"The air lock is functioning perfectly," her voice said suddenly through his comm implant. "I have light and gravity, but no air. The pumps are working, but it would appear they have no air to work with. The inner doors are opening. Lights have come on beyond them. I'm now in the corridor outside the lock. No movement anywhere. Still no air, and the temperature's way below zero. You might as well come on over. There's no sign of any welcoming party."
"Stay where you are," said Silence. "We'll be right with you."
He worked the lock's outer doors again, and he and Cross passed through into the Champion, followed quickly by the security men. The corridor beyond the lock was brightly lit but uncomfortably narrow, and the low ceiling seemed to press down above their helmets. The walls were covered with cables and conduits and tightly packed instrumentation. The Empire's designers had been cramming in every extra improvement they could think of, right up to the last minute. None of it looked particularly dated. The Dauntless might be more efficiently arranged, but the systems were still pretty much the same. If a thing worked, the Empire tended to stick with it.
"Interesting," said Frost, and Silence turned automatically to look at her, though all he could see was her featureless helmet. "According to my suit's sensors, the light and gravity are only a local phenomenon. The rest of the ship is still powered down. Which would seem to suggest someone knows we're here."
"Could be the ship's computers," said Cross.
"No," said Frost. "I don't think so. They would have turned all the life-support systems on."
"Try general address on your comm," said Silence. "See if anyone answers."
"This is Investigator Frost of the Dauntless, representing the Empire. Respond, please."
They waited a long time, but there was no reply. The comm channel was empty of everything, even static. Silence's back crawled, feeling the pressure of unseen watching eyes. The words ghost ship came back to him, along with the half-serious stories that were always circulating during his cadet days. Tales of dead ships populated by dead crews, sailing silently through the long night on journeys that would never end. Skeletons on the bridge, or dead men rotting at their stations, heading for some far off destination the living could never understand. Silence had to smile. He hadn't realized those stupid stories had made such an impression on him.
"Let's make for the bridge, people," he said briskly. "Maybe we'll find some answers there. Investigator, lead the way."
Frost patched into a map of the Champion's structure, provided by the Dauntless's computer records, and set off down the corridor. Lights turned themselves on ahead of them and turned off behind them, so that they moved always in a pool of light surrounded by darkness. Weight remained constant at one gravity, but there was still no air or heat. Silence had the security men check out each room and compartment they passed, but though there were frequent signs of people's lives, there was no trace anywhere of the Champion's crew.
There were unmade beds and abandoned meals, cards discarded in mid game and doors left ajar, as though the people involved had just stood up a hundred or so years ago, and walked away from their lives, never to return.
Silence kept thinking he could see things moving on the edge of his vision, but every time he looked there was nothing there. Shadows moved disturbingly around the small party as they moved deeper into the ship, their hard suits eerily out of place in the crew's quarters. They all had the feeling they were being watched, even though the ship's security cameras clearly weren't working, and the security men spent as much time checking behind them as they did the way ahead. Frost, of course, just strode on through the empty corridors, calm and unmoved as always. Silence stuck close to her.
They finally came to the main elevator. Silence plugged in a portable energy pack; they came back on line. There were walkways, but it would have meant a long climb to the bridge. Silence split the party into two groups, just in case, and they made their way up to the bridge in separate elevators. The cramped metal cages took an uncomfortably long time getting there, not least because they insisted on stopping at every floor in between, but eventually the elevator doors opened onto the bridge, and Silence led the way forward with something very like relief. If there were answers to be found anywhere on this ghost ship, he should be able to find them here.
There was no one sitting in the command chair, skeleton or corpse, and the workstations were unmanned. No sign of any crew. No sign to show they'd ever been here. It was just as Silence had expected, but he still felt obscurely disappointed. Something really cataclysmic must have happened on board the Champion, to mean abandoning the bridge like this. And yet there'd been no signs of attack or mutiny, no damage or signs of haste. Cross leaned over the comm station and tried a few warm-up routines, and then turned away.
