Without warning, the image on Nicole's compad was overwhelmed by a blinding series of colored strobe lights; at the same time, audio reception disintegrated in a deafening yowl of static.
"Ciari," Nicole yelled. " Ben!"
" 'S'all right, boss—'m'all right," came the reply as the fierce light show vanished as suddenly as it had begun. " Whew! That was a treat. Hang on, I need a sec to regain my bearings. I have spots big as houses in front of my eyes."
"Your helmet polarizers didn't work?"
"Happened too fast. I'm not harmed, though. There's a gas filling the lock. I think this must be some form of decontamination process. The special effects are probably meant to stop an intruder dead in its tracks...."
"...and thereby give the crew sufficient time to prepare an appropriate welcome," Nicole finished, "as well as a comparatively tractable specimen to cope with."
"Something like that. Want me to go on?"
"No choice, Ben. We sure as hell can't go back. But stay loose."
"As always. I'm trying the inner hatch. Nope. No joy, Nicole. I'm stuck until the decontamination process runs its course."
Fifteen endless, frustrating minutes later, the inner hatch hissed sideways into its bulkhead and Ciari stepped gingerly into a well-lit, antiseptically clean corridor. The hatch automatically closed behind him, both audio and video communication suffering considerably as a result.
"Ben," Nicole called, "our picture's lousy; we can hardly see for all the snow and interference. What do things look like to you?"
"I'm in a corridor," he replied, speaking slowly, and carefully enunciating every word. Even so, the others had to strain to understand him. "It's width and height are the same as the airlock's; my Ranger scans its length as fifteen meters. There are various modules built into the vertical bulkheads, all labeled with pictographs as well as more detailed directions, at least, that's what I assume they are, in the Alien language. Aha—paydirt!" he crowed. "One of them is a suit locker. I'm opening it. Can you see what I've found?!"
"Not very well."
"Hana and I were right. They're humanoid, and smaller than us. Their pressure suits aren't very bulky at all; ours look like tanks by comparison. Superb engineering. I wonder how they did it? I wonder what they use for armor?"
"Marshal...," Nicole muttered.
"I get the hint. Moving right along. The module next door holds portable tanks, probably air. Another module holds medical supplies, complete with gurney. Very sensible. They assume that anyone using an emergency airlock will probably need assistance. I wish I could take a look at their tools. They'd tell us a lot about them. But the surgical kit is sealed. I think I'd better leave it be. There's another hatch at the far end of the corridor but I don't want to proceed until the rest of you join me. The deeper on-board I go, the worse communications gets."
"I copy," Nicole told him. "We're on our way.""
"Interesting set-up," Hana said. "A double 'lock system. They can allow someone aboard, and even treat their wounds, without violating the integrity of the rest of the spacecraft. Want to bet, Nicole, those two compartments are lousy with monitors?"
"Keep your money. I don't know which would be worse, though, an empty ship or meeting a live crew. Andrei, as soon as we're aboard, activate the MapMaker; hopefully, it'll keep us from getting lost." The MapMaker was a portable inertia! tracking computer; already programmed with an external plot of the starship, it would mark their progress through that vessel, showing their position both in relation to their starting point—the airlock—and the other hull. Literally each step they took would be recorded in its memory banks. It was said that the MapMaker was a foolproof guarantee against getting lost. Nicole fervently hoped it lived up to its reputation.
Their first hours aboard were slow and uneventful. Beyond the inner compartment was another corridor, running fore and aft for over a hundred meters in either direction. Again, this corridor was wide and high, designed, they concluded, for quick, easy transit through the ship.
"Courteous of them to leave their lights on," Andrei remarked soon after they began their explorations.
"I hate to burst your bubble, tovarisch," Ciari chuckled, "but they didn't. My sensors registered a slight power surge as I stepped out of the airlock; that's when the place lit up. Before that, it was as dark in here as intergalactic space."
"Have you noticed," Andrei asked, almost rhetorically, "how similar this layout is to that of our own starcraft?"
