The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “If there’s still air can we go in without suits?” Peever asked eagerly. “Maybe just breathe with face mask units?”

  “There’s air in there, all right,” Bothu said with a grim chuckle, “but would you really want to risk carbon dioxide poisoning, or breathe what a crew full of dead people have been rotting in for the past month? I don’t know how sanitary it’d be.”

  Peever’s face turned a pale greenish-white. He found himself unable to speak for a moment, unable to manage anything more communicative than a shake of his head—a fairly useless gesture inside a pressure suit.

  Bothu turned away and started working the lock controls. “Once we’re through into the Bear, I’m using a plastic weldbonder on the Flea’s outer hatch,” Bothu announced. “We don’t want any parasites coming to visit.

  “The bonder will hold the hatch shut just as well as a real weld would. Just in case some of us run into trouble, you’ve each got a can of the deactivator chemical in your suit’s left hip pouch. Once you hit the weld with that stuff, it’ll dissolve and you can get back into the ship. Whoever gets back will be able to get aboard Fleance. Just be damn sure it’s only us who get back aboard. The chief will use his detectors and triple check everyone and everything that makes it back.”

  Once again, Peever devoutly wished that Bothu would choose her words more carefully.

  Bothu opened the hatch, stepped in, and gestured for Peever to join her. The two of them cycled through to the Bear, then waited for Wellingham and Clandal.

  Once aboard the derelict, Bothu occupied herself by check running a manual diagnostic on a status panel. Or at least trying to run it. There was no power at all in the system, not a millivolt or a microwatt. Peever looked about the darkened lock area nervously as Bothu worked.

  With ship’s power out, they had to see by the powerful lamps built into their suit helmets. The lamps stabbed into the surrounding darkness on a tight beam. Perfectly ordinary objects—tools, work consoles, monitor screens, equipment racks—loomed weirdly up out of the darkness, transmogrified by the strange shadows cast by the eye-level headlamps.

  Hanging in the darkness, drifting in weightlessness, Peever suddenly felt as if his head were caught in the last bubble of air in the whole universe, that the shaft of light from his lamp was stabbing up, not out, that the surface of some fever-imagined sea lay immeasurably far above him, lost in the shadows, and he was trapped, trapped, trapped at the bottom—

  Clandal and Wellingham cycled through with a series of very real-sounding bumps and clumps that chased the false creations of a heat-oppressed brain away. Peever unclenched his fists. His suit thrummed quietly as its cooling system cut in, trying to deal with his sudden, nervous sweat.

  “How’s she look?” Wellingham asked, his voice booming just a bit too loud in Peever’s ears.

  “Dead,” Bothu replied. “Totally dead. Which is weird, because then the temperature should be at local background, but it’s a bit warmer than that. I tried to get a manual readout here using the ship’s emergency power, but even that’s gone. I wish to hell I could plug my AID Gertie in to the diag socket—”

  “No AIDs,” Wellingham said sharply. “Captain’s orders, and he’s right. Those damn parasites can suck their way right into an AID, and then it’s all over. Would you rather not get an answer, or not be able to trust the answer you get?”

  “But I thought we could detect the parasites with the G-wave detector,” Peever protested.

  “Can we detect all of them?” Wellingham asked. “Maybe there’s a kind that doesn’t give off G-waves. Or maybe the parasites could figure out a way to trick the detectors. Like by getting into a detector, and then where the hell would we be? No chances taken, that’s my motto. I’ve got engineers working to isolate every major system on the destroyers from every other major system, so the ships can be run without the damn computers. And I’m going to vaporize every bit of equipment that we take aboard this ugly hulk before we return to the Banquo. I’m not letting this gig redock with the destroyer, either. We’ll use a pressure tunnel and then burn the tunnel. But for now, Clandal, get that hatch sealed and let’s get on with it.”

  Peever watched unhappily as Clandal applied the bonding compound to the hatch cover and ran the activating current through the thick goo. It hardened instantly, sealing off their one possible line of retreat. Deactivator in his hip pouch or not, Peever was not enthused. The others turned and headed into the ship, and Peever suddenly found himself left behind.

