Fading Darkness

Chelsea ran the scan a second time, and then a third. The numbers came back wrong every time.

The airlock had cycled them in not long ago. It shouldn't have cycled at all. A dead relic didn't keep pressure, but the outer door read their knock, the seal breathed, and the inner door opened onto warm air that moved on its own. Chelsea had staked a career on physics, and her scanner was telling her the physics was broken.

Hull composition read cellular where it should have read alloy. Power distribution ran circulatory. The data-web had folded itself into something that wasn't a network anymore — something closer to a nervous system. She ran the diagnostic again and got the same numbers back.

"Readings don't make sense," she said, and kept her voice level even though her hands wanted to shake. "There's biomass in every primary system. The hull is growing, cell division all through the structure."

"Run it again."

"I ran it three times, Commander. I'll run it a fourth if you want, and it'll say the same thing, and then we'll have spent another two minutes standing in an airlock."

"Run it a fourth."

She ran it a fourth. It said the same thing.

"Colonial engineering doesn't do that," Nigel said. He had his scanner up beside hers. "Corruption engineering does. Two centuries of it. On a ship that was supposed to be a dead relic."

Two centuries. Sanctuary had left Earth carrying three million colonists and a plan to seed a world. Somewhere between one star and the next, something found her, and it was still at her, cell by cell, longer than anyone in the airlock had been alive.

They came here without a way home. Their own craft was dying under them, and had been for weeks. It had carried them since the moon — a stolen thing that never quite belonged to them, through the grey world and the long drifting months since — and lately it stopped pretending it would last. The last of it kept breathing because of an engineer who was dying herself. Sanctuary was the nearest thing with power, so they went in. The craft was still docked at the lock behind them, running on what was left of its recycler.

They watched Sanctuary come up on the scopes for two days — a dead shape in the dark, bigger than anything had a right to be. Their own craft's air was going stale by then. The recycler was failing, and Priya had it down to a wet ticking thing that gave back less every hour. She told them nine more days at first. A week later she said six, and after that nobody asked her for a number. She stayed on it anyway, and it went on giving back less. There was a choice. Stay aboard a craft that was going to stop breathing on its own schedule, or dock with the one dead giant in reach and take whatever it was. So they docked and cycled the lock, and the lock breathed. Chelsea understood then that the giant wasn't dead.

The concourse opened ahead of them like a throat. It went back and down and swallowed the light — green on the walls, the floor giving underfoot — and drew a slow breath down the whole length of it. Chelsea walked into it because the mission was on the far side of it.

It had been a gathering hall once. She could still read the bones of it under the growth — the tiers where people stood, the wide floor where a crowd would have gathered. Somebody had bolted a bracket to the rail on the second tier and never hung anything from it. It was still empty. Three million people were supposed to have celebrated births here, grieved deaths, watched children grow into strangers who would never stand on a planet. Instead there were the tiers, and the bracket, and a green light on everything, and a smell in the recycled air of the suit that her own filters were supposed to have taken out.