by Sean Danker
“Where are you?” I asked.
There was enough of a pause to indicate mild panic.
“You aren’t lost, are you?” I stopped myself there. Only minutes ago I’d been praying that Deilani could let go of her personal feelings about me and focus on reality. Making fun of her at a time like this would be hypocritical. “Relax, Lieutenant. We’re on a private channel. Where are you?”
She’d just taken a wrong turn on the way back to the airlock. I guided her back on track. I wouldn’t have bothered her, but her cargo of O2 and EV charges was a safety net that we needed to have as soon as possible.
Nils returned. He was right; the crippled recycler on his grav cart was not pretty. I didn’t care, but it bothered him. He liked to take pride in his work, and his mental state was fragile at the moment.
“We’re going to heat this room with a fuel cell,” I announced. Salmagard’s brows rose. Nils’ jaw dropped.
“You’ll bake us alive,” he said. “We have no way to regulate it. Even with power, EVs can’t balance those temperatures.”
“Not once we lose the rest of our residual heat,” I said. “It’s going to be cold. And we’ll put it in an isolation unit and quarantine it. That’ll contain some of the heat.” If we couldn’t get usable power out of an energy source, why not at least benefit from the heat? There would be cells in the shuttle bay.
Nils didn’t like it, but he didn’t have a better idea. I sent Salmagard with him; it would take them both to get a cell onto a lift cart. They’d barely left when Deilani arrived. It was an enormous relief to see the supplies she brought. As the temperature dropped, these EV suits would be our last line of defense against the cold; we’d need to keep them charged. Freezing to death did not appeal to me.
“What now?” she asked, giving me a look. It was a new look. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it seemed encouraging.
I considered the question. Deilani didn’t have the technical know-how to handle a protein combiner. That would have to be Nils. A lot of this would have to be Nils or myself. But I was tied to an examination table.
“I’m sure there’ll be more urgent things than this, but for now why don’t you see if you can find a viewer, some readers, and some archives? If we’re stuck here for a while we’ll need something to do. I’m serious.”
Deilani left looking conflicted, and I was glad she didn’t have a weapon. If we really did find ourselves waiting around for weeks on end, she’d be glad I’d asked her to do this.
I had some peace and quiet to figure out our next move. It would take time for Salmagard and Nils to extract a cell and get it back here without using lifts. The next item on the list would be water. We’d have to find some kind of containers, then think of the best way to access the water aboard the freighter. Not with the taps, of course—those were controlled by the computer. My inclination was to crack open a pipe, seal it, and just open it again when we needed more, but there was probably a more elegant way. Nils would know.
I sat up, instinctively touching the com control on my collar with my one free hand. Someone had just dropped off the shared feed. The change in the audio was subtle, almost undetectable, but in the quiet dimness of the empty medbay I couldn’t miss it.
I shifted channels until I heard voices. No surprise: Nils and Deilani. Deilani’s idea, no doubt.
“. . . but can you do it?” Deilani was asking. She was trying to pressure him into something.
“I could. But I won’t.”
“You’re refusing an order?”
“Ma’am, you don’t have a chain of command, and even if you did, I would not be in it.”
“Under these circumstances—” Deilani began, but Nils cut her off.
“Under these circumstances we do what we have to, and that means listening to whoever’s got the best idea.” I was proud of Nils, but I wished he’d shown this kind of backbone earlier.
So this was what they sounded like when I wasn’t around. These trainees had been drilled to exude Evagardian presence. Restraint, professionalism, perfection. They were less guarded now. Deilani had plenty of bluster when we were face-to-face, but she was also trying to pull in the other trainees for support behind my back. Smart. Sort of.
“He’s an enemy operative, and he’s going to try something. He doesn’t want an imperial rescue,” Deilani was saying earnestly.
Actually, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. It looked as though Deilani was worrying about my problems for me. That was sweet of her.
“But he’s getting one, and he knows it because we’ve got a liner on the ship,” Nils pointed out. He was right. If the Empire did find us, it was just as likely to be because of Salmagard’s wonderful genes as me.
“Yes, and his only chance is if we aren’t there to tell them who he really is.” Deilani had thought this through.
“We don’t know who he really is,” Nils protested.
“She does.”
It was time to step in. Deilani was going down a dangerous path, and she was putting Nils in a bad place, and from the sound of it she would soon be questioning Salmagard. Nils had no good options; disobey a man who might be an honorary admiral, or disobey a woman who was most certainly an imperial lieutenant.
This wasn’t ideal. Why couldn’t Deilani just mellow out? No, that wasn’t a reasonable expectation. That was what made this so frustrating: her paranoia was legitimate. There was sabotage everywhere, and me on top of it. I knew how sketchy I must look to these three. Of course she was on edge. She was just following her training and trying to look out for her comrades, for the people she knew were her comrades.
She saw me as a threat, and she was trying to protect Nils and Salmagard. Maybe that meant she had the makings of a decent officer.
But she was going to get us all killed if she kept this up. Good intentions weren’t enough.
