Upon a Sea of Stars (16 page)
Read Upon a Sea of Stars Online
Authors: A. Bertram Chandler
Chapter 5
SLOWLY THE RANGE CLOSED,
until the derelict was visible as a tiny, bright star a few degrees to one side of the Lorn Sun. The range closed, and
Rim Mamelute’s
powerful telescope was brought into play. It showed very little; the stranger ship appeared to be an almost featureless spindle, the surface of its hull unbroken by vanes, sponsons or antennae. And still, now that the distance could be measured in scant tens of miles, the alien construction was silent, making no reply to the signals directed at it by both the salvage tug’s communications officers.
Grimes sat in the little control room, letting Williams handle the ship. The Mate crouched in his chair, intent upon his tell-tale instruments, nudging the tug closer and closer to the free-falling ship with carefully timed rocket blasts, matching velocities with the skill that comes only from long practice. He looked up briefly from his console to speak to Grimes. “She’s hot, Skipper. Bloody hot.”
“We’ve radiation armor,” said Grimes. The words were question rather than statement.
“O’ course. The
Mamelute’s
ready for anything. Remember the
Rim Eland
disaster? Her pile went critical. We brought her in. I boarded her when we took her in tow, just in case there was anybody still living. There wasn’t. It was like bein’ inside a radioactive electric fryin’ pan . . .”
A
charming simile
. . . thought Grimes.
He used the big, mounted binoculars to study the derelict. They showed him little more than had the telescope at longer range. So she was hot, radioactive. It seemed that the atomic blast that had initiated the radiation had come from outside, not inside. There were, after all, protuberances upon that hull, but they had been melted and then re-hardened, like guttering candle wax. There were the remains of what must have been vaned landing gear. There was the stump of what could have been, once, a mast of some kind, similar to the retractable masts of the spaceships with which Grimes was familiar, the supports for Deep Space radio antennae and radar scanners.
“Mr. Williams,” he ordered, “we’ll make our approach from the other side of the derelict.”
“You’re the boss, Skipper.”
Brief accelerations crushed Grimes down into the padding of his chair, centrifugal force, as
Mamelute’s
powerful gyroscopes turned her about her short axis, made him giddy. Almost he regretted having embarked upon this chase in person. He was not used to small ships, to the violence of their motions. He heard, from somewhere below, a crash of kitchenware. He hoped that Sonya had not been hurt.
She had not been—not physically, at any rate. Somehow, even though the tug was falling free once more, she contrived to stamp into the control room. She was pale with temper, and the smear of some rich, brown sauce on her right cheek accentuated her pallor. She glared at her husband and demanded, “What the hell’s going on? Can’t you give us some warning before indulging in a bout of astrobatics?”
Williams chuckled to himself and made some remark about the unwisdom of amateurs shipping out in space tugs. She turned on him, then, and said that she had served in tugs owned by the Federation Survey Service, and that they had been, like all Federation star ships, taut ships, and that any officer who failed to warn all departments of impending maneuvers would soon find himself busted down to Spaceman, Third Class.
Before the Mate could make an angry reply Grimes intervened. He said smoothly, “It was my fault, Sonya. But I was so interested in the derelict that I forgot to renew the alarm. After all, it was sounded as we began our approach. . . .”
“I know that. But I was prepared for an approach, not this tumbling all over the sky like a drunken bat.”
“Once again, I’m sorry. But now you’re here, grab yourself the spare chair and sit down. This is the situation. All the evidence indicates that there’s been some sort of atomic explosion. That ship is
hot
. But I think that the other side of the hull will be relatively undamaged.”
“It is,” grunted Williams.
The three of them stared out of the viewports. The shell plating, seen from this angle, was dull, not bright, pitted with the tiny pores that were evidence of frequent passages through swarms of micrometeorites. At the stern, one wide vane stood out sharp and clear in the glare of
Mamelute’s
searchlights. Forward, the armor screens over the control room ports were obviously capable of being retracted, were not fused to the hull. There were sponsons from which projected the muzzles of weapons—they could have been cannon or laser projectors, but what little was visible was utterly unfamiliar. There was a telescopic mast, a-top which was a huge, fragile-seeming radar scanner, motionless.
