Machine
And giving a reasonable wiggle factor for gravity wells along the way boosting and slowing her. Plus she’s on the wrong vector.”“Thanks, Sally. So… she’s gone a lot farther using that initial v and her drive capability than she should.”
“Right,” said Tsosie. “That’s what I was saying.”
“That’s not worrisome at all.”
“Right,” said Tsosie. “That’s what I was saying.”
“I’ll keep working on it,” Sally said. “It’s possible they tried some slingshot maneuvers for extra velocity. In the meantime, pull out your sample kits. There’s dust in the corners. Some of it might be shed skin fragments containing DNA. Vacuum it up and analyze it, would you?”
We found the bridge soon after. Not by accident: we had the ancient plans and schematics and had been aiming in that direction. If anybody was left alive on this ship—if anybody was left at all on this ship—perhaps this was where we would find them. But when we entered, it was nearly dark and nearly silent, except for a rill of green and amber lights around the edge of the room at counter height, accompanied by a melodious beeping.
A moment later, lights began to brighten, and Tsosie and I found ourselves standing on what once must have been a fairly pleasant, beige and slate-blue bridge. The layout was semicircular; we had entered from the flattish side. Large dark viewscreens covered the arcing wall in front of us, and two rows of consoles and chairs curved around a single central command chair.
We stood behind that one, but slightly above it, as the stations we were near were slightly elevated. Oddly, in my experience, they all had tall chairs shaped for humans. The consoles all had dedicated push buttons and switches and dials, not adaptive consoles like the ones I’d worked with all my life, even back on Wisewell, the frontier settlement where I’d grown up, been orphaned, got married, had a kid, and left the first chance I’d been offered. Those consoles and chairs were the thing that brought home, unsettlingly, that everybody on this ship really had been a Terran human. Knowing something intellectually and realizing it in your bones are very different.
Because of our elevation, and because the command chair was turned toward the back of the room, we could see that the seat was not empty. And that the jumpsuit-clad person in the chair had been there for a very long time, and was not likely to move from it under their own power ever again.
On the other side of the bridge, Tsosie and I kept on walking. The tinkertoys were back, and watching those modular lattices click apart ahead of us and click together behind us as we got farther and farther from the egress made me even more unsettled than the dead body in the command chair had. We could cut our way out through the hull if we had to—a rescue hardsuit, especially backed up with the physical power of my exo, was more than capable of rearranging the generation ship’s superstructure. I wouldn’t do that unless our lives were in imminent danger, however. It would kill any crew members in the areas of the ship I would inevitably decompress in the process.
And piss off the archaeological team.
Assuming for the moment that there were any crew members left on this ship—an assumption that was seeming less and less probable with every weirdly echoing step Tsosie and I took—it was my job to save them, not murder them.
There had been skin cells in the dust I collected, at least. And all of them were Terran. People like me and Tsosie, only six hundred ans removed. Six hundred of their ans—years, to use the old style—and closer to a millennian for us, I guessed. Time gets really funky when you’re zipping around the galaxy at relativistic speeds and information still travels either through white space packet, or by slow boat or electromagnetic progression.
That’s one of many reasons why I am not an archinformist. They have these plots of events happening at different times and in different places and where the information fronts of those events intersect. It’s like trying to read a contour map while somebody spins it in the air in front of you and the colors keep changing.
So. A ship full of missing Terrans. Missing, bar one: the body that we—or one of our sister ships still inbound—were going to have to come back to collect and transport eventually.
Inside the hardsuit, I licked my lips uneasily. The hairs on my arms horripilated and my palms grew cold.
Intuition is a real thing, though there’s nothing supernatural about it. It’s not without mysteries, however. The human brain (and presumably, the nonhuman brain as well) gathers and processes a lot of information in excess of that which we are consciously aware. It doesn’t use words or often even images. It deals with feelings and instincts, and that glitchy sensation that you can’t trust somebody, or that something is wrong.
So when I say that I had the increasing, creeping conviction that the generation ship’s endlessly rolling wheel was deserted, that it felt empty, I don’t pretend there was any higher knowledge behind it. But I was sure there were plenty of subtle clues, even if I couldn’t have named a one of them.
My conscious awareness was pretty busy riding herd on a half dozen exotic ayatanas and the processing issues that all of them were having with the alien (to them) environment and my human sensory input.
There’s a common misconception that wearing an ayatana is sharing your brain with somebody else. And it’s not, exactly. It’s more like having someone else’s memories and opinions and experiences to draw upon… along with their neuroses, preconceptions, trigger issues, and prejudices. Because nothing in this galaxy can ever be simple.
But I had two different methane species loaded, including one from a Darboof staff member. That was the species that was driving the fast packet we’d seen. Or had been driving him, at least: they might