“It’s strange they didn’t dismantle their ship,” the captain mused.
“Not strange at all, if you think about it,” Peron said.
When Kiara offered him a blank, uncomprehending stare, he offered a follow-up observation. “Something must have happened to them too. There’s no sign that they’re in this system either.”
* * * * *
“Full stop, Ms. McKenzie.”
The helmsman hit the appropriate buttons on her instrument panel and the Euripides slowed to a halt some ten feet off one of the principle air locks of Brynhild Station. It was a nice piece of flying, above the basic competence level that Jewel was coming to expect of the crew of the Euripides, but then pilots really did have to be top notch wherever they were working. Starships couldn’t go banging into every space station they docked with. The casualty count would simply be too high.
“Seeing as we’re not being fired upon, Mr. Exec,” the captain said, “I think we’ll work on the assumption that the crew of this station is either absent, dead or incapacitated.”
She didn’t wait for a response. “Patch me through to the Deck Officer,” she told Everson. She’d sent Warrant to the Euripides’ air locks twenty minutes before to prepare the ship for docking.
Everson hit a couple of buttons. “You’re clear, Captain.”
“Deck Officer, you may extend the boarding tunnel,” the captain said, “but you are not to actually open our airlocks.”
“Yes, Ma’am!” Warrant acknowledged.
The captain turned to Erik. “We don’t like each other very much, do we, Mr. Exec?”
Erik was clearly surprised by her question, which attracted the sharp attention of everyone on the ship. “I wouldn’t say that, Captain.” The lie was obvious to anyone looking at his face. “We’ve had a few bumps in the road, but we respect each other enough to get the job done.”
Kiara considered his words for a few moments, then clearly discarded them for the hot air they were. “Well, I’m going to do you a good turn anyway. You’re in charge of the boarding party. I want you to make friendly contact with the natives, if there are any. And I want you to support the purser’s mission to secure us the supplies we need.”
Erik clearly liked his instructions so much he couldn’t keep the grin off his face. “Thank you, Captain!”
Kiara had already turned to face Jewel. “Aurora, you’ll accompany the exec. Find out what they have and get us what we need.”
“Yes, Ma’am!” Jewel agreed, wishing she’d been paired with the deck officer and not Erik.
“Well what are you two waiting for?” the captain asked. “Mr. Warrant will have the boarding tunnel extended in no time flat.”
Erik and Jewel started off toward the exit as if in lockstep.
“And both of you keep in mind,” the captain called after them, “that this is a work party. Don’t let me hear about you two fucking each other in any dark passages.”
* * * * *
Jewel, Erik and four crewmembers assembled outside the airlock that the deck officer had linked to the corresponding gate on Brynhild station. Jewel looked over the crew, wishing she knew them better, but still glad that she knew at least a little about each of them. As purser she had a lot of contact with the general crew. Alfonse Arico had a reputation for being lazy, which hopefully would keep him from getting himself into too much trouble. Jester Carter was a cutup—too concerned with having a good time to pay attention to his job. Malcontent Meg Falco would be too busy complaining about the extra duty to do anything useful. Dawil Kwon—he was the one she’d have to watch out for. There was something about him she didn’t like. He was hard in all the wrong ways, but maybe it wouldn’t matter. Maybe Erik had known what he was doing when he picked these people to accompany them.
“All right crew, listen up,” Erik told them. Like everyone else, he was dressed in his normal shipboard uniform with the addition of a vest covered with tools and first aid supplies. Unlike everyone else, he looked very good in his uniform—good enough that Jewel wondered if he had it tailored to better fit him than standard issue would.
“This isn’t the military,” Falco said. She was a tall woman with tawny hair, but she didn’t groom herself well. Her clothes were too loose and she gave off a disheveled aura that enhanced her reputation for having a chip on her shoulder. “I’m a civilian. You can’t shout at me like that.”
“Hey, that’s a good one,” Jester told her as he jabbed her in the ribs with his elbow. Too thin to be truly handsome, he compensated by playing the class clown. “I wish I’d thought of it first.”
Falco pushed him back. “How many times do I have to tell you, Jester? Don’t touch me! Exec? You saw it didn’t you? Jester’s harassing me.”
Jewel rolled her eyes and kept her mouth shut.
Erik tried again, raising his voice to speak over his crew. “We’re going into a foreign space station. We do not know the status of the inhabitants. If they are present and in control of the station, we will treat them politely. If they are incapacitated or in need of assistance, we will render them aid. And if the station is deserted, we will investigate it to learn what happened to the inhabitants—”
“No,” Captain Kiara interrupted as she stepped into the corridor where they were assembled outside the airlock. “If the station is deserted, we will search it to learn which of their resources we can utilize to get us home again. Are there any questions?”
Meg Falco immediately raised her hand.
“Not from you, Falco,” the captain cut her off. “From you, Mr. Exec.” She advanced until she stood directly in front of him and poked her finger into his chest. “I’m letting you lead the boarding party because you’re a former member of the Ymirian navy, and as such, it seems to me that you’re the best man I’ve got to investigate a Ymirian space station. But make no mistake about it. This is not a humanitarian mission. If you happen to find out what happened to the crew here, that’s fine. But all I really care about is getting the Euripides home again. Understood?”
