Shipstar (3 page)

Tananareve looked around, wondering where to run. The ship had a narrow transparent face and through it she could see the pilot, a spindly brown-skinned creature in a uniform. It looked not much bigger than she was and the tubular ship it guided was enormous, flaring out behind the pilot’s cabin. The ship eased in alongside the main platform, jetting cottony steam. Tananareve wondered what she should do: hide, flee, try to talk to—?

Then, behind huge windows in the ship’s flank, she saw a tremendous feathered shape peering out at her, and recognized it. Quick flashing eyes, the great head swiveling to take in all around it, with a twisted cant to its heavy neck. She gasped.
Memor.

THREE

Redwing looked out across the yawning distances, frowning.

Far down, there were all the artful graces of land and sea, suspended before a warming sun like a rich, steaming dish offered on a steel-hard plate. Everything was larger, grander, and strange.

The Bowl seas were light blue expanses larger than Jupiter, bounded by shallow brown edges. Across those ran arcs of grand wave trains, immense ripples that must roll on for years before finding a shore. At finer resolution, sediment plumes of tan and chocolate spread across shallow seabeds, feeding kelp straits of festering ripe green. Rumpled hill ranges were larger than Asia. Never driven by continental drift, these crosshatched the vast lands, carved by rivers that could cut no farther than the Bowl’s hull. Indeed, he could see places where wind or water had worn away the living zone, leaving patches of rusting metal. Under close-up, he and Karl watched teams repairing such erosions.

The deserts were huge, too. Tan lands of grass went on over distances greater than the Moon was from Earth, with only dots of green beckoning where an oasis sprouted. Sprawling dry lands ended where water found its way to make moist forests. Storms spiraling in immense white-bright pinwheels churned with ponderous energies, raking across deserts larger than planets, and over forests so deep, no one could ever walk out of them.

How did anyone design a thing like this? A vast trapped atmosphere, oceans the size of planets, lakes like continents, yet no real mountains—maybe that was a clue. Of course, putting an Everest on the Bowl would make it lopsided and complicate dynamics. There could be no plate tectonics and so no volcanoes, but how did this biosphere circulate carbon and water? On Earth, a complex cycle a hundred million years long did the job. As well, Earth’s tectonic ranges forced air over and around them, generating the moving chaos humans called weather. The Bowl’s dwellers did not suffer from mountain wind shadow, or the combing winds that raced through narrow passages. Mountains made for stormy trouble on Earth. The Bowl was a milder place than planets could be.

But why build a whole contraption like this, when you could just move to Florida?

The question wasn’t just rhetorical. If he could fathom what built such a thing, and why, he might have a clue about how to deal with them.

Ping.
His autosec reminded him of lunch.

He thought of it as the mess, very old school, but Fleet said it was a Starship Wardroom. He sat as usual for Meal 47, his current choice: classic turkey dinner, rich cream sauce and cranberries. He made himself not think about the simple fact that it was all made of ingredients centuries old; after all; so was he.

He had kept mistaking what Mayra Wickramsingh said at every meal:
Nosh for me,
it sounded like. After she and her husband, Abduss, went down in the disastrous descent to the Bowl, he had looked it up. The Linguist AI had a transform function, so it learned even through his mushy pronunciation; the AI found it was an Indian phrase,
naush faramaiye,
meaning “please accept the pleasure of savoring this meal,” which seemed like
bon appétit
to Redwing. Suitable. “
Naush faramaiye
to you all,” Redwing said, bowing his head. The crew bowed back. Clare looked puzzled.

“Cap’n, I’m having trouble with the Artilect coherence,” Jampudvipa said.

Redwing still used
AI
as a shorthand for the shipboard systems that patiently oversaw operations, since that’s what everybody called them when he was growing up. But Artilect was the actual Fleet term, since integrated artificial minds constituted a collective intellect. It was useful to think of the systems as different people, engaged in a constant congress, discussing the ship’s current state. “What’s their problem?”

“They want to go back into full scoop mode.”

“In a solar system? We can’t get the necessary plasma densities.”

“I know.” Jampudvipa shrugged. “I think they’re showing mission fatigue.”

