Starrise_at_Corrivale

Six, the computer replied.
Gabriel swallowed hard. "Did you count six?" he said to Enda. "I thought there were five." She told the computer's virtuality field to lift from around her, and she sat back in her seat, tilting her head from side to side. Not, Gabriel thought, as a gesture of negation, but because she was wondering whether she might hear the brains slosh when she did so. His own certainly felt wobbly enough, and there were other parts of him that might need drying off as well.
"Five, I thought," Enda said. "Obviously we both missed something in the heat of the moment." Gabriel rubbed his face and looked again at the computer's diagnostics. "You're not going to like this," he said, "but I think the cargo bay may have taken another hit. Look at the stress schematic back there." Enda glanced at it and made an annoyed face. "One more problem," she noted, "but there is another that interests me more. Our shooting was better this time." "Just barely," Gabriel said. "Yours was what saved us."
"Leaving that aside," Enda said, but Gabriel noticed that she did not contradict him, "look out there. Bodies."
They both bent closer to the computer tank, looking at the slowly spinning outline. "Body, anyway," Gabriel corrected. "At least I don't see more than one. And it looks more or less intact. Human?" "So it would seem, but you were the one who suggested you wanted to see who or what had been shooting at you."
"So let's go get it and take a look."
Gabriel brought the system drive back up from standby and nudged Sunshine toward the floating shape. "Probably won't be recognizable," he said, "after explosive decompression."
"Are you expecting to see anyone you recognize?" Enda asked, getting up to go aft and check the seals between the main section and the cargo bay.
"Hard to say at this point, but no one knew we were going to be here. Or at least no one should have known."
A brief silence. "You did not file a starfall plan, then? Or an insystem flight plan?"
"No," Gabriel said as he inched Sunshine closer to the spinning, tumbling form. As they got closer, the
tactical display in the tank was better able to show a shape. Definitely humanoid, Gabriel thought. There was something odd about the head though. Even an e-suit helmet would not be quite that big, as a rule. Enda looked out into the darkness. "Well, we knew there was surveillance of some kind going on, did we not? Now we know that it is not merely random or casual. Something quite sophisticated is being used on us."
"My money says we're carrying some kind of tag or tracer," Gabriel said as they glided very close to the body. He eased back on the throttles and brought up the external spotlights, instructing the ship to train them on the body as they got close enough for them to do any good. "I really love the prospect of tearing this ship apart piece by piece to find out where the tracer is when we don't know what it looks like or where it's been put or even when . . ."
Five hundred meters away, they could now see, just as a speck, the faint reflection from the spotlights on
a spread-eagled humanoid form. Gabriel nudged the ship ever so slowly closer to it.
"Who would have put such a thing on us?" Enda asked. "And why?"
"Someone who wants to see us dead of an 'accident' in far system space," Gabriel answered.
"Or in a street on Grith, late at night," Enda said.
Gabriel thought about that for a moment and shook his head. "On-ship surveillance wouldn't help anyone who wanted to do that. The people with the knives and the guns-that's some other kind of surveillance working, I'd say."
"So there might be two different parties tracking us," Enda said.
Two hundred fifty meters now. Gabriel sighed, "I was kind of hoping to avoid that particular conclusion."
"But you have not been able to?"
Gabriel shook his head. Two hundred meters.
"On the other hand," he said, "it's possible that if we removed whatever surveillance device was presently on the ship-"
"-assuming that we could find it in the first place-"
Gabriel nodded. "-that its removal would alert whoever had put it there, and they would get even more annoyed with us than they are."
"I would suggest by present indications that they are already fairly annoyed," Enda said, looking over the computer's diagnostics again and sighing. "More hull repairs for the cargo bay, I fear, and the damage may possibly be well up into the superstructure as well. Well, riches are a burden, they say." "I thought you said you weren't rich." One hundred meters. The shape was slowing, losing its spin. Gabriel thought he could see something like tubes curving out stiff from the body as if frozen that way. A very big dark head section.
"I was speaking figuratively," Enda said. Together she and Gabriel peered out the cockpit windows as
they came up to about fifty meters. Gabriel slowed Sunshine down to the merest crawl.
"Have you ever seen an e-suit with a headpiece like that?" Gabriel asked. It looked like solid metal,
though the light was poor and certainly there were enough metallic coatings for visors, gold and
platinum for example, that could fool you into thinking the whole helmet was polished metal. The shape
was peculiar, too, oddly elongated toward the sides.
"Someone with very large ears?" Enda inquired.
"That large?" said Gabriel, and shook his head. "If it's a new species and that is for their ears, they're going to have to put up with a lot of teasing."
He reached into the computer's tank and told it to bring up the exterior handling software that controlled the grapples and configurable cables. Gabriel continued to nudge the ship's nose a little to one side of the body to bring the lift access close to it.
