The Wolf Itself (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 1)

by mikel evins

  “They were in here,” she said.

  “Great,” said Angier.

  “It was a long time ago, though.”

  Angier stuck his head into the hatch.

  “You can tell how old a smell is?” he said.

  “Sure,” Mai said. “Can’t you?”

  Angier pulled his head back out and rolled onto his back, arms crossed, scowling.

  Mai walked down one wall and up the next, turning and spiraling all over the inside of the companionway. It was maybe four meters end-to-end. It seemed like she was trying to pass her nose over every square millimeter of it individually. Eventually, though, she lifted her head and said, “All clear.”

  “You’re sure?” Jaemon said.

  “They were in here, but it was a long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “I dunno. Years? Decades?”

  “Nothing newer than that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, let’s get inside and get that hatch closed again.”

  He started unscrewing the rat’s nest of connections he’d made between my arm and the hatch circuitry.

  “Once we get inside, Lev, maybe we can get you fixed up. What do you think?”

  I shook my head.

  “Burned.”

  With a supreme effort of will I stopped my damaged speech center from repeating that word half a dozen times. I felt a thrill of triumph.

  “Maybe,” Jaemon said. “But maybe we can run a bypass or make some circuits do double duty. Worth a try ain’t it? It’ll pass the time, anyway.”

  “Manual,” I said. “In in in mem-memory. In memory. In in. Memory manual.”

  “Sure. I’ll take a look.”

  He snapped my arm back together and I tried wiggling my fingers. They wiggled, but I still couldn’t feel them.

  Once we were inside, Jaemon poked at a panel and the hatch slid shut.

  “Whew,” he said. “I’m glad that hatch worked. I was afraid for a second I was going to have to open your arm back up. Let’s move on through the same way. We’ll shine a spot around and take a good look at each new chamber, then Mai will go in and check it over for us.”

  “Yes, Sir!” Mai said enthusiastically.

  “Spectrum,” I said. My voice crackled with static. “Op-op-op-optics.”

  “What?” Jaemon said.

  I touched my cameras with one hand.

  “Spectrum,” I said.

  Jaemon frowned and looked at Angier. Angier frowned back.

  “More,” I said. “Wide. Wide more more wide. Wide.”

  “Oh,” Angier said. “I got it. The Doc can see a wider spectrum. Wants to be the one that looks through the hatch.”

  “Oh,” said Jaemon. “That makes sense. That right, Lev? You want to scout for us?”

  I tried to sigh with relief, but it came out a meaningless sputtering noise. I nodded.

  Jaemon said, “Okay, that makes good sense. Let’s see about that next hatch.”

  15.

  Like Kestrel, Autolycus was a torch, so its interior was arranged into stacked decks. Its bridge had been at the top, with other decks stacked below. Autolycus’ decks were much smaller than Kestrel’s, just as the ship itself was smaller.

  We moved cautiously through the hulk from one enclosed space to the next. It was extremely dark, the only light being that from our spots. The next chamber below below the vanished bridge was a maintenance deck, an arrangement exactly like Kestrel’s, except that the maintenance deck was much smaller, with conduits and instrument stations crammed so close together that there was little room to move around. That explained the access tube we had entered. It ran alongside the maintenance bay, offering a way past the tangle of ship’s guts in the bay.

  The bulk of cables and conduits routed through the maintenance bay and into junctions in the firewall between decks was impressive. Though Autolycus was much smaller than Kestrel, her nervous system was actually larger.

  In place of a lift cage, Autolycus had only access tubes like the one we had used to get inside. Safety hatches had sprung shut at each deck. Jaemon had to repeat his work at each one, opening my arm to get at my internal cabling, piping power to the local circuitry, working in the shaky light of our spots, coaxing the safety hatches open and shut. After the first couple, he got quicker at it, and we left my right arm open, cabling clipped to my ulnar strut for easy access. The fingers of my right hand were frozen half-flexed in a sketch of a metallic claw.