Erik’s eyes burned with cold fury as he confirmed the captain’s instructions. Jewel wondered if the anger was because he disagreed with the captain’s priorities or because she had disrespected him by dressing him down in front of his crew. Probably it was a combination of both things. The situation on the Euripides was beyond going from bad to worse.
Jewel wondered if Captain Kiara had intended it that way.
“Very good then. Deck Officer, wait until I’m out of the corridor and then open the lock.”
Warrant nodded and gave the captain about ten seconds to get behind a different air-tight door, then he manually unsealed the inner airlock on the Euripides and ushered everyone inside. Once they were in position, he resealed the door and spoke to Erik through the intercom system. “It’s all yours, Gunnarson. Good luck to you.”
“Thanks, Manny,” Erik told him before beginning to unseal the outer airlock. It was a heavy door and he had to strain to turn the wheel. It occurred to Jewel that if Warrant had screwed up and failed to secure the docking tunnel correctly, then the six of them were about to suffer a very painful death.
Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
Erik swung open the outer lock and stepped through. “Hey, Exec,” Jester called out. “Do you have a pistol stuffed in the back of your pants or did you just shit yourself?”
Erik didn’t answer him, just checked to make certain his gun was secure in the waist of his pants and kept moving into the docking tunnel. The tunnel was a zero gravity environment but the exec managed the floating passage like a seasoned professional.
Jester didn’t do so well. He was laughing too hard to keep his balance and dark-skinned Dawil Kwon shoved him hard in the back to send him sprawling face first down the tunnel toward Erik’s ass.
Meg Falco flashed one of her few genuine smiles. “Thanks, Dawil.”
“No problem,” he told her just before shoving her after Jester. “I can see you two are made
for each other.”
Falco squealed and floated after Jester.
Jewel hung her head for a moment, embarrassed by the unprofessional nature of the crew, then started down the docking tunnel, easily handling the zero gravity. They played sports in zero g where she came from and transiting to the station presented no problem. “Hello?” Erik called as he entered the satellite ahead of them. It appeared to be a standard greeting area just inside the airlock. “Permission to come aboard?”
Brynhild was dark as a tomb on the station side of the airlock and refrigerator cold.
Jewel stepped into the airlock behind him. Her weight returned to her as she left the docking tunnel. Jewel took out her flashlight. “There’s power or else we wouldn’t have gravity. I wonder why there’s no light.”
“There’s probably an energy saving mode, which shuts them down in the corridor if a certain amount of time passes without anyone walking by,” Kwon volunteered.
Jewel couldn’t help glancing at him in surprise.
He smiled at her, as if he’d enjoyed confounding her expectations. He had wide, flat features on skin darker than her own—evidently his parents hadn’t been obsessed with sculpting him into something he wasn’t.
“Then all we have to do—” Jewel started.
“Is walk into the hall,” Erik finished for her as he acted on the suggestion.
Lights blinked on in the corridor cascading out from them as far as the eye could see.
Erik twisted back around to offer Kwon a serious look of appraisal. “Good job, Dawil. You spend a lot of time on space stations?”
“I grew up on one,” Kwon told him. “It was a couple of centuries old with all kinds of sections tacked on—some of which people never went to anymore. It didn’t make sense to heat and light them if people weren’t around.”
“Unfortunately, I think that’s going to apply to Brynhild too,” Erik told him. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s still around.”
Jewel knew how much this discovery had to disappoint Erik, but she was impressed by how he covered his pain as he handed out assignments. “Okay, let’s find out for sure what’s going on here. Jewel, you take Falco and Jester and head spinward. I’ll take Kwon and Arico and head counter spin.”
Very few space stations gained their gravity through spin anymore, but the terminology had lingered.
Jewel took a moment to size up her crew, strangely disappointed that Erik was splitting the two of them up. She knew it made sense—they were both officers. And she didn’t want to be alone with him and inspire any more rumors, but she was disappointed just the same.
Like Erik, she decided to press on as if nothing troubled her. “All right you two, let’s get going. We’ve got supplies to locate.”
“I’m not going with you,” Falco protested. “You’re not a real ship’s officer—you’re the purser.”
Jewel decided to ignore her. “Come on, Jester, let’s get to work.”
Falco wasn’t ready to give up. “She’s not a real ship’s officer,” she shouted after Erik.
“That’s right,” the exec called back as he led his two people up the corridor. “All she knows about, Falco, is how to pay your salary—or not pay it, if the fancy strikes her.”
“She can’t do that!”
“I’d say the joke will be on you,” Jester told her, “if you keep pushing and find out she can.”
“I can’t believe how cold it is!” Falco said. In two hours she hadn’t stopped complaining. “It’s freezing in here!”
If Jewel were in a fair mood, she’d have admitted the woman was right, but she wasn’t feeling fair right now. Brynhild Station was more than cold, it was near freezing—the temperature gauges apparently kept at 4 degrees Celsius in the power down mode they’d found the station in. That sort of frigid atmosphere did not heat up again very quickly—and it didn’t help that their explorations continued to move them into new parts of the station.