The ship inched around and came to rest relative to the body, which was simply drifting now, no longer spinning. Gabriel let the ark's manipulation field snug in around his hand as the grapples extruded themselves from Sunshine's side and snaked out gently toward the body. The grapples were "negative feedback" waldo-bands with sensor-augmented faked sensation so that your hand could "feel" what the grapples felt through the software as they engaged with a solid object. Gabriel felt his way toward the body, opened the fingers of the grapples, and closed them carefully around it. The sensation was peculiar, slightly squishy.
Slowly he pulled the body closer and flicked one thumb to open the lift access, then he pushed the body carefully into it and closed the access again. Gabriel put on light gravity in the lift and instructed it to come up to ship level while filling with parasitic air siphoned out of the main cabin. The lift clunked into place. Gabriel watched the lift's pressure gauge in the tank until it matched exactly with that of the cabin. Finally he was satisfied of a perfect match and touched the control to open the lift door. Enda was already up out of her seat, heading aft. He went after her.
They stood and looked down at the body on the floor of the lift. Despite its short time out in space, it seemed already well frozen, the arms flung out forwards, one of the legs oddly bent. There was the large glossy headpiece, cracked but otherwise intact, glazed inside with a silvery metallic compound. The e– suit covering the body, though, was most peculiar. It looked like greenish plastic-but the green of the plastic was not even. It looked lighter in some areas, darker in others. Enda knelt down beside it, reached out a hand toward one of the slits that the explosion had apparently torn in the e-suit, then took the hand back again, glancing up at Gabriel.
He put one booted toe out and nudged the body slightly. Over the greenish e-suit were shoulder pads and shin coverings and a breastplate of what might have been some kind of dark armor. It was faintly ribbed and looked less metallic than chitinous, as if it had been wrought from the wing casing of some large beetle. The armor was by no means complete, though, and much of the body was left uncovered. It appeared to have been partially blown away from the lower left leg, and splintered bone was visible. There was little blood, even clotted blood, but from underneath the plastic material of the e-suit where it had been torn, something pallidly green was oozing.
"The suit's filled with something," Gabriel said. "Not air, either." He too put a hand out as if to touch that strange e-suit, then thought better of it and withdrew it.
"I confess to having been eager to see who pursued us," Enda said, pursing her lips, "but now I am less eager. I do not like the thought of investigating this being much further without specialized protective gear, which, alas, we do not have."
Gabriel thought about that for a moment. "I bet I know who does have some, though," he said. "Oh?"
"Doctor Delde Sota."
Enda blinked at that. "You are considering taking this body back to her for autopsy?" Gabriel shrugged. "Spacefarers going about their lawful occasions are supposed to assist the authorities in investigating unusual occurrences, especially in system space, where the occurrences could cause danger to life or limb." He glanced back toward the cargo bay. "Our limbs were pretty well endangered, if you ask me. Legally, Doctor Sota would have to assist us. This is a 'public health' matter. And
anyway, what is this creature, Enda? A new alien species of some kind? If it is, people should know about it, and that it's fairly aggressive when it gets you alone out in the dark."
"I would find it hard to argue with that." Enda stood up. "Well, we should wrap it up and keep it as intact as we can." She stood up, thinking for a moment-then turned to the nearby cabinet that contained the phymech and stroked its front panel. The panel lit up and displayed available settings. "I thought so," Enda said. "Here. 'Corpse wrapping.' "
"That's going to use up all the disinfectant film," Gabriel said, looking up past her as the machine displayed its materials requirements.
"Yes, well," Enda said, "what would you recommend we use instead?"
Gabriel sniffed the air. It was already becoming sharply rank with the scent of the green gel that was dripping out of various punctures and rips in the creature's protective suit as the air warmed it and the once-frozen liquids began to melt.
"Never mind," he said hurriedly, "I think you're right; we'd better just do it."
Enda told the phymech to put down its handling arms. It extruded them, wrapped them around the
strange body and lifted it, preparatory to wrapping.
"When it's finished," Gabriel said, "I think we'd better put it in the cargo bay and vent the hold." Enda made a little sniff of laughter. "If the hold is not already well enough vented. But, yes, that should successfully stabilize it. At least, we will hope so."
The phymech got on with its wrapping. Soon there was nothing left but an opaque, silvery-sheened, ungainly, and not very human-looking bundle, for neither Gabriel or Enda wanted the body forced into an unnatural shape that might destroy some useful piece of equipment or other evidence. The shape was awkward. They had some difficulty getting it into the airlock between the forward area and the cargo bay, but it fitted at last after some tugging and pushing. When the airlock was closed again, Gabriel activated the secondary grapples mounted inside the cargo bay, the ones used for handling rocks inside the bay, and carefully opened the other airlock door.
