by B. V. Larson
“Well done,” I said, stepping past her and cranking up the illumination cast by my suit.
We had enough battery power and oxygen to keep us going for another ten hours, at best. But there was no point in lying around conserving every breath. Either we would find something aboard to keep us alive, or we wouldn’t. I knew it would be best for morale to keep moving.
“What I don’t understand is what Singh is up to,” Rumbold said at my side. He was the second man to enter the passageway and clank along at my side.
“It’s a mystery to me,” I told him. “But the assassination attempt on my father was a surprise as well. People seem to be coming at me from all directions.”
“You’ve got that right!”
“Yamada,” I said, turning to my lead technician. “This region seems to be completely depressurized. Am I correct in that assumption?”
“Not quite, Captain,” she said. “The passageway did have a trace of air, but it quickly escaped when we opened the hatch. We could seal it and hope the atmosphere will build back up.”
I halted and watched as my crewmen filed past me, looking around. The passage was festooned with piping and hardware I didn’t recognize. The piping could be part of a life support system.
“It’s worth a try,” I said. “Close the door once we’re all inside.”
“No retreat?” Rumbold asked.
“No. The hold wasn’t all that much of a sanctuary, in any case.”
“What about Jimmy, sir?” he asked. “We could bring him with us…”
I glanced at him, but he said no more. Was he thinking of sharing out Jimmy’s air and power? Or, perhaps, even something worse?
“All right,” I said. “Bring him with us.”
Once everyone was inside the passage, it was a little crowded, being no more than two meters wide and three high. Yamada shut the door—and we were rewarded with a welcome surprise.
The walls lit up, at least panels along the side did, creating bright white bands of light on either side of us.
“I’m hearing something,” I said, noting a rising hiss. “Is it breathable?”
Yamada studied her computer closely. “Yes sir. It’s a nitrogen and oxygen mix, but it’s higher in oxygen content than Earth normal. Still, I wouldn’t open your faceplates yet. It’s too thin to breathe at this point.”
“Power, air…” I said, smiling broadly. “Looks like we’re going to make it, crew!”
There were nods and relieved looks. I pretended everything was fine. Keeping up morale was an officer’s job, and a big part of that job was never letting on how grim a situation really was.
“Let’s see what else we can find,” I said, striding down the passage in the lead.
The walkway curved gently as we walked, so we couldn’t see more than fifty meters ahead or behind us. I found it somewhat alarming that the lights were only shining where we were at any given moment, switching off behind us and flickering into life as we reached a new section. I supposed the ship was conserving power, but I had no idea if that meant the supply was dangerously low, or if it was a preprogrammed function.
We passed a lot of locked, circular doors. I had Yamada try out a few of them, but unfortunately, they each had a combination that didn’t match the one that had gotten us out of the cargo hold. Rather than spending another ten minutes working on a random door, I decided to press ahead and see if we could find the extent of the passage we’d discovered first.
“There are no labels on these doors,” Rumbold complained. “They all look the same. How were those female giants able to find their way around?”
“See that dot over the door?” Yamada asked, pointing to a small mark that looked like the pinhead tip of a vid pickup. “That’s not a camera. It’s an identifying microdot of information.”
“So high?” Rumbold asked, peering up at the nearest dot.
“Remember, they were tall people.” I said.
“Right…”
“Yamada,” I said, “can you interpret these dots? We must know where these doors lead.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Can you reach up there and run my tablet over the dot? I can’t reach.”‘
Taking her computer from her small hands, I reached up and brushed its sensors repeatedly over the microdot. After a few seconds, I handed the device back to her.
“Ship’s stores,” she said a few moments later.
“Excellent,” I said. “We’ll read them all until we find something useful.”
“Wait a second!” Rumbold said. “Did you say ship’s stores? You’re sure about that interpretation? That would confirm this is a powered vessel, not some kind of abandoned station.”
“The translation is over ninety-five percent certain.”
I eyed the two of them and nodded. It was critical information. We’d known all along that we were inside an artificial structure of some kind, but that wasn’t very definitive. If this was a ship, it stood to reason it would have engines and a bridge. If we could get the engines operating…
“Start looking for a bridge,” I said. “Anything that will get us to a command sector of some kind.”
“Medical,” she read next.
We kept going.
“Life support.”
That made me halt. After thinking for several long seconds, I gestured toward the door.
“Open it. We need air and heat more than we need anything else right now.”
Yamada went to work on the door immediately. My crewmen were visibly relieved. It weighs on a spacer’s mind to know he’s living on borrowed time. Usually, a man walking outside a ship always knows he can scoot to a nearby airlock and find solace if he’s running out of the essentials for life. Even then, one tended to check the key measurements, such as how many breaths you had left to take, every half hour or so.
But when you know you’re cut off from life support, it tends to become an obsession. A man who’s in trouble will check those numbers every few minutes, and the tension will grow into a great weight on his mind as time ticks away.
It was about four minutes later that Yamada broke the code on the lock. I complemented her on her improving skill. She smiled.