  “Up ahead, I think,” he heard the chief’s voice say in his earphones. “I’m getting a very nice bright G-wave reading about a hundred meters this way.”

  The gloom-black walls started to close in on him, and Peever found himself unable to breathe. He grabbed at the nearest handholds and rushed desperately, trying to catch up.

  The other three members of the boarding party paused for a moment at a turn in the darkened corridor. Heart pounding, Peever caught up with them, bathed in cold-fear sweat. He stopped behind the others, their backs turned to him as they checked their instruments. Maybe they weren’t paying attention to him, but at least he was caught up with them.

  Peever allowed himself a sigh of relief. The sigh died in his throat—when he felt a hand grab onto his shoulder from behind.

  His throat knotted in terror, and he turned around, wide-eyed with fear.

  One look at the gaunt, pallid, skeletal face behind him, its haunted eyes staring into his, and he found his voice.

  Wellingham, Bothu and Clandal tried to jump out of their boots when they heard him scream.

  ###

  It was Destin, of course. Wellingham figured that out the moment he turned around, before Peever had a chance to faint, before Wellingham had a chance to read the name stenciled on the chest carapace of the banged-up suit.

  He couldn’t really blame Peever for fainting. Destin’s appearance was enough to give anyone the screaming meemies. The man’s ghost-pale face seemed to float up from the darkness of his pressure-suit helmet; his sunken, haunted eyes verging on madness; a month’s growth of pale blonde beard sprouting like a dirty fungus from his jaws.

  The suit itself was bad enough—dirty, banged up, worn and patched, the helmet scuffed and scratched. The suit looked like something a ghost would wear. Wellingham realized that Destin’s mouth was moving, as if he was trying to speak. Wrong frequency, Wellingham realized. He reached for the controls on his own suit radio, then decided the hell with it. It could take forever to find the right channel. He yanked the radio’s hardwire link, pulled it out and plugged it into a socket on Destin’s suit.

  “—ad to see you! I didn’t know how much longer I was gonna be able to hold out. I kept telling m’self the crew should still be okay in cold sleep. I’ve been living in my suit for a month now, and I think the damn thing is about to give out. Nothing to eat but hand meals small enough to air lock through the suit’s chestlock. Couldn’t power up anythin’, not even my sleep pod . . .” The man was babbling, near hysterical with relief, shameless tears welling up in his eyes.

  Wellingham nodded sympathetically, cursing their good fortune. Finding Destin and his crew alive was a major victory in terms of intelligence, but tactically it was a disaster. They had assumed that the Dancing Bear would be an empty hulk, a derelict they could leave to the enemy when the Pact Navy was done with it. Now they had a ship full of civilians to defend, with a marauding alien fleet bearing down on them from all sides.

  He looked again at Destin and shook his head sadly. And this poor sod thought his troubles were over. “Glad to see you, Captain,” he said at last. “Let’s get you back to our gig.”

  ###

  When Destin came out of his pressure suit for the first time in a month, everyone else aboard the Fleance immediately wanted to get back into theirs—and would have, except for fear of appearing rude.

  The man stunk. Wellingham bundled him into the Fleance’s cramped head and told him to clean himself up fast—an ord
er Destin was delighted to obey. Bothu offered an old Marine Corps trick as a way for dealing with Destin’s very ripe suit. She tossed the empty, open suit out the auxiliary air lock at the end of a lanyard and let the vacuum suck most of the stench out of it. If Destin needed the suit again, God forbid, they could drag it back into the cabin and hold their noses.

  Destin emerged from the head, still emaciated and wild-eyed, but with the worst of the grime scraped off him. His naked flesh was a pattern of welts and raw abrasions caused by the suit cutting into his skin. Either Daltgeld-system spacers weren’t bothered by nudity, or Destin was past caring.

  Bothu went over him with a first-aid kit, cleaning and binding the wounds, while Destin talked nonstop, half-hysterical, as if all the pent-up words from his enforced solitude were trying to come out all at once. Wellingham let him go on, first making sure a recorder was running and that the secure commline to the Banquo was still open. Even babble from this man might be vital data.

