The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(54)

“How’s your nose?” Kiva asked.

“It’s been better.”

Kiva nodded at this and punched Louentintu in the nose again. Louentintu slumped back against her headboard.

“That was the ‘or,’” Kiva said. “Make sure the countess gets it. And tell her to get her ass out of Hubfall. She’s got a great big fucking spaceship. From now on, she can sleep there.”





Chapter

14

The spaceship was large, like a tenner, and featured a ring, like a tenner. Unlike a tenner, the ring wasn’t rotating, providing itself with the force to pin people and objects down to the inside of its walls. Lights were on here and there across the ship. If Marce had to guess, he’d say the ship’s power and systems were intermittent, at best. The ship was indeed “warm,” but that warm was only relative to the space around it. Except for one arc of its ring, the ship registered a temperature of a couple of degrees above zero, Celsius.

What was interesting about the ship was not the ship itself, but the swarm of objects around it: dozens of small cylindrical objects, each no longer than thirty meters wide, connected to one or more other similar objects by cables, rotating around a central point, which was itself connected to the larger ship. Marce looked at one of the cables in his crew’s ready room on the Bransid, and saw something moving on it: a small container, attached to a mechanized pulley. As he watched, the pulley brought the container to one of the cylinders, which swallowed it up.

“Are we actually seeing this?” asked Jill Seve, watching the container disappear. She was a navy linguist, and had a degree in anthropology as well, which Admiral Emblad had decided was close enough for this mission.

“Oh, we’re seeing it,” said Plenn Gitsen, the naval biologist. “Are we believing it, is the actual question.”

“I mean, how the fuck are people actually alive out here?” Seve asked. “How long has it been since the collapse of the Flow stream?”

“Eight hundred years,” Roynold said. She was standing by Marce, watching the monitor.

“How do people live like that”—Seve pointed at the monitor—“for eight hundred goddamned years?”

“They probably didn’t live like that for eight hundred years,” said Gennety Hanton. “We have evidence there were people on Dalasysla thirty years ago. If we had time to examine the other habitats in the local space, we’d probably find some of them were inhabited or at least visited recently. Well, relatively recently.”

“So you’re saying that people have been living like that for thirty years at least,” Seve said.

“Looks like,” Hanton said.

“Okay, how the hell do you live like that for thirty years?”

“Got me.”

“They live like that because they don’t have any other choice,” Roynold said, testily. “Obviously. Our job is to find out why. And how.”

“So are we going over there?” Hanton asked Marce.

Marce turned to Gitsen, the biologist. “Are we?”

“Whoever they are, they’ve been isolated here in Dalasysla for most of a millennium,” he said. “The number of people they’ve lived among all their life can’t number more than a few hundred at best. That’s not a lot.”

“You’re worried that if we breathe on them, they’ll die of our diseases,” Roynold said.

“Or the other way around,” Gitsen said. “We have no idea how the bacteria and viruses in their very limited environment have mutated and evolved. We aren’t going to just walk up to them and give them a hug. That might be mutually assured destruction.”

“So that’s a vote for no,” Marce said.

Gitsen shook his head. “I didn’t say that. I think we have to go over there. Whoever these people are, they represent a miracle of science. Somehow they managed to survive eight hundred years after the collapse of their civilization. We need to talk to them. But we have to be careful.”

“Back into the suits,” Hanton said.

“You don’t have to go,” Seve said, to Hanton. “There are no computer systems that need to be hacked.”

“That you know of,” Hanton replied.

Roynold looked over to Marce. “Who does need to go?” she asked.

“Seve and Gitsen, definitely,” Marce said. “I think we might want to ask Merta Ells.” She was the ship’s doctor on the Bransid. “And I know that Captain Laure is going to want at least a few marines. And you can go too, Hat.”

“What makes you think I want to go?” Roynold asked.

“I went on the last mission,” Marce said.

“That’s the one I should have been on,” Roynold said. “You know I don’t like people much.”

“Sorry,” Marce said.

“It’s fine,” Roynold said, then turned her attention back to the ship. “But how are you going to do it? You just going to go to the front door and knock?”

“Hey,” Hanton said, pointing to the screen. “Do you see that?”

“See what?” Marce asked.

“One of the lights on the ring started blinking.”

Marce looked at the ship and could barely make out the light in question. “Can you zoom in on that at all?”