Into the Sea of Stars (8 page)

As she passed by him there was a flash of a smile that
made Ian shudder. She was enjoying this!

"Want me to open this one?" she asked.

He nodded and closed his eyes. Would he ever be able
to open a door again?

She turned the handle. There was a faint whisper of
air as the pressure equalized. Something bumped against
him. He wanted to scream, but with a supreme effort he
repressed it. Opening his eyes, he discovered that Shelley
was up against him.

He half suspected that she had banged into him on purpose, and a slightly mischievous smile almost confirmed it. There were no bodies inside, however, and to
gether they pushed into the main corridor and started to explore.

"Shelley, Ian, this is
Stasz
. You better prepare for your
return. Your in-suit reserve is below twenty percent."

Ian checked the elapsed time on his arm-mounted
watch. Nearly six hours and not one percent of the vessel
explored. They hadn't even gotten out of the main shaft area.

The sheer number of bodies overloaded his senses, but
he had slowly grown inured to their presence or he was
simply in shock and the reaction would hit later.

The forms of death were varied and frightening. Every
where the dead leered at them, some gently floating by
as the opening of long-locked blast doors and passage
ways triggered gentle currents in air that had not moved
for centuries. Most of the cabins still held some air, but neither Shelley nor Ian dared to remove their helmets to
try it. The command and control enter had been totally
destroyed by a hulling—the impact that had punched a
twenty-meter hole clear through the vessel with an egress
puncture nearly fifty meters across.

Most of what they explored
were
various access pas
sageways, docking terminals, and the guidance center for
the ship's sails, where half a dozen desiccated forms were
still strapped to their couches.

"Dr.
Lacklin
, I'm in what appears to be a communi
cations center on level three, section four. Would you please join me?"

Turning about, he floated back up the corridor that she
had followed only moments before. He pushed past a
small body that held an even smaller form to its breast—
he didn't look closer.

There was a faint light coming out of a room. He pushed
his way in and to his surprise found that she had managed
to locate a backup lighting system that could still function.
A soft, diffused light radiated from overhead panels.

Shelley noticed his look of surprise. "Apparently the
power grid hooking into this area is still intact and there
are some backup batteries."

The room was circular with a number of windows on
one side that looked out over the docking bay. As Ian
went up to the window, he could see the
Discovery
docked
on the next level down, or at least in the direction that
his feet were pointing.

"It looks as if they stayed alive in here for some time after whatever it was hit them." She pointed to a number
of boxes and empty emergency food containers that floated
in the room along with the four bodies.

"Poor bastards.
Damn it, Shelley, there must have been
close to forty thousand living here. I'd have thought that
damage control could have brought this ship on line again."

"I've been thinking about that, Dr.
Lacklin
. Look at
the damage. Primary ship functioning area totally de
stroyed. Power reactor
destroyed,
main communications, data storage banks, and transport lines to the two wheels, damaged or destroyed. Eight major hull hits, all
to
vital
areas. Two or three at the same time they could have
bypassed and still managed to restore service.
But not
eight at once.
Taking out those eight at the same time was
fatal, and the occupants stayed trapped in each of their
emergency chambers till the oxygen ran out. It's possible
some might have lasted for weeks. What a horrible death..." Her voice trailed off.

"You think there's any chance of calling up ship's rec
ords?"

"Just a moment, Doc."

Shelley floated to the far corner of the room and hovered next to a body. For several minutes she twisted the body back and forth and suddenly the hand snapped off the body. He could hear a faint cry of dismay and felt at
least a little pleasure at the realization that even Shelley
was affected by this charnel house.

"Dr.
Lacklin
, how good are you at deciphering Old
Japanese?"

"Not too good. I can speak it, but that's about it."

"Damn, this body had a notebook clutched to it. It
might be worth looking at."

"I have the dictionaries back aboard ship."

"Speaking of back aboard ship,"
Stasz
interrupted again,
"listen, Doc, I have no desire to board that graveyard in search of your bodies. You're down to seventeen percent
of reserve so would you kindly get your butts back where
they belong. Shelley, at least get your butt back, I like it better than our rotund professor's
gludius
maximus
, or
whatever it is that Croce calls it."

Shelley started for the door still holding the notebook
with the
clawlike
hand clinging to one side. Ian turned
away for a moment and looked back out the port. His
view was framed by the two wheels, above and below
him, spinning slowly against the backdrop of an endless
sea of stars. All the key points of the vessel struck, prob
ably simultaneously—dooming all aboard. He looked out
across the stars and shivered.

"I figured I should share this with all of you. I must
confess that it changes the complexion of this mission"—
Ian hesitated for a moment—"perhaps to the point of
abandonment."

He looked around the room at his companions. Coming
from a desk-bound civilization where meetings were the form of business, and the form required desks and chairs,
the concept of a meeting in zero G had a slightly ridiculous
quality. There were no desks to define territory and no seating with the leader at the head. Rather they floated
around a room and copies of paperwork were tossed back and forth after being attached to clipboards.
Stasz
wasn't
helping matters any by floating upside down relative to
the rest of them.

