by Mel Keegan
“Take your time,” Richard warned. “Twelve thousand tracking marks. One Ebrezjim. It’s going to take a while to find the needle in this particular haystack … Lai’a!”
“I have been examining objects since my deep scan completed,” Lai’a said unconcernedly. “Only two thousand mapped traces are large enough to be the remains of the Ebrezjim. I am matching scan profiles with the specifications of the Resalq vessel. Given that Captain Rabelais and the ship’s service drones undocked the engine deck, the Ebrezjim will be easily identified by this profile. However, it is not currently within scan range. Transspace drive is operational; I have already commenced routine search procedures.”
As it spoke, the deck began to thrum with the now familiar vibration of the hyper-Weimann drive. The ship was moving – fast, if Marin was any judge, though the navigation tank remained utterly black.
A perplexed look settled on Vaurien’s face and he tilted his head at Shapiro. “Are you sure you wanted a captain along on this jaunt?”
“Absolutely sure,” Shapiro told him, though he chuckled. “Lai’a is more than capable of handling itself and any technical aspect of the expedition. The human element is something else. Lai’a, can you estimate how long it’ll take to locate the Ebrezjim?”
“Not to any degree of accuracy, General. I have no information regarding the point at which the Ebrezjim transited the temporal horizon, so I cannot estimate its drift vector.”
“Suppose you had to grid-search the whole lagoon,” Shapiro coaxed, “at good speed, with scan platforms configured for maximum range.”
“Four hours, at current speed,” Lai’a said promptly. “It is equally possible for me to locate the Ebrezjim in one minute, or 240 minutes.”
“Best guess, a couple of hours, give or take,” Shapiro decided. “I’m going to get a shower, a meal and some rest. Richard, give me a buzz when Lai’a finds the wreck. I’d like to watch this.”
“Decontamination will be complete in 28 minutes,” Lai’a added. “In armor, humans and Resalq will be able to safely tolerate residual radiation levels in 22 minutes, with a decontamination penalty upon return.”
“How long a penalty?” Dario growled.
“No less than five minutes,” Lai’a warned.
“I can live with that.” Tor was moving. “Gives us plenty of time to check out the hardsuits, get the gear together. Mark?”
“An expedition of ten, fully equipped, redundant safety protocols, equipment and backups, heading back in 70 minutes, or 80 at maximum.” Mark looked from Jazinsky to Vaurien, who both nodded. “Get busy,” he said to Dario and Tor, Marin and Travers. “Neil, call Medic Inosanto and choose one other hand from Bravo. Lai’a … keep me informed.”
“Of course, Doctor,” Lai’a said with just a trace of reproach.
Chapter Twelve
Travers had lost track of how many hundreds of hours he had spent in Marines armor, in vacuum and on the surface of blasted worlds like Ulkur, but he recalled nothing as eerie, as disturbing as the lagoon. In normal space there was always orientation, some feature of landscape or sky to tell a man which way was nominally up or down. Here, there was nothing, and he felt his sense of orientation lock up like jammed gyros.
The Arago sled was a hundred meters from Lai’a, and he turned deliberately to look back at the ship to fix a navigation point. The naked drive core crackled in blues, greens, golds, casting a strange light and macabre shadows over the dorsal hull. The hangar from which they had launched was closed now, but red running lights marked its position. A meter from the furthest reach of any light generated by Lai’a, all was blackness, and Travers saw why Vidal had come to call it the pit of hell.
He turned back as the sled’s floodlights kicked on, and listened to the muttered profanities from Fargo, Inosanto and Tor Sereccio. Marin’s gloves had the sled’s guard rail in a vise-grip, while Kulich and both the Sherratts were busy with instruments. Rabelais and Queneau were silent, grim, fixated on the shape that wallowed up beneath the sled like a ghost.
The Resalq science ship was one of the strangest vessels Travers had ever seen. The nose was scooped, hollow, filled with the spines and rods of sensor probes; the dorsal surface was pockmarked, cratered, with scores of dishes set into the hull rather than being mounted on it, and Mark had described the ventral surface as being one cavern after another, holds and hangars and escape pods, all sealed and shielded by plate armor of the same tenacity as the Zunshu armor. The damage to the hull was restricted to a single tear, a hundred-meter rip which had peeled her open down the port side, from a point just behind the sensor probes to another not forty meters forward of the place where the engine deck should have begun.
