by I G Hulme
“Thanks Angelique,” croaked Ryann, taking it with a shaking hand. She pulled him up into a sitting position and he swayed drunkenly as the cabin span.
“How’s the state of the Ibis?” he managed at last. “Any sign of the crew?”
Angelique shrugged.
“Not yet. The pilot of that Patroller blew open the outer-airlock door and then opened the inner one — looks like he depressurised some of the ship — maybe that killed them? I didn’t go any further than the airlock but it looks as though the Ibis has taken less structural damage than I first thought — Jeez Ryann, you’ve gone green now — are you sure you’re okay?” she asked in concern.
He nodded slowly; he could feel a film of cold sweat all over his face, and thought he might black out again at any moment.
“Stay here a while if you need to,” she said matter-of-factly, pulling on her helmet. “I’ll go and see if I can get some power back to the Ibis. Like I say, it all looks pretty lifeless.”
Ryann grabbed her arm as she went to stand. He tried shutting his eyes for a moment but his head span even more.
“Hold up a minute,” he gasped. “We don’t know who was aboard that ship or what they were doing. Give me a second, we’ll go together.”
“I can handle myself,” muttered Angelique defensively.
“Just give me a second,” he repeated, pulling himself shakily to his feet, holding on to the back of his chair. “There’s every chance that someone could be sealed off in another part of the ship. We go together.” He pulled his helmet over his head, locking it in place. “Helmet comms seem good,” he said, tapping the earpiece on his helmet. “It should be safe enough to use them if we set the range to a minimum. We got any guns?”
“Nope,” replied Angelique, steadying him as they walked over to the hatchway. “Not that I can find. The Raven’s a mess — anything that wasn’t bolted down got sucked out through the big holes all over our hull.”
“Let’s just hope that there’s nobody waiting for us aboard the Ibis then.”
“Well, look on the bright-side,” muttered Angelique as she swung open the hatch. “At least we don’t have anything left on the ship that’s worth stealing.”
Ryann laughed weakly, the sound quickly degenerating into a racking cough. He leant heavily against wall as Angelique closed the hatch behind them, sealing them into the narrow passage. The corridor was in chaos, with wires and pipes hanging down from the low ceiling. The weak illumination from his helmet’s light cast crazy shadows all about. He stooped beneath a tangle of fallen cables, moving down to the far end of the corridor. Their inner airlock door hung open, and together the two of them squeezed through the gap and into the airlock.
“We can’t get the inner door sealed then?” asked Ryann, inspecting the controls. Angelique shook her head and sighed.
“Something’s jamming the manual override,” she muttered. “Took me ages just to prise it open.” She reached over to the manual release on the outer doors.
“I managed to get a tether to the Ibis, but she’s still a little way off, so don’t fall out,” she said with a grin as she purged the air from the corridor. She went to open the outer doors and then stopped, holding on to the wall as she swayed. “I’m okay, just a little dizzy still,” she mumbled, straightening up as Ryann went to help her.
“You took quite a knock back there,” he replied in concern.
“Let’s face it — we’re both a mess,” she said, smiling shakily. “Give me a hand to get this open, it’s jammed again.”
They heaved on the door release and it slid open with a jolt. Ryann almost lost his balance and stumbled forwards, catching himself upon the wall just in time. For a second he had an overwhelming shot of vertigo as he swayed upon the edge of the airlock.
He was staring down into the vastness of space, and far, far below him luminous banks of green mist and ice shone out — the impenetrable wall of the Halion Belt.
He pulled himself back from the edge with a start.
“I told you,” drawled Angelique. “Here, clip on to the tether line — we’ll have to pull ourselves across — unless you fancy jumping.”
He glanced back out across the emptiness to the corroded hull of the Ibis. The old colony ship dwarfed their vessel, its sheer sides rising up beyond his view. The dark circle of the open airlock looked like some ominous cave. Nothing moved, but the stillness seemed foreboding.
For a moment Ryann felt a deep sense of unease as he stared across the gulf and into that dark entrance.
After he had landed the Raven upon the Ibis’ airlock, it must have drifted away again, for they were now about ten metres from its hull. A string of cables and air-lines bridged the gap from a panel beside the airlock door and across to the silent ship.
“Here,” repeated Angelique, making Ryann jump. “Clip yourself on.” She held out a short tether-line, fastening one end to an anchor point on his flight-suit and then up to one of the steel hawsers that linked the ships together.
“Can’t we pull her any closer?” asked Ryann, looking mistrustfully across the gap; he hated looking down into space, he always felt as though he was going to fall, and keep falling forever. Pretty much true, he thought grimly, tugging on the tether-line to check that it was secure.
“The grav-plates are still charged in both ships,” explained Angelique, checking the air-lines. “And we’re upside-down to them, so the ships are pushing each other away — lucky I managed to get the tether on in time. But at least it means we won’t be floating about the Ibis in zero-g. Come on, get going.”
Ryann took one last hesitant look over the edge and then reached up, grasping the steel cable.
