“It’ll be easier for me to get over there if he’s not whirling around with the wheel, having made that jump already. But it’s your call. I can undock him manually.”
“No,” Sally said. “If you’re willing to take the risk, I can plug in a drone and make things nice and easy with matched velocities. You don’t even have to go over and, as you so kindly offered, solder on a panel. Just handle a life-support setup for the crew while we’re in transit.”
“You’re very accommodating,” I joked. “What if Afar is contagious?”
“I have a personality core backup on archive at Core General,” she answered. “And I have good firewalls. If you meat types are willing to take the small additional risk, I am. The worst I stand to lose is a few diar of memories. You could wind up drifting forever in the interstellar darkness.”
I laughed.
But maybe a little nervously.
Our IR scanners and the drones showed Afar was cold—cold, cold, cold—but that didn’t mean the crew was dead. Cold was the only habitat methane breathers could endure.
I got Sally to give me two more ayatanas from Core General staff who belonged to Afar’s crew species. As Sally had previously demonstrated, the Darboof’s name for themselves sounded like the chiming of glass bells; their sensorium experience was foreign to mine. Even though I unloaded a couple of the antique human ayatanas first, downloading and integrating the recorded memories of two more from the Darboof strained my capabilities enough that I found myself looking at the brown squishiness of my own fingers with disgust. I was revoltingly unlike the clean, crystalline purity of the methane breathers. Wet, dangerously hot, full of terrifying caustic fluids…
Right. I tuned myself to manage my increasingly catastrophic endocrine response and felt the pulse rate of my (hot, caustic-blooded) heart slow.
Better living through brain implants!
Calmer, I settled in to research in my borrowed memories. Since the ayatanas in question were those of medical professionals, I was able to find the information I needed fairly quickly.
That infrared reading suggested they hadn’t gotten too hot: their climate control was still working. The vessel’s hull seemed intact per visual inspection and the drone report, so there probably hadn’t been any impacts. And, I reminded myself, the drones said the crew were alive in there, just in some kind of suspension.
Which led me to the least reassuring detail I learned from my recorded passengers. I reaffirmed my earlier impression that the Darboof did not, in general, exhibit a hibernation response to trauma, though there was some evidence that one could be induced in them by the right combination of interventions. That would require the equivalent of putting me in a cryo tank, though, so I didn’t think it was what had happened here.
The Darboof were physically tough, able to withstand more gs than squishy little critters like myself, and they didn’t demineralize in free fall, either. Lucky. Being under simulated gravity for however long they had been docked—not too long, since they were still alive and respiring, per the drones—wouldn’t have harmed them.
Neither would lack of gravity on the way back to Core General. And they could survive the transition from the former to the latter unrestrained except for their acceleration couches, which they were conveniently already slumped upon.
“All right, I think this is a go,” I told Sally, staggering onto the bridge with one hand braced on the wall. We were back to maintaining position over Afar, whipping around the rolling wheel of the generation ship on a following curve, and pulling some extra g because of it. Sally’s rotation meant that we endured successive waves of feeling lighter and heavier as the accelerations interacted. It was profoundly disorienting, but if Sally had stopped her rotation, anybody on the other side of the hub would have been sitting on the ceiling. Awkward.
Loese was sensibly strapped into her chair, both sets of hands buried in her console. I popped myself down next to her. We watched a stabilized screen rather than trying to follow the action through a viewport, which would have been nauseating—as I’d learned before my last jump.
I was already doing enough tuning to compensate for my inner ear’s opinions about the vector situation without compounding the problem, thanks.
Tsosie and Rhym were strapped in to watch the show, as well. I clicked my own belts into place and lay back on the acceleration couch with a sigh.
It helped.
“All right,” Sally said. “I have control of Afar’s nav systems. Here goes nothing.”
Nothing on the bridge changed, at first. The swelling waves of acceleration washed us; Afar clung like a barnacle to the vast curve of the generation ship. Then a seam appeared in the adaptive collar that held him to the airlock. It peeled away and vanished back into Afar’s hull. In the normal course of events, the materials would have been salvaged for printing into another tool as necessary. I wondered, with the ship and crew disabled, if it would be cluttering up the airlock like a giant pile of parachute cloth when I went in.
Because of the collar mismatch, Afar had not shot his docking bolts. He clung to the outside of the generation ship with emergency grapples, and because the airlock had not been seated to Big Rock Candy Mountain, there was no puff of escaping atmosphere.
Afar retracted his grapples evenly and instantly shot free of the generation ship, no longer bent to her curve but not deprived of velocity. He vectored off as fast as he had been spinning. The pings of one of the two distress beacons went with him.
We followed, the swell and release of acceleration replaced by a pressure that would have leaned us aft if we hadn’t been strapped down.
I rubbed my hands. All the liquid inside me was sloshing around, and my joints had opinions about it.
Localized pain, you can tune out pretty safely and easily, up to a point. The systemic stuff
