Nimisha's Ship

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Thank you for that update on our position, Helm,” she said with gentle irony. She had not programmed any humor into Helm, but sometimes he was inadvertently funny. Then she looked at the timeworn spaceship. “Poor guys,” she said, shaking her head.

  Gaining entrance to the ship was not a problem. A ramp or steps of some kind must originally have been used, but the centuries had allowed a buildup of windblown dirt and debris that reached to the lower lip of the hatch. There were exterior controls where any sensible designer would have put them, and since she was an even more sophisticated designer, it took only moments to open the airlock. She climbed in. The inner lock stood open, and as she neared it, she heard some sort of ventilation system begin to circulate the air inside.

  “Not bad,” she said. “Some power remains.”

  “Solar panels have been detected,” Helm said.

  “Why would they use solar panels if this wasn’t a landing type craft?”

  “There were many attempts at achieving the optimum use of many power sources—chemical, nuclear fusion, and solar power, both from generator panels and light sails—on early spacecraft,” Helm said in the pedantic tone he assumed for his “science officer” role.

  “Well, they did that right.”

  Nevertheless, the air was stale and still had an acrid stink that left a taste at the back of her throat of metals, old foodstuffs, human perspiration, and hydrocarbon hydraulic and lubricant fluids.

  “One does have to air the place out every now and then,” she said in her best imitation of her womb-mother.

  “Repeat?” Helm asked, mystified.

  “Don’t bother,” Doc said. “I’ll explain it to him.”

  She went forward to where she expected to find the bridge. And did, though it was dark, since the forward screen had crashed right into the rock of the hillside and was now shards on the deck. She used her wrist light and found the appropriate toggle. She pushed it and faint illumination resulted—enough to see that the bridge was empty. She hadn’t expected to see any bodies. The establishment of some sort of a base camp indicated there had been crash survivors enough to have suitably interred their dead. The big question was if any had survived long enough to establish a colony.

  She tried to access the bridge log, but evidently the small source of power that circulated the air did not spark the computer systems into action.

  She toured the ship and its cramped crew quarters with bunks stripped to the metal frames. Lockers had been emptied; dust had sifted in through the vents over the centuries that the ship had lain here. The galley, when she entered it, was also tidy, apart from dust. Again all usable items had been taken. The same could be said of any other transportable item or equipment that such a vessel would have carried. Well, if one were shipwrecked on an alien planet, one would certainly use whatever equipment was on hand. Only where had it—and its porters—gone? Would she find the descendants somewhere else? Had they regressed to a primitive state in the meantime? Certainly she had seen neither fires nor fossil fuel smoke to indicate any human settlement . . . so far, that is. The climate of the plateau and its position on the continent made it part of a temperate zone. Considering the new growth she had noticed on trees and shrubs, she had landed in this planet’s vernal period. Part of the shagginess of the grazers might be due to shedding winter fur.

  Time after time, she had to shake her head at the clumsiness of design in the spaceship, the heaviness of the building materials.

  “I shouldn’t criticize. FSP didn’t even have petralloy until two centuries ago,” she remarked. “Easy for me to find their design attempts awkward and inefficient. They got this far with what they had. Give them credit.”

  “Most creditable,” Helm agreed.

  “Definitely first wave of the Diaspora,” Doc said, having finished the analyses.

  “Is this ship among the eighteen cited?” Nimisha asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  She checked all storage areas and found them empty. And dusty. An orderly withdrawal from the ship. But where to? She returned, striding in her own footprints in the dust, wondering if this would add to the mystery of the ship for future explorers. The whimsy made her grin.

  She was glad to be outside in the fresher air. She closed the outer airlock to preserve what power remained. She might want to come back and investigate. There were other metallic anomalies to be examined. If there were actually four ships already marooned on this planet, had the groups joined forces? But if they had joined up, why had they not made use of even such basic requirements as fire, for heating, cooking, and lighting? And built shelters of some description? Or used caves? A rudimentary necessity, or at least a comfort. She had fireplaces in rooms that were heated by cheap and nonpolluting substances. She’d even had one at the Yard in her private office for those late night sessions with her subordinates. And tête-à-têtes with Caleb. Oh, dear, better not think of him, she thought in dismay.

  She prowled around the rusting ship and found the little graveyard, sited in the churned up soil of the landing, above and to one side of the ship’s resting place. Nine metal shafts were etched with the names of the dead: three women and six men. So it had been a mixed crew. The dates were four hundred years ago.

  How many generations would that be? Nimisha wondered. If there had been any.

  “What was the last registered disappearance that might have been a wormhole eating a ship, Helm?”

  “Say again, ma’am?”

  Helm liked his commands and queries crisp and uncluttered by personal opinion.

  “What is the date the last ship disappeared?”

  “Sixteen years ago, ma’am.”

  Well, that was much better than four hundred years, she thought, firmly banishing the sinking feeling of utter despair. She’d already slept away one of that sum.

  “Is there any significant interval between disappearances?”

  There was a definite pause as Helm worked on the answer. “A regular pattern cannot be established by the disappearances of ships.”