“It’s not me, it’s my computer. The algorithm is learning likely variations heuristically.”
“Never turn down praise,” I told her. “I couldn’t have done it so quickly.”
Beaming now, she led us into the chamber. Compared to the cargo hold, life support was relatively small. But I knew that beyond the tight walls around us were large machines that distributed air, water and heat.
We approached a large graphic control system. Yamada laid hands on it, and she swept her fingers over it. The interface seemed to respond reasonably to a standardized set of gestures.
“We’ve got power,” she said after working on the system for several minutes. “But it’s low. I don’t think we should try to heat the whole ship. The engines are shut down completely. They’re as cold as they can be, and from these diagrams it looks like they’re supposed to feed the internal generators most of the time.”
“The batteries are low,” I said thoughtfully. “That indicates the ship has sat here for a long time. I wonder what happened to her? Any logs or computer connections?”
She showed me the console. The direct control system wasn’t password protected, but when she tried to access the ship’s central computer, she was blocked by security. The connectivity options were set up to allow operators to do appropriate work with life support in this chamber, but not to access the ship’s systems in general.
“This unit isn’t going to let me get away with splicing wires and hacking,” she said. “The doors were built to allow physical overrides in case of emergencies, such as the one we’re in the middle of, but the central computer is protected. To get into their network, we’ll have to have the right passcode.”
“Fair enough. Let’s see the ship’s layout, if we can.”
That she could display. The crew gas
ped as the decks and passages were laid out in colorful screens before them.
The ship was huge. It was a hundred times the size of Altair and more than a thousand times the size of Cutlass. I was impressed with the colonists, clones or not. Just building such a vessel was, by itself, a marvelous feat of engineering.
“And to think,” Rumbold said, “back home they begrudge us the budget to keep six destroyers in space. This ship is fantastic! An unbelievable achievement for Beta colonists, by damn!”
I nodded, but I wasn’t as elated as the others. I was thinking about the implications of this massive vessel. If the Betas had built it, they were undoubtedly our masters in the construction of shipping. That was worrisome enough, especially when adding the fact they’d figured out a way to get from their system to ours with this vessel.
But what concerned me more was that this ship had been seriously damaged somehow. On the diagrams, there were large areas displayed in red with repair requirements listed over them.
“Were those areas damaged during flight, or was this ship attacked and damaged in battle?” I asked aloud.
The group sobered as they studied the computer.
“This damaged area contains the fire control systems,” Yamada explained. “Without fire control, they couldn’t aim their weapons. The second damaged deck over here indicates it’s a core power distribution center. If I was trying to disable a ship in battle, I might well choose the same targets. I think the fact that those two regions were damaged, plus the fact they’re both on the outer rim of the ship, close to the hull itself, indicates a purposeful attack occurred.”
“She’s right, sir,” Rumbold added. “This looks like the aftermath of battle to me. We’re lucky the enemy didn’t disable her engines. If we can get the generators going again, we can fly.”
“Yes,” I said thoughtfully. “But another point strikes me: If a group of colonists managed to build a ship of such amazing size and power—who else out there was able to build enough hardware to beat this monster in combat?”
They eyed me in concern, grasping my point immediately.
“Something must be out there that’s even bigger and more powerful than this battlewagon,” Yamada said quietly.
“Right,” Rumbold said, leaning an elbow on the screen and scratching his face. We had our visors open now, even though the air was still a bit thin and cold. “That’s got to be the way of things. It’s a frightening thought. I don’t think our entire fleet could stand up to this ship alone, much less whatever behemoth beat her in battle.”
“Hmm,” I said thoughtfully. “Chief, you asked me earlier about Captain Singh’s motivations. Maybe he knows more about this ship than he’s been letting on. Maybe he has a purpose to his seeming madness.”
“He’s a traitor! Pure and simple!”
I smiled thinly. “Hopefully we’ll be able to get some straight answers out of him, if we can get this vessel operating again.”
My crew, given a new goal and new hope, tackled the problem with gusto.
The loss of Cutlass still stung my mind whenever I thought of it. I’d loved that ship, lowly though she was. I guess a commander always has a soft spot in his heart for his first command.
But rather than letting the destruction of Cutlass demoralize me, I was determined that it would give me purpose. Here, we had a new ship, a frighteningly powerful one that appeared to be abandoned. If we could get it into a functional state, Captain Singh may yet come to regret his recent choices.
The life support system wasn’t perfect, but it functioned. We didn’t have enough power to pump air and heat into every chamber aboard the vessel, but we didn’t have to.
“Warm up the bridge, engineering, this section we’re in and the passages in-between.”
“Working on it, sir,” Yamada said.
“Delegate the task to one of the engineering mates,” I told her. “I’m taking you and Rumbold on a little tour.”
She licked her lips nervously, but nodded in agreement. We put down our faceplates just in case and exited life support. The crew looked after us wonderingly. They were more than happy to stay inside the only comfortable chamber aboard.
