Ship’s hologram appeared. “The surface of the entity contains a mixture of iron, alloyed metals and superconductors,” it said.
“What does that mean?” asked Lucille.
“It means it’s the same as us,” said Arnold. He nodded to the hologram. “That’s right, ain’t it?”
“Yes. This is most likely a human space vessel – either a message shuttle, a scout or the remains of a larger craft.”
A human space vessel.
Everyone pulled themselves up.
“Is it heading for us?” asked Beth, her throat dry.
“On its current trajectory, the entity will pass ahead of us by five hundred kilometres.”
“Have we tried to contact it yet?”
“Negative,” said Ship.
Beth faced the others. “Well … should we send it a message?”
“We don’t know what it is,” said Vihaan.
Lauryn said, “Could be a search mission!”
Lucille looked excited too. Arnold was staring at the screen and frowning. Mikkel shrugged.
Beth chewed her lip for a moment.
“OK,” she said. “Mikkel, send a ping.” A ping was a very short burst of radio noise, like the single dit of ancient Morse code messages. “Lauryn, keep an eye on the sensor readings. Ready? Go.”
Mikkel pressed a button on his console and nodded. The children watched.
Nothing happened at first. The little craft didn’t change its route. But after a few seconds Mikkel said, “That’s a ping back.” He sounded like he was discussing the weather.
Beth took a deep breath. “OK,” she said. “Let’s wait and—”
“And more,” he said, studying the screen. “That’s a welcome signal, I think, yes? And that is communication protocol. Ship’s translating it—”
A metallic voice suddenly echoed around the bridge. “Greetings, alien ship!” it said cheerfully. “Come a please banana on the relay to twice happy intervals!”
There was a pause, and then Arnold sniggered.
“Er … was there a problem in the comms link, Mikkel?” asked Beth.
Mikkel was tapping away at his screen but shook his head. “No, that’s really what it said. It’s sending data to Ship as well. I think it’s uploading log files. There’s gigabytes, terabytes of data.”
He considered it. “I think it is an automated navigation scout, yes? Someone has sent it to look for Jump routes and report back what it finds.”
“Can we reply to it?”
He shrugged. “For sure. Wait… OK, talk into the mike.” He handed Beth a small microphone.
Feeling very self-conscious, Beth said, “Hello?” She coughed and tried again. “Alien vessel, this is, er, Captain McKay of the colony ship Orion. Can you hear me?”
The speakers crackled back into life. “Hello! Chortle joy! Listening and with the merry breath one station two station adjust sigma variation please.” The voice was full of happiness and seemed to bounce around the bridge.
“I think you might have a problem with your speech systems,” said Beth. “Do you understand us?”
“Indeedly doodly! Speeching on the snicker-snack, so sad boohoo. Cor blimey governor! What to do? Hello? I’m so pleased to see you!”
Still grinning, Beth said, “Ship – is there anything we can do to help with its talking?”
“Processing log upload,” said Ship. “Please wait.”
They waited. Beth said, “Where are you from, craft?”
The metallic voice chuckled. “Mostly on the far side, flip side, hoppity-hop, oh such a long, long, longitude, latitude, who can tell? Long ago, far way, so much to see, yes? Sorry, burbling, so lonely long time. Friends, yes? Yes, friends!”
“I think its AI is maybe a bit fritzed,” said Lauryn.
“Yeah,” said Beth. “Or maybe it’s been on its own for a loooong time.” She activated the mike again. “Alien vessel, what is your name and designation?”
“A name!” The voice laughed. “I had a name, that’s right! Yes indeed, remember the name? I don’t. Do you?”
“Well, what should we call you?”
“Call me anything! Call me any time! Call me Ishmael! No. Bob. Bob the Happy Wanderer.”
Arnold snorted. “So, it really is nuts.”
“I thought it was looking for us,” murmured Lucille. Her head dropped.
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter,” said Beth. “All that matters is, does it have a working Jump drive?”
“Oh, yeah!” said Lauryn. “We could get it to send a message!”
“Mikkel, does it have Jump drive?” asked Beth.
