Centered in that screen was Klyber’s pilot. He sat strapped in his chair, his head hanging slack. At first I thought he was reading something. Then I noticed the tell-tale details—white skin with a slight blue tint, the blood blister color of the lips, the frozen eyes—and realized that only his harness held him strapped in his seat. “He’s dead,” I said.
“Shit!” the controller gasped. “Shit! Shit! Shit!
“Oh my God! Emergency station, Mary, mother of God, it’s a ghost ship. Repeat, emergency station, five-Tango-Zulu is a ghost ship. The pilot is dead!” he said. “Holy shit! Mary, mother of God. Repeat, the pilot is dead.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A network of emergency lights flashed red, then green, then white, then yellow around the launch pad. I walked over to the window and watched twelve floors below as emergency teams moved into position around the enormous hangar. Rescue workers piled on to carts and trucks and rode to the outer edge of the locks. Five ambulances arrived and medics set up emergency stations. Watching from the cool, stale environment of the control tower, I saw everything and heard just a shade of the chaos below.
Soft-shells climbed out of rigs and set up emergency equipment. Soft-shells was Marine-ese for spaceport emergency personnel who wore soft armor designed to protect against flames, toxins, and radiation.
Watching them now, I noted their color-coding. Medtechs wore white. Firemen wore yellow. The bomb squad wore black.
“They’ll do what they can,” the colonel said as he took a place beside me to look out the window. He spoke in a near whisper. “We get a lot of crashes when we test prototypes. These guys know how to scramble.”
“The Triple Es are ready,” the traffic controller called from behind us.
“Triple Es?” I asked.
“Emergency evaluation engineers,” the colonel said. “They’ll inspect the ship and board her if possible. Their control room is two floors up. We can watch what they do from there.”
I followed the colonel into the elevator. A moment later, we entered a universe that bore no resemblance to the traffic control floors below. The sterile glare of fluorescent lights lit an endless expanse of cubicles. People didn’t just speak on this floor, they shouted at each other.
“Hey, Clarence, this isn’t a good time. We have a ghost ship,” somebody yelled at the colonel as we stepped off the elevator. A short, chubby man in a messy white shirt and dark blue pants came toward us.
“That’s why we’re here,” the colonel said. “Harris here is familiar with that ship. He’s Klyber’s head of security. Maybe he can help.”
The colonel turned to me. “Just don’t get in the way,” he said. We followed the colonel’s friend into a control room lined with video monitors.
A bank of four monitors along the wall displayed the scene in full color. The first screen showed only Klyber’s ship, which hung in mid-space, silent and motionless. I saw light through the portholes but no movement. Strobe lights along the tail and the wings of the ship flashed white then red.
The next screen showed a five-man security ship approaching the derelict transport from the rear. The security ship was tiny compared to the C-64. It looked like a minnow approaching a whale. I became mesmerized by the glow of the transports’ strobes as it reflected along the hull of the transport . . . red, then white, red, then white. When the security ship shined a powerful searchlight on the hull, the glow of the strobes seemed to vanish.
All of this took place in the eerie silence of space.
The third screen was a close-up of Klyber’s ship, illuminated by the bleaching eye of that searchlight.
“Are you bringing the ship in?” I asked the man who led us to this bank of screens.
“Hell, no. We don’t know what killed them. That ship could be leaking radiation. That’s all I need, a dirty bomb in the middle of my landing field. They could have been killed with some kind of germ agent.”
“You scanned it,” I said to the colonel.
“We must have missed something,” he answered.
“McAvoy.” Somebody stuck his head out of an office and called to the colonel. The colonel walked over to that office for a chat.
“Scanning the target,” a voice said. It came from a small speaker below the bank of screens. The man who led the boarding team pressed a button, changing the view of one of the screens on the wall. “Keep sharp, boys. They ran a scan on this bird before it left the docks and it came up empty.”
“Roger,” the voice said over the speakers. “Scanning for bombs.”
The background in the scanning screen turned red. Everything on the screen turned red. The space around the exterior of the ship was empty and black with a slight red tint. The Mercury Class transport showed a bold red. The nose of the transport turned bright pink as a laser shined on it. Three columns of text appeared across the bottom of the screen displaying an on-the-spot object, substance, and element analysis.
The laser beam moved ever so slowly as it scanned the ship. I watched, nearly needing to bite my tongue to stop myself from screaming. There was no bomb on that ship. If there had been a bomb, the ship would have blown up.
“Harris,” the colonel returned, “you sure you saw Halverson?”
I nodded.
“Rear Admiral Thomas Halverson?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, now feeling a little frustrated. I was tense to begin with, and I did not think there were many admirals in the U.A. Navy with the last name Halverson.
“That can’t be,” the colonel said. “He’s registered as a passenger on Klyber’s ship.”
“You have the passenger manifest?” I asked.
The colonel nodded.
“Can I see it? We might get some answers by comparing the list of passengers with the people we find on the ship.”
“I’ll get a printout,” the colonel said. “And I’ll put out an all-points bulletin for Halverson. If he’s still in the Dry Dock facility, we’ll find him.”
