These thoughts gave her another idea. Perhaps the work of penetrating the ship's voidhull had already been carried out.
“I'm going to take a look at the hull breeches up close,” she announced. “We need to know what damage they caused. They looked superficial, but maybe they'll give us a way in.”
She pulled herself across the Dragon's hull, walking on her hands and using the suits thrusters to nudge her in the direction she needed to go. Ondo followed, as did the bubble of protective energy emanating from Surtr. As ever, the Aetheral appeared to be able to move without making any effort. They worked their way around one of the sharp edges of the ship's superstructure, putting them out of sight of Surtr's vessel. She sent an instruction to the lone nanosensor to alter its position to maintain line-of-sight. The good news was that a second device had shown up at the collection point, meaning she could arrange them in her sky to give her good comms coverage from all directions.
More good news was that the voidhull had successfully absorbed the impacts of two of the strikes it had suffered; presumably the energy hull had been able to handle the kinetic energy of those strikes.
The third high-g missile, however, had breached the superstructure. The point where it had struck the Dragon's bare voidhull was an ugly, ragged rip in the previously-unimpaired surface, puncturing through the layers of carbon-metal armour to expose ducts and cables and data flecks that were never supposed to be visible from the outside. The ship would have reacted by sealing off all pressurised decks and voids within its structure in an attempt to contain the danger and maintain the ship's viability. The question was, how much damage had been inflicted – and which capabilities had been destroyed.
The impact had apparently been from a small device; the entry wound was a little over a metre in diameter, narrowing in the inner layers as the device used its raw velocity to punch through. The device also hadn't detonated. Missiles were usually rigged to explode once their forwards momentum was stopped by the hull of the ship they'd been fired at. They embedded themselves into their target as deeply as they could, then blew. The more delicate and vulnerable systems were obviously always inside a ship, protected by the energy hull and hard voidhull.
“Looks like we got lucky,” said Selene, talking brain-to-brain with Ondo, showing him what she was seeing.
He appeared beside her to peer into the ragged gash in the side of the Dragon. “I assume the ship's beam-weaponry incapacitated the missile before it struck.”
“I can't work out which part of the interior layout the missile would have ended up in.” She'd spent quite a few hours during her metaspace traversals trying to construct a comprehensive map of the Dragon's layout – and had had never fully succeeded. Even now, there were areas of the ship that appeared to be unconnected to anything; blank areas where, she presumed, unidentified aspects of the ship's inner workings were turning, doing whatever they'd been built to do. The fact had troubled her at first, but Ondo had put her mind at rest. Aefrid Sen had spotted the same thing, but had concluded the dead spots were nothing to worry about. They were just odd spaces left over from the Dragon's multiple transformations over the centuries and millennia.
“Either in or near the cartography deck, I believe,” said Ondo. He sent her a three-dimensional schematic with his estimate of the missile damage overlaid on it.
The light of Surtr's glow shone brighter on the surface of the Dragon as the Aetheral drifted closer to study the breach for itself. It touched the entry-point with its gauntlet hands, exploring exposed surfaces and ducts and the ragged ends of fractured beams as if feeling for a pulse. She let it work; it didn't appear to be doing any harm. It probed inside. Although its hands were large, its fingers were surprisingly slender.
After a few moments, it said, “There are some elements within the structure of the ship that I can repair, just as I repaired your bodies when they were damaged.”
“You're talking about your entropy-spiral tech?” Ondo asked. “That's how the Dragon is able to restore its form after it has been damaged?”
“The spirals operate by returning a complex system to a known structural state, reversing the effect of decay and disrepair. Your DNA and Selene's artificial analogue of it allowed the spirals to operate upon you to a degree, and I can see that the ship knows what structure it is supposed to have. I can make use of that, boost the effect of its own spirals, which have become somewhat weakened.”
“What do you mean, it knows what structure it is supposed to have?” asked Selene. “The superstructure is just a lump of beautifully-engineered metal, carbon and polymer. It doesn't know anything.”
“Its ideal form is encoded within its deeper structures. It is the same with me. The effect is weaker in this ship, but it is there.”
Ondo said, “How do you evolve and change if these spirals are always trying to return you to an original state?”
“They have to be deactivated during a period of metamorphosis. Once a transition has been completed, they must be reprimed to maintain the new structure. It can be a vulnerable time.”
“I see, yes. It's fascinating. But surely…”
Selene held her hand up to stop him in his flow. “Later, perhaps. We're still floating in space outside a crippled ship, here.”
“Yes, yes, of course, yes.”
She glanced aside at Surtr, although the gesture would be lost within her helmet. “If the structure of the ship is self-repairing, why is the
