Free Mallow by Robert Reed

Master.
    The gray glow of the ceiling diminished, plunging the room into a late-dusk gloom. Then the amused voice said. 'The ship. Please.'
    A real-time projection swallowed the float-globe. Built from data channeled through the Master's internal systems, the ship reached from the floor to the ceiling. Its forward face looked at the audience. The hull was slick and gray, cloaked in a colorful aurora of dust shields, a thousand lasers firing every second, evaporating the largest hazards. On the horizon, a tiny flare meant that another starship was arriving. New passengers, perhaps. Washen thought of the machine intelligences, wondering who'd meet them in her absence.
    'Now,' said the Master, 'I'm going to peel my onion.'
    In an instant, the ship's armor evaporated. Washen could make out the largest caverns and chambers and the deep cylindrical ports, plus the hyperfiber bones that gave the structure its great strength.
    Then the next few hundred kilometers were removed. Rock and water, air and deeper hyperfiber were exposed.
    'The perfect architecture,' the Master declared. She stepped closer to the shrinking projection, its glow illuminating a grinning face. Resembling an enormous young girl with her favorite plaything, she confessed, 'In my mind, there's no greater epic in history. Human history, or anyone else's.'
    Washen knew this speech, word for word.
    'I'm not talking about this voyage of ours,' the Master continued. 'Circumnavigating the galaxy is an accomplishment, of course. But the greater adventure was in finding this ship before anyone else, then leaving our galaxy to reach it first. Imagine the honor: to be the first living organism to step inside these vast rooms, the first sentient mind in billions of years to experience their majesty, their compelling mystery. It was a magnificent time. Ask any of us who were there. To the soul, we consider ourselves nothing but blessed.'
    An ancient, honorable boast, and her prerogative.
    'We did an exemplary job,' she assured. 'I won't accept any other verdict. In that first century - despite limited resources, the shadow of war, and the sheer enormity of the job — we mapped more than ninety-nine percent of the ship's interior. And as I could point out, I led the first team to find their way through the plumbing above us, and I was the first to see the sublime beauty of the hydrogen sea below us . . .'
    Washen hid a smile, thinking, A fuel tank is a fuel tank is a fuel tank.
    'Here we are,' the Master announced.
    The projection had shrunk by nearly half. The ship's main fuel tanks we re emerging from the frozen mantl e, appearing as six tiny bumps evenl y spaced along the ship's waist - each tank set directly beneath one of the main ports. The leech habitat was beneath the Master's straightened finger, and on this scale, it was no larger than a fat protozoan.
    'And now, we vanish.'
    Without sound or fuss, another layer of stone was removed. Then, another. And deeper slices of the fuel tanks revealed great spheres filled with hydrogen that changed from a peaceful liquid into a blackish solid, and deeper still, an eerily transparent metal.
    'These hydrogen seas have always been the deepest features,' she commented. 'Below them is nothing but iron and a stew of other metals squashed under fantastic pressures.'
    The ship had been reduced to a smooth black ball — the essential ingredient in a multitude of parlor games.
    'Until now, we knew everything about the core.' The Master paused, allowing herself a knowing grin. 'Clear, consistent evidence proved that when the ship was built, its crust and mande and core were stripped of radionuclides.The goal, we presumed, was to help cool the interior. To make the rock and metal still and predictable. We didn't know how the builders managed their trick, but there was a network of narrow tunnels leading down, branching as they dropped deeper, all reinforced with hyperfiber and energy buttresses.'
    Washen was breathing faster now.