Out here, where you wouldn’t expect to find another vessel and there isn’t likely to be a world or a star or basically anything that will care about a sudden particle bombardment, we sometimes get a little sloppy.
I made myself stop thinking about how it could have been worse, because things were bad enough. Singer flipped our ring ninety degrees, lowering our profile. The other vessel’s bubble brushed past, but through some miracle or skill in the other crew we didn’t make contact. Still, their bit of space and our bit of space were folded in different directions and moving at different speeds, and dragging one through the other didn’t make for comfortable weather.
Our little tug shuddered with proximity, and the relative tinny silence of space continued to be shattered by the alarm. I heard the unmistakable scritching of claws into carpet as the ship’s cats attached themselves to the nearest wall. Bred and born in space, they knew how to manage themselves. I latched down too, wrenching an ankle as my afthands clutched wildly. I swung away from center like a barn door, almost losing my grip and my orientation to become a projectile within the command cabin myself.
“Haimey!” Singer yelped. “A little help please!”
“Reverse?” Connla asked. “Go Newton?”
He meant, let the ship bob back up to the surface of space. I stabilized myself and turned off the pain. I’d fix the ankle later. “Where the hell are they?”
He twisted his head—meaningless, but reflex. “I don’t know! They’re gone! Maybe they went past?”
What the hell are they? And what are they doing here?
We were still in white space, folding the fabric of the universe around us, but we weren’t moving fast. You could stay still. It was possible to throw a little fold of space-time around yourself like a vampire vanishing into his swirl of cloak. But as long as we were behind the scar, we couldn’t see out, and nobody outside could see in.
“Dock,” I said, not believing it even as I felt my own lips moving.
“Dock? With whom?”
“With the salvage target, Singer! Get us next to whatever’s inside that scar! Behind it, by preference, so if anything swings through the bubble from the same direction, it’ll hit them first!”
Give an AI this; our white bubble meshed seamlessly with the dead fold surrounding the hulk, and an instant later we had visual. It was a big one: I gasped out loud. The metal in the hull alone would make the trip worth our while, if we could figure out how to get it home. I was only the third-best pilot on the ship—I had Bushyasta and Mephistopheles beat, at least—but even I could already identify a few technical difficulties.
“Stop gawking,” Singer said, bringing us around under the target. We were coasting within the big ship’s fold now—a little farther out of the line of disaster. But not home with our boots off yet.
Because even with our oversized white coils flipped longitudinally, we were inside the big ship’s ring.
I ducked back into the interface and busied myself casting around for ripples that might show me the direction and velocity of the ship whose bubble we’d bumped into. If I got lucky, I might be able to spot it through gravitational lensing—one of the tiger-eye bands of radiation ringing our bubble might show a ripple as their bubble concentrated light—or at least see a disturbance in the fold where it had tossed space-time around when it left.
There was nothing. It was gone again, and maybe they’d been as freaked out by the contact as we were and ducked away hard. If they hadn’t scared themselves as badly as they’d scared us, that begged the burning question: Had they been expecting us? Following us? Or had they just been on their way to somewhere else, and we had both been the victims of a statistical miracle, our white bubbles colocating?
That they might be the law didn’t worry me too much, as we weren’t doing anything illegal. There was such a thing as pirates, though—and rival salvage operations, some of which might not be as ethical as we were about claim jumping.
Or maybe a lot of people had paid our source for the location of this derelict.
Had they bumped us on purpose, trying to scare us off? We might not have noticed them sitting very still, waiting. There wasn’t a lot of light out here, and the dead Ativahika sure was a great distraction. We had been out of transition long enough that they might have developed a good idea of our v. A sufficiently crazy cowboy pilot or shipmind just might have gotten the idea to scare us off with a bump. My own standards of risk assessment were . . . a little more conservative, I’m afraid to say, but some people around here think I’m a stick-in-the-mud.
I kept one eye on the salvage prize, but with the bulk of my attention spent a few more moments on scanning, rechecking our records of the contact and the moments before and after. It was something to do, even though Singer could do it better, but both of us kept coming up empty. That brought me back to the idea we had both just been the victims of terrible, coincidental timing. That sort of thing happens every once in a while, even though space is so unimaginably vast it’s staggering to think of the odds. But they’re no worse than the odds of, say, the sort of planetary impact that provided Earth with a moon.
Space is vast. But time is long, so there’s a lot of it for unlikely things to happen in.
Terra does have a moon. And so on.
Anyway, I couldn’t find that damned ship anywhere. We had a record of the contact, but all it showed me was a blurred flash of a quicksilver ring and a ship whose hull was mostly white. No port or species designation was visible, which didn’t mean they were pirates. I could see about a third of the front and port side of the hull, and not everybody paints their name in the same place. We hadn’t caught a transponder ID, but a brushing contact like that—we might only have been in the same universe with them between pings.
It was hard to think with the derelict looming over us, anyway. Singer was a dashing-enough little craft, his plated sliver of a hull dotted with sensor arrays and painted a cheery green and blue. His derrick and towing array, usually kept folded, were bright orange, with stripes in ultraviolet paint to catch the attention of species that were blueshifted by human standards. But I found myself imagining how he would look dwarfed by this behemoth if I were standing outside, and shook my head.
“You’re not having any luck finding the other ship either?” I asked.
Connla’s ponytail went all directions, but mostly side to side. I wasn’t sure if the text was “Go find out for yourself” or “I’m not sure,” but the subtext was that he was busy, and answering questions was not a productive use of his time currently. Singer—of course—was doing most of the flying. But Connla and I both liked to feel at least a little more useful than the cats.
Slightly.
Hey, it could happen.
“It’s the Admiral,” Singer said ominously. “He’s coming to get you because you didn’t eat your vegetables.”
I laughed. Pirate boogeymen didn’t hold any terrors for me.
I was so distracted staring at the derelict that I was surprised by the little shiver through Singer’s surfaces that told me the derrick had been deployed.
“We’re behind the derelict as requested,” Connla said. “And I’ve got a cable on them. What’s the next step?”
“Singer?” He was better at math than I was. “Enter it here, or try to splice into it?”
“If you want to spacewalk in a warp bubble, I’ll make sure to have record functionality online so we can send your last moments to your clade survivors.”
“Hah. They’ve disowned me.”
“It’s not too big?”
Division of labor: Connla flew. I figured out structural tolerances.
I looked back out at the damned thing speculatively. I didn’t think it was a human ship, though we’ve got some funny cultures, and those funny cultures come up with some funny designs. Its hull color was a sort of chocolate brown, and didn’t match exactly from plate to plate. It had some markings in cream, and some more in yellow, and that contrast made me think that its previous owners might see in spectra similar to ours.
However, that wasn’t a color human-type people usually painted ships—we went for whites, or grays, or bright colors that stood out against space. Pirates liked black, both for the obvious reasons of concealment and probably because it made them feel like badasses, and I expected their egos needed all the shoring up they could get.
It was a pretty typical shape for a deep-space ship with no intention of maintaining gravity; Singer has a little room on a counterweighted stick we can spin around the main spindle to generate centripetal force so we can work on our bone density. We use the other end for storing cargo, or water usually.