"Everything's shut down, Captain. Give me an hour or so and I should be able to bring something on-line. Half these systems will have to be reprogrammed from the bottom up, but everything seems functional."
"The autopilot's still working," said Frost. "Someone must have fed in the coordinates that brought the ship here."
"Hold everything," said Cross. "I've got the security cameras up and working. Which shouldn't be possible, but… watch the monitors."
They all crowded around Cross and stared at the bank of three monitor screens attached to his station. They lit up in swift succession, as though they'd only recently been turned off. Cross switched rapidly from one camera to another the length of the ship, scenes appearing on the viewscreens one after the other, pausing just long enough to give a continuing feeling of emptiness everywhere on board. From corridors to engineering, sick bay to crew's quarters, everywhere was still and silent. It chilled Silence to his bones to see a ship so abandoned, so deserted.
He tried to remember more about the history of the Champion rather than the legend. The Captain, Tomas Pearce, had been something of a fierce officer by all accounts, a strictly by-the-book man, as hard on himself as anyone else. Everyone agreed he ran a tight ship, right up until the day it disappeared. He would never have walked away from his ship, no matter what his crew did. He'd have hit the auto-destruct first. Silence wondered what Pearce would think now if he could see so many posts abandoned, so many stations unmanned. No, he wouldn't have walked. Someone or something must have taken him.
"Hello," said Cross suddenly. "What have we got here?" He fussed at the panels before him, muttering to himself and stabbing awkwardly at the controls with his armored fingers. Hard suits weren't meant for delicate work. "I think I've got something, Captain. The cameras in the main cargo hold are out, but I'm getting some information through the ship's interior sensors. There's something down in the cargo bay. A lot of somethings."
"Hardly unusual for a cargo bay," said Frost.
"It is when the computer manifests are convinced the ship isn't carrying any cargo at all this trip. And, even more interestingly, all these somethings are roughly human in shape."
"Life signs?" said Silence.
"Not so far," said Cross. "But whatever these things are, there are hundreds of them."
"Then, for want of anything better to do, let's go and take a look," said Silence.
He left four of the security men on the bridge to watch the monitors and run further checks on the instruments, and herded the rest of his team back into the elevator. It was a long way down to the cargo bay, but at least they didn't stop at every floor this time. Silence chose to see this as a good omen. The doors finally opened on the main cargo bay, and Frost made the others wait in the elevator while she checked out the situation first. She kept them waiting an uncomfortably long time before waving them out. The bay was deserted, but the lights had already been on when the elevator doors opened, almost as though someone was waiting for them.
The bay itself was huge, with intricately marked steel walls surrounding a vast open space. They'd emerged at ground level, like mice creeping out of their hole. Frost signaled for the group to stay together, while she lo
cked the elevator doors open, just in case they had to retreat in a hurry. As far as Silence was concerned, she needn't have bothered. He'd never felt less like wandering off on his own in his life. Still, as Captain he was expected to provide a good example, so as soon as Frost gave him the all clear, he stepped confidently forward to take a look around.
Away from the elevator, the sheer size of the cargo bay was almost overpowering, but Silence's attention was drawn immediately to the bay's sole cargo; hundreds of long mirrored cylinders, each the size and general shape of a coffin. They'd been laid out in neat rows, forming a perfect square. Silence checked them out from a cautious distance with the limited sensors built into his suit, but the coffin shapes gave up no information at all. He couldn't even tell what they were made of, never mind what might be inside them.
"That's the crew, isn't it?" said Cross quietly.
"Could be," said Silence. "The numbers are about right. Only way to find out is to open a few. Investigator…"
"Way ahead of you, Captain," said Frost, striding forward pugnaciously.
Silence gestured for Cross and the two security men to stay with him. "Take it slow and easy, Investigator. There's always the chance those things are booby-trapped."