"Basic principles of spatial engineering and physics have to be the same," replied the Marshal. "Stands to reason the design would follow suit."
"Y'ask me," Hana grumbled with a shake of the head and a worried twist to her mouth, "I'd feel a whole lot more secure if the beings who built this bucket were the traditional slithery, slimy, tentacled, bug-eyed monsters."
"Whyever so?"
"Because, Andrei, if they look like us, and build like us, they might also think like us, and have the same instinctive, maybe irrational, reaction to uninvited guests."
"The 'Goldilocks Syndrome'?" Nicole asked with a grin.
"Go ahead, boss, make fun. But for a supposed derelict, this ship is in pretty good shape."
"End of the line, all," Ciari announced from up ahead. "Found something?" Nicole queried. "See for yourself."
A massive hatch blocked the corridor. Like everything else they'd seen, it was marked with both the Alien written language and their basic pictographs, stenciled across the face of the door in garish, iridescent paint. Above the hatch, bright lights pulsed. The meaning appeared obvious: NO ADMITTANCE.
"Nicole," Ciari suggested, "activate your external receiver."
She heard nothing, and told him so. "Shift your reception range up into ultrasonic levels," he directed. And she winced as a piercing, banshee wail sliced through her skull, pulsing in sync with the lights. "Thanks a lot," she growled, after reducing the gain.
"Sorry, really. But you see what that means, don't you? This is a blunt, basic warning—'keep away'—yet the aural component of it is pitched far higher than the human ear can hear."
"Um," Nicole murmured, stepping forward to the hatch and placing her gloved hand flat against it. "The door's coated with a thin sheen of ice. I wouldn't be surprised if the far side is a hard, cold vacuum."
"Open to space?" Hana asked.
"Yah. There's a cross-corridor twenty meters back; let's head down there. I'd like to find some living quarters and control centers."
"Nicole," Andrei said, "a reminder—these are fifty kilosec airpacks. We have another fifty-pack apiece cached at the airlock with the rest of the supplies. After that, we either breathe the local atmosphere or return to the Command Module for more."
"Hana, your responsibilities are LifeSystems; anything nasty in the air?"
"Not really my field, Nicole, and these scanners can only handle a basic analysis."
"I know that. But have you found anything to dispute Marshal Ciari's initial findings?"
Hana shook her head.
They moved forward now, their steps taking them towards the central core of the starship. As they went, they discovered that the line of sealed bulkheads moved with them, slashing diagonally across the heart of the great vessel. When they finally finished charting its progress, Andrei figured that roughly half the starcraft lay open to space.
The flight deck proved to be a surprise, a strange mixture of pragmatic design and sensual indulgence. There were seven primary control stations: four side-by-side along the forward-most lateral bulkhead, then two more set four meters behind them, flanking a massive central console built on a low dais so that it stood higher than the others. These three formed an equilateral triangle and in the space between them was a huge sphere, four meters in diameter, half its bulk above deck level, half below. It was a hologram tank, now deactivated and dark, looking for all the world like a giant fortune teller's crystal ball.
There were secondary consoles lining the rear bulkhead, on either side
of the open airlock through which the four astronauts entered. Just behind what they all assumed was the Command Console—the one in the center of the bridge—was a circular opening in the deck with a fireman's pole set in the middle of it, leading down to a subordinate compartment. Ciari turned himself upside down and, rifle pointing the way, swam down to scout it out.
"Neat as my father's study," Andrei commented. No one argued the point, though Nicole thought, too neat, and felt a cold trickle of fear at the base of her spine.
"They can't have expected an explosion of that magnitude," she said, mostly to herself, as the three of them spread out through the compartment. Andrei unclipped his Hasselblad camera from its chest harness and began shooting pictures of everything in sight, while Hana leaned over a console, jumping back as a scanscreen flared to life, flashing a stream of incomprehensible data at her before switching off again.
"Didyouseethat," she yelped, making the sentence a single word.
"Whatever else one can say about this vessel," Andrei told Nicole gravely, "it is not dead."
