Ancestral Machines

by Michael Cobley

  Pyke had taken the usual precautions: apart from Punzho and Hammadi, the rest of the crew were on hand to provide the deterrence of an armed welcoming committee. Khorr and his men had climbed out of their squat shuttle and strode leisurely over to where Pyke stood next to a waist-high crate on which sat the merchandise, resting within its shaped padding, a state-of-the-art milgrade subspace scanner-caster. When the three stopped a few feet short and crossed their arms, Pyke had heard one of Dervla’s trademark derisive snorts from behind. Ignoring it, he had given a bright smile.

  “Well, now, here we are, meeting at last. Very nice.”

  Khorr, face like granite, grunted. His dark eyes had flicked right and left at the rest of the crew for a moment before fixing on Pyke again.

  “This is the device?”

  Pyke gave the scanner’s case an affectionate pat.

  “You see before you Sagramore Industries’ latest and finest scanner, factory-fresh and field-ready, conveyed to your waiting hands by my professional services. Which don’t come cheap.”

  Khorr nodded, reached inside his heavy jacket and produced a small flat case just the right size for holding a number of credit splines. He held them out and waited until Pyke’s fingers were prying at the release button before saying, “Here is your payment!”

  Now, floating weightless in the half-lit passage, Pyke remembered how his danger-sense had quivered right at that moment but his hands had had a life of their own and were already opening the small case. A faint mist had puffed out and even though he had turned his face away from it he still caught a whiff of something sweet. He had felt cold prickles scamper across his face as he turned to shout a warning, but saw Ancil and Win crumpling to the deck a second before grey nothing shut down his mind.

  And yet I’m still alive, he thought. And that skagpile Khorr really doesn’t seem like the type to leave behind loose ends.

  Grabbing handholds on the bulkhead, he launched himself along the passage towards Auxiliary Hold 4. He slowed and floated over to the hatch window, gazed in and swore at the sight. Hammadi’s corpse hung there, adrift amid blue and green spares boxes. Dead. The jutting tongue and noticeably bulging eyes spoke of suffocation by depressurisation, gradual not explosive, otherwise there would have been webs of burst blood vessels and more grotesque damage. Hammadi was–had been–chief engineer, a genius in his own way who had made the Scarabus’s drives sing like a chorus of harmonised furies.

  But all Pyke could think about was Dervla. Dear god, please no!

  Pyke pushed away from the hatch, turning towards a side opening, the midsection lateral corridor which led to the port-side passageway and the other auxiliary holds. He launched himself along it, driven to get it over with.

  The quiet was eerie, unnerving. No mingled background murmur of onboard systems, no whisper of a/c, no low hum of micropumps, no faint sounds of crew activities, no music, no chattering news feeds. Just a numbed silence. But the air… he sniffed, breathed in deep, and realised that it was not as stale as it should be. Some backup ventilation had to be running somewhere, but how and why? More unanswered questions.

  It was just as gloomy over in the port-side passage. From the T-junction he glided across to Auxiliary Hold 2, grabbed the door stanchion and peered in through the hatch window. There was movement, and the surprised, bandito-moustached face of Ancil Martel glanced up from where he floated, crouched next to the manual override panel.

  “Hey, chief,” came his muffled voice. “It’s jammed on this side. Can you…?”

  Pyke nodded, pried aside the outer panel and after several sharp tugs the hatch seal gave with a familiar pop. A moment later the hatch was slid aside enough for Ancil to squeeze through.

  “Those ratbags chumped us, chief.”

  “I know.”

  “But why are we still alive…?”

  Pyke ground his teeth and shook his head. “Hammadi’s in Hold 4, dead from air-evac. I think that’s what that gouger Khorr had in mind, for us all to be in our quarters and dead from some massive failure of the environmentals. But something must have interrupted the scum… or he just made a bollocks of it and didn’t know.” He glanced along at the next hatch. “What about Hold 1? D’ye know if there’s anyone in there?”

  Ancil shrugged. “Only came around a short while ago. Banged on the wall a few times but I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Better find out, then, hadn’t we?”

  So saying he pushed off along to Hold 1’s hatch, grabbed its handle and swung in close to the window and…

  “Feck and dammit!” he snarled.

