Godlike Machines (8 page)

The glass cockpit of the Soyuz was much more advanced than the basic frame of the ship itself, which was older than my grandmother. Before our departure, Galenka had configured the sensors and readouts to emulate the same telemetry she’d been seeing from the Progress. Now all she had to do was watch the scrolling, chattering indications for the auguries of an opening window. She’d have no more than a second or two to assess whether it was a window she could reach in time, given the Soyuz’s capabilities. Deciding that there was nothing I could contribute to the matter, I closed my eyes and waited for the moment.

No matter what happened now, we had made history. We were inside the Matryoshka—the first humans to have made it this far. It had taken three apparitions to achieve this feat. Once, I would have assumed that things would only go from strength to strength with each new return. By the time of the fourth apparition, surely there’d be a permanent human presence out here, following the Matryoshka throughout its orbit. Study stations, research facilities— an entire campus, floating in vacuum.

Now I wondered if anyone would come after us. The space effort was winding down-even the
Tereshkova
was cobbled together from the bits of earlier, failed enterprises. It seemed to me—though I would never have voiced such a conviction publicly—that it was less important to my country what we found out here, than that we were seen to be doing something no one else could. The scientific returns were almost incidental. Next time, would anyone even bother sending out a ship?

“Brace,” Galenka said.

The thrust came hard, like a hoof kick to the spine. It was worst than any booster separation, stage ignition or de-orbit burn. I had experienced re-entry gee-loads that were enough to push me to the brink of unconsciousness, but those forces had built up slowly, over several minutes. This came instantly, and for a moment I felt as if no bone in my body could possibly have survived unbroken.

Then I realized that I was all right. The engine was still burning, but at least the gee-load was a steady pressure now, like a firm hand rather than a fist.

“We are good for insertion,” Galenka said, as if that had ever been in doubt.

We sailed through the two closely-packed shells, into the luminous blue-green interstitial space above Shell 4. Once we were clear—with the window sealing above us—Galenka did a somersault roll to use the main engine to slow us down again. The thrust burst was longer and less brutal this time. She dropped our speed from hundreds of meters per second to what was only slightly faster than walking pace. The thicket lay ahead or below, depending on my mental orientation. We were making good time. There was no need to rush things now.

Maybe, just maybe, we’d get away with this.

A screen flashed red and began scrolling with error messages. “There goes the
Tereshkova
,” Galenka said. “We’re out of contact now.” She gave me a fierce grin. “Just you and me, and an impenetrable shell of alien matter between us and the outside world. Starting to feel claustrophobic yet?”

“I’d be insane not to. Do we have a fix on the Progress?”

She jabbed a finger at another readout—target cross-hairs against a moving grid. “Dead ahead, where she said she was. Judging by the data she recorded before getting stuck, we’ll be able to get within 200 meters without difficulty. I won’t risk taking the Soyuz any closer, but we should be able to cover the remaining distance in suits.”

“Whatever it takes.” I checked my watch, strapped around the sleeve of my suit. We’d been out from the mother ship for less than three and a half hours-well ahead of schedule. We had air and fuel to spare, but I still wanted to be out of here as quickly as possible. I kept thinking of that iron ceiling overhead. “How soon until we’re in position?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes, give or take.”

“We spend two hours on station. Nothing changes that. If we don’t succeed in unloading everything, we still leave. Are we clear on that?”

“This was your idea, Dimitri. You decide when we leave.”

“I’m going to finish suiting up. We’ll check comms and life-support thoroughly before we leave. And we’ll make damned sure the Soyuz isn’t going to drift away from us.”

Galenka’s estimate was on the nail. Twenty minutes later we were deep into the thicket, with blue-green structures crowding around us. Closest to us was a trunk or branch with thornlike protrusions. Galenka brought the Soyuz in against the trunk until the hull shuddered with the contact. Ordinarily I’d have been worried about a pressure rupture, but now that we were both wearing helmets that was only a distant concern. Galenka had picked her spot well, for the Soyuz was resting on one of the out-jutting thorns. Friction, and the ship’s almost negligible weight, would serve to hold it in place until we were ready to leave. Galenka had even taken to pains to make sure the forward escape hatch was not blocked.

