Richard Russo

by Ship of Fools

  “All right,” I said. “Give me the bad news.”

  “Oh, I don’t know that it’s bad, exactly. Weird. Three things, and you should know about them. Nikos ordered me not to speak of one, and he doesn’t know I’m aware of the other; I don’t think he’s even aware of the third. But I won’t keep them secret any longer. Not when we’re about to start explorations tomorrow.” She cocked her head. “Whether you choose to tell the others, I leave to you. It probably doesn’t matter. But you should know, since you’re in charge.”

  “I’m glad someone thinks so.”

  She smiled, but only briefly. “This first thing is mostly just a mystery, maybe some physical phenomenon that we don’t recognize, but it could have some significance we can’t yet determine. We also can’t do anything about it, but it’s worth being aware of.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “We maintain a steady three-thousand kilometer distance between the Argonos and the alien ship. The problem is this: every couple of days we have to retreat a bit, because the Argonos drifts closer to the ship.” Another shrug. “Well, we drift closer to it, or it drifts closer to us, or we’re drifting together, it doesn’t matter which.”

  “Frame of reference,” I said.

  “Yes. However you chose to view it, every two days we have to make a several-minute burn of some of the attitude jets to pull back to three thousand kilometers.”

  That was weird, all right. And disturbing.

  “What’s the mass of the alien ship?” I asked.

  “We’ve already run that, and it doesn’t work. That damned ship is huge, dense in some sections, and it’s got significant mass, but not enough to account for this, not at three thousand kilometers.”

  Cardenas may have thought it was just a mystery, but I didn’t like it.

  “Any ideas?”

  “No. We still don’t pick up anything from the ship except a hint of ambient heat, which isn’t much higher than its surroundings. No one’s been able to suggest an explanation.”

  “That’s encouraging.” I shook my head. “What about the shuttle? We’ll drift into the ship as well, won’t we?

  She nodded. “Probably. A couple of choices. We can set down on the ship’s hull, anchor the shuttle with a few cables. Since there’s no rotation, and there will be a tiny bit of natural gravity, it wouldn’t take much to secure us. The cargo hold has all the necessary equipment.”

  “Thinking ahead.”

  She gave me a quick shrug. “Just wanted to be prepared. The other choice is to tell the pilots that the mass of the ship is enough to cause a small attraction, and let them use the shuttle engines regularly to keep us parked.”

  I nodded. “Preference?”

  “Land on the ship and anchor to the hull. If that ship is dangerous, being seventy-five meters away won’t make much difference.”

  “I agree. We’ll make a final decision tomorrow.” I sighed. “Okay, what else?”

  Cardenas hesitated a long time before answering, which only increased my anxiety.

  “Did you ever wonder how it was we found this ship?”

  Sure, I had wondered—a dark mental creature of doubt had gnawed away at my thoughts, although I had always managed to suppress it for a time. I hadn’t wanted to think about it too much. I knew something was wrong.

  “Just coincidence,” I tried. “On our way out from Antioch, it was just there, near our flight path. Coincidence. Luck.”

  Cardenas made a kind of snorting noise. “This ship, this alien vessel, is nowhere near anything. You take all the possible flight paths we could have charted out from Antioch’s system, and just by chance we choose the one that takes us right to this starship.”

  “Were we on a flight path to make a jump to the bishop’s next star?”

  She shook her head. “The bishop hadn’t made a selection yet. He doesn’t usually make one immediately, but he’d never hold off that long. Either Captain Costa somehow convinced him to postpone his selection, or the bishop and the captain worked together on this. I don’t know how it played out between them.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A few hours after you entered the chamber on Antioch, the transmitter at the original landing site sent off a long, highly directional signal burst. It stayed on long enough for Communications to chart its path. Didn’t seem to be directed at anything in particular—the nearest star in its path was hundreds of light-years away. Working backwards in time, it still would have been a couple thousand years ago before anything would have been much closer.”

  “So Nikos got curious.”

  “Apparently. He set course to follow the signal path, and we stayed under conventional propulsion all those months until we picked up the alien ship. Even so, we almost missed it; we nearly went right on by. The only reason we didn’t is because the captain had all the ship sensors on full alert, looking.”

  “So you think the signal was directed at the alien ship.”

  “What do you think, Bartolomeo?”

  “And Nikos doesn’t know you know about this?”

  “No. He ordered the people in Communications not to speak of it to anyone. When he set our course, he gave no explanation, just gave the orders to the navigators.”

  “Then how did you learn about it?”

  She hesitated. “The crew obeys most of the captain’s orders, but not in certain matters. We have open communication among ourselves. We keep no secrets from one another.”

  “Any ideas about the signal?” I asked. I had a couple myself, but they were only partially formed, and I wanted to hear what Cardenas thought.

  “We talked about it. The crew. A number of suggestions, but most extremely unlikely. Two primary possibilities, we concluded.” She held up a finger. “One, it was a signal to the alien starship that the chamber had been discovered. Or breached.”

  “But you said the signal wasn’t sent until several hours after we’d entered. Why the delay?”