  We moved from firewall to firewall: jimmy the hatch, stick my cameras through the opening for a scan, send Mai through to sweep the revealed space. Then all of us through the hatch and jimmy it shut again. If we ran into a nest of Titans inside, we were cutting off our escape route. On the other hand, we knew there were Titans outside, and if they didn’t find us anywhere else, they would have to start searching for us inside eventually. Better to make them take time jimmying the hatches the same way we had to.

  The Pilot’s cabin was very strange. The bunk—if that’s what it was—was a circular thing with a sort of rounded spongy surface. It was hard to imagine any biological I knew of finding it comfortable for sleeping, and if the pilot had been a mech then he or she wouldn’t have needed a bunk. We floated in the dark, spotlights playing over the thing, looking blankly at each other.

  “Any ideas?” Jaemon said. No one answered.

  Galley. Head. Both were equally strange. The head had some weird furnishings none of us had seen before.

  There was a comm station that had been outfitted out of all sane proportion. It looked like it belonged in a ship five times the size of Autolycus. The work and display surfaces were arranged around the outside of the deck with a central space left unoccupied. There was no seat. Once again we looked at each other and shrugged.

  Below the comm station was an engineering and maintenance bay, a little taller and wider than the other decks we had passed. It had ports for access to all the ship’s systems. An interior bulkhead separated the working space from the access tube, and it was fitted as a single huge viewport. There was a large workstation, offset slightly from the center of the deck, horseshoe-shaped, facing away from the viewport. Its soft instrumentation was dead and cold, offering no clue as to its capabilities, but the display surfaces were extravagant. Again, there was no seat.

  As on every deck so far, the access tube ended in a firewall that we soon had open. I stuck my cameras through the opening and scanned it. The space below resembled the bridge maintenance bay, but taller and wider, with more cabling gathered into larger clusters. Once again, Mai pulled herself through and swept the interior.

  “Something different here,” Mai said.

  “Titans?” Angier said quickly.

  “I don’t…maybe,” Mai said.

  “What do you mean? Do you smell Titans or don’t you?”

  Mai floated around a central trunk of cables to look through the open hatch at us, expression troubled.

  “It smells kind of like those other Titans, but not like them. Anyway, it’s as old as all the other traces I’ve smelled, so whatever it was, it hasn’t been in here for a long time.”

  “Maybe the missing primary?” Jaemon suggested.

  “That must be it,” Angier said.

  “I don’t think so,” Mai said. “It smells…different.”

  “Different how?” Angier said.

  Mai cocked her head at a different angle.

  “Just different.”

  Jaemon said, “Do you think there was more than one Titan here?”

  “More than one?” Angier said. “There were hundreds out there.”

  “No, I mean more than one primary,” Jaemon said. “Each primary has its own secondaries. A primary can’t use secondaries from another primary. They’ll try to kill it and eat it. Or the primary will eat the secondaries.”

  Angier looked dyspeptic.

  “That’s just…”

  Jaemon shrugged.

  “It’s a lucky break for u
s. Maybe that’s why they’ve never been able to gain much of a foothold off of Titan. They’re too busy eating each other.”

  I had to admit I was becoming more and more curious about our spidery adversaries. I wondered how they could have mastered enough technology to become a threat to shipping lanes around Saturn if they were nothing but mindless cannibalistic eating machines. If they posed such a threat to each other, how did they manage to cooperate well enough to threaten armed orbital settlements like Arnessen Station? What was their origin? Were they consciously designed, and if so, for what purpose? Or were they some sort of naturally evolved organism? I had never encountered answers to these questions in the Fabric.

  Jaemon found yet another safety hatch in the floor of the maintenance bay. We followed the same routine, popped it open, scanned it, sent Mai to sweep. Then Jaemon pulled himself through.

  “This looks like a torpedo bay,” Jaemon said. I followed him through the hatch, pulling myself through with my good hand.

  “These aren’t torpedoes, though.”

  “What are they?” Angier said, sticking his head through the hatch behind me.

