“Hmm,” said Singer. “I see what you mean.”
One of the things I loved about working with Singer was that even if he’d figured something out before I did, and hadn’t pointed it out, he never felt the need to mention it once I figured it out for myself. Some shipminds can be a little lordly and insecure. Of course, a lot of those shipminds probably wouldn’t sign into a tugboat on a salvage detail so they would have the opportunity to see as much of the galaxy as possible while paying off their inception.
Anyway, I knew he had noticed, or was noticing, all the same little details I had: that the locker doors that around this accessway were lined up as if horizontal led toward the center of the ship, not down toward the floor. And there were locker doors in the floor, too, and carpet all over everything.
“Who the heck can just install gravity in an existing ship, though?” I blinked sweat off my lashes. At least it just flicked off onto my cheek and faceplate instead of floating around inside my helmet until I managed to bump it up against the absorbent lining. “I mean, who can install gravity, period? If it were that easy, we’d all quit floating around except when it’s convenient.”
“Or fun,” Connla put in.
I ignored him.
“Well,” he went on, “obviously, the former operators of the Milk Chocolate Marauder.”
I ignored him some more.
Singer said, “So you suppose they’re using dark gravity to do that, somehow? And if they can use dark gravity to manufacture weight in their interior, do you suppose they can use it to maneuver?”
I had more immediate concerns. “Do you suppose the bridge is at the center of that thing?”
“It’s where I’d put it,” Singer agreed, seeming to consciously rein in the very theoretical physics.
I forced myself to start moving again, trying not to listen too hard to the sound of my own breathing in the suit. My ox supply was great, though I was burning through it faster than I liked because I was out of shape for being under gs. I was just psyching myself out for some reason. A few seconds of self-contemplation—and continued progress down the corridor, which was about to end in a choice of three hatches—and I figured out why.
My headlamp flickered over surfaces. There was no general interior lighting, which might have been a design choice, a power interrupt, or a technical flaw. On the other hand, the gravity was working, and that had to use energy, right? And I could see readout lights blinking and flickering on panels here and there. And here and there, small task lights burned over surfaces as if the crew had just left them on when they went home.
“This is creepy.”
“It is a salvage operation.” Connla was on a roll.
“No, seriously. There’s no reason for this ship to be dead like this.”
“What do you mean?” My business partner could make the switch from dragging me to dead serious in microseconds.
I got to the choice of hatches and picked the one in the middle. There was a sensor—an old-fashioned mechanical gauge—built into it, and I guessed that the fat umber line on the top that the needle was resting on was the “no air pressure beyond this point” warning, because the rest of the lines shaded from that color to a delicious-looking creamy dark chocolate shade. These guys liked linear latches and linear readouts, apparently.
And apparently I really needed to do something about my blood sugar.
I tongued a yeast tablet from my helmet dispenser. The guys would just have to listen to my crunching, and my voice getting powdery, until I washed it down.
“The ring is intact; there’s no sign of external damage; and the interior is . . . It looks good, guys. Really good. Pristine. There’s power.”
“Just evacuated,” Singer said, meaning the atmosphere rather than the people.
“And no bodies,” Connla helped.
“And no shipmind,” Singer said. “I’m working on cracking their language. Probably easier and faster to learn it than to write and install a new OS.”
“Less buggy anyway,” Connla said.
I would like to say that I paused a moment to be impressed that Singer was debating whether it was faster to learn an entire alien language or just rewrite all of their code, but I was actually kind of used to Singer after a decan or so and I had a real tendency to take him for granted. In retrospect, we couldn’t have been luckier in our shipmind, though.
I said, “That’s part of it. It does look evacuated. Both ways. Speaking of which, I’m going to try the middle door.”
“Middle door. Check,” Connla said.
“No lights. No air. No, as you said, bodies. No damage. No people. No floating stuff. No mysterious stains on the upholstery. It looks like it just got out of a port after a nice retrofit, steam cleaning, and maybe a new paint job a standard week ago. And then somebody loaded it up, brought it out light-centads from anywhere somebody might reasonably be going, and . . . parked it here. And then abandoned ship. In white space.”
“Well,” Singer said, also helping, “the gravity works.”
“I wish I were in the same room with you, so I could throw a pencil at you.”
“Digital pencil.” Connla snickered.
“The Flying Dutchman,” Singer said.
I opened the middle hatch. Remember the hatch? Right, I opened it.
Another airless, unlit chamber beyond. This looked like a rack room, standard issue—extra-large. There were cozy, padded indentations in the walls and floor, with tethers to hold you there. Only about three-fourths of them were oriented so as to be usefully horizontal, however, and sleeping in a third of those would involve being walked over.
“They gave up a lot of bunk space to have that gravity installed,” I said. “I think the Milk Chocolate Marauder is a . . . not a prototype. What’s the word I want?” I quicksearched and came up with it. “A test-of-concept. Somebody took this existing vessel and installed this tech in it, to see if it would work out and what the immediate flaws were before they spent the resources prototyping.”
My muscles ached. My spine felt like somebody was stepping on my head, and my afthands were killing me. I crouched, and rested my elbows on my knees. “Guys, I need a break.”
“Take five,” Connla said.
I drank some water and chewed another yeast tablet. Mmm, yeast. Just like mommas used to make.
“Logically,” Singer said, “if you were a species who found lack of gravity even more physiologically damaging than you humans do, you’d be eager to find a technological solution. Do you think they would have gone with their full normal gravity? Or something a little less fatiguing?”
I was about ready to lie down on one of those padded shelves from dealing with what they had installed, and I’d only been in it for ten minutes. “I’m against gravity in general. Nasty stuff.”
There were syster races that couldn’t run their circulatory systems without it, though. Or keep their electrolyte balance. Which was a lot worse than the human problem of our bones falling apart. Singer had a spinlounge for us to exercise in—a little bubble on his belly that rotated and made gs.
Connla and I were supposed to spend about a standard hour a dia in there. He was better about it than I was. But he was planet-born. And liked looking muscular. I wished I’d been more diligent.
I might have been wishing past-me had traded past suffering for current suffering, but somewhere back there, past-me was probably gloating about having shifted the load.
Speaking of bones falling apart, mine felt like they were doing that right now. Chips working loose as I waited. Inches of height being crushed away.
Connla said, “So if this is partial pull, just enough to get by on, their homeworld is pretty dense.”
“Or pretty large. And they’re pretty large too,” Singer said. “That narrows down the syster field a little.”
“About half again as wide and half again as tall as a big Terran,” I agreed, eyeing the bunks. “Really heavy, if this is like one-quarter g for them. Dense? Muscular? Or lightly engineered?”
“Are you recovered enough to keep moving?” Singer asked, conciliatory.
“Don’t blow smoke in my intakes,” I answered, and stood. I managed not to groan, too. Very loudly, anyway.
The other side of the room had a drape, not another hatch to fight with, which was soothing. Rings at both top and bottom rattled as I slid it back. I remembered to step over the bottom rod, and left it pulled open behind me.