"My money says we're carrying some kind of tag or tracer," Gabriel said as they glided very close to the body. He eased back on the throttles and brought up the external spotlights, instructing the ship to train them on the body as they got close enough for them to do any good. "I really love the prospect of tearing this ship apart piece by piece to find out where the tracer is when we don't know what it looks like or where it's been put or even when . . ."
Five hundred meters away, they could now see, just as a speck, the faint reflection from the spotlights on a spread-eagled humanoid form. Gabriel nudged the ship ever so slowly closer to it.
"Who would have put such a thing on us?" Enda asked. "And why?"
"Someone who wants to see us dead of an 'accident' in far system space," Gabriel answered.
"Or in a street on Grith, late at night," Enda said.
Gabriel thought about that for a moment and shook his head. "On-ship surveillance wouldn't help anyone who wanted to do that. The people with the knives and the guns-that's some other kind of surveillance working, I'd say."
"So there might be two different parties tracking us," Enda said.
Two hundred fifty meters now. Gabriel sighed, "I was kind of hoping to avoid that particular conclusion."
"But you have not been able to?"
Gabriel shook his head. Two hundred meters.
"On the other hand," he said, "it's possible that if we removed whatever surveillance device was presently on the ship-"
"-assuming that we could find it in the first place-" Gabriel nodded. "-that its removal would alert whoever had put it there, and they would get even more annoyed with us than they are."
"I would suggest by present indications that they are already fairly annoyed," Enda said, looking over the computer's diagnostics again and sighing. "More hull repairs for the cargo bay, I fear, and the damage may possibly be well up into the superstructure as well. Well, riches are a burden, they say." "I thought you said you weren't rich." One hundred meters. The shape was slowing, losing its spin. Gabriel thought he could see something like tubes curving out stiff from the body as if frozen that way. A very big dark head section.
"I was speaking figuratively," Enda said. Together she and Gabriel peered out the cockpit windows as they came up to about fifty meters. Gabriel slowed Sunshine down to the merest crawl.
"Have you ever seen an e-suit with a headpiece like that?" Gabriel asked. It looked like solid metal, though the light was poor and certainly there were enough metallic coatings for visors, gold and platinum for example, that could fool you into thinking the whole helmet was polished metal. The shape was peculiar, too, oddly elongated toward the sides.
"Someone with very large ears?" Enda inquired.
"That large?" said Gabriel, and shook his head. "If it's a new species and that is for their ears, they're going to have to put up with a lot of teasing."
He reached into the computer's tank and told it to bring up the exterior handling software that controlled the grapples and configurable cables. Gabriel continued to nudge the ship's nose a little to one side of the body to bring the lift access close to it.
The ship inched around and came to rest relative to the body, which was simply drifting now, no longer spinning. Gabriel let the ark's manipulation field snug in around his hand as the grapples extruded themselves from Sunshine's side and snaked out gently toward the body. The grapples were "negative feedback" waldo-bands with sensor-augmented faked sensation so that your hand could "feel" what the grapples felt through the software as they engaged with a solid object. Gabriel felt his way toward the body, opened the fingers of the grapples, and closed them carefully around it. The sensation was peculiar, slightly squishy.
Slowly he pulled the body closer and flicked one thumb to open the lift access, then he pushed the body carefully into it and closed the access again. Gabriel put on light gravity in the lift and instructed it to come up to ship level while filling with parasitic air siphoned out of the main cabin. The lift clunked into place. Gabriel watched the lift's pressure gauge in the tank until it matched exactly with that of the cabin. Finally he was satisfied of a perfect match and touched the control to open the lift door. Enda was already up out of her seat, heading aft. He went after her.
They stood and looked down at the body on the floor of the lift. Despite its short time out in space, it seemed already well frozen, the arms flung out forwards, one of the legs oddly bent. There was the large glossy headpiece, cracked but otherwise intact, glazed inside with a silvery metallic compound. The e- suit covering the body, though, was most peculiar. It looked like greenish plastic-but the green of the plastic was not even. It looked lighter in some areas, darker in others. Enda knelt down beside it, reached out a hand toward one of the slits that the explosion had apparently torn in the e-suit, then took the hand back again, glancing up at Gabriel.
He put one booted toe out and nudged the body slightly. Over the greenish e-suit were shoulder pads and shin coverings and a breastplate of what might have been some kind of dark armor. It was faintly ribbed and looked less metallic than chitinous, as if it had been wrought from the wing casing of some large beetle. The armor was by no means complete, though, and much of the body was left uncovered. It appeared to have been partially blown away from the lower left leg, and splintered bone was visible. There was little blood, even clotted blood, but from underneath the plastic material of the e-suit where it had been torn, something pallidly green was oozing.
"The suit's filled with something," Gabriel said. "Not air, either." He too put a hand out as if to touch that strange e-suit, then thought better of it and withdrew it.
"I confess to having been eager to see who pursued us," Enda said, pursing her lips, "but now I am less eager. I do not like the thought of investigating this being much further without specialized protective gear, which, alas, we do not have."
Gabriel thought about that for a moment. "I bet I know who does have some, though," he said. "Oh?"
"Doctor Delde Sota."
Enda blinked at that. "You are considering taking this body back to her for autopsy?" Gabriel shrugged. "Spacefarers going about their lawful occasions are supposed to assist the authorities in investigating unusual occurrences, especially in system space, where the occurrences could cause danger to life or limb." He glanced back toward the cargo bay. "Our limbs were pretty well endangered, if you ask me. Legally, Doctor Sota would have to assist us. This is a 'public health' matter. And anyway, what is this creature, Enda? A new alien species of some kind? If it is, people should know about it, and that it's fairly aggressive when it gets you alone out in the dark."
"I would find it hard to argue with that." Enda stood up. "Well, we should wrap it up and keep it as intact as we can." She stood up, thinking for a moment-then turned to the nearby cabinet that contained the phymech and stroked its front panel. The panel lit up and displayed available settings. "I thought so," Enda said. "Here. 'Corpse wrapping.' "
"That's going to use up all the disinfectant film," Gabriel said, looking up past her as the machine displayed its materials requirements.
"Yes, well," Enda said, "what would you recommend we use instead?"
Gabriel sniffed the air. It was already becoming sharply rank with the scent of the green gel that was dripping out of various punctures and rips in the creature's protective suit as the air warmed it and the once-frozen liquids began to melt.
"Never mind," he said hurriedly, "I think you're right; we'd better just do it."
Enda told the phymech to put down its handling arms. It extruded them, wrapped them around the strange body and lifted it, preparatory to wrapping.