by Rick Partlow
Those mechanical digits hovered over her left ring finger and she whimpered helplessly, shaking her head.
“Tell me,” he intoned with the threat left unspoken, “where.”
She wished she didn’t remember, but she’d recited the coordinates for Sandi and Ash and her memory had been nearly eidetic even before the modifications she’d been given. She had to repeat them twice while the bearded man copied them down on his ‘link, but once she’d finished, the cyborg let loose of her arm and she cradled her hand against her, hissing in an agonized breath.
The bearded man went to the door, and the cyborg followed and she stared at them wide-eyed.
“You…,” she stammered, knowing she was tempting fate but unable to stop herself. “You’re not going to kill me?”
The metal man turned back just inside the doorway, eyeing her with what might have been amusement.
“You,” he told her, “are not the one I want to kill.”
The door slammed shut and both of them were gone.
Chapter Five
“This really is the ass-end of nowhere,” Korri Fontenot mused.
Looking at a computer-enhanced map of the system on the main screens, Ash couldn’t argue with the assessment. The red dwarf star was attended by only two planets, an ice giant so far out that its orbit took well over 300 standard days and a gas giant about three quarters the size of Saturn circling much closer in, about where Venus would be back in the Solar System, with a half a dozen moons to call its own. A few million asteroids, a cometary halo and that was it. The system was unremarkable…except in its isolation.
“We’re as far as you can go in the Cluster in this direction,” Sandi agreed. “Feels…” She shrugged, her whole body moving against her restraint harness in the microgravity. “Feels weird out here. Lonely.”
Ash saw what could have been a shiver running through her shoulders and he reached over to grip her hand, an instinctive reminder that she wasn’t alone. Or maybe it was a reminder that he wasn’t alone. He hadn’t decided yet.
“You have used this term before,” Kan-Ten spoke up, strapped down at the navigator’s station beside Fontenot. “This term ‘Cluster.’ What are you referring to?”
Ash looked at Sandi and Fontenot, a bit surprised. He figured everyone knew what the Cluster was. Then again, maybe his concept of “everyone” didn’t really include a Tahni exile who’d learned English out in the Pirate Worlds.
“You know what the Transition Lines are, right?” he asked the alien, suddenly wondering what sort of education the average Tahni received in physics. “The gravito-inertial lines of force between stars that we travel on when we go to Transition Space?”
“I have heard of how the Transition drive works,” Kan-Ten confirmed. Ash was still not quite to the point where he could read the alien’s expressions, not even after six months travelling and working with him, but he thought the Tahni might have been annoyed. “But what is the Cluster?”
“Those lines,” Sandi interjected, “they connect thousands of stars in a globular formation we call the Cluster. It’s kind of like a road system, except you can’t stop anywhere but where one of the lines ends, inside the gravitational influence of a star system. But the Cluster is, as far as anyone can tell, a closed formation, with no way out.”
“Some people think there’s a way out,” Ash said. “They call it the Northwest Passage, but no one’s ever found it. So, this,” he waved a hand at the star system on the screen, “is as far as you can go on the inner hemisphere of the Cluster…that is, the side of the Cluster that’s closest to the galactic center, rather than the edge.”
“Which is why it took three interminable weeks to get here,” Fontenot cut in, scowling. “No offense to you, Ash, but I’m ready to get off this fucking boat.”
“There’s your chance,” Ash told her, pointing at a sensor reading highlighted in red by the computer. It was still hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, much too far for the optical cameras to pick up as anything but a glint of reflected light, but the computer had already assigned it the shape of a Fleet cruiser. “Going to have to go in suited up, though. We’re not getting anything off her reactor, and she’s an ice cube. Life support has been off for a long while.”
“You think it’s been orbiting that moon this whole time?” Sandi wondered. “Ever since the war?”
“From the readings, it looks like parts of the moon might be habitable,” Ash told her, scrolling through the sensor display with a flick of his fingertips. “Cold as shit,” he equivocated, shrugging, “but habitable. Maybe they went down to the surface? If any of them survived, that is.”
