Twenty-Four #2
They had nearly made their way to the end of the dead ship.
The body was lashed to a ring in the wall beside a wide metal doorway.
It was charred, arms and legs pulled into an almost fetal pose by the tightening of ligaments.
The flesh of its face had pulled back, and the eye sockets held only a wrinkled, half-deflated remnant of what had been there before.
“Is that… Is that human?” Ghati asked, his voice hardly more than a whisper.
Campar planted his feet on the side of a ladder and pulled in for a closer look. Whatever it was, it had been wearing a kind of uniform. Four fingers and thumb. The jaw was plausible, but…
“I don’t know,” he said as he opened the sampling kit. “It looks like it might have been, but that can be deceiving. Evolution converges. If you burned a Soft Lothark badly enough, it might look something like this too. Whatever it is, it’s what we came for.”
“Put the first pole here,” Vaudai said from farther down the hall.
“In a moment,” Campar said. “I have to do this too.”
The translation half-mind made a small, exasperated sigh.
Campar used the thinnest knife to dig a sample of flesh off the dead thing.
The bit of meat floated in the airlessness, drifting with the spin of the ship, as he opened a glass bottle and let the sample float inside.
Then, he turned to the spot that Vaudai had indicated, set up his half of the sheet, and waited for Ghati to be put in position as well.
When they turned the viewing apparatus on, instead of the x-ray vision of the space beyond the wall, there was a flash of blue that matched the shielding color, and then nothing.
“Oh,” Vaudai said. “Switch your places, please.”
Campar and Ghati did as they were told. “I’m getting thirsty,” Ghati said as the screen came back, still with the flash of blue and then nothing. “How much longer are we going to be at this?”
“We have no image,” Vaudai said. “This is it. This is the center of the mystery. Whatever is behind that door will tell us why the ship failed to destroy itself. We must get through!”
Campar shut off the pole in his hand and moved to the door.
He hadn’t been paying the closest of attention to the other portals they’d passed, but he had the sense that this one was more robust. There was no knob, no handle.
An irregularity beside the corpse might have been a control pad of some sort, but unpowered it might as well have been a stone. Ghati came to his side.
“There’s a seam there,” Ghati said, his voice uncertain. “We could try pulling it open.”
Campar ran his thick, encumbered fingertip across the seam in the metal. If he hadn’t been looking at it, he wouldn’t have felt the irregularity at all. “We can try,” he said. “We can’t succeed, though.”
“A lever arm,” Vaudai said. “You must find a lever arm and pry the door apart! Use the poles! Use anything!”
A voice came in Campar’s ears, affectless and calm and panic-inducing. All animals will return to the expedition ship at once for evacuation.
“No!” Vaudai said. “We must stay! This is the critical moment! Stopping now would be”—the half-mind stuttered—“like depositing half an egg.”
“Oh good lord,” Campar said. “I see why Rickar enjoyed your company, Vaudai. We have to go back, though. Evacuation aside, we don’t have the tools to get through this.”
The great slug cycled through several shades of gray-green. “You are correct, sticks-with-meat-on-them. Hurry, then. There is no time to waste.”
Back at the expedition ship, the beasts of the Carryx moieties were having their vacuum sheaths removed.
The Budon gathered in a clump, grooming each other, fur askew and damp.
When the Sinen applied the solvent to Campar, his skin went cold all over, then warm, then the goo peeled off him in sheets that reminded him of when he was twelve and he’d stayed out shirtless until his shoulders were too sunburned to touch.
Vaudai, on the other hand, was following one of the Sinen around the deck, staying so close to the goatish alien that it seemed like the moment before a fight.
By the time Ghati had been cleaned off and they’d both gotten bulbs of water to replace the sweat of the day, Vaudai had escalated his cause to the Carryx soldier standing resplendent in the middle of the space.
Campar shifted in closer, trying to overhear the conversation, but his half-mind didn’t report it for him.
There was only the low birdsong of the Carryx as it answered whatever demands Vaudai had put to it.
Campar gave up and went back to where Ghati was reviewing the collected images they’d made with the scanning sheet.
Altogether, about a quarter of the command ship had been entered into Carryx knowledge.
The lines where the shielding had been degraded or unmade were either slashes cut through the bulkheads or else great gaps where the ship had been completely obliterated by the weird field weapons that the Carryx had turned on the ship.
The dead room was marked in a dull orange without any detail, the equivalent of an In need of further study note at the end of a project report.
“The design looks familiar,” Ghati said. “Don’t you think?”
“Compared with what?”
Ghati waved the question away like it was a gnat.
“Everything. Compared with the fungus warren you told me about with the Night Drinkers. Compared to the rooms full of vines and mites by the old labs. Or the nests the Qasim make on the sides of the hallways. Compared to anything. This looks like someone dug up a bunch of service tunnels, put an engine on one side, and shot them into space.”
“You think the design looks human.”
“Of course it looks human ,” Ghati hissed. “Don’t tell me that you don’t see it too.”
“It does. It looks. That doesn’t mean it is. If we start anthropomorphizing things, pretty soon—”
“Good news!” Vaudai said, rushing up to them the way a puppy would have if it didn’t have feet, fur, bones, or eyes. “Excellent news! Come with me! Prepare yourselves to return! We have permission and a torch that will cut through the offending door.”
“I thought we were evacuating,” Ghati said. “Emmin said that there were enemy ships popping back into the system.”
“Yes yes yes. Three ships. Many fewer than left before. The maneuver to divide our fleet and pull off enemy resources has succeeded, but what have returned are certain to be tasked with the destruction of the command ship. We must hurry. The cutting torches are this way. Follow, useful appendages!”
“What about vacuum sheaths?” Ghati asked.
“Oh. Yes,” Vaudai said. And then, almost plaintively, “Will you feel excessive discomfort without them?”
“We will expire, and be less useful as appendages,” Campar replied.
“Fine. You prepare yourselves. I will find others to gather the tools for you.”
“How long do we have?” Campar asked before Vaudai could depart.
“I don’t understand.”
“The enemy ships are in the system, but systems are big. If they’re on the far side of the heliopause, they might not be here for many cycles. If they’re on the doorstep, that’s something else again. Do you know how long before they’ll be in range?”
The pause was long enough that it started feeling awkward. Across the hold, three of the beetle-like things started buzzing together, a fight or a choir or a coincidence. Campar had no way to know.
“Field weaponry propagates as would light or gravity,” Vaudai said, and Campar had the feeling that the alien was trying to make a very simple concept very clear, as if it were speaking to a child or a fairly intelligent dog. “If we can see them, the battle has in essence already begun.”
“Then why are we going back on the command ship?” Ghati said. “It’s not safe.”
“For us, no,” Vaudai said. “But if we hurry, we will learn things no one has ever told the Carryx. The key to unmaking the deathless would justify our moiety. Our children and their children and theirs for generations . We are insignificant, the war is all that matters! Plus which, it is interesting and I am bored !”
“Well,” Campar said. “I suppose if you put it that way…”