  Jaemon was floating next to a set of racks mounted to the exterior bulkhead. Two circular utility ports were mounted next to the racks, one on each side of the ship. They rose a little from the deck, and their casings blended with the bulkhead on one edge. There were big canisters mounted on the racks, in easy reach of the tubes. Each rack had a couple of empty slots.

  Each canister was a meter and a half long and glossy black, a little less than a meter wide, exactly the size of the utility ports. The ports were arranged so that if you shoved a canister into one, the canister would be angled away from the ship’s centerline. The canisters were long and smooth and dark, and had little ports all over them, like jet exhausts.

  Jaemon shrugged. “Lev? Any ideas?”

  I tried poking at them through the Fabric. They were inert, but I could feel rows of transceivers in them, and the telltale conductivity of magnetic rails in the utility ports.

  “Probes?” I hazarded.

  “Hunh,” Jaemon grunted. “Well, it was supposed to be a scientific survey vessel.”

  “I thought it was a spy ship,” Angier said.

  “Kinda the same thing, really,” Jaemon said.

  Our Fabric feed came to life. An image of Chief Verge appeared.

  “Survey Team One, what is your status?”

  Jaemon said, “Hey, Verge. So far, so good. We’re inside the hulk, poking around. We’ve made it down to its engineering bay.”

  “Are you all safe and well?”

  “Lev’s got some circuits blown, but we’ll get him fixed up, soon as we get the chance. Membranes are all nominal and good for a couple of days yet.”

  “No further sign of Titans?”

  “Mai says she smells them in here, but the traces are old. Nothing recent. We haven’t seen anything new, and the secondaries haven’t found us yet.”

  “Still no sign of a primary?”

  “Not yet.”

  “All right, good. The Captain instructed me to tell you we’re trying to work out firing solutions that will get us there sooner. He said to say, ‘no promises.’”

  Jaemon smiled.

  “Understood. Don’t blow Kestrel up trying to get to us,” he said. “We’re okay for the moment.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  Angier muttered, “Now we’ll find the primary and it’ll eat our faces.”

  “Nah,” said Jaemon. “We’ll show it your face first and scare it away.”

  Angier scowled and glared at Jaemon.

  “Would that really work?” Mai said.

  Jaemon laughed out loud.

  “No,” he said, still laughing. “I’m just joking, Mai.”

  “Har har,” said Angier sourly. “Everybody’s a comedian.”

  “Oh,” said Mai.

  16.

  We were still poking around the maintenance bay when I noticed a row of status lights coming on.

  “Light!” I said. “Light! Light!”

  “You need more light?” Mai said, pushing herself off a bulkhead and sailing toward me. She dialed up the output of her spotlight as she came. She caught herself deftly on the workstation, looked at the display, and called out, “Status lights are coming on!”

  “What?” said Jaemon and Angier in unison.

  Suddenly everyone was crowded against me, floating around the console as it lit up with status information.

  “How the devil is this stuff coming on?” Jaemon said. “This hulk is cold and dead. We haven’t transferred nearly enough power for this, have we? Where’s the power coming from?”

  He stopped and jerked upright. His eyes tracked right and left for a moment.

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “What?” Angier said.

  “I just had an idea,” Jaemon said. “Lev, can we find out the source of that power?”

  My speech centers were damaged, but I hadn’t lost my mind. It only took a few seconds to see how to reconfigure the status display to show power distribution. I poked at the controls.

  “Uh-oh,” Jaemon said again. “That power’s coming from our tent generators. The secondaries are transmitting power. They’re funneling it to the hulk’s batteries from our generators.”

  “There must be a primary out there!” Angier said. All the color drained out of his face. Mai’s eyes went wide and her ears clamped down tight.

  “Easy there, Angier,” said Jaemon. “We don’t know that.”

  “I thought you said secondaries were dumb?”

  “Well, they’re no geniuses. But they can do basic maintenance stuff like this, and a little bit of planning, if they have a clear goal.”