“There’s only one way to find out.” Sandi nodded at the representation of the ship.
“It’s your turn to drive,” he reminded her, grinning crookedly.
She laughed, raising her hands palms-up in surrender.
“Hey, if you think cramming yourself into a suit and floating around a frozen ghost ship is a fun adventure, more power to you.”
“I’ll go,” Fontenot declared. “At least it’s something different.” She twisted around and cocked her natural eyebrow at Kan-Ten. “Unless you wanted to go?”
The Tahni made a gesture with his hands that Ash had learned signaled negation.
“I don’t care for your vacuum suits,” he explained. “They fit me poorly. And I don’t know that I care for your concept of ‘adventure’ either.”
“You were a soldier,” Ash said. “And after the war, you left home and went out to the Pirate Worlds to live with human criminals. Why would you do any of that if you didn’t want adventure?”
“I was a soldier to serve my Emperor. Once he proved that he was not worthy of the name or of my service, I did not care to stay…” He paused. “What’s the human term? Under the heel, I think. Under the heel of our conquerors. I read much of your literature when I was trying to learn your language, and there was a writer who said it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. If I understand that phrase correctly, I have chosen Hell.”
Fontenot snorted laughter.
“I don’t know about you two,” she said to Ash and Sandi, “but I feel insulted.”
“Hold that thought,” Ash said, spooling out the interface cables and re-entering the meld with the ship. “We’re heading in.”
***
“I don’t like hanging your ass out in the wind like this.”
Sandi’s voice sounded tinny coming out of his helmet speakers, further emphasizing the feeling of isolation that sank into him every time he went out in a vacuum suit. The Acheron’s utility airlock was small, smaller still with someone as large as Fontenot sharing it with him and both of them wearing External Maneuvering Units, but the suit separated him from even that enclosed space, enveloped him in a bubble of unreality. He’d been surprised to find the feeling comforting.
“Ain’t no wind out here, shor’,” he murmured, unconsciously slipping into the slurred patois of the Trans-Angeles housing projects where he’d grown up. He’d made a concerted effort to abandon that accent for a generic-North-American English one when he’d left for the Commonwealth Military Academy, but sometimes it slipped out when he wasn’t paying attention. “I’d rather keep the ship clear, just in case,” he said, louder and in his normal voice. “We’ll be fine. Just get us as close as you can without scuffing the paint.”
“She doesn’t show any exterior damage,” Fontenot mused, staring out the thick, transplas port in the outer airlock hatch.
Ash crowded in over her shoulder, feeling a bit of awe at the size of the ship. The Metaurus, if that was indeed what she was, loomed beside them, glowing in the reflected light of the star. She was a floating mountain of nickel iron and BiPhase Carbide, over a kilometer long and half that wide, a monolithic mass of constrained power and death. He could feel the maneuvering thrusters kicking the cutter gradually closer to the huge vessel, and he gnawed at his lip to silence the protest he wanted to make that they were goi
ng to collide with her. Sandi was a hell of a pilot, and he trusted her in the left seat.
Out the portal, he saw the barely-perceptible lines of the rounded service airlock at the edge of the ship’s docking bay and another burst of maneuvering jets matched their relative motion with that of the cruiser, just over the entrance and perhaps a half a kilometer away.
“This is as close as I want to get,” Sandi confessed.
“Close enough,” he assured her. He reached past Fontenot’s shoulder and touched the control to open the exterior lock.
There was no sound; the lock had been drained of air minutes ago. Just the slow slide of white metal and plastic into the gap in the hull and then there was nothing between them and the Metaurus but the almost nonexistent atmosphere of high orbit. Fontenot pushed herself out of the lock, gaining about six meters of clearance before she hit the controls of her EMU and began slowly accelerating across the gap between the Acheron and the cruiser.
