Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Hold it there,’ she instructed her co-pilot, already getting up and heading aft, gesturing the snatch team to stay back from the airlock.

  This, she opened herself, with the fighter already depressurised, overriding the system so that both hatches could be opened at once. And then, locking her magnagrip boots to the deck at the edge of the airlock, she simply reached over and opened the door of the airship.

  It was as simple as that; no locks, not even a pressure-wheel for manual opening. There was a handle in a recessed indent to one side of the door. This, Shion pushed, twisted and then pulled, gliding the door out a few centimetres and then sliding it sideways.

  ‘My God…’ A voice murmured, voicing the horror they all felt at the idea of going into space in something that terrifyingly inadequate.

  Alex heard the little hiss with which someone reminded the speaker that they were on silent running protocols, but he didn’t look up.

  He was watching the feed from Shion’s helmet camera as she disengaged her boots and pushed herself across into the airship’s cabin.

  Oh my God…

  It was dark in there, no power at all and the gleam of starlight through the windows cast eerie beams. Shion’s helmet light illuminated the scene all too clearly, though.

  It was apparent that this cabin took up at least half of the airship’s interior. The only item of furniture in it was a platform, approximately the same size as a bed, which had been draped with a cloth fastened down at the corners.

  The only other things in there were the body bags. Nineteen of them, all floating in freefall. It was obvious to a spacer eye that one of them had been recumbent on the platform and that the rest had been placed around it like petals radiating from a flower. The central bag was significantly longer than the others and it had been enveloped in a fabric which shone like pearl, while the others were wrapped in gauzy pastel shrouds. All of the bags, though, were reading as gel-filled tubes, deeply frozen figures within.

  ‘I will pass them through,’ Shion said, her voice perhaps rather unnaturally steady. Using boot-clamps, she selected one of the shrouded bags and moved it through the door so that the snatch-team on the fighter could receive it. ‘She is to be revived first,’ Shion said and as if anticipating their question, ‘She’s the senior medic.’

  The snatch team lifted the bag carefully onto one of the seats which had been got ready for passengers, set upright now to support the rigid tubes. Five more bags came across, five more bags were secured to the supports. Then Shion came back, bringing with her the largest of the tubes, the one in the pearlescent shroud which had been resting on the central platform.

  ‘I’ve got her.’ Shion waved away those who went instinctively to help. She guided the shrouded chamlorn onto a stretcher in the remaining space, clipping freefall tethers to hold her there. ‘All right – go,’ she told the co-pilot and with a signal directed to Bluebottle, ‘Buzz, you’re on.’

  They had practiced this, though most of their rehearsal had involved the assumption that the passengers would be conscious. Shion had set the protocol – six attendants and the chamlorn on the first fighter, then six each to be brought to the ship by Bluebottle and Wasp.

  ‘On it,’ said Buzz, with Bluebottle already decelerated and poised to move in as soon as Firefly cleared the open doorway. It would take them longer to get in position, but Buzz’s voice was calm and confident.

  Alex wished he felt that confident. Shion’s she’s to be revived first showed at least that she believed they could be recovered from this. But those bags looked extraordinarily… well, the only word was primitive. They weren’t active stasis bags as used by the Fleet, no powered control systems, no readouts, just a container filled with some kind of gel and the occupant allowed to freeze. Cryogenic suspension wasn’t unknown in the League, of course, but it was a method of stasis they’d abandoned as soon as they came up with something better. Cryogenics were unreliable and even the slightest miscalculation could leave people with cell damage – at best, bruising throughout their muscles and organs. At worst, reducing them to a non-survivable mess. Alex was resolutely not allowing himself to think about the frozen-berry experiments they’d done at elementary school. But he knew, oh, he knew, what might be in those bags.

  He should, he realised later, have had more faith – faith in Trilopharus, in the Pirrellothians themselves and in his own medical team. But it was hard to have that kind of faith when you were having to concentrate on keeping your heartrate from going into hyperdrive, taking deep breaths and keeping a calm exterior to reassure the crew.