  “We were tryin’ a core on that damn ast’roid when we found—well, it seems like yuh know a lot about that already. When we saw that damn control room, or whatever the hell it was—I kin tell you I dunno what we thought. Either that we was rich, or that we was scared to death, like finding the oldest haunted house in the universe. Penny Sue D’Amalfi—she’s one of the geologists on the Bear—she took some reading and figgered the control room must have been abandoned a million years ago. At least.”

  “We’ve seen pictures,” Wellingham told him gently. “And our captain talked to Chairman Jameson before he escaped. The StarMetal crowd damn near killed our captain. Tell me, why did you sell the helmet to Jameson? Why not bring back other artifacts? Why just that one? And why Jameson?”

  Destin’s face clouded over as Bothu handed him a flight coverall. Destin pulled it on, and it hung baggily on his emaciated frame. “I’ve spent the last month setting in the dark in my pressure suit aboard a ship that won’t power up no matter what I do, waitin’ to die, trying to figger all that out myself. It don’t make sense, and I know it. None of us seemed to think it through. That ast’roid wuz nuthin’ but tunnels ’n compartments. We shudda explored it, recorded it, looked fer clues to who the bug people were, where they came from. Hells bells, even if’n all we was int’rested in was money, the news rights on that kinda thing woulda made us all richer than any amount of prospecting.”

  “But you’re miners,” Peever objected. By now he had recovered, and was a trifled embarrassed over fainting. “Isn’t money all you’re after?” he asked, a bit harshly.

  “Course that’s why we’re out here, but my Gawd, how could anyone not fergit cash for a while in a place like that? We did wander around for a while, looking at things, until—until I worked up the nerve to take that helmet off the bugman. Then things seemed t’change. That thing was so purty, gleaming bright. I just up and decided that was worth more than anything else. I got real greedy, decided just selling the helmet’d make us all richer’n hell. Everybody else looked at it, and decided the same thing.”

  Wellingham said nothing.

  The helmet-creature must have focused its attention on Destin somehow, convinced him to take up the helmet. Once in his hands, in contact with human flesh, its abilities were amplified somehow. It had convinced the whole crew to do its bidding.

  But if the helmet had that kind of power, capable of controlling the minds of a whole crew at once, why hadn’t it used that power over Spencer and Mannerling in Jameson’s office? Or over Suss when she dove in, coming to the rescue? Perhaps its powers were greater near the asteroid. Perhaps the helmet, with no other duties to distract it, was able to focus its entire power on mind control, in one supreme effort.

  Maybe it was simply planning to kill Spencer and company and didn’t bother controlling their minds. Whatever. For some reason, it got to Destin and Jameson, but not Spencer. “So you must have decided you’d get a better price for it on Daltgeld, rather than back on Mittelstadt?” Wellingham suggested.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. We flew back at maximum boost, rushing all the way. Don’ really know why we did that, either. After all, the thing had been waiting a million years. What difference could a month or two make? Anyway, we got here, and I got it into my head to try selling the helmet at the StarMetal building. Every flunky took one look at the thing, picked it up and looked at it and agreed the chairman would love having the helmet in his collection—”

  “Collection of what?” Bothu asked. The helmet didn’t seem to fit into any category of collectables.

  Destin looked troubled again. “I dunno. That’s another strange thing now that I look back. Every single person I showed the helmet to said exactly the same thing, almost word for word.”

  That didn’t seem strange to Wellingham. Not one little bit strange, if you realized the damn helmet-thing could control the mind of whoever touched it. “We know that you got as far as Sisley Mannerling. Did she pass you onto Jameson’s office?”

  Destin thought for a moment. “Mannerling, yeah, that was one of them. She seemed a bit more nervy, like she was suspicious of it all. At least at first. Then she changed her mind real fast, like someone throwin’ a switch, and sent me on to Jameson.

