Chapter 25:
Womb

“Come back to Legacy with us,” Donovan had said, as casually as he might ask someone back to his quarters for dinner. The oddity of it struck Sal like a mallet. She’d resigned herself to Mars, and space travel belonged to her adolescence. It was all in the past.

Launches on Mars were still dangerous and unpredictable business, events that all the children rushed to watch on the southern observation deck, with their mouths agape and eyes full of wonder. The tone in Donovan’s voice said that those days were over. The world had changed overnight, and space travel was about to become as dangerous and rare as a trip to the bathroom.

He hardly needed to ask, of course. What choice did she have? It was so obvious that she was finished packing before she realized she’d decided to go.

When Kazuo found out that Sal was going, he invited himself along for the ride. She wasn’t sure if he felt left out, protective, or some combination of the two, but Donovan’s precise reply was, “The more the merrier.”

They suited up before nightfall and marched out to the skiff while the sun was setting behind the burnt horizon. When they reached the vessel, its circular portal opened and the ramp lowered lowered for them. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, but the ship seemed eager to meet them, and pleased once they were aboard.

The world had become a strange place, and was getting stranger by the minute.

Sal and Kazuo immediately started searching for seats to strap themselves into. Meanwhile, with a wave of Donovan’s hand, flat metallic panels around the ship became transparent and revealed the darkening Martian landscape shrinking into the distance. The ship was already up and away.

Sal felt a soft jostle but nothing else. “We’re not actually flying, are we?”

“Like hell we’re not,” Donovan said.

Dr. Rao, who struck her as nervous, chimed in. “The ship uses artificial gravity to counteract inertia. You can hardly feel anything at all.”

“Amazing,” she said. “Is it using artificial gravity for propulsion too?”

“Oh no. It takes a rather extravagant amount of energy to project external gravity wells. Only larger ships like Legacy can afford such systems. We’re still not completely sure what the skiff uses for propulsion, but I have theories.”

“Rao always has a theory about something. You’ll get used to it,” Faulkland said gruffly.

“But how can you not know?” Sal asked. “You built this thing in two weeks and you don’t even know what drives it. How is that possible?”

Donovan answered this time. “The short answer is that we didn’t build it. Legacy did, and I use the word ‘built’ loosely. She grew the skiff the way we grow hair or fingernails. It and the tugs, which you’ll see shortly, should be considered components of the mothership. They’re not sentient like she is, and they’d hardly function without her.”

Sentient ships and machines that were grown rather than built. Sal decided she would need some time to wrap her head around those ideas. The world was changing maybe just a little too fast.

It was around then Kazuo tapped her shoulder and pointed into the distance. Sal was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she missed the shift from dusty sky to star filled space, and they were already rapidly approaching a massive green object in the distance. Like the skiff, it was far more organic than technological, but hinted at both in its own ways. It had two conjoined hulls, like some sort of space catamaran, and Sal very quickly put together that this thing was her planet killer. It was Donovan’s warship.

The skiff came around Legacy, and Sal stared in awe at the vast ship glimmering in the light of the sun. As exotic as it was, there were still structures that reminded her of ships on Earth. She made out what appeared to be a bridge tower atop the larger hull, and the whole surface bristled with articulated towers that she figured were weapons, sensors or both.

The skiff came to Legacy’s bow, and Sal got a good look at the front of the two hulls. They were similar in shape, but obviously different in function. The main hull gaped open, with the shadows of some dark machinery lurking within, while the smaller hull’s mouth was covered in a complex pattern of overlapping panels which converged at the center. It had to be a hatch of some kind. Her suspicions were confirmed as the very center of it slid open just wide enough for the skiff to come inside.

Once through the opening, they were in a different world altogether. The cavity was filled with blue-green light, revealing structures all along the interior surface. The walls near the mouth were covered in a tangle of thick tubes, and behind them lay an uncountable legion of octagonal pads, all facing in toward the center of the chamber. They were all identical in every detail but size, each holding its own set of adjustable clamps, hoses and cables. Long, rectangular buildings split the pads into groups, and were themselves covered in small terraces and balconies.

Other structures jutted out from the walls on thin stalks, like a forest of cradle-topped trees. These grew progressively larger toward the aft, with the largest dwarfing even the vessel that carried Ares Colony to Mars.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“This is the secondary hull,” Donovan said. “It’s broken into separate compartments, each with its own purpose and unique equipment. This one would normally house and launch completed craft. It’s a hangar.”

“Man oh man,” Kazuo said. “Factory, carrier, battleship. Is there anything your ship doesn’t do?”

Faulkland said, “Only one thing so far… land.”