  Shion did not pilot Firefly back herself. She stayed with the chamlorn, kneeling beside her as gravity was restored. She stayed with her, too, as they docked on to the quarantine airlock at sickbay and the Pirrellothians were carried through. No hand but hers touched the grav-stretcher which carried the chamlorn through to the treatment room where Simon, Rangi and a team of paramedics were waiting.

  ‘Haven’t seen anything like this,’ Simon observed, as he was fastening sensors to the outside of the first of the bags put up on the surgical table. ‘Not outside historical textbooks. And it is going to take…’ he was looking at the readings and grimaced slightly, ‘three days to bring them up to temperature.’

  The temperature in the quarantine ward was being dropped as he spoke, to far below zero. Had it not been for their survival suits, Simon and the medical team would have been human popsicles themselves. As it was, they were perfectly comfortable in the terrible cold and safe, so long as they didn’t try to take off their suits.

  ‘Hmmn – organs viable,’ Simon observed, looking at more detailed readings now that they’d been able to pass penetrating scans over the inert forms. ‘Brain intact… some petechial haemorrhage…’ he muttered to himself, tapping a screen angled for convenient note-making. ‘Nothing serious,’ he reported.

  The same was found in sixteen of the other attendants. The only exception was one of the women who’d suffered damage to the delicate tissues in eyes, ears, sinus… she would come out of cryo, Rangi observed, bleeding from every orifice.

  Simon looked affronted at that.

  ‘She will not,’ he declared. ‘We’ll have all of that fixed as soon as she’s thawed enough to work on.’

  All eighteen of the attendants, he assured Alex, would be fine. And they were all, as Shion had told them to expect, human. Or at least, from the same original design now defined as human. Their DNA, Simon said, was similar to the Altarbian genome, but in any case, well within the range of the Homo Sapiens Identification Act. They all had functional immune systems, too, though they had never been triggered, never exposed to any pathogen which had built up any strength of resistance. Simon, therefore, would give them broad-spectrum anti-pathogens, medication which would kick start their immune systems and medibands programmed to both monitor and provide further meds. Give them a week in quarantine for everything to settle, Simon said and they could move freely about the ship. As for further details, he could tell them that the attendants ranged in age from thirty two to eighty five and all but one of them was female.

  This in itself was not tremendously surprising. One of the first things Shion had noticed about their culture on her arrival there was how many males they had in their population. To her, a ten-to-one preponderance of female births was the genetic norm. That and the fluid romantic relationships such a gender ratio imposed.

  Chamlorn Lady Ursele, though, was of the same ancient genome as Shion herself. Her physiology was just the same and her DNA showed that she was related to Shion both through maternal and paternal relationship. In fact, the DNA analysis showed that Lady Ursele was both Shion’s aunt on the maternal side and her half-sister, sharing the same father. Though the father’s DNA, Shion had said, was irrelevant, culturally, identity being determined entirely through the female line.

  The DNA analysis also confirmed what Shion had told them to expect. Chamlorn Lady Ursele was middle aged for her genome, mature, bu
t nowhere near yet in the phase of life where she’d be considered to be elderly. At three hundred and fifty six years old, she had at least another century of life expectancy ahead of her, yet.

  Shion, who looked as if she was in her mid-twenties, was still considered youthful by her people at the age of eighty nine. And she would still be looking youthful, in the prime of life, when the great grandchildren of the people around her were themselves growing old.

  Shion stayed with her aunt, standing beside her as Simon took his readings. And he, for once, did not tell a relative to clear off out of the way and let him do his job. Shion, he understood, needed to be there and she was quiet, too, staying out of his way.

  ‘Shion…’ Alex called her, nearly an hour later, when they’d finished bringing over all the things they’d found secured in a baggage compartment behind the main cabin. There were trunks, there – actual wooden trunks, as well as innumerable fabric bags and something which looked rather alarmingly like a stone sarcophagus. It felt like finding the contents of an ancient tomb, undisturbed after thousands of years. It was all brought across and the airship thoroughly searched and scanned for later analysis.

