Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 09_ Edge of Victory 02_ Rebirth - J. Gregory Keyes [30]
The chambers were jeweled with ice crystals, frozen in the act of boiling from and rupturing the soft inner walls. The once-pliant floor was as rigid as the yorik coral on the exterior of the ship, but much more dead.
They continued down, through progressively smaller chambers. They saw fewer dead down here, too, reinforcing Nen Yim’s guess. The rupture had ended catastrophically, emptying the arm of air and life in a few tens of heartbeats, but it must have begun small.
Why had the rikyam given no alarm? Why hadn’t the seals between each and every layer closed and hardened?
Eventually, they came to stars.
The arm curved toward the end, and “down” followed the anterior edge. Here objects weighed the most; the area had been reserved for the training of warriors originally, but since most able-bodied warriors had moved ahead of the slower worldships to the glory of battle, the tip had been transformed into a crèche, so that the children of the next generation would mature with thicker bones and more powerful muscles.
A futile hope for these children. Those who hadn’t been hurled out into space regarded the stars they might have conquered with frozen eyes through a fifty-meter-long tear in the fabric of the hull.
Nen Yim shivered. The stars were decidedly down. If she were to fall, the spin of the ship would sling her irrevocably into trackless parsecs of nothing.
And yet it was glorious. As she watched, the disk of the galaxy spun into view, too enormous for even such a large gash to fully frame. The Core blazed, a white mass tinged blue, spreading into arms that gradually faded toward cooler stars. Technically, the Baanu Miir was already within the boundaries of that great lens, but even the nearest world was unreachably far from the Baanu Miir.
That became even more apparent as she examined the rupture. The edges of it were curled outward, revealing the tripartite nature of the hull. The outer shell was yorik coral, rigid metal-bearing nacelles wrapped around the hardy, energetic organisms that created and tended them. Below that were the sheared and frozen capillaries that carried nutrients and oxygen out to the arms and pumped waste products back for the maw luur to cycle and recycle, supplemented by the hydrogen atoms that the dovin basals pulled from surrounding space. There also were the muscles and tendons that could flex the great arm, contract it if need be, and here something had failed. When the rift occurred, the medial hull should have drawn together and been sealed by its own freezing. The outer hull would have replicated and closed the gap, and over time the dead, frozen cells should have been replaced by vibrant new ones. The soft, pliable inner hull would have healed as well, eventually leaving nothing more than a faint scar to remind of the disaster.
“What happened?” the warrior asked. “I don’t understand this.”
Nen Yim pointed to the rent mass of striated muscle.
“It tore itself,” she said.
“What do you mean, it tore itself?” the prefect asked. “How can that be?”
“The muscles spasmed, as the muscles of your leg might after much exertion. They contracted and split the hull, then kept contracting, tearing it wider.”
“That’s impossible,” the warrior grunted.
“No, only undesirable,” Nen Yim replied. “The rikyam is supposed to monitor such fluctuations and moderate them.”
“Then why didn’t it?”
“My deduction? Because the rikyam’s senses in this arm are dead. It is unaware that anything here exists. Very likely the impulse that ripped the hull was one of the few random impulses to enter here from the brain in many cycles.”
“You’re saying the rikyam itself did this?” Ona asked.
“Only indirectly. What you behold is the result of a ship-brain so far gone in senility that it is losing control of its motor functions.”
“Then there is no hope,” the prefect murmured.