Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
C ampar stood, stripped to his skin, with his arms out to his sides and his fingers spread.
The Sinen trundled toward him with the same spray nozzle that it had used on Ghati and Emmin.
Danna, behind them, was still waiting her turn.
There had been times when Campar would have been uncomfortable nude in the presence of strange, alien beings, but those days were apparently behind him.
“Respirating the vacuum sheath will end your existence,” the Sinen said, just as it had to the others.
“So you’re saying hold my—”
But before Campar could finish, the little squid monster was already spraying a stream of thick, clear liquid at his feet.
It was warmer than Campar had expected, and it began to set as soon as it touched his skin.
When the Sinen told him, he lifted his feet one at a time and let it coat his soles and arches.
By the time he went back to standing, the new skin had already hardened.
Bit by bit, the Sinen went up his body leaving a coating of clear resin as it passed.
When it reached his neck, it paused, shoved a pair of devices into Campar’s ears that looked and felt like thick black slugs, and put a cover over his face from the top of his neck to just over his eyebrows.
He knew from watching the two who’d gone through the procedure before him that this was where the oxygen mask would sit.
When the face cover came off, the Sinen stepped back.
“Can you hear and see?” it asked.
“I can,” Campar said, then shuddered. His own voice, transferred through the black slug things, sounded strange and oily.
“You will proceed to the next step,” the Sinen said, and gestured Danna forward.
“How will this work with bathroom breaks?” Campar asked.
“Exudates will pool inside the film until your work period is complete.”
“Ah,” he said. “Lovely.”
The expedition ship was long and narrow.
It reminded Campar of a group transport with fewer seats and worse amenities.
At the far end, the Budon of Luus were undergoing their own hardening.
The gel darkened and disarranged their fur, leaving them with the look of beakless birds who’d been dunked in oil.
The beetle-things were suffering an entirely different procedure that seemed to involve fixing tubes of metal to their legs.
In the center of the ship, the Carryx soldier rested on six of its limbs, its eyes shifting across the pandemonium.
The Sinen would occasionally go and prostrate themselves before it.
Campar assumed there was some conversation between the aliens when that happened, but it might only have been to make the Carryx feel appreciated.
There was no way for a mere human being to guess.
Campar pulled his trousers and tunic back on.
“Are you all right?” Ghati asked, taking his arm to steady him.
“It feels like being numb,” Campar said.
“Lucky you. I feel like someone’s tugging at every hair of my body. It itches, and scratching doesn’t help.”
“Your voice is very clear,” Campar said, and tapped on the clear bubble of glass or plastic or chitin that covered Ghati’s face. “I’d have expected this to have more of a muffling quality.”
“I don’t think you’re hearing me through the open air anymore,” Ghati said, and a second Sinen elbowed him out of the way and fit a mask over Campar’s face.
There was a pinching sensation as the edges of the mask fused to the gel-like extra skin, and then a pop as the Sinen put a tube through the mask that ran to a round, pink thing meant to be worn on one shoulder that looked like a conch and a keg of beer had fallen very much in love.
The scent of the air that came from it was surprisingly sweet and pleasant.
“The two of you will accompany this one,” the Sinen said, and turned to gesture to Vaudai.
Campar couldn’t tell whether the huge slug-like thing had also been covered in the false skin or if its kind didn’t need interventions to withstand the vacuum of space.
The Sinen tapped Campar’s sternum to get his attention.
“Gather samples of the enemy and do as this one tells you.”
“I understand,” Campar said, and the Sinen trundled away to fit a mask on Danna’s face and jaw.
“Come, come, come, meat-on-sticks,” Vaudai said, moving toward the far side of the transport with surprising speed. “We have almost arrived. There is much to be done. We are filled with glorious purpose. You are privileged to be my limbs and do what I cannot. Come! Now!”
Ghati looked from Campar to the retreating Vaudai.
“I suppose he’ll need help opening doors and drawers,” Campar said. “Shall we?”
The enemy command ship floated in the emptiness of space, turning end over end like a suicide falling from a rooftop forever.
