Her Brother's Keeper - eARC (20 page)

“Are you piping this throughout the ship?”

“Yes ma’am. The feed is available on every screen on board. How close do you want me to get? She’s got a debris field around her, but we can avoid the big chunks, and at our current relative velocity the little chunks pose no threat. The same goes for the asteroids—nothing presently poses a threat to us.”

“Well, then…shall we make this challenging?”

“What did you have in mind, Skipper?”

“Find a docking port.”

It took Colin a brief moment to process what his Captain was telling him. A toothy smile appeared on his face. “Yes ma’am! The way she’s tumbling like that, though…”

Catherine smiled back. “I said it was going to be a challenge.”

Colin tapped his control panel. “Attention all personnel, return to your acceleration stations. I say again, return to your acceleration stations. Stand by for docking operation. This might get a little bumpy.”

* * *

The
Agamemnon
had a docking module just aft of the primary hull. It was located by design at the huge ship’s center of gravity. Through a combination of skill, experience, and computer assistance, Colin was able to bring the
Andromeda
in close on an approach vector while avoiding the debris field that drifted through the darkness along with the derelict. With a coordinated burst of the maneuvering thrusters, the pilot spun the
Andromeda
clockwise, matching rotational speed with the larger ship.

With their rotation matched, the
Andromeda
cautiously closed with the docking hub. The privateer ship’s docking port was located at her nose, and had a variable coupler that could work with ports of various types and sizes. The stars wheeled around the two ships as the distance between them decreased. Colin turned on a pair of bright floodlights, illuminating the derelict’s hull during the approach. It was obvious that she’d been drifting out there for a long time—her hull was scarred, dented, had been perforated by micrometeorites time and time again. She had long since depressurized.

A burst of the retrothrusters slowed the ships’ relative velocity to a crawl. The
Andromeda’
s nosecone opened, her docking umbilical extending like a proboscis from her hull. From under her belly a heavy-duty mechanical arm unfolded, extending forward with the umbilical. As the
Andromeda
came to a halt, relative to the
Agamemnon,
her arm silently clamped down onto the exposed support beams that surrounded the docking module. Stabilized, the docking umbilical extended further, and latched onto the long-sealed port on in the larger ship’s hull.

In the
Andromeda
’s nose, Wade Bishop and a small boarding team made final preparations for the upcoming extravehicular activity. Wade’s Fleet EVA certifications had long since expired, but he had conducted such an operation much more recently than any other of the hired mercenaries. The spacesuit he was using was actually nicer than the one he’d had in the fleet, and old habits came back to him quickly. He’d be clumsier in freefall than he was before, and he had to take a pill to settle his stomach, but he was excited to go. After all, how often did one get to explore a genuine ghost ship, a relic from another era?

Besides, Wade rationalized, there could be explosive hazards on that ship. Emergency demolition charges, propellant, even military ordnance. As the only one on board qualified to render safe such hazards, he was able to convince Captain Blackwood that he should go. She hadn’t been particularly disagreeable about it; the skipper was paying her hired guns a lot of money, so it made sense that she’d want to get as much use out of them as possible.

Accompanying Wade were three technicians, each experienced in boarding operations. Captain Blackwood didn’t want to send over a large team, risking more lives than necessary. Something had obviously gone wrong on the
Agamemnon
’s journey, and there could be danger hidden in her long-silent passageways. Moreover, the task at hand was merely to complete an initial survey of the ship. The
Andromeda
had a more important mission at hand, and wasn’t equipped for a salvage operation of this magnitude in any case.

Officially leading the expedition was Kimball, the
Andromeda
’s diminutive cargomaster. On a ship with a crew of only twenty-one, personnel often performed duties outside of their normal roles. There wasn’t much for the cargomaster to do in transit, so Kimball pulled double-duty as one of the ship’s chief EVA experts. Being small of stature and physically strong were advantages in zero-gravity operations. In addition to being more maneuverable than most, Kimball required less oxygen than a larger individual, and could operate for longer periods of time on a limited air supply. Wade was impressed with how gracefully he handled himself in the docking bay, checking and rechecking his team’s spacesuits and equipment.

