I stared forward, past her left shoulder. Stared down, and felt my fingers curl tight on the back of Vongsavath’s seat.
Fear confirmed.
The old shift in the head, like pressure doors locking sections of my brain up under diamond bright illumination. The conditioning.
I breathed.
‘You’re going to stay, you might want to sit down,’ said Vongsavath, busy with a buoyancy monitor that had just started gibbering at the sudden lack of a planet beneath us.
I clambered to the co-pilot’s seat and lowered myself into it, looking for the webbing straps.
‘See anything?’ I asked with elaborate calm.
‘Stars,’ she said shortly.
I waited for a while, getting used to the view, feeling the itch at the outer corners of my eyes as instinct-deep reflexes pulled my peripheral vision backwards, looking for some end to the intense lack of light.
‘So how far out are we?’
Vongsavath punched up figures on the astrogation set.
‘According to this?’ She whistled low. ‘Seven hundred and eighty-odd million klicks. Believe that?’
It put us just inside the orbit of Banharn, the solitary and rather unimpressive gas giant that stood sentinel on the outer edges of the Sanction system. Three hundred million kilometres further in on the ecliptic was a circling sea of rubble, too extensive to be called a belt, that had for some reason never got round to coalescing into planetary masses. A couple of hundred million kilometres the other side of that was Sanction IV. Where we’d been about forty seconds ago.
Impressive.
Alright, a stellar-range needlecast can put you on the other side of so many kilometres you run out of places to put the zeroes in less time than that. But you have to be digitised first, and then you have to be downloaded into a new sleeve at the other end, and all that takes time and technology. It’s a process.
We hadn’t been through a process, or at least nothing humanly recognisable as such. We’d just bumped across a line. Given inclination and a vacuum suit, I could literally have stepped across that line.
Sutjiadi’s sense of not belonging came and touched me again at the nape of the neck. The conditioning awoke and damped it out. The wonder along with the fear.
‘We’ve stopped,’ murmured Vongsavath, to herself more than me. ‘Something soaked up our acceleration. You’d expect some. Holy. God.’
Her voice, already low, sank to a whisper on the last two words and seemed to decelerate the way the Nagini apparently had. I looked up from the figures she’d just maximised on the display, and my first thought, still scrabbling around in a planet-bound context, was that we had cruised into a shadow. By the time I remembered that there were no mountains out here, and not much in the way of sunlight to be obscured anyway, the same chilly shock that Vongsavath must have been feeling hit me.
Over our heads, the stars were sliding away.
They disappeared silently, swallowed with terrifying speed by the vast, occluding bulk of something hanging, it seemed, only metres above the overhead viewports.
‘That’s it,’ I said, and a small cold shiver ran through me as I said it, as if I’d just completed an obscure summoning.
‘Range…’ Vongsavath shook her head. ‘It’s nearly five kilometres off. That makes it—’
‘Twenty-seven kilometres across,’ I read out the data myself. ‘Fifty-three long. External structures extending…’
I gave up.
‘Big. Very big.’
‘Isn’t it.’ Wardani’s voice came from right behind me. ‘See the crenellation at the edge. Each of those bites is nearly a kilometre deep.’
‘Why don’t I just sell seats in here,’ snapped Vongsavath. ‘Mistress Wardani, will you please return to the cabin and sit down.’
‘Sorry,’ murmured the archaeologue. ‘I was just—’
Sirens. A spaced scream, slashing at the air in the cockpit.
‘Incoming,’ yelled Vongsavath, and kicked the Nagini on end.
It was a manoeuvre that would have hurt in a gravity well, but with only the ship’s own grav field exerting force, it felt more like an experia special effect, an Angel wharf-conjuror’s trick with holoshift.
Vacuum combat fragments:
I saw the missile coming, falling end over end towards the right side viewports.
I heard the battle systems reporting for duty in their cosily enthusiastic machine voices.
Shouts from the cabin behind me.
I started to tense. The conditioning broke in heavily, forced me into impact-ready limpness—
Just a minute.
‘That can’t be right,’ said Vongsavath suddenly.
You don’t see missiles in space. Even the ones we can build move too fast for a human eye to track effectively.
‘No impact threat,’ observed the battle computer, sounding slightly disappointed. ‘No impact threat.’
‘It’s barely moving.’ Vongsavath punched up a new screen, shaking her head. ‘Axial velocity at… Ah, that’s just drift, man.’
‘Those are still machined components,’ I said, pointing at a small spike in the red section of the spectrum scan. ‘Circuitry, maybe. It ain’t a rock. Not just a rock, anyway.’
‘It’s not active, though. Totally inert. Let me run the—’
‘Why don’t you just bring us round and back up,’ I made a quick calculation in my head. ‘About a hundred metres. It’ll be practically sitting out there on the windscreen. Kick on the external lights.’
Vongsavath locked onto me with a look that somehow managed to combine disdain with horror. It wasn’t exactly a flight manual recommendation. More importantly, she probably still had the adrenalin chop sloshing about in her system the same as me. It’s apt to make you grumpy.
‘Coming about,’ she said finally.
Outside the viewports, the environment lighting ignited.
In a way, it wasn’t such a great idea. The toughened transparent alloy of the viewports would have been built to vacuum combat spec, which means stopping all but the most energetic micrometeorites without much more than surface pitting. Certainly it wasn’t about to be ruined by bumping into something adrift. But the thing that came bumping up over the nose of the Nagini made an impact anyway.
Behind me, Tanya Wardani shrieked, a short, quickly-locked-up sound.
Scorched and ruptured though it was by the extremes of cold and the absence of pressure outside, the object was still recognisable as a human body, dressed for summer on the Dangrek coast.
‘Holy God,’ whispered Vongsavath, again.
A blackened face peered sightlessly in at us, empty eye sockets masked in trailing strands of exploded, frozen tissue. The mouth below was all scream, as silent now as it would have been when its owner tried to find a voice for the agony of dissolution. Beneath a ludicrously loud summer shirt, the body was swollen by a bulk that I guessed were the ruptured intestines and stomach. One clawed hand bumped knuckles on the viewport. The other arm was jerked back, over the head. The legs were similarly flexed, forward and back. Whoever it was had died flailing at the vacuum.
Died falling.
Behind me, Wardani was sobbing quietly.
Saying a name.
We found the rest of them by suit beacons, floating at the bottom of a three-hundred-metre dimple in the hull structure and clustered around what appeared to be a docking portal. There were four, all wearing cheap pull-on vacuum suits. From the look of it, three had died when their air supply ran out, which according to suit specs would have taken about six to eight hours. The fourth one hadn’t wanted to wait that long. There was a neat five-centimetre hole melted through the suit’s helmet from right to left. The industrial laser cutter that had done the damage was still tethered to the right hand at the wrist.