Outpost

by Allan Baillie

  15.

  The Cutter

  SEPS listened to the whisper and shivered. ‘We have to get out of here!’

  Dece looked at her with horror. He should be the one panicking, not the Skimmer rider of the Dreaming Sea. Only a major disruption would have made Dece move the Tug out of the hold, not a little sound. But he reached for the Tug’s magnet release.

  ‘No.’ Seps put her arm on his.

  Dece looked at her.

  ‘Sorry.’ She shook her head. ‘We can’t go. If we move the Tug from here with only those jets working we are in trouble. We can’t even orbit round the ship or float round the rings.’

  Dece lifted his arm from the magnet release.

  ‘It was nothing,’ Seps said.

  He moved his arm away. ‘Yes, yes, it’s probably nothing at all. Some old machinery, that’s all.’

  ‘We can watch.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They looked at the screens and listened to the mutter for a long time. Then Seps got up, went to the sleeping pods and wandered back. Dece lifted his head and waited.

  ‘He is still sleeping.’

  ‘We have to do something.’

  ‘Out there?’

  ‘Well … I wasn’t meaning that.’

  ‘But we have to.’

  Dece shook his head violently.

  ‘That sound means nothing,’ Seps said gently. ‘It’s like a toy running out of energy. We have to find out how the engines are.’

  Dece looked at her, then again at the receiver with the whispering connection, then back to her. ‘Oooh!’ He leaped from his seat.

  ‘We don’t have to go far. Just to the end of the nozzles.’

  Dece jerked towards the door like a broken robot. Seps slipped past him, glanced at the sleeping pods and pressed the airlock. Dece lurched into the airlock, but he stopped when the escalator dropped onto the alien metal of the ship.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m looking.’

  ‘Oh.’ Seps tolerated this for half a minute and then stepped onto the escalator.

  ‘All right, all right.’ Dece followed her.

  Dece watched the high walls as he moved the engine nozzles, but Seps was only looking at the nozzles. She paused before reaching the end of them.

  ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’

  This time they were looking up at the engines’ nozzles instead of down from above, but the different view told the same story: One Engine was crushed at the bottom with its nozzle bent over its mouth and pushing Two Engine’s nozzle and Three Engine was knocked so badly out of shape that if it was fired it would blast One Engine. It was hopeless.

  ‘We shouldn’t have gone out,’ Dece said.

  Seps waved the flakes of ice away and turned to the hold’s open space.

  It was better to look at the rings and Cotal than at the Tug. There was a terrible question over the Tug and neither of them wanted to go there.

  ‘The rings seem to be calming down,’ Seps said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It wasn’t the rings that caused the ice storm, was it?’

  ‘No. It’s Cotal. It’s like the geysers on Ord,’ he said.

  ‘You like Cotal, don’t you? The killer geysers and these berserk rings that … Never mind.’

  ‘Cotal controls everything – the rings, the geysers, the wobble of Ord, even the sun. You can’t blame it. Things happen, and that is that.’

  ‘You tried to get Cap to move the Tug away from the rings, didn’t you?’ said Seps.

  ‘I saw something.’

  ‘Down there, on Cotal.’

  ‘The Red Storm. It’s always there.’

  ‘But you saw something there.’

  ‘It had built up.’ Dece nodded. ‘When the storm carries on you can see more geysers on Ord.’

  ‘And the Red Storm caused the ice storm.’

  Dece shrugged.

  ‘If he’d listened to you we would be looking at this ship a long way from here, away from the rings. With nothing to worry about.’

  ‘If he had listened to Boss we would still be back at the Base …’ Dece petered out. What if Cap died in the sleeper? Then Dece would remember this moment forever.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ said Seps.

  Dece said nothing.

  Seps turned away from Cotal to look at the Tug. Not at the ruined engines, but at the space between the airlock and the bridge.

  Dece knew what she was thinking. She was staring into the hull, where the sleeping pods were.

  ‘At least we can sleep it out for the rescue,’ he said.

  Seps swung around. ‘Mother can’t.’