“Have you tried to give them some shut-eye time, one by one?”

“They resist it.”

“Enforce it. Tell them they need a psych reboot, only make the language prettier.”

This got rueful laughs around the wardroom table. “Diplomacy—not our strong suit,” Clare Conway said. She was more personable than most pilots, one of the reasons she had made the crew. Redwing had gone through her file while making his selection of whom to revive.

Ayaan Ali frowned. “It is serious problem, Artilect coherence. They start to disagree, to have their own ideas—trouble.”

“They want what’s impossible,” Karl Lebanon said. He folded his hands and leaned back against a bulkhead. As general technology officer, he shepherded Artilects through daily problems, plus a dozen other jobs. “We can’t go back to interstellar mode.”

Clare sipped her coffee. “They have to adjust our ramscoop intake in ten-second intervals, to optimize. That burns their attention reservoir, makes their duty cycles long. Stresses them pretty hard.”

“We’re getting system clash in our magnetic scoop system,” Karl said. “It’ll tire the Artilects and we’ll start getting torques, surges, inductive effects that wear down our gear.”

“Same small-scale coil problem?”

“Yeah. The system’s pretty stressed. Never made for this kind of low-velocity maneuvering. We can’t get into the magneto components to adjust them.”

Clare said, “A mechanical problem, fixable—but only if we could get a bot in the inductive chamber. Those we could maybe make, but present bot complement can’t do it. That choice set is not even in the partition menu.”

“We can’t downtime them?” Redwing knew the answer but if he let people talk, they felt better. All three chimed in with their versions of the same hard fact: A ship designed to work at interstellar speeds was a bitch to control in planetary orbit, and have any actual maneuvering capability. The Artilects were taking the brunt of it.

Redwing nodded as each spoke but ran his own inventory as well.

By this time his knees were sending angry messages that they wanted a trial separation. His weight workout this morning had pushed the limit too far, again. A warning sign: When he overexerted, he was working out unconscious worries. So he concentrated on Clare’s detailed tech talk and focused outward, nodding and keeping his gaze on her while thinking about all the crew. They worked well together, as the Psych Artilect Adept predicted, before Redwing had wakened the new members. How well would they do when Beth’s team came aboard? Only four left out of six, but—the ship would get more crowded and irritations would begin to build. He had a time window before he would have to decide whether to get out of this entire situation and cast off into interstellar flight again or—what? Go down onto the Bowl in enough numbers to accomplish a resupply and … what?
Too many unknowns.

He let the crew run on for a while, noting that their uniforms were getting a tad messy, hair uncombed, beards a few days old. He would have to sharpen them up a bit, and now might be the time.

At least this crew would look better then, when and if they got Beth’s team aboard. They’d have to double on berths. Working spirit and order would be more difficult. A clock would start ticking.

He said mildly, “Officer Jampudvipa, with the Artilects going moody, should we be letting them run the bridge alone while we have lunch?”

Blinks, nods. Jampudvipa looked rueful, mouth turning down, and got up hurriedly. “Yes, sir. They’re in collective agreement mode but—yes.”

That let him focus on the others. “Beth’s team will be aboard in a few hours. That’s if we’re lucky and solve the problem we have to focus on now. Still, I want everybody spruced up—clean, shaven, bright eyed.” Nods all around, some repentant. He turned to Karl. “But the major problem is, how do we get them aboard?”

“I’ve got her photos of the vehicle they’re in—basically, a magnetic train car with locks facing outward, to vacuum,” Karl said. “But they don’t have their suits. The aliens, these ‘Folk,’ took those at capture.”

“So…” Redwing let them think a moment. “Can we match velocities and run a pressured conduit?”

“Not easily.” Karl’s mouth fretted as he thought. “We’ve got EVA gear, sure, but it’s one-man, for repairs.”

“How about the
Bernal
?” Clare asked. “It’s for freight transfer, but we could maybe refit it for a fix-up flexi passage.”

“I don’t trust anything flexi to stand up to torques and stretches,” Karl said. “If we try it, yes,
Bernal
is the best craft.”

