She built her archive of PV spacefaring lore.
She drank enough to kill most mammals.
She dreamed that she met Rigel again and he bought her drinks and she spoke about the past, the future, how she wanted to become a pilot. He said she could, if she worked at it. She believed.
She had a fight with Stem. She couldn't remember what had started it, and it wasn't physical, but it was in public (at Shine, in fact), and it was raucous enough that Stem had stormed off, leaving her in the tunnel outside with Yed.
"I don't get it," Yed said. "Why are you
with
him?"
"Because he asked."
"That's all it takes?"
"We all want somebody, don't we?"
"And you deserve better."
By which he meant him. Rada laughed, too drunk to care how she sounded. His face crumpled, but she wasn't laughing at him. Just the absurdity of life. Why were people so afraid to try to get what they wanted?
At last, Parson called them up to the port. The
Box Turtle
waited. Its stern was shredded and scorched, but they didn't have to worry about aerodynamics or aesthetics.
Rada settled into the bridge with the others. "Good to be back on board."
Parson grinned. "It's good to have something
to
board."
Genner ran the countdown. They separated from the landing pad and boosted away, leaving the blocky habitats of Skylon behind. The chatter during the flight centered on recapping the funny things they'd seen and done on leave.
"Shall we get to the subject we've been studiously avoiding?" Parson said during a lull. "The first thing we're going to do is send a probe to the vessel. Make sure it
is
a vessel. Once that's established, we'll begin excavation. It'll be just like a mining op—except instead of extracting ore, you'll be digging out an egg. Any cracks to the shell could destroy what's inside."
Stem snorted. "In other words, we're gonna be there a while."
The captain smiled. "You have to earn your share somehow, don't you?"
The
Turtle
touched down on the surface of the tiny moon. The grounds were churned up and darkened from the repair team, but the landscape was otherwise identical to how they had left it. They took the carts to the site and unloaded the gear.
Karry and Parson floated a long steel canister over to the ice sheet. From it, they withdrew a long cylinder with a conical nose, then stepped back. The automated drill gouged a path into the ice and disappeared. While it burrowed, the crew deployed a portable shelter, modified the mole for ice duty, and assembled a smaller excavator for when the mole got closer to the frozen vessel.
The work was detail-oriented and labor-intensive. After the last two weeks in the bars of Skylon, it felt great. With no sun, Rada soon lost track of time; when Parson called a halt, she was surprised to see that six hours had passed. They headed back to the ship to eat and grab some sleep.
"The probe should reach the hull in another three hours," Parson informed them. "By morning, we'll have a much better idea of what we've got here."
Rada wanted to stay up to hear the probe's findings, but as soon as she hit her bunk, she passed out like she'd pounded a fifth of pig.
She got up just ahead of her alarm. The ship lighting was set to predawn. She hit the head and padded down to the galley. Karry and Yed were already there.
"Any news?" she said.
"Nothing yet," Yed said. "Although it will still be morning for a few hours. Technically speaking."
Karry dug into a bowl of pink All-Paste. "Genner and the captain been consulting in his cabin for hours. Either the two of them decided to quit mining this moon and start mining each other. Or they've got the news and they're sittin' on it."
Karry was a crusty lifer who drank more than the rest of them put together, but Rada had learned to listen when he spoke. She ate, cleaned up, dressed. With no word from Parson, she paged through her collection of pre-PV research.
The announcement didn't arrive until nine that morning. "Crew to the bridge."
Stem glanced up at the ceiling and laughed. "He sounds like someone just nuked his dog."
They jogged from their cabin and up to the bridge. There, Parson leaned over his desk, eyes sleepless and puffy, face sagging like they'd hit quadruple G. He waited for everyone to arrive, then looked up, gazing past them.
"It's not a Pre-Virus ship," he said.
Rada's heart shrank. "How do you know that?"
"We've spent hours going over the newest scans. It doesn't match anything in the records of PV vessels. Not even close. The design is far too cohesive. Spacefaring."
"So what are we talking?" Stem said. "It's just some old hulk?"
"Probably."