"There remains the problem of exactly how we handle this body when we get to Iphus," Enda said. Gabriel finished up with the grapples and closed the airlock door again, pausing to look at the inert lump lying there in the light gravity he had left turned on. "Probably," he said, "it wouldn't be a great idea to haul it through the corridors."
"No. I would think we might be able to get the doctor to make a house call, though, especially if there
was an illness aboard ship."
"Oh?"
"Yes. I was just thinking how unwell you look, Gabriel." "What?"
"Oh, most unwell. I think you have eaten something bad. Contaminated stores, perhaps." Gabriel blinked at her, then made a few experimental retching noises. "Maybe there was something wrong with that last batch of meat rolls?" he suggested.
"Certainly there was," Enda said. "I cannot believe the amount of hot spice with which you ordered them made. They are nearly inedible, but perhaps there was some bacterial contamination as well." "Something that the phymech can't handle."
"Well, it has never been as strong on nontraumatic problems or simple systemic infections as it is on trauma. Perhaps there might be something wrong with the phymech as well. Yes, some kind of error in installation-or better still, another software problem that the installer missed even though it caught the
other one."
Gabriel shook his head and turned to make his way back up to the pilot's seat. "I begin to see why fraal are such a long-lived species," he said.
Enda looked after him with some concern. "Why would that be?"
"Sneakiness," Gabriel said. "Come on. I'm going to go sound sick on the comm back to Iphus." Smiling very slightly, Enda came after him.
Chapter Thirteen
ABOUT FIVE HOURS later they were docking once again in the main ring on the Iphus Collective. Gabriel had been in no hurry to get there quickly, partly because he was "sick," partly because he wanted to give some of those big VoidCorp ships time to go away. Indeed when Sunshine arrived, they were all gone, which also made Gabriel wonder slightly. What other part of the system have they gone off to intimidate, and why?
Doctor Delde Sola was there at the docking ring to meet them. She came up in the lift, stepped into Sunshine, and held quite still while she glanced around her. It was slightly amazing to Gabriel how her height made the ship around her look smaller than it really was. Equally surprising was the look she trained on him as she stood there, holding what appeared to be a brushed-metal version of the standard doctor's bag.
"Conjecture: faked illness," the mechalus said with an expression that for the moment was decidedly cool. "Etiology: uncertain. Observation: atypical odors for human/fraal habitation. Query: nature of callout?"
"We were attacked in system space by ships, one of which was piloted by an alien we cannot identify,"
Gabriel said. "We managed to save the body. It's … pretty abnormal."
"Query:" said Doctor Sota, "recording of attack and response?"
"The computer has saved it," said Enda and brought up the JustWadeln software.
Delde Sota stepped up to the pilot's seat and paused there for a moment, looking at the smear that still
lay across the cockpit window from the first object that had hit them. "Query: provenance?"
"The residue from an impact," Enda said. "You will see it in the playthrough."
Delde Sola's braid reached up over her shoulder and brushed across the cockpit controls, the hair-tendrils finding one preferred spot and infiltrating itself through it into the computer circuitry behind. The tank flickered with images, dark and bright, too quickly for Gabriel to get a clear sense of any individual one. Delde Sola turned to them then and said, "Observation: lucky to be alive. Query: repeat occurrence?" "It happened once before, yes," Gabriel replied, "but there weren't any remains we could find." "Proposal: autopsy," said Delde Sota, moving aft and taking her bag with her while looking around for a place to put it. "Requirements: suitable surface, disinfectant solution-" She smiled briefly. "Body." "We have a table," Enda said and led Delde Sota down into the "sitting room" area, where she unfolded the table from the wall.
Wait a minute, we eat off that table! Gabriel thought, but he didn't bother to say it out loud, for Enda was already making her way down toward the cargo bay with the doctor in tow. Gabriel sighed and turned to the computer, telling the cargo bay to pressurize itself with air from inside the docking ring access. He then followed the others.
Enda and Delde Sota were standing there in the chill, looking down at the unwieldily wrapped body. "Observation: some haste in preparation, programming in phymech insufficient," said Delde Sota. "Observation: odor immediately noticeable, some haste suggested. Query: computer interface in this area?"
"There against the wall," said Gabriel, "over by the spee-gee apparatus."
Delde Sola's braid started lo lengthen itself, wavering out and along to where the computer interface was embedded by the specific gravity and metallurgic assay equipment. "Observation: table too small. Conjecture: even if right size, not much good for dinner afterwards," Delde Sola said, going over to kneel by the corpse and putting her bag down while her braid insinuated itself into the ship's computer, "even after scrubbing by marine." Gabriel blinked at that. "Suggestion: pathology and food a bad mixture in close quarters. Query: assistance?"
"I'll help," said Gabriel, utterly horrified a second later that such a suggestion had come out of his mouth. Doctor Sota gave him a look. "Observation: educational. Also: finder's right." She opened her doctor's bag.