Her Brother's Keeper - eARC Read online

  “It was an exploration ship,” Kel Morrow reported, “constructed in Earth orbit. It departed on what was intended to be a long-duration survey mission, mapping out new transit routes along the frontier, studying worlds that had been identified as potentials for colonization, and cataloging scientific discoveries along the way. The records from this time period are incomplete, patched together by historians, but it seems it was one of a dozen in its class commissioned by the Survey Fleet.”

  Catherine’s eyes widened. “Survey Fleet? Does that mean what I think it means?”

  Kel nodded at his captain through her screen. “The program was called Cosmic Odyssey VI. It was the last such venture ever commissioned by the Second Federation.”

  “My God, Kel,” Catherine said, unable to hide her excitement. “That ship has been waiting to be found for, what, eight hundred years?”

  “Something like that, Captain,” Kel agreed. “Cosmic Odyssey VI was initiated just as the First Interstellar War was getting into full swing.”

  “How is it she hasn’t been found, in all this time?”

  Kel shrugged. “Transit points move over time. In a high solar orbit like this, in a system this far from most of inhabited space, the odds of a ship translating into the system when the Agamemnon’s orbit and the transit point were close to each other are very, very small. Not much trade traffic comes this way, and we’re off the normal trade routes anyway. This isolation, juxtaposed with the fact that the derelict would be hard to pick out of the star’s rings if you were much farther away than we are, and it makes sense. It’s a remarkable find, but not a shocking one.”

  Catherine shook her head slowly. Humanity had been a spacefaring race for something close to fifteen hundred standard years, depending on whose calendar you went by. The Second Federation represented to its era what the Interstellar Concordiat did to the present: the interstellar polity that presumed to unite most of humankind. Its era was known as the “Diaspora”: centuries of rapid outward expansion, colonization, and exploration. It was during this period that most of the now-long-established colony worlds, including Avalon, were first settled. It was seen by some as a golden age, an era of unprecedented discovery and achievement. Even in the present day, it was considered to have been the peak of human civilization. Technological wonders were devised that had not been eclipsed in the subsequent eight hundred years.

  The Diaspora came to an end with the outbreak of the First Interstellar War. What started as a localized conflicted between the Federation and the Post-Humanist Movement would spread, like wildfire, into a conflagration that engulfed the heart of known space. Warfare in an age of unchecked scientific advancement proved to be more destructive than anyone could have imagined. Orbital bombardment, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and even nanotech weapons were all used with reckless abandon as both sides attempted to annihilate one another. Both were ultimately successful; the Post-Humanists were destroyed, and the Second Federation collapsed shortly thereafter.

  Billions died in the war. A massive amount of critical space infrastructure was destroyed. Entire colonies were wiped out, and others lost contact with one another as interstellar traffic tapered off to a trickle. Earth itself was subjected to orbital bombardment. The end of a war heralded the beginning of a new dark age, the Long Night, formally known as the “Interregnum.” For four hundred years, technology stagnated or even regressed, an unknown amount of knowledge was lost, and human society backslid into an earlier era. Even in the present day, hundreds of years later, there were technologies from the era of the Diaspora that could not be replicated.

  What all of this meant for the crew of the Andromeda was that the Agamemnon was potentially a very valuable find. Too valuable to pass up, in fact, despite the urgency of the present mission. Catherine’s officers agreed with her assessment: the amount of time they would lose was acceptable, given the potential payoff. There was no way the Andromeda could salvage the massive relic on her own, but the find was valuable all the same. If nothing else, the location of the ship could be sold to a salvage operation for a hefty payout. The Agamemnon was so big, and was in such a remote location, that nothing but a professional salvage effort could successfully bring her back to port. That didn’t mean vultures hadn’t picked her clean over the centuries, but judging from the sensor feed she appeared remarkably pristine.

  The intercept of the derelict went smoothly, and the Andromeda precisely matched the trajectory of the Agamemnon. As they closed in on their target, Catherine made her way up to the flight deck.

  Colin Abernathy was startled when she appeared behind him. “Skipper! What can I do for you?” Lean, dark-skinned, and possessed of a head of short, curly, black hair, Colin was the only member of the crew who hailed from Earth. He had spent several years as an apprentice pilot with a small, family-owned trade company before being recruited for the Andromeda. He had spent most of his life in space, and was extremely skilled for one so young.

  Catherine smiled at her junior pilot. “Don’t let me disturb you. I don’t get up here as much as I like these days, and I want to see her with my own eyes.” She climbed into the acceleration chair to the right of Colin’s, and reclined. There were windows on the flight deck, part of an aerodynamic protrusion from her hull. If you stood on the deck, they were above you, but reclined in the pilot’s chairs they were ahead of you, as if you were flying an airplane. This cockpit wasn’t necessary; there were several stations from which one could take complete control of the ship. It was more tradition than anything else, a throwback to the early days of space travel on Ancient Earth, when the lines between spacecraft and aircraft were more blurred. Catherine loved it.

  “You want to take the controls on the approach, Skipper?” Colin asked. “The Andromeda’s your baby. I won’t be offended.”

  Catherine was sorely tempted by her pilot’s offer, but only smiled and shook her head. “You’re doing a fine job, Colin. Carry on.” She didn’t mention it, but was pleased to see her young pilot with his hands on the controls, tapping the retro-rockets and making tiny course corrections manually. Too many spacers were far too reliant on the computer, in Catherine’s opinion.

  “Yes ma’am,” Colin said. “You can see her in the distance now.”

  The Agamemnon appeared as little more than a particularly bright star, shining against the tapestry of the rings of the white dwarf star. As the minutes ticked by and the two ships closed, Catherine was able to make out the shape of the derelict more clearly. “That is a big ship,” she said absentmindedly. Vessels of that mass displacement were rarely seen in the modern era. The power requirements for pushing such a monster through a translation were astronomical. Few places were able to produce transit drives with that kind of mass capability, and few organizations could afford to field a ship so large. Even a veteran spacer like Catherine Blackwood found the technological prowess of the long-defunct Second Federation to be awe-inspiring.

  “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 th
e 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 a
dvisement. 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.