But a purser who couldn’t scrounge up three coats on a deserted space station really wasn’t worth the title. Jewel had found them blankets to drape over themselves inside of eight minutes and upgraded those to actual winter weather gear within eight minutes after that. She’d been a little bit surprised to find so many cold weather garments on a temperature-controlled space station. An ominous sign, but the gear was useful to them just the same.
“Jewel?” The sound of Erik’s voice, even over her com unit, made Jewel’s heart beat faster. “We’ve found the Control Deck. It’s deserted like everywhere else.”
Jewel willed her hormones to cool off—not that the mere wishing for it actually accomplished anything. She still didn’t like the way Erik had started things with her without first clueing her into his history on the ship, and she really didn’t like the way her body kept responding to him. She wet her lips and asked a probably futile question. “What about the computer terminals?”
Erik’s deep voice continued to resonate inside her. “Password protected, of course, just like the others.”
“Damn,” Jewel whispered. She knew she had the capability to break into those systems if she was willing to activate her bioware again, but she couldn’t do that without compromising her security. Her parents had installed her first bioware chip when she was an infant, and planned all her expansions and upgrades as she grew older. She knew they’d used it to spy on her—monitor was the term they would have preferred—throughout her childhood. And they could continue to legally do so until she reached her thirtieth birthday and legal emancipation into adulthood. Not that she really expected them to stop spying then. Laws really didn’t apply to people like her parents.
“That’s too bad, Er—Mr. Gunnarson. Any sign of what happened to the people?”
“Just call him Erik, for Stars’ sake,” Falco muttered. “It’s not like everyone doesn’t know he’s balling you. Hurry up and get it over with so someone like me can get her turn.”
Jewel spun about to stare at Falco in astonishment, unable to believe the sort of things that came out of this crew’s mouths. Was no one on the Fringe even remotely professional?
“No sign,” Erik responded over the com-link, “but as I said before, I can’t get access to the computer. How about you?”
“We’re taking a quick inventory of the kitchen storage compartments. The news is pretty good. They have a lot of food stored here—all vacuum sealed—at a glance it looks like enough to last for years.”
“Decades,” Jester interrupted with his own little contribution. “These are packets of colonizer food and those ships had to be prepared for the possibility that they wouldn’t find a habitable planet in the first couple of star systems they visited, so they had to lay in a serious quantity of extra supplies.”
“Sounds great,” Erik said. “What’s the problem?”
“Well, it’s centuries-old colonizer food,” Jewel reminded him. The hardest thing about running away from home, strangely enough, had been the poor quality of food the rest of the universe ate. She really missed the cuisines of her family’s private chef and Luxor’s five star restaurants. “It may be vacuum sealed, but it’s hardly going to be something we’d consider edible.”
Erik laughed. “It won’t be that bad. This is really a good thing. If our holds weren’t pretty full already, I’m sure the captain would fill us up with those food packets.”
He paused for a moment. “Actually, she may still do that. It’s sellable after all. I can see her filling the corridors to offset some of our losses on this trip.”
“Always assuming we find enough fuel to get back again,” Jewel muttered.
“Better hope we do,” Erik teased. “Otherwise we’ll be eating these old food packets for years to come.”
* * * * *
They found their first body in the medical wing and it wasn’t pretty. The cadaver had curled up on its side, an injector lying near its bony hand. It had had blond hair once—much like Erik’s—and tufts of it still decorated the skull. Its clothes
lay loose against what appeared to be a mostly skeletal frame.
“I can’t believe you’re making us do this!” Falco complained. “Skeletons? Tell me where this is covered in my contract.”
“Can I keep it?” Jester quipped. “I’ve always wanted to have a few skeletons in my closet so people could have something interesting to learn about me.”
Jewel ignored both of them and squatted down to better examine the body. She had no medical knowledge to speak of, although her bioware had a vast database in its memory if only she could access it. Even without specialized knowledge it wasn’t hard to draw a conclusion from what she was looking at. The injector was right there before this person.
“Hey, Aurora,” Jester called out. All humor drained from his voice. “I think you better see this. It looks like this was a family.”
She got up and hurried over next to him to peer into one of the medical rooms. Inside, a clothed skeleton hugged two much smaller skeletons against its chest. Or at least, that’s what it had probably been doing. The whole mass of bodies had tilted to the side so that the arms were no longer cleanly around the little forms anymore, but the intention—the sentiment of this person’s act was clear.
Evidently, Jester didn’t feel as enlightened. “What the hell happened here?”
Jewel looked at him as she picked up her com unit, wondering if he truly didn’t understand. “Mr. Exec? Captain Kiara?” she called. “We’ve found some bodies including two children. It looks like mass suicide, although I guess we need Dr. Brüning to confirm that.”
There was a moment of silence on the other ends of the com, then Kiara answered her. “I guess when they realized they were cut off it got to be too much for them.”
“Cut off?” Falco asked. “What were they cut off from?”
Evidently, Erik heard her over the open com-link. “We’re assuming that this station was isolated after the Armenites invaded Ymir. Either the people who knew about this settlement were killed in the invasion or they chose not to tell the Armenites of its existence.”
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