“Well, this is going to be interesting,” he muttered, and took a deep breath before swinging himself out into the void.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE WRECK OF THE IBIS
There was a moment’s strain as he took his weight upon the hawser, before feeling the curious pull back to his ship from its artificial gravity. He hauled himself hand-over-hand, and as he went, he felt his body growing lighter as he left the localised gravity field of the Raven. In a few moments he was practically floating, his body weightless in space. And then, as he neared the larger ship, his body began twisting around as he felt the unfamiliar pull of the Ibis’ gravity-plates. Before he knew what was happening was himself hanging upside down in relation to the Raven.
“How the hell did you get across to the airlock in the first place?” he gasped, steadying himself as he tried to reorient his perspective of what was up and down.
“Buy me a drink some day and I’ll tell you all about it,” he heard Angelique mutter from close behind.
Ryann hauled himself across the last few metres to the edge of the open airlock door and hung from the tether-line exhausted, trying to get his breath back. His head still swam from his near-suffocation, and the extra exertion made the world spin before his eyes.
With a last effort he swung himself forwards, catching hold of a hand rail. After a moment, he managed to get his foot up to the door and pulled himself into the airlock. He lay upon the floor panting, thankful to feel the reassuring pull of gravity once more. He heard Angelique climb up beside him, deftly unclipping her tether and stepping over him.
Ryann looked up, rolling on to his side.
“I feel like I’ve —”
Angelique cut him off with an urgent motion of her hand. He pulled himself up in alarm, instinctively straining his ears for any sound, even though they were still in the silent vacuum of space.
Angelique pressed her hands to the wall of the airlock for a moment, then motioned to Ryann to do the same. He held out his hand, trying to calm his breathing. He thought that he could feel the faintest of vibrations running through the ship, an intermittent throb.
He looked quizzically up towards Angelique.
“Power?” he whispered.
She shrugged, glancing over to the lifeless control panel on the wall.
&n
bsp; “Not here at any rate. I don’t like it,” she replied, glancing suspiciously around the airlock. “What do you think did this?” She inspected the outer doors of the airlock. They hung open, the locking-bolts scorched and severed. Deep furrows in the metal suggested some great force had been used to prise them open.
She crept over to the far end of the airlock; the meagre light from the distant Viridis sun couldn’t penetrate the shadows and Ryann held his breath as she was swallowed up in the gloom.
He jumped as a stark beam of a light cut through the darkness as Angelique pulled a flashlight from an open emergency panel.
“Here, there’s another one,” she said quietly, pulling another light from the locker, all the while gazing around. “Inner airlock doors are open but look intact.” She pointed her flashlight out into the corridor beyond, stepping through cautiously. “Help me get them closed, then we might be able to restore the atmosphere.”
“Give me a second,” muttered Ryann, fumbling with the tether-line. He turned and took a long look back to the dark silhouette of the Raven hanging silently in space. From this angle, looking at the underside of the ship, she didn’t look in too bad condition, he thought to himself.
“Ryann.”
He stepped through into the dark corridor, and together they turned the wheel of the manual override and slowly the airlock doors slid closed.
They looked around: it was pitch black now that the airlock doors were sealed. The corridor appeared much the same as any other rust-laden freighter they had ever been aboard, but out here, drifting in the eerie stillness of space the shadows felt heavy with a brooding menace. The walls and ceiling were a mass of pipes and cable-runs, all covered with a thin layer of ice crystals. The beams of their flashlights only served to deepen the shadows, tricking their eyes into seeing movement in the darkness.
They found themselves at a main intersection, with corridors running off left, right and straight ahead. A flight of steps led to the levels above and below. Peering down the corridors, they could see that all the bulkhead hatches hung open, and upon further inspection, they discovered scorch-marks on the walls and floor where the locks had been cut.
“This doesn’t look good,” whispered Angelique, directing the beam of her flashlight down into the depths of the stairwell. “Looks as though something like a squad of marines has run through this place. Maybe we’ve bitten off more than we can chew?”
“What choice do we have?” murmured Ryan inspecting the blast marks upon the hatches. “It sure does look like someone took an arc-cutter to these doors — but it couldn’t have been anyone coming aboard from that Patroller — that’s just a single-seat flyer — it would have taken a team to cut all these doors. Perhaps they were already cut? Before the ship took off from New Eden?”
“You thinking that somebody jacked the Ibis — broke in and got her running?” asked Angelique.
“Maybe — trying to escape from New Eden for some reason. Then the Patroller was sent after them, to stop them giving away their location to the Lumina.”
“It didn’t work then. Wonder why the guy in the Patroller took a dislike to us so much?”
“Who knows,” said Ryann. “Maybe they thought we were pirates or something?”
“You do have that look about you,” replied Angelique with a grin. “Well, that all sounds plausible. Someone broke through all the doors to steal her — then the moment that Patroller opened their airlock-doors it depressurised the entire ship. Now that would be poetic justice to a gang of ship-jackers.”
“Well we don’t know who they were, so let’s stay sharp just in case any of them did survive. Where do you want to start — generator deck?”
