‘Nice work, Olli, my sweet child,’ Rollo told her. ‘Smooth as a baby’s ass. Now get the cutters ready.’
‘You’re not going to hail them?’ The new voice came from the control compartment’s hatch. Idris glanced up and nodded as Kris came in. Here on board ship she was dressed in a variant of the same printed clothes, though she had one of her signature scarves about her neck, same as always. She was a dark woman a shade taller than him, her hair a carefully shaped mass of fine curls. She was also running from her own trouble, but getting out of trouble was her speciality skill.
‘Nobody to hail,’ Rollo insisted, but a moment later he grudgingly went through the motions. If they cut through the hull and someone fell out and died in space, at least they could hide behind a trail of proper procedure. This was the sort of trouble that Kris specialized in.
*
They could just have hauled the whole ship off like an unopened present to give to the Heritage Foundation. That was all the contract required. Rollo was always on the lookout for a bonus, though. What if the Gamin held some unexpected treasure? What if there really were living refugees? Why give the kudos to the Heritage people when the Vulture’s crew could cash in?
They could have gone in through a hatch, like civilized people. However, four years ago a fellow salvager had been destroyed by actual honest-to-goodness booby traps left by the long-dead occupants of the ship it had opened up. Trapped in stranded ships, the mind went to strange places, especially if it had been exposed to unspace for long. The crew of the Vulture God were taking no chances, and going in through the wall instead, Olli cut smoothly along some of the pre-existing repair seams until the side of the freighter had been peeled back. There was no rush of stale atmosphere, only vacuum meeting vacuum. Could have been worse, Idris allowed.
‘Right then, let’s get this business underway,’ Rollo announced. ‘Olli, move your remotes in, and have Medvig follow up with his little fellows. And you, shyster,’ he said to Kris, ‘may as well get a camera drone in there. The mediotypes will be worth something. Double-time, everybody! And that does not mean double pay, before anyone asks.’
The crew spaces of the Gamin were adrift with small objects. Back in the earliest days of space travel nobody would have dared fit out a ship with so much loose junk, but people had been taking artificial gravity for granted for generations before the Architect came to Amraji. It was a small side-use of the same engines that moved the ships through space. The Gamin’s gravitic drives were lifeless though. The viewfeed from Olli’s drones showed her remotes jetting carefully through a swirl of odd items: data clips, slates, gloves, a gleaming silver locket, a stiffly frozen plush toy. Of the crew themselves there was no sign, and Idris wondered if they had taken a shuttle and tried to get . . . where? Emerging unplanned from unspace in the middle of nowhere, drive burnt-out and the nearest star system light years away, where would you go?
‘Atmosphere loss by slow leak, my guess,’ Olli’s glitching voice came to them. ‘Or this junk’d be flushed out already. Moving towards the cargo.’
‘Check if there’s pressure before each door,’ came Kris’s input, following up with her cameras.
‘My hands are in the carcass,’ announced Medvig, with that tinny edge of jollity that always tinged their artificial voice, no matter what the topic. Like many Hivers, they had accumulated a lopsided personality the longer they were separate from the wider hive mind of the Assembly.
Idris slouched down to the bay, feeling that even if he wasn’t doing anything, he should at least be where the doing was done. Towards the ceiling, Olli hung in her pod, eyes closed as her three remotes cleared the way for Medvig inside the wreck. She was a pale doughy woman, grown bulky through inactivity even on a spacefarer’s diet. Half obscured in her pod, the most obvious thing about her silhouette was her stunted, near-useless limbs. Her arms ended at the elbows with a tuft of half-formed fingers, one leg stopped at the smooth stump of her knee, the other absent altogether. Olian Timo – Olli – had been born so, and without any sense of proprioception – a stranger in her truncated body. But she’d been born to a colony where every single human being was a precious resource and they’d found where she excelled. Olli had trained with remotes of all kinds since she was three. Her mind could mould itself to any body shape, regardless of how its limbs and senses were configured. Three remotes at once was just another day at work for her.
The crew had set up an umbilical leading the three metres or so between hulls. It led ‘down’ to the Vulture’s crew – though its direction was meaningless to the dead spaces of the Gamin. Medvig’s armless tripod frame was already squatting at the Vulture end, a metal assemblage of dull bronze and copper, their cylindrical body dominated by four square openings. Their long head was featureless save for a couple of mismatched yellow lights – humans liked to have something to focus on. Medvig’s ‘hands’ could act as his own personal remotes and he had already sent these small spiderlike assemblages down the pipe and into the freighter to help Olli with the fine work.