Ghosts of the Vale

by Paul Grover

  In the centre of the viewport lay a dark sphere, occasionally lit by discharges of blue energy snaking over its surface. Aside from the energy waves it was a flat black, darker than space around it.

  “A hole in the sky…” Mira whispered.

  When she was a child, maybe four or five years old, she had seen a halo around the moon. To her it had looked like a giant hole in the sky with the moon at the bottom. It was not long before the family had left London, bound for the Cape.

  Mira glanced at Tish. She stared into the black nothing of the Mothernode, her lips moving silently.

  “Mira, I don’t like it here… this place is wrong.”

  “It’s okay, Tish. I understand.”

  Rich Barnes came onto the deck.

  “Man, that is weird shit,” Barnes said. “Reminds of Arethon.”

  Barnes had vocalised what she was thinking. A low-level vibration pulsed through her bones. She could not decide if it were real or imagined.

  “I can’t believe I’m seeing a Dyson Sphere… It’s incredible,” Alex said. “That’s next century technology for us.”

  Mira stole a glance at Alex. His eyes were wide with wonder. Despite her misgivings she was equally awed by the alien megastructure. The object was dauntingly big. If it were Earth’s sun at the centre, the Second Chance would be somewhere between the Asteroid Belt and Jupiter.

  Settling down was a pipe dream.

  This is what tramps like us live for.

  Mira completed the FTL drive shutdown.

  “Fire up the sensor suite, Tish. We should pull all the data we can on this… whatever it is. Let’s launch the Swarm.”

  Tish tapped in a command sequence. Pods attached to either side of the ship’s hull opened, releasing 500,000 tiny probes.

  The swarm probes raced toward the sphere, forming a network as they went. They would gather data on the object and closely survey the surface. The swarm had immense processing power, distributed between each solitary device.

  “How long before we have a full picture?” Barnes asked, his voice as edgy as Mira felt.

  “About eight hours. There are a lot of probes but the object is big,” Tish said, her voice brittle.

  Mira reached across and touched her hand. “It’ll be okay… I’m scared too. We can get through this.”

  Tish replied with a nervous nod.

  Mira pushed her seat back and unclipped her belts.

  “Wait!” Tish said. “I am detecting something… a signal, a distress beacon!” Her fingers danced across the touchscreens. A square appeared on the HUD showing a vessel in low polar orbit.

  Mira tapped into the sensor suite. The IFF identified the vessel as the DSSV Carl Sagan, a Halley class research frigate.

  “It’s an audio beacon on a loop,” she said.

  Mira patched the feed through flight deck speakers.

  “….This is second officer Simon Walsh of the Carl Sagan… We are in trouble… Our containment systems have broken… Our ship is compromised…. We need help… transmitting coordinates… This is science officer Simon Walsh of the DSSV Carl…”

  The message looped twice before Mira shut it off.

  “The Torrence encountered that vessel. It was the source of the nano cloud,” Mira said, her tone flat.

  “The Sagan must have set down on the node; they may have useful data.”

  Mira thought of the enviro-suited intruders on the Torrence and the empty core caddy and shivered.

  Is there another vessel out here? One with hostile intent?

  “Alex, can you raise them? Try every frequency, twice.”

  He opened a comms app and broadcast a standard message. Mira turned back to the viewport. Alex’s voice was a comforting drone in the background.

  “Nothing,” Alex said. “I’m not detecting any emissions from her either. Her reactor is running but there are no active or passive sensor outputs save for the distress beacon. We should check it out.”

  “And bring the contagion onboard?” Barnes replied, his voice level but laced with concern.

  “If we keep our suits on and level one decontaminate on return, we should be okay,” Mira said, hoping she was right.

  “Bring us alongside, Tish.”

  Tish nervously increased the power.

  The journey to the ship took fifteen minutes. Monica joined them on the deck.

  “How big is that thing?” she asked.

  “Big enough to hold the inner planets and then some,” Alex replied.