"And if the ship isn't," Nicole nodded, "What right have we to assume the crew is? Everything we've seen is as tidy as if she'd just left on her maiden voyage. Look at this flight deck, for Christ's sake! Regardless of what happened, enough of the crew remained alive to clean house and ensure that the functioning on-board systems maintained perfect or near perfect operation."
"Maybe they had cleaning robots?" Hana suggested.
"Seen any?"
"Good domestics are, by their very nature, discreet. And maybe it's their day off?"
Nicole snorted. Andrei looked at his chronometer and announced: "Fifteen kilosecs left on these airpacks, Nicole. A little over four hours. We should consider returning soon to the airlock for our reserves."
"I copy, Andrei. Ben, anything below?"
"Lots more consoles, what look like active automatic monitoring systems. Damned if I've a notion what they're monitoring, though, life support, environment, power? They must have had one helluva fire. An entire wall is scorched, together with a bank of consoles, a couple of them completely gutted."
"Okay. We'll try to puzzle out the mysteries on the flip side. Come on up. We're going back for our spares."
She wasn't expecting trouble. The starship was so huge, so empty; subconsciously, they'd all started believing that it was deserted, as much a derelict as Wanderer.
The first Nicole knew of anything wrong was when Ciari's hushed, overly calm and controlled voice came over the combat scrambler circuit of her suit, for her ears only; Hana and Andrei didn't hear a thing as they kept happily poking and puttering about, more excited by their explorations than they'd dare let on.
"Nicole," Ciari hissed, "don't make a move. Not one. Freeze."
"What is it?"
"Have the others freeze. Then you pivot real, real slow. And whatever you do, woman, please do not make even a hint of a move towards your gun."
Nicole thought she'd felt heart and guts turn to ice before, but those sensations were nothing compared to what she experienced now as she realized what had to have occurred for Ciari to talk and act like this. She tapped her chin gently against the com control inside her helmet, activating the ALL HANDS/SCRAMBLED circuit.
"On my mark," she said, marveling at how normal she sounded, "freeze!" She breathed a sigh of thanks as her people did as they were told.
"What is it, Nicole?" Hana asked.
"Dunno. But I'm about to find out. Just stay loose and stay frozen—and wish me luck."
Wondering, absurdly, if her next move would get them all killed, Nicole tapped her foot gently against the casing of the Command Console. Slowly, her weightless body spun clockwise towards the rear of the flight deck. Her hands were by her sides; she left them there, painfully aware that her right hand was within centimeters of her holstered pistol.
She saw Ciari, half in, half out of the deck opening, his back to her, and then she saw what stood beyond him. For a moment, her mind refused to function, only instinct prompting her to shift her left leg slightly, snagging her boot against the console's base to brake her spin. For eight hours, they'd wandered the length and breadth of the Alien starship, wondering what its masters looked like and what had happened to them. Now, in a sense, both questions had been answered.
The Aliens lined the rear bulkhead, most of them concentrated in and around the airlock, barely two meters from Ciari. They were armed and, if looks meant anything, they were very, very angry.
Chapter Ten
Nicole's first thought was that the Aliens looked cute.
They were smaller than human norms. The bigger ones—Nicole assumed they were the males—averaged about a hundred seventy centimeters in height, the females roughly a hundred fifty. But what the males lacked in stature, they made up for in bulk. Their bodies were broad and hard, sleek muscles rippling under snug uniforms. They watched Nicole and Ciari with painful, unwavering intensity, and Nicole was certain that their strength and speed probably matched the best the astronauts had to offer.
They were a feline race, their features dominated by great, almost luminous eyes. Their faces and, Nicole presumed, their bodies underneath their clothes, were covered by a very fine layer of fur, increasing in length and thickness around their heads, much like human hair. Nicole noted patterns to the fur, subtle and distinct variations in color laid out in a myriad of designs, each unique. Are the designs natural or artificial? she wondered. Perhaps they can change them the same way we get our hair styled?
