Behind me, the historians were talking to Miya about the ship.
“I see you have a secondary airlock in case of airlock faults,” Tima was saying, “but there’s no extra protection against hull breaches, and this thing has the thinnest hull I’ve ever seen on a vessel. What happens if you knock into something and shatter that window? How would the people inside survive?”
“Usually, the people inside is just me, and if I’m dumb enough to hit something hard enough to cause a hull breach that severe then I’m already dead. What happens if you slam your head into a wall hard enough to break the skull? We can’t go around wearing helmets all the time.”
“That’s somewhat different to a ship!”
“No, it isn’t. The risks are the same. In case of a minor breach, there is a hidden pressure door in the ship’s middle wall so I can just hide in the undamaged half of the ship, be that the front or back, and call another HEX for rescue. Or the bathroom, if the damage is that severe. Anything that doesn’t give me time to get into the undamaged half has already killed me no matter how many emergency systems are in place, so.”
I tuned them out and peered out into space.
The rest of Hexacorallia wasn’t in front of us. We’d been spinning with the Stalwart when docked, and when we undocked, it had flung us sideways. We’d pushed away from the Stalwart a little when undocking (that had been the sharp jerk), so we were also moving forward a little bit, but not as much as we were moving sideways. Looking out, I realised that Miya hadn’t made any corrections with the engines; we were just travelling on the path that the Stalwart had flung us on. And that path was heading directly for Hexacorallia, just a little bit forward of directly right of us.
It did look like one ship. One massive, very strange ship, the strangest I’d ever seen. Not cylindrical or round or ring-shaped or even two balls spinning around each other. Hexacorallia looked like some sort of leafless shrub or short tree, a bunch of metal branches stretching out from the middle and splitting into smaller branches at all kinds of angles.
I pressed my face to the glass and squinted, and soon I could make out why. It was a whole bunch of little ships, little circles and cylinders all covered in rockets and external arms and latches, all attached to each other. Most of them had big long legs like strange insects and clung to their neighbours; some hooked onto each other with big cables. Together, they made the strange bush shape, and as I watched I saw one detach itself from the end of one ‘branch’, walk over a few of its neighbours, and burrow into a new position, linking airlock to airlock with a ship further in. Another retracted a bunch of cables and pushed away from the mass on big long legs like a cricket’s, jumping towards another spaceship. They all had rockets, of course, but most of the rockets were very small even for such tiny ships, and none of them were using them (which made sense; they wouldn’t want to burn their neighbours). Watching them, I got the sense that their rockets were mostly for emergencies, and they normally walked or leapt or swung around.
Staring at the mass, I suddenly understood the bid for the colony. I could so clearly imagine these little ships jumping from asteroid to asteroid, spreading out among the field and mining its resources to make more little HEX ships, lashing together to make big ships when they needed to and separating when being small made more sense.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Miya asked, coming up behind me. “Everyone said I was crazy when I opted to have half of my HEX be the pilot’s cabin. Huge waste of limited space, they said. But I don’t know how anyone can say no to a view like that. It’s the people restricting their view to a tiny port and some electronic screens so they can get a bit more storage space who are the crazy ones. Besides, it’s so much better when you can see what your arms are doing with your own eyes.” He gestured to the edges of the hemisphere, where I could see six large metal ‘arms’ on the HEX anchored just behind the glass.
“You designed this?” I asked.
“Well, I told the engineers what I wanted. Obviously they wouldn’t build me anything dangerous.”
“This isn’t dangerous by your standards?” Tima asked nervously, eyeing the huge window like it was going to breach at any moment.
Miya laughed. “Don’t worry. Jamon’s ship is incredibly safe.” He said the word ‘safe’ like it was something to be a little bit embarrassed about, like Jamon was a nervous parent who wouldn’t let her kids climb the Big Spiderweb or something. “She’s always got children in and out, so she’s very cautious.”
Jamon was our host on Hexacorallia, in HEX-46, but I didn’t know much about her. “She’s a mum?”
“Runs a little orphanage. She’s good at it.”
I did my best not to look too surprised. Obviously women could raise orphans, but it was a little bit weird. Hardly any women or men became carers on the Courageous; if they wanted to raise kids then they made families. Most of the carers were brennans, who were just more suited to looking after lots and lots of kids; I knew there were a couple of carers around who weren’t brennans, but a woman running an orphanage? Jamon must be something really special.
I shouldn’t judge, though. I mean, my dad had a girly job. How many men managed microbial biotanks? Hardly any. It was something that women were better at, like gardening, or computer chip repair. And Dad was great at his job, so Jamon might be great at her job, too.
