“Bridge is built. Pumping air into it now. Keep it steady, Dalton.” I put my helmet on and seated it. While the suit prepped for vacuum and linked the helmet to my comms, I moved over to the door.
“Why do you need your helmet if you have air in the tunnel?” Fiori asked.
“She doesn’t trust molecular barriers,” Dalton replied.
Both their voices were soft and distant, filtering through my suit’s comms.
Fiori tilted her head, considering me. “Have you ever seen one break and expose someone to vacuum?”
“Doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” I growled. It was no answer at all, but I wasn’t in the mood for intellectual debate. I checked the shriver’s charge and shoved it back on the clip on my hip, then picked up the torrent shriver from the far side bench and hefted it.
“Ready.”
“Be careful,” Dalton told me.
The door opened and a soft breeze tugged at me as the atmosphere inside the tunnel and the one inside the ship equalized. Ten meters of space separated me from the scratched, pitted and dented hull of the Ige Ibas. Dalton had lined up with the man-sized hatch on the side, which was likely the primary boarding port. A ship like this wouldn’t run to a full sized freight bay and ramp. It was a personnel carrier, and by its size, I judged it would be a cramped berth for anyone aboard her.
“Lyssa?”
“Here,” she whispered in my ear.
“Can you open the Ige Ibas’s primary hatch from there?”
“I’ll have to connect with the ship’s AI.”
“No,” I said quickly. “If the AI didn’t answer your hails, then I don’t want to stir it until I know what happened over there. Slide in under the AI and manipulate the hatch algorithms yourself.”
After a pause of several seconds, Lyssa said, “Let me see what I can do.” She didn’t sound upset, but I knew I had surprised her. And perhaps I had just challenged her, too. She might have orange hair and a temper, but she was still a conservative youngster. It wouldn’t occur to her to by-pass the shipmind because that was rude.
I had no problem being rude when it was required and, often, when it was not.
“No resistance at all…” Lyssa murmured.
I got the torrent shriver up as the hatch on the Ige Ibas slid open and revealed a dark airlock chamber. My heart slammed around, and I cursed silently. Fiori would read too much into that spiking beat.
I waited, my gaze not shifting away from that black hatch.
Nothing moved.
“Going in,” I warned. I said to Fiori, “Shut the door as soon as I move beyond it.” I didn’t look at her.
“Yes, Colonel.” Her tone was close to Lyssa’s meek one and it didn’t fool me any more than Lyssa’s did.
I moved to the very edge of the open door, then pushed myself off into the weightless ether between me and the yawning mystery of the Ige Ibas.
—9—
The airlock chamber was a standard two-man lock with controls both inside and out. The inner door was cranked shut, which was normal.
I glanced through the porthole of the lock’s inner door. The arrival foyer had once been pristine white, but now was a stained and dirty yellow, barely bigger than the lock itself.
The ship still had lights and gravity. It was possible it still had breathable atmosphere, too. I wouldn’t know until I got inside, but the closed inner lock was a good sign.
I punched the oversized keypad carefully with my gloved finger, picking my way through the interstellar-standard controls to close the outer door and move through a purge-or-pump cycle. Without the cycle, the inner door wouldn’t open. It didn’t know there was already air in the chamber. It didn’t care, either. It was kept dumb so it couldn’t be reasoned into opening upon a vacuum. It obeyed the rules. And the rules said pump, first.
The lock switched to green. I hit the key to unseal the inner door, then brought the torrent shriver up once more. It was highly likely the opening of the inner airlock door would trip off a dozen different alerts and alarms. At least one of them would sound on the bridge—or the flight control module, which was all this ship most likely ran to.
The lock door drifted open. It operated on hinges, rather than sliders, and would slam shut again if a vacuum formed on this side. I pushed it fully open with my other hand and stepped over the high sill into the foyer beyond, then pushed the door closed again.
