The Mind Field (7 page)

Javier could see the jumpdrive. Big, honking monster sitting there in front of twin pulse thrusters. That thing over there was probably an auxiliary power reactor, just from the color. Air scrubbers all along that wall. Way smaller than he expected, so either more efficient design than he thought, or smaller crew.

“Looks good,” he said finally. “Everything accounted for. Environment safe. Only wandering monsters are out in the hallway.”

That got him a sour look from all three girls. Of course, he wasn’t holding a gun on a closed hatch. In a ship that was centuries old, stuck inside a minefield. Did they think they needed the whole van Helsing routine?

“Sascha and me next,” Sykora commanded. “Hajna with Aritza and Yu last.”

“Aye, sir,” replied the girls and the gun bunny, on cue.

Javier nodded sloppily. Her, he might salute, just to piss her off. He might even do it right, just to show her, exactly once, that he could.

He refrained. Barely.

He typed instead.
Company coming. Stay sharp.

Si, commandante.

See? That, right there, was how you did snark. He was so proud of his girl.

Javier thought about going back up to the Cryonics facility while the amazon was elsewhere, but decided that the gun bunny would just interfere and stop him before he could do anything interesting.

Might as well wait.

He was quickly bored, waiting the three minutes for the two women to cycle through the airlock.

Anything you want me to do while we wait?

Not that wouldn’t give you away. Look for rat droppings. That will be the clue that the environmental systems are compromised.

Fresh or dried?

After this long, anything you can see is a problem.

It would, however, give Sykora something to shoot. That would probably improve her humor. Silver linings.

It seemed like forever before he and Ilan finally made it onto the big deck. It was noticeably warmer back here. Not warm, but the various machines seemed to be turning over regularly to provide power from the solar batteries. And the life support systems had been left on. That was a good sign.

Or a bad one. Hard to tell. Still, Javier had three armed women handy. Not exactly a harem, but this wasn’t exactly his idea of a bordello. Generally.

“Ilan,” he said, shaking himself from his reverie and dragging the machinist’s mate along with him, “this is the environmental system. I’m familiar with the theoretical design. You get to learn it. Don’t do anything stupid. Yet.”

“Gosh, sir,” Yu replied with an equal–parts sloppy and sarcastic salute, “I shall endeavor to live up to the standards of excellence you embody.”

Javier did a double–take, just to make sure the man was kidding. You never knew with engineers. He might have gone all professional and stuff. Bad juju.

Javier gave him the stink–eye, just in case, and then headed in the direction of the APU. It seemed to be putting out a baseline.

What, however, needed a baseline? Life support would barely require a quarter of the juice flowing out. The other options made him nervous. More nervous. Almost as nervous as his paranoid cohorts.

Okay, maybe not that bad, but bad.

Mentally, he made a list as he cracked open an access panel and shined a pocket light in.
Storm Gauntlet’s
Chief Engineer, Andreea Dalca, could probably have it tuned and humming in half an hour. She was that good. One of her people would probably take a half–day, just to be sure. They might need to string a power–line over from the big ship, if what was using the juice was what he feared. Not a good thing to interrupt.

Engines were next. Primary tanks were long since drained, but could be filled up pretty quickly by cracking hydrogen from the water tanks that showed mostly full. In a pinch, Javier had once hijacked a comet and used a small pulsar to cut a section out to melt for the water.

If all else failed, there was a whole planet below. Water would not be a problem. Whether the fusion torch would work, that was a different question. And not his concern. Let Dalca’s people solve it. Tomorrow.

“Javier, I thought you said this would be hard,” Ilan mock–whined from the corner.

“Nope,” he replied with a smile. “Sledge–hammer stupid. Brute force machine.”

“I know,” Ilan smiled. “Wash the screens, flush the primary coolant and recycle it. I don’t have all the tools I need, but this won’t take more than an hour. Why do we use bio–scrubbers?”

“A quarter the size, Ilan,” Javier noted, “and about a thousand times more efficient. This air would get pretty stale after a month.”

