Her Brother's Keeper - eARC (21 page)

“Wow,” Wade said.

“I apologize,” Love said. “I didn’t mean to give you a sermon. My faith, the Universal Stellar Union, originated on Hera as well. My ancestors were persecuted terribly by the Post-Humanists, who declared their atheism while bowing their heads and groveling to a computer. You are correct, though: Euclid started a war that destroyed much of human civilization. Anyway, back on task. From what I read about the ship design, the command deck is in the upper levels of the habitat module, just below the shuttle bay.”

“It’s a long way up there. The interior doors might be sealed.”

“We can follow the elevator shaft,” Love said. “There’s no reason to assume it doesn’t go up to the very top, is there?”

Using a mechanical entry tool Love had strapped to his back, the two spacers managed to force open the elevator doors. They floated into the tube, the only illumination coming from their helmet lights. Low-light enhancement assured them that the lift itself wasn’t stuck above them, blocking their way. They could make it out hundreds of meters below them, probably down in the engineering module.

“I feel like a gnat crawling down the barrel of a rifle,” Wade mused as they drifted upward. The inside of the elevator shaft had a ladder, so that it could be traversed in zero gravity or under acceleration.

“A what?” Love asked.

Wade didn’t bother explaining what a gnat was. He instead studied the labels on the walls as they drifted past each deck. Each set of access doors had a sign next to it, in standard Commerce English and two other languages that Wade couldn’t read, listing the deck number and the purpose of the level. As was expected, the interior habitat spaces of the main hull were used primarily for storage, including a gigantic cargo bay. Wade had been on some massive Concordiat warships, but he had never seen a ship design so opulent, so expansive, with so much open space. It was decadent, almost wasteful. “I don’t understand why they built a ship like this,” Wade said. “So much internal space. The shaft that connects the hab module to the engineering module, why is it so long? It’s like they were less concerned with mass ratios than they were with how big they could make the ship. Can you imagine the reactor output of this thing?”

“I can imagine the payout from the salvage rights if it’s still intact,” Love said. “A Second Federation vessel? Gods, we could all retire.”

Wade snorted in his helmet. “Ha! As if a career spacer like you is ever going to retire. You’ll be underway until they have to launch you out of the casualty chute. In any case, I wouldn’t count your currency just yet. There’s no way we can recover this monster ourselves. It’s going take a fleet of transports to break it down into pieces small enough for them to translate with and get it somewhere else.”

“It’s kind of callous, if you think about it,” Love thought aloud. “This ship is a historical artifact. Perhaps Kimball was right. It seems disrespectful to the dead.”

“Maybe so,” Wade agreed. “But someone else will find it eventually. How it sat out here for eight centuries without being discovered, I have no idea. But sooner or later, someone will find it. We can either benefit from the find, or someone else can.”

“True enough, mate, true enough. Ah,” he said, grabbing onto the ladder to stop himself. “This is the stop for the command deck. Stand by. Kimball, this is Love, do you read me, over?”

Kimball’s voice came back over the radio, heavy with static. “Copy that. Have you broken but readable. We have no comms with the
Andromeda.
” That was no surprise. A ship as massive as the
Agamemnon
would be equipped with heavy shielding to protect the crew from cosmic radiation and the hull from micrometeorite impacts. Their suit radios didn’t have enough power to transmit through all that. “Engineering is sealed. We’re trying to get in now. How goes it for you, over?”

“We’re in the lift shaft, about to enter the command deck. No sign of the crew yet, over.”

The cargomaster could barely be heard over the white noise of static. “Roger. Use caution. Kimball out.”

“Ready?” Wade asked.

Love nodded inside his helmet, and prepared the mechanical breacher again. “Let’s get this door open and see what we can see.” The device took a few moments to place. Once secured to the doorframe, powerful jaws dug into the doors and forced them apart, bending and twisting them as it did so. There was no sound in the depressurized ship, but the two spacers could feel the vibration in their hands as they gripped the ladder. “That’s it. We’re through.”

