“Holy carp, how do you feed that thing?”
I closed my eyes, the better to concentrate on what I was feeling through my own senso and Singer’s instruments rather than looking.
The ship’s sensors were better, anyway. Connla’s voice made me jump and look again. It loomed over us, cliff-like now as we approached it. I had . . . nothing to say in reply.
Nobody built ships that big. The energy expenditure needed to throw a white field around them was beyond prohibitive. Even an antimatter reaction couldn’t cover it. This thing was bigger than the Milk Chocolate Marauder. And it wasn’t a bubble around a hollow inside.
This thing was bigger than some stations, by a long fall.
“Wow,” Connla said.
I just reached out and touched the forward bulkhead with my fingertips again. As if that could get me physically closer to the thing. Awe surged through me, so strong as to seem numinous.
So this is what the Wake-Seekers are feeling, when they feel it.
Some of that awe was because we had a visual of something that could only be a Koregoi vessel. Well, maybe not only, but it was the top explanation that came to my mind. Some of it was because, well, we had coaxed this thing out of the depths of deep time and a black hole, and here it was nearly close enough to touch.
“Wish we still had a boom,” Connla muttered.
Yeah, that was quite likely going to be a problem.
I wondered if the ship looked better in whatever wavelengths its builders perceived—I found myself imagining they saw it as a soothing marine blue—but I still had to look at it with human eyeballs. It was no better through my interface with Singer; he was getting it in infrared and ultraviolet, too, about a dozen shades of each—but with his perceptions I could experience the vivid, hallucinatory patternings that covered the hull.
They were almost organic. Stripes, spots, and whorls that looked as if somebody had painted a tabby cat while in the grip of a manic episode were laid over a shaded coloration that started dark on one surface—it might have been what was meant to be the dorsal side, but that could just be my Terracentrism getting in the way—and paled to lesser intensity on the other.
The craft itself had some organic outlines, too. Its white coils were there, intact. As we came closer, I could see that the coils encompassed a hull whose angled-brick shape was ornamented on a small scale with bulbous curves and strange, knobby outcrops. It remained strangely streamlined-looking, but the streamlining didn’t look mechanically or aerodynamically effective, and it certainly didn’t look like anything you’d take very deep into an atmosphere.
Not with the fragile halo of the white coils surrounding it. Not with the aerodynamics of a brick.
I found myself visualizing how it would look against the coruscating, folded background of white space—the silver and ebony of the Core. That white space background would have been both different from the high-gravity sky we were currently experiencing, and similar. The blaze of light, the lensed distortions, the bands of white and dark. But as flashy as the view from inside white space was, it didn’t have the twists, the spirals, the flares, the sheer magnitude of gee-whiz engendered by a forty-odd-million stellar-mass black hole.
I kept looking at it when I should have been hurrying.
We got something out of that, I thought.
Well. Not all the way out. But that got me wondering. A black hole this big . . . How close to the event horizon would be recoverable? What could you learn from a trip like that?
Who would you be if you came back?
The astrogator who flew into the Well and came back without getting spaghettified.
It sounded like a children’s reel.
“Right,” I said, holding my sparkling, galaxy-studded hand up in front of the equally sparkling night before us. “Time to spacewalk, and all.”
? ? ?
Because we had no boom, we grappled the Koregoi ship and matched velocities with her. I went over on a clipped cable, like one of those planetary things where you slide down a long line on a carabiner, and you’re going really fast because you’re under acceleration? I hear people do it for sightseeing. And for fun. When I landed on the hull, at least there was something ferrous enough in the structure to help me stick, so that was a benefit.
Nothing even vaguely resembling a hatch was visible on that hide, smooth and blocky and strangely curved as some exotic fruit.
“Any idea how I get in there? Is there even an ‘in there’ to get to?”
“Well, it isn’t solid through,” Connla said. “Sensors show lots of open space inside.”
I ran my glove over the surface.
I discovered in passing that while the patches of different visible color didn’t seem to indicate any additional qualities, the stripes that were evident in more energetic wavelengths had a slightly different texture, which was interesting.
I decided to explore that for a while. Maybe they were tactile, and my clue for getting inside would be in my sense of touch.
Well, it was a nice guess, anyway.
The damn thing was big. I kept walking around on it—well, crawling around on it, three points of contact at all times—and I hadn’t even come close to circumnavigating it yet. I wasn’t sure how much luck I was likely to have randomly knocking on the hull and looking for hatches, either.
I tried following the stripes and whorls around; tried poking at the various colors and color combinations in a bunch of patterns (I had hopes for the Fibonacci strings); and generally making enough of a nuisance of myself that if there had been anybody inside, they probably would have come out to yell at me to get off their damn lawn, you meddling sentients, and honestly I couldn’t have complained.
“Repeated sequences?” I asked Singer, standing up and stretching my spine out, making sure there was ox in my tanks and that both of my feet were firmly magnetized to something ferrous.
“It all looks pretty random,” he answered sadly.
“This is more fun in three-vees.”
Connla laughed. “It’s more like one of those problem-solving games where you have to keep moving stuff around until you find the right pattern.”
“Yeah, I always hated those,” I grumbled.
I ran my gloves over the plates again, feeling the change in textures snagging at the fabric. And I had what might be described as a minor epiphany.
Textures.
Densities. Or at least, functional densities? Artificial densities?
Patches that were exerting more gravity than they should have been, in other words, which I was picking up through the Koregoi senso that had infiltrated my skin.
The information on the surface of the ship was encoded in how heavy parts of it were.
So if I didn’t know how to get in . . . maybe my parasite did.
I kept my magnetized boots on the hull, but I shut down the electromagnets in my gloves so I wouldn’t be distracted by those tugs and pulls. It would probably feel different, right? Something inside my skin, as opposed to something I was wearing on the outside? But it probably wouldn’t hurt to reduce the noise in the system.
I held out my arms, waving my forehands around like a damaged windmill, and realized that I could feel something, indeed. The variations were too small for the navigation trick I’d used to be effective—I couldn’t just close my eyes and feel the shape of space because the scale was . . . well, not below my limit of perception, but lost in the scale of everything else. But moving my forehands in circles, I sensed the artificial variations in the surface of the ship, and—walking slowly, careful of my safety line—found a place where the artificial gravity marked out a kind of bull’s-eye on the hull of the Koregoi ship.
Artificial gravity.
In everything that had happened since we’d encountered the Milk Chocolate Marauder, I’d almost forgotten that that was what we were dealing with here. Something paradigm-changing, a technology that would revolutionize the Synarche’s understanding of how the universe worked, give us access to whole new theoretical universes that I didn’t even begin to have the knowledge to understand. I could feel Singer’s excitement, though—he understood. Well, this would make up for losing the Milk Chocolate Marauder.
“Got something here,” I said, and felt as much as heard Connla exhale. “Now how do I get it open?”
“Let me see if I can manage to talk to it yet,” Singer said. “Well, not talk. I still can’t find a shipmind in there. But if I can get a protocol and figure out how—”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to chill out while you work on that.”
I sat down on the hull beside the bull’s-eye and magnetized my butt.
The Synarche ships were close enough now that I could see them with the naked eye, mostly because of their visible movement against the backdrop of stars and Well and gas and twisted light spiraling down the Milky Way’s tub drain.
That was my new life, coming to meet me.