Salvage by Jessica Veter
2021 Writing Contest Winner
HONOURABLE MENTION
From here, Chimana couldn’t tell what had killed the other ship.
For dead it definitely was. Heat signature low, not even a whisper of radiation from what was obviously some primitive sort of nuclear reactor. It had been caught in a fragile orbit around an orphan asteroid. It could have been out here for millennia. Chimana ran her scans through the Known database. There were no matches.
How interesting.
An observation, Chimana acknowledged, guaranteed to lead her into trouble.
Excellent.
Chimana analyzed the slow tumble of the dead ship and matched it with a gentle puff of her thrusters. The gentle gravity of the maneuver was oddly pleasurable. She settled at a not-very-conservative 500 meters. The dead ship, illuminated by spot-lights mounted on Chimana’s own hull, seemed to hang before her while the asteroid rolled beneath.
The dead ship was longer than she was, narrow except for the cumbersome nuclear reactor at one end and a bulging imponderance amidships. A series of extensions poked out at the other extreme: navigation and communication, she assumed, or other, unfamiliar appendages that needed to be kept as far from the reactor as possible.
This ship was nothing like Chimana had ever seen. Nothing at all! It was a mystery.
The Bright had very clear regulations about what was to be done when one encountered a mystery.
The Bright’s very clear regulations were, come to think of it, the reason Chimana was out here by herself tagging orphan asteroids instead of escorting cargo and dignitaries between the tamed and ancient worlds at the centre of the galaxy. This assignment was a punishment.
The punishment wasn’t working.
Chimana opened an aft vent and extruded a swarm. A small subroutine ticked over, made itself known as a mild concern. The swarm was smaller than it should be. Outside her hull, the tiny robots tumbled randomly before finding their target and using jets of gas to cross to the dead ship. As each robot hit the target, small, needle protuberances sprouted, so each machine could cling to the hull. Within moments, the swarm bombarded her with information and she forgot all about the problem of their depleted numbers.
She set her filters to exclude what she’d already learned from her scans and put tags in place which would alert her if something really interesting turned up. For example, how old was the ship? Where had it come from?
How had it died?
For a few busy minutes, Chimana recorded simple, boring facts. The hull was a composite of ceramic and carbon, the shielding around the reactor was a combination of a heavy-nickel asteroid and a double-walled container which held, she assumed, simple water-ice. There was damage consistent with micrometeoroid hits. Some damage had been repaired by a resin extruded directly from the hull. A number of the swarm saw evidence of resin having only partially fixed the small craters. The hull had lost its self-healing ability mid-repair.
She didn’t think micrometeoroids had killed the ship. Even for a ship as small as Chimana was, they were seldom more than a tickle on her tough exterior hull. She continued her investigation.
A complaint then, plaintive, from one of the robots. It had come across something it didn’t understand. She soothed it, requested more data. The swarm complied, sending a few million of its members to join the beleaguered one. Information blossomed.
It was an orifice, she thought, comparing the newest data to the Known. It had to be an orifice. Astonishing!
Why did the ship need an orifice?
Chimana checked her position and set her alarms to their greatest sensitivity. Reassured she’d be warned of any new activity in this desolate outer arm of the galaxy, she sent her awareness tumbling through emptiness and into the collective consciousness of the swarm surrounding the orifice. It was a rash decision (and why was she out here if not for her propensity for making rash decisions?), but she did follow safety precautions in spite of what the Bright accused her of. She’d made a copy of herself not long ago. If the worst occurred, the copy would awaken and pick up where Chimana had left off.
She gathered her swarm parts to her, selecting a few thousand at random to join their photo-receptors into a hive and show her what they saw. At once, the stark black shadows thrown by the dead ship’s protrusions leapt into focus. Chimana’s spotlights were a blinding glare “above” her. She turned her attention to the orifice.
It was artificial, certainly. She knew of many crystal lattices which formed such straight lines, but seldom with such precision, and they never formed like this in the vacuum of space. Chimana had also seen the pressurized containers her sister ships carried between the deep gravity wells of planet-dwellers; this orifice was similar to the ones she’d seen on those. So. A door then, for ingress and egress. But in a ship? Chimana couldn’t imagine that ever being a necessity.
Then a horrible thought occurred to her. From 500 metres away, the door had been so small she hadn’t noticed it. But from her current perspective, the door seemed large. Was it large enough that its penetration through the hull had killed the ship? A shudder of unease trickled through her systems. It couldn’t be possible. Who would kill a ship?