Javier looked around at the jump engines and the thrusters. “Ship like this is designed to sail point to point in small jumps, and land on a planet every two to three weeks, or dock with a station. Not to make long sails like
Storm Gauntlet
does. And it would still have a very small crew doing it.”

“Well,” the machinist’s mate said smugly, “I can fix this easy enough.”

“Good,” Javier said. “Make a list of what you think you need and then go do the same thing on the APU. I expect we’ll need to bring over a portable generator or run lines across the way so we can bring it off–line and work on it. Don’t worry about the engines until the Chief comes over and inspects them.”

“Roger that, sir.”

Javier turned and realized that all three women were staring at him. Not hostile. More like open–mouthed shock. It was a weird feeling, surprising this particular group. Felt good.

He forgot, sometimes, that they never saw him in his engineering and fix–it mode.
Concord
Fleet
officers were trained for this sort of thing as a matter of course. Hell, fixing the bio–scrubbers on
Storm Gauntlet
when he first arrived was the original reason he hadn’t ended up as a slave on a farming world.

He smiled innocently at Sykora. “Nobody to shoot here,” he needled. “Orders?”

Part Six

Javier stood outside the hatch and took a deep breath. Ilan and the male gun bunny had been left in engineering to clean things up. He had the three women with him, four with Suvi, as he contemplated the little brass plaque hung at eyeball level.

Cryonics Lab.

To Sykora and Hajna and Sascha, just words. They weren’t trained in this sort of thing. Hell, almost nobody was, these days. The technology was used so much less today than it used to be. Mostly for medical purposes, in a total catastrophe. Ships didn’t need it, as life support systems were so much better now and Jumpdrives could hop so much farther in one go.

He took a second deep breath.

“Why are you nervous, Aritza?” the amazon asked, her voice almost blowing warm air in his ear.

He did not, quite, jump out of his skin. He did turn and look her in the eye, from a distance of about eight centimeters. Biting her seemed rude. Kissing her, more so. Both would be equal amounts of surprise as payback. Maybe tomorrow.

“What’s on the other side of this door,” he said, just loud enough for the three to hear him.

Safeties clicked off in the ominous silence.

“Oh, put them away,” he half–snarled. “There’s nothing in there to worry you. You’re the bogeyman, remember?”

That nearly got him punched. By more than just Sykora.

They did holster the weapons, though, so Javier could relax.

Suvi took up watch above and behind, where she could see down the long hallway and over any of the bodies in the way. She was prepared, in case she needed to rescue him. Again.

Javier turned back to the door and placed his palm flat on the access plate. Given the circumstances, he could see someone actually locking it, but that would be an oversight, not a design feature.

The hatch clicked back a centimeter into the room and slid out of the way on powerful pneumatic sledges.

Javier reached out a hand and caught Sykora before she could complete her step forward.

“Not yet,” he whispered, almost intimately as she rounded on him. “Let it breathe.”

“Breathe?” she asked, almost as quiet.

“It has been closed up for a very long time. The air is likely to be a little foul with volatile trace elements.”

“What’s in there, Javier?” she asked, turning her head to scan the room beyond.

Javier? We’re back to Javier, are we?

“Not what,” he said, a little louder, of the other two to hear as well. “Who.”

“Who?” That got her head spun all the way back around to face him. A hand was on the pommel of the pistol, ready to draw and fire.

Javier leaned forward and sniffed carefully at the breeze blowing softly into his face. A little rank. Extremely dry. Cold, where the rest of the ship had been merely cool. Right about what he had expected, from the things he had read, once upon a time.

Some days, he hated being right.

Javier walked forward instead of answering, one hand still on Sykora’s arm, but more as a guide than a restraint. As if he could actually stop a woman like that if she set her mind to something.

She trailed along anyway, half a step behind him, probably prepared to throw him into the dragon’s maw to give her the half–second she would need to draw and kill it. It was how she thought.

The room was larger than he had expected. Or rather, the walls were where they should be, but less space was taken up.

