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Chapter 18

The Privateer Ship Andromeda

Deep Space

Baker-3E871 System


Baker-3E871 was a pale white dwarf star, slowly dying an eons-long death. Its dim, harsh light was filtered through beautiful rings of debris, a stellar disk that surrounded the star and made for an awe-inspiring image on the Andromeda’s screens.

Or at least it would have, if the damned screens would work, Catherine thought. In terms of transit shock, not all translations were created equal. Being shunted into the Baker-3E871 system had been particularly hard on the ship’s systems. The captain monitored the process of getting underway, noting happily when systems came back online, as a pair of systems technicians were replacing electronic components on the command deck.

The transit point was presently outside of the dying star’s debris disk, if only barely, but was still uncomfortably close to the star itself. Momentum is not retained when translating into a new star system, and the Andromeda had to consume a lot of reaction mass to get up to orbital velocity so as not to fall into the white dwarf. The acceleration gave her technicians the sensation of gravity as they worked to replace burned-out optical computer boards behind Nuchy’s console. Now, once again in freefall, they were finishing up their task.

“Captain!” It was Luis Azevedo. “You need to see this!”

“Send it to my . . . damn it!” Catherine snarled. Her screens were still locked up. She unfastened her safety restraint, pushed herself out of her chair, and gracefully drifted across the command deck toward her junior officer. “What is it, Luis?” she asked, bracing herself on a nearby handhold.

“We didn’t notice at first because sensors were offline. But the optical auto-tracking picked it up as soon as the system cycled. Look.”

Catherine moved in closer to get a better look at the young officer’s display. Against the starry background of space, a shimmering blob reflected the light of Baker-3E871. It was surrounded by other such blobs, chunks of rock and ice in the star’s debris disk, but it stood out nonetheless. The image slowly zoomed in, magnified hundreds of times, until she could make out the silhouette of a large ship. The spindly vessel appeared to be slowly rotating, end over end.

“It looks like she’s adrift, Ma’am,” Luis said.

“Range?”

“Point-nine million kilometers. She’s skimming the edge of the debris disk.”

“Any radio traffic coming from her?”

“None that we’ve picked up so far.”

“Very well.” Catherine pushed herself away from her junior officer’s console, flipping over as she did so, landing right in her chair. She tapped the intercom. “Colin, are you tracking that unknown contact?”

“Roger that, skipper. Sensors are still giving me error messages, but I’ve got her on optical.”

“Good. Lay in an intercept course, shortest time. Start broadcasting a standard emergency response message. If there’s anyone alive on board, maybe they can hear us.” Catherine rapidly tapped the controls on her command console. She was pleased to see that systems were starting to come back.

Kel Morrow looked a little ragged when he appeared on her screen. Of her officers, he was the most sensitive to transit shock, and it was often a miserable experience for him. “Astrogation,” he said tersely.

“Kel, we’ve got an unidentified contact nine hundred thousand klicks ahead of us. I’m not ready to trust the sensors yet, but optical telemetry leads me to believe she’s adrift. Once you can access the database, do a historical records search and see if there are any reports of a derelict in this system.”

Astrogator Morrow raised an eyebrow. “Thinking of taking a detour, Captain?”

“I wouldn’t, but it’s not far off of our planned trajectory. It’ll give the crew something to keep busy with.” Catherine didn’t need to mention the potential monetary gain from recovering a derelict ship. If the core systems of its transit drive, which required extremely rare elements and were difficult to manufacture, were intact enough to salvage, it would pay for the reaction mass needed for the intercept hundreds of times over.

If the ship wasn’t a derelict, and was in fact in distress, then all the better. Ancient Laws of Outer Space demanded that any available ship come to the aid of another in need. In an empty system far from civilization, there was no one to enforce such laws, but that didn’t matter to Catherine Blackwood. The skipper of the Andromeda wasn’t the sort to ignore a call for help or leave a ship in obvious distress to its fate.

Klaxons sounded and Colin’s voice was broadcast throughout the ship. “Stand by for acceleration, two gravities. T-minus ninety seconds and counting. All personnel stay in your acceleration couches. Personnel not on watch, return to your berths. Stand by for acceleration, T-minus eighty seconds and counting.”

Catherine calmly fastened the restraints on her command chair, and reclined it back into the acceleration position. Her eyes lit up as she studied the blurry, magnified image of the unknown ship on her screen. Even if it proved to be nothing, at least it broke up the monotony.

* * *

Long hours ticked by as the Andromeda boosted along an intercept course intended to match the trajectory of the unknown ship. With her sensor suite fully operational once again, the Andromeda was able to thoroughly scan the adrift vessel in the visible spectrum, in the infrared, and with radar. What telemetry revealed was startling: the unknown contact was not a ship in distress. It undoubtedly had been at some point in the past, but presently it could only be classified as a derelict. She was cold, with no active emissions signature at all. Only the pale light of Baker-3E871 slightly warming one side of her hull caused her to stand out from the cold background of space.

The intense ultraviolet radiation of the dying star had bleached her hull almost white, but the computer was able to identify the ship. Her name was Agamemnon, and she was huge. From nose to tail she was seven hundred and forty meters long, and she outmassed the Andromeda by an order of magnitude. Her primary hull was long and cylindrical. Four cylindrical habitat modules were folded against this section; under acceleration, their decks were perpendicular to the ship’s axis of thrust, so that passengers could enjoy a sense of gravity. While the ship coasted, the arms were intended to rotate ninety degrees outward. They would then be spun around the ship’s axis, using centrifugal force to simulate gravity for the crew during the long haul between transit points. A lengthy but narrow spine connected the primary hull to the propulsion unit, a bulbous cluster of massive rockets, propellant tanks, and radiators.

She rotated lazily, end over end. Her hull was peppered and pockmarked with micrometeorite damage, but she was remarkably intact for being adrift in the rings of Baker-3E871.

“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 conflict between the Federation and the Post-Humanist Movement 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 the 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 party 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 advisement. 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 the 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.

“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 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 had 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.”




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