Shipstar (21 page)

Beth was out of her depth here—
hell, I’m a field biologist!
—but regs said nobody worked alone on ship maintenance, ever. Flight deck officers were full up, conning
SunSeeker
as close in to the Bowl’s atmosphere levels as they could, while still grabbing enough plasma from the star as they could. Just maintaining flight trajectories while watching for bogies was burning up all their attention.

Beyond tending to the hydroponics, certifying the air content, and helping turn algae into edible insects and porridge, Beth had nothing more to do. She helped a little with the preliminary “fault tree” analysis of this maintenance run, but that meant mostly giving instructions to the Artilect, which plainly knew far more than she did about what she was supposed to be doing. So she used a wise saying she’d learned from Cliff:
Never pass up a chance to shut up.

Which was harder to do than she had thought. “Uh, can I help?” she asked for maybe the eighteenth time.

“No, I got it.” Kurt never took his eyes from the screens, and his headphones whispered constantly with updates from the Artilect. “Going well.”

Man of few words, bless him. At least Karl didn’t ask her over and over about living on the Bowl, like the rest of the watch crew.

The snakes wriggled some more, did scrub procedures on some parts, and with surprising speed got a discharge capacitor line back up to specs—part of the booster system that allowed them to amp their magscoop when needed. “Okay,” Kurt said, “come on back out. You guys need a break.”

The snakes dutifully turned and started on their tortured way back out of the engine labyrinths. “Amazing what they can do,” Kurt said, nodding his head. “Makes me wonder how we got by without them.”

“Barely,” Beth said.

“You’re bio, how did smart snakes ever evolve? They sure didn’t Earthside.”

“Something about their home world, one of them said. It had plate tectonics gone wild, crazy surface weather, storms that would take the paint off metal. So smart life stayed underground.”

“How about earthquakes? Volcanoes?”

“Their world had ‘bands of furious turmoil,’ they said—their language has considerable poetic power. Their landmasses butt against each other, kind of like Earth, with its baseball seam wrapping around the globe. Stay away from those, and life underground is somewhat easier, they learned. Where are you from?”

“Gross Deutschland. You?”

“Everyplace, mostly away from California—after the Collapse, we had plenty of migrants from there.”

“Okay, snakes got smart, but
mein Gott
they are wonders at handling mechanics.”

Beth grinned. “Look, we don’t even know why we’re relatively hairless, compared with the other apes. Why we walk on two legs and can outrun anything over distance. Why we’re so damn good at mathematics, at music—you name it. So understanding where an alien species came from is hopeless.”

The finger snakes came wriggling out of the narrow cap passage into the drive’s innards. Ordinarily she and Kurt would’ve used smart cables to get in there, running them with a control panel. To her astonishment, the snakes broke into a high, wailing song—
chip chip, duooo, rang rang, chip, duoo duoo.
Not entirely unpleasant, either. At least it did not last long. Then they formed a “wriggle dance” as Redwing called it, arcing over each other and forming intricate curves that included bobbing in and out of the circle, rolling over and doubling up to make
O
’s, then back into the throng—still singing, though less shrill. They finally ended up standing halfway erect on their muscular tails, their fingers wriggling at the dumbstruck humans in comradeship—or so whispered the Artilect in Karl’s ear.

Then, with good-bye hails, they went off to eat in the algae pits, where a repast cooked up by Beth earlier awaited.

Karl said, “They’re so coordinated. As if it was completely natural for them.”

“You mean instead of how humans do it—drill, train, discipline, drill some more?”

“Pretty much. The snakes—look at them, off to their home in the biospace. All together, chattering … Some species are better at collaboration than we are. How come?”

“We’re pretty new at it. About two hundred fifty thousand years ago Earthside, group hunting became more successful than individual hunting. That started the logic of shared profits and risks. Penalties kept alpha males from dominating. There emerged a kind of inverted eugenics: elimination of the strong, if they abuse power. And the cooperators won out.”

“Wow, you know this stuff. It’ll be fun seeing you work out all the aliens on the Bowl.”

Beth opened her mouth to say something modest but … he’d brought up what she’d already missed. Back onboard, but dreaming at nights of the Bowl. “Uh, yes. Look, it’s time for that self-cook in the mess,” she said.