  Mira continued scanning the viewports for the first glimpse of the Sagan. A speck of light moved against the darkness.

  “I can see her running lights,” Mira said, pointing to high starboard.

  “From here?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah, my new eyes are good.”

  An alarm sounded; the ship shook.

  “What was that Tish?” Mira asked. Her hands tightened on the yoke.

  “Ionising radiation, there is a… I don’t know what to call it… It’s like a weather system around this thing. That was an electro-plasma discharge,” Tish replied.

  “Is it dangerous?” Barnes asked.

  “It could be. A powerful blast has the potential to hole us.”

  Mira tried to dismiss the thought and watched as they closed on the Sagan.

  Tish programmed a refined nav point and pulled the ship onto an intercept vector. Mira matched their relative velocity to the research ship. She edged the ship closer and rolled for optimum viewing.

  “Hit the lights, Tish,” Mira said.

  Tish flicked a bank of switches on her console and lit up the ship’s spotlights. The powerful xenon lamps painted the Sagan with an unsympathetic blue-white light.

  Alex gasped from behind her.

  The ship should have followed standard human design philosophy of a rectangular steel fuselage with engines at the stern and a raised section at the bow housing the command deck. The Sagan was now an echo of the designer’s original concept. Thick black roots burst through the hull. They ran forward and aft, twisted over themselves and bored in and out of the hull plating. All four starboard airlocks were open, lit from inside by the ship’s emergency lighting system.

  “They vented her…” Tish whispered.

  “I guess they wanted to flush the nanos… It didn’t work,” Mira added. “The reactor is still running, so I guess it happened fast.”

  “When I was a kid,” Alex said. “There was woodland surrounding my school. I found a 20th century car abandoned there. A tree had grown though it and the roots snaked around it. That ship reminds me of it.”

  “Creepy as fuck,” Mira whispered.

  “Poetic as ever, Thorny,” he added.

  Mira pulled her gaze from the viewport.

  “Alex and Rich, suit up. We can’t risk powered suits. There is too much energy out there. We go in traditionally, using a line.” She paused. “Ask Shannon if she wants to take a walk with us.”

  Tish grabbed her hand.

  “Don’t go! I have a bad feeling, Mira.”

  “I feel it too, Tish. I won’t leave you. I’m coming back, okay? For you, for Eden, for Zoe and for Reece.”

  Another thought occurred to her.

  “Tish, we are out here and no one knows where we are. Can you fire a high-speed burst message to Jon? Copy it to Xander’s drop box too.”

  It would be hours, more likely days before either got the message but at least they would know where to look if it all went wrong.

  Tish swivelled in her seat.

  “Be careful.”

  “I will,” Mira replied. “We have that promise.”

  When Mira arrived at the airlock, Shannon was completing her suit set up; Alex was checking the seals and helping her attach the helmet. When he finished, he stepped back and gave her a thumbs up.

  “Don’t mind me,” Mira said, slipping off her jacket and pulling her t-shirt over her head.

  “Mira!” Alex said.

  “I don’t think an
y of you are sexual deviants, so take it as a compliment, Alex.”

  Alex turned his back while Mira suited up. Barnes helped her pull it over her shoulders and checked her seals. She returned the favour checking his suit for him.

  “Everyone good?” Barnes asked.

  “Yes,” they responded in unison.

  A broad smile lit up Gunny Barnes’ face.

  “Then let’s do this shit.”

  Despite the risks it was the happiest Mira had seen Barnes since Mars. Tish had told her how he used Moonlight to rescue 30 people from sealed compartments on the station; when she had asked him about it he brushed it off. For Rich Barnes battles were supposed to be tooth and nail fights to the death, not button pushes on a console.

  Barnes punched the control for the outer lock and it irised open.

  Mira swayed and took a deep breath of sterile NitOx. Open space always got her that way. A discharge of energy hit the Sagan. Arcs of blue sparks wrapped around the hull, lighting the growths with a surreal blue light.