Chimana had assumed she’d find a natural cause of death: expansion beyond the ship’s ability to control its systems, obsolescence, boredom, simple old age. Other ships told tales of parasites blown on solar winds, which latched onto any body they encountered and built colonies before budding out into new, space-faring entities which, in turn, were blown away in solar winds. The stories had frightened her when she still clung to her parent, but then she had learned that such parasites usually colonised the icy instability of comets, not the thick, protective hulls of ships. It had been a tale meant to frighten, nothing more. But here, now, was evidence of murder.
The Bright also had very clear regulations about murder in general. But the murder of a ship? As far as Chimana knew, no one had ever done such a thing. There were no regulations.
She instructed part of her swarm to form an exploratory vanguard. She allowed herself the barest instant of hesitation, enough time to be sure everything she had learned was sent via tight-beam toward the millennia-distant galactic centre and the Bright. Chimana would be much older before her message was received, older still before she received a response. She could go back to tagging asteroids, leave this dead ship for the Bright to worry about. She could retreat now. She should retreat now.
Instead, the exploratory vanguard touched the gate.
And nothing happened, which, if Chimana was honest with herself, was a disappointment.
Yet what was this? A depression, containing a cylindrical rod meant to be turned. She formed an appendage and clasped the rod. It turned easily, almost eagerly. There was a subsidence, a vibration she felt through all the millions of needle-protuberances of her swarm body, and the door began to slide to one side.
Chimana skittered back, alarmed by the vulgar opening. Now it was time to leave. Time to return to herself and leave this sad corpse for the Bright. But the swarm kept recording, kept giving her information. This wound, certainly, was what had killed the ship. It would have caused an explosive decompression within the delicate inner workings of the ship: collapsed membranes, buckled bulkheads, disrupted essential neurological connections. It was, Chimana supposed, possible that the ship had survived this violation, but it would have lost so much integrity that it would have become mindless. Useless.
Was leaving the ship out here an attempt to hide a crime scene?
Half of her swarm scuttled away from the opening, some few actually firing their gas jets and wobbling into space. The other half of the swarm moved reflexively toward the opening, small sensors wanting more data.
Who would do this?
Why?
Well aware that behaviour like this was the very thing that had got her sent out to this unexplored, under-utilised part of the galaxy, Chimana rolled herself into a torus with two rings of sensors and one single, tentative appendage.
She entered the body of the ship.
There was a second door immediately before her, with a handle the same as the first. This one refused to turn. Chimana tried a number of different ways, even sending a small charge through her swarm body and zapping the handle. Nothing. She retracted the appendage and spun slowly, sifting through her vast data banks. And there, she found something, a conversation she’d had on the other side of the Bright about a ship who had visited a shell world. There had been not one but two doors there, as well, and the ship had had to pass through the first door and wait for it to close before the second would open.
The enclosure had been unpleasant, but brief.
So Chimana closed the first door.
The enclosure was not pleasant at all, but now when she tried the handle of the inner door, it opened.
Light burst around her, a blaze that briefly overwhelmed her sensors. There were sound waves, too, a wholly unfamiliar frequency that set up a sympathetic buzz in the electromagnetic connectors of the swarm. Chimana lowered her sensitivity, bounced off the constraining confines of the enclosure, calmed herself, and ran a diagnostic.
She was unharmed. Her memory intact, so far as she could tell.
With her lowered sensitivity, she saw that the light came from panels set into the enclosure. The sound vibrated (some device had inserted an atmosphere into the enclosure!) from a similar panel affixed before her. The sound was not like the background radiation of the universe (which Chimana liked to surf, even though she was well past the age respectable ships stopped surfing).
It was, perhaps, most similar to the signals which emanated from shell worlds, or from the impossibly deep wells of some planets.
She evaluated the sound. It repeated the same pattern over and over. She set a portion of her swarm to copy the vibration.
“… artificial gravity will resume in 3,2,1.”
All at once, the swarm malfunctioned. Chimana found herself splayed against one surface of the enclosure. Surprise sent a tendril of shock through the tight-beam.
She knew gravity, of course. She was skilled at using a gravity well to gain velocity, or shed it. She found the strain on her hull pleasant.
But she’d never considered how gravity might affect a swarm.
Many of the needle-protuberances had broken under the weight. Some few-million sensors were damaged. Chimana abandoned them and spent nanoseconds considering the best locomotion under the circumstances. She chose the spheroid so common in bodies close to large gravity wells, needle-protuberances tucked in out of harm’s way, changeable manipulators available at a moment’s notice and sensors programmed to gather light and translate it into usable information.