The air seemed to leave the bridge. Rada felt her hopes contract. She still had the Dison job lined up, but this find could have changed everything. Along with the money, she would have become famous. Part of the team that found the relic from humanity's first space age. Ships across the system would have lined up to take her onto their team. She could have vaulted straight into the stars.
She lifted her chin sharply. "Wait,
probably
? If it's not PV, and it's not from the modern age, what else could it be?"
"There is another option," Genner said.
Parson scowled. "It's reckless to speculate until we know more."
"I hate secrets," Stem said. "If you're not going to spit it out, why call us here in the first place?"
Parson sat back, sighed, and nodded at Genner.
"I think," Genner said, "that it could be alien."
4
"Alien," Rada said. The word felt funny in her mouth, like a nut she wasn't sure had been shelled. "You're talking about Swimmers?"
"There's no way to tell yet," Genner said. "It isn't necessarily from the invaders. Conceivably, it could be another species altogether."
Yed looked around the bridge. "Is this as big as it sounds?"
"Bigger." Rada ran a hand through her hair. "This is the only thing that could be more valuable than a Pre-Virus human ship. Nobody's ever found an intact alien vessel. Everything from the invasion was destroyed in the war or torn up by scavengers. We know they had viable lasers. Drives that seemed to pluck their fuel right out of the air. Tech like that could be worth billions."
Stem's mouth fell open as if in slow motion. "Did you say
billions
? With a 'B'?"
"'B' as in 'Buy your own private moon.'"
"We are making a lot of assumptions," Parson said. "Starting with the very possibility it's alien. Even if it is, chances are it's damaged or destroyed. It's been under the ice a long time. And something put it here in the first place."
Genner tipped her head to the side, shrugging. "Being under the ice could have preserved it."
"Preserved what, exactly? The aliens must be dead—probably—but what if the Panhandler virus isn't?"
"It killed everyone who wasn't immune," Rada said. "Every one of us is the offspring of the survivors. We should be immune, too."
"You're willing to bet your life on that?" Parson clasped his hands. "The entire point is we don't know what's down there. Maybe that sounds exciting to you. But I'm the one who's got to worry about people getting hurt."
"Talk won't solve nothing," Karry said. "There's only one way to find out what's down there: dig it out and take a look."
"Yup," Stem said.
Parson pressed his lips together. "How about the rest of you?"
"We have to," Genner said. "We owe it to humanity to find out what there is to be learned."
"We've spent the last four hours arguing about what you think," the captain muttered. "Rada? Yed?"
Yed glanced at Rada. "I'm in."
"Rada?"
"I bet my life every time I hop in a cart," she said. "At least this gives us a shot to never have to take that risk again."
"I was afraid you'd say that." Parson turned to the screen. Weak blue light glimmered from the frost and rocks. "Let's go to work."
~
Four days later, from the surface, it looked like they'd hardly made any progress. A single hole, twenty feet across, sunk into the ice a quarter mile from the dig. The ice around the entrance was dirtied with churned-up rock and refrozen sludge. That was it.
Below the surface, it was a completely different story.
The mole had cleared a vast cavern above the ship. As it pulverized the ice and rock, the team had loaded the detritus into the carts that Rada drove to the designated slag pile. They were now too close to the ship for the mole to continue operations. This was a double-edged sword: work would slow as more delicate machines took over the dig. On the other hand, with so much of the ice extracted, Genner had been able to take more detailed scans.
Seeing them, Rada now had no doubt the ship was of alien make. It was a squat cylinder, ribbed and segmented, like a stack of tires or sea urchins. Insect-like arrays projected from its radial design. Many appeared to be broken, or missing altogether; the site showed indications the ship had crashed, leaving a trail of debris behind it. The impact had been low-speed, however. Either that, or the ship was incredibly tough—as far as they could tell, its hull was intact.
It was the hull that hit her eye most oddly of all. It didn't resemble any class of ship she'd ever seen. It looked like it belonged underwater. Like it had been built by coral or crabs.
Like it had been built by Swimmers.
The next few days were tough ones. Not that there was too much to do: just the opposite. The machines scraped the ice down to within inches of the vessel, then withdrew, replaced by a second set of machines tasked with melting the final layers without doing damage to the ship. The crew was left with little to do but prepare for entry.
