Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “Be careful with everything,” Dario warned. “Touch nothing till we’ve warmed this up. Ernst, how the hell did you manage to handle this stuff?”

  “Didn’t,” Rabelais told him. “It wasn’t a problem. The engine deck was a lot warmer. I told you how the drones had been servicing the generators, remember. Every few days they ran them up for routine maintenance … just enough heat to keep metals and plastex viable. The engine compartments were at maybe 80, 90 below. Not like this. I explored a little of the ship, top deck, looking for food, water. Later, on other ships, we worked out how to handle super-cold stuff. Jo?”

  “There’s a trick to it,” Queneau said in a taut voice. “You find something you want, but you don’t touch it. You break it out of the surrounding structure, with maybe 20, 30 centimeters of plastex or aluminum or whatever else on a side … handle with velvet tongs, in zero-gee … let the whole block sit someplace warm for two, three days. It comes up to temperature, then you cut out the part you wanted and dump the trash.”

  “And yes,” Vidal finished, “you almost cash out before you learn this stuff.”

  Tor whistled softly. “So, say we wanted to lift out the whole computer core and bring it back to the lab on Lai’a.”

  “Are we wanting to do that?” Dario did not sound so sure.

  “It’d be a hell of a lot easier to work with it there than here,” Tor argued. “Shit, Dar, we can’t work with it here unless we heat the whole compartment, and that’d take upwards of a week. The whole wreck would be bleeding off the heat we were pumping in while the void’s sucking heat out of the wreck. And even when we’ve raised the temperature enough to be able to touch anything without busting it to fragments, we’ll still be in armor with one eye on the clock, changing power cells every half hour unless you want your toes to turn blue and fall right freakin’ off!”

  “He makes a very good point.” Mark was twenty meters ahead. His helmet thrust out from a compartment on the left of the central passage. “It sounds like a plan, Dario – figure out how. Let’s get it done.”

  Some note in his voice made Travers look at his instruments, and he swore softly. Power consumption was dire and the clock was ticking. Where had time gone? They had 25 minutes more before they must start back, given the wide safety margins.

  “Your sled-load of power cells just clamped on,” Vidal’s voice said. “Your drones are launching right now, Neil. Are we having fun yet?”

  “Fun?” Travers echoed. “You got some bloody strange ideas about fun!” He had already reorganized the handy to monitor the extra drones and asked, “Lai’a, you getting a steady datastream?”

  “Quite adequate, Colonel,” the AI assured him. “When the extra drones insert, I will begin to model the ship.”

  “Do that, Lai’a.” Mark paused. “Can you scan accurately enough in this cold to locate the computer core?”

  At temperatures close to absolute zero, when even water was hard as iron, it could be difficult to tell one material from another, Travers knew, but Lai’a was certain. “I have access to original information regarding the Ebrezjim. The specifications are incomplete, but a comparison between current scans and old source data suggests the computer core to be one of only three possible objects. Technician Kulich could confirm this.”

  The mention of his name brought Kulich back from a compartment thirty meters aft. He came diving along the passageway, avoiding walls, floor, ceiling, and triggered a tiny jet from the thrust pack to stop himself a meter short of Mark. “You wanting me for whatever things, Doctor Sherratt?”

  “Yes.” Mark cleared the screen of his handy. “Lai’a, give me what you have. Technician Kulich is right here.”

  The handy was flickering, fluttering, and before it could get the datafeed the power cell flatlined. Mark had been expecting it. The big kevlex-titanium gauntlets were clumsy, yet he managed to be deft as he dropped out the cell and clicked in another. The handy rebooted, realigned, and took the data feed at once.

  “Time, people,” Marin warned. “I’m reading 20 minutes. Judith?”

  “And 20 seconds,” she affirmed. “I’m getting cold already.”

  “How cold?” Marin turned toward her, where she and Inosanto were hanging in the passageway with a mountain of gear, none of which touched the super-cold, delicate deck.

  “Just autumn-rain chilly,” she admitted. “Like … hey, boss, you remember when we’d go chasing wreckers, smugglers and Freespacers in shitholes in the Drift that were so far from any sun, they were a frozen hell? That kind of cold.”

