Rogue Galaxy, Episode 1: The Captain and the Werewolf (10 page)

They were in a large room, across from an open doorway leading out into a corridor. Dust motes were swirling in the still-flickering, bluish fluorescents now that the atmosphere had returned. This room contained many plastic and metal crates, of various sizes. They were stacked in racks that held them immobile in the zero-G. Although the stacks were neat, the crates’ varieties of sizes and materials gave the room a jumbled, cluttered feel. All the crates had code scramblers engaged, and since the
Canary
’s crewmen were civilized it never occurred to the men to hack through that curtain of privacy, not before confirming absolutely that this was a derelict. Fehd put his hands on some of them, as if he could learn something by touch. He was practically licking his lips at the thought of what riches those crates might hold. Then again, they could just as easily contain shipments of underwear for a species long-dead, and then where would they be?

They moved cautiously—largely thanks to Burran, but Madaku had to admit that the ship’s interior made him uneasy. Probably just the dire influence of the security specialist. Burran had suggested they send the ship’s robot over, instead of live personnel, but he hadn’t argued when Fehd said no. The presence of a mere robot would not constitute a salvage claim, and if there were any survivors aboard it could create a legally fuzzy situation, wherein the robot could be considered as forfeited to
Ironheart
’s occupants. More importantly, there were at least twenty major cultures, human and non-, that considered humanoid robots an abomination, and sending one unasked aboard their ships was one of the few ways left to spark a violent confrontation.

Of course, there were plenty of non-humanoid robot models out there. But Fehd had picked his up on the cheap. One of the few things Madaku and Burran were able to share a laugh over was the idea that the robot was, in fact, so cheap and shitty that the day they needed it, it would probably break down. But that was only a joke—the odds of anything breaking down on the
Canary
were vanishingly small, unless the ship were left derelict a few centuries as
Ironheart
had been. It had been a thousand years since the diagnostic and self-maintenance tech had become advanced enough that serious problems repaired themselves, even in bargain-basement second-hand shit.

They air-swam out of this first room. Their hands were free—all the readings they needed were displayed on the insides of their visors, and if a situation arose in which they needed weapons, their suits’ AI’s would activate its defenses and use them with better reflexes than the humans could ever manage. The firearms mag-clamped to their thighs were formalities more than anything else.

When they entered the corridor, it curved away to their left, their view obscured by the bend after twenty meters or so, but to their right it continued straight on for about forty meters before making a sharp left. Burran frowned: “Why should it be laid out so irregularly?” There were hatchways on both sides of the corridor, spaced an average of five meters apart but with noticeable variation. The hatches were not all the same make or color, and they all had different locking mechanisms. Some had no visible locking or latching mechanisms, at all.

They paused to take that in. One or two hatches might be replaced haphazardly in a ship’s lifetime. But none of them had ever been on a vessel where it was impossible to tell which make of interior hatch was the original. Not only that, but the hatches were such different sizes that it looked like the bulkhead must have been cut through in places to accommodate them. Wouldn’t it have been much easier to order or manufacture hatches that fit the already existing specifications? Could the ship’s interior parts have been intentionally mismatched, from the start?

They chose the curving path to the left. Not only did the tubular corridor curve, it also descended down deeper into the ship—they had been swimming along for many seconds before Madaku reminded himself that, in zero-G, one could just as easily say they were ascending as descending, yet he still could not shake the feeling that they were going down and not up. The walls were irregular, and the tunnel gradually narrowed. It was such a subtle change that it would have been on the mere edge of the range of human perception, except that their visor readouts kept them abreast of it. Along the walls were more crates, held in place by racks. There seemed to be no order to their placement or type. One of the crates was not really a crate at all—it looked to Madaku like a great box made of
clay
. He was finding the whole thing unsettling. There was no reason for a spaceship not to have a rational design; the fact that he couldn’t make any sense of this one’s bespoke some exotic alien intelligence unlike any he’d ever dealt with. Almost like the sort of legendary creatures that had supposedly roamed before the Hygienes.