  Inside, near the rear bulkhead, the bulky, brown-overalled form of Krefom, the Henkayan heavy weapons specialist, drifted a few feet off the deck, still as a statue, sightless eyes gazing out of that craggy impassive face. In Pyke’s mind he imagined Khorr and his men moving through the ship, dragging the unconscious crew along, imprisoning them one by one.

  “That son of a bitch is going to pay!”

  With the last rage-filled word he slammed one palm and upper arm against the flat bulkhead, making a sudden loud bang which reverberated along the passage. Then he gasped as he saw the Henkayan’s still form jerk convulsively, eyes staring wildly around him for a moment or two. Then he spotted the disbelieving Pyke and Ancil at the window, gave a big grin and pointed.

  “He was sleeping?” Pyke said. “Sleeping… with his eyes open?”

  A frowning Ancil shrugged. “Maybe Henkayans can do that, chief. I’ve never seen him asleep.”

  Then Krefom was at the hatch, knocking on the window with a big knuckly fist.

  “Can’t open this side, Captain-sir,” came his deep rough voice. “Broke the emergency handle. Sorry.”

  “We can crack it from here, Kref,” Pyke said.

  Moments later the lock-seal was released and Krefom pushed the hatch aside with a single push of one mighty forearm. As the big Henkayan shouldered out of the hold he gave a gravelly chuckle and slapped palms with Ancil. Pyke intervened before they started swapping stories.

  “Kref, I need to know what you have stashed in that cabinet up by the crew quarters.”

  “Some good stuff–shockbatons, trankers, concussion and smoke nades, some light body armour…” The Henkayan frowned for a moment. “And a tangler. You think them skaghats is still on board, Captain-sir?”

  “Dunno, Kref,” he said. “But I’ll not be taking any chances. Let’s go.”

  Together they floated back along the lateral corridor to the midpoint where a panel was yanked out to reveal an interdeck access shaft. Pyke went first, hand over hand up the cold alloy ladder. Near the top, where a hatch led to an alcove near the crew quarters, he heard voices and slowed. He made a silencing gesture to Ancil and Kref below him while listening intently. One voice was female and after a moment he smiled, recognising the unflappably sardonic tones of Win Foskel, their tactics and close combat expert. Pyke proceeded to snap open the hatch catches without trying to mute the noise, then gripped a ladder rung and pushed the hatch upwards.

  “Stop right there!” came Win Foskel’s voice. “Surrender your weapons–toss them out, no smart moves or I’ll drop something down that shaft that’ll fry you from the inside!”

  “And what would that be?” Pyke said. “One of those gritburgers from the galley?”

  Ancil laughed further down as Pyke pushed himself up and into the corridor. A rueful Win tilted her tranker away and nodded, then grinned as Ancil was next to emerge. Her glittered dreads wavered as she drifted over to him. Out in the corridor proper, Pyke found Mojag, a skinny Human, Punzho the Egetsi, and Dervla who seemed oddly calm when her eyes settled upon him. He was about to ask how she was but there was something in her features, in fact something in the demeanour of them all. Then he realised what was wrong–three Humans, one Egetsi, but no portly, middle-aged reptiloid Kiskashin.

  “Where’s Oleg?” he said abruptly, even as he guessed.

  Dervla floated over to him, grey eyes staring intens
ely from her pale face, her back-tied red hair looking almost black in the redness of the emergency light. She leaned in close and kissed him.

  “That’s for being alive,” she said. Then with disconcerting suddenness she slapped him. “And that’s for Mojag, because he’s far too polite!”

  “So you thought you’d take it upon yourself to act in his stead, is that it?”

  Her gaze was full of smouldering anger but Pyke could see the hurt behind it. Oleg had been Mojag’s copartner but in the four years since they joined the crew Dervla had built up bonds of friendship with the Kiskashin.

  “You led us here, Bran,” she said.

  “Where is he?” Pyke said.

  “And it was your idea, your deal.”

  “Where?”

  Before she could answer, Mojag spoke from where he floated further along the darkened passage.

  “Our cabin,” he said in a quiet voice. “They must have sealed him in there then set the environmentals to evacuate. I don’t know if he knew what was going on but when the temperature and pressure fell the hibernation reflex must have taken over.” Mojag breathed deeply for a moment and rubbed his face. “He looks peaceful–he was probably in hibernation fugue when the air ran out.”