“Nose shell is gone missing,” Midani Kulich said quietly. “See sensory gearings inside nose? Oughtta be covered up, all protect with armor, like shell. Is gone, but.”
The nose armor would have given the Ebrezjim a more normal appearance, but even so she was far wider in the beam, by ratio to her length, than any human ship or modern Resalq vessel, would have been. The impression was strengthened when Travers saw how she just ended, stopped, on the line where the engine deck should have locked into place.
The whole section containing the generators and transspace engines had been undocked – the Arago clamps released so it could be floated off and redocked to the Odyssey. That segment of the Ebrezjim still existed, parked at Alshie’nya and still attached to the Orpheus-Odyssey, where it was being studied by Resalq engineers.
“There she is,” Ernst Rabelais said to no one in particular. “I was close to the end when I found her. I came drifting in like this, but from below and behind. The engines were cold, dead, but she was almost whole. I’d never seen a hull that was still just about in one piece – everything I’d run into before was smashed. This one, well, look at her. Just the one tear in her. Throw an Arago field across the gash, and you could hold an atmosphere … I thought, Christ, there could be people on this one.”
“You might hold an atmosphere at useful pressure,” Mark mused, “but you’d bleed away heat so fast, you couldn’t keep the hull habitable for long. Have you looked at the ambient temperature here?”
Travers had. Instruments showed -268o C, just a little above absolute zero, and in the lower left of his helmet display a red caution had already begun to wink, warning of excessive power drain. The suit remained warm enough, but it was burning through its power reserves so fast, Travers did not like to think about it.
“Of course, there was nobody aboard,” Rabelais was saying. “Or, nobody alive. I … didn’t look too far after I found the drones that’d been servicing the machinery for eons.”
“Be glad of them,” Dario said softly.
“They’ll still be here,” Rabelais added.
“They’ll have gone dormant.” Mark was scanning the hull as the sled dropped lower, looking for the best way in. “You made off with the generators, so they’d have no way to recharge their cells.”
“They go sleep,” Midani told Rabelais. “I working with many kind of drone, way back when. They getting down to having little bit power left maybe, they go sleep, waiting for …” He turned aside to Dario. “How say, culbarlal?”
“Retrieval,” Dario supplied. “We’ll hunt around, Ernst, see if we can find them. You want to take ’em with?”
“I wanted to take ’em with last time I was out this way,” Rabelais said, hushed, “but I didn’t have the space on the Odyssey, much less any power couplers that’d fit to keep ’em charged, or spare parts to keep the little buggers operational. In the end, I just left them – I guess, in case I needed to come back.”
“You expected to come back here?” Marin asked, surprised.
“It was possible. Remember, I’d been in the lagoon for months,” Rabelais reasoned as the sled jetted down, closer, closer, and began to ride across the ship’s cratered upper hull as if it were a landscape. “I’d passed by the point where I ever expected to meet another living soul in thi
s hell. Thought I’d be alone till I figured some way, any way, to drag myself out. In the end, I was hunting for the tech to do it with. Figured, if I could stay alive long enough, I might actually find something that’d do the job.”
Queneau stirred, between Rabelais and Judith Fargo. “One day, Mick and me are there, just sitting in the cockpit of the Orpheus – cold, hungry, thirsty, tired … winding down, if I tell you the truth, eh, Mick?”
“Winding down is about right,” Vidal’s voice said into the loop.
He was in Ops, seeing exactly what they all saw, via the viddrone which rode the second, heavily-loaded sled, above and behind the personnel mover. Comm was mildly distorted by the energy fields surrounding Lai’a, but the drive was shut down now. Decontamination was complete, and Lai’a was boosting comm in both directions with as much power as it took to get acceptable signals.
“We were ready to jack it in, Curtis,” Vidal was saying. “Take a long nap and not wake up, you know? Then we looked outside and we saw lights. I swear to gods, we saw lights coming toward us.”