  “Ulkur, Rannach, don’t remind me,” Travers growled. “It’s all right, Curtis – nothing dangerous, not yet. Judith, keep one eye on your power and life support. You could have a faulty powerpack.”

  “The thought occurred,” Fargo admitted. “Damnit, but – is it just me, or is this place freakin’ creepy?”

  “It’s creepy,” Rabelais said loudly. “It always was. I didn’t have the chance to explore too much, but – yeah, I had this same feeling.”

  “Like it’s haunted,” Queneau whispered.

  Fargo’s voice was low. “Hey, guys, just don’t. The place is wicked enough without that kind of crap.”

  “What is …” Kulich had been bent over the handy, and looked up at Mark. “What is all this, this thing, ‘honnded’?”

  “Haunted,” Mark repeated, stressing the ‘t.’ “Ebcares.”

  “Ebcares,” Kulich echoed. “Curtis, we got 20 minute? Doctor Sherratt, I having time … with a drone, going looking. Back there, down.” He gestured aft. “Got-found one service shaft, for tech like me, going up-down, working. Want be going trying looking.”

  “Looking for what?” Mark wondered, but a note in his voice told Travers, he already knew.

  Kulich hesitated. “I having kin and friends on Ebrezjim. Maybe, still here. Maybe, finding.”

  “And, if they are?” Mark asked with surprising gentleness. “I had family on this ship too.”

  “Then, you no be wanting chelemlal?”

  “Memorial,” Marin said softly, for Travers’s benefit.

  Mark seemed to hesitate, and then sighed. “In fact, I do. Whether or not your friends and family, or mine, are still aboard, whoever was here deserves a memorial, even if it’s a millennium late.”

  “Me looking, then?” Midani was restless. “Trying finding, while we having little bit time?”

  “Go on – take a drone, and 15 minutes, Midani,” Mark said firmly, “not one second more. Before you go, point out the computer core, and then –”

  “Be bloody damned careful,” Dario finished loudly. “Remember, Ernst almost died in here. Okay, Mid, which is it?”

  “Here. Computer core is being this thing, big marking thing, in handy … is bury in-under deck, under Ops room, maybe ten meter, other-far end from servicing crawling tube. Of service tube,” he corrected.

  “Ten meters along a tech’s crawlspace under the Ops room. Got it,” Tor translated gleefully. “Okay, kid – watch yourself. Dario?”

  “Move!” Dario dove away ahead of him with a scanner in his left hand and a flashlight in the right.

  A drone jetted after Kulich as he made his way aft. As he passed by the equipment he took a light and a handy. Travers was tracking all of the active drones and warned, “Two of these buggers will be critical in another 20 minutes.”

  “We’ll be out of here by then,” Rabelais mused. He and Queneau were mere spectators but neither was missing a word.

  “Take them back with us, change out the cells in the workshop,” she added. “You don’t want to be spending one minute longer here than you need to.”

  Travers knew what she meant. The wreck felt utterly dead. It felt like an open grave, though he was not about to say it. Part of the sensation was due to the intense cold, the darkness and an absence of any kind of time. Any ship in the void would feel like this, not only, or especially, the Ebrezjim. He forced his attention back to the instruments and a moment later Marin warn
ed sharply,

  “Ice is beginning to move. It’ll start to come sheeting off the walls in another hour or two.”

  “Sooner,” Tor added, “when we haul the cutting gear in here to pull out the core. We’re going to pump in a load of heat.”

  “The more we can do with drones, the better,” Travers muttered.

  “Yeah, I’d have to say Neil’s right. This whole place is soon going to be unstable.” Marin was trying to get readings off the ship’s structural members. “At this level of cold, I’m wondering how much force it’d take to break right through something critical.”

  “Quite a lot,” Mark said shrewdly. “Remember, this is a driftship – cold or not, these hull plates are our ancestors’ equivalent of Zunshu armor, and more than likely an alloy so similar, you couldn’t tell the two apart. It won’t react as you’d expect aluminum, steel, titanium, tungsten, to react. Still … Neil, do you have a couple of spare drones?”

