Smugly, she revealed an analysis that—once we deducted the nitrogen from our containment bubble—was only a few points off from her initial estimate. The craboid was (or had been, until it opened up) chock-full of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide—an atmosphere that might have been a copy of Terra’s in any number of geologic epochs.
My pulse was still racing. I waited, trying to slow my heart without resorting to tuning. The biofeedback worked as long as I concentrated on my breath. In a few seconds, I had collected myself enough to try to peer into the spill of radiance and get a glimpse of the inside of the pod.
It was like trying to stare into the proverbial tunnel of white light. My vision swam; there was nothing within except brilliance. Maybe it was supposed to decontaminate the hatchway.
“Nothing’s coming out,” I said after a few minutes during which nothing had come out. “I’m going to go look inside.”
“Be careful,” said Sally, while Hhayazh muttered a comment about humans being too dumb to die.
“Hey, it’s my job to climb into questionable structures.” I stepped under the curved forward edge of the walker pod. I looked up, and peeked inside. At first, the light was too bright for me to see anything. “I’m going to poke my head up.”
“Maybe send a drone first?” Sally said. She didn’t wait for my request, but zipped one right past me and made a right-angle climb toward the hatchway. I hadn’t even noticed it hovering behind my shoulder until it moved.
It passed through the hatchway. There followed a sharp electrical pop, and it passed through the hatchway again, this time in the opposite direction. Falling.
The drone struck the polymer over the deck plates with a thump.
I froze.
“I recommend that you don’t stick your head in there, Dr. Jens,” Hhayazh said.
“Thank you, Hhayazh. That sounds like excellent advice.”
“Can you see into the pod?” Sally asked. “What can you make out in there?”
“There’s a lot of glare, but it looks like a couch and a console. And some cargo space, which is empty, but there are straps. What are you picking up?”
“Nothing,” Sally said.
I stepped back away from the hatch, out of an abundance of caution. “But how is that possible?”
“The interior is still electromagnetically shielded. But this whole situation makes me uneasy. We’ve hauled a whole lot of weirdness back to civilization, and I’d really like some insight into how two ships and two crews were mysteriously disabled, and what exactly this walker is for. I don’t like mysteries.”
“I love ’em,” I said. “I like the satisfaction of solving them. I’m not feeling a lot of satisfaction right now.”
“Go get decontaminated,” Sally said. “I’m going to turn the craboid over to a research team. Let their drones get electrocuted for a while.”
CHAPTER 12
DECONTAMINATION WAS PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD. THERE are stalls all over Core General—near every equipment locker, and at every transition zone between environments. Sally herself is designed to decontaminate everything that comes in or goes out, if necessary.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to get my hardsuit irradiated. Just doused in a little antiseptic and scrubbed down, so it was over quickly. I returned to Sally, left my hardsuit in my locker, and argued her out of a rest period on the grounds that I was supposed to report to the Administree.
Reporting to the hospital administrator didn’t involve anything so commonplace as taking a lift to an office. There was a lift—funny how we still use such antiquated terminology in an environment with no up and nothing to lift against except spin, and for a transportation pod that goes in all sorts of directions—but where it disgorged me was back to the outermost layers of the station, far from the machine bay or even the docking stations.
This was not an office, but a park. An upside-down sort of park where the sky was underfoot and the grass grew over your head. One of the weirder things about getting your gravity from spin was that when I came out of the lift I had to walk down a curved ramp to the transparent outer layer of the station. Having accomplished this, I had the unsettling option of looking down past my feet at the outside, or even lying down and pressing my nose against the shatterproof lumium for a more comfortable angle.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t here to bask in the view. I was here to give a report, and I knew it. I had hopes of avoiding being called on the decking… but time would indicate whether I would get away with my hide intact. I didn’t know that I had done anything wrong, but getting a note from your boss that says “See me” is never a pleasant experience.
Core General’s administrator would not have fit in the office I mentioned before. To be fussily precise, they also did not fit entirely into the park. But a lot of them did, and the majority of their organs of sense and thought were concentrated here.
I stepped off the bottom of the ramp, walked a few steps over the whirling, vertiginous space below to free up the landing for anyone else coming or going, and craned my head back at the ceiling.
Or rather, at the whispering canopy of leaves largely obscuring the next-innermost onion layer of Core General. The leaves, shiny and green-violet, rustled as if there were a breeze behind them. I could make out the windows beyond, leading to levels inhabited by a variety of different species.
This far out and on this side of the hospital, they would all be carbon dioxide or other compatible metabolisms if they weren’t ox types like me, and they would all be species who could tolerate a certain amount of grav and rads. But that was where