I nodded. “Can you run another DNA search in the apartment they blew up last night?” I asked. “Maybe you missed something. If you find anything, compare it to Halverson’s file.”
“You think that was Halverson?” the colonel asked.
“Or some of his friends,” I said.
“The room was pretty well scorched, but we’ll give it a try.”
“Okay, explosives came up clean. Let’s run for chemicals and anomalies,” the tech at the screens said.
As the chemical scan began, the single color on the screen turned from red to white. A line pulsed across the face of the screen, and a three-dimensional wire frame diagram replaced the video image of the transport. The lines in the image changed color as the security ship scanned for chemicals, radiation, power surges, and temperature fluctuations. This scan moved more quickly, but not by much.
“Can you bring it in now?” I asked.
“No,” the controller said without looking away from his monitor.
“Admiral Klyber could still be alive,” I said.
“We don’t know what happened on that ship. We can’t risk it.”
I felt my insides coiling. I clenched my fists and rapped my knuckles against my thigh.
“Ready to board the ship,” the voice said over the speaker.
I looked back at the screens on the walls. Dry dock emergency must have sent two teams out to the transport, one to run scans and the other to board the ship. The smaller ship, the one that had looked like a minnow beside the C-64, had attached itself to the transport. Now that it sat snuggly connected just behind the cone-shaped cockpit section of the big transport, it looked more like an enormous tick.
This was a civilian operation. Instead of giving orders, the guy at the screen growled suggestions such as, “Let’s have a look.”
The first three screens now showed nothing but static shots of the outside of Admiral Klyber’s transport. All the action took place on the fourth screen, which was mostly dark. This screen showed a helmet came
ra view of the action. It showed the accordion walls and temporary gangway that connected the Triple E ship to the transport. The only light on the screen came from the torches in the evaluation crew’s helmets.
One of the engineers pressed a three-pronged key into a slot on the side of the C-64’s hull, and the hatch opened. There was a brief blast of air as the cabin repressurized. A loud slurping noise blasted over the speakers, then stopped as suddenly as it began.
“Okay, we’re moving in.”
The cabin within was brightly lit. I recognized the ivory-colored carpeting in the quick glance that I got.
“I’ll check the cockpit. You search the ship,” the lead engineer said.
On the screen, the eye of a single torch beam lit the door to the cockpit as a hand came out of nowhere and tried the handle. The door opened.
The pilot and copilot sat upright in their seats, their heads hanging chin to chest as if they were asleep. Lights winked on and off in the dimly-lit space. The pilot’s coloring was off—the blue tones in his skin more pronounced then before. I might have mistaken it for bad lighting had his brownish black hair not looked the right hue.
“Any idea what killed him?” the colonel asked into a microphone.
“I can guess,” the voice over the speaker said. “It seems pretty obvious. Want me to take a tissue sample or wait for the medics to arrive?”
“Take it,” the controller said.
On the screen, the camera drew closer to the pilot. A gloved hand reached under the pilot’s chin and drew his head up. Blank, glassy eyes and blue lips faced the camera. “Any vital signs on your end?”
“He’s dead,” the controller said. “Jab him.”
The gloved hand released the pilot and his head flopped back toward the floor, bobbing with the whiplash of the neck. The gloved hand on the screen dug through a small pouch and produced a plastic packet. The hand tore the packet open and pulled a three-inch long needle with a little hilt on one end.
“God, I hate this shit,” the controller said.
On the screen, the tech pressed the needle into the fleshy area just under the pilot’s jaw. The point was sharp enough to pierce the skin instantly. A single drop of blood formed around the needle as the tech pushed it into the hilt. “You getting a reading?”
“Yeah,” the controller said. “Cardiac arrest.”
“You want me to do the copilot, too?”
“What’s the point?”
“Cardiac arrest?” I asked.
“Means they got electrocuted,” the controller said. He did not look back. Nothing could induce him to take his eyes from the screens.
“Live and learn,” I said to myself.
“We’ve found bodies,” another voice said over a speaker. More screens lit. On one of the new screens, a tech sorted his way through the passengers in the main cabin. This part of Admiral Klyber’s transport had a living room-like décor with couches and padded chairs arranged in intimate clusters and workstations.
The tech shuffled from one passenger to the next, lifting heads and occasionally using a handheld device to check for pulses and other vital signs. Looking at this scene, I remembered attending elementary school at the orphanage and how the teachers sometimes made us put our heads on our desks when we misbehaved. Apparently all of the passengers had misbehaved. One officer had fallen off of a couch and now lay slumped over a coffee table. Whatever had killed these men did not so much as jostle the ship. Nothing had fallen out of place and the three men sitting at the bar had not fallen off their stools.
This guy was not as reverent as his partner in the cockpit. He moved through quickly, moving the bodies as little as possible, and saying, “Dead. This one’s dead, too. Dead. Dead.”
He reached a body in a corner of the cabin. This man’s arm hung in the air like a school kid looking to ask his teacher a question. “This one got flamed,” the tech said over the speaker.
The man’s hair and uniform had apparently caught on fire. The flames had singed his skin, burning it up like a log in a fire. The face, with its lips parted to reveal a skeletal smile, was unidentifiable.