*   *   *

Fred was talking while he pounded a wad of bread dough. Physical work opened him as well as anyone could, so Beth tried to pay attention. “I kept wondering, y’know. The Bowl map shows Earth as of the Jurassic period, when all of the biggest dinosaurs emerged. Y’know, apatosaurs and so forth. I think I finally have the sequence right.”

Beth nodded while she did her own kitchen work. He slammed the dough down and punched it for punctuation. “A variety of intelligent dinosaurs emerged first.
Oof!
They must have been carnivores. They invented herding.
Uh!
For millions of years they must have been breeding meat animals for size.
Ahh!
”

He looked around and realized that nobody was listening except Beth. “You mean all those theories about dino evolution are wrong?” This was interesting to her but apparently not to the others. The crowded kitchen buzzed with low conversation as they worked on aspects of dinner. Fred’s jaw closed with a snap. She knew the pattern—if people didn’t listen, he didn’t talk.

Karl handed Beth a handful of roasted crickets that reeked of garlic. “Try these. Crunchy.” He had pitched in with the cooking before she even got to the ship’s mess.

“Yum,” she said. Next came a basket of aromatic wax worms ready to cook. She tossed aside black ones: that meant necrosis. “They go bad fast; hell, I harvested them two hours ago,” she apologized. “The rest are pupating—just right.” Deftly she peeled back their cocoons and tossed them into the electric wok.

Captain Redwing came in and watched, standing straight and tall, smacking his lips slightly. “Wax moth larvae, a gourmet favorite.” The crew laughed, because he always pretended to like the food in the mess, no matter how implausible that was. Or else he ate alone in his cabin. After their last culinary disaster, a motley mashed-up dish everyone disliked and called Stew in Hell, he went on dry rations alone.

Karl turned and swept brown roasted crickets up, salted them—salt was easy to extract from the recycler—and with head tilted back, trickled them into his mouth. “How come when you have less to eat, it tastes better?”

“Less is more,” Redwing said. Everyone around him raised eyebrows. “Look, we’re in a tough spot, carrying forward maneuvers nobody trained for—” He nodded at Karl, Beth, Ayaan Ali. “—and exploring a big thing nobody even imagined. We’ve got to do with less until we see our way out of this.”

Everyone nodded. Redwing finished with, “So on to Glory—and let’s eat.”

The moth larvae weren’t all done. The crew watched the chubby white larvae sway and wriggle in delirious fits as the heat took them. Insect protein was simple to raise on algae and, if well cooked, had a zest that the rest of the menu lacked. Fresh from a skillet, they had a kind of fried fritter some called “pond scum patties” to go with them. The ship couldn’t afford the room or resources to raise muscle and sinew. Some crew came from the North American Republic and weren’t used to insect food, or else from experience regarded it as beneath their standards. A few weeks’ exposure to the stored rations usually fixed that. Some things, like the trays of gray longworms, few could bear to look at. Those Beth thought it best to grind into a paste for a fake pancake.

Beth spread the larvae into a frying pan, where they fell into a fragrant, fatty goo Ayaan Ali had made. They squirmed as they sizzled and then went still. She stirred them, thinking
Amazing what you’ll eat when you have to …
and then recalled things she had gratefully ingested when she had to on the Bowl. Sometimes, admittedly, while deliberately not looking at them …

A zesty aroma rose from the crusty larvae and as soon as she set them out, crew descended on them.

Redwing had saved a morsel for this moment, and now trotted out from his personal stock a bowl of—“Honey!”

That made the dish work. Everyone dug in. “As insect vomit goes,” Karl said, “not at all bad.”

Ayaan Ali asked Karl, “Done with that flight analysis?”

Karl barely slowed his eating to say, “Realigned the simulation, yes. Fitted it to isotope data from the scoop over the last century.”

Beth asked, “Meaning?”

Ayaan Ali said, “We’re still trying to understand why the scoop underperformed. It might help us fly it now in this low-plasma-density regime.”

Redwing said casually, “How’s the detector mote net working?”

Beth knew this was one way Redwing liked to turn social occasions into a loose staff report meeting. Certainly his approach made hearing tech stuff flung about a tad more appetizing.