  “That could be accounted for,” Doc put in, “by the fact that the disappearances themselves took time to be registered.”

  Even sixteen years—and then the problem of catching the wormhole as it opened at this end. But she’d miss so much of Cuiva . . . her darling daughter . . . She gave herself an admonitory shake.

  “I’ve seen all I need to here,” she told her ship. “I’m coming back aboard. Helm, please lay in a course for the second anomaly. We’ll fly at a low enough altitude to see if we can spot any abandoned settlement these people may have built.”

  The second blip proved to be the Poolbeg FSPS 9K66E. It had landed circumspectly near a small stream. It, too, showed that it had had a rough passage through the wormhole, with gashes that in one place had damaged the hull integrity.

  “She’d have had ten as crew, from the type she is,” Nimisha said. “Any word on her?”

  “She is listed as lost in space, ma’am, sixteen years ago.”

  “We know that. What other information have we on the Poolbeg? Can you get a response from the ship?”

  “I have already been calling and received no answer. I am accessing the comunit. Shall I display the result?”

  “Just the last entry now, please, Helm.”

  On her screen was the entry, dated fourteen standard years before.

  This is Lieutenant Commander Jonagren Svangel, acting captain of the Poolbeg. As we have sustained damage to our drive and cannot make the repairs required, we have voted to leave the ship to explore our immediate surroundings in the shuttle. We hope to make a base camp in the foothills . . . a map was inserted, showing the projected goal . . . and live off the land. Our botanist says there are enough nontoxic edibles to supply us with a fair diet and we have plenty of additives to supplement what we can gather or hunt. Some of the indigenous animals are ferocious, but they can be avoided. We will try to get back and update this log at regular intervals.

&nbs
p; “And didn’t, poor wretches,” Nimisha murmured.

  “Shall I spool back, ma’am?”

  “No, but copy to our files and for the material we’re storing in the beacon.”

  “Did you intend a physical examination of the ship or its environs?” Helm asked.

  “Yes, and break out sidearms for me. I want something that’s powerful enough to stop ‘ferocious indigenous animals’ in their tracks. Obviously the captain of the Poolbeg met with a disaster,” Nimisha said.

  “How do you construe that?” Doc asked.

  “Because an acting captain is making the entry,” Nimisha said curtly, on her way to the airlock, where she donned the heaviest of her coveralls and attached the repeller harness. “Besides which I can see two graves from here. They were down to eight crew when they left the Poolbeg.” She slid the stunner on to its belt hook and completed her exit apparel with a full-face helmet that had a neck protector. She wouldn’t be able to turn her head as easily, but the protection might prove a wise precaution.

  She paused briefly by the grave sites, pointing the recorder at the markers. Then she stood at attention for a moment, hand on her heart to salute the Service dead. They had died on the same day, two weeks before Svangel’s final log entry. She wondered where the others had met their ends, since no one had returned to the Poolbeg to make updates. She detoured slightly to get a sample of the water. The shallow stream burbled down a rocky channel. Winter runoff, if this were the spring of Erehwon’s year? The water was cold and clear in the sample tube.

  The Poolbeg had been left as shipshape and neat as the older vessel. It had not been stripped of quite as many of its fittings, nor had all the supplies been taken with the marooned. Sixteen years would reduce the supplies the Fiver carried to crumbs. And the Poolbeg was new enough that whatever it had dispensed by way of comestibles could be used by the Fiver’s catering unit. However, she could come back when she needed more, if she couldn’t find local substitutes.

  In fact, since they hadn’t taken the small captain’s gig, she decided she’d use that for an aerial reconnaissance of their proposed base campsite. And so she informed Helm.

  “It’s got full power. Why waste mine when this is available?” she said in an unarguable reply to Helm’s polite but negative response to her idea.

  “I’ll run basic checks on it, but initial readings indicate all systems are go. It’s designed, you know,” she added with some heat, “to remain in full working order for years, considering the distances exploratory ships have to go. I know the model. It’s still in service and I’ve flown one. It is also supplied with missiles, which my skiff isn’t.” Another oversight on her part: that she hadn’t thought to load her skiff’s weaponry for the shakedown cruise. Then she added a final rebuttal. “Besides, if there are survivors, they’d recognize it and that would establish my bona fides.”

  On her way, she spotted examples of what anyone would call “ferocious animals.” They were the size of trees, and even if someone had stunned one—as the dead captain may have—sheer momentum would have kept them moving forward. The largest one was close to ten meters from ground to undulating shoulder, or what she thought was a shoulder, since the creature did not have definite sections that could be easily labeled “legs” or “body” or “head” or “tail.” It was a lump that moved by contracting and expanding its muscular frame along the ground. Nimisha wondered if it was as agile on uneven surfaces as it was on the more or less level one it was now traversing. The front part seemed to swoop down into the grassoid, raising to give her the sight of the appendages of some smaller creature disappearing from view. She didn’t see a mouth, as such, or eyes, when the giant creatures raised up their front ends to investigate the gig. She increased her altitude to well above their full length. That they were aware of her presence could not be denied.

