Local vertical.
Insistent mental alarm bells. Get local vertical.
Old truths, surely no use now?
The humming. Insistent. No air here but he could not get away from it. Insect-faint but there.
A sphere ahead. Adhesive patches on the backs of his gloves gave him purchase on it. He swung around, his creaky body bird-quick.
Beyond the metallic sphere yawned a space so vast his torch fetched back no reflections, no answers. He turned to go back, mind still recalling another place and time—
The humming lurched, rose. Shrieked, wailed. A violin string stretched to yield an octave too high, cutting, a dull saw meeting hard steel—
Silence. He blinked, startled.
It had been like this back so long ago. On his mission to Icarus, a supposed asteroid that had bloomed fitfully, outgassing a momentary cometary tail. That had been caused by the final loss of an internal atmosphere, as it worked out, from a ship. A vessel built inside an asteroid, a starship. Its rock was extrasolar, and lay beyond the dating protocols, the ratios of isotopes awry. For perhaps a hundred million years it had been left orbiting in the inner solar system.
And Nigel had found this same configuration there. Strangely shaped spaces. A sphere. The humming. A quick electromagnetic cry.
His suit had recorded it all. He spun slowly in a pocket of darkness, the sphere now seeming smaller, spent, exhausted.
Message received. He jetted back toward the others.
FIVE
Huck
Ping, their capsule spoke.
Nikka’s face was drawn and furrowed in the reflected light. A searing blue glow seeped down the crevasse. To be this bright down here meant that brilliant furies worked along the asteroid face outside. They were tucked into this makeshift canister, flimsy protection.
A solid bang slapped them against their restraints.
“That’s it,” Nikka said. “The shock wave.”
Tongues of thin fire licked by the observation port.
A few hundred meters away, ionized frenzy worked to get at them—or so went the human-centered view, Nigel reflected.
The awful truth was worse: that the unleashed searing energies booming out from the black hole sought no one, meant nothing, cared not a fig for the human predicament. It would grind up intelligence and spit it out, toward the sleepy stars beyond. Here, mind shaped itself to nature, not the reverse.
They waited out the onslaught for a day, then two. A giant drummed on the walls. Sensors on the ship sent data, painting a picture of huge mass flows past the hull. The ship itself breached, repaired itself, breached again, zapped a few bits of debris. They had come to respect these self-fixing aspects in the long voyage from the suburbs of the galaxy. They were parasites, after all. If they drew too much attention to themselves, some cleanup squad might well get activated.
He had brought with him a few personal bits, hauled all the way from Earth. In dim suit light he read again the small yellow hardback, spine cracked, pages stiff and yellowing and stained from the accidents of adolescence. Near the end there was a passage he had long ago involuntarily memorized:
And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory for a couple of weeks or two, and I says, all right, that suits me . . .
Nigel had never felt himself remotely American, despite having lived and labored there for decades, but this passage somehow always made his voice catch in his throat when he read it aloud.
The capsule ticked and pinged and he realized that he and the others had lived so long now in alien metal corridors that they were used to the feel of quiet, implacable strangeness all about. Once you’d left home, all places were remote and foreign and so you might as well keep going. On to the finality, the omega point of some alphabet you could not read but by tramping along the full length of it.
When they finally straggled out, the crevasse was blocked with debris. Lumps and chunks of rock jammed into every crevice. Nigel worked on it for a while and then had to rest. He was old, in stringy good health, but knew his limits. He wondered if there might be another way out of this place, which was clearly a wreck of a starship of asteroid size.
“It’s like the old crash site on the moon,” he said to Nikka over comm. “In Mare Marginis.”
“Ummm. I’d noticed some resemblance.”
“And the original derelict ship I found, Icarus.”
“Which implies that—what? Whoever built them was spread all over the galaxy?”
“They got this far. Must’ve been.”
“And this hulk, as dead as the others?”
Nigel nodded. “Means the mechs got them, I suppose.”
“There must have been millions of them, to run into another, thirty thousand light-years away.”
“Um. There’s a big game afoot.”
They coasted together down one of the side corridors, looking at yawning vaults and smashed metallic enclosures. “Looks like someone stripped it,” Nikka said, shining a torch into a dark warren. “Not much left for us to scavenge—”
—out of the corner of Nigel’s eye, skimming fast, came the snaky thing.
Helical, with bulky masses appended, a sharp glinting prow. No bigger than a man but faster, coming at Nikka and him as though it had waited for this.
