You had to screw your eyes up really hard to make the Vulture God look like any kind of bird. Perhaps a very fat bird with enormous claws and stubby little wings. The central bulk of its barrel body contained its oversized gravitic drive, which could displace enough mass into unspace to bring back the Gamin. Projecting out at cross-angles were the blunt little ‘wings’ of its brachator drive that would give it purchase on real space and let it manoeuvre. The actual mass drives for fine manoeuvring were almost inconsequential, a handful of vents about the bloat of its hull. Slung notionally ‘underneath’ – a direction determined by onboard gravity – was the great clenched tangle of its docking arms. The Vulture could latch on to just about anything and haul it around, and now it had reached the Gamin it was ready for action.
Idris was already awake, as always, though having stared unspace in the eye for the last day he was feeling washed-out and tired. Ready to nap for about a hundred years, not that it was going to happen.
He alone had been awake in the deep void, guiding the Vulture God across unspace. He’d covered vast empty light years in moments to emerge, a ridiculous distance from anywhere, near where the Gamin had somehow ended up. There was the promised distress beacon, sounding loud and clear. There was the lost freighter, tumbling slowly through space, the beacon its only live system. There had been some suggestion that people might still be in suspension, aboard, but Idris knew cobbled-together ships like the Gamin and they didn’t lend themselves to miracles.
He made some scratch calculations for an approach and burned some fuel in the mass drives for cheap and dirty momentum. Then he had the brachator drives reaching out to that liminal layer where unspace and real space met, that quantum foam of transient gravity nodes which their ‘grabby drives’ could latch on to. The Vulture God sheared sideways through space as its inertia was shifted through thirty degrees, scudding closer towards the distant winking signal that was the Gamin. Idris tutted at his own inelegant piloting and made a few adjustments, spinning the vessel on its axis, stabilizing its drift, grabbing at another handful of the universe to pull them along a slightly different angle of approach.
After that, he had the ship’s mind reconstitute itself enough to make him a cup of much-needed kaffe. Then he set about waking the others.
*
The Vulture God boasted a crew of seven, five of whom were human. They made for an odd mix by the standards of ships that stuck to the regular Throughways – the readily navigable pathways within unspace that dictated where most vessels could and could not travel. There were no standards for deep void ships, though. There just weren’t enough of them. Most species didn’t even have a means of navigating off the beaten track and, even where such means existed, they were hard to engineer and needed delicate treatment. Idris certainly felt like he needed treating delicately.
He hadn’t ever been meant for this. He’d only ever been intended as a living weapon. Long past his use-by date now, Idris was still lurching on like a lot of Colonial civilization – most certainly like the Vulture God. He’d been on board for four years now, so it was hard not to be sentimental about the ship. It had always come through for them and never quite broken down beyond repair. And if there was one thing the war had taught Colonial humanity to become very, very good at, it was patch repairs on failing starships.
Unspace had made him sweat unpleasantly, so by the time the rest of the crew were stirring he’d blasted his body clean in the dry shower and printed out fresh clothes. This was one of the delights of long-range spaceflight on a shoestring budget. They were basically the same clothes he’d taken off, chewed up and reconstituted as nominally ‘clean’。 White undershirt, black short-sleeved tunic, grey breeches and sandals made up his outfit. When he cinched his toolbelt about his waist, he felt almost ready to deal with the universe at large.
His quarters were down near the drone bay, which doubled as engineering control. He could hear Barney complaining loudly within about the list of systems that had developed faults since they set out. Olli would be prepping the Vulture’s claws, ready to clasp to the Gamin, and Medvig would be . . . doing whatever the hell Medvig did when they didn’t have anything constructive to contribute. Idris sloped forwards towards the command compartment, where Rollo was going over the initial scans.
Rollo Rostand was a stocky, square-faced man, brown-bronzed by decades of low-level radiation exposure, his hair and moustache wispy and dark grey. He had a rare weight-retaining physiology and the Vulture had been doing well enough to keep his paunch over his belt. He supplemented the standard printed crew clothes with a military-surplus jacket he claimed had been his father’s, the war hero. The details of these heroics tended to change with the telling, but everyone of that generation had done something. Idris, the actual veteran, was more than happy with Rollo’s embellishments because it meant nobody would ask about his truths.