  Mira keyed her link. “Tish?”

  “Mira there is a lot of ionised energy in this area. The swarm is mapping the energy field. I should be able to track the discharges shortly. The one that just hit was random… please be careful.”

  “Okay.” She closed the link and stepped forward.

  “Listen up, we are about 100 metres from the ship. We are clear of the energy field but Tish is seeing rogue discharges; we do not want to be in open space for longer than we need to be.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to go over first?” Barnes asked.

  “I’m on it, breaking into derelict ships is a speciality,” Mira replied. She could hear the false bravado in her voice.

  The Sagan floated in the hard vacuum ahead of her. The corrupted grey hull illuminated by Second Chance’s lights.

  Barnes raised a magnetic harpoon and fired it toward the damaged vessel. A green strobe blinked, showing a positive connection. He mounted the other end to the bulkhead.

  Mira clipped her suit onto the line and pushed off toward the Sagan. She glanced behind and saw Alex’s suit light pursuing her.

  The hull came up faster than she expected and she hit hard. Gasping for breath, she struggled to activate her mag boots. Alex arrived a few seconds later and helped steady her.

  “You okay, Thorny?”

  “Yeah, fine. You’re good at this. You judged the distance better than I did.”

  “It’s always easier going second. I saw what a complete mess you made of your landing and changed my approach,” he replied.

  Mira wanted to flip him off, but her suit’s gloves made the gesture impossible.

  “Come on over, let’s get the party started,” she said over the public channel. Shannon came next; Barnes arrived just after. When they were in the airlock, Mira sealed it.

  Alex located a console; he brushed the ice crystals off it and typed a command sequence. The lights flickered.

  “I’m closing all the open locks and restarting the air circulation. I know we’re staying suited, but it’s safer.”

  Mira’s weight increased as the gravity came back on.

  “I’m leaving it at half a G, so things are not too hard on us,” he added. “Watch the floors. They will be slippery when the temperature rises.”

  Mira led the way through the inner door; Foglets swarmed in the air, thicker and denser than on the Torrence.

  The ship was lit by emergency lighting. The main lights flickered anaemically. A sheen of ice covered every surface.

  “I guess these are your Nanos?” Alex asked, stirring the air with his hand. The Foglets swarmed around his glove and glowed as they danced.

  Ahead of them two bodies lay on the floor, both corrupted by roots and frozen solid by exposure to the vacuum.

  Barnes knelt and inspected the first, then the second.

  “Look at the wounds on this guy.” Barnes pointed to bare forearms and what was left of the corpse’s face. “These scratches look like he was defending himself.”

  Barnes rolled the man’s head to one side. A prominent bite mark could be seen on his neck.

  “Fuck,” Mira said. “They tore each other apart.”

  “This was the attacker.” Barnes pointed to the other body. “He was put down with an energy weapon.”

  Mira stared at the bodies, trying to piece together the events from precious little evidence.

  “So you’re saying this guy was crazy and he attacked this guy.” She pointed at the victim. “Using his hands and teeth?”

  “And someone shot him, but it was too late?” Alex completed her train of thought.

  “That’s what I would say,” Barnes said, flatly.

  It was barbaric… inhuman… alien.

  The light flickered.

  Ghostlike figures coalesced from the air around them. They were fighting each other using bare hands. A man carrying a laser weapon ran through Alex. He turned and fired. Alex ducked.

  “What the fuck?” he yelled.

  The figures faded.

  “The cloud records events,” Mira said by way of an explanation.

  “The crew turned on each other?” Barnes asked.

  “The colony uses a living host to reproduce. I wonder if it alters the behaviour of the people it infects… Maybe it spreads more effectively like this.”

  It was conjecture. Mira had seen foglets emerge from the corpse on Baikonur and Zenia had told her the Blackened used the technology for destruction.