“You two did see me hand off my weapon, didn’t you?” I asked suddenly into the com.
The following silence was gratifying. I could picture their faces. Deilani rallied quickly.
“I daresay,” she said tightly. “We could not expect a Ganraen agent to be entirely helpless, even unarmed.”
And damn if that wasn’t a damned reasonable thing to say. I sighed. I wanted to retort that surely a Ganraen operative couldn’t possibly pose a threat to three imperials and their superior genes and training, but I decided against it.
“And just because you haven’t done anything yet doesn’t mean you won’t later,” she added. I groaned inwardly. She was being childish. If I fought her stubbornness with stubbornness, I wouldn’t win.
“Admiral,” Salmagard’s soft, lustrous voice interrupted. I silently thanked the universe; without her, this ordeal would’ve been infinitely worse.
“What is it?” I heard Deilani hiss in frustration. She couldn’t have seriously expected her little chat with Nils to stay private. If privacy was what she wanted, she should have encoded the channel. Did they teach that to young officers going into bio? Probably not.
“I have movement.”
That took a second to sink in. “Where?”
“In the buffer ring.”
That was at the reactor.
Never mind why anyone would be there—who could she have detected? “Nils, Deilani, where are you?”
“Bay Four.”
“Bridge.”
So it wasn’t them. Why had Salmagard and Nils separated? No time to think about it. I flicked out my knife and slashed the straps tying me to the examination table. I couldn’t untie myself; it wasn’t my fault Deilani had forgotten that I still had my knife. It wasn’t my job to point that out to her. She was the officer, after all. Hadn’t they taught her about attention to detail?
I turned on my EV suit’s lights and left Medical.
“Are you tracking?” I asked over the com.
“No, sir. I’ve lost it.”
“I’m on my way. Private, get back to Nils and hold up. I’m going to find Deilani. Keep scanning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re supposed to be secured!” Deilani said as I slid down a ladder to come face-to-face with her.
“A lot of things are supposed to happen, Lieutenant. You don’t hear me whining. Don’t act like you’re not glad to see me. You know you don’t know the way to engineering, and if there’s somebody else on this ship, I don’t want anyone moving around alone.”
“Not friends of yours, then?”
“I don’t have friends,” I said.
She made an aggravated noise, but she followed me.
I didn’t know what to think, so I didn’t. I just ran, and with only minimal lights, that was difficult enough.
We found Nils and Salmagard outside the buffer. With the reactor shut down, the ring-shaped tank of mercury served no purpose. And without the reactor, the ship had no purpose. It was just a big metal box.
The core was in marginally better condition than the rest of the ship. There were signs that there had been maintenance recently, and some imperial materials on display. One panel on the gray wall was covered by a shiny smart-panel that glowed faintly. Seeing the Evagardian technology in this ship wasn’t getting any less surreal.
“Where?” I asked Salmagard.
She pointed down at the maintenance trench beneath the ring. “It was brief—only a flicker.” She sounded almost apologetic. “The readings are unusual. It’s as though there’s some kind of interference, Admiral.”
She had a combat scanner clipped to her ear, and there was a tiny light on it, strobing almost unnoticeably. It was projecting its readings directly onto her eye. Evagardian technology.
Because she was a negotiator, that would be a standard piece of equipment for her. I wondered why she’d felt the need to put it on. Afraid of the dark? Jumping at shadows? Had she wanted reassurance that she really was alone?
“I’ve never heard of one of those giving a false positive.”
I knelt at the edge of the trench and pointed my light down. For something to register on Salmagard’s scanner, it had to have a certain amount of mass and it had to be alive, or at least move like it was.
Those things were hard to fool; I’d tried.
Salmagard wasn’t tense, but she was ready. I could tell from her body language that she took the reading absolutely seriously. Because she was an aristocrat and as a trainee, it went without saying that she had never seen action before. As I looked at her face as she gazed into the trench, it seemed like she was ready for something to happen. Maybe even itching for it. Had they trained that into her, or was it just her style?
I had no reason not to believe her. She wasn’t the twitchy type. I hadn’t known her long, but I’d seen enough to know that much.
She was trusting me, so I would trust her, too.
4
“ADMIRAL?”
“Yes, Ensign?”
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.” I got to my feet and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir.” Salmagard didn’t hesitate.
“What made you decide to scan?”
“No lights, sir.”
Dead ship, probably a dead planet, and still looking over her shoulder. Salmagard took her job seriously.
There was someone else here. Someone who didn’t want to make contact with us. That raised some interesting questions. I peered down into the maintenance trench.
Maybe now it was time to panic.
What had this mystery individual been doing with the reactor? What could he do with a cold reactor? Supposing this guy was our saboteur—or rather, one of our saboteurs—what more sabotage was there to do? You don’t fix a ship so it’ll get lost, then hitch a ride with it. Something else was going on.
I considered the layout of the reactor. Our new friend would need power, and a tech suit with clearance to open those inner hatches, so in theory he still had to be close.
