Kempster held Renato’s pack steady as it adhered to the armour suit. “I can’t feel the weight,” the young astronomer datavised. “I just have to balance right. And I’ve even got a program for that.”
“The wonders of science,” Kempster muttered. “Mind you, I ought to be flattered. Commando raids to acquire astronomical data. I suppose that’s a sign of how important my profession has become.”
“The Sleeping God isn’t an astronomical event,” Parker chided irritably. “We’re sure of that now.”
Kempster smiled at the blank neutral-grey back of his assistant. Now he was ready, Renato datavised Oenone ’s processor array for an update on their approach. Tanjuntic-RI’s dilapidated spaceport was a hundred and fifty kilometres away, and the voidhawk’s sensor blisters had it in perfect focus. The large disks were separated by a single central column that appeared to be made up from hundreds of braided pipes. They were spaced far enough apart, a hundred metres at least, to admit ships between them. Tyrathca craft had used them as hangar floors, anchoring themselves to docking pins and plugging into the utility sockets. Now, the disks were essentially flat sheets of decaying metal; their thin lattice of ancillary systems had evaporated away along with the rim.
“We’re not going to land on those, are we?” Renato Vella asked. “They don’t look very reliable.”
Samuel used his suit’s bitek processor to datavise a reply. “Oenone will take us in under the bottom disk. We’ll go EVA and try and find a way in along the spaceport’s support column.”
“It shouldn’t be a problem,” Monica datavised. “The archaeology team from the O’Neill Halo got in easily.”
“A hundred and thirty years ago,” Kempster said. “The decay rate Tanjuntic-RI is suffering from could well make things difficult for you. The original route may be blocked.”
“This isn’t an archaeology project, doc,” Monica datavised. “We’ll just cut our way in if we have to. Decay should help us there. The structure won’t put up much resistance.”
Kempster caught Parker’s eye, the two of them registering their disapproval in unison. Cut it open, indeed!
“At least we have a basic layout file of the internal chambers,” Oski datavised. “If we really did have to explore, I doubt we’d achieve anything.”
“Yeah,” Monica agreed. “How come the Tyrathca allowed that university team in?”
“Wrong question,” Parker said. “Why shouldn’t they? The Tyrathca couldn’t understand our interest in the arkship at all. You know they seal up and abandon a house once the breeders have died? Well Tanjuntic-RI is a similar case. Once something of theirs has ended its natural life, it becomes . . . invalid , is about the nearest definition we have. They just don’t use it, or visit it again. And it’s not due to the kind of respect we have for graves; they don’t consider their relics or burial houses to be sacred.”
“Weird species,” Monica datavised.
“That’s what they think of us, too,” Parker said. “The various Lords of Ruin have asked them on several occasions if they would join the Laymil research project, another viewpoint would always be valuable. It was the same answer each time. They’re simply not interested in examining obsolete artefacts.”
Oenone folded its distortion field to almost nothing as it crept across the last kilometre to Tanjuntic-RI. The arkship was rotating around its long axis once every four minutes, with only a small wobble picked up over the centuries. Which said a lot for how well they’d managed the internal mass distribution, Syrinx thought. As a result of the minute instability, the spaceport was pursuing a small loop which the voidhawk could match easily.
They slid in under the bottom disk, which was only seventy metres in diameter. The short length of the support column which emerged from the disk’s centre to burrow into the rock was twenty-five metres wide.
That lower disk must have been used to dock the Tyrathca analogue of our MSV’s,syrinx suggested. With the big inter-planetary ships on the top deck.
That would be logical,Oenone agreed. I wonder what they looked like?
Very similar to those the Tyrathca use today,ruben said. They don’t innovate much. Once a system is finalized they never change it.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense,serina said. How can you know when something is as good as possible unless you keep analyzing and tinkering with the design? A bicycle is a good, efficient method of getting from one place to another, but the car came along because we weren’t satisfied with it.
I hadn’t really thought about it,ruben admitted. Now you mention it, thirteen hundred years is a long time to stick with one design, an awful lot more if you add their voyage time to that. We’re still improving our fusion drives, and we’ve only had them six hundred years.
And they’re a lot better than Tyrathca fusion drives,oxley said. We’ve been selling them improvements ever since we made contact.
You’re applying human psychology to them,ruben said. It’s a mistake. They don’t have our intuition or imagination. If it works, they really don’t try to fix it.
They must have some imagination,cacus protested. You can hardly design an arkship without it.
Ask Parker Higgens,ruben said. a slight tinge of defensiveness was leaking into his affinity voice. Maybe he can explain it. I guess being slow and methodical gets you there in the end.
Syrinx examined the twisted braid of pipes and girders that made up the spaceport’s support column. Following her silent urging, Oenone expanded its distortion field enough to pervade the dilapidated structure. A picture of entwined translucent tubes filled her mind. The number of black-crack flaws in the metal and composite was alarming, as was the thinness of individual tubes. That really is very fragile,she declared. Samuel, please be careful when you egress. It won’t take much to snap the spaceport clean off.
Thanks for the warning.
Oenone rotated gently, turning its crew toroid airlock towards the lead-grey shaft. Standing in the open hatch, Samuel’s suit sensors showed him the stars slip past until he was facing the wrinkled mesh of metal. Even though it was basically just a frayed mechanical structure, it had a quality that told him it wasn’t human. Neatness, he decided, it lacked neatness, the kind of confident elegance that was the signature of human astroengineering. Where humans would use failsofts and multiple redundancy, the Tyrathca built tough simple devices in tandem. If one was taken out of service for repair or maintenance they trusted the second to remain functional. And it was obviously a philosophy which worked. Tanjuntic-RI’s existence and triumph was evidence of that. It was just . . . reality at one degree from human sensibilities.
The voidhawk’s movement halted. Shadows plagued the hull, turning the marbled polyp a dingy walnut. Gravity in the airlock faded away as the distortion field flowed away from it.
This is as close as we can get,syrinx said. The archaeology team went in just above the bearing ring.
The spaceport support column appeared to be holding steady just past the lip of the hull. Stars waved about behind it. Samuel triggered the cold gas jets in his armour, and drifted out from the airlock. Gaps in the column were easy enough to find. The original close weave of pipes and structural girders had been loosened when the bearings seized up, opening a multitude of chinks, though it was impossible to guess which one had been used by the archaeology team all those years ago. He selected one ten metres above the huge bearing ring set in the rock.
Nitrogen puffed out from tiny nozzles around his slimline manoeuvring backpack, edging him closer to the gap. It was lined with a buckled pipe on one side, and a tattered conduit casing on the other. He reached out with his left gauntlet, and made a tentative grab for one of the flaky cables inside the conduit. Dust squirted out around his fingers, and tactile receptors in his palm told him the cable had compressed slightly in his grip. But it held. His main worry had been that everything they touched along the column would disintegrate like so much brittle porcelain.