  Dece lowered his head. ‘Sorry.’

  Seps shook her head and looked around at the hold. ‘It’s a big area, isn’t it?’ Her voice was thick.

  Dece turned away from the Tug’s engines and finally began to examine the hold. The polished metal area was like a vast cave; far bigger than the rock hangar of Ord Base. The Tug almost scratched the top of the rock hangar, but here it shrivelled in size. A shell in a rock pool.

  The deck was scarred and dented. There were a few odd, angled surfaces on the deck, some with massive hooks attached to them, and there was a dark area at the bottom of one wall. Narrow beams jutted out from the walls and ceiling, connected by a thick net. Lines of wire ran between the beams, and cables wafted from the ceiling. It was like being inside a huge dead carcass.

  Dece hunched a little.

  ‘I wonder what was here,’ Seps said.

  Dece noticed a narrow line where the edge of the deck met the ship’s hull, and a similar line in the ceiling. If there was a moveable plate under the two lines and they had power they would be able to push the deck and the ceiling together. But there was no power. He looked at the hooks, some of them standing up, but many lying flush with the deck. He watched the cables drifting from the ceiling. Two of them were touching, winding round each other and slowly twisting apart.

  ‘A lifeboat,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Here – where the Tug is – was an emergency space carrier.’

  ‘So when the meteor hit, everybody got to the carrier and left.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Seps thought a bit. ‘And they wouldn’t have come here.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘That disaster could have happened almost anywhere. Somewhere, the ship was hit by a meteor and everyone climbed aboard the carrier to go home. The ship – crippled, no power – just kept on going until Cotal got it.’

  He smiled weakly. ‘I guess.’

  ‘So there is nobody on the ship but us.’

  But Dece was hearing the quiet mutter in his helmet. ‘That sound …’

  ‘A machine dying.’

  ‘All right.’ He knew that she was preparing to say something terrible, and he waited.

  Seps took a long breath. ‘I think we should explore the ship.’

  Dece closed his eyes for a second then turned to her. She was looking at the dark corner of the hold. ‘Ah, no …’

  ‘Why? There is nothing there.’

  ‘Without Cap? No, no.’

  ‘Why? Cap could be sleeping for a while. And we might find something which could help us fix the Tug and get back home.’

  Dece looked at the dark corner and nibbled his lip.

  ‘We don’t have to go far into the ship, just a little bit.’

  ‘Ah … wait.’ Dece hurried to the Tug’s escalator, bringing it down as he moved towards it. He climbed up, grabbed a tool from the airlock wall and returned to Seps.

  Seps frowned. ‘A cutting-machine?’

  ‘That’s all we have.’ He plugged it into his belt and swung its long pole towards the open hole. After clicking on the power he pressed the button, and a bright white beam destroyed an ice boulder.

  ‘Oh.’

  Dece held the cutting-machine ahead of him and moved towards the dark corner. ‘Are you coming?’

  16.

  The Ch
asm

  THE lights on their helmets snapped on and revealed two high entrances. One seemed to lead to the bridge and the other to the stern, that great black smile between the engines.

  ‘That one?’ Seps pointed at the entrance to the black grin.

  Dece began to shake his head, but stopped. Everything on this ship would be frightening, no matter where.

  ‘All right.’

  They moved to the entrance. The corridor before them was high and wide, so roomy that Dece thought he could probably have rumbled Telp into it.

  ‘The aliens must be big,’ whispered Seps.

  ‘Because everything is big?’

  ‘Just think of our corridor in the Tug.’

  Dece looked at the entrance and tried to visualise the aliens. Like something huge and slithering with red bulging eyes. Everywhere …

  ‘They have gone,’ Seps said.

  ‘Yes.’ Dece tried to shake the image from his head.

  There were small packs of ice on the edges of doorways. Dece played his lights through open doors to reveal cluttered areas that seemed to be storerooms for parts of the ship’s engines. There were piles of disks, cones, cubes, cylinders with holes – big, tiny, round, square. He walked through a doorway, touched a row of metal shapes and lifted one of them to get a feel for the weight, but when he accidentally dropped it, it shot back to the same spot. He understood magnetic tools, but he couldn’t work out anything else and there was nothing that resembled any parts of the Tug.

