The Kepler Rescue

by James David Victor

  By far the largest and most derelict of all of the craft here, however, was the large rhomboid shape scattered with pods and domes and blocky bulkhead doors. Rows and rows of porthole windows lined its hull, speaking of a complicated interior world of rooms, habitations. Enough for several families, at least.

  And on the side of the craft, there was printed in giant machine-plate, industrialist lettering:

  KEPLER DEEP-FIELD

  “It’s got no engines,” Wen said, pointing out the great gouged and ragged holes near the back where several large engine blocks—each one larger than the scout vessel itself—used to reside.

  “Those weren’t just propulsion engines, either,” Karamov confirmed. “That size? They’re Barr-Hawking generators.”

  Jump engines. Solomon knew that each of the deep-field ships had them, although he had never seen them on any craft other than the hauler jump-ship like the one that had brought them out here.

  And well, I guess I’m not looking at them now, either, he admitted. “They’ve been scavenged by the raiders, clearly,” he said, which was probably bad news for someone down the line, he figured. If the raiders had Barr-Hawking generators that size, then they could pretty much run their own deep-field ships, competing directly with the Confederacy for trade to the Outer Colonies.

  But whatever, we’re not here for politics. Solomon shook his head.

  “What happened to her? Raiders?” Kol asked.

  “Looks like it,” Solomon started to say, before he stopped himself. The Kepler did indeed have blackened scorch marks pocked all over its nose and belly, betraying the fact that it must have had many of the raiders’ rockets fired at it. The ship was so large, though, that he knew that would be like gnats biting an elephant.

  “Unless they boarded at the same time…” Solomon considered, sweeping his eyes over the vessel.

  Wait a minute. “What’s that?” His gaze stopped on a broken section of the hull, which looked to be where the raiders had started to tear apart the metal walls for their own salvage mission.

  Only, from the outward jags of blackened and twisted metal, it looked as though it had been burst apart from within, not from without. Almost like the Kepler had given birth to some monstrous, murdering child all its own out here in the depths of space. Solomon shuddered superstitiously.

  “That’s an internal explosion.” He tapped his finger on the screen.

  “Sabotage?” Wen considered.

  “Could be. Or a malfunction?” Solomon shrugged. “It either means that the raiders got on board first and crippled her, or that the Kepler was in a bad shape anyway and had suffered an almost catastrophic accident by the time the raiders hauled her in here.”

  There were no lights along the entire length of the Kepler, and short-range scans either returned with asteroid static or inconclusive results.

  “Looks like we’re going to have take a closer look,” Solomon said, nodding to Kol to begin the approach. “Karamov, I want you staying here with Kol. Keep this boat in a tight scouting circuit around the Kepler. Flush out any more raiders if you can. Wen and Malady, you two are with me on the away mission.”

  “At last!” Even though Wen had recently had the excitement and terror of hand-to-hand combat to the death in the hold of this very ship, it appeared that she was only too ready for some more.

  Three vaguely humanoid shapes threw themselves from the airlock of the Marine vessel, arms and legs wide in star positions as their momentum carried them across the emptiness of space toward the jagged hole in the Kepler.

  The three shapes looked almost like satellites themselves, the metal of their suits shining under the vessel’s floodlights, their collars glimmering with their own subdued suit lights.

  “Ready?!” Solomon called from in front as he flew past the first twisted and half-slagged girder and into the belly of the metal beast. Behind him and slightly above was spread-eagled Specialist Jezzie Wen, and last of all, looking like a cannonball compared to the rest of them, powered Full Tactical Malady.

  The bright, reflective glare of the Kepler’s outer hull vanished in an instant, to be replaced by a confusing darkness of shadows and shapes threatening to criss-cross their flight path.

  Solomon’s suit lights showed buckled girders thicker than he was wide, as well as plates of bulkhead metal that had been seemingly torn and pushed out with the force of some kind of explosion.