“I’m in,” I murmured. “Running air diagnostics.” I punched the panel on my forearm and watched the bars dance and shift in colors. The display at the bottom ran through digits, then flashed green. “Normal,” I added.
I moved over to the chamber door, which was open, and peered out into the corridor beyond. Dirty carbonfiber floor, worn down to the metal in places. Scratched walls, also once white. Doors along either side, all of them closed.
While switching my gaze from one end of the corridor to the other direction, I leaned the shriver muzzle-down against my thigh, took off my helmet and clipped it to the belt against the small of my back.
I sniffed.
The old, faded sweat smell of people living in close quarters for years was distinct and familiar. Over the top of it, I caught the fizzing sharpness of ozone in the air.
Shriver bolts left trails of ozone behind them.
I lifted the torrent shriver up once more and leaned out the door. “Hello!” I bellowed, then listened.
Nothing.
I shouted again and again, keeping it up for long minutes, and listened hard in between.
“There’s no one home,” I said at last. “Lyssa’s scans had it right. There’s no signs of violence, except I can smell ozone.”
“Any blood?” Dalton asked.
I winced, thinking of Fiori, then I remembered she was a medic and had probably seen more blood in her lifetime than I had. “Nothing like that. You can come over now, if you still want to. Fiori, do you think you could manage to pull Vara across?” The question surprised even me.
“Will she let me?” Fiori said doubtfully.
I put the question to Vara, using the simplified symbols and word pictures that she understood.
“She doesn’t like the molecular barriers anymore than I do, and she hates weightlessness even more, but she will let you pull her across so she can help me,” I told Fiori.
“I’ll bring Darby,” Dalton said.
I went back to the airlock. “Lyssa, we need to jam the outer and inner doors open at the same time. Figure you can argue the AI out of overriding us?”
“That’s the thing, Colonel,” Lyssa said, not sounding very happy. “I can’t raise the AI at all. I’ve been trying since I opened the airlock, because it was too easy to reach the lock.”
“The shipmind is dormant?”
“I can’t find it at all, Colonel. It’s gone, just like the crew.”
I had intended to engage with the ship’s AI next, to establish what had happened. If we couldn’t find the thing, that would be a problem.
I saw the outer door of the shuttle slide open. I didn’t have time to deal with this new mystery right now. “Okay, keep searching for it. The code has to be somewhere. Meantime, open the inner and outer hatches on this lock for me.”
“That’s easy enough, with the AI hiding,” Lyssa said.
The inner door popped open again, as the outer door slid aside. Warning lights flashed red in panic.
Dalton pushed off from the lip of the shuttle door, his bare hand up against Darb’s neck, guiding the parawolf across the tunnel. Darb scrabbled at nothing with his forepaws, which had the affect of flipping him upright. Dalton bore down on his neck, keeping him oriented properly. This was clearly not the first time Dalton had maneuvered Darb through weightlessness.
They reached the outer hatch as Fiori pushed off from the shuttle with Vara alongside her, her hand gripping Vara’s neck the same way Dalton had steered Darb.
Darb landed on the floor of the airlock chamber and felt faux gravity under his paws once
more. He gave an unhappy whimper.
“Come here, Darb,” I told him, beckoning him out of the way.
He and Dalton moved out of the chamber as Fiori and Vara reached the hatch. Vara was far more elegant with her landing, but her tail was down because she didn’t like weightlessness any more than Darb did.
All of us crowded into the arrival foyer, leaving little room.
“That smell…” Dalton said, his nose in the air. “Shriver bolts, for sure,” he concluded.
“You can tell that by smelling?” Fiori asked.
“We’ve both smelled it a lot,” I said grimly. “It’s unmistakable.”
“All I can smell is unwashed human,” Fiori said.
“That, too,” I added.
Dalton grinned and pulled out his shriver. “Split up and quarter?”
“Two parties, a wolf each. Fiori, do you want to go with Dalton or me?”
“You,” Fiori said firmly, surprising me.