The other two were members of the ship’s crew that Wade had seen before, but didn’t actually know. One was a pretty woman with ebony skin and a bald head, the assistant engineer, Wade thought. The other, a thin, unassuming man with pale skin, blonde hair, and a dour demeanor, was a communication technician. None of the boarding party, including Wade, were vital to shipboard operations. Should the worst happen and the entire party be lost, the
Andromeda
could complete her mission mostly unimpeded.

Suited up, sealed, and with oxygen flowing, the four-person boarding party pulled themselves upward to where the internal hatch was. The room fell silent as it was slowly depressurized, and the internal bay doors opened. Wade found himself looking down a long, flexible, illuminated tube that connected the two ships. His sense of equilibrium was off, and maneuvering was difficult, as the two ships were still slowly rotating together. The centrifugal force was slight, but it was enough to throw off maneuvers if you didn’t account for it. Kimball had no apparent difficultly, but the rest of the part moved awkwardly through the umbilical, pulling themselves along the guide lines that ran along the wall of the tube.

The docking port doors to the
Agamemnon
were closed, and had been powered down for centuries. With extensive improvised wiring, it might be possible to apply power and get them open, but the team instead opted to do it the (relatively) easy way: with high-energy laser cutters. The lasers were connected, via a long, retractable cable, to a power outlet in the
Andromeda
’s docking bay. Many times more powerful than any handheld laser weapon, and designed for short-range cutting applications, the laser cutters were the fastest way to get into the derelict short of blasting a hole in her hull.

The process was still slow, taking the better part of an hour. The cutters were ultimately successful, and Wade helped Kimball push in the two-meter-across circular section they’d cut out. It disappeared into the dead ship’s interior, leaving the boarding party to stare into utter darkness.

“Off we go, gentlefolk,” Kimball said somberly. “Please be respectful. This ship is a tomb. We don’t want the restless dead coming on board the
Andromeda
with us.”

If any member of the boarding party thought such ancient spacers’ superstitions were silly, they didn’t say so. The docking bay was a spherical room a dozen meters in diameter. As their helmet lights shone on the interior of the
Agamemnon,
the first light to illuminate her corridors in centuries, Wade felt a sense of cold unease crawling up his spine. Pieces of metal and debris drifted around them as the team moved into the compartment. Bits of ice sparkled in their helmet lights as they scanned back and forth, looking like nothing so much as very light snow.

“Control, this is the entry team,” Kimball said, transmitting on his radio. “We’ve entered the docking bay. The ship is depressurized, but other than natural damage from extreme age, seems to be intact. We’re going to split up. Myself and Gentlewoman Delacroix will head aft, to the propulsion section. Mercenary Bishop and Technician Love will head up to the crew module, to see if they can download the ship’s logs from the command deck. We may lose comms once inside. She’s a very big ship. The cables on the laser cutters won’t reach into the interior. We may not get very far.”

“Copy all,” Captain Blackwood said crisply. “Use extreme caution. Your air should last for about four hours. That’s all the time you’re going to get. Salvage whatever you can. Try to find out what happened to this ship. If you find the bodies of the crew…”

“We will pay them our respects, Captain. They haven’t had a proper burial. Entry team out.”

Stabilizing himself in the cavernous, yet surprisingly empty docking bay, Wade looked up at Kimball. “Are you sure splitting up is a good idea?”

“No, Mr. Bishop, I am not, but we are on a tight schedule. If you feel unsafe at any time, come back to the
Andromeda
as quickly as you are able. This ship has seen enough death. Let’s not add to it.”

“Holy shit, this is creepy,” Wade muttered, forgetting his radio was on.

Kimball grinned through his helmet’s face plate. “What’s the matter, Mr. Bishop? You’re not afraid of a few ghosts, are you?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Wade said, sounding dreadfully unsure of himself. In the darkness of a long-dead ship, it was easy to let one’s imagination run wild.

Kimball grinned again. “Good, good. I am sure the dead here will take that under advisement. Move along now, time is of the essence. Be careful.”

“Yeah,” Wade said, pushing off into the darkness with the technician named Love. “Careful.”