Ash waited until she was maybe fifty meters away before he grabbed the edge of the outer lock and pulled hard. Emptiness swallowed him up, and around the silver wedge of the cutter behind him and the mountain of metal ahead, he could see the brilliant field of stars that stretched out into infinity. They called to him, as they always did, distracting with their siren song, promising new worlds and alien horizons and everything that wasn’t the Kibera slums of Trans Angeles, everything that was bigger than his family and their obsession with territory and face and respect.
Those stars, they were why he’d left, why he’d risked everything to leave. He’d found other reasons since, of course: honor, and duty, and love. But the stars had been first, and weren’t last even now. With Sandi and the stars to keep him company, even life on the run didn’t seem so bad.
He shook his head, clearing away everything but the present, and squeezed at the control butting up against his left hand. Maneuvering jets kicked him in the pants and the gleaming hull of the cruiser began to race towards him until he twisted the control a different direction and the braking jets squeezed the mounting straps against the front of his shoulders and his waist. His approach slowed and he could see Fontenot ahead of him, tethered to a ring affixed to the hull, working at a control panel next to the service lock.
They lacked the RFID chips that the crew of the cruiser would have had, but they did have the emergency codes that Fox had given them on that crystal spike, and that proved to be enough. The outer airlock slid aside even before Ash touched lightly against the hull, activating the magnets in his boots to stick there. Using those and the ones in the fingers of his gloves, he scooted across the surface of the hull, feeling like a bug on a plate. He pulled himself over into the recess of the lock, grabbing Fontenot’s outstretched hand and moving into the shadow of an overhanging ridge of BiPhase Carbide armor. Beside the lock and stretching out for dozens of meters on either side, he could see the rows of circular hatches that marked the ejection ports for the ship’s main complement of life pods. They all seemed to be intact; no one had ejected during whatever had happened.
“At least the airlock is working,” Ash said, hitting the control to close the outer door. The lights inside the lock were harsh and omnidirectional, leaving no gaps for shadows.
“Emergency backup batteries,” Fontenot guessed. She started the lock cycling with a punch of a button affixed to the bulkhead, but rather than the usual inflow of air to match pressures to the interior of the ship, the inner door simply slid into its recessed niche with a flashing red warning that the other side was still in a vacuum.
The service bay was dark and cold and airless and suddenly, Ash wasn’t so eager to leave the airlock. He stalled, unlatching the straps of the EMU and leaving it floating behind him, gesturing for Fontenot to do the same. It might have been handier to have the jetpacks strapped on aboard the cruiser in microgravity than to have to rely on their suit magnets, but the EMU’s woud be bulky and awkward inside compartments or in narrower passageways.
With the framework of the maneuvering unit shed, he reached back and freed his pulse carbine from where it was strapped to the environmental pack that heated his suit and generated its air. The carbine had a tactical light affixed to the forearm, and he’d need it in here. His helmet’s optics had infrared filters and light-intensifying software, but he couldn’t count on having any light, infrared or visible, if the power was down. Main passageways and vital compartments such as the bridge or medical bay would have chemical ghostlights, but much of the ship would be pitch black.
He touched the rubberized button on the stock and the light snapped on, turning hulking, shadowy monsters into industrial exoskeletons, remotely operated zero-g cargo jacks and polymer crates stacked from deck to overhead in metal locking frames. And a desiccated, floating corpse surrounded by an orbiting halo of frozen blood.
“Fuck!” he blurted, barely restraining himself from shooting.
The body was dressed in Fleet blue utility fatigues where they weren’t ripped apart, and his short, dark hair seemed incongruously fresh and lifelike against the mummified, grey skin. The eyes stared out blindly, milky and mesmerizingly wide open.
“Cover the door,” Fontenot snapped, her carbine going to her shoulder.