Rumbold had his pistol out, I noticed. I couldn’t blame him for that. Yamada walked with her face gazing down into her glowing computer screen. It was as thin as paper, and she held it rolled open with both hands. Occasionally, she spoke out loud to it.
“I noticed something on the screens as we examined them,” I said as we walked the lonely passages. We moved down several decks. The ship was a maze.
“This is it,” I said, stopping in front of a door like a dozen others. “What’s that microdot say?”
“Uh…detention, sir. I’m pretty sure that’s it.”
I nodded, curious. “That’s what I thought. Can you open it?”
She worked on the door for less than three minutes before she had it open.
“You’re getting better and better,” I told her, then I stepped inside.
The chamber was different than any of the others I’d seen so far. The ship overall was laid out very methodically. Most of the walls, passages and chambers had a certain sameness to them. Only the purpose of each region and the equipment inside provided variety.
This room was different. There were sub-chambers, a dozen of them, each effectively a cage-like structure with ribbed walls and small portholes in the sides.
“Cells?” Rumbold asked. “May I ask why we’re here, sir?”
I pointed to the last cell in the line. “That cell,” I said. “I noticed when we first examined the diagrams that there was power and heat down here. I didn’t know it was the detention center, but it makes sense to me now.”
I walked up to the cell and peered into a fogged over porthole.
Rumbold huffed and followed me. “You can’t be serious!” he said. “A prison? One cell that’s still functioning? No one could be alive in there!”
Rather than answering him, I tapped lightly on the metal cell wall. A ringing, reverberating sound met our ears. The cell was like a tin drum, echoing my tapping.
Suddenly, a face loomed in the glass.
Rumbold fell back, gasping. “By the gods!”
Yamada sucked in her breath, but said nothing.
For my own part, I simply stared. Her face—it was obscured somewhat by the glass, but still unmistakable. She was the woman Yamada had projected by reading the DNA in the tubes. Those clones must have been her sisters. Thousands of them.
But that wasn’t the shocking part. The thing that alarmed my crewmen was her size. Her face was that of a giant. As broad and thick-boned as the largest of men.
-18-
The female giant in the cell regarded us thoughtfully. We could only see her face, but even that was impressive. Her green eyes were intelligent but wary. Her raven black hair was long and hung down to spill on her broad shoulders.
Those eyes…they shifted from one of us to the next. Often, they came to rest on the weapons we had on our belts.
“Hello,” I said in Standard. “I’m Captain William Sparhawk. Who are you?”
“You are Basics?” she asked aloud, speaking Standard with a strange accent. Her voice was deep for a woman’s, but not as deep as mine.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that term,” I said.
“Basic stock. Old-men. That’s what you are—I can tell. You’re all varied in design, but not for specific purposes.”
“We’re Earth men,” I said, “and we’re here to rescue you.”
She studied us suspiciously for a moment longer, then a smile spread across her wide face. That smile wasn’t entirely friendly, in my opinion. There was a hint of something predatory in it.
“You’ll find the lock difficult to open,” she said. “But there is a bypass at the guard station over there. Before you open it, please make sure the atmosphere is breathable, for my sake.”
“We’ll do so,” I said. “Yamada, power up life support in detention, pl
ease.”
“It will be a few minutes, Captain.”
I turned back to the prisoner. “We have time for a few questions,” I said.
“How fortunate,” she said, but she didn’t appear to be happy.
She wanted to get out of her cell. I could understand that, but I felt I had to know more of her situation first.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Betas don’t have names, we have serial numbers. But those I interact with on a regular basis called me Zye—the last symbol in my serial number was Z.”
“Zye…all right.” I proceeded to introduce the three of us. No one looked comfortable. I could tell she didn’t trust us, and we certainly didn’t trust her. But the introductions seemed to help a little.
“Zye,” I asked, “how is it that you’re alive and everyone else aboard this ship seems to have died or abandoned her?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trapped in here—I don’t know how long. Fortunately, the cell is automated. It has fed me, provided me with air, and removed my waste since the ship was stricken.”
“Do you know what might have damaged this vessel?”
Zye shrugged. “The Betas have many enemies. It might have been the Stroj, or the Reavers. I can’t be sure. The crew wasn’t interested in keeping me up to date on events.”
“How did you come to be imprisoned? What were the charges?”
Her mouth worked for a moment, but she didn’t answer.
“I’m like you,” she said at last. “That was my crime. I varied too much from the pattern. They didn’t like the variation.”
Frowning, I wasn’t sure how to take her statements.
Rumbold cleared his throat and I glanced at him. He indicated that I might want to step away from the porthole to talk to him privately. I indulged him, connecting a channel for a privately radioed talk and turning off my external speakers.
“What is it, Chief?”
“I don’t like this, sir, and I don’t like her. She’s obviously some kind of vicious criminal.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Oh, come on, Captain! A man doesn’t have to be a hundred and sixty to know that a prisoner is generally behind bars for damned good reasons.”