Hot Sky

Hot Sky

By Robert Silverberg

The Calamari Maru was pretty impressive. It was big and long and sleek, built somewhat along the lines of a squid itself, a jet-propulsion job that gobbled water into colossal compressors and squirted it out behind. That was one of the many low-fuel solutions to maritime transport problems that had been worked out for the sake of keeping CO2 output down in these difficult times. Immense things like flying buttresses ran down the deck on both sides. These, Kovalcik explained, were squid lures, covered with bioluminescent photophores: You lowered them into the water and they gave off light that mimicked the glow of the squids’ own bodies, and the slithery tentacular buggers came jetting in from vast distances, expecting a great jamboree and getting a net instead.

”Some butchering operation you got here,” Carter said.

Kovalcik said a little curtly, “Meat is not all we produce. The squids we catch here have value as food, of course, but also we strip the nerve fibers, we take them back to the mainland, they are used in all kinds of biosensor applications. They are very large, those fibers, a hundred times as thick as ours. They are like single-cell computers. You have a thousand processors aboard your ship that use squid fiber, do you know? Follow me, please. This way.”

They went down a ramp, along a narrow companionway. Carter heard thumpings and pingings in the walls. A bulkhead was dented and badly scratched. The lights down here were dimmer than they ought to be and the fixtures hummed ominously. There was a new odor now, a tang of something chemical, sweet, but not a pleasing kind of sweet, more a burnt kind of sweet than anything else, cutting sharply across the boom of drums. Rennett shot him a somber glance. This ship was a mess, all right.

Hot Sky. Illustration by Elena.

“Captain’s cabin is here,” Kovalcik said, pushing back a door hanging askew on its hinges. “We have drink first, yes?”

The size of the cabin amazed Carter after all those weeks bottled up in his little hole on the Tonopah Maru. It looked as big as a gymnasium. There was a table, a desk, shelving, a comfortable bunk, a sanitary unit, even an entertainment screen, everything nicely spread out with actual floor space you could move around in. The screen had been kicked in. Kovalcik took a flask of Peruvian brandy from a cabinet. Carter nodded and she poured three stiff ones. The drank in silence. The squid odor wasn’t so bad in here, or else he was getting used to it, just as she’d said. But the air was rank and close despite the spaciousness of the cabin, thick, soupy stuff that was a struggle to breathe. Something’s wrong with the ventilating system, too, Carter thought.

“You see the trouble we have?” said Kovalcik.

“I see there’s been trouble, yes.”

“You don’t see half. You should see command room, too. Here, have more brandy, then I take you there.”

“Never mind the brandy,” Carter said. “How about telling me what the hell’s been going on aboard this ship?”

“First come see command room,” Kovalcik said.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)