  “But they could only do that if they got into the enviro controls first,” said Ancil, who then paused, and snapped his fingers. “The auxiliaries in the main hold.”

  Pyke nodded, anger leashed. “You’re right.”

  “Wouldn’t be any of them still aboard, would there?” said Ancil.

  “No–once the deed was done, the filthy gougers would have left us for dead and scarpered, although we better be sure.” By now the crew were gathered round, listening. “So what we’re going to do is this–empty that armoury cabinet, make sure everyone’s got something harmful and a torch, and maybe some armour, then we split up. Two groups, one sweeping the ship from bows to stern while the other heads for Engineering to see about getting the power and the environmentals back up and running. Okay? Let’s get to it.”

  The crew seemed subdued, faces masked with sombreness and… something else. Sorrow over the loss of Hammadi and Oleg, certainly, but Pyke could sense some kind of reserve. Perhaps Dervla wasn’t the only one laying blame at his door.

  The armoury cabinet had only been partially looted. Unearthed from a carrycase was a solitary pulse-stunner which Kref passed to Pyke, who looked it over, checked the charge, then pulled out the extendable stock, locking it in place. It was an ugly, stubby weapon done up in a horrible mud-brown colour scheme but for shipboard skirmishing it was highly effective.

  Pyke chose Kref and Win to go with him to Engineering, while the others accompanied Dervla forward to start at the bridge. The Scarabus was a small ship, yet the journey back along grav-less, low-lit passages to the aft section was tense, almost nerve-jangling. Pyke’s group checked from the main hold back to the storerooms, the little machine-shop, the lower and upper generators and the aft maintenance niches, ending up at last in the narrow, split-level chamber that served as Engineering Control. It had taken twenty-odd minutes, and Dervla’s group arrived just moments after them.

  “Nothing,” she said, balancing a black-handled shockbaton on her shoulder. “Not a sign, not a sound, not a soul.”

  “Just as well,” said Pyke. “Then first order of business is getting the gravity back on. Ancil, you think you can manage that?”

  Ancil screwed one eye half shut thoughtfully. “Eh, if Mojag lends me a hand.”

  Mojag gave a wordless nod and climbed up to join Ancil at the long console where he sat, prodding boards awake.

  “Time we got as close to the deck as possible,” he told the others. “Don’t want anyone copping a sprained ankle or worse.”

  Lying flat out with his head propped up on one hand, Pyke thought about Mojag. He was a skinny guy in his middle years, dark brown eyes and short brown hair lightened by encroaching greyness. He and the Kiskashin, Oleg, had only joined the crew a year ago but the story went that back in his twenties, before he met Oleg, he had suffered head injuries so serious that nearly half his brain was replaced with a pseudo-organic cortical prosthesis. While the injury and subsequent operation erased great swathes of memory, the prosthesis permitted the replacement of fact and images as supplied by members of his family. Whenever the subject arose Mojag insisted that before the injury he had been something of a planet-skipping, bed-hopping playboy, a claim most of the crew found amusing since the Mojag they knew was calm and meditative and self-possessed to the point of unreadability. Even now.

  Once everyone was on the deck, Ancil gave a five-second countdown before bringing the grav-system back online. The return of body weight elicited a collective oof! a moment before the sound of crashes and clatters reverberated along the corridor outside and undoubtedly throughout the ship.

  “The sound of our worldly goods rediscovering which way is down,” said Dervla as she got up on shaky legs.

  With a dry laugh Pyke forced himself upright. “Right, then, Ancil–can you activate some sort of comms?”

  Sitting slumped in one of the bucket seats by the monitors, Ancil frowned. “Without oversight from Scar? I might be able to rig an open channel using the corridor voker network. You might have to shout, though.”

  Scar was the name Pyke had conferred upon the ship’s AI.

  “Aye, do it,” Pyke said. “We’ll get Scar back online, and then maybe we can find out what’s keeping the air breathable.”

  “Bet it’s another legacy system,” said Dervla. “Y’know, the stuff that Voth dealer promised that he’d wiped from the substrate nodes. Six years since you bought this heap and we’re still getting weird events like this.”