  ‘We’re done on the airship,’ Alex told her. ‘Do you have any wishes as to what we do with it?’

  He was asking, delicately, if he was to dispose of it as they would normally deal with a defunct vessel in space, taking it out with a missile, or whether they were to leave it floating there.

  ‘Oh – can we bring it aboard?’ Shion asked. ‘We can fit it in the hangar if we take out a couple of jettoes.’

  Her tone implied that she would not mind in the slightest if he blew up two of the Jettoni class fighters the Admiralty had inflicted on them. Shion had said from the start that they were a waste of space, but the First Lord had asked that they carry three of them and that Shion see if their performance might be improved. Shion had dutifully investigated every conceivable method of upgrading the fighters and had concluded in her official report that the only way to improve their performance would be to take them to bits and use the spare parts to make swarms.

  ‘It will never survive being brought superlight,’ Alex observed.

  ‘It could,’ Shion replied. ‘If we fill it with stelfoam and wrap it in cargo netting.’

  Alex opened his mouth to point how long that would take and how much it would cost, considered what he was about to say and nodded instead.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘We’ll give it a try. Do you want to come and supervise?’

  ‘No,’ Shion said, looking down at the rigid figure on the table. ‘I am staying with Her Grace.’

  ‘All right.’ Alex would normally have given such a task to a junior officer, as a technical and organisational challenge, but he was sensitive to the diplomatic considerations here. ‘I’ll ask Buzz to do it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Shion said, without looking up.

  So it was Buzz who organised the party which took stelfoam canisters across to the airship, releasing them in controlled bursts so that every compartment in it was filled with the yellow foam. It was used aboard ship for decompression incidents, since it expanded rapidly in vacuum, filled up the space and set rock-hard in a matter of nanoseconds. The biggest danger in using it as they were was that someone might get trigger happy with a canister and end up burying themselves in the stuff, but they were all highly qualified damage controllers and taking extraordinary care, too.

  They were extremely careful, too, as hullwalkers encased the airship in duralloy cargo-netting, wrapping it first in protective casing and then securing the unwieldy duralloy netting around it. It took some time to attach it to their tug-shuttle with the twenty six points of support Buzz considered necessary to prevent it coming apart under acceleration. It was nearly three hours before he was able to report to Alex that they were ready to attempt the run, with the pilot set to abort if it went into structural failure.

  The airship did crack all along one side in the latter stages of acceleration, but it remained sufficiently intact for them to continue the run and after another series of checks, to bring it over to the ship. Transferring it into the hangar bay took another three hours, requiring great care and precision and some innovative technical adaptations.

  Eventually, though, they had it secured in the space where two jettoes had been – rather to Shion’s disappointment, later, she’d find that the jettoes had been shifted to airlocks rather than ditched – and they were finally able to bring all their shuttles back aboard, close the hangar doors and stand down the salvage.

  ‘We got the airship aboard,’ Alex told Shion, who was still standing next to her aunt, in sickbay. ‘And we’re ready to leave – unless you want us to stay here for a while?’

  ‘What? Oh, no.’ Shion scarcely glanced up. ‘That’s fine,’ she said, sounding calm but remote. From this distance her homeworld was no more than a bright star, rendered insignificant by an even brighter starfield. And it wasn’t as if she, or Lady Ursele, or any of them, could ever go back. ‘Leave whenever you like,’ she said and then, as an afterthought, ‘Skipper.’

  Alex nodded, gave the order and the Venturi began to cruise away, accelerating rapidly to its high cruising speed. They were heading in completely the wrong direction for Lundane. It would take them a couple of days to get clear of the cone shaped indent, to be able to make the turn to go up and back over Marfikian-held space.