  “Well, that was pretty weird too. Jameson was a nice-looking man, friendly and polite, but he didn’t quite understand why I’d been let in to see ’im, not at first. Then he saw the helmet, and his whole face changed. At first it was just like someone’d whupped him on the head with a hammer. Then it was like I almost felt the helmet had seen him or something, called to him. I can’t explain it. Jameson got all excited and then he jest reached out his hands for the helmet, an’ I gave it to him. He put it on, and all of a sudden he gets this big grin on his face.”

  Destin’s gaunt face went blank, and he seemed to be seeing something that wasn’t there. “Not much to tell, past that. Not much you don’t seem to know already. Jameson paid us off all right, bought up the helmet for more money than I’d ever dreamed of, more than I’d ever of thought to ask for. Like he didn’t care about money and that stuff anymore. He never asked anything about where the helmet came from, or how I got it. I went back to the ship, and we all decided to launch for Mittelstadt and throw a hell of a party there, before we went back to get a look at that asteroid. Right about then, the whole crew was starting to think about how much we had left behind there, how much exploring and studying and things to find there must be there.”

  Wellingham nodded. “You were back in charge of your own minds by then. The helmet wasn’t guiding your thoughts. It had what it needed of you.”

  Destin looked at the chief and nodded sadly. “That’s what I figgered out, sitting here in the dark. But the helmet needed to keep us quiet, maybe keep us from interfering with the asteroid. So it figgered someway to fire our engines, throw us off course, and shut down the Dancing Bear by remote control. That must be it, cause this weren’t no natural malfunction. I was the only one out of cold sleep when it happened. Air got foul and too cold even to risk taking my pressure suit helmet off.”

  “Tell me something,” Wellingham asked, in what he hoped was a calm, neutral voice. “There it was when you found it, on the bugman’s head. It certainly looked like something you were supposed to wear on your head. Did you ever try the helmet on?”

  A strange and terrible expression passed over Destin’s half-starved face. It was as if Wellingham had asked if Destin had ever committed cannibalism—and Destin was forced to admit that he had, by mistake, without knowing what was in the pot.

  “I did, once,” he whispered. “I didn’t know better, just thought it was a purty hat. Put it in front of me now and I’d cut my head off rather’n wear it. That one time I put it on, it felt strange, like something inside it was just waking up. I swear I felt it move a little, and then I sure as hell took it off pronto.”

  He stopped talking for a moment and stared out into the open air. “That was when I got the big idea of bringing it back home to Daltgeld. But
you folks. You know a lot about it. You know how it shut my ship down? Can you bring her back to life, before my crew dies in cold sleep?”

  Wellingham nodded again. “I think we can. But we need to know where that asteroid is. Do you know? Are the coordinates in your computer system?”

  Destin chuckled. “There isn’t a rockminer in the Belt who’d need a computer to remember where a strike like that one was. But why you want to go there?”

  “We’re going to find out enough about that helmet to kill it, destroy it,” Peever answered, his voice eager.

  “Good. You do that. Gimme something to write with.” Bothu handed him a stylus and a writing pad. Destin scrawled out a string of numbers and scaled the pad back to Wellingham. “Orbital coordinates, down to six decimal places. Go kill that thing.”

  ###

  Spencer sat unhappily in the command chair of the Banquo. He needed to control three ships, and this was the only place to do it from. Tallen Deyi stood behind him, ready to assist, ready to echo Spencer’s commands to his own ship.

  The news from the Fleance was good. In fact, a little too good. The Bear was not derelict. Spencer shook his head. “Tell Fleance to stand by. I’ll talk to Wellingham in five minutes.”

  He shut his eyes, leaned back, and tried to think. He was tired, horribly tired, and he was having a great deal of trouble concentrating on all the tactical complications on the situation. All his ship deployments, all his feinting and dodging around the enemy fleet, had been based on the assumption that the Bear’s crew was dead and the ship itself therefore expendable.

  Faint, ghostly, phantom shapes played about the inside of his eyelids. He opened them and found he had to wait a moment for the phantom shapes to clear. He had been prepared to relegate the planet of Daltgeld to the ashes, and here he was dithering over a single ship’s complement. Spencer recognized but did not appreciate the irony.