The Devil's Nebula (18 page)

“Three of us go that way,” the militia captain ordered, indicating the rear of the ship. “You three that way. We’ll meet on the other side and consider how we’ll board the ship, okay?”

Lania, Gina and Choudri moved along the flank of the ship towards the bulbous command section. Its superstructure was as unremittingly grey as the regolith, its original livery excoriated by passage through the void. Here and there Lania made out the ghost of old insignia and numbering, and towards the front end of the ship the outline of the word
Procyon
.

The Pride of Procyon
, she thought. There was nothing proud about the sad old ship now.

They came to the bull-nosed front end. Slit viewscreens, on three levels, banded the great hull. Lania jumped up in the light gravity and landed on a projecting fin. She moved along it towards the body of the ship and peered in through the screen.

“Make anything out in there?” Gina asked.

“Not a thing.”

Had she been expecting to see the skeletons of the flight crew, she wondered? Or signs of fire, or some other catastrophe? The flight-deck looked like the darkened set of a holo-movie, emptied of actors and technicians.

“Lania! Everyone! Here!” Gina called.

Heart thumping, Lania jumped from the fin and looked around for Gina. A trail of footprints led around the nose. Lania followed, bouncing in the low gravity, once or twice almost losing her footing.

Gina was standing before the flank of the ship, hands on hips, staring up at something. Choudri was beside her, mimicking her stance as he too stared up at what they had found.

Beyond them, the two other militia and Commander Gorley were bounding towards them.

Lania reached Gina and stared up.

A metre above her head, a hole punctured the metal of the flank. It was perhaps two metres across and perfectly circular.

Gorley’s voice sounded in her earpiece, “That certainly wasn’t made by a meteor.”

“Look at the edge of the incision,” Gina said. “The metal looks burnt.”

The surface had bubbled around the hole and dribbles of metal had run like candle wax. “What the hell could have done that?” she found herself saying.

“Dunno,” the militia captain said. “But we’ve found ourselves an entrance. Wait here while I recce.”

He bent his legs, sprang up and took hold of the lower lip of the circular hole. He hauled himself up, climbed aboard and disappeared from view.

He was gone for perhaps two minutes, and then reappeared at the opening. “Looks deserted to me.”

He knelt, then reached out a hand for Gina.

One by one they scrambled aboard the colony ship.

They stood in a long, lateral corridor, brightly illuminated by their collective headlamps. Choudri was kneeling beside the hole, examining the perfection of its incision through the ship’s outer skin, its insulation and wiring, and two inner membranes.

“Whatever did it, it cut through with great heat, or maybe acid.”

“If there were any colonists out of suspension and awake,” Gina said, “they would have died quickly with the decompression.”

Choudri said, “The ship landed, which suggests the maintenance crew were conscious.”

“So where are the bodies?”

Lania gestured towards the hole. “This wasn’t an accident. Something did this intentionally.”

Gina grinned at her. “Give the girl a coconut,” she jibed.

“We split up,” said the captain, “go through the ship in pairs. Draw your arms. Maintain radio contact. Meet back here in thirty minutes. Understood?”

Gina took Lania’s arm and steered her towards a side corridor, opposite the circular hole punched through the skin of the ship. Gina led the way, Lania following her dark, bulky shape.

It was oddly eerie, walking through the semi-darkness of a ship that had left the Expansion over a hundred years ago. There was something of the museum experience about it, familiar and yet strange. She had watched holo-vision programs about aged ships and seen old scrap in junkyards, but to see superseded fittings like strip-lighting instead of glo-tubes, staple-ladders instead of chutes, gave her a shivery sense of temporal displacement. She hurried to catch up with Gina.

“Back there in your cabin, girl...” Gina was saying now.

“Gina! Shh!”

“S’okay. This links just the two of us. You don’t think I’d let my bastard captain know, do you?”

“Well, Gorley knows something. And Ed.”

Gina turned and smiled at her through her faceplate. She reached out. “I just wanted you to know, you’re special.”

Piqued by something she could not easily identify, Lania said, “Yeah, that’s what Ed says.”