“Lieutenant, go with the private. Ensign, with me. Take the right side, make plenty of noise. If there’s someone here, I don’t care if he’s shy. I want to know who he is and what he’s doing on this ship. Check all the way down to the coolant reservoir.”
Deilani wouldn’t want to be alone with me; she didn’t like Salmagard, but she couldn’t distrust her. And Nils was too crucial to our survival to be let out of my sight. “And stay on the main channel,” I added, wagging my finger at the lieutenant.
Deilani gave me a defiant scowl, and Nils looked guilty.
We split up. The ensign and I climbed down into the trench. It was even colder, darker, and tighter than the ship’s normal corridors. There were clear plastic shields over the panels, but they were old and filthy, making it difficult to see the machinery behind them. This wasn’t the inferiority of Ganraen engineering; this was just neglect.
“Turn on your light,” I told Nils. “We’re not being subtle.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep your eyes open. If this guy noticed Salmagard and pulled out, he might not be friendly.”
“Sir, how did we get a hostile aboard?” Nils asked, baffled.
“I am more confused than you are right now,” I told him.
There was nothing to suggest we weren’t alone. I saw no sign of a fifth living person on the ship. The freighter was old, and there was plenty of dirt and grime. Tremma’s lax approach to maintenance was evident. Like the rest of the ship, panels were missing, and bulkheads were mismatched and shoddily welded. Wiring and pipes were exposed, sometimes hanging low from the ceiling.
Their training would have already exposed the three graduates to plenty of propaganda to strengthen their prejudices about galactic cultures, specifically those found in the Commonwealth. The state of this ship wasn’t going to make them look on Ganraens any more kindly, but they had no context for what they were seeing.
Taking a Ganraen ship, making it half Evagardian, then trying to keep it running with a crew of two was a big job. This freighter received the best of care when it was in dry dock in a safe place, but that wasn’t often. Just looking at this ship you’d almost think it had been built by an alien species.
But Ganraens were people, the same as everyone else. Though the war hadn’t made it any easier for Evagardians to see them that way.
But they did build such ugly, uninviting ships.
“Hard to believe this thing even flies,” the ensign muttered. He was spoiled. “When was the last time any of this was inspected?”
“Never,” I guessed. The metal around us was pitted and corroded.
“Looks like it, sir. There are safety violations everywhere.” Nils was appalled.
“Of course. These cores are twenty years old. The mercury in the ring hasn’t been replaced in more than that. In fact, most of the work seals look like they came from Oasis.”
“The station with all the pirates?”
“That’s a broad generalization. And there aren’t any pirates there anymore. Anyway, you don’t even want to know about the guidance computers.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m an admiral. I know everything.”
Nils didn’t push. “Who could be here? There were only our sleepers in the bay.”
And a strange sight that had been: the sleek Evagardian sleepers in a cramped, rusty little room. No one deserved to wake up to that. I didn’t think anyone’s illusions survived the Imperial Service forever, but these graduates were having theirs battered a little early in their careers.
Still, it could’ve been worse.
“It’s only a short jump series to Payne Station. It’s not like a conscious passenger would lose a lot of time, even on a ship this slow. It wouldn’t be
strange at all if Tremma had added a third man to his team.”
“Team? You mean ‘crew,’ sir.”
I winced. That was a slip. Nils was giving me a look, but he didn’t want to press.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if he added another man, or even a couple of men. What I don’t understand is why they would avoid us,” I told him.
“Unless they had something to do with what happened in that airlock,” Deilani said over the com.
“Why bother running, though? Where can they go? They can’t leave the ship. Even if there’s someone here who’s up to no good, he’s in the same fix we are. Rescue will come, they’ll have scanners, and everyone will be accounted for. Avoiding us is pointless,” I said.
“Is it? We still don’t know where we are,” Nils said. “This planet could be anywhere. There could be a settlement a kilometer away for all we know.”
“True,” I admitted. “But I’m pretty well traveled, and I’ve never seen anything like what’s outside this ship right now.”
“It’s a big galaxy,” Deilani said. “Nobody could keep track of the climates of every world on record.”
“Agreed. But it’s not just the mist—it’s the gravity. I’ve never felt this before. You aren’t used to the difference because Evagardian worlds all use gravity cores to stay consistent with Old Earth force. But once you get out a bit, you’ll get a feel for the differences. Trust me.”
“Oh, we do,” Deilani snarled.
I decided to change the subject. “You two have anything?”
“No signs, no readings,” Salmagard reported. “Where are you?”
“We just cleared the trench on the second core.”
I looked up at the high ceiling. There had once been catwalks overhead, but they hadn’t survived the repurposing of the ship. One less thing to check. I pointed my light back into the trench. I’d have sworn something moved, but now there was nothing. My brain chemistry was playing tricks. I wished we had enough power for more lights.
“Sir?” Nils was looking at me intently. He was following me blindly, but was still keenly sensitive to my mood. As long as I acted like the situation was under control, he’d hold together.