  ‘It’s useless,’ said Dece. ‘This technology is completely different to ours. We won’t find anything here. I’m going back to the Tug.’

  But Seps wandered through the short passageways that branched out from the main corridor and Dece followed her. Down each passageway they were eventually blocked by closed red doors and odd symbols.

  ‘They are probably the doors to the power system for the engines,’ Dece said, trying to be smarter than he felt.

  ‘Oh, it’s safe?’

  Dece grabbed his left arm and read his bracelet. ‘It’s fine.’ He glared at the bracelet and thought, I should have been awake to that.

  The bracelet would detect any radiation and any form of poison.

  The main corridor also ended with a closed door, but there were no red or funny symbols on this one. Dece was sure that on the other side of that door was the black grin.

  ‘Well …’ Dece shrugged, hiding his tension.

  ‘Hello, do you hear me? Hello!’ Seps pushed at the door for a moment and thumped her arm on it.

  They listened, but there was no sound apart from the whispers in their helmets, ice rustling down the corridor and the creaking of the ship.

  Seps looked at Dece’s cutter.

  ‘Oh no.’ Dece shook his head. ‘That’s dangerous.’

  ‘You can bang it on the door.’

  ‘Oh.’ Dece hammered the door with the cutter.

  But nothing happened. They moved away from the door and returned to the hold.

  The Tug was still there. That was a relief. As if it could have melted into the ship’s deck or just drifted away.

  Seps saw Dece’s expression. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Just me.’

  They moved through the other main entrance. This one was different. The first corridor had a few patches of ice through it, but this one’s walls were coated with a layer of thin ice, giving it the look of a tunnel in a glacier. The other corridor was still, as though waiting for a switch to be turned on, but this one was angry. Ice particles flurried along the floor, the wires and cables in the ceiling were swaying, parts of the corridor were particularly deep in darkness, and it was so askew that all the doors looked jammed open. Dece heard the ship creaking as he moved.

  They were peering into the jammed doorways when they saw the rip.

  ‘Can you see that?’ Seps hissed.

  ‘You can’t miss it.’

  They clumped past odd rooms with half-closed doors, smaller passageways, past the shifting cables and stopped.

  Dece could see to the end of the corridor, but he was standing on a ledge. It was as if there were two separate and independent corridors. But there were not. Between the two halves of the corridors was a great chasm.

  ‘Careful,’ murmured Seps.

  The ship’s skeletal frame was above and below them. Twisted girders and sheets of metal that had buckled and been torn apart lay all around. Several large tubes were swaying into the chasm, and there were small passageways below without a beginning or an end. When he looked down through the wreckage, Dece could see Cotal’s drifting ice and rings. When he looked up, there were more rings and a flood of stars.

  ‘That meteor went right through the ship,’ Dece said quietly. ‘No wonder the crew got out.’

  ‘But they were on the other side. How did they get from there to here?’

  Dece glanced at Seps. ‘That’s easy.’ He pressed his suit for the squirt of air and slid towards the distant corridor.

  ‘No!’ Seps reached out for him hopelessly.

  ‘What?’ Dece said happily. See? The dumb scaredy-slug can do things! Just so long as he doesn’t think beforehand …

  ‘Oh.’

  A large tube connected to a single cable was swinging towards Dece. As the tube rushed at him, he hit the jet and spurted sideways. Dece couldn’t literally feel air moving in space, but he still felt like he was being swatted like a bug. He tried to return to Seps, but the tube had slowed, reversed and was coming back to cut off his escape. It was after him!

  Dece aimed for the other end of the corridor and shot himself onto it. For a moment, he was barrelling along the corridor, until he used the jets to slow and turn round. He stared at Seps on the other side, far away.

  Stupid, stupid. Saphare would have banged his head for that. Now how would he get back?