  “They just arrived, topside.” Travers gestured over his shoulder, back toward the crevice in the hull.

  “Task four.” Mark was drifting away toward the Ops room. “Send them down and under. As I mentioned, ships of this vintage carried their escape pods in the belly. See if any are still here.”

  “They’re all gone.” Rabelais spun slowly toward them. “That’s one of the things I looked at, when I got here, when the Odyssey drifted up, from below the keel. I was desperate for breathing mix – an oxygen rebreather, anything, since my life support had started to jack around. I got a good, close-up look at the belly.”

  “Won’t hurt to confirm what you saw,” Mark mused, “and it’ll only take a few minutes. Go ahead, Neil – have the drones stream video.”

  “On their way,” Travers reported. “You think the escape pods blew after the crew made it through into the void? Why would anyone do that? The ship’s in one piece, the engines were good enough for Ernst to salvage them, and –”

  “And why would you punch out when there’s nowhere to go?” Marin finished. “Unless …”

  “Unless?” Mark was willing to entertain any theory. He had just maneuvered into the compartment identified as Operations.

  “Well, suppose several crews, several ships, had survived long enough to make it through into the lagoon,” Marin said slowly. “Two choices: cooperate, join forces to survive … or pillage, raid. It would come down to survival of the strongest. Say the Ebrezjim was raided. The crew might have blown the escape pods as an alternative to getting shot.”

  A sigh rasped over Mark’s audio pickup. “Anything is possible. It could also be that the pods were blown at a far earlier date – they might have been long gone by the time the ship made it this far.”

  “A power surge has been known to blow escape pods.” Travers paused to watch the handy. “I’ve got your vidfeed here … and it looks like Ernst was dead right. Empty launch bays. All of them.”

  Marin stirred deliberately. “Ten more minutes, people. Dario, Tor?”

  And Dario: “Just sizing up the job, Curtis, not doing it.”

  “Possible?” Travers prompted.

  “Oh sure.” Tor was certain. “Give me six or eight handling drones, a set of cutting gear, a couple of Arago units, no problem.”

  “How long?” Mark wanted to know.

  This was harder to answer. “Say, two, three hours,” Dario estimated. “And I know, we’ll do it in a couple of different shifts – safety protocols.”

  With nine minutes left on the clock, Midani Kulich and his drone dove back down the passage. As he jetted to a halt he turned the handy to display images he had captured. Marin and Travers frowned over them, and Curtis murmured an oath. “Mark?”

  “Right here,” Mark said at once, “looking at instruments, hardware, under a rime of frost. It looks … so old. It is old. I haven’t seen this kind of tech since I was young, but I remember it. Today’s hardware does the same thing equally as efficiently; just differently.”

  “Mark, there are dead aboard,” Marin told him quietly. “Midani has pictures. He’s found at least twelve bodies. They’re – well, they’re perfectly preserved. I can’t be sure, but it looks like they might have been dead before the hull was torn open. There certainly isn’t any of the distortion you expect from explosive decompression and exposure to vacuum.” He took a long deep breath which carried over the audio pickup. “Midani recorded faces – they’re thick with frost, of course, but the images should enhance. I don’t suppose you’d recognize your grandparent?”

  “No,” Mark said sadly as he drifted back out of the Ops room and approached Marin and Travers in a long, slow zero-gee glide. “I don’t believe I ever saw an image of him. You’d have to match DNA to identify any relationship between myself and one of the dead, and it’s not something I want to do. It seems intrusive, discourteous, to disturb these people. The Ebrezjim has been their tomb for a thousand years. It’ll continue to be their tomb for some time, even if they’re eventually taken to the new Resalq colony for interment.”

  He sounded troubled, and Travers was sure he knew why. It was an old spacer’s superstition, common in Freespace. If a soul passed over in space, did it find its way home? And if a soul were to pass over in a gods forsaken place like this void, how could it ever find its way out? Vidal had whispered the same sentiment, a long time before, and Travers had no more answer than anyone had.

  “Four minutes, people,” he warned. “Wrap up whatever you’re doing. Check your power cells.”