“Maybe you should stay here, while I check out the Progress,” I said. I didn’t feel heroic, but it seemed the right thing to say.

“If we have to unload it, it’ll go quicker with two of us,” Galenka responded. “We can form a supply chain, save going all the way back each time. And keep an eye on each other.” She unbuckled. “You ready for this? I’m going to vent our air.”

She let the air drain out through the release valve before opening the hatch. As the cabin transitioned to vacuum my suit ballooned around me, the seals and joints creaking with the pressure differential. I’d checked everything, but I was all too conscious of the thin membranes of fabric protecting me from a nasty, lung-freezing death. Every gesture, every movement, was now more awkward, more potentially hazardous than before. Tear a glove on sharp metal, and you might as well have cut your hand off.

Galenka popped the hatch. I pushed these concerns from my mind as best I could and climbed out of the Soyuz. Now that I was seeing the alien environment with my own eyes—through a thin glass visor, rather than a thick porthole or monitor—it appeared much larger, much more oppressive and strange. The all-enveloping shell was a pitiless, hope-crushing black. I told myself that a window would eventually open for us to leave, just as one had allowed us to enter. But it was hard to shake the feeling that we were little warm animals, little shivering mammals with fast heartbeats, caught in a cold dark trap that we had just sprung.

“Let’s do this shit, and get back home,” Galenka said, pushing past me.

We climbed down the pea-green flank of the Soyuz, using the handholds that had been bolted on for weightless operations. We left the ship with the hatch open, the last dribbles of air still venting from the hull. My feet touched the thorn. Although I had almost no weight to speak of, the surface felt solid under me. It was formed from the same translucent material as the rest of Shell 4, but it wasn’t as slippery as glass or ice. I reached out a hand and steadied myself against the trunk. I felt as if I was touching bark or rock through my glove.

“I think we can do this,” I said.

“The Progress should be directly under us, where this trunk constricts against the one over here. I’d rather climb than drift, if that’s okay with you.”

“Agreed. There are thorns all the way down, spaced every three or four meters—we should be able to use them for grabs, even if we can’t get traction on the rest of it. It shouldn’t be much harder coming back up.”

“I’m right behind you.”

If the thicket registered our presence, there was no evidence of it. The structure loomed around us, dizzying in its scale and complexity, but giving no sign of being alive or responsive to the intrusion of human technology. I began to ease, trying to imagine myself in a forest or cave system-something huge but mindless—rather than the glowing guts of an alien machine.

It took fifteen minutes of cautious progress to reach the lodged Progress. It was jammed in nose first, with the engine pointing at us. A ship like that was not normally a man-rated vehicle, but the usual variants had a hatch at the front, so that space station crews could enter the vehicle when it was docked. In the case of ours, the innards had been replaced by scientific gear, computers, additional fuel, and batteries. The docking hatch had become a kind of mouth by which the robot could feed samples into itself, using the feeler-like appendages of its sampling devices. Inside was a robotic system which sorted the samples, fed them into miniature laboratories where appropriate, and delivered whatever was left into a storage volume just ahead of the fuel tanks. We couldn’t have got in through the mouth even if the Progress hadn’t been jammed in nose first, but that didn’t matter. A secondary hatch and docking assembly had been installed in the side, so that the sample compartment could be unloaded through the
Tereshkova
’s own docking port. Galenka, who had overtaken me in our descent from the Soyuz, was the first to reach the sample hatch. The hatch controls were designed to be opened by someone in a suit. She worked the heavy toggles until the hatch swung open, exposing the non-pressurised storage compartment. The hole in the side of the Progress was just large for a suited person to crawl through. Without hesitation she grabbed yellow handholds and levered herself inside. A few moments later the chamber lit up with the wavering light of her helmet-mounted flashlamp.

“Talk to me, Galenka.”

“It’s all racked and sorted, Dimitri. Must be about half a ton of stuff in here already. Some of the chunks are pretty big. Still warm, too. Going to be a bitch of a job moving all of them back to the Soyuz.”

“We’ll take what we can; that was always the idea. If nothing else we should make sure we’ve got unique samples from both Shell 1 and Shell 2.”

