There’s rarely a creepy, echoing silence and a dearth of anybody to rescue. Especially not on two ships, at the same time.
I followed Sally’s map deeper into the syster vessel. We carry a full range of schematics and plans for nearly every production-line vessel and some of the custom jobs, going back over a hundred ans. I couldn’t reliably pull you up a schematic for anything pre-Synarche, like Big Rock Candy Mountain—you’d need an archinformist for that—but Sally is big and powerful and we don’t haul cargo or data. Just casualties. Which means there’s lots of room in her for not only Sally herself, but ayatanas like the ones I was wearing now, medical information on every known species, and quantities of engineering data.
The last thing—along with Sally’s reconnaissance and the drones flanking me like Odin’s ravens plus an understudy—was the reason for my confidence that I was headed in the right direction if I wanted to find people. Sally said so, and until I saw evidence that Afar had been significantly altered from spec, I was going to trust Sally’s information. Besides, her drones had already been here.
Crew quarters were right where they ought to be. It had been so long since anything had gone predictably right that finding them left me with a silly little buzz of satisfaction.
I paused outside the hatchway. The hatch was open and the decompression doors hadn’t triggered, both of which were in line with the general intact state of the vessel. The space beyond the hatchway echoed the sound of my movements, though there weren’t any footsteps in freefall. It was so quiet in Afar that the rustles and clicks of my movement in the hardsuit resounded.
Sound carried differently in Afar’s methane atmosphere. It sounded weird to ox-based me, but made the part of me wearing the methane-based ayatanas homesick. There was one sound that wasn’t just my own sounds, reflected, or the pings and creaks of any ship in space. It wasn’t familiar to me, but my ayatanas recognized it.
Breathing.
I took a moment to be doubly certain I wasn’t leaking any dangerous radiation, either heat or visible light, and let myself drift inside.
I found the crew, Sally.
There they were, as promised, five spiky, multi-limbed, refractive, partially transparent living snowflakes. According to Sally’s information, this was the full ship’s complement.
I was relieved to confirm with my own eyes, more or less, that they weren’t splattered (did Darboof splatter? I supposed they might melt) all over the bulkheads. I would not have been so certain of my fast crew count if they had been.
Each of them floated in what the ayatanas informed me was an attitude of restful repose, drifting on a tether near the cubby bunks I had last—remotely—seen them collapsed against. They showed no immediate signs of injury. As I moved closer, my senso showed me the subtle, glittering movements that accompanied their respiration. All of them were breathing in rhythm, which was not—I checked—typical of this species when cosleeping.
I found the casualties. If they are casualties. Commencing exam. They all seem to still be alive.
Copy, Sally said, and left me to it.
I detached Sally’s drones now that I was confident I’d located the crew and the drone information was accurate. I hadn’t wanted to say anything to Sally without evidence, but given Helen’s somewhat delusional state and whatever had happened to Afar—not to mention Sally’s own memory lapses—I’d been harboring a few concerns about whether Sally’s remotes were providing us with accurate information.
What the Well was Afar doing out here empty, anyway?
Sally, are you finding any packets in Afar’s memory?
They would be easy to spot, being encrypted, with—virtually speaking—colorful address labels. Nobody likes the mail getting lost in the shuffle.
He doesn’t seem to be carrying anything, she said. Well, some transponder packets. Some of the same ones we have, which tells me he passed a few of the same waypoints on the way out.
So he came from Coreward. Interesting.
Why would a ship like Afar head out from the Core on more or less the proper vector to get to Terra, a major population center, and not bring any stuff with him? It was wasteful—the disgust I felt at that was something else I could share with my ayatanas—but obviously, as ambulance crew, I could also imagine an emergency so serious that it would bring everybody who heard the call at a dead run.
The problem was that if there had been such an emergency, Core General could hardly have avoided being informed about it. Hospitals are generally up on all the worst news.
There’s something else, Sally said. Afar’s storage is full, but it’s all encrypted. It looks like maybe iterating backups of his code—
Can you decrypt it?
Not immediately. But I can start.
Make sure of your firewalls, I said, needlessly. It probably came across as condescending, in retrospect. Sure, meatform, teach an AI how to program.
I sent the drones off to do one more survey and recon. Just because we had the right number of crew members didn’t guarantee that we’d found everybody on board. Or even that these were the five they were supposed to be.
It’s a galactic constant. Everybody is bad at paperwork.
My own responsible choice was to stay here and start triage and prep the patients to survive transport—and perhaps begin care—while the drones finished off the search part of the search and rescue. Then I could double-check their work and maybe check out that cargo bay with signs of construction that Sally had mentioned.
I moved toward the nearest of my patients.
Darboof have three genders. Despite that, they still manage to reproduce by budding. Nature gets up to some weird and wonderful things.
None of these were visibly pregnant, at least. One less thing to worry about.
The one nearest me was not arousable by any of the usual means, including pain stimulus. (The tool for checking this in most of these methane systers looks like a glass tuning fork, by the way.) Its crystalline
