Ghost Riders in the Sky

by Timothy Zahn

  #

  “So you just left them there?” she demanded.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Skoda insisted. Along with his new-found fear and nervousness, he was now rediscovering embarrassment and shame. He didn’t like those emotions any better than the first batch. “I barely got out myself. Be thankful I didn’t leave you.”

  “Because of course you could have figured out how to fly a tunnelship all by yourself?”

  “Yeah, about that,” Skoda growled. “I watched what you did. McDerry had the whole thing set up on auto, didn’t he? Probably did that when he came back for the Pathfinder’s registration, figuring we might have to leave in a hurry. All you did was turn on the main panel and the ship did everything else.”

  “Very good,” Chandra said. “And would you have known to try that before you watched me do it?”

  Skoda clenched his teeth. “Probably not.”

  “So what’s with these things?” she asked, waving at the two stargulls floating in the corner. “You said they helped you escape?”

  “More than just helped,” Skoda said. “Not just gave me the excuse that got me out of my cell, but also warned me His Grace was going to try to kill me. Plus they showed me where His Grace had hidden your body.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did they help you?” Chandra asked. “Why are they still here? What do they want?”

  “I don’t know that they want anything,” Skoda said.

  “Of course they want something,” Chandra scoffed. “Everybody wants something. Even if it’s just a free ride.”

  Skoda eyed the stargulls. He’d been trying to figure them out ever since they showed up in his cell, but that possibility hadn’t occurred to him. “If they are, they’re going to be disappointed. We’re not going anywhere in particular.”

  “Maybe nowhere in particular is exactly where they want to go,” Chandra said. “Maybe they’re on the run, too.”

  “From what?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Chandra retorted. “They’re your friends.”

  “I never even saw them before today.”

  “Fine; they’re your stray pets, then,” Chandra said. “Whatever. Just tell them to go home. We’ve got to figure out what to do.”

  Skoda waved a hand at the stargulls. “You heard her. Thanks for your help, but you have to go home now.” He turned around in his chair and called up the nav computer listing. “Okay, where do you want to go next? Something close, or something far?”

  “Something where we don’t have to keep running,” Chandra said. “Just because you’re dead and I’m out of indenture doesn’t mean we’re free.”

  “Any idea what a place like that would look like?”

  “Not a clue. I wish His Grace hadn’t heard the Nathan Detroit identity. You might have been able to keep us under the radar a little longer.”

  “Yeah, I should have asked McDerry to fix me up with a spare,” Skoda said sourly. “I don’t suppose you know this John Michael Smith pal of his, do you?”

  “No.” Chandra was looking past his shoulder. “You might have to give that order again.”

  Skoda turned. One of the stargulls was gone, but the other was still floating in the corner. “Where’s the other one?”

  “It went back through the wall,” Chandra said.

  “That wall? The one behind them?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  The direction of the ship’s bow. “Got an idea,” Skoda said, standing up. “I’ll be right back.”

  He was stepping through the bridge hatch when she caught up with him. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Front of the ship,” Skoda said. “Is your observation bubble on this deck?”

  “No, one up,” Chandra said. “Stairs are over there.”

  They reached the bubble to find that Skoda’s guess had been right. The missing stargull was flying ahead of the ship, keeping the same distance Skoda himself had maintained during his test flight.

  What Skoda hadn’t expected was that the stargull had again picked up some friends.

  “Good God,” Chandra muttered. “There must be twenty of the damn things. What are they doing out there?”

  “You told them to go home,” Skoda reminded her. “Maybe that’s where they’re going.”

  “To a system we picked out of a hat?” Chandra asked scornfully.

  Skoda looked at his chrono. Still four and a half hours to go, and fatigue was suddenly tugging at his eyelids. “Are there any bunks aboard? I need to sleep.”

  “Yeah,” Chandra said, still gazing out at the stargulls. “Two compartments back from the bridge.”

  “Thanks,” Skoda said. “Wake me when we get there, okay?”

  #

  Between the nightmares, he managed to get in a couple of hours of sleep. He woke up groggy, but a quick shower revived him enough to be functional. With twenty minutes left to go in the tunnel he returned to the bridge.

  Chandra wasn’t there. Skoda thought about trying the intercom, but there was really only one other place she was likely to be.

  Sure enough, she was sitting in her observation bubble, staring out into the emptiness. Empty, except for the clump of stargulls still running ahead of them. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, in a voice that didn’t sound okay at all. “Tell me again about the Meerian you pushed down the ladder.”

  “What about him? He was trying to knife me.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “He wasn’t cleaning his fingernails, if that’s what you mean,” Skoda growled. “Why are you bringing this up again?”

  “I just wondered if maybe he wasn’t going for you, but for them.” She nodded toward the stargulls.

  “What, with a knife? They float straight through hull metal, remember? Besides, he couldn’t even see them.”

  “No, but you could,” she pointed out. “Are you absolutely sure the thing he was holding was a knife and not something else?”

  “It sure as hell looked like a knife.”

  “Did you ever get a good, close look?”