“I’ll go first,” Wade said, pushing off of the ladder. He moved across the lift shaft, grabbing onto the pried-apart doors, and pulled himself through.

“What do you see?” Love asked, moving closer. “Wade? Any sign of the crew?”

“No…there’s just a helmet floating around in here, and some other junk. Let me take a look…AUGH!”

* * *

On the
Andromeda
’s command deck, Captain Blackwood kept herself busy running system checks and going over the planned route to Zanzibar for the hundredth time. There was precious little she could do at the moment, and it frustrated her. She had very badly wanted to go on board the derelict herself. She abhorred the idea of sending her crew into the unknown while she sat safely on the ship, and she was just as curious as anyone to explore an ancient relic from an earlier era. But that wasn’t the captain’s place. If something happened to the boarding party, the mission had to go on. A good skipper knows when to take charge, but more importantly, she knows when to trust her crew to do their jobs. Sometimes, being a good skipper was no fun.

It was disconcerting for her, all the same. The ship’s sensors couldn’t get a good lock on the boarding party’s suit transponders, and the away team had no direct communication with the ship. It had been long enough that Catherine was getting concerned, and was about to order the rescue team to report to the docking bay.

Before she could give the order to proceed, Luis Azevedo looked up excitedly at his control station. “Captain! The boarding party just entered the docking umbilical. They’re…they’re moving fast. Something’s wrong.”

“I’m going up there, Luis.” Catherine hit the emergency release on her seat harness and made for the hatch. “The ship is yours.”

Up in the docking bay, Catherine waited impatiently behind a heavy pressure hatch as the airlock was sealed, and the nose of the docking bay repressurized. The four members of the boarding party had all returned and, judging from what she could see on the camera feed, they all seemed to be okay. They had certainly returned to the
Andromeda
in a hurry, coming through the umbilical so fast they crashed into personnel waiting for them.

Once the pressure was equalized, the door opened, and Catherine pushed herself into the docking bay.

Annabelle Winchester was the first to notice her. “Captain on deck!” she announced.

“As you were,” Catherine said, grabbing onto a handhold. The ship’s flight surgeon, Harlan Emerson, Med Tech Lowlander were checking the boarding party’s vitals.

Cargomaster Kimball and Assistant Engineer Delacroix seemed fine, if a little confused. Wade Bishop and Tech Love, on the other hand, looked as if they’d seen a ghost. All color had drained out of their faces, and sweat droplets floated off of their heads as their helmets were pulled away. Love was on the verge of hyperventilating, and the med tech placed an oxygen mask over his face to keep him from fainting.

“Mr. Bishop,” Catherine said, drifting closer to her hired mercenary as the Winchester girl was helping him out of his suit. “What happened in there? Are you alright?”

Bishop nodded his head. “I’m okay, Captain, I just…I just…”

“Kimball said you and Love had just entered the command deck. Did you find some sign of the crew?”

“That we did, ma’am. All over the walls.”

“What?”

“As soon as we opened the door to the command deck, we found a corpse. Frozen, largely preserved. He’d been decapitated. I mean, I found the head first. I thought it was just a helmet, until I saw, you know, the eyes. Frozen eyes. But, accidents happen in space, right? Sooner or later we were going to find bodies. So we pushed in, tried to find a way to access the ship’s computer, get at the logs, see if any of it is intact.”

“I see. Did you have any success?”

“What? Oh, no ma’am. Nothing we had with us is compatible with their systems. Love said it was all quantum positronic whatever. Way more advanced than anything we have. Second Federation stuff. This ship doesn’t have a computer, she has an honest-to-God
AI.
”

There were few places, even in Concordiat space, with the technology to create a powerful, self-aware artificial intelligence. Much of that knowledge had been lost in the Interregnum, and attempting to create such things in the modern era was something of a taboo.

“I see. What happened then?”

“We recorded everything. It’s all on the video. We just…we explored the command deck a little. Huge, multiple rooms. We found the entrance to the actual bridge and popped the door open.”