“I’m going to try and bring out the first chunk. I’ll pass it through the hatch. Be ready.”

“I’m here.”

But as I said that, a status panel lit up on the side of my faceplate. “Comms burst from
Tereshkova
,” I said, as alphanumeric gibberish scrolled past. “A window must just have opened.”

“Feeling better now?”

“Guess it’s nice to know the windows are still behaving.”

“I could have told you they would.” Galenka grunted with the effort of dislodging the sample she had selected. “So—any news?”

“Nothing. Just a carrier signal, trying to establish contact with us. Means the ship’s still out there, though.”

“I could have told you that as well.”

It took 20 minutes to convey one sample back to the Soyuz. Doing it as a relay didn’t help-it took two of us to nurse the object between us, all the while making sure we didn’t drift away from the structure. Things got a little faster after that. We returned to the jammed Progress in good time and only took 15 minutes to get the second sample back to our ship. We now had pieces of Shell 1 and Shell 2 aboard, ready to be taken back home.

A voice at the back of my head said that we should quit while we were ahead. We’d salvaged something from this mess-almost certainly enough to placate Baikonur. We had taken a risk and it had paid off. But there was still more than an hour remaining of the time I had allowed us. If we moved quickly and efficiently—and we were already beginning to settle into a rhythm—we could recover three or four additional samples before it was time to start our journey back. Who knew what difference five or six samples might make, compared to two?

“Just for the record,” Galenka said, when we reached the Progress again, “I’m getting itchy feet here.”

“We’ve still got time. Two more. Then we’ll see how we’re doing.”

“You were a lot more jumpy until that window opened.”

She was right. I couldn’t deny it.

I was thinking of that when another comms burst came through. For a moment I was gladdened—just seeing the scroll of numbers and symbols, even if it meant nothing to me, made me feel closer to the
Tereshkova.
Home was just three shells and a sprint across vacuum away. Almost close enough to touch, like the space station that had sped across the sky over Klushino, when my father held me on his shoulders.

“Dimitri,” crackled a voice. “Galenka. Yakov here. I hope you can hear me.”

“What is it, friend?” I asked, hearing an edge in his voice I didn’t like.

“You’d better listen carefully—we could get cut off at any moment. Baikonur detected a change in the Matryoshka—a big one. Shell 1 pulsations have increased in amplitude and frequency. It’s like nothing anyone’s seen since the first apparition. Whatever you two are doing in there-it’s having an effect. The thing is waking. You need to think about getting out, while the collision-avoidance algorithm will still get you through Shell 1. Those pulsations change anymore, the algorithm won’t be any use.”

“He could be lying,” Galenka said. “Saying whatever he needs to say that get us to go back.”

“I’m not lying. I want you to come back. And I want that Soyuz back so that at least one of us can get home.”

“I think we’d better move,” I said.

“The remaining samples?”

“Leave them. Let’s just get back to the ship as quickly as possible.”

As I spoke, the comms window blipped out. Galenka pushed away from the Progress. I levered myself onto the nearest thorn and started climbing. It was quicker now that we didn’t have to carry anything between us. I thought of the changing conditions in Shell 1 and hoped that we’d still be able to pick a path through the lethal, shifting maze of field-lines.

We were half way to the Soyuz—I could see it overhead, tantalising near—when Galenka halted, only just below me.

“We’re in trouble,” she said.

“That’s why we have to keep on moving.”

“Something’s coming up from below. We’re not going to make it, Dimitri. It’s rising too quickly.”

I looked down and saw what she meant. We couldn’t see the Progress anymore. It was lost under a silver tide, a sea of gleaming mercury climbing slowly through the thicket, swallowing everything as it rose.

“Climb,” I said.

“We aren’t going to make it. It’s coming too damned fast.”

I gritted my teeth: typical Galenka, pragmatic to the end. But even she had resumed her ascent, unable to stop her body from doing what her mind knew to be futile. She was right, too. The tide was going to envelope us long before we reached the Soyuz. But I couldn’t stop climbing either. I risked a glance down and saw the silver fluid lapping at Galenka’s heels, then surging up to swallow her lowest boot.