  And then his suit lights revealed that they were floating through a large, empty space.

  “Looks like some kind of holding bay,” he called out over the suit’s Gold Squad communicators.

  “TZZZZRK! What’s that, Commander? I can’t…TZZZRK!” The fuzzy voice of Karamov in his ears, dressed in static, revealed that the Kepler was disrupting any attempt at long-range communication. They were on their own in here.

  “I read you loud and clear, Commander,” Malady informed him.

  “Aye, same here,” Wen confirmed. “We should be able to use short-wave suit-to-suit in here.”

  The ‘in here,’ as it turned out, was much larger than Solomon had initially thought.

  “No graviton generators working, clearly,” Solomon heard Malady say. “Depressurized. No oxygen.”

  “I think we can see that, Mal.” Solomon even managed a joke as he floated through the center of the vast metallic cavern.

  This was one of several holds in the ship, Solomon surmised, whereas the upper floors of the station-ship would be given over to workshops, domestic units, and even galleries of shops. Down there, in the massive vault space that could have easily fit several of the scout ships that Gold Squad had come in on, was where the hundreds if not thousands of tons of cargo would be stored. These deep-field ships were the caravans of the colonial Confederacy, hauling everything from raw minerals to prefabricated buildings, entire drone assembly units, or even spacecraft.

  It was all gone.

  “Where is everything?” Solomon asked. “Did the raiders really strip it that fast?” He couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Stealing stuff is what they are famous for, Commander,” Wen said dryly as she floated up behind him, making small, languid movements with her hands to direct her flight.

  Solomon flinched a little at that. He wondered if he should feel some sort of strange criminal loyalty to the raiders that he had just fired upon, and doubtlessly had killed in the process. I was a thief once, too, he thought. Being a thief also gave him a little inside into the nature of this crime, though.

  The hold was a large oblong room, whose walls were criss-crossed with metal gantries that led to bulkhead doors. Some of those doors would doubtless lead up into the more personal and human areas of the Kepler. He could tell easily which four, six, or eight-man doors were also the loading and unloading ports. When he craned his head up, he saw a whole forest of metal winches and grabbing arms stationed securely above, which would have been used to move containers around.

  On the floor far below him were metal bars and bridges, which presumably would once sit between the different stacks of boxes, and to which the crates could be secured.

  Solomon didn’t see one strap, webbing harness, or tie dangling anywhere.

  “No way.” He shook his head. “This is too big. It would take a meticulous crew weeks to clear this out, if not months. And look at the sort of job they’ve done. Nothing is out of place, absolutely nothing. No packing materials left behind, no container crates, no ropes or ties that had to be cut or burned apart.” He was an idealist by nature, one of the universe’s eternal optimists in some ways, although it was very well hidden under a cynical demeanor.

  But even so, even the reckless, best-thief-in-New Kowloon couldn’t believe that any gang had the skill or the audacity to perform such a feat.

  “The ship must have been empty when they found it. The Kepler must have jettisoned its cargo,” he called out. The cargo that they were supposed to find, he remembered his mission parameters pretty much exactly.

  “Excu
se me, Commander, but that is unlikely,” Malady’s voice said in his suit’s ear. “The deep-field ships are simply too expensive to run empty. It would cripple the families who lived here, not to be paid at the end of a run. Traditionally, the deep-field ships leave with minerals and cargo, and return with their colonial equivalents to sell in Earth’s on and off-world markets.”

  Then how did they achieve this? Solomon was thinking. “Malady, find a system computer. Patch yourself in and see if you can find the manifest. And the crew information.”

  That was the other thing that was worrying Solomon. No crew. Anywhere. Not even body parts, or spatters of blood or signs of a firefight as far as he could see. Who wouldn’t defend their home, their livelihood?

  Unless they mutinied, he considered, moving his hands in a swimming motion to descend through the gulf toward one of the gantries.