Mikkel peered at his screen again. “It is hard to tell,” he said. “It’s waking up, I think. Something’s changing. It’s starting up other systems. Ship, what’s the other vessel doing?”
“Processing log upload,” said Ship again. “Please wait. Please wait.”
“Hang on,” said Lauryn, frowning. “I’ll cancel that.” She tapped at her console.
“Cancelling,” said Ship. “Cancelling. Processing log upload. Please wait. Please. Processing.”
“Stupid thing,” muttered Lauryn.
Beth said, “Alien vessel, please cancel your data stream to our ship.”
“Affirmative! Absolument! Steady, drip-drip, too much chaos. Never-ending, never-ending.” Its cheerfulness was relentless. “Better now? All better? So many things to tell you!”
Lauryn shook her head. “No, Ship’s still struggling. It’s weird, hang on.” She tapped again. “Ship, are you back?”
“Processing log upload,” said Ship.
“Alien vessel, you’re still streaming data,” said Beth.
“Processing,” muttered Ship. “Please— Processing log upload. Wait. Processing log up— Attack. Please— Emergency log upload, upload, upload, upload— SYSTEM REBOOT IN TWO SECONDS.”
“Alien vessel, your data stream is causing problems for our systems. Please stop at once,” said Beth.
“Oh noes!” said the voice, sounding heartbroken. “No with the badness! So sorry, so sorry – oops, watch your head, vicar! Cancellation. Cancelling the cancellation. Boohoo.”
“It’s still going,” said Lauryn. “It’s still sending stuff!”
“Alien vessel, stop!”
“Stopping, stopping, ceasing, ending, finalising, finishing!”
Its ridiculous voice was starting to get to Beth. It wasn’t just cheerful – it sounded like it was … laughing, like someone telling a cruel joke. In fact, the more it spoke, the more Beth realised that really… really, she didn’t like the voice at all.
“SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE,” said Ship. “Resuming systems in two, one… Processing log upload please wait. Processing log upload—”
“This is wrong,” muttered Beth. “There’s something seriously wrong; this is—”
A brief shimmer of light caught on the body of the other ship and threw it into focus, and Arnold gasped.
“Oh my god,” he shouted. “It’s a rat!”
“What?” For a moment, bizarrely, Beth found herself staring at the floor of the bridge.
“No, no. It.” Arnold jabbed a finger at the screen. “It’s a rat! We’ve got to stop it leaving!”
Beth stared at him in bafflement, but Vihaan had snapped to attention. “Can you shoot it?” he asked Arnold.
“I don’t – maybe!” Arnold leaped to his weapons console.
“What are you doing?” demanded Beth.
Vihaan turned to her. He looked really alarmed. “It’s a rat,” he said. “A Scraper scout! It’s looking for us and now it’s going to try to Jump back and tell them!”
A Scraper scout.
“Mikkel,” hissed Beth, “what systems did you say the vessel was powering up?”
“I cannot tell, Ship is still processing—”
“Figure it out!” she snapped. “Lauryn, help him!”
It wasn’t random garbage, she realised. The ship wasn’t broken, it was distracting them.
This was an attack. They were under attack.
“Alien vessel!” she shouted into the mike. “Cease your data stream and power down or we will open fire!”
“No can do!” said the voice, metallic and manic and malicious. “No can do. Can … candle to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head, suckers!”
Arnold was powering up the long guns. How far away was the rat now – 600 kilometres?
“Arnold, how long to fire?” she asked.
He was frantically pressing buttons and didn’t answer, but Vihaan said, “Fifteen seconds. Maybe more.”
“Lucille,” said Beth in a careful voice, “how close are we to being able to Jump?”
Lucille looked at her, aghast. “We cannot Jump!” she said. “Three weeks, maybe four, the emitters—”
“If we had to Jump,” said Beth, cutting across her, “could we do it?”
“Non!”
“Yes!” shouted Lauryn over one shoulder, still typing.
“No,” said Mikkel calmly. “We need to fix more emitters. We can’t create a Jump gap.”
“How many more?”