The beetle-like aliens were all assigned some task on the skin of the ship, and they glowed dimly as they crawled across the dark metal surfaces.
The sprawl of the stars around them felt fake; a backdrop too vast to be real.
The tiny tug that carried Campar and Vaudai and Ghati was square, and open at one side.
It didn’t seem to have an engine, but it moved anyway, depositing them at a wound on the dead ship’s side that was all twisted metal and flakes of grayish matter that clung to it like dust.
They placed their feet on the deck, and something in the vacuum-sealed skin they wore knew to adhere there, allowing them a clumsy sort of walk as long as they always kept one foot planted.
Using this one-foot-at-a-time locomotion, they moved into the body of the ship, Vaudai taking the lead, its body stretching and contracting like an inchworm as it moved across the deck, its skin dancing with subtle colors.
“Follow! Follow!” Vaudai said. “And keep the scanning sheet ready.”
The scanning sheet wasn’t a sheet at all, but Campar hadn’t bothered asking why it was called that.
The device was a pair of thin metallic poles, one for him and one for Ghati.
Along with them Campar had been given a sampling kit whose functions he recognized—sealed glass tubes, palette knives, a rudimentary spectrometer about the size of his thumb.
The kind of satchel kit you gave children who were interested in science for their twelfth birthday, but it was enough that he could take decent samples back for actual analysis later.
“We begin here,” Vaudai said, “and move toward the bottom of the ship.”
“That sounds good,” Campar said at the same time Ghati said, “Begin doing what?”
“We will survey the internal shielding,” Vaudai said, and even through the half-mind’s bland translation, the massive slug sounded transported by joy at the idea.
“I’m going to be sick,” Ghati said. “I think I’m going to vomit.”
“Feel free,” Vaudai said. “The air recycler is designed to keep gas exchange passages clear, even for animals as poorly designed as you. Now this way! This way!”
The corridors inside the ship felt weirdly familiar.
They were a little thinner than the passageways Campar had known back in his previous life, and they had a squared, machined rectilinear aesthetic that the grown coral of Anjiin rarely adopted, but the scale of the place was almost human.
Without power, the doors and hatches were locked in whatever state they had been in the moment the ship had died.
Strange script was worked into the walls along with arrows and symbols whose meanings Campar couldn’t guess.
The scanning procedure was simple enough.
Vaudai would indicate one spot for Campar, another for Ghati, and they would place their thin metal poles as they were instructed.
Once they were set to Vaudai’s specifications, it would turn the devices on, and a glowing plane of energy appeared between them that showed images of the ship through the walls and decks, laying bare the superstructure of the rooms and chambers around them even when the doors didn’t open to let them pass.
When in use, it did look a bit like a long, electric sheet.
“There!” Vaudai said the third time they’d gone through the exercise. “You see the shielding?”
“No,” Campar said.
The glowing image between the poles shifted, cycling through the full rainbow and back again.
Now a series of the walls were marked a vibrant blue.
“These are the places where the shielding held. These others, where it failed. When I compare this to the record of the battle, I will be able to know what attacks the enemy command is most vulnerable to.”
“The Carryx will be pleased,” Campar said.
“Yes, them too. But most importantly I will know . I will be the first to know. Most exhilarating! Come. This way. Down here.”
Ghati took his hand as they floated down the eerie, dead corridors, but Campar could only feel the hand as a pressure and intention. The sausage casing that kept the vacuum from killing him also kept him from feeling anything but the growing damp of his own trapped sweat.
For what felt like days and was only hours, they shifted the two poles to positions that Vaudai indicated, sometimes capturing images taken through the walls, other times through the decks and ceiling.
The superstructure of the ship laid itself bare to the scanner.
Twice, Campar saw little irregular lumps that might have been the bodies of enemy dead, but never in rooms they had access to, and Vaudai was too enthusiastic and focused to allow any exploration that detracted from its growing map of the ship.
Campar had almost given up his assignment to sample the dead when they found the first corpse.