“My floods,” Rabelais said in the same harsh, hushed tone. “First I saw of the Orpheus was a cockpit module, and I thought to myself … damn, that’s human. A human designed that. You just know. So I cruised closer and looked in through the canopies, and I saw two faces. People. Alive, like me, in this place. Jesus, I thought I was hallucinating. Going mad at last.”
“We called out,” Vidal went on. “Called out on every band we could make, over and over, till he answered.”
Rabelais groaned, deep, bass, in memory. “Took me three hours to rig a docking adapter and I bled a lot of heat out of the ship, getting us set up to transfer people back and forth – it got cold inside, you remember, Jo?”
Her voice was a croak. “All I remember of that time is cold and dark, hunger and pain. Then, I think I must’ve slept.”
“Sixteen hours,” Rabelais told her. “We were so sure you weren’t going to wake up, Mick and I started to run the numbers, see how far we could make consumables stretch for two.”
“Then I came around and screwed it all up for you,” she said hollowly.
“Bullshit.” Rabelais’s armored hand rested over hers on the guard rail, as the sled touched down beside the broadest part of the rent in the hull of the ancient ship. “I’d have been dead five times over, if you hadn’t been there. Tell her, Mick.”
“Ten times over,” Vidal corrected. “And … it looks like you found your spot, Mahak. I’m going to drop a viddrone in, take a look around. Standby.”
“Quick as you like, Michael,” Mark murmured. “We’re on the clock.”
The 70 minutes before they must turn around and head back were already eight minutes through, and Travers made a mental note to keep his eye on the time. It was too easy to lose track of it in this place. Behind him on the sled, Inosanto and Sereccio were sorting gear while Mark and Dario set up a big, broad handy to monitor the viddrone feed.
From the Ops room Vidal tasked the drone, and it jetted up over the heads of their armor – gray-green, cylindrical, about the size of a beachball, powered by tiny jets of compressed gas that froze instantly and streamed away into the darkness like miniature snow flurries. Inside the body of the drone were four even smaller camera ’bots, and the display on Mark’s handy split into quadrants. The viddrone dropped right in through the rip in the hull; blue-while light glared from within, and the screen came alive. Marin peered over his shoulder, as eager to see as were the Resalq.
Frost covered every surface, masking every detail. The only information one could glean from the visual feeds was that most of the compartments were open, pressure was zero, temperature was ambient with the void, and a rime of ice had accumulated on everything.
“It’s safe,” Vidal said at last. “I’m seeing nothing hazardous. Ernst, you recognize any of this?”
Rabelais’s voice was odd indeed. “I recognize all of it.”
“Then, you know your way around,” Mark said with grim satisfaction. “That’s going to save us hours of exploration.”
The remark sent Travers’s eyes back to his chrono, and he grunted in surprise. “People, we got 50 minutes, tops, if we’re going to hold to this safety schedule.”
“We are going to hold to it,” Vaurien said loudly over the loop. “Drop as many drones as you like, set up whatever gear you need to work by telepresence, but you get out of there and leave in 49 minutes and 30 seconds!”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Mark was not really listening. He was the first off the sled, aiming his body before he kicked off and not even using a jet from the suit’s maneuvering pack before he reached the hull tear.
It was bigger than it seemed at first. As Mark touched down beside it, Travers saw that it was three meters across at its widest point. A few seconds behind Sherratt were Fargo and Kulich, and without a word spoken they rigged a battery of worklights which cast a bright, steady illumination around the crevice.
Six glowbots popped up out of a case, and Dario tasked them by remote. They jetted down into the hull, and Vidal mused, “You’re good to go in … be aware, you’re going to be feeding a lot of heat into the interior. Ice can shift all of a piece.”
“Good thing we’re in armor, huh?” Fargo said aridly.
“Yeah, but your equipment isn’t,” Travers reminded, “so keep a bloody eye on where you’re putting anything delicate!”
“Uh, yeah, right,” Fargo muttered. “Sorry, boss … you know this is the first time I ever assisted on a science survey?”
“We do now,” Tor Sereccio told her. “You get questions, Fargo – ask.”
“I will. Hey, Doc Sherratt, you want to set up any kind of a perimeter? Leave anybody outside?”