  “Well, aye, but this time it’s kept us alive,” he said. “Perhaps yourself and Win could go up to the main hold and restart the enviros from up there?”

  “What about Oleg and Hammadi?”

  “We’ll deal with them once the Scarabus is up and running, and we have the sensors and weapons primed and ready, not before.”

  Dervla regarded him. “Should we go to the bridge afterwards, relight the boards?”

  “No, I’m heading there myself in a moment or two.” He offered a thin smile. “Get Scar woken up and bright-eyed.”

  “You and that AI are too close for my liking,” she said, arching one eyebrow. With that she headed out of the hatch, followed by Win who smiled and rolled her eyes before leaving.

  Watching them go, Pyke thought, Well, if I didn’t know any better…

  He turned to the others. Mojag and Ancil were still working at their elevated workstations, prodding and flicking screen glyphs and webby data arrays. Krefom the Henkayan was doing stretching exercises to firm up his relaxed muscles, while the Egetsi, Punzho Bex, was still slumped on the floor by the wall. At two and a half metres he was average height for an Egetsi, a lo-grav biped species whose homeworld lay in the confederal alliance of Fensahr.

  Pyke squatted down beside him. “How are you doing, Punzho?”

  “I have been without gravityness for some time, Captain,” the Egetsi said in his soft, double-larynxed voice. “I am with embarrassment at my body’s incapacity. I should be aiding the recovery of our vessel.”

  “Don’t you worry yourself about that–you’ll be right as rain in a short while. I just need to ask you something about when that Khorr and his goons came aboard; did ye sense anything from them at all, any kind of threat?”

  The Egetsi’s narrow features were a picture of anguish. Pyke had hired him a year and a half ago on account of his voluminous knowledge of rare and valuable trade goods (especially arts and antiquities). He also possessed some low-level psi abilities that had proved useful now and then.

  “Captain, I am with sorrow. I detected nothing from them, nothing at all. They were very calm—”

  “Might have been shielded,” chipped in Ancil from above.

  “Or mind-trained,” Pyke said, frowning. Which would make for a very inte
resting skillset for a bunch of supposed smugglers.

  He patted Punzho on the shoulder and stood.

  “Look, if they were able to shield their minds then there was nothing you could have done. Doesn’t matter how they did it. So don’t be getting bent out of shape over it, all right?”

  Punzho raised one long-fingered hand, reached inside his pale green overtunic and took out a small dark blue pouch. He loosened its ties, opened it and tipped out a number of small, intricately detailed figurines. Sorting through them he picked out one and returned the rest to the pouch.

  “You are right, Captain,” he said. “I must winnow out the true guilt from the false, and in the enduring time regain my strengths. Gst will help me see the path.”

  Punzho was a follower of the Weave, a religion derived from the lives of nine holy seekers who lived at a time when the Egetsi had reached a tribal level of development. Believers memorised the Three Catechisms, the Three Inspirations, and the Three Obligations, and carried on their persons a pouch containing effigies representing the Nine Novices. The little figurines served as a focus for meditation on a wide range of topics, either on their own or in specific arrangements. Out of curiosity, Pyke had once asked Punzho if he ever employed the effigies as stand-ins for the crew but the Egetsi insisted that according to orthodoxy such a use amounted to allegory and was therefore inadvisable. Pyke wasn’t sure how much of an answer that was.

  “Good,” he said. “And now I’m off to the bridge to get things humming there… oh, and Kref, would you check the aft storage booths for breakages and damage? The sensors on some of the stackerbots are crocked so we may have to straighten the booths out by hand.”

  “I can do that, Captain,” Kref said. “There’ll be some good lifting in that.”

  Pyke grinned and left, following the starboard corridor to where a companionway led up to an offdeck up on a level with the high gantries that ran along either bulkhead of the main hold. A viewport gave a view down into the hold where he could see Win Foskel inspecting the innards of a tall, hinged maintenance panel. Of Dervla there was no sign. Turning, he glanced at the smaller, thicker viewport in the bulkhead which was part of the hull; there was only a dozen of them scattered around the Scarabus, and all were double-sealed by the shipwide shutdown. Getting them open again was high on his list, serving his need to see the stars. The Great Star-Forest, as his Granny Rennals used to call it, saying that there were many trails through the forest and not all of them were safe.