Besides, Hexacorallia orphanages might be different. All the other ships I’d been on raised kids differently to the Courageous. Maybe Hexacorallia raised orphans in a really girly way, somehow.
There wasn’t all that much to do on HEX-107. We just kind of waited around. The historians debated about some random history thing that it was obvious even they didn’t actually care about, which was normal, and I tried to look around the tiny ship very, very slowly so I wouldn’t run out of stuff to look at.
I still did run out, though. There weren’t all that many things to be interested in. I asked the three questions I had and that was about it. Why are the boarding seats in a tiny cylindrical sort of hall? Because the ship has no ‘down’ and, when docked with a ship undergoing inertial pull, the pull could be in many different directions. The seats rotate so that they’re the proper way up for passengers no matter what angle the HEX is at when it docks with another ship. Does it get lonely to have a whole ship by yourself? No, because Miya’s a bit of a loner anyway, and if he wants to talk to people he can always message them and talk to them that way whenever he wants. And if he wants to see people face to face, he’s never more than a day from the rest of Hexacorallia, and can just down there. The whole fleet’s decelerating to fall into orbit, so why isn’t Hexacorallia burning any engines? How are they decelerating? They aren’t. HEXes and everything in them are designed to be able to withstand a lot of inertial pull but they work the best in zero pull. Hexacoralli cruises along at zero pull most of the time, and every now and then all the HEXes assemble so their engines are pointing towards the Dragonseye and the decelerate for a while at a full standard pull, which is much, much faster than the fleet is moving. Then they turn the engines back off again.
That was it. Those were my three questions. And we still had hours before docking.
“So I imagine your captains’ ships have to stay in the central, uh, mass?” Hali asked at one point. “Along with your treegrave and essential combined services and soforth? So really it’s a very customisable ship with a big fleet of peripherals.”
“The larger HEXes do tend to stay where they are most of the time, just because more mass makes moving more difficult,” Miya shrugged, “but they don’t have to. They can detach as easily as anything else. We have a lot of available centralised services, like main manufacturing and food growing hubs and convention halls and stuff, but they’re really there as a matter of efficiency while travelling; lots of HEXes make and grow as much of their own stuff as they can, or trade with other small HEXes who have specialised their space into one thing. Apart from the treegrave, tehre’s not all that much which is critical. And we don’t have captains, so.” He shrugged again.
“What do you mean, you don’t have captains?” I asked. How could a ship not have captains?
“We have various respected specialists, but things that can’t be worked out HEX-to-HEX are decided by full committee,” he explained. “Every citizen fifteen or older gets to vote on community issues and majority vote wins. It’s a bit more complicated, people vote for elected subcommittees that handle actually implementing stuff so they can make judgement calls where needed, but there’s no overarching power to tell us what to do.” He thinks for a second. “I mean, you could argue that the specific systems used to propose and vote on things have a lot of control depending on how they’re implemented, and the treegrave does that, so you might be able to argue that the treegrave is kind of in control for now, in a roundabout way? But I don’t know much about that.”
I thought that sounded like a good idea, but the historians all exchanged worried glances.
“And that’s working out?” Plia asked cautiously.
“Oh yeah, it works great! I mean, there’s always small issues, where roughly equal groups of people disagree vehemently on something really important, and then the voting methods and wording of things become kind of important. We’re all getting a little antsy with the approach to Dragonseye, because if we get the bid for the colony then that’s going to be fantastic news for all of us. We’re all kind of stuck together travelling in space like this, but when we’re in orbit? Then we can spread out. There’ll be enough iron and ice to make as many HEXes as we want. Massive disagreement that divides Hexacorallia in two? No problem! It can literally divide in two! Everyone will have the space and the resources to organise however they want and live however they want! We can work together as aggregate ships to meet mutual goals and spread apart when we want to do our own thing! It’s going to be fantastic! If we win the bid, anyway.”
Another worried glance passed between the historians. Miya was looking proudly out the window at Hexacorallia, so he didn’t see Tima behind him mouth to the others something that looked like, ‘Tethered heart just waiting to happen.’ Plia gave a nod and thumbs-up in response, and Hali raised one finger and silently mouthed back, ‘In one generation, probably.’
“If they split up into smaller ships,” I asked, “who gets the treegrave?” That seemed to be the obvious flaw in the plan, to me.
“Oh, don’t worry about the treegrave,” Miya said casually. “There won’t be one.”
Derin Edala 