  Cardenas smiled. “We worked that out. Long enough for Antioch to rotate and bring the transmitter into a position where it could send the signal to the correct location.”

  I nodded. “Second possibility.”

  She held up another finger. “The signal was meant to lead us here.”

  “A trap.”

  “Of sorts. Except there’s no one left alive on the ship. The trap, if that’s what it was, can’t be sprung.”

  “That’s what we think. Maybe it’s what we’re supposed to think.”

  Cardenas shrugged. “Haven’t seen any signs of life yet.”

  “There’s always tomorrow,” I said. “You said there were three things.”

  “Yes. The third bothers me the most. It’s the bishop.”

  My gut tightened still further. “Go ahead.”

  “Not sure what to tell you. It’s been three weeks now since exploration of the alien ship was suspended. During that time, the bishop has made three excursions of his own, three trips here with a shuttle and a crew. I’m fairly certain Nikos doesn’t know about the trips, and the bishop probably thinks no one does—he managed to override all the security alarms, took circuitous flight paths, arranged for the bridge to shut down sensors and detection equipment until the shuttle was far from the Argonos, that kind of thing. Very thorough.”

  “Not quite thorough enough, apparently.”

  Cardenas gave me a hard smile. “People usually underestimate the crew.”

  “Nikos knows about one trip.”

  She nodded, still smiling. “And I guess I underestimate Nikos.”

  “What was the bishop doing?”

  “Don’t know. But we think he brought something back to the Argonos on his second trip.” She shook her head. “No idea what.”

  That was distressing. And I wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that there was no longer any gravity in the room that had killed Santiago.

  “Any suggestions?” I asked. “A plan of action?”

  “Not really. The crew’s looking, but it’s unlikely t
hey’ll find anything. The bishop is too smart, and the Argonos is too big. You want a plan? We keep a close eye on the bishop. Wait, and watch our backs.”

  26

  THE next day we secured the shuttle to the alien ship’s hull, after extensive and contentious discussion with the pilots, Nikos, and the bishop—we argued that extra stability for the shuttle was necessary since we might be there for weeks—but only after working out a way for the pilots to perform a quick-release and takeoff. Rita Hollings set up a system of boosters and relays throughout that part of the alien ship already explored, so video and sound would be transmitted from the suit helmets to the shuttle with minimal loss of signal quality. We could have someone monitoring the exploration teams at all times.

  As a precaution, we continued to use two remotes, although they slowed our progress considerably and were too crude to be much real help. We sent them first into each new passage or cabin, but aside from acting as a decoy that could spring any traps awaiting us, and providing preliminary images, they were practically useless. In addition, each of us had a hand stunner secured to our pressure suits, although none of us expected to use them.

  I would like to say that the following days were filled with awe and excitement, with marvels and wonders, astonishing discoveries. If they were, the marvels went unrecognized.

  Mysteries we did find, and they were many. But I learned that something can be too mysterious, too alien—so mysterious or alien as to approach being meaningless:

  —Two connected rooms crisscrossed by metal rods; we had to laboriously climb through them each time we went in or out of the ship until we found a curving passage that bypassed them. We couldn’t even guess at the purpose or function of the rooms or the rods.

  —More bare and empty cabins with walls so featureless, the rooms appeared to be incomplete.

  —Mazes of interlocking tunnels that doubled back on themselves and led nowhere.

  —A series of dead ends—high, narrow corridors ten to twenty meters in length that simply ended at solid, featureless walls.

  —And finally, a large spherical room we dubbed the Greenhouse. Ninety meters across, the inner walls consisted of hundreds of hexagonal facets of clear material like steelglass; with the hand torches and lanterns we could see through the facets to another layer about a meter behind the glass, this one consisting of smooth unmarked metal. There was only one entrance to the room. Did we really think it served as a greenhouse? No. What would have been a light source? Where would plants be mounted? As with everything else we’d seen, we had no idea what the Greenhouse’s function was.

  But there was one major plus during those early days: there were no deaths, and there were no injuries. We made steady, though slow, progress farther and farther into the alien starship, and there was a growing sense of accomplishment, and a belief that better things were to come.

  TWO and a half weeks after we’d arrived, the team of Starlin, Cardenas, and Winton explored a room with blistered walls—metal covered with crusted, discolored, irregularly shaped bubbles. They spent some time studying and probing the blistered metal, speculating on whether the discoloration and blistering were intentional, or were symptoms of neglect and abandonment. Then the team drifted toward a wall adjacent to the one through which they’d entered, and approached a second door.

  Instead of sending in one of the remotes, Starlin got careless. Perhaps because they were at the end of their shift and tired, the door seemed to be in the “ceiling” of the room, and it had been weeks since we’d encountered any portion of the alien ship that had gravity—nothing since the room where Santiago had died. The door was quite large, wide and tall enough to accommodate three or four people at once; when Starlin turned a handle on the wall beside it—a rectangular bar that moved easily with the slightest pressure—the door slid smoothly open, disappearing into the thick wall.