“And you found the remains of the crew in there?”

“If you want to call it that,” Wade managed. “Captain, the ship itself is intact. There is no apparent damage to the interior that isn’t consistent with being adrift for hundreds of years. But the crew…there were a dozen bodies on the bridge. All frozen. Some of them were naked. Some of them looked like they’d been torn apart by animals or something. There was frozen…blood, guts, whatever, stuck to the bulkheads. I think we found the ship’s skipper, too. He was sitting in a big chair in the center of the bridge, still strapped in. He was even wearing his spacesuit, but the helmet visor was up. He’d been stripped down to the bone. There was a fucking skull grinning at us from inside his helmet, Captain.”

“Dear God,” Catherine said quietly. She noted that the color has flushed from Annie Winchester’s face.

Bishop continued, “I’ve seen a lot of shit in my career. I’ve rendered safe unexploded missiles from ships that had been mangled in combat, where there was blood and body parts floating around me as I worked, but I’ve never seen anything like
that
. I don’t know what the hell happened on that ship, but there’s something
wrong
in there.”

“I see,” Catherine said reassuringly. “Just try to relax, Mr. Bishop, I won’t be sending you back over there.” She looked over at her cargomaster. “Mr. Kimball, did you find anything as gruesome?”

“Nothing, Captain,” Kimball replied. “The aft section was completely deserted, no sign of the crew whatsoever. We were beginning to think they’d all abandoned ship. We weren’t able to get into main engineering, though. The pressure doors were sealed, and it’s going to take heavy laser cutters to get through. May I speak freely?”

“Of course, Mr. Kimball. Give me your honest assessment.”

“Mercenary Bishop is correct. I don’t know what happened on this ship, eight hundred years ago, but there’s a wrongness about her. At first I thought it was just the mind playing tricks, in the silence and blackness of such an old relic, but after what was found on the bridge? Who knows what we might find behind those pressure doors, or in the crew habitat arms. Better to just mark the location of the find and sell it to someone else for exploitation. We don’t have the capability to get much out of her in any case. She’s just too big, and we have places to be.”

“I hate to leave such a find for someone else to take,” Catherine said. “Aside from everything else, if that AI is intact, the Concordiat authorities will pay a hefty salvage fee for it.”

“Indeed, Captain,” Kimball agreed. “If we don’t sell the AI core to them they’ll try to take it by force. They’re quite serious about AI control.”

Catherine nodded. “We’ll leave a claim beacon on the ship, one that responds to a coded signal, so whoever we sell it to can find the
Agamemnon
again. If someone else finds her in the interim, there’s no guarantee that anyone will respect our claim out here, but it’s better than nothing.” She observed Tech Love, breathing rapidly into an oxygen mask. “As you said, Mr. Kimball. She’s been waiting out there for eight hundred years. She’s not going anywhere. You all did an excellent job in there. Mr. Kimball, see to securing the docking umbilical. As soon as the ship is buttoned up we’ll be getting underway.”

Kimball nodded. “I’ll take care of it, Captain.”

“Excellent,” Catherine said, pushing herself back toward the hatch. “Carry on.”

Chapter 19

Zanzibar

Danzig-5012 Solar System

Lang’s Burg, Equatorial Region

Cecil Blackwood popped the cap of his flask and poured a shot of stiff local booze into his coffee before turning back to his compatriots. Zak Mesa and Anna Kay had an improvised lab set up on the ground floor of the building they had been allotted, and were both lost in their work. Cecil was the idea man, he liked to think, and the money guy. He didn’t really do much of the research stuff. He had
people
to do that.

People who were now hostages, just like him. People whose lives he’d put in danger. Cecil took a deep breath, then sipped his alcohol-laced coffee. He didn’t really need to be here. He wasn’t contributing much to the effort, as Zak and Anna burned the proverbial midnight oil, but he had never been the sort to go off and relax while his team was on the job. Good leaders lead from the front, his father used to say, whether he’s a commander of a warship or a foreman on a job site.