“To guard against what?” Mark wondered.
“Against the thing you never thought of, and can’t imagine,” she said levelly. “That’s the first ground rule we get taught in rookie school.”
“I … think it’s one we can break here, now,” Mark decided. “There just isn’t anything here, Lieutenant, and if there was, Lai’a would know about it long before we would. I’d rather have you inside, monitoring safety protocols.”
“Your call, Doc,” she said easily. “What kind of a security wrangler would I be if I didn’t at least suggest it?”
And Mark was the first one in, going through the rip in the hull boots-first while Marin and Travers dove from the sleds, which were cable-tethered six meters from the crevice, with the last of the equipment cases. They paused on the ancient hull surface and Travers took the chance to gaze around, though they could see no further than the pool of brightness cast by their own worklights, and by Lai’a, which hung a kilometer away, illuminated by the eerie glow from the naked transspace core.
Second in after Mark was Rabelais, with Dario and Tor right behind him. Fargo and Inosanto hung back, and Marin had already begun to monitor the ‘environment.’ Travers peered over his shoulder to see the display. Local density was just a few molecules per cubic meter – mostly hydrogen which had leaked out of substances in the wreck, perhaps even out of the life support system as it slowly decayed. Temperature was up five degrees, with the heat of lights, machines, the armor itself. But the void was sucking energy frighteningly fast. Travers’s own armor was warning constantly about power consumption to keep out the cold, and in the last few minutes his feet had grown chill.
“You cold, Neil?” Marin asked pointedly as Travers began to work with his own handy, monitoring the drones.
“A little,” he admitted. “Worse than that, these drones are going to fail fast. They’re chewing through their cells, trying to keep anywhere close to a working temperature. You there, Mick?”
“Yo,” Vidal called.
“Better send across another sled,” Travers told him. “Load it up with power cells, and make it quick. Every machine we have, including the lights, is going to keel over in about twenty minutes, max.”
“It’s chilly out,” Vidal said
in a haunted voice. “Ten minutes, Neil … where do you want it parked?”
“Right by the rip in the hull,” Travers decided. “Task the sled to get over here and clamp right on.”
“Done,” Vidal reported. “I’ve also loaded spare powerpacks for the suits … just in case. You won’t need them, but … what the hell.”
“Thanks. Damn,” Travers whispered as he joined Marin at the crevice, “it’d be easy to die here.”
“Get lost in the wreck,” Marin agreed, “or get jammed in one of the narrow little crushed compartments, run out of juice, and…”
“And freeze,” Jo Queneau said bitterly. “We lived with it for months, Curtis. There were times, a lot of times, when we almost didn’t make it.”
Kulich was feeding himself headfirst through the crevice with instruments in either hand as Dario called, “Ernst – Ops room. Where?”
“Forward, top deck, about fifty meters from the nose,” Rabelais told him. “You’re going to want a lot of lights – it’s big.”
And Mark: “It’s cold inside. Before we dare touch anything, we ought to rig a power cell for the armor doors, get them closed, pump some serious heat in, get the interior up to viable temperatures. As it is, everything’s so brittle, I wouldn’t like to touch anything important and see it shatter into atoms.”
“Going to need to bring in a big supply of cells for the hardsuits,” Tor added. “Mine’s dropping like a brick. I also want to put enough drones into the ship to map the whole thing. Neil, you want to get some more machines in here?”
“Will do. Ten more ought to cover it.” Travers was halfway through, upside down, a few meters from Marin, who had just dropped through the mess of twisted plating, severed conduit, cables that still coiled like snakes, frozen in time as well as space.
And Mark was right about the brittle characteristics caused by the deep cold. Travers flicked a cable with one armored hand, and it snapped; he caught the broken piece and clenched the gauntlet around it, and it shattered to crystals which hung like diamond dust in the vacuum and freefall. He touched down on the deck, bent his knees to absorb energy and control the bounce effect, and peered around in the harsh lighting. Floor, walls, ceiling, everything was ice, glaring in the floods. He had come down into a cavernous compartment, right beside open armordoors. Beyond was a wide passageway leading forward to Ops and back to the blastdoors which sealed off the ship ahead of its missing engine deck.