The central docking hub was located at the bottom of ship’s primary hull. It was connected to a massive cargo bay. Whatever supplies the
Agamemnon
had been carrying were still in place, secured and tied down inside the huge compartment. Wade and Love drifted through the quiet darkness, their helmet lights shining the way ahead, as they explored the hold. Random debris and ice particles drifted in the vacuum; the occasional pinprick of light from Baker-3E871 shone through small holes in the hull.

“Well, this is pleasant,” Love said anxiously. “This isn’t anything like a typical horror story. No, wait, I’m mistaken. It’s
exactly
like
every
horror story.”

Wade patted the vacuum-rated pulse laser pistol attached to the front of his suit. “That’s why I brought this.”

“Well, you have more sense than most horror story characters,” Love said, pushing aside a free-floating crate that had crossed trajectories with him.

“I don’t think we’re going to find aliens or anything up there. This ship has been dead for eight hundred years. Nothing could’ve survived that long.”

“We assume,” Love added.

“Look,” Wade said, shining his light on a set of stairs. They led upward into the primary hull. “The doors aren’t sealed. Everything is open. The whole ship is probably depressurized.”

“If they were in trouble, why didn’t they lock down?” Love wondered. A standard emergency function of nearly every spacecraft was to seal pressure hatches in the event of a hull breach.

“Maybe they didn’t know,” Wade mused, grabbing onto the staircase railing. His body flipped around and he nearly lost his grip. “Argh,” he growled. “Damn it.”

“You okay?” Love asked, steadying himself on the railing with much more grace than Wade had.

“I’m fine. Just going a little too fast. Anyway, maybe they didn’t know there was a problem until it was too late? There’s no sign of an explosion, major hull breach, or anything.”

“That’s what’s so weird,” Love said, leading the way into the crew module. “It’s like the crew were all incapacitated.”

“I’ve heard stories,” Wade said, following Love through the hatch, “about ships that arrive through a transit point, and the entire crew has vanished.”

“I’ve heard those stories too. Another version has the crew all dead, of asphyxiation, like they ran out of air. Some kind of time distortion. There’s no verified report of such a finding, though.”

“Maybe not,” Wade agreed. “Or maybe it never gets reported because no one is alive to report it. Maybe records of that were lost during the Interregnum. Who knows? I mean, let’s be honest, the transit drive itself is basically magic.”

Love chuckled. “It’s not magic. It’s math. Really, really complicated math.”

“Same thing. Okay…where the hell do we go now?” The habitat module of the
Agamemnon
was a cylinder over two hundred meters long. The four rotating “arms” were folded into semicircular recesses in the hull. The primary hull was topped with a huge shuttle bay. The compartment the spacers found themselves in was an impressively large open space, almost like the lobby of a building. Long dead plants, preserved in the icy vacuum, decorated the room, as did several large displays. The screens weren’t attached to the wall so much as they were part of it. “This ship is huge. The crew must have been in the hundreds.”

“The actual crew was only a couple hundred,” Love said. “And it was only that big for damage control purposes. This is a Second Federation vessel. She was very likely controlled by an artificial intelligence.”

“How did that work?” Wade asked. “What did they do about transit shock? My handheld was wiped after our last translation.”

“The AI would’ve been rather more sophisticated than your handheld. Aside from that I don’t know. They did have problems with AIs, which was probably the only reason ships of that era were manned at all. We can’t make such systems today.”

“I don’t know why anyone would want to,” Wade said. “The last time we tried to play God it caused the bloodiest war in human history and the collapse of interstellar civilization. Why screw with that again?”

“Have you read much on the Post-Humanist Movement?” Love asked.

“Not since school,” Wade admitted. “They were led by an AI, though, I know that.”

“Not just led by it. On the inner colony world of Hera, they built themselves a machine god, an entity they called Euclid. They gave it more and more power, more and more control, let it make decisions affecting the entire colony. They let it reprogram itself, helped it expand its own processing power. The machine was mad, and they didn’t know it. They practically worshiped it as a deity, but in their hubris they denied this. They believed Euclid’s decisions were based in science, and therefore everything it did was logical. Those with spiritual beliefs were mocked, then persecuted, and eventually were considered to be mentally ill, even as the rest knelt before their machine god.”