Zak and Anna were an odd pair, Cecil thought, watching them. Zak was reading something on one screen while analyzing high-resolution pictures of various artifacts on another. Anna had one of the ancient Zanzibari artifacts that had been recovered from Trench Town, a sword with an oddly curved blade, in a laser mass spectrometer. She studied the results and took copious notes. The two of them spoke only occasionally, and a person who didn’t know them might think they didn’t like each other.

Cecil didn’t think they were screwing each other, but suspected they both secretly wanted to. Stressful situations like being a prisoner tended to bring people together, forming strong bonds through shared misery. Cecil could read it in the way Anna interacted with Zak. Back home, he was considered something of a womanizing scoundrel, but he liked to think of it in more romantic terms. However one chose to look at it, he knew how to read women, and it was obvious to him that Anna had fallen for Zak.

The historian, for his part, was either a master at keeping his private life private, or was utterly oblivious to his partner’s affections. Cecil strongly suspected the latter. Zak was a dour man who wore his emotions right on his sleeve. He was one of those quiet, bookish types who were usually too introverted to have much success with women. Anna was just like him, which is probably why they hadn’t jumped in bed with each other yet: both were too shy to make a move.

Cecil found the whole thing grimly adorable, but at the same time annoying. All men, especially men of note, were expected to know how to properly court a lady on Avalon. He had wined, dined, danced with, courted, and bedded plenty of women on Avalon, commoners and aristocracy alike. He was confident that he could have married any of a dozen women if he had wanted to settle down (he didn’t). The confidence and the charm came naturally to him, but he knew it didn’t for most men. It frustrated him to see Zak missing an opportunity like this; Anna was quite comely, remarkably intelligent, well-traveled, and came from a prestigious family. She’d be a prime candidate for marriage for any young man on Avalon, but Zak…poor Zak just didn’t see it. Like a couple of awkward adolescents, Zak and Anna rotated around each other, but neither could muster the courage to voice their desires.

Finishing his coffee, Cecil resolved to pull Zak aside one of these days and have a man-to-man talk with him. He very much doubted the shy historian would find himself a better woman than Anna. In any case, life was short, too short to waste on being shy…especially when you’re being held for ransom by a petty, sociopathic warlord, Cecil thought bitterly. He set his mug down and took a long swig from his flask. “So,” he said, putting the flask back in his vest. “How goes things?” He was glad that they’d found some ancient novelty to keep themselves busy with. Lang’s brutal conquest of Trench Town had deeply disturbed the two intellectuals.

Anna glanced up at him briefly. “Well enough, Mr. Blackwood. Spectrograph readings aren’t really telling me anything about this particular item that wasn’t included in the manifest, but I scanned it just in case. It’s fascinating.”

“It’s some kind of dagger, isn’t it?” Cecil asked.

“More like a short sword,” Anna said. “See how the blade is curved? It’s meant for slashing, not stabbing. The Zanzibari were smaller than humans. This would be about perfect size for them to use as a one-handed weapon. The metalwork is beyond that of any culture of a similar technology level back on earth. The blade isn’t steel. It’s an alloy, with some synthetic materials that my spectrometer can’t identify.”

“That’s…unusual, isn’t it? The Zanzibari were at a rough equivalent to the Bronze Age, weren’t they?”

“Indeed they were. This is puzzling, and it seemed to vex the prewar archaeologists that were studying their civilization as well. They were not primitives. They had a sophisticated, technological society that would have rivaled Ancient Rome at its zenith. Even still, the materials science needed to make a blade like this had to have been beyond their capabilities.”

“I see. How is it so well preserved? Even high quality steel rusts away with enough time.” The short sword’s blade was darkened and worn, and whatever material the handle had been made of had long since disintegrated, but the weapon was otherwise intact.