Back on the first screen, the engineer in the cockpit took readings using the C-64’s sensors. He took an air reading. “High ozone. High carbon dioxide. You reading this?”
“I see it,” the controller said.
“Am I cleared to retrieve the ship?”
“Unless one of the passengers objects’,” the controller said.
Both men laughed.
“What did he find?” I asked.
“Ozone,” said the emergency systems operator. “That means the broadcast engine malfunctioned.”
I did not understand the relationship between the broadcast engine and ozone. “How do you know it was the broadcast engine?” I asked.
“Ozone is what you get when you fire up a broadcast engine.”
“How do you know it malfunctioned?” I asked.
“They’re dead, ain’t they?” the operator quipped.
I could not argue with that one.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The colonel had a cart waiting for us at the bottom of the control tower. An MP drove us out to the edge of the docks, and there we waited for ten long minutes while the tower guided Admiral Klyber’s C-64 transport in through the aperture.
Through the wavy lens of the electroshields, I saw the big Mercury-class transport sidle into the aperture. It entered the landing bay nose first, then hung in the air for several seconds, its bloated fuselage swaying slightly like a chandelier in a breeze.
“What is a ghost ship?” I asked the MP.
“Dead crew,” he said.
“And the passengers?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged as he spoke. “Once the crew is dead there’s not much hope for the passengers.”
Landing gear extended from the bottom of Klyber’s “ghost ship” as it dropped down to the deck on the other side of the lock. Before this moment, I had never appreciated the sheer bulk of a C-64. The rods that held the landing gear were four inches in diameter, as big around as a mortar shell. The struts were thick as beer bottles. The ship was solid but it looked like an apparition through the turbulent veil of the electroshields. I watched it closely as I pulled on the blue soft-shell jacket of a civilian security man.
“What the speck do you think you’re doing?” somebody barked at me. I turned around to see the head of Golan Dry Docks emergency services, a slightly chubby man with a thick neck and a spiky buzz cut. He was a civilian, and he apparently had very little respect for the military.
“Lay off, Smith,” the colonel said. “He’s with me.”
“That’s just what I need, a damned Liberator running around loose in my operation.” The man’s face turned a deep red as he spoke. He lowered his voice but his tone remained unreasonable. Since the Golan facility was a public sector operation, this man undoubtedly outranked the colonel.
Struggling to keep control of his temper, the colonel zipped the front of his soft-shell coat closed. The quarter-inch-thick plasticized material was just stiff enough to form a tent-like slope over his shoulders. Frowning fiercely, he said, “Harris is Klyber’s head of security. He has the right to be here.”
“He doesn’t have shit in my landing bay,” the emergency services chief snapped.
“I’ll take responsibility for him,” the colonel said.
“Then it’s your ass,” the chief said. He looked down at the tarmac and shook his head.
While they had this conversation, the transport rolled through the first gate of the docks. Once that sealed behind it, the second electroshield opened and the C-64 pulled within a few feet of the emergency teams.
Five medics boarded the transport first. The colonel and I came in on their heels. They stopped to inspect the bodies in the main cabin, an area that looked more like the executive suite of a luxury hotel than the interior of a military transport. The soothing soft light of table lamps illuminated the cabi
n.
Even in my emergency armor I could smell the acrid scent of ozone, the smell of overheated batteries, and charged copper wires, as I entered the cabin. This smell was soon drowned out by a stronger scent—the dusty smell of burned meat. Two medics crouched in front of the charred body in the corner of the cabin.
I hurried across the thick ivory-colored carpeting and past the living room fixtures and entered a hall that led to the rear of the craft. I had traveled with Bryce Klyber in the past. He always reserved a private cabin for himself in the rear of the ship. I knew where I would find him.
Two Marines—clones—had stood guard by his door. Both men had collapsed in place, their M27s still strapped across their shoulders. The color of their faces had turned to a deep violet, and their black tongues hung from their mouths. I did not have time to feel sorry for them. That might come later, though I doubted it would. Pity and empathy were emotions that seldom troubled me.
The door to Klyber’s cabin was locked. Without looking back to the colonel for permission, I kicked the door open. The door swished across the carpeting, stirring a small cloud of dust. I touched the surface of the door then looked at my glove. A fine layer of dust covered the tip of my finger.
“Ash,” a medical tech said as he and a partner squeezed past the colonel and entered the narrow hallway. They carried a stretcher. “It’s everywhere in here . . . the carpets, the walls, the bodies.”
Hearing the word “bodies,” I snapped out of my haze. I watched for a moment as the medics pulled one of the guards onto their stretcher, then I turned and entered Admiral Klyber’s cabin. I spotted the admiral immediately.
The room was a perfect cube—fifteen feet in every direction. It had a captain’s bed built into one wall and a workstation built into another. Bryce Klyber sat flaccid at his desk, still wearing his whites, the gold epilates gleaming across his hunched shoulders. The admiral’s head lay on the desk, his left cheek resting on the keyboard of his computer, his blue-black lips spread slightly apart and his swollen black tongue lolling out. Klyber’s bright blue eyes stared at the wall across the room.
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