The lower level of the Truth Unholstering Her Blaster was less polished in appearance than the upper. The metal surfaces were less shiny, the plastic ones less smooth. While everyone took meals in the galley, only Chari (and his relief, Dohbi Ch'kahladuvatrekonil Sain) spent the majority of his spaceborne life down here, within the engine room, which compared to everything else on the ship could seem impossibly spacious: almost the same size as the bridge but meant for only one person, with room to move around freely and visible floor space. At the same time, Chari could not help feeling that his vast but lonely kingdom had left him alienated from the others. Even Sain took breaks from shifts to socialise in the galley and chat with Kalesh-jun on random topics, but Chari—claustrophobic and shy by nature—felt more at ease at his station than traversing the narrow passageways or playing board games with his crew.
He never felt this alienation more strongly than when in the company of Aleia Leku. Partly, of course, it was that she was young and pretty, but also she came from a well-to-do family on Sievitsa itself, at the very heart of the Empire. Her grandmother had been High Commissioner of something-or-other in the time of Miska II. Though space is the great equaliser in many respects, her well-bred accent and manner had never left her. Chari, with his bristly beard and slow mumbling speech and hands dirty with engine grease and metallic dust, felt particularly ugly and barbarous around her, and held his tongue even more than usual. And yet he had to speak sometimes, because she looked up to him for orders—he'd trained as a spacer, of course, whereas she'd been "volunteered".
One such time was now, as they struggled into two of the five environment suits that hung in the engine room. (At least Space Forces officials had acknowledged that the entire crew might have to leave the ship on occasions, instead of supplying them with only three.) Leku was asking: "We've never had to dock with a vessel without a standard docking bay before. What's the normal procedure for that, Chari-doh?"
"Well, er," Chari paused to buckle his chestplate into place and tighten a strap. "Ah, it's a bit... complicated, see. We're going out first to get, whatever. A visual. We report that to, er, the junbi and she uses the magnetic beams to maneuver it the right way. See at this range we haven't got scans, so they're totally blind up there."
"Aha. I understand," said Leku, though Chari was sure he hadn't explained it well at all. She was fully suited up now, lacking only the helmet. Chari hurried to finish adjusting his suit and triple-checking his oxygen supply. Helmets had to be secured in the back and needed another person to do so. Presumably either for building trust or because of budget cuts. It struck Chari as damned stupid; what if you were the sole survivor of some disaster?
"We're looking for, what you might call, an entrance or exit of some kind. Once that gets pointed towards our airlock, er, I'll show you, but there's an attachment we install that is... sturdier than it looks, haha."
"Yes, that makes sense," said Leku, giving him a wan smile. It occurred to him—as he took her helmet down from its hook, carefully installed it on the shoulders of her suit and then secured and pressurised it using the switches, straps and buckles on the back—that she smiled at everyone, even the nehbi. Amahir-neh's vaguely sexual comments towards her (though never within earshot of the junbi) were indefinably unsettling to Chari, and even more so the way he sometimes put his arm around her waist or touched her hand or her shoulder or her hair, unasked-for and unreciprocated. If it bothered even Chari, who grew up with seven siblings in a one-room house on Mondova, it must have seemed behaviour of the utmost vulgarity to Leku herself. But it was not Chari's place to say anything, and he sometimes wondered if he was only uncomfortable out of envy. (Thoughts of Amahir-neh were always perilous. The man was everything Chari had imagined himself being as a child—handsome, intelligent, with a devil-may-care attitude, unbowed by authority. He had no fixed job but plenty of money, and had only joined the Space Forces officer corps for the sake of a new experience. Chari both admired and resented him.) He could not understand why Leku smiled so often as though it were a social nicety, especially when it was such a radiant smile, one that lit up entire rooms and should have been reserved for special occasions.
The snap and hiss of pressurisation reminded him that he had successfully installed and pressurised Leku's helmet, and she had just finished doing the same for him. The viewscreen on the inside of his helmet was a little bit blurry; presumably there was some dirt on the outside, which he would deal with later. Leku came back around and gave him a "thumbs up" signal.
"It's just like your first spacewalk," Chari said into the built-in radio. "We'll stay in contact this way."
"Understood, Chari-doh." Leku's voice emerged crisply from somewhere in front of his eyeballs. The internal speaker would indicate the vector the transmission came from by positioning the sound spatially inside the helmet, which was occasionally helpful but could play hell with one's sense of direction. "Bridge, we are suited up."
"Away team, be advised." Victory Kalesh-jun's voice now came from somewhere around the top of his head. "Sonar is detecting not one sentient on board, but three, repeat three."
"Three? Are you sure, Kalesh-jun?" Chari asked. He had the strange feeling of sinking through the floor very rapidly. One more person might have been doable with some additional rationing of food and water. Three meant the mission might have to be aborted, and though that would be a relief, it was two days to the next jump point and there was all the potential fallout of returning to Sievan space with extrasievicals in tow, which likely meant never returning to the core systems.
"Certain. Two of them are very weak judging from heartbeats. We are stabilising the object's position—move out."
