He let the crew run on for a while, noting that their uniforms were getting a tad messy, hair uncombed, beards a few days old. He would have to sharpen them up a bit, and now might be the time.

At least this crew would look better then, when and if they got Beth’s team aboard. They’d have to double on berths. Working spirit and order would be more difficult. A clock would start ticking.

He said mildly, “Officer Jampudvipa, with the Artilects going moody, should we be letting them run the bridge alone while we have lunch?”

Blinks, nods. Jampudvipa looked rueful, mouth turning down, and got up hurriedly. “Yes, sir. They’re in collective agreement mode but—yes.”

That let him focus on the others. “Beth’s team will be aboard in a few hours. That’s if we’re lucky and solve the problem we have to focus on now. Still, I want everybody spruced up—clean, shaven, bright eyed.” Nods all around, some repentant. He turned to Karl. “But the major problem is, how do we get them aboard?”

“I’ve got her photos of the vehicle they’re in—basically, a magnetic train car with locks facing outward, to vacuum,” Karl said. “But they don’t have their suits. The aliens, these ‘Folk,’ took those at capture.”

“So…” Redwing let them think a moment. “Can we match velocities and run a pressured conduit?”

“Not easily.” Karl’s mouth fretted as he thought. “We’ve got EVA gear, sure, but it’s one-man, for repairs.”

“How about the Bernal?” Clare asked. “It’s for freight transfer, but we could maybe refit it for a fix-up flexi passage.”

“I don’t trust anything flexi to stand up to torques and stretches,” Karl said. “If we try it, yes, Bernal is the best craft.”

Redwing had used the repair bots to inspect SunSeeker’s hull soon after entering the Bowl system, and he privately agreed with Karl. In interstellar mode, their strong magnetic fields had kept the ship from the blizzard of neutral atoms and dust. SunSeeker was less effective dealing with erosions while it maneuvered at low thrust around the Bowl. The externals looked pitted and scarred now, and he wondered about whether the repair bots could spot flaws that could prove fatal in a personnel transfer. Or if the flexi would sustain pitting from random debris. A thousand questions nagged at him.

Redwing said, “We could try a fit with our dorsal hatch. We’d have to rig some kind of docking collar.”

This they liked. Redwing let them toss ideas around for a while as he tried to envision exactly how that configuration might work. Ayaan Ali had little to say, but he saw a quick widening of her eyes and nodded at her, holding up a hand to draw attention.

“I … have an idea,” she said quietly. “But we must work quickly.”

FOUR

Beth watched the Bowl’s outer hull, a fast-forward world flittering by below the hard black of space. Even protrusions the size of skyscrapers were just passing gray blurs. In contrast, though the Bowl itself had a surface rotation speed in the range of many kilometers a second, the array of gas clouds and nearby suns hung still. Even high speeds on the interplanetary scale meant nothing to the solemn stars.

Their tubular craft traveled down the outside of the Bowl, hovering close on magnetically secured trap-rails. She watched enormous plains of gray steel and off-white ceramic flash by. Images jittered so fast, she could not tell what was important. A wall with crawling maggot robots, doing unknown labors. A sliding cascade of liquid metal fuming in high vacuum as it slid into jet-black chunks, then ivory cylinders, then shapely gray teardrops—all to descend into intricate new works, objects meant for mysterious use. All that went by in a stretched display she processed in a few seconds—an entire industrial process carried out in cold vacuum, far from the Bowl star’s intrusions. It seethed with robot motion. Fumes danced, billowed, and evaporated away in lacy blue streamers.

Now enormous tangled structures the size of mountains flowed by them. She could see lattice works and cup-shaped constructs but not what they did. It was difficult to keep perspective and their speed seemed to increase still, pressing her at an angle. She was sitting in a chair designed for some other being, one wider and taller. Windows on all sides showed landscapes flitting by, lit by starlight and occasional bright flares amid the odd buildings. From above her head came occasional clanking noises and whispery whistles—sounds of the mag-rail.

“All this industrial infrastructure,” Fred said quietly beside her. “Kept out of their living zone.”

“Ah, yes,” Beth said, not taking her eyes from the images flashing by in the big board window. “We hardly saw any cities before, either.”

“Sure, the Bowl’s land area is enormous, but then you realize that their whole mechanistic civilization is clinging to the outer skin. So they have twice the area we thought.”

Beth glanced upward into the “sky,” where the hull’s burnished metal gleamed beneath fitful lights. “And anyone who lives here, does so wrong way up. Centrifugal gravity pushes them away from the hull, so the Bowl is always over their heads. The stars are at their feet.” Beth laughed softly. “An upside-down world of its own.”

“Smart, really.” Fred was watching, too, his eyes darting at the spacious spectacle zooming past. “You can do your manufacturing and then throw your waste away in high vacuum.”

Beth shook herself; enough gawking. “Look, we’re in a cargo drone. We have to be ready in case we stop and get new passengers.”

“Relax. We’ll feel the deceleration, get ready.”

“At least we should search for food dispensers. This passenger compartment is for whoever’s accompanying the cargo—”

“Plants, yeah,” Fred said distantly, still distracted by the view. “Those finger snakes arranged to escort the plants, fit us in. Neat.”

Beth smiled. Fred had summed up days of negotiations. Their halting efforts had been beset by translation errors and mistakes. Even sharing a sort-of common language, a mix of Bird and Anglish, there were ambiguities that came from how different minds saw the universe. The snakes used wriggles and tiny movements of their outsized faces to convey meaning, and it took a while to even notice that. Words meant different things if a right-wriggle came with it, versus a left-wriggle. The snakes had similar troubles reading “primate face gestures” as they termed it.

Fred turned to her. “You’re worried about Tananareve.”

“I … yes.”

“You’re surprised I noticed.”

“Not really, I—”

“Look, I know what’s in my personnel file. I’m classic Asperger’s, yep. But I hope I make up for it by, well, my quirky ability to see how things work. Or that’s what the file says.”

To stall for time she asked, “How did you see your file?”

Fred was honestly surprised. She realized he did not actually know how to be dishonest, or at least without detection. “An easy hack.”

“Well … yes. I read everybody’s file before we left SunSeeker. Standard field-prep method.”

“So I should overlook how you fret about us, especially Tananareve.”

“She’s not really recovered, and I should’ve noticed she didn’t get in here with us.”

Fred gave her an awkward smile. “Look, the place was confusing and we didn’t have any time. She wandered off. There were the finger snakes making a racket and shooting questions at us.” A sigh. “Anyway, put it aside. We’ve got the boarding problem coming up.”

She sighed. “Right, of course.” So much for Asperger’s patients not picking up on social signals. What had that training program said? “Cognitive behavioral therapy can improve stress management relating to anxiety.” Yet Fred seems calmer than the rest of us.…

Fred pressed on. “The snakes say we’re due for a stop about where SunSeeker could rendezvous with us. But we have to come out at high speed, so they have to match us. But—”