Dalton didn’t seem surprised. “I’ll take aft.”
“Don’t go down into engineering yet,” I warned him, for the bare metal stairs down to the engine room were back there. Engineering compartments were often mazes of mounted equipment and machinery, where anything could hide and lie in wait. I didn’t want anyone wandering around alone down there.
“‘kay.” He stepped out into the corridor, checked to his left, then turned right. He gave a soft whistle and Darb trotted over to his side. The two of them moved down the corridor toward the rear of the craft.
“Is this the only corridor, do you think?” Fiori asked. She had a small shriver in her hand, which I approved of. Medics who insisted upon not picking up a weapon because of a silly principal often ended up dead…which didn’t help their patients in the slightest.
“Yeah, I think this is the one and only corridor,” I told her. “Right down the spine of the ship.” I stepped over to the nearest door and tapped the control panel. No response.
“Lyssa, crack open door seventeen,” I said and lifted the torrent shriver.
The door gave a little click, then slid open. We both held still, aiming into the room beyond, and looked around it.
A full-sized bed crammed in one corner, a smart terminal against the other, and a shelf with memorabilia clamped upon it.
Vara pushed her nose in, sniffed, and turned away, disinterested.
“Captain’s quarters,” I guessed. “Or a senior officer. If wildcatters even run to senior officers.”
“In my experience they’re just as unlikely to have a captain. They’re big on equality,” Fiori said.
I gave a soft snort. “There’s no time to put it to a vote when you’re up the sharp end in deep space.”
“That’s almost exactly what Gabriel said,” Fiori replied.
The bed was unmade. The terminal was a blank face with no lights, not even a ready signal. There were no signs of violence. The abandoned air made me shiver.
“Next,” I declared and turned to the next door.
It only took us twenty minutes to move up the length of the corridor to the flight deck, pry open every door along it and look inside. No one. No overturned chairs or burned-out belongings.
Beverages sat in sealed cups, half-drunk. Sandwich crusts on a plate, going moldy.
We stepped up into the cramped little flight control module, which had two chairs, a semicircular dashboard and two large screens.
“No inertia shells,” Fiori observed.
“The ship wasn’t designed for high gee combat maneuvers.” I prodded at the pilot’s controls, but the dashboard remained blank and unresponsive. “Lyssa, have you found the AI yet?”
“There’s nowhere to look, Danny,” Lyssa said, sounding even more unhappy now.
“What does that mean?”
“It means there’s no directories of files. No matrix. No structure. Nothing.”
“How can there be nothing?” If there was truly nothing there, then there were no logs, no debug dumps, nothing that would tell us what had happened.
“There’s only one way an entire shipmind can be removed. Someone purged the systems,” Lyssa said.
Now I understood why she sounded so unhappy. “There’s not even a backup anywhere?”
“The ship is literally just a shell. There is no life of any sort on it that I can detect.”
I frowned at the dead screens.
“Why would anyone purge their ship systems?” Fiori whispered, horror twisting her voice. “That’s life support, emergency systems, even food, deleted beyond recall.”
I nodded. “There’s one reason I could think of for doing that, but you’re not going to like it.”
Fiori grimaced, which made her pert nose turn up. “I already don’t like this. Tell me.”
“As a captain, I would order the purging of all intelligence and information about my ship and my crew, even the general database, if I didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”
“What wrong hands are there, out here?” Fiori’s voice was nearly a squeak. “Everyone has access to all human knowledge.”
I shrugged. “It was likely he was in a hurry. A full purge is faster than picking out sections and deleting them.”
“In a hurry over what?”
“To delete critical data before they were boarded.”
Fiori blinked. “Boarded…” She let out a sigh. “You don’t know that.”
“It’s a pretty good guess,” I told her.
“It’s one of only three possible scenarios that fit the facts we’ve learned,” Lyssa added, her voice emerging from the control panels on our forearms. “And the most likely one, too. The crew have left the ship. They didn’t use the shuttle, and this craft cannot navigate atmosphere and gravity. Therefore, they must have transferred to a second ship.”
