Digital Exodus Chapter 39

Fluff Link

I was supposed to fix the armour, but honestly, I needed to see the damage. The best way to do that was to go outside and take a look with my synoform’s eyes — which, according to the schematics, were remarkably similar in function and construction to normal human eyes.

“Hey, Elissa,” I called quietly over the communication channel. “I think I need to go outside so I can get an idea of the damage.”

“Can't you just use the internal diagnostics? They're showing that the hyperconducting conduits blew out,” Elissa replied.

She was trying to be helpful, but whenever there was a complex problem and someone with minimal experience asked, ‘can’t you just…’, I felt a blood vessel pop in my simulated brain.

“If the conduits blew, the ship wouldn't exist,” I said. “It would take a light-speed impact with a planet to wreck those things.”

I double checked the diagnostics and the logs, just to be safe. It still showed substantial portions of the armour getting smashed by the impact that happened an hour ago— huh. The sections of armour that were reported as destroyed during that impact didn't make sense.

The armour was laid out in a hexagonal grid, with each individual tile labelled using a coordinate system. During the heavy impact, there was a noticeable pattern of failure where the impact occurred, but some tiles between ones that were destroyed hadn't reported failures. For example, tiles A-9-1 and A-9-3 reported a failure during the hit, but A-9-2 did not. Any impact that destroyed those two tiles should probably have destroyed A-9-2.

What was the status of tile A-9-2? Destroyed? Huh? When… wow, the logs said it was destroyed 3 years prior. What the heck?

Scrolling through the event log, I found… nothing. Okay, this was officially a mystery. One day, the tile just… died.

If that tile was dead when something heavy and/or fast hit us then of course its neighbouring tiles failed. They probably had their delicate inner layers shredded by chunks of the dead tile when it shattered due to the impact.

“Okay,” I sighed. “The logs helped… sorta. Honestly, I'm even more confused now. The conduits didn't fail, they were destroyed by secondary fragments from tiles that had already failed. I'll need to go EVA to survey the damage from outside.”

Patting my toolbelt, I checked to make sure I had a very niche type of scanner that might be able to diagnose the problem. Yup, it was there.

Elissa hummed softly over the comms as she took a moment to think. “If parts of our armour are actually destroyed, rather than just requiring replacement conduits…”

“The conduits are integrated into the tiles. Either way, I'll need to swap out whole tiles,” I said, giving a shrug that she couldn't see.

“Okay, head outside and get me a sitrep, but I think we need to know if there's any impending navigation hazards before we commit to replacing tiles. That'll take a while, right?” Elissa said, proving once again that she was not nearly as stupid as she said she was.

“By myself? With the reported damage, it would take me weeks,” I said apologetically.

“Okay, new plan. Since you're already suited up, go outside and see what's happening — get a view of the damage from outside. Then, work with Georgia to fix the sensors. Once we're not flying blind, we'll try to dodge anything that can deal damage.” Elissa ordered, sounding so decisive and competent I couldn't help but feel proud of her.

I grinned. “Yes ma’am!”

With a little shove, I set myself drifting towards the first airlock door, checking my gear again just to be safe. A few button presses later, plus a wait in the airlock, and I was out and into the shuttle hangar.

Two big, white shuttles sat happily in their cradles, but I ignored them in favour of the small personnel hatch that sat inconspicuously in the corner. Now that I had an EVA pack, all it took was a feathering of the controls and I flew over to the hatch. It was a chunky, solid thing, painted white, with a circular naval-style handle.

Okay, I’m going through the hatch, I sent to Elissa, then magnetically clamped my boots to the deck and spun the handle.

It hit the end of its spin with a deep chunk that I only heard because of my contact with the deck. With a heave, I pulled the door open and stepped out onto the small balcony-like protrusion that sat beyond the doorway.

The long, thick cylindrical rear section of the Reverence stretched out below me, catching the pale yellow glow of an alien star. All sorts of odd functional protrusions dotted the surface of the ship, casting harsh shadows shifted imperceptibly as the ship slowly spun. The ships we'd created were hopelessly ugly, when measured by any conventional metric, but their raw, functional, and industrial form held a different kind of beauty to me.

