Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt
Page 24
We watched it expand gradually into a squat heavy cylinder, thick though the middle, rounded at one end, flared at the other. “It’s one of ours,” said McIras, not entirely able to conceal her surprise. “But it’s old! Look at the design—.” It was small, and ungainly, and unsettlingly familiar, a relic from another age. It was the kind of ship that had leaped the stars during the early days of the Armstrong drive, that had carried Desiret and Taniyama and Bible Bill to the worlds that would eventually become the Confederacy. And it was the kind of ship that had waged the internecine wars, and that, in humanity’s darkest hour, had fought off the Ashiyyur. As far as anyone knew, the only other race in the galaxy. The telepaths. The Mutes.
For a long time, no one spoke.
It grew steadily larger.
“Captain,” said the watch officer. “Recovery estimates twenty-eight hours for the recall.”
“We have its orbit,” said Carmody. “Closest point of approach will occur in three hours, eleven minutes, at a range of 2600 kilometers.”
McIras acknowledged. “Stay with it. I want to know if it shows any response to our presence.”
She was a beautiful ship, silver and blue in the bright sunlight. Her lines curved gently: there was about her a sense of the ornate that one does not see in the cold gray vessels of the modern era. The parabolic prow with its sunburst, the flared tubes, the sweptback bridge, the cradled pods, all would have been of practical use only to an atmospheric flyer. Somehow, I felt as if I knew her; and she reminded me of a time when I’d been very young.
“What’s that on the hull?” asked a voice over the comm circuit.
Carmody had centered the Tenandrome’s long-range telescopes on the ship’s designator, a group of symbols beneath the bridge, which we were still unable to make out. But there was a mark just forward of them, near the bow, dark against the silver metal. He tried to increase magnification, but the image grew indistinct, so we waited while the two ships drew closer.
Recovery reported that two of the survey teams were en route from the surface. There were six others, but they would have to wait until we could change orbit. Several were already on the circuit, demanding to know what was going on. Holtmeyer exploded when I tried to explain it to him. (That was more or less typical of Holtmeyer, although, in his defense, he was at the time sitting on a glacier and thought he’d seen some large fossils through the ice.) McIras overheard most of it, maybe all of it, and she cut in near the end. “Hugh,” she said, on a circuit not audible to the ground, “tell him I said to get back here tout de suite, and without further discussion. By the way, you might be interested in knowing it’s a warship.” She explained something about transformational pods, but I stopped listening because the mark near the bow was resolving itself, and somebody else must have seen the same thing I did because there was a burst of profanity behind me.
It was a symbol we all knew: a black harridan spreading its wings across a crescent moon. And in that moment, I understood why I had recognized the vessel.
“It’s not possible,” breathed the watch officer.
Her design suggested a simpler age, a more heroic time. Maybe it was the ship itself, maybe it was the tangle of associations we all had with her. I’d seen Marcross’s magnificent rendering of her in the main lobby of the Hall of the People on Rimway, flanked by portraits of Christopher and Tarien Sim, the brothers who had stood almost alone against the Mutes. And every child on every world in the Confederacy knew the simple inscription carved in marble at the base of the central painting: Never Again.
“My God,” said the watch officer, his voice little more than a whisper, “It’s the Corsarius.”
After a while, the ship began to draw away from us; the details blurred and faded.
The Tenandrome was in a high geosynchronous orbit: we were taking our first team on board when the Corsarius began its long descent toward the nightside. But Carmody’s telescopes still held it in the center of the monitors, and I alternated between watching it and scrolling through library accounts of its exploits.
All the vessels in Christopher Sim’s Dellacondan squadron had displayed the black harridan, a ferocious predator much admired on their mountainous world; but only the commander himself had placed the symbol within the crescent moon, “to ensure the enemy can find me.”
The ship plunged down the sky into the twilight, a thing of legend and history and pride. At the end, when all had seemed lost, and only the last few ships of the Dellacondan squadron had stood against the all-conquering invader, her crew had abandoned her. And Christopher Sim had gone down to the bars and dens of lost Abonai, where he’d found the seven nameless men and women who’d ridden with him on that final brilliant sally.
The navigator’s fingers danced across his presspads. He glanced at the Captain. McIras looked at her own panel and nodded. “Axial tilt’s eleven degrees,” she said. “And it’s rolling. It’s been there a long time.”
Images flickered across the command screen, tail sections and communication assemblies and stress factors. “Is it,” I asked, “what it appears to be?”
She shrugged, but there was discomfort in the gesture. “Sim and his ship died off Rigel two centuries ago.”
It was dwindling quickly now, falling through the dusk, plunging toward the terminator. I watched it during those last moments before it lost the sunlight, waiting, wondering perhaps whether it wasn’t some phantasm of the night which, with the morning, would leave no trace of its passing.
It dropped into the planetary shadow.
“I’m still getting a good visual,” said the navigator, surprised. It was indeed still visible, a pale, ghostly luminescence. A chill felt its way up my spine, and I looked around at the crew, startled to see that even on the bridge of a modern starship people can react to the subtle tug of the supernatural.
“Where the hell,” asked Carmody, “is the reflection coming from? The moons aren’t in her sky.”