Based on the size of the ship, he had expected two, or possibly three big boxes in here. Sarcophagi. Coffins.

There was only one, tucked back into the corner, although he could see the power couplings for two more coming out of the walls.

One was enough.

Javier walked to it quietly, hearing the slight hum of the device in the still air, feeling it in his feet when he got close and stood over it.

Ancient kings on the Homeworld had been buried like this. Big black box, three meters or so long, two wide, one tall. This was metal instead of stone, and the inscriptions on the sides were medical instead of propaganda.

The goal was still immortality.

He glanced over at the three women to make sure they were still with him. They were, but their faces showed growing apprehension. They were beginning to understand things, at least a little.

He heard Suvi shift a little forward just inside the door, where she had a good view of the room and could still interfere if someone tried to sneak up on them. They had cleared the ship room by room, but Sykora was a stickler for those sorts of details and he wasn’t in the mood to argue with her. Not right now.

Javier leaned forward for a better view. The top half of the sarcophagus lid was clear, covered over with a thin rime of frost. It was active. Whether it had worked was a different story.

He reached down pulled off a glove. He would need the body heat.

That warm hand wiped away the layer of frost ice from the glass.

Inside, the face of a young woman, instead of a desiccated mummy. She was dressed in a simple black shirt, with the same logo worked on both sides of the collar.

Javier blew out a breath he had forgotten he was holding.

“That’s who,” he said, quietly, reverently. Without a nav computer, he couldn’t even begin to guess the odds of success. Machines like this were supposed to be used for much shorter periods. Months. Maybe as much as a year, in a pinch. But centuries? The mind boggled.

“Who is she?”

Javier wasn’t sure who spoke. It was a quiet whisper, almost an intrusion into the realm.

“She is a Shepherd of the Word,” Javier said simply.

Part Seven

Zakhar looked down at the coffin. This was why they paid him the big money, so he could be in charge at moments like this. Life and death decisions. Command.

His Science Officer stood to one side, consulting quietly with the Chief Engineer. Andreea Dalca was a broad, compact woman, a product of high–gravity world. She was a first rate engineer, and a complete introvert. How she and Javier got along so well was a mystery for the ages. But it worked.

Right now, they were deep in a very esoteric, technical conversation. He followed about a third of it. Nobody else in the room probably got a tenth.

Sykora and her two pet pathfinders were here as well, staying mostly out of the way in a corner. The room wasn’t crowded, and he wasn’t sure they would leave if ordered, given the situation. It was certainly unique for him. Best let it slide for now.

Out in the hall, he could hear others moving around. Mostly Dalca’s people, doing the sorts of maintenance tasks any ship accumulated, even at rest. Given the age and state of the ship, they were already money ahead if they could get it to any port. If they could locate the right sort of collector or museum, they might be rich.

That would bring a new set of problems. He would burn that bridge when he got there. They had a much more interesting problem today.

What to do with the ship’s owner?

Andreea and Javier seemed to think that there was a good chance she could be revived with no long–term damage. At which point, she became his problem.

Zakhar hadn’t set out to be a slavemaster. He was a
Concord Fleet
veteran, retired, damn it. They had saved the galaxy when
Neu Berne
had set out to conquer it. That it had been done before his birth didn’t reduce the fact that they were supposed to be the good guys.

Javier looking at him that way didn’t help. It was a reminder that they were brothers, of a sort. Men who took the oath.

Unconsciously, he found himself playing with his class ring. Concord Fleet Academy, Class of ’49. An Officer and Gentleman, by Act of Congress Enshrined.

If he thawed her out, he would have a brand new kitten. What was the ancient saying? If you saved a life, you were responsible for that life. He could order the plug pulled instead, but he didn’t want to know which of his crew would actually obey that sort of order. Or how much of his crew he would lose, on a personal level, if he became that sort of Captain.

There really was no doubt what his answer would be. Javier and Sykora had to have known that. But they had been in complete agreement that he had to come over and make it. This was only the third time they had ever done something like that.