My very low-power UV lidar imaging system was clicking away, supported by the efforts of the drone. An image of the cargo space around me resolved, shimmered.
Handholds—appendage-holds—ran along the bulkheads. They didn’t look like the handholds my species built, but their purpose was obvious. I used them to haul myself along the curve of the wall until I got to the craboid’s nearest foot.
It seemed to be… a foot. A spider foot. Only gigantic.
Sensors indicated that it was constructed of metal, ceramics, and some very durable resin compounds. It had some ferrous content. It looked smooth and sculpted, flat-bottomed, with hooked barbs projecting on all sides. It was bigger around than the span of my arms.
The bulkhead of the cargo hold was faintly dented from the pressure of the foot braced into it. I set my back and hands against one of the appendage-holds and shoved the foot with my boots, extending my legs as strongly as I, exo, and hardsuit together could manage.
My machines couldn’t budge this machine. I didn’t even feel it give, or sense any tiny scraping through the hull. The machine was wedged into the hold as solidly as if welded there. As if it had been designed to climb into a cargo space and make itself functionally a rigid part of the ship’s structure.
Maybe it had. The central pod, or capsule, or habitat, was suspended in the midst of a reinforced framework—the spider-crab legs—that seemed to have been rigged up to brace and protect it. It was too far away from the cargo bay bulkhead for me to inspect very well.
That couldn’t stop me from drifting up to it for a closer look.
Hey, crew, I said, stick a memo on the calendar to look into who sent Afar out here, when we’re back in touch with civilization.
Fast packets didn’t just fly around the galaxy empty, and I kept coming back to that. Okay, so Afar wasn’t empty: he had been hauling… this thing.
Whatever this thing was for.
I followed the line of the nearest leg with the softest pulses of my jets. The central pod wasn’t precisely spherical. It was teardrop-shaped, and I was slightly kitty-corner to its round end. I sidled around until I was facing the round part dead-on, exactly at the midline. There were no legs attached to this end, and that seemed significant. It had no portholes, and it had none of the smaller manipulators I would expect if it were, for example, the kind of war-suit that Loese suggested.
Sally’s drones zoomed around me on a rising helix, then broke off to swirl around the teardrop-shaped part of the machine. Sally forwarded their feeds to me. I felt, rather than heard, the small clicks as they settled onto the machine’s surface.
Loese’s comment about combat armor was still niggling. I stretched my hardsuit’s sensors, but there were no visible weapons, and no obvious ports that weapons could slide out of.
If I were going to put a door in something like this, the underside is where I would put it. I let myself float, frowning behind my opaqued faceplate, and studied the apparently featureless surface with all the tools at my command, since it was too dark in the hold to use my eyes.
The pod was not entirely featureless. It had some small, uneven swellings, little bumps that bent backward in a manner that resembled fairings. They looked like they might grow up to be barbs like the ones on the feet, given good nutrition and time. There were differences in texture on its surface. Sally used my hardsuit to bounce another low-powered UV laser off the carapace. The results told me that if I could have seen it with my eyes, the machine would have been black, the whole thing, with a satin shine and blue and red overtones on the edges. Pretty, in a monstrous sort of way.
Senso also told me that there were glossier sections in the pod, which I was starting to think of as a hull. They were black, too, but the luster made me think they were not so much opaque as opaqued, like my helmet. They were small, and the plating around them looked thick. Reinforced. Like window frames, around armored windows. Or like—given their size—one-way mirrors over maneuvering cams.
Was this thing a vehicle of some kind? Optimized for maneuvering in hostile environments? An armored all-terrain vehicle?
Something designed to protect the occupant for long duty in extreme cold, or heat, or whatever?
Sally, what’s the temperature in there?
There’s not much atmosphere inside it, she said, based on vibratory tests with the drones. But the pod is hollow, and the interior volume of the capsule is about twenty-three cubed meters.
I did a quick visualization exercise and decided that was more than enough space for an adult human, though it might get cramped after a while. Does it have life support?
There is some machinery that looks like compressors, filtration, and so forth. It’s carrying a water supply. And supplies of carbon and nitrogen. There is a mini fusion plant, batteries, and power access. Those are all quiescent now. The water has been allowed to freeze; the tank it’s in was either partially empty, or is designed to allow for expansion.
H2O. Now there was a surprise. That was a rock, as far as the Darboof were concerned. And a durable rock at that.
But if you had hydrogen dioxide, carbon, and nitrogen, you had the basic components of life support for a water-solvent ox-respiring syster. Like Rhym, or Hhayazh. Or me.
If it was a suit of environmental armor, a piloted walker of some sort, it sounded like a pretty pleasant way to get around, depending on what the upholstery was like. Especially with the interface between my exo and the hardsuit chafing at my left knee and my underarms, and the infiltrated cold from before still making my joints hurt, and the undissipated heat of now causing sweat to pool against my