And just abaft the sharp stem there was the name.
No,
thought Grimes, studying the derelict through the binoculars,
two names.
It was the huge, sprawling letters, crude daubs of black paint, that he read first.
Freedom
, they spelled. Then there were the other symbols, gold-embossed, half obscured by the dark pigment. There was something wrong about them, a subtle disproportion, an oddness of spacing. But they made sense—after a while. They did not belong to the alphabet with which Grimes was familiar, but they must have been derived from it. There was the triangular “D”, the “I” that was a fat, upright oblong, the serpentine “S” . . .
“Distriyir. . .”
muttered Grimes.
“Destroyer?”
He passed the glasses, on their universal mount, to Sonya. “What do you make of this? What branch of the human race prints like that? What people have simplified their alphabet by getting rid of the letter ‘E’?”
She adjusted the focus to suit her own vision. She said at last, “That painted-on-name is the work of human hands all right. But the other . . . I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before. There’s a certain lack of logicality—human logicality, that is. Oh, that stylized ‘D’ is logical enough. But the substitution of ‘I’ for ‘E’—if it
is
a substitution . . . And then, as far as
we
are concerned, a destroyer is a class of ship—not a ship’s name . . .”
“I seem to recall,” Grimes told her, “that there was once a warship called
Dreadnought
—and the dreadnoughts have been a class of warship ever since the first ironclads were launched on Earth’s seas.”
“All right, Mr. amateur naval historian—but have you ever, in the course of your very wide reading on your favorite subject, come across mention of a ship called
Destroyer
—and spelled without a single ‘E’? There are non-humans mixed up in this somewhere—and highly intelligent non-humans at that.”
“And humans,” said Grimes.
“But we’ll never find out anything just by talking about it,” grumbled the Mate. “An’ the sooner we take this bitch in tow, the shorter the long drag back to Port Forlorn. I’d make fast alongside—but even here, in the blast shadow, that hull is too damn’ hot. It’ll have to be tow wires from the outriggers—an’ keep our fingers crossed that they don’t get cut by our exhaust . . .”
“Take her in tow, then board,” said Sonya.
“O’ course. First things first. There’ll be nobody alive inside that radioactive can . . .”
The intercommunication telephone was buzzing furiously. Grimes picked up the instrument. “Commodore here.”
“Mayhew, sir.” The telepath’s voice was oddly muffled. He sounded as though he had been crying. “It’s Lassie, sir. She’s dead. . . .”
A happy release,
thought Grimes.
But what am I supposed to do about it?
“One of her nightmares, sir,” Mayhew babbled on. “I was inside her mind, and I tried to awaken her. But I couldn’t. There was this huge rat—and there were the sharp yellow teeth of it, and the stink of it. . . . It was so . . . it was so real, so vivid. And it was the fear that killed her—I could feel her fear, and it was almost too much for me. . . .”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mayhew,” said Grimes inadequately. “I’m sorry. I will see you later. But we are just about to take the derelict in tow, and we are busy.”
“I . . . I understand, sir.”
And then Grimes relaxed into the padding of his chair, watching, not without envy, as Williams jockeyed the salvage tug into position ahead of the derelict, then carefully matched velocity. The outriggers were extruded, and then there was the slightest shock as the little missiles, each with a powerful magnetic grapnel as its warhead, were fired.
Contact was made, and then Williams, working with the utmost care, eased
Rim Mamelute
around in a great arc, never putting too much strain on the towing gear, always keeping the wires clear of the tug’s incandescent exhaust. It was pretty to watch.
Even so, when at last it was over, when at last the Lorn Star was almost directly astern, he could not resist the temptation of asking, “But why all this expenditure of reaction mass and time to ensure a bows-first tow, Mr. Williams?”
“S.O.P., Skipper. It’s more convenient if the people in the towed ship can see where they’re going.”
“But it doesn’t look as though there are any people. Not live ones, that is.”
“But we could be putting a prize crew aboard her, Skipper.”