"Jun." Chari clomped out the door of the engine room to the small corridor that separated it from the galley and supply store, and opened the access hatch. The ladder here led up to the living quarters and bridge, and down only to a small, empty room at the very bottom of the ship, slightly too wide to be a corridor, which terminated in the inner airlock door. It was down that he went, closely followed by Leku.
The airlock mechanism was almost totally automatic: with the inner door shut, atmosphere was pumped back into the ship quite rapidly—the magnetic boots alone holding the "away team" to the floor—until pressure had been equalised with the empty space outside. Then a red light clicked to green and, with a small but powerful motion, Leku sprung the manual catch and pushed the outer door open.
The views, to start with, were breathtaking. It was a total cliché, but Chari had become a spacer because he loved space, and this—ahead of him the Oort cloud, very close now, looking like a massive ring of purple faintly outlined against the blackness; all around him thousands of stars; far below the curving belt of the Galaxy; above and far to the left a distant nebula; somewhere an irregular light that could have been a pulsar—was almost enough to make him forget his job. But there was also something else, this foreign and definitely man- (or something-) made object, seemingly suspended just a few meters from where they stood at the edge of the airlock. White and glossy despite some damage it had sustained, strangely out-of-place—it could have been a fragment from one of the newest military ships, or part of a rich man's yacht.
"Bridge, object is within sight. If I had to judge," Chari raised his hand to rub his beard, only for it to strike the visor of the helmet, "I would say it's part of a ship."
"Agreed," said Leku, "and I would add to Chari-doh's assessment—it looks like part of a large ship. There is no sign of propulsion, sensors or anything else functional, apart from life support. Alternately propulsion, sensors and other devices could exist in a highly advanced form, and are simply compromised at the moment. It could be a shuttle, or a lifeboat, or even a fighter."
"Or a pleasure booth," said Amahir-neh, but Kalesh-jun spoke more or less at the same time. "Interesting deductions, away team. Proceed out to the object to examine it for a name or any other sign of function."
"All right. Leku-crewman," said Chari, "can you tie us in to a line?"
"Already done," said Leku, holding up the end of a line attached to the outside hull of the ship. "Here." He took it and attached it securely to one of the buckles around the waist of the suit.
"Good. Now all that's needed is to deactivate your magnetic boots. We're reliant on gravity from here."
Stepping out from the airlock onto the hull was always something Chari enjoyed—no longer tied down to artificial gravity, able to move freely. This, he felt, was how humankind had been meant to be. To move in harmony with the cosmos, rather than attempting to impose planetary conditions on it. Planets, after all, were anomalies. Low-grav was normal. Twisting his head slightly he saw Leku following him, slightly more hesitantly, and he pushed off the hull into the narrow gap that separated Truth from the object—not more than twenty meters at this point. "Leku-crewman," he said, "use the line to direct me towards the object."
"Yes, Chari-doh," she replied, possibly sounding a bit disappointed.
"Away team, your visor cams are active," said Amahir-neh, his voice now coming from the back of Chari's head. Chari obligingly kept his visor focused on the object as he approached. Approaching anything directly is difficult in space. More than once he drifted too far to the left, and a sharp jerk of the line (felt somewhere around his navel) pulled him back towards the object. It was perhaps five minutes before it was close enough for Chari to make out every small detail of the cracks in its hull and the symbols inscribed on the outside. The object was significantly larger than it had looked from the airlock—though still seemingly too small to have its own independent propulsion system. But then whoever made it might have more advanced miniaturisation techniques than the Sievans. (Chari's one encounter with extrasievicals had involved a ship that moved through space with no visible propulsion, controlled by a being directly through her mind. If that was possible, anything should be.)
"Bridge, are you reading this?" asked Chari as he propelled himself along the six sides of the object—which he now perceived to be vaguely rectangular apart from the damage it had sustained—making sure his viewscreen picked up everything that looked like writing or information.
"Yes, we're reading your feed very clearly," said Kalesh-jun. "The writing's in Basic." She sounded almost surprised.
"Basic, Kalesh-jun?" That was Leku's voice. She too sounded surprised. For Chari, Basic was a programming language, and the writing looked nothing like it, but he forbore to speak.
"Yes. That's a very widely spoken language in the Galaxy, at least as far as I've been told," said Kalesh-jun. "I can speak it, a little bit."
Ah. "What does it say?" Chari said, attempting to focus his visor even more strongly on the markings on the hull ahead of him.
"That says nothing," said Kalesh-jun. "I think what you're looking at is hull damage caused by small asteroids or perhaps weapons fire. The Basic was further back, near where you started."
There was a sound of distant, suppressed laughter which sounded like Sain. Chari ignored him and made his way gradually back towards other markings which, now that he thought about it, did in fact look somewhat different.
"Are you working on a translation, Kalesh-jun?" said Chari.
"Yes. It says... Sain-doh, you know some Basic, don't you?"
"I can beg for mercy and explain some scientific concepts," said Sain cautiously.
"This does say what I think it says, right?"
There was radio silence for a few seconds. "Er, possibly. I think you have the gist of it, Kalesh-jun."