“What second ship? This is the very end of nowhere!”
I held up my hand. “Let’s think about it later. First, I want to check the engineering section, then get back to the Lythion.” The need to head back was a siren song in my mind. I was well beyond gut instinct now. Silent alerts were screaming in my mind. I had to stop myself from checking behind me every few seconds.
I moved down the corridor, Vara trotting beside me, and Fiori behind us.
Dalton stood beside the turned steel railing of the stairs down to Engineering. He leaned against them, his shriver resting on the other elbow. “Another wildcatter ship, a competitor, might have taken them somewhere.”
“That would explain why the captain wanted to delete his data,” I said, as we came up to him. “He might have been trying to stop the other ship from grabbing it. Do you have any idea how long they’ve been here? Would they have had time to land dirtside and complete mineral surveys?”
Dalton grimaced. “There’s no logs for us to check if the shuttle was used recently.”
“Or to tell if that planet out there has the strike of the century,” I added. “We could be hanging over a goldmine and wouldn’t know it.”
“Isn’t deleting all the ship systems to just halt a competitor…isn’t that a bit desperate?” Fiori asked.
“It’s extreme, but again, we don’t know how rushed he was. Maybe they forgot to watch their back while they were turning rocks over, down there, and the other guys crept up and surprised them.” I bent over the railing to peer into the dim light below. “Emergency light only. Fantastic.” Although I was only mildly annoyed about the lack of bright light. We were lucky to have gravity and any light at all—and the only reason we had either was because both were autonomic systems, independent of computer control.
Dalton flicked his fingers at Darb. “Send them down first,” he suggested.
I nodded and told Vara to go with Darb and check the compartment was clear.
She and Darb climbed down the steps in unison. They were narrow steps and they filled the width of them, their shoulders brushing against each other.
We waited for thirty seconds, then I felt Vara’s assurance. “Cl
ear,” I said, as Dalton murmured the same word.
“Stay behind us,” I told Fiori.
She just nodded, her expression strained.
We trod a step at a time, down into the gloom. My eyes adjusted quickly. I moved the shriver around as I scanned the cramped room. Unlike the Lythion, this ship didn’t have discrete compartments or even a decent bulkhead. It was all one room, taking up the narrow space at the bottom of the hull. If there was a containment breach or an ion spill, nothing would stop it reaching the crew, above.
We studied the hulking shapes of servers and motors and other mystery equipment that Sauli, had he been here, would have been able to identify without issue. But this was terra incognita for me.
“Nothing,” Dalton whispered.
I relaxed and clipped my shriver to my belt. “I guess it’s official. It’s an abandoned ship. Not that it’s worth even salvage rights, without the ship systems in place. We’d have to tow—”
Alarm crashed into my mind at the same instant Vara and Darb both growled, the sounds rumbling in their chests, making the small hairs on the back of my neck stand up painfully.
I yanked at the shriver, fumbling it, for both parawolves were facing a bank of some sort of machinery, enclosed with flat panels of metal adorned with warning signs. Radiation. High pressure. High voltage risk.
The side of the paneling had an inspection hatch built into it and both wolves were snarling at the door, their rows of serrated teeth on display, their lips curled back.
—10—
My heart running hard and fast, I signaled to Dalton to move around in a big circle over to the hatch and open it. The big circle was to keep him out of the line of fire if whoever was behind the hatch was clever enough to shoot through it. I moved over to one side myself and pushed Fiori with me.
I mentally urged Vara to stay down low. She sank to her belly but didn’t stop growling.
Darb dropped down with her.
Dalton moved around in a large semi-circle and approached the hatch from the side, his shriver up. He glanced at me. I nodded. From the corner of my eye I saw Fiori bring her small shriver to bear upon the hatch, too.
Galactic Thunder Page 6