  Between roots consuming the ship and the crew tearing each other apart, it’s an effective weapon…

  Mira shrugged with her hands; a dismissive gesture used by those used to wearing EVA suits. She walked to the deck chart mounted on the wall opposite the airlock and studied the configuration of the Sagan. Four decks; crew accommodation was in the lower two. The upper deck was devoted to science labs and the mid deck, on which they stood, the main operational section.

  The ship’s main lights were flickering into life. The external temperature was -53 Celsius and rising steadily. She deactivated her mag boots and bounced on her heels to get a feel for the artificial gravity. The others did the same. Only Shannon remained still. Mira had to remind herself this was only Shannon’s second spacewalk.

  “Gunny, you and Alex head for the flight deck; see if you can download her core. Shannon and I will go to the labs,” she said. “I know it’s grim but try to film the bodies. It might help us work out what happened here.”

  She activated her helmet camera and called Tish.

  “Tish, I going to look at the science stuff. You are smarter than me; tell me if I am missing anything.”

  “Affirm. Picking up your feed five by five. Stop looking at Shannon’s boobs,” Tish replied.

  “I wasn’t! She’s in a suit…” Mira shook her head, glad for the relief.

  “Don’t do that either; it makes my head spin,” Tish added. The camera was mounted on the top of her helmet on a gimbal that tacked Mira’s head movements.

  “Okay, I think I preferred it when we had a voice only link. Tish, we might need to record some seriously fucked up shit. Just be aware okay?”

  Tish clicked the com-link twice to acknowledge.

  Mira took a final look at the schematic and headed aft. The roots were thick and interwoven, mostly they ran fore to aft. Occasionally they had to duck under one crossing the ship laterally. They encountered six more bodies, some so corrupted they were little more than piles of organic material.

  Shannon played her suit lamp over the roots.

  “They are following the lines of the ship,” she said.

  Before Mira could reply, Tish cut in.

  “Simple engineering; they have maximum space to grow if they follow the long axis.”

  Mira thanked her, choosing not to mention that at the end of each root would be an exploded human carcass.

  They found other bodies. Most had wounds from small arms fire, while others bore the marks of physical str
uggles.

  Ghosts appeared as they walked, re-enacting grisly hand to hand battles. They barely phased Mira.

  “Are you okay, Shannon?” she asked. “This must be pretty freaky.”

  “Fine, it’s fascinating. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Mira knelt next to the body of a young woman. Something hung from her mouth. She staggered and fell when she realised it was an ear.

  “I thought I was getting used to this… evidently not,” she muttered as Shannon helped her to her feet.

  They arrived at a stairwell clogged with growth. Mira pushed through. She helped Shannon squeeze after her and they arrived on the upper deck.

  The lab was fully open. Plexiglass walls separated the work areas into discreet zones. Roots had invaded the entire facility.

  Ghosts appeared, running toward the stairwell and vanishing as they reached it.

  “So what is this stuff?” Shannon asked, tapping a root.

  “I can only guess what the makeup of it is, but it looks organic, don’t you think?” Mira replied.

  A voice crackled in Mira’s ear.

  “They are calcium carbonate with elements drawn from the hull; I’m not aware of a human equivalent,” Tish said. “What do you suppose happened here?”

  “I’m guessing a failed experiment. The Torrence crew must have picked up their distress call, as we did.” Mira pointed at black lettering on one wall, written in a rough hand.

  JACK LAWSON - DSSV TORRENCE

  THIS SHIP IS DEAD

  DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME

  “Lawson was the data analyst on the Torrence,” Tish confirmed.

  Our missing man… Mira thought.

  They walked on in silence. Mira was looking for a master terminal.

  “So what made you want to join up with us, Shannon?” Mira asked suddenly, not knowing why. “This isn’t exactly the safest job in the galaxy.”

  “Once a risk taker, always a risk taker, I guess. In all seriousness I think it’s because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah… you remember Angelo De Silva?”

  “Hell yeah, until you came along he was the best racer in J1.”

  “My rookie season was with the J-Spark team. He was my team mate. Third race out he had a suit malfunction and hit the ground hard.”