Stem was their all-purpose grunt. An obvious choice for the breach team. Yed, as their expert on hostile environments, was the second. To her own surprise, Rada found herself raising her hand to volunteer.
"No way," Stem said. "I'm not letting you go in there."
She raised both brows at him. "Who says you get a say?"
"It's way too dangerous, Rada! I can't let you go."
"If it's that dangerous, then maybe I can't let
you
go."
He laughed. "That's ridiculous. This is what I do."
"And I know more about the history of spacefaring vessels than anyone here."
"Then I won't touch anything." He gestured at her torso. "Besides, you're…"
She bunched her fist. "A woman?"
"Enough!" Parson hollered. "Rada's in. Anyone has a problem with that, and no one goes in. I don't know why we're not handling everything with drones anyway."
"Once upon a time, they almost wiped us out," Rada said. "A human should be there to see this."
"That does not convince me in the slightest."
"We'll start with drones," Genner said. "But there are some things that look different in person. Besides, someone has to go inside it at some point."
"There's nothing to say it has to be one of us." Parson rubbed his temples with one hand. "You people will be the death of me, I swear."
While the machines neared the hull, she prepared with Stem and Yed. Discussing protocols. Plans. Although the ship must have been frozen for a thousand years, Stem insisted on bringing a gun. Rada rolled her eyes.
"All hands to the bridge." Genner's voice piped through the ship's speakers, unusually animated. "Unless you want to miss being the first humans to see inside an alien ship since Weirdness."
Rada bolted from her chair and sprinted to the bridge, Stem and Yed on her heels. Karry was the last to arrive, unhurried as always. The main screen showed a dark, featureless chamber, small and roughly cubical. The doors at the far end were parted halfway, but the drone's light didn't extend far past the room.
"This is the airlock." Genner grinned, rapt beneath the screens. "Had to cut our way in."
"Was there pressure?" Rada said.
"No atmosphere of any kind. Don't worry, Rada, the monsters are dead."
"Permission to proceed," Parson said.
Hands on the controls, Genner ordered the drone toward the gap in the doors. It floated smoothly into a long, straight tunnel. From the drone's low perspective, it was hard to get a feel for the exact size of the hall, but the proportions were wider than human ships. A waste of space—unless you needed to accommodate an umbrella-like spread of claws, tentacles, and limbs.
Sealed doors lined both sides of the tunnel. These too were wider than standard. The drone came to a T-shaped intersection. The floor was marred with black streaks.
"What's that?" Parson peered at the screen. "Scorch marks?"
"Irregular. Must have had gravity." Genner nosed the dirigible-like drone forward, hesitating at the intersection, then swung it to the right. Its light swept over a tangle of sticks and lumps.
Genner screamed.
"Holy
shit
!" Stem said. "Is that—?"
Bulbous, fist-sized eyes gazed up at the drone. Unwinking. Frozen. Yet so lifelike Rada could barely bring herself to gaze back.
The alien's head was long and vaguely oval, pointy toward one end, like a stretched-out egg. A thin neck connected it to a tapered body. Its gray, mottled skin was shark-like. Thick yellow liquid lay in a frozen pool beneath its tangle of claws and tentacles. Yed thrashed toward the bulkhead, pulled open the recycler, and vomited.
"Moons save us," Parson said, strained. "That's a Swimmer."
~
Over the next few hours, the drone mapped out most of the ship. It was a sizable vessel, corvettesque, but to Rada, it felt too small to have made it from another star on its own. Its insides were still, silent, frozen. The drone had located seventeen Swimmers so far. Each one bore severe wounds, as if the crash had been abrupt and unexpected. Some were nearly cut in half. Scorch marks spangled the interior, but the fires had been too brief to cause structural damage.
There was no sign of anything resembling a dedicated medical research lab, nor of anything that looked like an obvious container for lethal viruses. Not that any such things were likely to have survived nine-plus centuries near absolute zero. Even so, as Rada suited up to breach the ship, she couldn't help feeling like she was doing something incredibly stupid.