“Actually, there’s plenty she doesn’t do,” Donovan corrected after a moment. “She can’t construct capital ships like herself, nor can she fabricate hollow-drives… her energy source. That’s going to be a serious problem soon enough. She has some trouble with internal repairs, and she’s absolutely rubbish at math. Can you believe that? Still baffles me. I mean, she can count quickly, but that’s about the end of it. Anything more complicated than that, she either does by intuition, or labels it ‘Eireki-stuff’ and leaves it for us.”

Sal didn’t quite follow. “What do you mean by intuition?”

Donovan took a moment to think. “Let’s say I throw you a ball and you catch it. Did you numerically calculate a parabolic arc, or did you just feel where it was going?”

Sal nodded. “Understood.”

“She can operate well enough doing a lot of things that way. She can figure out intercept vectors and orbits without a problem. Unfortunately, there’s a whole host of other systems we can’t use until we figure out the maths behind them.”

Sal noticed that the skiff had passed the landing pads and was continuing toward the other end of the chamber where another hatch waited. “We’re not going to land?”

“Not yet,” Donovan said. “She’s giving you a tour.”

This hatch also opened as the skiff approached, but all the way this time, opening like a flower to the morning sun. The many thousands of panels folded, each into the next, and Sal was hypnotized by all the machinery working perfectly in concert on such a large scale.

“This chamber…” Donovan began to say.

“Is a shipyard,” Sal finished his sentence. They had a distinctly alien flavor, but the bright orange docking rings were enough like wet docks in Earth orbit. She looked on excitedly and recognized the joints that would allow them to shrink or expand to accommodate ships of different shapes and sizes. Sal could puzzle out the uses of most of their tools, even with them lying dormant.

A few were busy, constructing machines whose purposes she couldn’t guess at. The manipulator arms ducked and dodged around their queries at an incredible pace, occasionally stopping to weld a seam and produce a shower of golden sparks.

Sal looked deep into the distance, and there were rings as far as the eye could see. “There are enough facilities here to work on hundreds… maybe thousands of ships simultaneously,” she said.

Donovan nodded. “Once production ramps up, yes, but we don’t have the resources to put it all to use just yet. We will soon, though.”

The skiff drifted along, and Sal watched every set of docking rings pass. Each manipulator arm she looked at extended and reseated itself, like saluting a passing officer. They wanted her to know they were fully functional and ready to go.

“You said the ship reads minds?”

“Give or take,” Donovan said. “Let’s just say that Legacy is very sensitive to certain kinds of thoughts, and leave it at that.”

The skiff approached the end of the shipyard, and this time, there was a single mid-sized hatch surrounded by thousands of smaller replicas. “Those lead to the actual heart of the manufacturing complex, where components are gestated before being brought here for assembly. Past that is resource digestion. We can take a look at both if you like.”

“Digestion?”

Donovan nodded. “The tugs have their own ports in back where they deposit raw materials, which are then broken down for use in manufacturing. I make it sound technical, but it’s… not pretty.”

“Say no more.”

The inside of the skiff was quiet, as if everyone was waiting for someone else to speak. After far too long, Donovan smiled at Sal and asked, “So what do you say?”

“To what?” she asked.

He had a confused look on his face, as if the answer were as plain as day. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, “I have a bit of trouble with what has and hasn’t been said sometimes.” He gave the interface on the side of his head a quick tap.

Sal had a sense she was being seduced, but into what she wasn’t entirely sure. As far as she knew, she’d been brought aboard to take a look around and help them design weapons. Or something.

“This facility has astronomical potential, but in order for that potential to be fulfilled, it needs someone to run it. It needs an inventive mind to give it purpose and direction.”

The answer dawned on her, and her eyes went wide with surprise.

“I’d like you to run the factory,” Donovan said. “It would more or less be yours.”

“This is too much,” Sal said, and she started to wave her hands in front of her. “I’m just a wrench jockey. I fix things that are broken, Doctor Donovan. I don’t run factories.”

“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I know you’re much more than that. Your work is inspired, and you know it, too.”

The woman physician, Doctor St. Martin, waved Donovan off. “Christ, you haven’t a subtle bone in your body, Marc. You’re putting too much pressure on her.”

St. Martin had a warm smile and sharp, inquisitive eyes. Sal suspected this woman was their voice of reason, and the voice of reason went on, “Why don’t we put the skiff down and find some dinner? We can give Ms. Saladin a proper tour, and maybe show her some of the ongoing projects tomorrow. Does that sound alright?”

Sal thought about it for a moment. “Everything’s so damn weird, I’m not sure what’s alright anymore. But I guess that’ll do.”

With that, the skiff headed back toward the launch bay, and no one spoke of Donovan’s offer for the rest of the night.