On their left they came upon a doorway whose hatch stood open, leading into a big chamber. They floated into it, Madaku first. As he went over the threshold, Madaku spotted something that startled him, and he yelped and floundered in mid-air. Burran automatically yanked first Madaku, then Fehd behind him, placing himself between them and whatever the threat might be.

Only it didn’t seem to be much of a threat, after all. Nevertheless, each man’s breath grew faster. Even Burran’s.

Across the room, in a transparent coffin, was a woman, propped up against the coffin’s back. At this distance she was small; yet the sight of her was such a shock she seemed to fill the mind.

She had dark, nearly black hair; wavy, down to her shoulders. Her face was youngish—there was no telling what cosmetic treatments she may have had, but if she’d aged naturally she was probably around forty. Her oval face was well-proportioned, but her thin lips drooped down at the corners, and even in stasis her eyebrows seemed drawn together, giving her a severe expression. She had to be in stasis, and not dead or asleep. You could see the blood still pink under her sallow skin, despite the fact that her chest and diaphragm were completely motionless under her pinkish-gray unitard.

The three men hung back at the entryway, regaining their breath. It wasn’t only their irrational fear of ghosts, zombies, and the like that had spooked them. A crewmember in suspended animation was the kind of thing that might be surrounded by defensive boobytraps. Burran scanned even more carefully than he had done so far.

Finally he said, “Looks safe,” and began to swim toward the coffin.

Fehd hung back. “Are you sure?” he said. “Did you check for everything?”

“You can never check for
everything
, Fehd,” Burran replied, mocking Fehd’s remark from earlier, and continued on his way.

Madaku and Fehd swam across the room after him. “How long has she been there?” demanded Fehd. “Has she been in suspended animation ever since those thrusters started going cold?” Madaku couldn’t decide whether the intensity of Fehd’s tone came from his aggrievement at having his salvage rights snatched away by a survivor, or by amazement at the ship’s suspended-animation tech. Probably amazement, he decided. Credits were nice, but it wasn’t like anyone was ever likely to have so few they’d go hungry. But tech like this would be genuinely exciting.

Neither Burran nor Madaku acknowledged Fehd’s question, since they had no way of answering it yet. As they neared the coffin, Madaku started to say, “First thing, let’s see if we can figure out the readouts. If it’s been such a long hibernation, there could be complications during the revival....”

His words cut off with a gasp. They all gasped, not just him.

The woman’s eyes had popped open. Not a groggy, slow, blinking journey back into wakefulness. They snapped open, spent a millisecond roving around the chamber, then returned to the three arrivals and moved back and forth among them, fixing on first one and then another.

“Her chest isn’t moving,” said Fehd. With a chill, Madaku realized Fehd was right. She also didn’t seem to be blinking. Fehd pulled the doctor off Madaku’s thigh. He pointed it at the woman and started scanning.

“What’s it say?” asked Burran.

Fehd shook his head at the readings. He seemed to be using the doctor as an excuse not to have to raise his eyes to the eerie woman in the transparent coffin. “Just, she’s, uh, she’s coming out of suspension. Vitals still very low.”

“I can see that,” said Burran, “because her chest isn’t moving. So why is she awake?”

“Maybe it’s, um, maybe it’s just a reflex,” said Fehd.

Burran snorted.

Right now the woman was looking straight into Madaku’s eyes. He said, “That’s not a reflex.”

Her eyes bore into him—no muscle of her body seemed to have moved except for those controlling her eyes. Madaku found her expression and the thoughts behind it inscrutable, but he was certain there was a wakeful awareness behind those eyes.

Her gaze continued to move from one to the other of them. They didn’t dart back and forth in confusion. They went from one to the other at a slow, steady pace, as if she were evaluating them, summing them up from her distant, aloof vantage.

“Yeah,” said Burran. “Madaku’s right. She sees us.”

––––––––

I
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Ironheart,
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