"I'll bear it in mind," said Frost. "Now, a little quiet, if you please. I have to concentrate."
She stopped just short of the first outer rank, tried her sensors again, and sniffed disgustedly as they failed to provide any useful information, even at close range. Each cylinder was seven feet long, and the correct proportions for a coffin. Plenty of room for a body inside and any number of unpleasant surprises, too. Frost knelt down by the nearest cylinder and got her first surprise when she realized the mirrored surface wasn't showing her reflection. She examined the edges of the cylinder carefully and got her second surprise. There was no sign of any seals or openings. The entire cylinder seemed to have been produced in one piece. Perhaps… formed around something. The word cocoon occurred to her, echoing in her mind with a significance she couldn't pin down. She straightened up and looked at the rows of cylinders stretching away before her. She had been intending to open one by force, with her gun if necessary, and trust to her hard suit to protect her, but she was beginning to think that was what she was supposed to do. More and more, the whole place felt like a trap. The cylinders were too tempting, and there was too much light, as though the cargo bay was a stage, waiting for the action to begin.
Frost reached out cautiously with her gloved hand to tap the lid of the coffin, and her hand sank through the shining surface as though it was some silvery liquid. And inside the coffin, something grabbed her armored hand and squeezed it hard. She lurched forward, caught off balance, and her arm plunged further through the lid and into the coffin. She quickly braced herself against the steel floor and pulled back, but whatever had hold of her wouldn't release its grip. She could feel the pressure, even through her armored glove. She gritted her teeth, snarling under her featureless helmet, and pulled back with all her strength. The suit's servomechanisms whined loudly. Her arm slowly reappeared from the lid, and then her glove, clasped by a dead white human hand.
The weight on her arm was suddenly lessened as a dead white face appeared through the shining lid like a drowned man's face surfacing in a river, and then the dead man was out of his coffin and standing before Frost, smiling, still holding her hand in his. Her first thought was that it was a Fury, one of Shub's killing machines in a human skin, but then she saw the marks of drastic surgery unhidden on his shaved skull, and she knew at once what had happened to the Champion's crew. He was a Ghost Warrior. All around her, dead men were emerging from the silver coffins, like vile gray butterflies bursting out of shimmering cocoons. The man before her wore a dated fleet uniform, torn and stained with long-dried blood where his death wounds had been. His skin was dead-white, and though his smile was inhumanly wide, there was no emotion in his face and no life in his unblinking eyes. She could hear Silence shouting at her to get away from the dead man, but his gaze held her like a hook she could wriggle on but not escape. The dead men were rising everywhere now, silent and calm, their movements filled with an implacable purpose.
And then the blast from an energy weapon tore away the head of the man before her, and the headless body slumped to its knees. She was suddenly herself again, freed from the dead gaze, and she fell back a step, tugging at her captured hand. The pale fingers still gripped her firmly, despite all her struggles. Frost drew the sword on her hip with her left hand and hacked savagely at the pale wrist. The blade sheared clean through, and she staggered backward, released. The dead hand still clutched at her glove, and she had to cut it away finger by finger as she hurried back to rejoin Silence and the others.
They were all firing now, energy bolts leaping from the disrupters built into their gloves, and dead bodies were blown apart and slapped aside, but still the hundreds of dead moved purposefully forward. Frost took up her place between Silence and Cross, too angry to be frightened or worried. She'd fought every kind of alien in her time, and thought there was nothing left in the Empire that could throw her, but something in the dead man's gaze had held her as securely as any chain. If Silence hadn't blown its head off, she'd have been standing there still, until the dead overwhelmed her and dragged her away to make her one of them. She had no doubt it had been Silence who freed her. She'd have done the same for him. She took a deep breath and settled herself.
"Well," she made herself say calmly, "at least now we know what happened to the Champion's crew. Those bastard AIs somehow got their hands on them, scooped out their brains, and replaced them with their filthy computers. We've found a whole ship of Ghost Warriors."
