luarca was light years away, her voice fading in and out of a howl of static.
“Nothing that won’t hold until we reach Teton, and probably for a few more transits after that. There’s no reason for the crew not to start sleeping now.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said, letting me know that I’d presumed rather too much in issuing a recommendation. But she softened her tone by adding: “You did well, Raoul. Branco would have been satisfied.”
Satisfied, I thought. Not pleased, not proud. Just satisfied. She was right, as well.
“Now get back inside. The sooner we’re all dreaming, the happier I’ll be.”
“I’m on my way,” I said, trying to ignore the arduous task that lay ahead of me.
I surveyed my handiwork for one last time, re-checked the readouts on the sensors, then took a step off the ledge where I’d been standing.
Or at least, tried to. I was still secured, but the line should have spooled out enough to let me begin the ascent. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the suit wasn’t letting me climb. Whenever I tried to initiate the movement, it felt as though I was trying to wriggle inside a solid steel tomb. This was wrong. This was worse than wrong. Full paralysis had come on much faster than I’d anticipated. It was almost as if the suit had been waiting for me to complete the sensor checks before springing this on me.
“Captain Luarca,” I said. “We have a problem. I think the suit’s…”
But some instinct told me I was speaking into an unlistening void. I halted and waited for her response. It didn’t come back. She couldn’t hear me.
The suit wasn’t just freezing up on me. It had turned mute and/or deaf, severing my contact with the rest of the crew. Panicked, I wondered if this was how it had been for Branco. I’d assumed that he had been working quite normally until the spike hit him; that he’d only looked up an instant before it arrived, spearing down out of the blueshifted heavens. What if I was wrong about that? What if he’d been stuck in that position for hours and days, the suit refusing to move? He couldn’t have known that the spike was going to snap off, could he?
I forced calm. That wasn’t what had happened. This had been Branco’s suit until the end, the suit that had been his for most of his career on the ship. He’d painted it with love and affection. The volition box was making life difficult for me, but that was only because it had been so brilliantly, beautifully attuned to Branco.
Don’t blame the suit, I told myself. It didn’t kill him, and it’s not trying to kill you.
I don’t know how long it was before I tried moving sideways, instead of up. All of a sudden it was easier. Not as if the suit had suddenly decided to stop fighting me—there was still a lingering stiffness—but at the very least as if I’d found a path of least resistance. Perhaps the adaptive process was finally taking hold. But when I’d traversed sideways for several dozen paces, I was still unable to climb any higher. The suit was content to let me move in one direction, but not in another.
I think, even then, I felt a prickle of understanding.
Fighting the suit, trying to force it to let me return to the lock, would get me nowhere. Which left two possibilities. I could stay where I was, until such time as I was rescued. Or I could go where the suit allowed me.
Go, in fact, where the suit wanted me to go.
So I did. And it turned out that climbing down was even easier than moving sideways, and that there was a certain trajectory, a certain path, that was easiest of all. I followed it, still exercising great care, until it had taken me far beneath the engine spar. Still the suit wanted me to continue, even as the hull reached its point of maximum width and began to taper again, with the lighthugger’s blunt tail only a few hundred metres below. It was one thing to climb down a wall that was very steep; quite another to climb one that was actually leaning over from vertical. One slip, one miscalculation, and I’d see that wall rush past me, pulling gradually away until the ship had left me behind.
Perhaps that’s what it wants of me, I thought. It’s going to lead me all the way down to the tip, and force me to step off into the void. Could a suit become so attached to its wearer that the death of that wearer actually pushes the suit into madness?
But the suit wasn’t mad. And I knew it when I saw the hull begin, quite unexpectedly, to curve inwards in the form of a circular crater. Something must have hit us. The crater was perhaps ten metres across—a tiny, almost insignificant dent compared to the scale of the ship. And it was even less shallow than it was wide. The suit led me to the edge of this depression, and I looked into its heart, with no idea in my head as to what I might find. Why had the suit brought me here? It was the least vulnerable part of the ship, the one region where an impact stood little chance of doing any damage. No one lived down in those levels, so even a depressurisation event wouldn’t have harmed any of the crew.
But then I saw what was in the middle of the crater, and I understood.
Something twinkled there. It was a little silver nugget, a chrome-plated pebble. But the pebble had begun to extend fine, silvery tendrils out from its core, tendrils that groped their way out before plunging into the fabric of the ship. I didn’t need to be told what it was. I hadn’t seen the effects of it with my own eyes, but I’d seen enough on the transmissions from Yellowstone.
Melding Plague. Some tiny flake of it had hit the ship, lodged in tight and begun to grow. It could only have happened during our departure from the colony, in the turmoil and chaos of the outbreak. There had been ships smashing into each other as they fled the parking swarm; habitats around Yellowstone ramming one another as they lost orbital control. We thought we’d got away clean, but at some point—before the engines had given us enough speed to outrun such things—this little speck had found Formantera Lady.