Angelique shook her head, pointing her flashlight down the corridor that led off to their left.
“Head for the bridge. The Ibis died not long after that Patroller took out her heat-distributers. If my guess is right, and the crew just overcooked the drives, we might be lucky and be able to reboot the systems from there.”
“And if we’re not lucky?” asked Ryann, wiping a layer of frost from a corridor marker.
Angelique laughed grimly.
“Then I hope you know how to rewire a blown power distribution network on a fifty-thousand tonne ship.”
“Ah, you’ll figure it out, you always do,” said Ryann with a wink, leading the way cautiously down the darkened corridor.
CHAPTER NINE
GHOST SHIP
They didn’t encounter a single sign of life as they made their way towards the bridge. They passed along narrow corridors, up flights of steps and over rusting walkways. But the further they went, the greater a sense of foreboding seemed to hang in the air. They passed empty corridors branching off into the darkness, and as they shone their flashlights into the gloom they caught faint glimpses of habitation — cabins, sleeping-quarters, a recreation room, a galley. Everything was empty and silent.
Not a single light shone on the electrical panels, and the place was beginning to feel like a ghost ship.
A bed in the sleeping quarters lay unmade, as though its occupant had just got up and left only moments before. Half-filled glasses and dirty dishes sat upon the table in the rec-room; some lay broken upon the floor, no doubt disturbed during the bombardment from the Patroller.
Every step they took towards the bridge felt as though the pressure were mounting, and they found themselves glancing around nervously as they passed the open doorways. Each hatch they passed hung open, the locking bolts burned through just like the outer airlock door.
“Why cut open every hatch if you just want to steal a damn ship?” whispered Angelique nervously.
But Ryann didn’t answer; his throat was dry and all he could focus upon was the sound of his own strained breathing inside his helmet.
He stopped, crouching down, and Angelique quickly did the same. They flipped off their flashlights in unison, instantly plunging the corridor into blackness.
They waited there, unmoving, desperate to remain silent.
For a brief moment before he had turned out his light, Ryann had spied the shape of a figure at the far end of the corridor crouching in a half-open doorway.
“What is it?” came Angelique’s nervous whisper in his earpiece, making him jump.
Ryann didn’t reply.
They waited, counting their breaths, straining to make out any sign of movement in the darkness. Ryann had found himself a carving knife by now whilst scouting the galley. He gripped the handle tightly in his fist.
It took an age before he could bring himself to move, cautiously edging forwards through the darkness, the knife held out in front of him.
But it was no use, he could see nothing at all. Finally he came to a decision and turned on his flashlight, holding it out to one side in the hope it might help to avoid getting him shot.
He jumped as the sudden beam of light illuminated the frozen features of a corpse straight ahead of him. The visor of the figure’s helmet had been smashed, and his mouth hung open in a silent scream. He lay slumped against the hatch, his torso wedged in the gap as though he had died attempting to squeeze through. One arm was stretched out towards him, giving the impression that, even in death, the corpse were imploring him for help.
Ryann got warily to his feet, casting his flashlight over the grisly scene.
“He’s dead,” he whispered at last.
“Can you tell what killed him?” murmured Angelique in a shaken whisper as she switched her light back on.
“Well, it wasn’t old age,” muttered Ryann grimly. As Angelique approached he heard her gasp.
“Oh god Ryann, what the hell happened to him? He didn’t die in the depressurisation. He looks like he was running from something. This place is beginning to freak me out — there’s something really strange going on here.” Angelique’s voice had a note of rising hysteria as she stared down at the body.
“We’re nearly at the bridge,” said Ryann in a reassuring tone, reaching forward and ta
king hold of the hatch. “It’s not far beyond this section. Once we get the power and the lights back on, everything will look less scary. Give me a hand to get this open.”
He heaved at the door and it moved a little. The body fell forward heavily, making Angelique cry out in alarm. She stared down at the scene in horror: the torso had been severed cleanly in half, the two pieces laying in a gruesome display at her feet.
“What the hell?” cursed Ryann, stepping back in alarm.
“Ryann, I don’t like this one bit,” croaked Angelique. “What the hell’s going on?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“And who the hell killed him?” she asked in rising panic. “You said that there couldn’t be anyone else aboard that Patroller. And why cut open every single door in the ship? It’s as though someone was systematically going through, making sure there was nowhere left to hide!”
“Hey, come on,” sighed Ryann. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you. There’s bound to be an explanation for all of this.”
“Somebody cut his damn legs off as he was trying to claw his way through the door! Please Ryann, I don’t think we should go any further!”
“We don’t have any choice,” said Ryann, taking hold of the hatch once more. “We’ll be careful — first signs of anybody hostile we’ll make a run for it — I promise.” He heaved at the door again; it came free, springing open suddenly, and Ryann staggered, dropping his flashlight into the corridor beyond.
Angelique cried out in horror, standing stock-still, paralysed with fear.
“Oh my god, Ryann, what the hell is this?” she croaked letting her flashlight play over the grisly scene.