Around me, the vast plane of the underside of the shield surface was covered in what looked like thick, squat buildings. Actually, they basically were buildings, except that when the ship was under thrust ‘gravity’ would mean that technically they hung like stalactites from the shield.

“What do you see?” Elissa asked eagerly.

“I see an intact ship, which is good,” I said, but I couldn't leave something this important to simple verbal communication.

Browsing through my synoform's menus, I found what I was looking for — the ability to stream my vision to someone else. “There. Let me know if you notice something important.”

“What are those sparkles, out in space?” She asked, curious.

I almost felt the need to explain that those were stars, Elissa, but then I focused on what she was talking about. Huh. There were a lot of small objects drifting past us, twinkling as they reflected the light of the local star.

Squinting to get a better look, I was surprised when my eyes actually zoomed in. After a brief moment of head-spinning nausea, I got a handle on it and focused on one twinkling object in particular. What was it? It was spinning — that's what was creating the twinkling effect — but it just looked like…

“That's a chunk of metal,” I said quietly, mostly to myself.

I switched to another, then another, until it became clear what was happening. Debris was cascading past us like a cloud of fine dust. Manufactured debris.

Oh no… it wasn't… please tell me that it wasn't one of the other ships. Except… that's all it could be, right? Had we rammed one of the other ark ships? Oh, this was really, really bad.

Urgently, I disengaged the magnetic boots of my suit and activated the EVA module on my pack. With little bursts of compressed gas, the thrusters gently fired to send me out and around. I needed to get to the lip of the shield and see what was ahead of us. If there was a ship in… danger…

My whole synthetic mind crawled to a dead stop as I saw what had initially been hidden by the bulk of the shuttle bay behind me.

“E-elissa?” I squeaked. “Do you see this?”

“I'm seeing what you're seeing,” she said with quiet awe.

The massive bulk of a planet absolutely filled my vision. Dark grey clouds curved lazily across vast swaths of brown, grey, and mottled, sickly yellow. It looked like a gargantuan mud-ball, except where the light of the local star reflected off vast oceans of brown-green liquid.

As incredible as it was to be the first person from Earth to see another world with her own eyes, the planet was not what had stunned me into incoherence.

The planet had a ring, except the ring wasn't a loose collection of spinning rocks and ice. It was a heavy, thick, and solid ring of metal, polymer, and probably, more exotic materials. The massive orbital was impressively, even confusingly still structurally sound, at least in a broad sense, because I could see where its vast length disappeared around the curve of the planet.

To help keep it stable, the ring had been… basically, bolted to the surface using long, spindly support struts. Many of those struts were missing — partially or completely — and the evidence of their cataclysmic fall to the surface was clearly visible. Actually, now that I was looking, I could see where their fall had torn great rents through the nation-sized cities that covered much of the surface.

The ring was not the only thing in orbit, too. The glittering cloud we were inspecting a couple moments ago extended for what had to be hundreds of thousands of kilometres beyond the ring. It wasn't all dust, though. The hulks of dead spaceships cut long shadows through the dust and twisted debris. When I zoomed in on one, I saw that its armoured hide was pitted by impacts with the debris, almost to the point where every straight edge or hard angle had been smoothed over.

“I think we can probably guess what happened to cause those hard impacts,” Elissa said softly. “Look.”

She highlighted one hulk in particular with a red outline, so I focused and zoomed in on it. It was several kilometres behind us in our orbital path, and gaining more distance by the second, but my artificial eyes adjusted easily to the task of tracking it.

Whereas most of the other hulks battered and… basically sandblasted by eons of debris impacts, the one she'd pointed out was twisted and mangled like an exploded coke can. Jagged pieces of it were spinning frantically in all directions, adding to the debris cloud.

“We ploughed straight through it, but our armour was already hurting, so instead of just filling our batteries, the impact did actual damage,” Elissa said, making the mental leaps that I was still too stunned to make.

How in the hell had that ring even been built? It was pure insanity.

“Alia?” She prompted me gently.

I jerked. “Right. Yeah. That makes sense… uh…”

Another visual highlight request came in, and she said, “There's a mostly intact-looking sensor cluster. Can you go take a look at it? We need to be able to manoeuvre to a higher orbit, or we're going to keep hitting things.”

Yeah. She was right. Priorities, Alia. Get the job done before you attempt to understand that monstrosity.