“It has gotten brittle with extreme age,” Anna said, “but otherwise is in excellent condition. The soil of Zanzibar is dry. There’s been no rainfall here for millions of years. Being buried kept it from being eroded by the wind, and there are no plate tectonics or volcanism on this world. Zanzibar being a dead rock contributed to the blade’s preservation. According to the manifest we…” she paused, uncomfortable with how the blade had come into her possession, “That we
recovered
, it was originally found sealed in a deep chamber in the cave system beneath Trench Town. It had been found in a polished stone container that was also intact. The Zanzibari made things to last. Whatever material the blade is made of withstood the test of time.”

“So it would seem,” Cecil agreed. “I don’t suppose you’ve been able to divine what happened to the Zanzibari, then, from studying that blade?”

“I wish,” Zak said, without looking up.

“That would get our names in the history books,” Anna agreed. “That’s another thing our predecessors here were struggling with. They had archaeologists, geologists, climatologists, volcanologists, chemists, and physicists all working on that question, and they didn’t seem to be any closer to answering it than we are.”

“Some of the media I recovered shows their scientists actually
arguing
about it,” Zak said. “Not as in having a vigorous discussion. They were
shouting
at each other. Seemed like a passionate bunch, if nothing else.”

“They were frustrated,” Anna added. “According to the journals we’ve recovered, they’d been working very hard on this question, and were constantly pressured by their corporate and government sponsors. Zanzibar likes to keep its secrets, though.”

“I don’t think it was natural, what happened,” Zak added, “and neither did Dr. Loren. He wrote about it extensively in his journals. Their end was too abrupt. This planet changed too quickly.”

“Four million years is a long time,” Cecil pointed out.

“Not in planetary terms. The dinosaurs, giant reptiles from Earth, went extinct sixty-five million years ago. The Earth had a different climate and geography back then, but was still habitable. Even the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs didn’t wipe out all life on earth.”

“Even more perplexing,” Anna injected, “there’s no evidence on Zanzibar of a massive impact from space. There have been impacts, of course, but nothing big enough to wipe out an entire planet, and nothing that corresponds with the time frame. Even a massive asteroid impact, one sufficient to
sterilize
the surface, wouldn’t cause the oceans to permanently vanish, end plate tectonics, and curtail volcanic activity. It doesn’t make any sense. Planets don’t just suddenly
die.
”

“Apparently they do,” Cecil mused. “How big were these oceans?”

“Nothing like Earth,” Anna said. “They covered, at most, a fifth of the surface, and were shallow. But they just disappeared.”

“The poles have ice. There is also a lot of ice below the surface.” Mining subterranean ice is how most of Zanzibar’s scattered settlements survived. Water was a precious commodity on the barren, windswept world.

“That’s true. Zanzibar is cold enough that there is now ice where once there may have been a water table, and both poles are largely frozen over. Even still, that’s not nearly enough to account for all of the water that would’ve been in this world’s seas.”

“That’s…rather chilling, if you think about it,” Cecil said. “A world is suddenly wiped clean, and an entire team of scientists couldn’t determine why. It leaves a lot to the imagination, and what the imagination comes up with is frightening.”

“It’s the stuff horror stories are made of,” Zak said. “I doubt Anna and I are going to solve this quandary by ourselves, but to even have access to this data is unbelievable. If we get off of this planet alive, I’m going to send this to every research institute in known space. This is huge. And…” he looked at the sword again. “And people died for it.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Zak. By all means, save all the data you can. But for now, let’s just keep Lang happy so we don’t end up strung up like those poor bastards up north.”

Aristotle Lang himself entered the room unexpectedly. “Now, now, Mr. Blackwood, you don’t give me enough credit! Have I been anything but hospitable during your visit?”

Zak nearly opened his big mouth, but Cecil piped up before the historian could spout off. “Of course, Mr. Lang, of course. I was just using a figure of speech. We, ah, didn’t hear you come in.”