"Shub is right on the other side of the Empire," said Silence. "But we'll let that pass for the moment. It'll be another two minutes before our disrupters recharge, and I have a strong feeling these creeps could manage something really unpleasant in that time, so everyone free your swords and back away. We are getting the hell out of here."
There was a muffled clang behind them as the elevator doors slammed shut.
"That's not possible," said Frost. "I locked them open."
"Someone's watching," said Cross. "And they don't want us leaving just yet."
"I'll try the bridge," said Silence. "Maybe they can override. Bridge, this is Silence. Can you hear me?" There was no reply, only an ominous quiet.
"Something's got to them," said Cross. "We're on our own."
The dead men stood facing them, row upon row, inhumanly still. One figure stepped forward, wearing an outdated Captain's uniform. Silence tried to recognize Tomas Pearce, but the face before him held nothing of humanity in it. One eye was missing, replaced by a camera lens, and the scars of brutal surgery were clear on his forehead. He came to a halt before Silence, carefully out of a sword's range, smiling widely as though he knew what a smile was supposed to convey, but didn't know how. His kind weren't used for diplomacy or conversation. Ghost Warriors fought Shub's battles with humanity, as much for psychological effect as any functional superiority. The dead man wore a gun and a sword on his hips, but so far had made no move to draw them. Silence found that disturbing. It implied the Ghost Warriors wanted him alive. Pearce's lips moved, and Silence heard a slow, horribly impersonal voice through his comm implant. It was a machine talking—through a human mouth.
"Captain Silence. Investigator Frost. You must come with us."
"Why us?" said Silence.
"Yeah," said Cross. "I feel left out."
"You are different," said Pearce, his dead eyes still fixed on Silence and Frost. "Changed. It is necessary that we discover how."
"Tough," said Frost. "We have other plans. Call our secretary and make an appointment. Captain, get those elevator doors open. I'll hold them off."
She stepped forward, her sword held in both hands, and swung it around in a vicious sideways sweep with all her strength behind it. If it had connected, it would certainly have beheaded Pearce, but he raise
d his arms impossibly fast and blocked the blow. The blade sank deep into his arm and jarred on splintering bone. In the split second while Frost was still off balance, Pearce reached out with his other hand and snatched the sword out of her hand. Frost snarled and hit him in the throat with her armored glove. The hard suit's servomechanisms amplified the strength of her blow, and she could feel the sickening crunch as her fist crushed Pearce's throat and snapped his neck. His head hung at an angle, but the expression on his face didn't change. He threw her sword aside and reached out with both hands to grab her shoulders. She kicked his legs out from under him, and he fell sprawling on the steel floor. The other Ghost Warriors moved forward in an unhurried, implacable advance, and Frost knew there were just too many of them to be stopped by anything she could do.
She checked the timer inside her helmet and opened up with her disrupters again. Energy blasts erupted from her gloves, slapping aside the advancing dead men like so many curling leaves caught in a fiery breeze. But then her guns fell silent, and the Ghost Warriors kept coming. Pearce was back on his feet again, reaching for her. Frost grabbed up her sword again, determined she'd die before she let them drag her off to Shub's bloody laboratories.
Silence and Cross got to the elevators and used their amplified strength to force the doors open. The two security men charged into the lift, pulled the control mechanism out of the wall, and began quickly preparing an override. Silence would have liked to turn and see how Frost was doing, but he needed all his strength to hold the elevator doors open. They strained against his hands with an almost malevolent urgency, and Silence could hear a faint straining sound from the servomechanisms in his suit's arms. He was wearing an exploratory suit, designed for protection, not the stronger and better-equipped battle suit. It wouldn't last much longer. One of the security men yelled out in satisfaction, and the pressure from the doors was suddenly gone. Silence and Cross let go of them and hurried into the elevator. They turned as one and opened up with their disrupters, the energy bolts blowing away Ghost Warriors to either side of Frost.
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