  And then, of course, there was the hole that they had entered through. As his boots settled on the gantry and he held onto the railing, he looked again at the vast hole in the side of the Kepler and tried to imagine just what could have caused it.

  “Some scorch marks, but not many,” he muttered to himself as Wen flew slowly around the vault room, and Malady made his laborious way to one of the bulkhead doors, sure to have some kind of computer screen access, if nothing else.

  Solomon looked at the tears in the metal, the splintered and twisted girders. There was slagged and melted metal, but it appeared to be from the inner supports as far as he could make out. It was as if something had managed to rupture gas and power lines that threaded through the Kepler’s hull, further weakening it. But the inner walls were all buckled outward, twisted, and all…clean.

  Just what in the name of Jupiter’s moons could cause that much of an impact that it ruptured the service cavity between the walls? Solomon wondered, slightly horrified.

  And then, he saw something glinting down there, near the bottom of the opening into outer space. It was something that was out of place, a flash of reddish color in an otherwise sea of silvers, blacks, and grays.

  Blood?

  “Wen? On me!” Solomon called, vaulting over the gantry and propelling himself toward the small red mark, unhooking his Jackhammer and priming the cartridges as he did so.

  “Ready, Commander.” Jezebel was already swimming up to rendezvous with him, not kicking with her legs but swimming like an eel or an otter through the vacuum.

  As they drew nearer, Solomon saw that it wasn’t blood like he’d first thought. Instead, it was a fragment of plastic, slightly transparent, lying wedged at the bottom of the hole. It had some sort of lettering stenciled across it, and Solomon tried to read it as he swam forward.

  “Near… Nova… Neo?” he hazarded a guess. “It looks to be some bit of packing container for whatever was in here, maybe?” he said.

  “But why was this the only bit left behind?” Wen asked as her feet clanked on the floor and she reached down to pull at it.

  “Wait!” Solomon called. It was all too obvious. What if this is a trap?

  But Wen had already seized the piece of plastic that was almost as tall as she was and pulled. It shuddered where it had stuck against a twist of blackened metal, but then flew free with a scraping shriek—

  Revealing an arm.

  A very large arm.

  “What the heck is that?” Jezzie let herself hover backward, away from the appendage.

  It was a silvered arm. One that was entirely made of metal, and which clearly had servo motors, wires, and metal plates along its form. It didn’t have normal human digits, but instead just three vice-like metal claws and one clamping ‘thumb.’

  “That’s a robot, clearly.” Solomon almost laughed at Jezebel’s reaction. He guessed that this place was spooking everyone out. Everyone apart from Malady, anyway. “Well, it’s a bit of a robot. Not an entire one.”

  “Yeah, of course.” The combat specialist shook her head at her own overreaction. “It’s probably an industrial robot, used to lift stuff in here.”

  “No. I think it was being shipped,” Solomon countered. “It was with that bit of corporate packing crate, right? I reckon it was one of the things that was being transported back to Earth.” Solomon had a thought. “Malady? Any luck with that computer? Where was the Kepler bound for?”

  “I’m into the mainframe, but the systems are down, Commander,” Malady stated. “But, luckily for us all, I can speak machine code. I’m reading the BIOS data-files as we speak.”

  “Look at you, multitasking,” Jezzie said dryly.

  “Kepler deep-field, bound for Mars Colony, then Luna Colony, and finally Earth before looping around the sun on its return journey to Proxima,” Malady intoned a moment later. “Crew complement: one hundred and fourteen. All radio and telemetries contact ceased two Earth-standard days ago. No distress beacon activated.”

  “Okay, but what was it carrying?” Solomon asked.

  There was a small electronic sound from Malady’s channel, which Solomon took to be the metal human-golem’s equivalent of a snort of frustration.

  “It doesn’t say. Restricted Access Only.”

  “Restricted Access? We’re the stars-be-damned Marine Corps!” Solomon burst out. “Don’t we get an automatic override or something?”

