Surface Detail

for a start. ∼A partial, the ship sent. ∼Just wounded. ∼Wow, our first partial. ∼Still accelerating, though slower. Seventy per cent. Course

change, too. Heading straight for that fabricary. Collisionary. The ship highlighted one of the great dark slowly orbiting

shapes, sitting less than a thousand kilometres ahead. ∼Collisionary? Auppi sent. Oh, fuck, she thought; just what they needed. High-speed

swarmer/fabricary collisions. ∼Ready, the ship told her. ∼Hit it again. She did. Still too small a result. The swarmer had got harder,

smaller, more reflective. ∼Forty-five per cent of original acceleration, the ship reported.

∼Still picking up speed though. ∼Come on, you fucker, fucking die! They whizzed through the debris field from their first partial

hit. The ship scanned the still hot cloud as they flashed through

it, shields taking tiny impacts that made the ship judder. ∼Interesting materials profile, the ship said. ∼Definitely learning. ∼Same course? ∼Yes; swerved back to it after we knocked it off. ∼Impact? ∼Three seconds.

They had time to hit the swarmer twice more.

By the time it collided with the fabricary it had stopped accelerating and been reduced to the status of something more like a tight cloud of debris all travelling in the same direction rather than a ship, though it was still making sufficient speed to create a substantial flash when it hit the dark, three-kilometre-long lump of the fabricary.

∼Fuck, Auppi sent, watching the debris bloom and expand.

∼Agree, the ship replied.

They cruised in after it, already turned about and decelerating hard as the engines readied them to go back the way they’d come, still heading backwards on their earlier course through sheer momentum.

∼Unexpected impact signature. The ship sounded puzzled.

∼Oh, fuck; has it broken it? she asked. The debris had hit at over thirty klicks a second. It had ended up being a glancing blow rather than head-on, but it had blasted a hole in the fabricary and set it spinning and tumbling. It was already spiralling out of its orbit and drifting fractionally inwards towards Razhir. Uncorrected it would eventually head right down, into the gas giant’s atmosphere, to burn up.

In theory the Disk ought to remain stable for ever; in practice passing comets and even near-passing stars could disrupt it, and the fabricaria each had automatic systems that could vent gas to keep them on station. It was one of the responsibilities of whatever species was in charge of the Disk to keep those automatics charged and working. The systems were designed to nudge the fabricaria back into place when their orbits were ruffled by tiny fractions though; even if they’d survived the impact undamaged, the gross effect of the swarmer remains slamming into it would be orders of magnitude beyond anything the automatics could deal with.

∼It’s as though, the ship said, sounding hesitant, probably waiting for additional detail to accrue via its sensors, ∼the surface had been hollowed out. The outer shell should be solid; protecting the fabricary itself and providing raw material for when it’s producing something, but instead it’s like the debris hit a thin outer crust and then partly went through, partly collided with some sort of minimal structure underneath.

They had almost drawn to a stop now, still approaching the damaged fabricary but increasingly slowly as the engines, still at full power, cancelled their earlier vector.

∼Cut engines, she sent. ∼Back flip. Take us in for a look.

∼You sure?

The ship cut its engines, a half-second or so before they would have started pulling away from the holed, slowly cartwheeling fabricary. They were nearly stationary, still drifting slowly towards the impact site.

∼No, not sure, she admitted. ∼But…

∼Okay. The ship turned about, fired its engines briefly, turned, fired them again and, with a little finessing, got them locally stationary relative to the hundred-metre-long, raggedly ellipsoid breach in the giant slowly tumbling fabricary.

Auppi and the Bliterator found themselves looking straight into the torn-open interior of the thing. The view was edged all around with sections of its still-glowing outer surface, which must have been largely hollowed out to leave only a thin outer skin supported by a fragile-looking network of skinny girders, cables and beams that lay between that impromptu hull and the wall of the fabricary proper, about twenty metres deeper inside. That too had been breached by part of the swarmer’s wreckage cascade, so they could see all the way inside to where the ancient stuff-making machinery and associated paraphernalia lay.

This was the antique alien apparatus that was not meant to have been touched or used for a couple of million years. It was supposed to be lying there, metaphorically cobwebbed, in a cavern which was otherwise completely empty.