  Skoda wrinkled his nose. No, damn it, he hadn’t. “I don’t know what else it could have been,” he repeated stubbornly.

  “So that’s a no,” she said. “I was just thinking that if he had something he could attack the stargulls with, and was using you to track them down, maybe he was trying to get them and not you. In that case, you dumping him down the shaft might have been them turning the tables on him.”

  “So what are you saying? That I helped kill him for them?”

  “Is that what you did?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Skoda snapped. “Why do you care, anyway? You’ve finished your indenture. Shouldn’t you just be looking for a place where you can lie down and die?”

  “Who says I’m not?” Chandra shot back.

  For a moment she glared at him. Then, she lowered her eyes. “Look,” she said in a quieter voice. “You’re right. You haven’t finished your indenture. I have. There’s nothing left for me—no friends, no work, no future. Nightmares and drabness.”

  She gave a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “It’s almost funny, you know. I used to think life was a series of crossroads. Now, I know it’s just a set of options as to how and when you want to die.

  “But just because I’m ready to die doesn’t mean I’m ready to let some pompous Meerian decide when and where it happens. So let’s solve this thing, figure out what the stargulls are and if you’re working for them, then figure out where to go from there.”

  “Yeah.” Skoda scratched at his cheek. “Okay. Well, we’re back to the same questions we started with. If I killed His Grace for them, why are they still here? And why did they take me to you afterward?”

  “Because they hope the two of us together can kill more Meerians?” Chandra offered. “I know that sounds crazy, but right now we don’t have a lot more data to work with.”


  Abruptly, the tunnel wall flared out and disappeared, and the stars were back.

  “And here we are,” Chandra murmured. “Our own little slice of nowhere.”

  Skoda nodded, leaning close to the bubble and looking around. Transfer stations and waysides had an extra-fancy Meerian component or beacon built into them that brought tunnelships out close by instead of just appearing at a random spot in the target solar system. Like the Sue Ann microswitch setup, the technique was very secret and very proprietary.

  It was also very reliable. The fact that there was nothing near the Pathfinder meant there were no stations here. A slice of nowhere, indeed.

  “So now what?” Chandra asked.

  Skoda huffed out a breath. “Good question,” he admitted.

  There were options, of course. With the McDerrys’ new technique, he and Chandra could go anywhere within the navigators’ thousand light-year limit. There were dozens of inhabited systems within a single five-hour jump, and at least that many more systems with stations or waysides.

  Unfortunately, none of them would be safe for more than a few days. By now, His Grace—or his body—had surely been found, and the alert had gone out for his attacker. Every ship leaving Bashan would carry that notice along with the rest of the general news feed, and it would be duplicated and echoed aboard every ship that left each of those ships’ destinations. Skoda and Chandra could pick the most obscure spot in the galaxy, and they’d still barely be settled in before local law enforcement would come knocking on their door.

  “Hello,” Chandra murmured. “What’s this now?”

  Two of the stargulls were still hovering ahead of the Pathfinder, but the rest had moved off to a point about thirty degrees to the left of the centerline. As Skoda watched, two stargulls left the group, moved back to the two holding station ahead of the ship, then returned to the group. A moment’s pause, then they repeated the action.

  “Any ideas?” Chandra asked.

  “I don’t know,” Skoda said, frowning. Back and forth; back and forth; back and forth. Mating dance? The stargull version of tennis? “No, wait. That’s the same back-and-forth thing they did when they were guiding me to where His Grace stashed you on Bashan. I think they want us to follow them.”

  “Follow them where?”

  “Where they’re pointing,” Skoda said. “I think the group’s hovering over our next target star.”

  “Lot of stars over there,” Chandra pointed out. “How are we supposed to figure which one they want?”

  “I don’t know,” Skoda said, maneuvering himself out of the bubble. “Let’s turn the ship that direction and see. Maybe it’ll be obvious.”

  It wasn’t obvious. Not by a long shot. As Chandra had said, there were a lot of stars out there.

  Fortunately, there was a solution. Skoda got one of the stargulls to hover over his shoulder while he pointed, one by one, at the cluster of stars on the nav display. On the fifteenth try, the stargull reacted, moving up and down. At Chandra’s suggestion, Skoda tried a few more before pointing again at the indicated one, eliciting the same stargull response.

  “So?” he asked.

  “Two hundred seventy light-years away,” Chandra said, frowning at the computer. “It’s not on any of the Pathfinder’s lists. Of course, neither are any of the others we tried.”

  “Maybe that’s their home? Wait a second,” he interrupted himself.

  “What?”

  “Let me check something.” Skoda pulled up another map. “Yeah,” he said. “Remember, on the way to Bashan, there was a point where they were bouncing all around me?”

  “Oh, yes, I remember,” Chandra said sourly. “I thought you were giving directions and turned the ship off course. We’re just lucky you were able to get us back again.”

  “My point is that they weren’t just pulling me at random,” Skoda said. “This star is in the direction they were trying to get me to go.”

  For a moment he and Chandra looked at each other. “Okay,” she said. “Well, if we’re going, we need to go. If the guys from Bashan start their search with the closest systems, they could be here any time.”