  “No one told me if we do,” Malady said. “Still Restricted Access Only. Whatever the Kepler was carrying, only the captain of the ship knew about it.”

  Instinctively, Solomon knew that meant trouble.

  12

  Mayday

  “TZZZRK! Come in. Is anyone there? Come in! TZZRK!” The cargo hold erupted with the sudden sound of radio static coming from the overhead speaker system.

  “Malady, I thought you said the computers were down?” Solomon startled, looking around.

  “They were, Commander,” Malady said. “A survivor appears to have found a way to run a generator, enough to run the speaker systems.”

  “TZZZK! Please, I know you’re there… Please help… I’m in… TZRK!...eighteenth floor, and…TZZZZRK!”

  As fast as it had come, the survivor’s message clicked out, leaving them wondering if they had even heard it at all.

  “Uh… Commander?” Wen turned to look at him.

  Someone is alive in here. Someone managed to stay alive. Solomon shook his head. “Malady, get those doors open. Blow them apart if you have to. We need to get to the eighteenth floor, quickly!” He was already swimming toward Malady to see the man-golem draw the cable from his wrist back into his metal body. The mech then seized the double bulkhead doors with metal, servo-assisted fingers—very much like the weird robot arm, Somolon thought—and heaved.

  CREEEEEAK! Much to Solomon’s astonishment, Malady managed to force the bulkhead doors open, releasing a sudden blast of steam and gases from the other side as what little bit of atmosphere was left in the corridor behind the door escaped.

  “Remind me to never annoy you, Malady,” Solomon said as he flew to the golem’s side, raising the Jackhammer to cover him.

  “You’d know about it if you had annoyed me, Commander,” Malady said, which to Solomon wasn’t entirely encouraging, he had to be honest.

  “Clear!” Solomon called, seeing the wide, empty corridor on the other side. The ceiling was vaulted with the heavy steel girders of the bulkhead. On both right and left, there appeared to be large service elevators. “This must be a loading hall.” Solomon pushed himself off the walls to float toward the elevators. “Malady, can you get the doors open?” he called, and the large golem-man seized the first of the lift’s doors to wrench them open, revealing a wide shaft with ladders around the outside and cables spearing down the center.

  No lift, though. Solomon looked up and down until he saw industrial-plate markings stamped on the wall.

  LEVEL 24 ACCESS: CARGO HOLD 1

  “I guess we go up, then,” Solomon said, kicking out from the open lift door to languidly float into the elevator shaft, trying not to look down. Despite the Kepler’s c
urrent depressurized state, it was still unnerving to be floating inside a large and dark elevator shaft, with apparently a hundred meters or so of empty space under his feet.

  Floating turned out to be quicker than using a lift, and Solomon had already started grabbing onto the cables and pulling himself up, ascending effortless meters with every handhold. Beneath him, Malady followed with a grace that he never had in gravity conditions. Combat Specialist Wen took up the rear.

  23…

  22…

  21…

  The floors swept by quickly, and even though Solomon kept his eyes peeled, he still couldn’t see any sign of whatever it was that had ripped a hole out of the ship. No burn marks on the walls, no signs of forced entry or exit on any of the doors.

  Where did everyone go? he thought, before remembering that there had to be at least one person left alive inside here. And hopefully, they would get more information…

  20…

  19…

  “Here we are,” Solomon whispered over the short-wave suit channel, slowing as he realized that there was something different happening at level 18.

  LEVEL 18 ACCESS: ATMOPSHERIC REGULATION LABS

  The lift door was open, and he saw a shaft of slightly grayer light hitting the back wall of the lift shaft, coming from the door. That meant two things. The hallway on the other side was depressurized just like he was right now, and also that someone must have tried to open them.

  “Malady?” Solomon allowed himself to float upward until he was above the partially open door, keeping his Jackhammer trained on the crack of graying light as the full tactical clanked onto the inner side of the door. Malady braced his large metal boots on the frame and started to heave the door apart with his hands—