Ayaan Ali gave herself an extra helping of sauce—much needed, since to Beth the woman seemed rail thin and low energy—and crunched up some more insect delicacies before saying softly to the others, “Karl and I deployed, on the captain’s direction, the diagnostic fliers we’d planned to use when we came into the Glory system. They would give us a good three-D map of the mag fields and solar wind when we came in.”

Redwing said, “So I decided we could send them out on a short leash. They can tell us details about the plasma turbulence, density ridges, things that we can’t get a good reading on inside
SunSeeker
’s mag cocoon.”

This, too, was a Redwing method—let the crew know there was logic behind his orders, but do so ex post facto. Playing along, Beth asked, “Short leash?”

Karl said, “I’m pretty sure we can reel them back in. They’re marvels, really, size of a coin but able to propel themselves by using tiny electric fields that let them sail on magnetic energy, to sense plasma and measure waves, and report back in gigahertz band. We’ve got them spread over a big fraction of an astronomical unit, sniffing out ion masses and densities, picking up plasma waves, the whole lot.”

Beth was impressed with
SunSeeker
’s abilities and kept quiet while the others kicked around their lingo. They loved their gadgets the way ordinary people cherish their pets. The thousands of “smart coins” sending back data were working well. That they could be fetched back, told to return home for reuse—amazing stuff. Plus they had useful results right now.

Ayaan Ali waved one of her augmented fingers, and a 3-D vision snapped into view, sharp and clear above their table. Hanging in air, it showed schematics of the Bowl in green, with
SunSeeker
a tiny orange dot swimming above it. The ship had to stay below the rim of the Bowl to avoid the defensive weapons there. But it also had to skate above the upper membrane that held in the Bowl’s atmosphere. That left a narrow disk of vacuum for
SunSeeker
to navigate, riding the plasma winds that came direct from the star. But more important, they got plasma spurts from the traceries and streamers that purled off the yellow-colored jet. The churning jet was big in the 3-D view, a slowly twisting nest of luminous threads that drove forward. As the crew watched the display, it shifted smoothly, since the Bridge Artilect tracked human eye movements to display what interested people. They witnessed the jet narrowing further as it flowed out, then piercing the Bowl cleanly at the back, through the Knothole and out into interstellar space.

Deftly Ayaan Ali pointed to the safety zone disk where
SunSeeker
flew and the 3-D dutifully expanded until they could see bright blue dots swimming in a grid formation all across the huge expanse. They were sprinkled over a distance of about an astronomical unit and when Ayaan Ali waved her hand, they answered with momentary violet flares, a ripple slowly expanding away from the ship’s position.

“They report in steadily, each staying a good distance from the others. We get plasma signatures in ample arrays. The coins feed on the plasma itself and change momentum by electrodynamic steering.” She could not restrain herself, beaming. “Beautiful!”

Karl nodded. “And they got good news, in a way. Remember, before we sighted the Bowl, our scoop underperforming? Turned out it was eating a lot more helium and molecular hydrogen than ordinary interstellar space has. Some of it got ionized by our bow shock and then sucked into the main feeder.”

“Ah, but it doesn’t fuse—got it,” Fred said. This was the first time he had spoken during the entire meal, and everyone looked at him. “Hard to tell from inside the ship that it wasn’t getting the right food.”

Beth didn’t see, but wasn’t afraid to ask, “So?”

“Those useless ions slowed us down, just pointless extra mass—and not fuel.” Fred dipped his head, as if apologizing. “Sorry if I get too technical. My obsessions don’t translate well.”

Everyone around the table laughed, including Redwing’s rolling bark. “Don’t put down your assets, Fred,” Redwing said. “Even that dinosaur idea.”

Beth appreciated Redwing’s methods but wanted to move this along, so she asked, “So our drive’s okay? We’re managing to keep it flying in interplanetary conditions, after all—which it was never designed to do.”

“That’s what the smart coins tell us. We’re actually getting more plasma than we would if we were in near-Earth space,” Karl said. “The jet snarls up some, so we get a bit more blowoff plasma from it.”

“That star isn’t behaving like a main-sequence one, either,” Redwing said. “I had the Astro Artilect look into it. It says we got the spectral class wrong at first because of the hot spot—it swamped some spectral lines. But as well, the whole jet formation active zone makes the star act funny.”