Her Brother's Keeper - eARC Read online

  “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.”

  “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 flo
ating 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.