The Garments of Caean

The chief technician stirred. ‘If I’d known you’d want us to make good we’d have been more careful. We invaded quite a few sub-systems by cutting into it in the way we did.’

‘How would you assess the suit, technically?’ Estru asked.

The other pursed his lips. ‘A good solid job, very durable. But judging by what we’ve seen so far there’s nothing too advanced for us to handle. Some of it’s pretty quaint, in fact. We can patch it up if you want.’

‘Good. Get on with it, then,’ Amara said.

‘It’s really more of a job for a doctor than an engineer,’ the medic said anxiously. ‘I’d be happier having him in surgery.’

‘Fair enough. You can all work on it together. Just before you seal him up give him whatever psycho-medications you think necessary.’ Amara made for the door, giving Estru a glance to follow.

As they walked back to their own section she tapped him on the arm. ‘There were two of them, remember? He called the other one Lana – in Old Russian that’s a feminine name.’ She screwed up her face in amusement. ‘I wonder what they were doing!’

In terms of the interstellar velocity of which it was capable, the exploratory ship Callan had been almost stationary when it spotted the deep-space suits. In fact it had been engaged on a moderately-paced sweep of the planetary system occupying the near-space of the small nondescript yellow star. This was the forty-third such unremarkable star they had visited at random, following Amara Corl’s theory that in this way they would uncover traces of the beginning of Caeanic civilization. Had their sensor scans not picked up the suits their stay would have been brief. The system contained no habitable planets. It was a bleak corner of the starry world, one among a million such bleak corners, and Estru, Amara’s first assistant, had been about to suggest that they abandon the search for ancient beings and move closer to Caeanic space proper.

Now, however, Amara was excited. It would probably take the techs a couple of hours to close up the suit again. Meanwhile there was the question of where it had come from.

Two nearby worlds offered themselves as candidates. The first and most unlikely was a gas giant surrounded by a system of Saturn rings but lacking any satellites. The second, a tiny arid planet quite unfit for human life, lay at present scarcely fifteen million miles sunward of the gas giant. The Callan had picked up its prisoner about mid-way between the two.

‘The small one, I think. Don’t you, Estru?’

‘Presumably. It’s not much of a world. Less than two thousand miles in diameter, a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and cold. But maybe there’s a protected outpost there or something.’ He reflected. ‘Shouldn’t we wait till we get a chance to talk to our specimen before going any farther? We might save some time that way in the end.’

She snorted. ‘We didn’t have much luck last time. He was raving.’

‘Maybe we didn’t try hard enough to meet him on his own terms? He seemed to be under a misapprehension regarding our nature, as well as we of his.’

‘Yes.’ She switched on the recording she had made, listening with a frown to the sonorous voice. “‘You will pay for all your barbarities,’” she translated slowly and with difficulty. “‘We have never submitted to you and we never shall. I shall tell you nothing…” As if we were an enemy he recognized, instead of complete strangers.’ She switched off.

‘I’d rather know more about his background before we go barging in.’

‘You can carry caution too far,’ she reproved. ‘What if we hadn’t opened the suit? We still wouldn’t know the truth about him. But all right. A few hours of library research can’t do any harm.’ She turned away and held down her memo key, which carried her voice to every section of her fifty-member team.

Minutes later she had alerted them to what was happening and had put the department on a crash project: investigate late Russian history, with special reference to any incursion into the Tzist Arm. She herself settled down to brush up her knowledge of the language.

She had been at it for a couple of hours when the vid chimed and the bearded face of Captain Wilce appeared.

‘I ought to tell you we’ve spotted another object heading our way, Amara. At a guess it’s come from the small planet up-sun of us. Any suggestions or preferences?’

‘Yes! Make contact!’ Amara replied immediately. ‘What is it, another deep-space suit?’

‘Something larger this time,’ Wilce relayed a blurred long-range sensor image to her. It was hard to make anything sensible out of the shape that emerged. The object could have been lozenge-shaped, or perhaps flat and rectangular. It was studded with smaller features which the scanner failed to define properly.

‘It has a length of about a hundred feet,’ the Captain explained. ‘We might have been better advised to proceed under baffle. They doubtless know we’re here by now.’