  “What’s their goal?” Mai said. “Why would they want to power up the derelict?”

  Jaemon frowned.

  “Beats me,” he said. “There’s no way they can pilot it out of here.”

  “Because the nose is gone?” Mai said.

  “Nah, they could pilot it from here. That’s not the problem. Problem is the reactor’s powered down.”

  “But if they’re putting more power in…?”

  “Nope. Won’t work. See this? Autolycus is an antimatter-catalyzed torch. When it powered down, the bottles lost power. Her antimatter dissipated a long time ago.”

  He frowned.

  “Unless…”

  I said, “Wake. Wake.”

  They all stared at me. I fumbled for a few minutes, making harsh sputtering noises. Then I said, “Asleep. Awake.”

  More sputtering

  “Power. Awake, work, power.”

  “Oh,” Jaemon said. “Okay, good point. See, they’ve been hibernating for a hundred years because they ran out of power. Make sense? But secondaries always have a job to do. It’s what they’re for. Whatever they think they’re doing, they want power to do it with. So they found our tent and the generators, and now they’re pumping power over here where they can use it.”

  “If they had some kind of project going,” Angier said, “How come we haven’t found it?”

  “We haven’t looked everywhere,” Jaemon said.

  “What kind of project?” Mai said.

  Jaemon pursed his lips. “As far as I know, with secondaries it’s either building something or taking something apart. At a guess? They’re trying to rebuild their primary.”

  “Oh, great,” said Angier. “How long will that take?”

  “Well, it’s taken them a hundred years, so far,” Jaemon said.

  “Oh, har-dee-har,” Angier said. “How long now that they have power again?”

  Jaemon shrugged.

  “Hard to say without knowing how much they already got done.”

  “We could find where they’re building it,” Angier said.

  “Maybe,” Jaemon said. “That how you want to spend your time? Poking around in the dark looking for a Titan primary? I’m thinking we might be better off figuring
out how to keep them away from us until Kestrel gets here.”

  “Yeah, but—” Angier swallowed and looked around, wide-eyed. We all looked around with him. Darkness surrounded us. Our moving spots cast eerie, stretched shadows against the bulkheads.

  “Keep your cool, Big Guy,” said Jaemon. “We’re doing fine so far.”

  Angier looked at him, his eyes showing a lot of white.

  “Will they use up all their power again trying build their primary?” said Mai.

  Jaemon frowned. “You know, that’s been bugging me. It doesn’t seem to me like they should have used all the power up in the first place. I mean, sure, it would take a lot of power and raw materials to build a Titan primary, but not that much. Not enough to drain the stores of a torch, even a small one. And anyway, the reactor should have kept them going the whole time. Why’s the reactor down?”

  “Bridge,” I said.

  Jaemon just stared at me. I tried to put a sentence together, but all I managed was some sputtering. Finally I gave up and put my hands together, fingers touching, then spread them apart in a big gesture. I made a burst of static as I did it.

  Jaemon blinked at me.

  Angier said, “Sabotage. Somebody sabotaged the ship. That’s why the bridge is blown apart like that.”

  “Oh!” Jaemon said. “Sure. That’s it. The pilot had Titans aboard his ship. He didn’t want them to take Autolycus, so he blew the bridge off and shut down the reactor. Probably set up the ship’s systems to drain the power stores, too.”

  Angier scowled.

  “That’s crazy! Why would anybody even have the stuff to do that aboard a spacecraft?”

  Jaemon shrugged.

  “Spy ship, remember? Can’t let the enemy get hold of it.”

  Angier frowned.

  “So why not blow up the whole ship? I mean, the Titans did get hold of it.”

  “We don’t know the Titans were the enemy he was spying on,” Jaemon said.

  “Who else?” Angier said. “A hundred years ago, right? Here in Saturn space. What else is there here, besides us and Titans?”

  “I dunno,” said Jaemon. “You could search the Fabric about it, I guess. Maybe somebody was operating honeypots out here.”

  Angier frowned again.