The variable portal they’d come through was now three thousand kilometres behind them. Eighteen thousand kilometres away, a dark rubble pile asteroid was tumbling along its lonely orbit. Acceleration vectors materialized in the navigation data, and Callum began to shape the drive patterns to match them, putting the ship on a course that would end in a rendezvous.
‘Nicely done,’ Yuri said.
The Avenging Heretic accelerated to two point two gees. There were some fluctuations in the thrust, which Callum did his best to get under control. His manipulation of the patterns wasn’t as proficient as he’d have liked.
‘Don’t overcompensate,’ Jessika said. ‘Keep the alterations smaller and smoother. The routines are adaptive; they’ll learn your style.’
Callum did his best to quash an instinctive defensiveness; she was advising, not criticizing. The oscillations in the drive levelled out.
They took it in turns to fly the Avenging Heretic: Yuri decelerating for rendezvous; Kandara manoeuvring around the frozen asteroid; Alik taking them back to the portal. Callum felt Alik had a way to go before he was as proficient as the others but didn’t say anything.
Jessika brought them back through the portal and onto the cradle in Kruse Station. Atmosphere began to vent back into the big chamber.
Callum looked around the bridge, and suddenly the effort of de-tanking was depressing. ‘We could just stay here until the next test flight.’
‘No way,’ Kandara said. ‘We’re going to be spending a long time in these tanks. And I, for one, am not adding to that.’ Her image imploded in a silent cloud of pixels.
‘The design crew needs to run analysis on the tanks,’ Jessika said. ‘This is the first time they’ve been used on an actual flight. Simulation runs can only tell us so much.’ She shrugged and vanished.
Yuri’s grin was so wide he must have had his nervecapture routine turned up to eleven.
‘Disengage the suspension tank,’ Callum told Apollo, his altme. The neural interface routines were now good enough to read his vocalization impulses directly. Besides, he couldn’t use his voice peripheral – not with an oxygen nozzle filling his mouth.
Feeling seeped back into his brain, along with the thick, gurgling sound of fluid draining out of the suspension tank. The frame holding him juddered slightly, and then there was a solid floor under his feet. A long strip of green and amber medical icons splashed across his tarsus lens, and he blinked his eyes open.
Directly ahead of him was the curving glass wall of the tank, smeared in clear fluid. With full body sensation returned, he could feel the droplets all over his skin and sneezed them out of his nose. The tube in his mouth wriggled outwards, creating a moment of panic. Serpent down my throat. He started to gag as the end pulled free of his lips, dripping goo around his feet. More icons flashed and turned green. Umbilicals disconnected from his navel sockets with popping sounds. The metallic tubes coiled away into the top of the tank. Then he was trying not to grimace as the waste pipes withdrew.
Final icon warning, and he braced his feet. The frame released him, and the glass wall parted to let him out. He was standing on a metal grid in the Avenging Heretic’s central chamber – a cylinder twenty metres high, divided into three sections by the grid floors. The ship had been heavily modified from its Olyix design and refitted with five suspension chambers. Human equipment and materials had supplanted the original walls, producing a metallic tube cluttered with blank system cabinets that made Callum think of a twentieth-century submarine. The emphasis was on function rather than the elan of twenty-third-century design, while the disturbingly coffin-like tanks seemed to have been resurrected from the period of history occupied by the Inquisition.
‘You were in a hurry to get out of there,’ Callum said to Kandara as they waited for Alik and Yuri to climb down the ladder to the lower deck.
‘And you’re okay in that white bubble?’ she asked curiously.
‘Sure.’
‘I’m not. We need to refine it. A lot.’
‘It does its job.’
‘Callum, we’re going to be spending years together in the bridge simulacrum. I need to not get spooked every time.’
‘We can add some texture. Like you say, we’ll have plenty of time to try out new designs.’
‘And the smell?’
‘What smell?’
‘Exactly, there isn’t one. Or hadn’t you noticed?’
‘I . . . No,’ he admitted.
‘Well, that’s one nerve impulse the interface hasn’t mastered.’ She glanced down the ladder as Jessika followed Alik below. ‘I wonder if the Neána forgot to build a sense of smell into their metahuman bodies?’
‘I doubt it. I remember Jessika being quite the wine connoisseur when we were working on security after the Cancer operation.’
Kandara’s eyebrows rose gleefully. ‘You two dated?’
‘No! Strictly work social events. Two teams getting properly acquainted.’
‘Okaaaay . . .’
‘Hey—’
But she was gone, sliding down the ladder with a grace he could never match.
The lower deck housed the gym, the G8Turing medical bay and the common washroom. Standing in the shower, Callum checked the umbilical sockets clustered around his navel, where the skin was still red and tender. He’d have to mention that to the medical team. The implants should have healed fully by now.
Like the others, he’d spent the last ten months in and out of the station’s clinic, having extensive body modifications to prepare him for the mission. His stomach was new: a biologic organ grown in a Neána-style initiator, allowing him to digest a direct nutrient feed from the suspension tank systems. Then his bones had all been reinforced with high-density fibres at the same time as his internal membranes had undergone gene therapy to strengthen them – all with the goal of making him more resilient to high acceleration forces. After an organ audit, the doctors had gone on to announce they were going to grow him new kidneys, a prostate and a left eye, and would replace a metre of lower intestine – ‘just to be safe. You’re going to undergo some