Ash had to force himself to look away from the body, training his weapon and its attached light on the closed hatch while Fontenot clomped across the floor on magnetic soles to check out the dead man. His eyes kept flickering back towards it, seeing on the darkened edge of his own helmet’s faceplate; he felt an irrational paranoia that the corpse would suddenly reanimate and come after them with undead fury.
“Something tore this poor son of a bitch apart,” Fontenot muttered, sounding thoughtful but otherwise unaffected. That wasn’t surprising, given that she’d been working in one violent profession or another nearly all of a life that stretched over 150 years. How many dead bodies had she seen in a century and a half? “It doesn’t look like a projectile weapon…but the fatigues aren’t burned, either, like they would be from a laser. It looks like it was sliced open.”
“A knife?” he grunted, trying to sound as if his stomach wasn’t churning. “Easy to conceal, I guess.”
“It’d have to be a monomolecular edge to cut this deep. It’s down to the bone…shit, it’s through the bone in some places.”
Ash swallowed hard, suddenly glad he was watching the door.
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Fontenot went on, and he could almost hear her shaking her head in confusion. “The clothes…the cuts through them aren’t clean, surgical. They’re rough, like whatever ripped them up wasn’t that sharp.”
There was a long pause and then, “His name was Raymond Castro, and he was a Technician Fourth Class, worked here in supply. No weapons, no ‘link, nothing useful on him.”
“I need to take a look,” Ash decided. He didn’t really want to, but if he was going to be a leader, he needed to act like one. “Watch the door for me.”
Fontenot moved over to replace him without a word. He couldn’t see her face, but he felt like if he could, she’d be wearing a wry smile. She was smart and experienced enough to know why he was doing it, and it undoubtedly amused her.
He clenched his jaws shut at the sight of the mummified corpse, pale and wizened and drained of blood. The frozen, crimson globules orbited him like the rings of a gas giant, twisting and spinning hypnotically, making it harder to concentrate on the details of the body. He forced himself, made himself look past the bloody kaleidoscope and into the wounds.
They were horrific, large and gaping and, as Fontenot had said, right through skin and muscle and scoring the bone. Castro’s left ulna was exposed, the flesh ripped away, and he could see that it had been splintered with the force of the blow. His chest had been split open, the ribs cracked, and he was reluctant to shine the weapons’ light into that wound, not wanting to see what had happened to the organs inside.
Whatever had killed this man had been incredibly, inhumanly strong, like the
exoskeletal load-lifter in the corner, and he could almost believe this had been a work accident, maybe caused by the loss of power. Yet Castro’s ‘link was missing, gone from its mount on his fatigue sleeve. It had been taken by whoever had killed him.
He shook his head. Fontenot was right; they weren’t going to learn anything else here.
“Let’s get to engineering,” Ash told her, pausing to take a sip from the helmet’s water reservoir; his mouth was dry, for some reason. “We need to get the power back on.”
Chapter Six
“This is just all kinds of fucked up,” Ash said, standing stiffly behind the Captain’s station on the bridge, trying to avoid the blood.
He hadn’t thought about the blood when he’d turned life support back on after powering up the ship’s reactor, but by the time he’d made it to the bridge from engineering, the atmosphere had begun to thicken and everything was warming up. The red crystal tears were melting, and the air currents from the vents were pushing them out of their stable orbits, making them splash wildly against any surface they impacted.
He’d sent Fontenot to check the docking bay, and they’d both been trying to shove any loose bodies they came across into closed compartments, but there wasn’t much they could do about the blood. There’d been a steady trickle of the dead, here and there, maybe a half a dozen that he’d found and another few Fontenot had reported. The bridge though…
Whatever had happened, it had culminated on the bridge. The emergency seal had been about three fourths of the way down when he’d reached it; he’d had to crawl under it before he could find the control to raise it back up. Something had interrupted its descent, something sturdy enough to stop the massive BiPhase Carbide hatch without being crushed. There were laser burns all over the bulkheads, and exploded plastic where the pulses had struck the viewscreen display projectors, and then there were the bodies.