Gina stopped and stared at her. “You and him?”

Lania found herself saying, “Sometimes. It’s on and off, Gina. I don’t let myself get too close.”

Gina made a sound like a disapproving sniff and continued to lead the way along the corridor.

Now why the hell did I say that, Lania wondered? She followed the armoured woman.

They came to a wide central aisle that ran the length of the ship, and Gina turned right. A minute later they arrived at a pair of double doors. Blocky lettering above the entrance read, “Cry-sus units 1-500.”

Gina turned to her. “This is where they’ll be, girl.”

Gina reached out and palmed a sensor panel beside the entrance. The doors refused to move. She slapped the sensor again, swearing. “Stand back.”

Lania did as instructed and covered her eyes as Gina lifted her laser and turned the sensor panel to dripping slag. She applied the muzzle of her weapon to the seam between the doors and prised. She was able to part the doors a centimetre, then worked her fingers into the gap. With brute force, assisted by her suit’s servo-motors, she dragged open the door. The mechanism broke and the door sprang back into its housing, almost skittling the militia-woman in the process.

She laughed at herself and led the way into the suspension chamber.

Lania stepped over the threshold.

The chamber was v-shaped, the banked walls on either side housing the cryogenic suspension units – two hundred and fifty, she estimated – along each side.

“Come and look at this, Lania.”

She moved to Gina’s side. The curved lid of the first pod was retracted and the coffin-like container was empty. Gina gestured along the row, diminishing in perspective. “And they’re all the same. Every one of them. Empty.”

Lania moved to the other side of the chamber. Likewise, every pod had its cover retracted and every pod was empty.

“Where the hell could they have gone?” she murmured.

Gina had opened radio contact with her captain. “Sir, we’re in the cryo-suspension chamber 1-500. Only the colonists aren’t here, sir.”

“Copy, Sergeant,” the captain said. “Move to the rear of the chamber and you’ll find an exit hatch. Pass through it. You’ll find us on the other side.”

They walked the length of the chamber, Lania checking that every unit was indeed empty, and arrived at the hatch at the far end. It was open; Gorley and the militia captain stood outside. Choudri and a militia-man emerged from a sliding door adjacent to the first chamber.

Gorley said, “We’ve checked every suspension chamber, now, and they’re all the same. There’s no trace of a single colonist.”

Lania looked along the corridor, where ten identical hatches gave access to the chambers.

“This doesn’t make any kind of sense to me,” Gina said. “The moon’s airless. No one can survive for a second out there. They can’t be somewhere else in the ship?”

Her captain grunted with derision. “Sure. They’re in the lounge, drinking coffee. All five thousand of them.”

Gina glared at the man. “I was thinking more of the holds.”

The other militia-man shook his helmeted head. “They’re not. We checked.”

A sudden heat swept through Lania’s head and she said, “They’ve been taken.”

They stared at her. Gina said, “What?”

“The colonists. They’ve been taken... somewhere. Whatever came in through the hatch, it took them.”

The captain snapped, “We’ve no proof of that.”

“Then where the hell are they?” Lania said. “There’s a big hole drilled neatly in the side of the fucking ship and the colonists are gone.”

Gina said, “I don’t know. Perhaps they suited up, left the ship.”

Choudri said quietly, “There would have been evidence of their departure, Gina. The regolith out there was undisturbed until we came along.”

They stood in silence, each with their own thoughts.

“So,” Lania said at last, “I’m right, aren’t I? Whatever made the hole, it got in here and took them. Didn’t it?”

Gorley said, “If it did, then why isn’t the regolith disturbed directly outside where the hole was made? You’d think the egress of five thousand colonists would leave some trace.”

The captain said, “Some kind of ship, an alien vessel. It approached the ship, drilled the hole, and they entered. They got the colonists and departed with them through an umbilical.”

Gorley said, tentatively, “If that happened, then it would have taken time. Perhaps the maintenance crew had time to leave some form of record.”

The captain said, “If they did, then the best place to look would be the flight-deck.”