  She had patched the gig’s comunit into the Fiver’s to allow Helm to make a record of her progress.

  “Is there any chance that that life-form can spring from the ground?” Helm asked.

  “I’m at one hundred meters. I doubt it. But I won’t risk the possibility. This is a very alien world. They definitely know I’m above them. Whoops!”

  Several wet and slimy looking ropelike objects were hurled at her from the two largest of those raised up from the ground. Neither made contact with the gig.

  “Tongues?” Nimisha asked, more of herself than expecting an answer.

  “There is nothing remotely similar to this life-form recorded in the Xenobiological Encyclopedia,” Helm said. “Rule out ‘tongues,’ since they have now detached from their primary source.”

  The thick strings fell back to sear the grassoid where they had fallen. Steam rose.

  “Whatever you do,” Helm suddenly said, tone urgent, “do not shoot at them!”

  “Not that I was going to, but do tell me why?” Nimisha asked.

  “On reviewing the tapes, I have ascertained that the captain tried to use a projectile weapon and the segment that he hit dispersed into fragments. He was covered by the substance, which is extremely toxic, and died before anyone could assist him. Lieutenant Senior Grade Barbra Weleda tried to resuscitate him and the toxic . . . material . . . transferred itself to her body. According to the report, there wasn’t much left of either to be buried in the graves you honored.”

  “I see,” Nimisha said after swallowing against nausea. “I wonder that any of the crew has survived if this is the sort of welcoming committee they met.” She flipped on the toggle for the sensors, setting one to find metals and another to locate the polymers used when the Poolbeg was built. “We’ll just see. I’m following their proposed route. They would have been wary of these . . . slime slugs.”

  “An earlier entry by the acting captain indicates that they used the shuttle to make an aerial reconnaissance of considerable depth before they departed to establish a base,” Helm said.

  “They hadn’t run out of intelligence, just good luck,” she said as she aimed the gig at a narrow gap in the foothills. She left behind the feeding territory of the slime slugs for a winding hilly pass that was strewn with boulders and such debris that slugs could not have writhed through. “Seismic activity?” she asked Helm.

  “It does not appear to be a very old world, and seismic activity has been noted in the archipelagoes. That debris, however, is more consistent with land or mudslides.”

  “Yes, I think I would agree,” she said, looking from one of the steep sides to the other and judging the deposits on the floor of the pass. “No vegetation to attract the hungry. Or bind soil with its root systems.” And the rocky path kept those slugs from getting through.

  She came out of the pass—there were thirteen bends in all—into hilly country, the valleys dotted with many lakes as far as she could see in either direction.

  “Definitely glacial formations,” Helm said, echoing her own thoughts.

  “I agree. Rather pretty,” she said and then saw more of the big buffalo types grazing. There were other species as well, smaller, and each kept their distance from the other as they ate.

  “Overfly one of the lakes, would you please, ma’am? I’d like a reading on any aquatic life.”

  “I should get a sample of the water, too. I’d love to take a full bath,” Nimisha said. “The stream by the Poolbeg isn’t deep enough.”

  “When I have checked the denizens of the desired bathing place,” Helm said sternly.

  “Of course, Helm.”

  So she hovered over the nearest of the lakes, a brilliant blue reflecting the clear skies above, and sent down a sample tube. She could perceive flowing figures in the water. While the explored galaxy had provided many, many different forms on land, water dwellers seemed to follow basic designs: the bottom feeders, the middle swimmers, and the upper-level insect catchers.

  “Bottoms out at thirty meters, along a crest. The shallows support reed and water grasses,” Nimisha said. “I’m testing the water.” The results followed on her wo
rds. “Well, definitely drinkable, with only trace minerals and nothing toxic. I shan’t, however, go fishing quite yet.”

  “Nor bathing,” Helm added repressively.

  “That’s right.”

  “Alert!” Helm’s voice reverberated through the speakers in the cabin.

  “Whatever for?”

  “To your port and high up, a flying object of considerable size.”

  Nimisha swung the bow of the gig accordingly. “Considerable size,” she agreed drily; indeed, it was probably larger than the gig. She reached the toggle to arm the forward missiles.

  “It has seen you and is diving,” Helm warned. “I am too far away to be of assistance.”

  “Good thing I took the Poolbeg’s gig then, isn’t it?” she said, gaining altitude and setting her sensors to magnify the oncoming menace. “ ‘Ods blood!” she exclaimed, an archaic epithet that one of her more effete acquaintances had resurrected and used for many occasions. “It’s twice my size.”

  “More than twice, ma’am. My advice is to fire now.”

  “It’s better to wait until I can see the whites of its eyes. If it has any.”

  The gig answered her touch on its control plates with more height and speed. The distance closed between predator and intended victim—she didn’t think anything with a head that crammed with teeth and already salivating at the thought of a tasty morsel half its size had friendly intentions. She bracketed her target and sent off two clusters of missiles: one at the blunt skull of the massive avian, and a second to take off one wing. Its body was long and narrow and not a good target yet. If she missed killing it, she had a chance to veer off and come up under to get the belly—if that should happen to be its vulnerable spot.