  Starlin swung himself “up” toward the opening, holding out one of the lanterns. As the lantern and his hand moved through the doorway, followed by one of his legs, the gravity kicked in. He didn’t have a good grip on the lantern and it was pulled out of his hand; it shot off like a jet beacon. Starlin, too, was pulled into the next room, but he had one hand and arm outside, his hand still gripped around the bar, and one leg hooked on the doorway. He let out a cry, but managed to hang on, half in the next room, half out.

  “Help me!” His helmeted head was still in the blister-walled room, but his grip seemed to be weakening.

  It’s uncertain just what happened next. Starlin was never unsure, and neither were most of the rest of us, but the seeds of doubt are still there even now.

  Sherry Winton pushed off the wall and floated across the room toward him, moving quickly. Starlin wasn’t looking at her, and his helmet camera was directed down at the door bar; Winton’s own video was too jerky, shifting around, missing much of the action of her hands and arms; and Cardenas’s view was blocked by Winton’s body. Winton crashed into Starlin, and he lost his grip. Winton claimed that in her panic to save Starlin, she misjudged her speed and direction and accidentally struck him, then scrambled to catch herself. Starlin said she intentionally crashed into him, then deliberately pried his gloved fingers from the door bar.

  With his primary hold gone, Starlin began to slide farther into the next room, his fingers scratching frantically for something to hang onto. Then Winton’s leg kicked out—accidental, she swore; deliberate again, Starlin accused—knocking Starlin’s leg through the doorway. Starlin’s slide accelerated.

  But as he went through the opening, he managed to get both hands onto the door frame, with just enough grip to stop his fall.

  He hung there, and I remember watching on the shuttle monitor—by that time Aiyana, who had been posted on the monitor, had alerted us to what was happening—and feeling that time was stretching out interminably; an aching fear drove through me, fear that he couldn’t hold on. But it was probably no more than twenty or thirty seconds before Cardenas was at the doorway, anchoring herself to the door bar with the security cable attached to her suit, and reaching out to Starlin.

  By that time Winton was settled, and began to help. Starlin, of course, later argued that Winton no longer had a choice; her opportunity was gone, and she had to help in order to cover herself. Whatever the reason, Winton worked with Cardenas to pull Starlin up through the doorway and out of the other room.

  As soon as he was free of the other room’s gravity, Starlin lunged at Winton. They struggled, although the suits made fighting awkward and difficult. Cardenas tried to separate them, but her own actions were clumsy, and everyone was losing control. Cardenas kept her head, though, quickly unhooked her security cable from the door bar, then turned the bar back to its original position. The door slid out from the wall and sealed shut just moments before Starlin and Winton both struck it; if it hadn’t shut, they both would have gone through the doorway and plunged to their deaths. As we were later to learn, the room was like the one Santiago had died in: the gravity was twice Earth normal, and the fall would have been more than thirty meters.

  BY the time they got back to the shuttle, Starlin was still furious, and Winton continued to vigorously deny any harmful intent. Both were confined to their compartments while the rest of us talked to Cardenas and reviewed the recordings. Cardenas couldn’t make a judgment. Much of her view had been blocked; everything had happened so quickly, and she’d been focused on Starlin, not on Winton.

  “I can’t be sure,” she said. “I really can’t.” There was a long hesitation. “But I will admit that my impression at the time, and I want to emphasize that it wasn’t a strong impression by any means, was that . . . was that Winton tried to push him through the opening.”

  No one said anything for a long time. Finally Maria Vegas said, “But why?”

  I don’t think the lack of an answer changed anyone’s mind about what had happened. We watched the recordings again, all three frames of reference. Still inconclusive. But like Cardenas, I, too, had t
he impression that Sherry Winton had tried to push Starlin into the next room, to his probable death. I knew others felt the same way, and Cardenas’s words had charged the air. More silence, no one knowing quite what to say, where to start. But I knew what needed to be done.

  “They both have to go back to the Argonos,” I finally said.

  There was no argument.

  27

  NOR was there any argument from the Executive Committee back on the Argonos. But they strongly suggested we all return to the ship for a few days, even a couple of weeks. The bishop declared that we needed a break from the alien starship, from the hard work of suiting up every other day and moving about in zero g, from being cooped up together for so long. Nikos, too, said he thought it would be a good idea. I told them I would discuss it with the others, and we would let them know. In the meantime, they would select two replacements.

  I called everyone except Starlin and Winton into the main cabin and told them what the Executive Committee had suggested. I included Taggart—the med-tech—and the two pilots because our decision would affect them as well.

  “I want to know two things from each of you,” I said. “First, do you want to continue as a member of this team? If your answer is no, you can go back to the Argonos with Starlin and Winton, and no one will think less of you. This has been hard on all of us, and there’s no reason to think it’s going to get any easier. As I said before we came here, I don’t want anyone on this team who isn’t willing.” I looked out at all those who had been on the shuttle with me all this time. “If you need to think about it, just say so. Take a few hours if necessary.”

  “What’s the second question?” Aiyana asked.

  “If you do want to remain a part of this team,” I continued, “do you think we should go back to the Argonos for a time, get away from the alien ship? So, let’s start with the first question.”