Ian tried to gauge their reactions. The meeting was
more a ritual; they already knew the information to be discussed and a general feeling had already been arrived
at. But he wanted to be sure.

"Look, Ian," Ellen said quietly, "this happened nearly
three hundred years ago. Three hundred years ago our
Democratic Bureaucracy was at war with the Chin. Today
the Chin
are
our closest allies."

"Let me go over it one more time, Ellen. And anyhow, I think you as a collective psychologist should know the theories of Constant Social Lines in relationship to an isolated society."

"It's a theory and I'm out here to prove it or disprove
it, that's why I think this is absurd."

"Let's hear him out, Ellen,
then
you can attack him."

Ellen glared at Richard, who returned her stare with a mock bow that sent him tumbling head over heels until Shelley helped to stabilize him.

"Here we go then," Ian stated as formally as he could, but his voice was pitched too high and the nervousness
showed.

"I've worked five days straight on the translations. In
the interim
Stasz
and Richard managed to explore part of one
torus
and I think we can confirm that absolutely no
one is left alive in there." He gestured vaguely toward
the window where silhouetted on either side were the twin
wheels rotating on their endless journey.

"This unit departed Earth in the year 2083 and is re
ferred to as
Unit 181
. I've provided you with all my notes
concerning its history. We've retrieved some
Holo
core
memories but I don't have the equipment to use them.

"Several more notebooks have been recovered and I
plan to analyze them, but I think the first one is good
enough to go on."

He looked down at the notepad strapped to his knee.

"Most of the notes in the book were poetry. Rather
nice stuff, called haiku. Our long-dead friend
Miko
was
a sensitive individual. A longer poem on page twenty-
three of the notebook gives us an interesting clue. He
describes the blue sun of his childhood, which he now
misses.
Stasz
and I have checked it out and this vessel
could have come out of Delta Sag. Which means these
people made it to a star eighty-two light-years from Earth
and, as near as I can estimate, spent only twenty-odd
years in orbit about that star and then began the long
journey back to Earth. There are in fact four references
to this sun. The next to the last poem is not a haiku, but more in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Romantics. In that poem the writer speaks of the mission they
have set.

To warn our forefathers in halls undreamed,

And seek again the light that was,

As we speak to the gods of the sleeping giant,

Revenge of their sons, long dreamed dead.

Ian looked around the room again. The rest were silent.
He had a brief mental flash of the vacant staring faces
that had populated his classroom. But these people were
listening to him, and he felt a surge of satisfaction.

"The last statement is a diary-type entry that makes one thing very plain—they were attacked. I'll read the
last entry."

He knew this was rather pedantic, but he couldn't help
but play on the dramatic; after all, he was a historian.

" 'It
is seventy-four hours since the Alpha/ Omega strike.
I look out at our twin wheel, our home,
our
world. The lights are still on in the Ag section, batteries...' The next
line is illegible and then picks up again. 'My eyes see, but
they cannot make me believe. My entire world is dying,
it is dying and they have murdered us.
Murdered us.
It
is the end and there is nothing. Our crypt shall journey
across the sea of eternity, a voyager of quiet death. And so I join the others as the lights of my world fade away
forever.

Ian felt a strange turmoil within. The young poet had
written this to him, far more sure of the immortality of
his verse than any Earthly poet. For in space the script would last, like its poet, for eternity.

"I've
backplotted
the heading,"
Stasz
interjected,
breaking the melancholy silence. "If acceleration ceased at current speed they would have left Delta Sag three
hundred and ninety-seven years ago."

"How far to Delta Sag,
Stasz
?" Ellen asked.

"Two months."

Ellen looked at Ian with a challenging smile.

Ian hesitated, trying to buy time. "We've got to be
logical about this one. First there is a wealth of infor
mation aboard this ship. This could keep an archaeological team busy for the next century. It's the first time
anyone from our modern age has stepped aboard a vessel
from the twenty-first century."

"Come on, Ian, stop being such a historian and start
thinking like an explorer," Ellen replied. "I'm not interested in dead things, I want living people to sample. One
of those things"—and she shuddered,—"in there might
interest you as you cut 'em up to see what they had for
breakfast, but that information is useless in my book. They came from this Delta Sag, I want to go there and find out more."

"There's the next point to consider, as well. This col
ony was murdered. Someone or something out there killed
them. They could kill us!"

Now his emotions were taking hold.

They hesitated for a moment on that one and Ian pressed
in. "I think we should stay here, study this one in further detail, and knowing there is something hostile out here, we have every legitimate excuse to return back home,
report our findings, and then get back to our lives."

"From what I've heard of your Chancellor,"
Stasz
interjected, "I don't think the sight of you four would be very welcome."

"To hell with the welcome," Ian replied. "What can he
do to us? We found a colony and that's that."