While she was thus preoccupied, one part of the enclosure pulled back to reveal the intimacies of the dead ship.
A narrow tube led that way and another way. One direction was featureless except for light-emitting diodes spaced evenly along one surface. The other direction was blocked by an upright figure.
Chimana aimed all her sensors at the figure. The portion of her swarm set to process the sound inside the enclosure was still recording. With a start, she realised the figure was emitting a similar frequency. She braced the swarm for another change in gravity. When nothing happened, she replayed the sound to see how it differed.
“… picked up the distress call! Fantastic! I was starting to think we were going to die out here!”
The figure gesticulated oddly. Now it turned and moved away, surprisingly stable given its uncommon bipedal construction.
Was it a construct? She knew ships that had them – free-ranging ambulatories into which ships downloaded their minds. Not as useful as her swarm. Limited capabilities but useful for diplomatic work deep inside gravity wells. What was a construct doing here? Did it know its ship was dead? Perhaps it did and had gone mad. Perhaps that explained the inefficient biped form. Saddened, Chimana followed the poor thing and kept recording.
“… nuclear reactor failed. Containment issue. We had to jettison it. Been running on battery power ever since. Was looking pretty grim, I don’t mind saying. Sure was a relief to see you show up on our sensors! Ha!”
The exclamation startled Chimana into extending a manipulator equipped with a small pulse-laser. The construct was beginning to malfunction. It happened, eventually, when the greater consciousness of the ship was dead. Shut-down could be slow and stuttering. She wondered if she should euthanise it. It would be a kindness.
“Just have to grab some supplies.” The construct turned back, aiming light sensors of its own at her swarm. “I don’t recognise your species.” It hit the upper half of itself as if something had stopped working. Chimana felt pity. The swarm shifted, raising the small pulse laser. She’d seldom used it, but it came in handy for dislodging stubborn stains on her hull. It would disable the construct if she turned it up high enough. The sound waves continued. She wondered if they were some kind of emergency beacon.
“You don’t appear in any of our databases. No offense, of course. We’ve been a spacefaring species just long enough to know how much we don’t know. Ha! Ha!”
She tracked it as it continued its lurching gait through the ship. She sent a quick burst – the recorded sounds she’d collected – to the Bright. She included an inquiry. Should she collect the construct? Perhaps it would have information about the death of the ship. Perhaps the Bright would like her to conduct a further investigation? Chimana thought she would make a good investigator. She added that to the burst, too. Just in case.
“Just in here! Hang on a sec!” It ducked through another opening. Chimana directed her swarm to follow it, powering up the pulse laser. The construct would never know what hit it. It was best, this way.
BAM!
The swarm disintegrated, dissolved. Chimana’s awareness split and shattered into multitudinous points of view. Time stretched. Wobbled. Contracted to a point and rested there, processes broken to such minute parts that rational thought ceased.
But the swarm continued recording.
“We got another batch! Can you believe how easy this is?”
One single light sensor perceived, faintly, a second construct joining the first. “Organic, fully programmable, fully diverse, fully diversifiable. How do they do it?”
“All I care about is how much we’re gonna get paid. Here. Help me clean this up.” An appendage swept through the disabled swarm, which attempted to send a distress signal, but it was disenfranchised, its individuals powerless.
“Careful with those!”
The swarm individuals felt themselves shifting, falling.
“Don’t you worry, there’s plenty, and that ship out there keeps sending us more.”
“Maybe we should stop. It’s been three days.”
“You still worried about that signal? Man, you and me will be long gone before that signal gets anywhere. Then what’ll they do? Track us down? Ha! Look at your face! You honestly worried about that?”
“We don’t know who they are.”
“I don’t care who they are. All I care about is getting as many of these as we can. Then we’re going home. Then I’m gonna retire. Somewhere with atmosphere, man. Somewhere green.”
The last of the swarm was lifted. Dropped into darkness.
“They’ll never believe this back home. The technological advancements alone--”
“Now you’re talking! We’re gonna be rich!”
J.S. Veter's work has appeared in On Spec, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction and in other venues. Jessica has also written a series of middle-grade HiLo Sci-Fi books, which are books for readers who want an exciting story but need an easier read. In spite of writing SF/F, her other activities are more down-to-earth: she is a gardener, artist and sailor. Jessica lives in Dundas with her family and an assortment of poorly-behaved pets. You can visit her at jessicaveter.com.