By the time I was armed, I had to come back toward the craboid via the airlock built into the bubble. I made sure the interior flap was secured shut behind me before Linden pumped her own ox atmosphere out and pumped a nonreactive nitrogen atmosphere in.
I rigged the drill, set up a brace to hold it in position, and stepped back before triggering.
The bit was diamond grown around a nanotube lattice for tensile strength. It whined against the hatch, a sound that scraped through my magnetic soles and my eardrums to vibrate along my bones and make my back teeth ache. It would have been even worse inside the craboid, so it was just as well there were no passengers.
The idea was that I would drill a very small hole in the craboid, enabling me to get a sample of the atmosphere inside. Then we’d have a better idea of who might use such a thing.
I was a little concerned that the craboid might be programmed to take evasive or defensive measures. But it stood there and waited quietly while I worked to pry its carapace open.
Right up until the drill bit snapped.
A piece of bit ricocheted off the deck plates and the craboid while I, reflexively, cowered. I got lucky: it pinged off my hardsuit, then lodged in the flexible collar of the nitrogen bubble’s lock. No hiss of commingling or escaping atmosphere followed.
Sally was immediately in my senso, asking if I was all right.
“Fine,” I said. I touched my faceplate. The drill bit had taken a tiny, glittering chip out of it right in the most distracting possible spot, but it wasn’t cracked or cracking, and it hadn’t gone through and taken out my eye. So that was lucky, and the hardsuit would heal itself quickly. “The drill bit broke. That’s not supposed to happen. Even if the diamond shattered, the nanotubes should hold it together.”
I pulled the bit out of the collar material and examined the broken end. Under magnification, I could see that the nanotubes were sheared off a little above the surface of the bit. The stub, still gripped in the drill chock, showed the same damage. It looked like the tubes had been stretched slightly. The ends looked slightly deformed, as if they had been pulled apart rather than cleanly cut.
“That’s definitely not supposed to do that.” I hooked Sally into my senso feed and got Hhayazh with her. I let them use my eyes to inspect the damage. “It looks like something weakened the structure of the tubes.”
“Vibrations?” Hhayazh asked.
“Harmonics, you mean?” I frowned through the chipped faceplate. “Maybe? Well, nobody died. I don’t know how we’re going to sample that atmosphere, though.”
“Sally’s density readings give it a pretty standard oxygen saturation.”
“A little rare for my tastes, but yes,” I admitted. “Figuring out what the atmosphere is made of from how fast sound waves go through it is not as certain as actually getting your hands on a little bit of air and running a few tests, however.”
Hhayazh made one of its noises, the kind that might mean exasperation or might mean amusement. “Well, we could get out a laser torch—”
“I don’t want to be in the neighborhood if a cutting beam starts ricocheting around!”
“Fine, just wait for it to open up on its own. That seems likely.”
“Don’t get your ovipositor in a twist, Hhayazh.”
Through our connection, I sensed Hhayazh’s bristles waving like the cilia on a paramecium. “I’d parasitize you, but my offspring might grow up to have your sense of humor.”
“I thought your species didn’t eat sentients.”
It made the expulsion of air that was its species’s equivalent of a disgusted snort. “We don’t.”
I was framing a retort, still standing there with the snapped drill bit in my left hand, when around me the atmospheric pressure abruptly changed. A grinding sound followed, shivering through the bulkheads. I took a clanging, magnetized step back. Polymer stretched against me, arresting my movement.
Llyn, report, Sally snapped.
The inner flap of the isolation bubble was against my back. I couldn’t open it, because whatever happened, I was in a hardsuit and most of the staff and patients in Core General’s ox sector were each in their own equivalent of shirtsleeves. I had to keep my crew safe from whatever pathogens or poisons might be contained inside the walker. Not to mention the atmosphere.
“You were saying?” I grumped at Hhayazh. Then collected my irritation, and said, “The airlock seems to be opening.”
For no reason that any of us could detect, the hatchlike portion in the craboid’s belly had dropped down and was sliding to one side.
In a haze of decision paralysis, I froze. I didn’t know what might be coming out of the craboid’s belly hatch. I didn’t have the least idea if I was going to be confronted with a patient in need of care or a pissed-off soldier with a shock prod or a swarm of flesh-eating battlebots. Or all of those things simultaneously, for that matter.
I scrambled to come up with a response. The hatch glided open, spilling a warm, mellow golden light into the much less pleasing ambiance of machine bay lights filtered through isolation tent.
Something atavistic and planet-bred in me relaxed at the color of that light. It was foolish; it was illogical. And yet I found myself letting out the breath I had reflexively taken, and lowering the hand with the drill bit in it. I’d been holding it up like a sword, as if such a ridiculous weapon were going to be good for anything.
I felt confident that whoever liked that light liked golden beaches shimmering under yellow suns and long