“Running lights,” said McIras. “Its running lights are on.”
McIras stayed on the bridge through her sleep period. I don’t know whether she thought something would move up on us in the dark, but the truth was that everyone was a bit unnerved. They’d assigned one of the pilots’ seats to me as a courtesy, but I dozed in it, and woke cold and stiff in the middle of the night. The Captain poured me a coffee and asked how I felt.
“Okay,” I said. “How are we doing?”
She replied that we were doing fine, that we’d recovered our first four teams, and that the others were on their way.
“What do you think it is?” I asked.
She took a long time answering. The computers were running the ship; the bridge was in semidarkness, with only the watch officer actually required to be awake. Several others, who usually would have secured for the night, were asleep at their stations. We were no longer at Condition Two, but the tension was still tangible. The instrument lights caught eyes, and reflected against the sheen of her dark skin. Her breathing was audible; it was part of the pulse of the ship, one with the muted bleeps and whistles of the computers and the occasional creak of metal walls protesting some minor adjustment of velocity or course, and the thousand other sounds which one hears between the stars at night.
“I keep thinking,” she said, “about the legend that he will come back in the Confederacy’s supreme hour of need.” She slid into a seat and lifted her cup to her lips. “It isn’t from Rimway.” She meant the coffee. “I’m sure you can tell. Logistics had a little mixup and we’ve had to make do with what they sent us.”
“Saje,” I asked, “what are you going to do?”
“The wrong thing. Hugh, if I could arrange to have everyone forget what they’ve seen, I’d erase the record, go somewhere else, and never come back. That thing out there, I don’t know what it is, nor how it could be what it seems, but it doesn’t belong in this sky, or any sky. I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“You’re stuck with it,” I said.
“Sim’s?” That was of course Man and Olympian, his history of classical Greece.
“Yes. He was something of a radical. He comes down hard for example on Socrates. Thinks the old bastard got just what he deserved.” I had known that, but had never been particularly interested in the details. Before now. “He says the judge and jury were right. That Socrates was in fact undermining the polis with a system of values that, although admirable in themselves, were nevertheless disrupting Athenian life.”
“That doesn’t sound reasonable,” I said.
“That’s what the critics thought, too. Sim blasted them later, in a second book that he didn’t live to finish.” She smiled. “Tarien said somewhere that his brother didn’t object to critics as long as he could have the last word. It’s a pity they never present this side of him in the schools. The Christopher Sim the kids get to see comes off as perfect, preachy, and fearless.” Her brow furrowed. “I wonder what he’d have made of a ghost ship?”
“He’d have boarded. Or, if he couldn’t board, he’d have looked for more information, and found something else to think about in the meantime.”
She walked away, and I called Man and Olympian up out of the library. It was a standard classic that no one really read anymore, except in undergraduate survey classes. My impression of it, derived from a cursory reading thirty years before, was that its reputation was based primarily on the fact that it was the product of a famous man. So I leaned back in the cushions, drew the screen close, and prepared to be lulled back to sleep.
But Sim’s Hellas was too vital a place to allow that: its early pages were filled with Xerxes’ rage (“O Master, remember the Athenians”), Themistocles’ statesmanship, and the valor of the troops who stood at Thermopylae. I was struck, not only by the clarity and force of the book, but also by its compassion. It was not what one would ordinarily expect from a military leader. But then, Sim had not begun as a military leader: he’d been a teacher when the trouble started. And ironically, while he made his reputation as a naval tactician, his brother Tarien, who’d begun the war as a fleet officer, became known eventually as the great statesman of the period.
His views are essentially Olympian: one feels that Christopher Sim speaks for History, and if his perspective is not always quite that of those who have gone before, there is no doubt where the misperceptions lie. His is the supreme judgment.
His prose acquires a brooding quality during his account of the destruction of Athens, and the needless loss of life during the misguided effort to defend the Parthenon. And, if I’d been at all inclined to sleep, he would have blasted that possibility by his denunciation of the Spartans for Thermopylae: The Hellenes knew for years that the Persians would be coming, and in any case they had advance knowledge of the formation of the invasion force. Yet they prepared no league, and set no defenses, until the deluge was on them. Then they sent Leonidas and his men, and their handful of allies, to compensate with their lives for the neglect and stupidity of the politicians.
It was a grim coincidence: those words had been written before the Mutes had launched their attack, and in a broad sense it fell to Sim to play the role of Leonidas. He led the holding action for the frontier worlds, while Tarien sounded the alarm and began the immense task of forging an alliance that could stand against the invaders.
I don’t know whether I ever actually got to sleep. Persians and Mutes got confused with each other, and then I was looking up into Saje McIras’ solemn eyes. Her hand was on my shoulder. “Hugh,” she said, “we’re going to send over a boarding party.”
“Okay. I’ve got a few people who should go.”
“No. I want to keep it small. Just you and me.”
I watched her, unable to believe she was serious. Just you and me? “Why?”
Her face was a mask, but the reflections that flickered across it had acquired a somber pulse. “I don’t really know. I’m afraid of what we might find, maybe.”