  Seps waved at him and studied the swinging tube.

  He realised what she was doing. ‘No!’ shouted Dece. ‘It’s too dangerous!’

  ‘Shh …’

  Seps moved from the safe corridor, drifted into the chasm as slowly as the setting sun and stopped. Dece could see her looking up as if she was admiring Cotal, and then the tube silently arched towards her. And she didn’t do anything. He saw her tilting her head and the tube sliced her way.

  ‘Seps!’

  The tube soared past, but she was still there. She seemed to be reaching out her arm to touch the tube as it charged past. Her jet puffed and she crossed over to Dece.

  He glared at her. Oh, he knew that she could judge a width of a hair. He had seen her on Ord, leaping her Skimmer over a gap in the Dreaming Sea and making it with less than half a head. If Boss had seen it, she would have demolished the Skimmer. But this was an alien ship, not the place to show off.

  ‘What?’ Seps said.

  17.

  The Rooms

  ‘NEVER mind.’ Dece glared at the swinging tube and swung the cutting-machine towards it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Seps shouted.

  ‘I am going to cut that cable off the tube.’

  ‘No, no! You can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We don’t know where it leads. It could damage something serious. You might hit something on the other side.’

  Dece looked at the cutter. ‘I wouldn’t.’ But he lowered it. ‘Now what?’

  They stood with their backs to the gaping chasm and looked down the corridor. Fat cables ran along the edges of the ceiling and a smaller cable ran from those ones to the doors. The cables reminded Dece of tentacles, as if a huge monster was controlling the dead ship.

  Most of the doors on this half of the corridor were open, but the door closest to them was mostly closed and appeared to be jammed. Dece measured the gap in the doorway. He should be able to slip through with ease.

  ‘Um.’ Seps hesitated.

  Dece’s right arm was through the gap. ‘What?’

  ‘I had a thought. The other doors in this corridor are ope
n. They would have closed automatically when the meteor hit. But the crew would have opened their doors once they put their suits on. They would have gone to the lifeboat. And left.’

  ‘We know that.’

  ‘But what happened to the aliens in those rooms where the doors were still open after the meteor hit?’

  ‘They died.’

  Seps said nothing.

  ‘Oh.’ Dece pulled his arm from the silent room.

  There will be dead aliens in this ship. Two? Three? Only one? Didn’t matter. He didn’t want to see any. But they were dead – maybe they’d been dead for hundreds of years. They would be skeletons – not even that. He wouldn’t be frightened by a skeleton, would he? But he didn’t want to see one.

  Seps moved closer and aimed her beam into the room. ‘Can you see anything?’

  Dece forced his eyes to focus through the gap. It was a huge room, empty, apart from a few odd-shaped bits of metal on the floor and walls.

  ‘Not really,’ he said in relief. No skeletons.

  Seps looked at the other open doors. ‘Maybe we should have a look in them.’

  Dece nodded.

  They approached the next door on the left, but from the other side of the corridor. If they saw a horrible sight in that room, well, they were not very close to it.

  The ship rolled a little, and Dece’s helmet banged against the wall. A noise like scratching and rustling started up from somewhere in the distance.

  ‘What is that?’

  Seps looked at him. ‘Nothing. It’s the ship moving.’

  Dece stared at her for a while before nodding.

  ‘All right,’ he said, but he kept glancing up at the ceiling and the swinging cables while Seps beamed her light into the room.

  ‘It’s big, isn’t it?’ Seps said.

  Dece let himself look across the corridor into the long room, which at first seemed empty. There were strange shadows on all the walls. Seps’ beam hit a bare wall a long way back. Seps crossed the corridor and Dece joined her at the threshold of the room, but quickly stepped back. For a moment, he thought there was no floor.

  Thin frost covered every surface, making the room glitter like a treasure mine. Dece’s light finally found the floor, but it was a big drop from where he and Seps stood. Several large cubes lay there, looking like parts of a huge game. But they were covered by a fine mesh and there were little pipes coming out of them. Something black lay under the mesh of one, not moving.