  On station at the fissure in the hull, Judith Fargo called, “Everybody back here for a head count before we shove off. Hey boss, you want to leave the equipment, sleds and all? This stuff is getting cold. A few hours, and it won’t be much warmer than the rest of the wreck, which is too cold to touch without busting up the delicate stuff.”

  “Load the sleds,” Travers told her. “Ernst, Jo, you want to lend a hand there? We want everybody and everything back aboard Lai’a. Richard, you there? How are we looking?”

  Vaurien had not intruded, but like any salvage captain he would have monitored the whole excursion. “Right here, Neil. Comm is a little weak but the datastream is fine. Lai’a just finished modeling the Ebrezjim. I’m looking at it right now.”

  “We’re coming home,” Travers told him as Fargo and Rabelais slung the equipment up through the crevice. He was recalling all drones as he spoke, and returned the handy to passive monitoring. “Curtis?”

  “We’re on time.” Marin frowned at the winking red warning in his helmet display. “But, damn, I wouldn’t want to push it much further than the 90 minute mark. 120 in a case of outright emergency. At 120 you’d have frostbitten feet unless you’d switched out your power cells at the hour mark, and overrun the heaters the whole time. I’ll make a recommendation right here: everybody heading outside for any reason carries a spare suit powerpack.”

  “Call that another ground rule,” Vaurien agreed.

  “Two minutes, people,” Marin said into the loop. “Hustle!”

  They were out with time to spare, and Fargo and Kulich took on to the chore of switching power cells in the sleds before they started back. Lai’a hung above them, half-lit against utter blackness, with the spill of light from the drive core picking out its planes and angles.

  Few people spoke on the journey back. The enormity of the job weighed heavily on the Resalq, no less than the presence of the dead. Rabelais and Queneau were hushed beneath the burden of memory, and Travers saw no reason to intrude on their thoughts.

  Tiredness ambushed him as he stacked the armor back into its locker, and he peered at his chrono. The clocks aboard Lai’a were synched to those on the Wastrel, and he had lost track of time. It was the small hours of the morning. He had been running on adrenaline and sheer curiosity, but the body was asking for rest, sleep. Dario and Tor were too wired to even notice the time, but Rabelais and Queneau had fallen very quiet as fatigue caught up with them, and Fargo and Inosanto had been on Wastrel time for long enough to be yawning
. Mark had desuited fast and already stepped out, headed for Ops.

  “You hungry?” Marin said as he closed up his locker. “I always get ravenous in the cold.” He yawned expansively and raked all ten fingertips through his hair.

  The sense of dislocation was familiar enough. Transferring from ship to ship, world to world, always incurred a transition phase, like acclimating to a new environment. “Food, sleep,” Travers decided. “God knows, they must have gathered enough data to keep ’em busy for a week.” He slung an arm over Marin’s shoulders and steered him out of the suiting room.

  Ops was quiet, the lights muted, a soft thread of Bach whispering from the big threedee where Alexis Rusch and Leon Sherratt were still dissecting the Orion 359 data. Leon was immersed in it again, relishing the opportunity to explore it in exhaustive detail, though he might not have expected to. Roy Arlott had pulled a chair up to the next workstation and gone to sleep, sprawled with his feet up on a second chair and a jacket laid over him. Vaurien and Jazinsky were sitting in the big chairs opposite the navtank, already eating a late supper.

  And Mick Vidal was enduring Bill Grant’s ministrations. A hypogun thudded against his shoulder, delivering a fresh infusion of the medical nano which was keeping him alive. Grant, in an outsized Elstrom Eldorado teeshirt loud with the fluorescent green and orange team colors of the aeroball squad, yawned animatedly as he put away the gun and aimed a scanner at Vidal.

  “You want to get some sleep, Mick,” he said sagely.

  “You don’t say,” Vidal muttered as he pulled up his sleeve and worked the shoulder around.

  “He’s right.” Mark had been in the crew lounge, investigating the autochef, and stepped into Ops right behind Travers and Marin. “You’re not getting enough rest, Michael … don’t think I’m not noticing.”