"That's what I thought. Away team, those are markings for how to unlock the... capsule? Pod? I don't know how to translate that word. Return to base immediately and prepare the docking corridor."
"Jun." Chari kicked off from the object, pushing it slightly out of position before it locked in again to the magnetic beams. "Leku-crewman, reel me back in, please."
The return trip was much faster. Chari found a certain comfort in the familiar form of the Truth—squat and bulky, about the size of a house, dull grey with its exterior appearing windowless and covered in chrome-plated sensor arrays that had perhaps seen better days. The sleek white form of the object, advanced and foreign and clearly belonging to someone very rich, home to three more people the ship couldn't possibly fit on board, disturbed him (and the order of how things were Supposed To Be—extrasievicals stay out in their part of the Galaxy, Sievans stay in their part—though this was the very edge of Sievan space and anything, he thought, could happen).
From there things proceeded quickly and like a well-oiled machine. Leku helped him back inside the airlock, and caught on very quickly when he unlocked something from the outer edge of the doorway and—safe on his magnetic boots—began pulling out a heavy plastic semicircle that extended from the rim: she was doing the same on the other side before he had to order her. (It briefly occurred to him that six months on a starship was definitely enough to make you a spacer with or without formal training.) The two semicircles locked together to produce a relatively solid corridor extruding itself from the ship, though one that swayed slightly when one walked on it, and at their ends were large accordions of a different, semitransparent plastic. From the furthest extent of the corridor Chari could see the object moving unnaturally towards them, very slowly, with something that looked like a hatch pointed towards the corridor.
"Docking corridor is in place, Bridge," said Leku.
"If only Leku-crewman were willing to open such corridors for her own crew," said Amahir with a mock sigh. It was many seconds later that Chari realised this was meant to be some kind of innuendo, and he looked guiltily at Leku, whose expression was of course (due to the visor) unreadable. Kalesh-jun said: "Did you say something, Amahir-neh?"
"Talking to myself, Kalesh-jun."
Chari wondered if Kalesh-jun was even listening, or if she'd turned her radio off in order to better concentrate on moving the object in. At length—having slowed to a crawl—it collided solidly with the corridor, which shuddered but held fast, so that only the hatch and a portion of the white metal exterior was visible. As though of their own accord, the semitransparent plastic folds closed in on the object, pressing themselves against it as closely as possible. Then there was a snap-hiss as they sealed the vacuum out.
Chari let out his breath, not realising he'd been holding it, and turned back to open the inner airlock door only to find Leku was already doing so. "Docking successful. Opening airlock door," he said instead.
"You're clear to do that. Everything seems normal," said Amahir-neh.
Opening the inner door was, of course, the kicker. If something had gone wrong, the ship would explosively decompress. That would mean mission failure and also death. That said, everything appeared safe, docking had been successful (otherwise the corridor would not have been able to seal) and the only real problem was now the three more people breathing their oxygen and drinking their water and eating their food. And having nowhere to sleep, of course. But presumably the junbi had a plan for that, otherwise she wouldn't have brought them in. Presumably. Air was beginning to flood the corridor, and the seconds ticked by as Chari waited for pressures to equalise.
Finally something on the inside of his helmet began to beep. "Atmosphere is now breathable," said a computerised voice. He said: "We have atmosphere. Do you want us to open the object, Kalesh-jun?"
"No, don't. I'm coming down," she said. "If they speak Basic, you'll need a translator. Feel free to de-suit."
It was in fact Sain who was first down, as Chari and Leku were removing their helmets. He grinned at them. Sain had the disturbingly bright and focused gaze of a mad scientist, and his grin was not a pleasant sight, but he seemed to mean it as a friendly gesture and Chari returned it with a slow, grave nod. Kalesh came down with Amahir a few moments later. It was not standard practice to leave the bridge abandoned, but it was also not standard practice to bring aboard extrasievical beings and some formalities had gone out the airlock.
Thus it was that, once the object was eventually opened, the first sight of the beings inside—if they were awake or conscious—would be five human beings in dark uniforms marked with an unmistakable Spaceship-and-Cthulhu, all of the same indeterminate ethnicity (our readers, if not the capsule's inhabitants, will recognise the term "Southeast Asian", but it must be emphasised this is merely an approximation and the millennia have heavily altered matters) and varying widely in height, build and hair colour, speaking among themselves in an unfamiliar consonant-heavy language. Perhaps if they were looking closely they'd spot the rank insignia, though even without it the small and somewhat fragile-looking woman opening the hatch carries herself with an air of solid authority to which the others defer, and alone seems to register understanding if they speak in Basic.
(Perhaps they'll be asleep or in stasis. Under the circumstances, that's a very likely possibility.)
Sunset wrote:NOTE:
Sunset is super-busy with work stuff. I'll be trying to post where I can, but it might be a week or so until I get things cleaned up. With a shovel, duct tape, and some shallow gra... holes. Yes. Holes. In the woods.
I'm having computer issues and will hopefully be taking it for repair later today. When I'll get it back is anyone's guess. Therefore posting now, anyway
This is unedited, sorry if it's too wordy or awkward. I wrote kind of in a hurry in between kernel panics