The ears were small and elegantly formed, set back and partway down the sides of the skull, their tips rising to sharp, curved points, and the fur around them was styled so that they blended in. The noses were broad, as with the Terrestrial cats Nicole had known all her life, but their faces were no more prominent in relation to those small mammals than Nicole's was in relation to her own simian forebears. Their mouths looked as mobile and expressive as Nicole's own.
With a start, she realized that, even at a casual glance, she had no trouble telling the Aliens apart; they were as distinctly individual as human beings.
One of them—a female, shorter and slighter than Hana yet possessing an innate sense of dignity and force of will that reminded Nicole of General Canfield—stepped forward. A big male caught her arm, snarling something in a low, rumbling voice and gesturing towards the astronauts; the female hissed back, breaking his grip easily as she faced Nicole and Ciari.
"Nicole," Hana called on the scrambled command circuit, "what's happening? I feel like a sitting duck here." Nicole saw a slight stir among the Aliens, heads moving, whispers exchanged, looks flashing at her and Hana. Christ, she thought, they're picking up our signals!
"You are a sitting duck, dummy," Nicole replied in a hurried whisper, moving her lips as little as possible. "Make a move and we're history. We're in the middle of the 'Goldilocks Syndrome'..."
"Hei!"
"Exactly. Deep in it. Stay frozen and stay quiet—they can hear us—till I give the word. Copy?"
"Copy. Good luck, Nicole."
She allowed herself the smallest of smiles, thankful now she'd worn a transparent helmet instead of one of the opaque, gold-anodized models. The Aliens could see her as much as she could them, which meant they had at least some idea of the physical nature of their surprise guests. And that, Nicole fervently hoped, might make them a little less suspicious and trigger-happy. Heaven only knows, she thought, what they make of Ciari, all in black. Have they scanned him? Do they figure he's some robot?
The female was looking at her. Nicole met that gaze, looking her up and down with equal intensity. Her fur was silver, high-lighted by patterns of indigo that were beautiful in their stark, pure simplicity. Her hair was longer than that of her companions, curving down her neck and back like a leonine mane. She wore a close-fitting, one-piece shipsuit of some silken material that managed to be both functional and attractive. It was short-sleeved, the indigo designs continuing down her arms to her han
ds. There were various patches on the suit, Nicole assuming that they corresponded to the insignia attached to her pressure suit. Like all her companions, the female had no tail; unlike them, she was unarmed.
She took a step forward and opened her arms, palms empty, held facing Nicole.
Nicole swallowed, swallowed again, and slowly stepped away from the Command Console, into the full view of the Aliens.
"Nicole?" Ciari said softly. "Can you see me, Ben?"
"Affirmative. Be real careful how you move. The one out front looks cool, but some of the clowns in the background are very edgy."
"Thanks. They know we're talking."
"I know."
"I'm dropping my gunbelt."
First, she mimicked the female's moves, lifting her arms away from her body and opening her hands, palms facing outward. Then, with infinite care, she reached her left hand towards the buckle of her equipment belt. The Aliens reacted immediately, one of them bringing a rifle-like weapon up. Nicole wanted to close her eyes, positive that in another split second, she was going to die. Ciari didn't move a muscle—even though, in his powered armor, he could have cut the opposition to pieces in the blink of an eye. The humans were the intruders here; they had to prove to the Aliens that they were friendly, and could be trusted.
Before the warrior could bring his weapon fully to bear, however, the female blocked it with a hand, using a blinding speed that brought a silent whistle of awe to Nicole's lips. The female snarled at the offending male, then turned on the others to snarl at them. Backs stiffened and fur ruffled under the obvious tongue-lashing, but when it was done, pistols returned to their holsters and rifles stayed at rest. Another command sent them off the flight deck, swimming fast, and with incredible grace, through the air, to be replaced by a trio of warriors clad in what had to be the Alien equivalent of combat armor.
"Terrific," Nicole breathed. Her arms and hands ached with the tension of keeping them frozen in position, and she grimaced as she realized that her palms were wet. She had itches she didn't dare scratch and the more she tried not to think about how uncomfortable she felt, the worse those feelings became.
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