Lau Pin said, “The finger snakes don’t keep time our way. I think it’s longer for us. I’ll make regular checks and send them.”

“We’ll be there. And you all need medical assistance? Four months in low gravity, out in the field—yeah. We’ll have Captain Redwing out of the infirmary by then, but it only holds two. Pick your sickest.”

“Would have been Tananareve.”

*   *   *

The drone was gone. The system’s magnetic safety grapplers released with a hiss. Tananareve stood in the sudden silence, stunned.

A high hiss sounded from a nearby track. She turned to find a snake to stop the drone, call it somehow—and saw no snakes at all. All three had boarded the drone. Now the shrill hiss was worse. She stepped back from the rising noise, and an alien ship came rushing toward the platform from a descending tube. It was not magnetic; it moved on jets.

Tananareve looked around, wondering where to run. The ship had a narrow transparent face and through it she could see the pilot, a spindly brown-skinned creature in a uniform. It looked not much bigger than she was and the tubular ship it guided was enormous, flaring out behind the pilot’s cabin. The ship eased in alongside the main platform, jetting cottony steam. Tananareve wondered what she should do: hide, flee, try to talk to—?

Then, behind huge windows in the ship’s flank, she saw a tremendous feathered shape peering out at her, and recognized it. Quick flashing eyes, the great head swiveling to take in all around it, with a twisted cant to its heavy neck. She gasped. Memor.

THREE

Redwing looked out across the yawning distances, frowning.

Far down, there were all the artful graces of land and sea, suspended before a warming sun like a rich, steaming dish offered on a steel-hard plate. Everything was larger, grander, and strange.

The Bowl seas were light blue expanses larger than Jupiter, bounded by shallow brown edges. Across those ran arcs of grand wave trains, immense ripples that must roll on for years before finding a shore. At finer resolution, sediment plumes of tan and chocolate spread across shallow seabeds, feeding kelp straits of festering ripe green. Rumpled hill ranges were larger than Asia. Never driven by continental drift, these crosshatched the vast lands, carved by rivers that could cut no farther than the Bowl’s hull. Indeed, he could see places where wind or water had worn away the living zone, leaving patches of rusting metal. Under close-up, he and Karl watched teams repairing such erosions.

The deserts were huge, too. Tan lands of grass went on over distances greater than the Moon was from Earth, with only dots of green beckoning where an oasis sprouted. Sprawling dry lands ended where water found its way to make moist forests. Storms spiraling in immense white-bright pinwheels churned with ponderous energies, raking across deserts larger than planets, and over forests so deep, no one could ever walk out of them.

How did anyone design a thing like this? A vast trapped atmosphere, oceans the size of planets, lakes like continents, yet no real mountains—maybe that was a clue. Of course, putting an Everest on the Bowl would make it lopsided and complicate dynamics. There could be no plate tectonics and so no volcanoes, but how did this biosphere circulate carbon and water? On Earth, a complex cycle a hundred million years long did the job. As well, Earth’s tectonic ranges forced air over and around them, generating the moving chaos humans called weather. The Bowl’s dwellers did not suffer from mountain wind shadow, or the combing winds that raced through narrow passages. Mountains made for stormy trouble on Earth. The Bowl was a milder place than planets could be.

But why build a whole contraption like this, when you could just move to Florida?

The question wasn’t just rhetorical. If he could fathom what built such a thing, and why, he might have a clue about how to deal with them.

Ping. His autosec reminded him of lunch.

He thought of it as the mess, very old school, but Fleet said it was a Starship Wardroom. He sat as usual for Meal 47, his current choice: classic turkey dinner, rich cream sauce and cranberries. He made himself not think about the simple fact that it was all made of ingredients centuries old; after all; so was he.

He had kept mistaking what Mayra Wickramsingh said at every meal: Nosh for me, it sounded like. After she and her husband, Abduss, went down in the disastrous descent to the Bowl, he had looked it up. The Linguist AI had a transform function, so it learned even through his mushy pronunciation; the AI found it was an Indian phrase, naush faramaiye, meaning “please accept the pleasure of savoring this meal,” which seemed like bon appétit to Redwing. Suitable. “Naush faramaiye to you all,” Redwing said, bowing his head. The crew bowed back. Clare looked puzzled.

“Cap’n, I’m having trouble with the Artilect coherence,” Jampudvipa said.

Redwing still used AI as a shorthand for the shipboard systems that patiently oversaw operations, since that’s what everybody called them when he was growing up. But Artilect was the actual Fleet term, since integrated artificial minds constituted a collective intellect. It was useful to think of the systems as different people, engaged in a constant congress, discussing the ship’s current state. “What’s their problem?”

“They want to go back into full scoop mode.”

“In a solar system? We can’t get the necessary plasma densities.”

“I know.” Jampudvipa shrugged. “I think they’re showing mission fatigue.”

“Have you tried to give them some shut-eye time, one by one?”

“They resist it.”

“Enforce it. Tell them they need a psych reboot, only make the language prettier.”

This got rueful laughs around the wardroom table. “Diplomacy—not our strong suit,” Clare Conway said. She was more personable than most pilots, one of the reasons she had made the crew. Redwing had gone through her file while making his selection of whom to revive.

Ayaan Ali frowned. “It is serious problem, Artilect coherence. They start to disagree, to have their own ideas—trouble.”

“They want what’s impossible,” Karl Lebanon said. He folded his hands and leaned back against a bulkhead. As general technology officer, he shepherded Artilects through daily problems, plus a dozen other jobs. “We can’t go back to interstellar mode.”

Clare sipped her coffee. “They have to adjust our ramscoop intake in ten-second intervals, to optimize. That burns their attention reservoir, makes their duty cycles long. Stresses them pretty hard.”

“We’re getting system clash in our magnetic scoop system,” Karl said. “It’ll tire the Artilects and we’ll start getting torques, surges, inductive effects that wear down our gear.”

“Same small-scale coil problem?”

“Yeah. The system’s pretty stressed. Never made for this kind of low-velocity maneuvering. We can’t get into the magneto components to adjust them.”

Clare said, “A mechanical problem, fixable—but only if we could get a bot in the inductive chamber. Those we could maybe make, but present bot complement can’t do it. That choice set is not even in the partition menu.”

“We can’t downtime them?” Redwing knew the answer but if he let people talk, they felt better. All three chimed in with their versions of the same hard fact: A ship designed to work at interstellar speeds was a bitch to control in planetary orbit, and have any actual maneuvering capability. The Artilects were taking the brunt of it.

Redwing nodded as each spoke but ran his own inventory as well.

By this time his knees were sending angry messages that they wanted a trial separation. His weight workout this morning had pushed the limit too far, again. A warning sign: When he overexerted, he was working out unconscious worries. So he concentrated on Clare’s detailed tech talk and focused outward, nodding and keeping his gaze on her while thinking about all the crew. They worked well together, as the Psych Artilect Adept predicted, before Redwing had wakened the new members. How well would they do when Beth’s team came aboard? Only four left out of six, but—the ship would get more crowded and irritations would begin to build. He had a time window before he would have to decide whether to get out of this entire situation and cast off into interstellar flight again or—what? Go down onto the Bowl in enough numbers to accomplish a resupply and … what? Too many unknowns.