Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 03_ Tyrant's Test - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [50]
“I will consider it,” Lobot said. As soon as Lando disappeared through the opening with a wave, Lobot turned to Artoo-Detoo. “Go get Threepio and bring him here.”
Artoo released the equipment grid and dove toward the portal, chirping his relief and approval.
“Don’t spare the propellant,” Lobot called after him.
Alone, he removed his right glove and his helmet, clipping both to the equipment grid. Bending his neck forward, he reached up with his bare hands and lightly caressed the edges of the Hamarin interface band, his fingertips playing briefly over the attachment release at the back of his head.
The interface had never come off in thirty-four years, not for maintenance upgrades, nor for sleep, nor for vanity. It did more than connect Lobot with a universe of interlinked data resources and control interfaces. The band had become a secondary link between the halves of his own brain, supplementing the corpus callosum so as to allow him to process the tremendous flood of data that pressed in on his awareness. His fingers knew it as part of the familiar and ordinary contours of his head. His mind no longer recognized a boundary between biology and technology; his integrated consciousness bridged both.
Even so, this time, his fingers were exploring the interface as an object apart—and he was wondering what it would be like not to find it there, either with his hands or with his thoughts.
Outside chamber 228, as elsewhere, the inner face of the vagabond’s interspace—the open area between what Lando thought of as the ship proper and the outer hull—was covered with hexagonal cells containing sculpted Qella faces. It seemed to Lando that the entire ship must be tiled with them.
As he jetted past the unbroken and unending bas-relief, Lando wondered how many faces there were, and whether each was unique. When he contemplated the numbers, it became almost unthinkable that it was a portrait gallery, that each represented an actual individual—long dead, in all likelihood, and perhaps remembered nowhere else but here.
There must be hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions. I’ll have to ask Lobot or Artoo to calculate it, Lando thought. Who could have made them all? Just gathering and organizing them into this collage would have been a monumental task. How were they made? Are they like the rest of this ship, almost alive?
The Qella watched with impassive eyes as he passed, more sanguine about Lando’s presence than he was about theirs.
And why are they here? All that work, and who would see them? The discovery of access portals to the interspace did not alter Lando’s impression of the interspace as a private place. They gaze outward as if the outer hull weren’t there, as if they’re held in trance by something they see lying beyond, as if they all share the same thought. Was it infinity? Eternity? Mortality?
Soon after entering the interspace, Lando discovered that the inner hull and outer hull were connected by slender stringers. Crisscrossing and arrayed in a continuous row, they stitched the two hulls together with an open pattern of diamonds and triangles, like a series of X’s. The smallest openings were large enough for Lando to pass through easily. Lando suspected that the stringers encircled the entire inner hull, like the spokes of a velocipede wheel—a single structure serving as strut, spacer, and shock mount.
As he continued forward, Lando encountered a second ring of stringers and learned they had another function. For this row was a solid barrier, with membranes closing the spaces between the strands, sealing off the next section of interspace. The obstacle drove Lando back inside the ship at chamber 207.
Forward from that point, the portals leading to the interspace were still illuminated by glow-rings but sealed tight. Although none of them would open to Lando’s touch, the center of those he tried to open transformed into a hexagon of the same transparent material they