Lucille and Mikkel stared at each other.
“Ten,” said Lucille desperately.
“We could do it with three,” said Mikkel.
Lucille closed her eyes in horror.
Three emitters, thought Beth. Do we have three hours?
“Set the Gizmo on those three,” she ordered.
“Guns ready to fire!” shouted Arnold.
“It’s about to Jump,” said Mikkel.
“Fire!” shouted Beth.
Arnold stabbed the button and two missiles launched from the Orion and hurtled towards the rat ship. They converged on its location in an astonishingly small time and exploded in a silent scream of firepower that filled the screen with white.
They were too late. The rat had shimmered and Jumped seconds before they hit, and it was gone.
Beth sank back into her chair.
That was its first Jump. It might have to Jump more times to get back to whoever sent it, but it would get back. And it would report that it had found the colony ship Orion, apparently stranded, and had disabled its ship systems.
And then whoever had sent it would come for them.
19
Scrapers
Beth had seen Scraper ships. On newscasts, in blurry footage taken by fleeing victims. In lessons, where they had always seemed remote and irrelevant.
It wasn’t remote now. Scrapers were coming for them and they were helpless: no way to fight back, no way to move, no way to Jump. There was nothing they could do—
“—orders, captain?”
Nothing except wait for them—
“Captain!”
She started and looked up. Vihaan was glaring at her. He said, in an exasperated voice, “You need to give us orders.” The others were watching.
Orders? What orders could she possibly give? Scrapers were coming! What was she going to say to them? It was ridiculous. She almost laughed.
Instead she said, “Right.” Her voice wobbled. “We’ve, ah, we’ve got a bit of time until they arrive. We can either try to fight, or try to Jump.”
“We’ve got no ammo to fight them off with,” said Arnold in frustration.
“We cannot Jump!” wailed Lucille.
“Mikkel thinks we can if we get three emitters online,” said Beth.
Mikkel shrugged.
Lucille threw her arms up. “You do not understand!”
“Then tell us,” snapped Beth.
This time her voice didn’t wobble, and she temporarily cut through Lucille’s panic.
The girl stopped. “There are four hundred emitters,” she said at last, making an effort to keep calm. “We need them all to Jump properly. Without them, we cannot steer. We cannot say which Jump to make, yes? But we have only … two-hundred and eighty working, maybe. If we Jump with this, maybe the Jump will not work. Maybe it half works and we are stuck in between, yes? Or the Jump gap is too small and half the ship goes through!”
Beth said, “But Mikkel thinks—”
“Yes, yes,” Lucille muttered, waving an arm. “Yes, it might work. We roll the dice, it comes up six, then it is OK, yes?” She stared at Beth. “But if we do not … we will die. And even if it works, we could be anywhere.”
“Well,” said Beth, trying to sound confident, “that’s just what we’ll have to do.”
To her surprise, talking to Lucille made her feel better. The more she tried to reassure the small girl out of her terror, the less panicked she felt herself.
“Right,” she said to the bridge. “You heard Lucille. We need emitters. How long do we have – any ideas?”
Vihaan chewed his lip. “The rat’s Jumped once. It has to boot up and Jump again … maybe once more? And they’ve got to come back… That would be three hours.” He looked uncertain. “Possibly.”
Beth nodded. “OK. Let’s say two hours. Arnold, what’s the state of the other Gizmos?”
“I got another one kind of working,” said Arnold. “It’s pretty flaky.”
“Send it out right now.”
She rubbed her face. What else? “Mikkel, we’re going to need to get the emitters going at really short notice. And a Jump. Oh, and Sleeping too.”
Oh god, Sleeping.
“Just do … whatever you have to do. Get us ready.”
Mikkel nodded and sauntered off to a console. He hummed under his breath as he worked, as if bored. Beth wondered if shaking him really hard would make her feel better.
“That’s the second Gizmo heading out,” said Arnold.
Beth nodded. “Lucille, work out the best emitters to fix. Make sure they’re close. Lauryn, you know what you have to do, right?”