The hull was seared and blistered and pocked. It had a patchwork quality from periodic replacement of plates. Navigational and communication pods were scored, after-section shields appeared to have buckled, and the drive housing was missing, exposing the Armstrong unit. “Nevertheless,” said McIras, “I don’t see any major damage. There is one strange thing though.” We were in a shuttle, approaching from behind and above. “The drive housing was removed. It wasn’t blown off.”
“Unfinished repairs,” I suggested.
“Yes. Or repairs made in a hurry. Not the way I’d want to take a ship on a long mission. But it looks serviceable enough.” The aguan solenoids, through which the Corsarius had hurled the lightning, protruded stiff and cold from an array of mounts. “So do they,” she added.
But the chill of age was on the vessel.
McIras sat in the pilot’s seat, thoughtful and apprehensive. The multichannel was open, sweeping frequencies that would have been available for automated responses from Corsarius. “The histories must be wrong,” I said. “Obviously, it wasn’t destroyed at Rigel.” She adjusted the contrast on the navigational display. One of the computers on the Tenandrome was matching the ship’s schematics with ancient naval records, again and again, in endless detail. “It makes me wonder what else they might have been wrong about,” she said.
I looked at her. “Assume Sim survived Rigel. Why did he disappear afterward? Why come out here anyhow? Saje, could the Corsarius have made this kind of flight?”
“Oh, yes. Hugh, the range of any of these vessels was only limited by the quantity of supplies they could get on board. No, they could have done it. Obviously, they did do it. But it would have taken the better part of a year, coming from the zone of operations. And presumably in the middle of a war. Why? Why in hell did they do it?” She stared down at the spine of the ship.
I’d always thought of the Corsarius as a large vessel, and the records confirm that opinion. She was large, for a frigate. But she was almost negligible against the square-cut bulk of the Tenandrome. “I wonder if, somehow, Sim and his ship fell into the hands of the Mutes?”
We drifted out over the bow, past the fierce eyes and curved beak of the harridan, past the weapons clusters bristling in the ship’s snout. McIras took us higher. The hull fell sharply away, and the blue sunsplashed planetary surface swam across the viewports. Then it too was swallowed by the broad sweep of star-strewn black sky. We swung around and started a fresh approach.
McIras was talking in a flat emotionless voice. “Blind and dead,” she was saying. “No effort to track.”
The curious Cerullian characters stenciled on her hull slipped past. They gave us the ship’s designator. “It checks,” came Carmody’s voice. “It’s the Corsarius.”
The hatch rotated open to McIras’ touch, and yellow light showed around its edges. We floated into the airlock. Red lamps glowed on an elegant status board, “Seems to be in working order,” I said.
“Ship’s got power,” she replied. “Not much. Enough to run the maintenance systems.” Not enough to generate artificial gravity. Once we were inside, the hatch closed, lights blinked to orange, and air hissed into the compartment. Carmody did a comm check and wished us luck. The bolts on the inner hatch slid out of their wells, warning lamps went to red, and the door swung open.
We looked out into a dimly-lit chamber. The bulkheads were lined with cabinets and storage enclosures and pressure suits. Two benches and an engineering console were anchored to the deck. Oxygen content was okay, a little low, but breathable. Temperature was not quite three degrees. Cool. McIras released her helmet, lifted it, and inhaled.
“They turned down the heat,” I said, removing my own.
“Yes. That’s precisely what they did. They left the ship, expecting to come back.” She drifted awkwardly across the deck, counting the pressure suits. There were eight. “All there,” she sai
d.
“We need to look at the bridge.”
“In a minute, Hugh.” She disappeared down a corridor. I waited several minutes, contemplating shadowy passageways. The cabinets were filled with oscillators, meters, cable, generators. One yielded a book of poetry, written in Cerullian. Another, a holo of a young woman and a child.
Everything was secured in bands, clamps, or compartments. The equipment was clean and polished, as though it had been stowed the day before.
I was looking at the holo when she returned. “Well,” she said, “there’s one theory blown.”
“What was that?”
“I thought maybe they’d gone down to the surface and got stranded.”
“Hell, Saje, they wouldn’t all have left the ship.”
“I suppose. Anyhow, it’s a moot point. The lander’s in its bay.”
“That means there was a second ship involved. They were taken off.”
“Or,” she said, “they’re still here. Somewhere.”
Some of the lights had failed. None of the elevators worked, and the air had a trace of ozone, as though one of the compressors was overheating. One compartment was full of drifting water-globes; another was scorched where an electrical fire had burned itself out. From somewhere deep in the ship came a slow, ponderous heartbeat, growing stronger as we penetrated the interior. “It’s a hatch opening and closing,” she said. “One of the circuits has malfunctioned.”
Progress was slow. Moving around in null gravity is cumbersome, and every hatch had to be winched open. McIras tried to establish normal power from an auxiliary board. Green lamps went on, indicating that the functions had been executed, but nothing changed. So we floated through the ship, unable to get leverage, and unable to pass through the hatches without a lot of effort. One resisted us so fiercely that we wondered, even though the gauges read normal, whether there wasn’t a vacuum behind it. In the end we went down one level and bypassed it.