He set off along the corridor, followed by Gina. Lania hurried after her, taken by a sudden dread she knew to be groundless; even so, she didn’t want to be last in line.

She thought of the colonists, woken to be confronted by aliens and ordered off the ship. The terror they must have experienced, the sheer horror of the unknown.

What else, she wondered, as she hurried after Gina, might account for what had happened here?

They walked along the lateral corridor and came to the hole in the flank. They slowed as they passed it, each one of them pausing to examine the incision again. As if this time it might offer up more clues, she thought.

A minute later the captain rounded a bend in the corridor and stopped. “Well,” he said, “here’s one colonist who didn’t get off the ship.”

He moved aside to let the others see.

“Christ,” Gorley said. “What happened to him?”

If Lania had felt the first stirrings of terror earlier, at the absence of the colonists, she was clutched by panic now as she looked down at the corpse of this lone, hapless human.

He had been mummified over the decades, his skin flash-freezing and then drying, contracting over his skull and bones, so that the remains seemed shrunken, his fraying uniform half a size too big. But it was not the process of mummification that frightened Lania, horrendous though that was.

The corpse was plastered to the lower bulkhead of the corridor, its upper half intact, but the bones of its pelvis and legs – without material or skin – fused and welded to the wall.

His mouth was open in a silent scream of pain.

Lania closed her eyes and moved away.

The captain said, “He has a weapon. Look.”

Lania opened her eyes long enough to take in the small blaster clutched in the corpse’s left hand.

“I wonder if this was why he was killed?” Gina said. “He showed resistance, fought?”

They filed past the corpse in reverent silence.

The captain led the way to the flight-deck, encountering no more bodies on the way.

They entered the flight-deck and moved around the oval chamber, taking in its old-fashioned design, its bulky flight couches in lieu of slings. Even the consoles and screens were bigger, bulkier, than those of today.

“What are we looking for?” Gina asked.

“Well, probably not a hand-written note saying ‘We’re being invaded,’ Sergeant,” her captain said.

Lania slipped into a couch and tapped the console. As she had expected, there was no response.

“They stored data on needles, back then, right?” The captain was on his knees, examining the interface of a com-stack.

“A hundred years ago? Yes,” Gina said. “Coiled fibre storage was still twenty years off.”

“So you’d think the needle storage units would be full of back-ups and blanks, right?”

Choudri crossed to him. “And they’re not?”

“All empty.”

“Here, too,” Gina called. “It looks like an entire com-stack was unbolted and taken.”

Lania said, “But why would they do that? Take a whole com-stack? It doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

Gina stood, hands on hips and looked around the old flight-deck. “What does, girl?”

Commander Gorley said to the militia captain, “Get the others over here. Go through the ship from top to bottom. And have Novak rig up a power system, okay? I want all the data possible copied from this ship’s core matrix – have Thomas go through it for any clues as to what might have gone down here.” He sighed. “And here I was, thinking we might find the colonists happy and settled on some idyllic colony world.”

The captain grunted. “You really expected that?”

“I hoped.”

Lania looked across at Gorley. For the first time ever, the man sounded almost human.

Commander Gorley led the way from the flight-deck and along the corridor. Lania averted her gaze as they approached the dead colonist, and wondered at her sudden squeamishness. She had seen far worse sights in her early years – and once or twice since joining Ed Carew, as well – but for some reason the sight of this corpse gave her the terrors. Perhaps it was the unknown circumstances of his death, at the hands of who knew what alien horror? Or perhaps the utter loneliness of his death, so far away from home.

Or perhaps I’m just getting too sensitive, she thought.

The captain jumped down through the hole and assisted the others out one by one. Slowly, weary now after being out for over two hours, they made their way around the starship and across the churned regolith to the
Hawk
.

Ed was standing in the reception foyer, his long face wearing a worried frown, when Lania cycled herself through the air-lock.

He came across to her and touched her shoulder in an uncharacteristically familiar gesture. “What happened? You look shattered.”

“I’ll just get this off and I’ll be straight up. Fix me a hot coffee and I’ll see you in the lounge, okay?”

He nodded and stepped onto the chute.