  “We didn’t have to stick with the ten-light-year limit.”

  “They don’t know that.”

  Skoda wrinkled his nose. “Point,” he conceded. “You want me in the chair while you watch and steer?”

  “That seemed to work the last time. Just don’t let the stargulls drag you off-course again.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

  #

  Five hours later, they reached their target system.

  To find that the stargulls apparently wanted them to keep going.

  “Yeah, this is fun,” Chandra growled as Skoda once again played spot-the-star with the stargull. “You sure you didn’t piss them off, and they’re just trying to drag us off the end of the map where they can kill us?”

  “I thought they wanted to kill Meerians.”

  “Maybe they want to kill everyone,” Chandra said. “Maybe they’re space Loreleis.”

  “And we’re only learning about them now? After fifty years of doing this crap? Not to mention how long the Meerians were doing it before they found us. Ah—there it is.” He marked the star the stargull had indicated. “Two-hundred ninety light-years. You want to keep going, or give up and go back?”

  Chandra shrugged. “I’ve got nothing better to do. You want to follow a bunch of ghost Loreleis to our deaths, that’s fine with me. At least it won’t be the Meerians making the decisions.”

  Skoda nodded. Another two-hundred ninety light-years into the unknown. Another five hours closer to death. “Sure, what the hell,” he said. “I’ve got nothing better to do, either.”

  #

  The first system the stargulls had taken them to hadn’t been on the lists. Neither had the second. This third was not only not on the lists, but it had apparently been missed completely by the astronomical cartographers.

  It was a complete shock, then, when the tunnel dissolved and Skoda discovered a darkened space station floating five kilometers directly ahead of them.

  “Definitely a Meerian design,” Chandra said, her voice coming from the bridge over the observation bubble intercom. “Not listed, though.”

  “Smaller even than a wayside,” Skoda said, frowning. “Is it running?”

  “It’s on minimal power,” Chandra said. “Just enough to keep it functional. Seems to be empty.”

  “In case they want to come back and spin it up again someday?”

  “Probably. Are the stargulls still going crazy?”

  “Don’t know if crazy is the right word,” Skoda said, eyeing the faint images. Earlier, when the creatures had wanted the Pathfinder to shift to a new course heading they’d gone back and forth between the ship’s nose and the proposed new vector. Now, they were going in and out: toward the station and away from it. “I think they want us to go check it out.”

  “How brave of them to risk our necks,” Chandra said sarcastically. “Another choice of when to die, I suppose. You want to take the shuttle in, or should we dock the whole ship?”

  “Which is easier?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got autodock software in both.”

  “In that case, let’s take the ship,” Skoda said. “I don’t like the idea of having to shuttle our way back if the Meerians decide they don’t like us crashing their party.”

  “I already told you the sensors don’t show anyone aboard.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it. Let’s go in.”

  #

  To Skoda’s mild surprise, the automatic docking program worked perfectly, maneuvering the Pathfinder alongside one of the station’s arms and locking it to the anchor pylons. Chandra opened the test chamber, and they waited impatiently the ten minutes it took the analysis system to confirm the air inside the station was breathable and contained no harmful chemicals or organisms.

  Three minutes after that, they were in
side.

  “It’s like a tomb,” Chandra whispered as they made their way down the first corridor, her flashlight playing off the dull metal walls, ceiling, and deck.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” Skoda told her.

  “I know,” Chandra said, still whispering. She pointed to the group of stargulls, now running single-file down the corridor ahead of them. “Any idea where they’re taking us?”

  “Well, if it’s a typical Meerian design, this way should lead to the central core,” Skoda said. “Maybe they want us to turn on the lights.”

  “Or maybe they want something on the far side of the station,” Chandra said. “We probably should have circled once before we headed in. Might have saved us some walking.”

  “We can use the exercise,” Skoda said. “Whoa. What now?”

  The line of stargulls had suddenly broken formation, all but one of them scattering in different directions. The remaining stargull stayed where it was, floating in the middle of the corridor, as Skoda and Chandra walked up to it. “I guess they don’t know where we’re going, either,” Chandra commented.

  “Give them a minute,” Skoda said.

  “Right.” Chandra flicked off her light. “Battery’s been a little iffy lately,” she explained. “Wanted to conserve the juice.”

  “I didn’t ask,” Skoda said. In the fresh darkness, he saw that the stargull was glowing like a ghost from a classic horror drama.

  “Any idea how long this is going to take?”

  “No idea,” Skoda said. “But they scoped out Bashan Station fast enough once they got there.”

  “Assuming they hadn’t already been there for years waiting for someone like us to show up.”

  Skoda snorted. “Now, there’s a depressing thought.”

  “What’s depressing about it?” Chandra countered. “Imagine how much additional joy they’ll get when we lead them back home.”

  “I thought you thought they were leading us to our deaths.”

  “Maybe they figure they can do both. Ah—here we go.”

  The roving stargulls had suddenly reappeared, coming back through the walls in ones and twos and once again forming a clump in the center of the corridor. A moment later, the whole bunch moved off again.