Godlike Machines by Jonathan Strahan [Editor] Page A

machine.
    It took fifteen minutes of cautious progress to reach the lodged Progress. It was jammed in nose first, with the engine pointing at us. A ship like that was not normally a man-rated vehicle, but the usual variants had a hatch at the front, so that space station crews could enter the vehicle when it was docked. In the case of ours, the innards had been replaced by scientific gear, computers, additional fuel, and batteries. The docking hatch had become a kind of mouth by which the robot could feed samples into itself, using the feeler-like appendages of its sampling devices. Inside was a robotic system which sorted the samples, fed them into miniature laboratories where appropriate, and delivered whatever was left into a storage volume just ahead of the fuel tanks. We couldn’t have got in through the mouth even if the Progress hadn’t been jammed in nose first, but that didn’t matter. A secondary hatch and docking assembly had been installed in the side, so that the sample compartment could be unloaded through the Tereshkova ’s own docking port. Galenka, who had overtaken me in our descent from the Soyuz, was the first to reach the sample hatch. The hatch controls were designed to be opened by someone in a suit. She worked the heavy toggles until the hatch swung open, exposing the non-pressurised storage compartment. The hole in the side of the Progress was just large for a suited person to crawl through. Without hesitation she grabbed yellow handholds and levered herself inside. A few moments later the chamber lit up with the wavering light of her helmet-mounted flashlamp.
    “Talk to me, Galenka.”
    “It’s all racked and sorted, Dimitri. Must be about half a ton of stuff in here already. Some of the chunks are pretty big. Still warm, too. Going to be a bitch of a job moving all of them back to the Soyuz.”
    “We’ll take what we can; that was always the idea. If nothing else we should make sure we’ve got unique samples from both Shell 1 and Shell 2.”
    “I’m going to try and bring out the first chunk. I’ll pass it through the hatch. Be ready.”
    “I’m here.”
    But as I said that, a status panel lit up on the side of my faceplate. “Comms burst from Tereshkova ,” I said, as alphanumeric gibberish scrolled past. “A window must just have opened.”
    “Feeling better now?”
    “Guess it’s nice to know the windows are still behaving.”
    “I could have told you they would.” Galenka grunted with the effort of dislodging the sample she had selected. “So—any news?”
    “Nothing. Just a carrier signal, trying to establish contact with us. Means the ship’s still out there, though.”
    “I could have told you that as well.”
    It took 20 minutes to convey one sample back to the Soyuz. Doing it as a relay didn’t help-it took two of us to nurse the object between us, all the while making sure we didn’t drift away from the structure. Things got a little faster after that. We returned to the jammed Progress in good time and only took 15 minutes to get the second sample back to our ship. We now had pieces of Shell 1 and Shell 2 aboard, ready to be taken back home.
    A voice at the back of my head said that we should quit while we were ahead. We’d salvaged something from this mess-almost certainly enough to placate Baikonur. We had taken a risk and it had paid off. But there was still more than an hour remaining of the time I had allowed us. If we moved quickly and efficiently—and we were already beginning to settle into a rhythm—we could recover three or four additional samples before it was time to start our journey back. Who knew what difference five or six samples might make, compared to two?
    “Just for the record,” Galenka said, when we reached the Progress again, “I’m getting itchy feet here.”
    “We’ve still got time. Two more. Then we’ll see how we’re doing.”
    “You were a lot more jumpy until that window opened.”
    She was right. I couldn’t deny