It made for a busy presentation, but better safe than sorry. Most sentients would manage to find something blazoned on my chest that looked like help if they took the time to squint closely enough.
Now it was all blurred behind insulating foam.
Oops.
Well, I had already looked like an alien monster.
Speaking of visual spectra, when I peered through the interior airlock door, I couldn’t see a damned thing. It was dark as the proverbial Well in here. That opaque-to-visual-spectrum atmosphere I mentioned was apparently present and accounted for.
The expectations of my alien memories, that I would be able to see, made me briefly terrified that I’d been struck blind. I resisted the urge to turn on my floods—it was all deadly radiation to the methanogens, and I didn’t want to cook them by looking at them. Sally was already adjusting the suit to pick up and relay Afar’s interior “lighting,” anyway, with overlays both in senso and on the inside of my faceplate. In moments, I had a good look into a receiving area, currently empty of people and cargo and much of anything else.
The distress caused by the alien ayatanas eased up once I could see. I was still trapped in a monstrous body, hot and squishy and viscerally revolting. (Actually, the viscera were a big part of the problem. They really didn’t bear too much thinking about, as far as my methanogen passengers were concerned.) But at least my passenger memories now found our surroundings comfortable to look at, even if I was isolated from them by a layer of armor.
I felt as ridiculous as if I were taking a bath while wearing an armored personnel carrier.
I knew better than to complain. However good we’ve gotten at treating psychological and neurological illnesses, hospitals—even Core General—have an ethos of getting the job done despite personal frailty or personal feelings that, on its whole, I feel is a good thing. It does mean you don’t want to get tagged as a wuss, though, or a complainer, or somebody who doesn’t pull her weight.
Fortunately, Sally had set the overrides on my hardsuit without my having to ask, so I was relieved of the temptation to peel it off and get out in the balmy negative 170 degrees Celsius. I would have frozen solid as soon as I popped a suit latch, and the incandescent outgassing of my pleasantly room-temperature atmosphere would boil the ice-crystal builders of this ship alive.
I wouldn’t have done anything so foolish. Even ridden by my guest ayatanas, I was the one in control—whatever you might have seen on your late-night three-vee. Reality is seldom as melodramatic as entertainment. On the other hand, reality is much more random, arbitrary, and dangerous than fiction, and it’s my job to understand that to exact tolerances. Feeling like you’re the protagonist of your own story doesn’t guarantee you’re going to make it to the final act of anybody else’s.
I wouldn’t have done anything foolish. But it was kind of Sally to take the distraction of temptation away. You’ve only got so much executive function, and it wouldn’t hurt to have all of it to process whatever life-or-death situation I was about to find myself in.
Was already in, if I were being honest with myself. I could feel the chill working its way through the insulation at the joints of my hardsuit. A round sort of ache settled into the bones of my hands and elbows as the cold began to saturate them, reminding me that my time in this environment was limited.
Well, work would help to keep me warm. I nerved myself and stepped farther into the darkness.
I made sure the interior airlock door closed itself behind me. The thing about airlocks is that they’re only effective tools for retaining atmosphere when both halves are engaged. I drifted through the empty reception bay, straining my senso for any sign of life, movement, even clutter.
I picked up a whole lot of nothing. Cargo nets festooned the bulkheads, empty as the webs of hungry spiders.
It was a regular arachnid famine around here, from what was—so far—a cursory inspection. But as I drifted cautiously toward quarters, I wondered who in the wide flat spinning galaxy would waste fuel, standard months of their life expectancy, and other consumables running around in an empty fast data hauler.
The information Afar had been carrying—and was named for—was his most valuable commodity as well as his raison d’être. Faster-than-light communication required faster-than-light ships to take messages from place to place, and the galaxy was big. The automated relay of transponders and packets worked, but like any hub-and-spoke system it relied on connections happening in the right order, and on regular patterns of shipping moving in more direct lines.
It could take ans for the mail to get from one isolated node to another if the relays broke down, and even if they didn’t you could never be entirely sure of when your message would reach its destination. Data haulers weren’t resource-light, but they were a direct route.
Because they weren’t resource-light, this emptiness was weird. Unless the data Afar was hauling was critical to lives or infrastructure in an emergency sense, a ship like him would normally stick around a port long enough to pick up some stuff. So his empty bays gave me a perfectly justifiable wiggins.
There was so much about this situation that wasn’t quite right.
Most heavy rescue situations are extremely straightforward. They are scary. There are often fires, or blown vessels, or explosions, or terrible collisions to deal with. There will nearly always be people screaming, if there is any