Lauryn, typing in bursts at a keyboard and staring at five or six streams of data on three screens, didn’t answer. She was trying to bring Ship back from whatever paralysed state the virus had left it in, her eyes darting from one stream to the next.
Finally, Beth turned to Vihaan.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked. “When they get here, what will they do?”
Vihaan stopped and thought. “They’ll be surprised to see us,” he said. “They’ll expect us to get Ship running again and then Jump. When they find we’re still here, they’ll assume Ship is still broken or the Jump is broken.”
“They’ll be right,” said Beth.
“They’ll be cautious because it won’t make sense,” he said. “But when they scan us, they’ll know we can’t Jump. They’ll move quickly. They won’t want to give us time to think. They’ll try to distract us. They might fire weapons, but –” he shrugged – “they may not want to waste ammunition. Scrapers have no base and it’s hard to get supplies. They don’t like to waste energy and material. They’ll knock out our long guns if we fire, then the defence network, then they’ll come in with cutters and open us up.”
“Can we hold them off?”
Arnold shook his head. “We have less than a hundred racks of long-range; there’s no way that’s enough to fight off Scrapers.”
“Maybe…” mused Beth. “Maybe we should talk to them.”
Everything stopped. Even Lauryn paused momentarily over her keyboard.
“To Scrapers?” asked Vihaan in astonishment.
“Well … look, we can’t Jump, we can’t fight. And we don’t care about the ship; we just want to get everyone home. Maybe we can do a deal – we give them the ship, they take us all to a colony—”
“Excuse me, captain.” Vihaan suddenly stood. “Can I have a word with you in private?”
He stalked off into the little captain’s room, leaving her with little choice but to scurry in after him. He closed the door behind them.
“I’ve seen the results of a Scraper raid,” he said calmly. “On another route, with my father. We found a colony ship, like us. Scrapers had raided them. They had taken their supplies, stripped the landing and settling gear. They took the
propulsion systems and the Jump emitters and the Ship computer and the weapons. And then the generators, and the gravity core … and the life support.”
His eyes glittered.
“They left the people,” he hissed. “They left them to die.”
His hands clenched into fists by his side.
“We will not surrender to Scrapers,” he said, “because it would be an unbelievably –” one fist lashed out and slammed into the wall next to them – “unforgivably –” he slammed again – “stupid thing to do!”
“OK, OK!” shouted Beth. “I was only considering—”
“Stop considering!” he roared. “Start commanding or you will get us all killed!”
His scathing fury was more shocking than if he had just hit her. She’d never seen him so nearly out of control. And she realised something else, too: Vihaan was scared, terrified, perhaps for the first time since they had Woken up. Somehow that was worse even than his anger.
“OK! OK, look,” she said, holding her hands up, “I understand. Sorry. OK.”
He nodded, and his breathing slowed. “Good,” he said. His voice was still hoarse. “Good.”
He turned and stalked out of the room. Beth waited for her heart to slow down, and for the hard painful prickle of adrenalin to leave the backs of her hands and for her trembling to stop.
Eventually it subsided, and she walked quietly back on to the bridge. Vihaan was back at his console. The others worked at their own screens. They didn’t look up when she came in. They had heard it all, she knew.
She sat in the captain’s chair.
Arnold’s second Gizmo crept on to the hull and towards its target. Beth watched it on one of the surface cameras, scraping along on two damaged legs and one arm like an injured crab. Arnold had said it would be able to do something, but to Beth it seemed like it was going to expire first. She tried not to think about it. Ninety minutes remaining. By now the rat could be making its last Jump. It could be reporting back to whoever sent it…
Lauryn was still staring at her screens. She’d started muttering under her breath; was that a good sign or a bad one? Lucille was going over and over her Jump settings, and Mikkel was preparing them for emergency Sleep. He’d made sure they all had backups; now he plodded around the bridge, handing them little black Sleep discs to fasten to the backs of their necks, to record their memories just before they Jumped. They still didn’t know why the discs had failed before, for the proper crew, but Mikkel had assured Beth that they would work this time. Beth supposed she would just have to trust him.
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