  As they headed out, though, Mister was physically shaking. He was still at Buzz’s elbow, sitting on a pull-out chair beside the Exec’s place at the command table. And he was staying quiet, too. The situation had changed for him fundamentally when he believed that Buzz was himself an operative working for the LIA. He was no longer alone. He was no longer having to make decisions for himself. He was a subordinate agent, working under orders and under supervision. It was an infinitely more comfortable situation.

  Buzz, though, had left him in his quarters for the long hours of the salvage operation and Mister had allowed himself to get into a state of high anxiety. Just watching the salvage had done that. Those bodies… and he couldn’t help but think of them as bodies. They weren’t the first dead bodies he’d seen, of course, the LIA exposed you to the contents of a morgue as part of your training. But there was something inexpressibly horrible about that frozen tomb floating in space and the gauze shrouded figures within. It was, he thought, like something out of a horror movie. And though he had no detectable imagination, he did have excellent recall of all the horror movies he had watched where frozen aliens came to life aboard the salvaging ship. And that never, ever, ended up with them sitting down with their rescuers for a nice cup of tea. Even the Fourth had gone very quiet, with a sombre mood aboard the ship.

  We are going to die out here… the thought kept running through his mind like a song you couldn’t get rid of. He was unaware of it, but that line too was from a movie which had scared him as a child and formed part of his vocabulary of fear ever since.

  They were going to die. They had frozen alien bodies aboard and they were, as far as he was concerned, in Marfikian space. He had no faith in the cone-shaped dent which the Fourth said showed space the Marfikians wouldn’t regard as theirs to control. That was, he felt, a very large assumption. And when you were dealing with ruthless alien cyborgs who were only stopped by force superior to their own, what chance one warship out alone in their territory? And if the frozen alien corpses didn’t get them, or the killer cyborgs, they were about to go into space no other ship had ever traversed, or at least, not surviving to share any record of it. And they would be out there, they said, beyond mapped space, where there might be anything, for four months.

  We are going to die out here…

  ‘We’re ready to seal the ward now, Shion,’ Simon told her, down in sickbay. Everyone else had already left. ‘Are you coming?’

  Shion shook her head. ‘I’m staying here,’ she said.

  Simon sent a message to Alex and got an answering assent. So he left the ward
and supervised its lockdown, leaving Shion inside with the frozen patients. It could not be opened now unless the ship came back to quarantine status. But there would be no need to open it for another three days, as Simon could control the environment and monitor each of the patients remotely.

  ‘Thank you, Simon,’ Alex said, in response to the medic’s report that the ward had now been triple-sealed and the outer skin sealed by an atomic bonder. ‘We can stand down now,’ he told Eldovan.

  They had been at full quarantine stations for so long that everyone had been obliged to replenish their suit’s ten hour air capacity at damage control points. They had itchy skin, some of it feeling that it had been rubbed raw. They were desperate to use the lavatory and the sterile-water sip packs they’d been allowed to use had in no way satisfied thirst, let alone the hunger that eleven hours in a suit had built up. Only Davie had been fed, sucking sterile nutrient through a sip-point in order to prevent his hyper-fast metabolism going into hypoglaecymic shock. But that stuff, as Davie would emphatically confirm, was disgusting.

  ‘All right!’ Eldovan grinned as people cheered. ‘Showers,’ she said. ‘Coffee. Food.’

  Everyone felt better, after that. And as it was getting late by the time they’d all covered themselves in soothing moisturisers, gulped down hot drinks and stuffed themselves full of good food, it wasn’t long before they were heading off to bed, too.

  Buzz, as he always did, walked Mister to his cabin. For all his geniality about it, the fact was that the LIA agent was in his personal custody, either to be within arm’s reach of him or restricted to his quarters. And while they hadn’t put a lock on the door, Mister knew perfectly well that if he went out of the cabin without Buzz, officers and crew would come bearing down on him fast.

  ‘This is just… so wrong.’ Mister didn’t speak until Buzz had come in after him and the door had closed – this, Buzz had indicated, was the only space in which it was safe to talk openly. ‘So wrong.’ He looked at Buzz with desperate appeal. ‘Can’t you stop him, sir?’