The stocky warlord was dressed in a long, furry coat that hung nearly to his ankles. What sort of beast the fur came from was anyone’s guess. He had a very large pistol hanging from his belt in a crossdraw holster. Two of his omnipresent bodyguards quietly entered the room, and posted themselves by the door. “I just wanted to pay my valued researchers a visit, see how you were doing.”

“Well, ah, we’ve been analyzing this blade, as you can see. It’s very well preserved, given how old it is.”

“Fascinating. Millions of years have passed, and it looks only a few hundred years old. How much do you suppose one could fetch for that, on the market?”

“There really aren’t any pieces like it on the open market, not that we can tell. You know how the Concordiat is about the trade in alien artifacts.”

“Ha!” Lang snorted. “To hell with the Concordiat, I say. They imagine themselves masters of humanity, but they are not the masters of me. What price could we fetch for it on the
private
market?”

Cecil put a hand on Zak’s shoulder to stop him from saying anything. “Several million, easily, given the condition that it’s in.”

Lang’s dark eyes lit up a little. “Good, good. As well, I have good news for you. A courier ship arrived in-system this week. On the bulk download was a message for me.” He held out a small tablet computer, and tapped the screen. “It seems your ordeal will be at an end soon, my friends.”

Cecil and his compatriots looked at each other in disbelief. It had been months, many months, since the original message to his father had been sent out. He had all but given up hope of ever hearing a reply. His excitement turned to shock when the video began to play, however. He absolutely had not expected to see
her.

“Greetings, Mr. Lang. I am Captain Catherine Blackwood, commander of the merchant vessel
Andromeda.
As I record this message, my ship is on New Austin. We are stopping here to resupply before setting out for Zanzibar. My father has contracted me to negotiate for the release of Cecil Blackwood and his entire staff. I come prepared to negotiate in good faith, and want nothing more than to resolve this matter as quickly and painlessly as possible. The specifics of our flight plan are included in this message, so that you know when to expect us. It is not a short journey, so I must ask for patience on your part.” Catherine’s demeanor softened ever-so-slightly. “Stay safe, little brother. I’m coming to take you home.” The message ended abruptly.

Cecil and his compatriots were left speechless. He hadn’t seen his sister in years, and now she was coming to pay his ransom? Without a word, he retrieved his flask and downed the rest of it in one gulp.

Lang beamed. “You see? I know you doubted me, but you are not in any danger. You are not any use to me strung up, as you say. I have plenty of malcontents to hang, if I wish, like those fools in Trench Town who did not accept my generous offer to join the revolution. I only have one rich man’s son to bargain with.”

“Yes…well…” Cecil stammered, still in shock.

“One last thing before I take my leave,” Lang said. “How much closer are we to that vault?”

Zak looked up, staring the old warlord right in the eye, before Cecil could stop him. “We’re
working
on it,” he said coldly. “All of your blustering, all of your veiled threats, and all of your pressure doesn’t make the work go by any faster. We’re trying to solve a mystery here, and honest-to-God treasure hunt. Most of the records were deliberately scrubbed, and most of those that
weren’t
were destroyed in the war. It’s going to take
time.
Research can’t be
rushed,
Lang. All these interruptions do is disrupt our workflow!”

Cecil’s mouth fell open. Anna coughed uncomfortably, and kept her eyes fixed on her lap.

Lang’s eyes narrowed. His two bodyguards looked at each other with disbelief. Nobody spoke to Aristotle Lang that way. The old warlord stepped across the room, until he was standing over Zak. The historian stood up, eye to eye with Lang, and glared at him.

This is it,
Cecil thought, cringing.
The damned fool just got himself killed.

“Ha!” Lang barked. He slapped Zak on the shoulder, laughing heartily. “I
like
this historian of yours, Mr. Blackwood! He’s quiet, like a mouse, but he has the heart of a lion! I’m surrounded by fools who are afraid to tell me the truth, but this man, this man has
balls!
Ha ha! Very well, Mr. Mesa. I will leave you to your studies. It will be some time before the ship arrives to collect you all, so perhaps we will find it by then?”