‘Well hola now, my children,’ the man was saying as Idris ducked into the compartment. ‘How’s it looking across the board?’
‘Everything’s broken to shit,’ came Barney’s sour voice through their comms. ‘I am sending you a shopping list for when we’re back on Roshu.’
‘Are you also sending Largesse to pay for it?’ And, interpreting the pregnant silence as a negative, ‘In which case I recommend you make do and mend like a good son of Earth. Olli?’
‘One of the drones is a lost cause,’ the remote specialist’s slightly distorted tones came in. She’d slept the unspace flight in her control pod, Idris knew, which was not best operating procedure.
‘Make do-’
‘And mend, I know, I know. Only it’s more making do than mending right now.’
Rollo beamed around at Idris as though this was the best news he could have expected. ‘We’ve just matched tumble with our prey, my children. I’m flagging up our access point. Should bring us into the Gamin’s crew spaces. Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’ Idris asked.
‘When they refitted that bucket for passengers nobody filed their new plans with the proper authorities, see right? So we do the best we can.’ Rollo settled back in his chair and put his bare feet up on the console. ‘Since you’re here, my son, you do the honours,’ he invited, and Idris dropped into the pilot’s seat. The Vulture God was now moving in-sync with the Gamin, so precisely that they might as well have been stationary. Idris engaged the brachator drive, nudging the salvage ship ever closer – while maintaining all the other vectors of their travel so that they drifted into the shadow of the freighter like a parasite tentatively approaching its host.
This close, he opened up the mass drives as well, trimming their motion carefully as they ghosted across the ugly, weld-scarred hotch-potch of the Gamin’s hull. The freighter’s crew compartment was set midway into one side. Most of the space above it would be for cargo – in this case the passengers – while the gravitic drive formed a lopsided torus around the freighter’s circumference. Lopsided because part of it was missing, a section of the ring torn open and warped into strange spiralling fingers that clawed at the void.
Rollo shook his head. ‘Looks like they cut it too fine getting out.’ There was no mistaking Architect-inflicted damage.
Idris couldn’t imagine what it had been like for the Gamin’s crew: enter unspace with a damaged drive or stay and risk the Architect’s attention. Likely he’d have made the same decision.
‘Olli,’ he transmitted. ‘Ready for you.’
‘On it.’ His board lit up to show she had control of the Vulture’s claws and was deploying them to bridge the final gap between vessels.
‘What are we getting besides the beacon?’ Rollo asked. ‘Kittering, send it over.’
Kittering’s real name sounded like nails on a chalkboard, made with a rapid stridulation of some of his mouthparts. The crab-like alien would be hunkered down in his own compartment, a space entirely adapted for his physiology and comfort. His chief role was managing accounts and logistics. Still, he was a good second engineer and when a job was afoot, everybody worked.
Even Kris. The last member of the crew – Idris’s business partner – hadn’t shown yet. She made a habit of taking her sweet time over actually reporting for duty. And if it hadn’t been for Idris’s value to the venture, Rollo would likely have dumped her somewhere along the way. Idris needed her, though, and the Vulture needed Idris to get out into the deep void. Otherwise it was just one more salvager among many, scrabbling for work along the Throughways.
Kittering sent over what the Vulture’s ailing sensor suite had gleaned from the Gamin. Aside from the beacon, just some low power readings: a few failing systems still labouring within the otherwise dead ship.
‘You don’t think we’ll actually . . .’ The thought of finding working suspension pods bobbed for a moment in Idris’s mind.
‘Find people? Alive . . . Be the fucking heroes of the universe, hey?’ Rollo shook his head. ‘Go on though, bet me a thousand Halma we’ll find them, bet me five-kay Largesse. Bet me anything?’
‘I won’t,’ Idris said quietly, and Rollo nodded.
‘No more would I.’
The frantic board showed that they had drifted close enough to set off all their collision alarms, but Olli had full control of the great convoluted mess of the claw. It was unfolding like a mechanical tarantula from the Vulture’s underside, to grope for the freighter’s hull. Olli was a top-notch remote operator with a rare gift – able to run non-humanoid rigs as though they were her own body. Right now she would be ‘in’ the docking claw, its seven articulated limbs stretching and flexing until she had them clamped to the Gamin, magnetically locked.