Redwing had used the repair bots to inspect
SunSeeker
’s hull soon after entering the Bowl system, and he privately agreed with Karl. In interstellar mode, their strong magnetic fields had kept the ship from the blizzard of neutral atoms and dust.
SunSeeker
was less effective dealing with erosions while it maneuvered at low thrust around the Bowl. The externals looked pitted and scarred now, and he wondered about whether the repair bots could spot flaws that could prove fatal in a personnel transfer. Or if the flexi would sustain pitting from random debris. A thousand questions nagged at him.

Redwing said, “We could try a fit with our dorsal hatch. We’d have to rig some kind of docking collar.”

This they liked. Redwing let them toss ideas around for a while as he tried to envision exactly how that configuration might work. Ayaan Ali had little to say, but he saw a quick widening of her eyes and nodded at her, holding up a hand to draw attention.

“I … have an idea,” she said quietly. “But we must work quickly.”

FOUR

Beth watched the Bowl’s outer hull, a fast-forward world flittering by below the hard black of space. Even protrusions the size of skyscrapers were just passing gray blurs. In contrast, though the Bowl itself had a surface rotation speed in the range of many kilometers a second, the array of gas clouds and nearby suns hung still. Even high speeds on the interplanetary scale meant nothing to the solemn stars.

Their tubular craft traveled down the outside of the Bowl, hovering close on magnetically secured trap-rails. She watched enormous plains of gray steel and off-white ceramic flash by. Images jittered so fast, she could not tell what was important. A wall with crawling maggot robots, doing unknown labors. A sliding cascade of liquid metal fuming in high vacuum as it slid into jet-black chunks, then ivory cylinders, then shapely gray teardrops—all to descend into intricate new works, objects meant for mysterious use. All that went by in a stretched display she processed in a few seconds—an entire industrial process carried out in cold vacuum, far from the Bowl star’s intrusions. It seethed with robot motion. Fumes danced, billowed, and evaporated away in lacy blue streamers.

Now enormous tangled structures the size of mountains flowed by them. She could see lattice works and cup-shaped constructs but not what they did. It was difficult to keep perspective and their speed seemed to increase still, pressing her at an angle. She was sitting in a chair designed for some other being, one wider and taller. Windows on all sides showed landscapes flitting by, lit by starlight and occasional bright flares amid the odd buildings. From above her head came occasional clanking noises and whispery whistles—sounds of the mag-rail.

“All this industrial infrastructure,” Fred said quietly beside her. “Kept out of their living zone.”

“Ah, yes,” Beth said, not taking her eyes from the images flashing by in the big board window. “We hardly saw any cities before, either.”

“Sure, the Bowl’s land area is enormous, but then you realize that their whole mechanistic civilization is clinging to the outer skin. So they have twice the area we thought.”

Beth glanced upward into the “sky,” where the hull’s burnished metal gleamed beneath fitful lights. “And anyone who lives here, does so wrong way up. Centrifugal gravity pushes them away from the hull, so the Bowl is always over their heads. The stars are at their feet.” Beth laughed softly. “An upside-down world of its own.”

“Smart, really.” Fred was watching, too, his eyes darting at the spacious spectacle zooming past. “You can do your manufacturing and then throw your waste away in high vacuum.”

Beth shook herself; enough gawking. “Look, we’re in a cargo drone. We have to be ready in case we stop and get new passengers.”

“Relax. We’ll feel the deceleration, get ready.”

“At least we should search for food dispensers. This passenger compartment is for whoever’s accompanying the cargo—”

“Plants, yeah,” Fred said distantly, still distracted by the view. “Those finger snakes arranged to escort the plants, fit us in. Neat.”

Beth smiled. Fred had summed up days of negotiations. Their halting efforts had been beset by translation errors and mistakes. Even sharing a sort-of common language, a mix of Bird and Anglish, there were ambiguities that came from how different minds saw the universe. The snakes used wriggles and tiny movements of their outsized faces to convey meaning, and it took a while to even notice that. Words meant different things if a right-wriggle came with it, versus a left-wriggle. The snakes had similar troubles reading “primate face gestures” as they termed it.

Fred turned to her. “You’re worried about Tananareve.”

“I … yes.”

“You’re surprised I noticed.”

“Not really, I—”