Grimes thought about saying something about the radio-activity, then decided not to bother.
“You just can’t win, John,” Sonya told him.
Chapter 6
IN THEORY
one can perform heavy work while clad in radiation armor. One can do so in practice—provided that one has been through a rigorous course of training. Pendeen, Second Engineer of
Rim Mamelute
, had been so trained. So, of course, had been Mr. Williams—but Grimes had insisted that the Mate stay aboard the tug while he, with Sonya and the engineer, effected an entry into the hull of the derelict. Soon, while the boarding party was making its exploratory walk over the stranger ship’s shell plating, he had been obliged to order Williams to cut the drive; sufficient velocity had been built up so that both vessels were now in free fall away from the sun.
Even in free fall it was bad enough. Every joint of the heavy suit was stiff, every limb had so much mass that great physical effort was required to conquer inertia. Weary and sweating heavily, Grimes forced himself to keep up with his two companions, by a great effort of will contrived to maintain his side of the conversation in a voice that did not betray his poor physical condition—
He was greatly relieved when they discovered, towards the stern, what was obviously an airlock door. Just a hair-thin crack in the plating it was, outlining a circular port roughly seven feet in diameter. There were no signs of external controls, and the crack was too thin to allow the insertion of any tool.
“Send for the bell, sir?” asked Pendeen, his normally deep voice an odd treble in Grimes’ helmet phones.
“The bell? Yes, yes. Of course. Carry on, Mr. Pendeen.”
“Al to Bill,” Grimes heard. “Do you read me? Over.”
“Bill to Al. Loud an’ clear. What can I do for you?”
“We’ve found the airlock. But we want the bell.”
“You would. Just stick around. It’ll be over.”
“And send the cutting gear while you’re about it.”
“Will do. Stand by.”
“Had any experience with the Laverton Bell, sir?” asked Pendeen, his voice not as respectful as it might have been.
“No. No actual working experience, that is.”
“I have,” said Sonya.
“Good. Then you’ll know what to do when we get it.”
Grimes, looking towards
Rim Mamelute
, could see that something bulky was coming slowly towards them along one of the tow wires, the rocket that had given the packet its initial thrust long since burned out. He followed the others towards the stem of the derelict, but stood to one side, held to the plating by the magnetic soles of his boots, as they unclipped the bundle from the line. He would have helped them to carry it back aft, but they ignored him.
Back at the airlock valve, Sonya and Pendeen worked swiftly and competently, releasing the fastenings, unfolding what looked like a tent of tough white plastic. This had formed the wrapper for other things—including a gas bottle, a laser torch and a thick tube of adhesive. Without waiting for instructions Sonya took this latter, removed the screw cap and, working on her hands and knees, used it to describe a glistening line just outside the crack that marked the door. Then all three of them, standing in the middle of the circle, lifted the fabric above their heads, unfolding it as they did so. Finally, with Grimes and Pendeen acting as tent poles, Sonya neatly fitted the edge of the shaped canopy to the ring of adhesive, now and again adding a further gob of the substance from the tube.
“Stay as you are, sir,” the engineer said to Grimes, then fell to a squatting position. His gloved hands went to the gas cylinder, to the valve wheel. A white cloud jetted out like a rocket exhaust, then faded to invisibility. Around the boarding party the walls of the tent bellied outwards, slowly tautened, distended to their true shape by the expanding helium. Only towards the end was the hiss of the escaping gas very faintly audible.
Pendeen shut the valve decisively, saying, “That’s that. Is she all tight, Sonya?”
“All tight, Al,” she replied.
“Good.” With a greasy crayon he drew a circle roughly in the center of the airlock door, one large enough to admit a spacesuited body. He picked up the laser torch, directed its beam downwards, thumbed the firing button. The flare of vaporizing metal was painfully bright, outshining the helmet lights, reflected harshly from the white inner surface of the plastic igloo. There was the illusion of suffocating heat—or was it more than only an illusion? Pendeen switched off the torch and straightened, looking down at the annulus of still-glowing metal. With an effort he lifted his right foot, breaking the contact of the magnetized sole with the plating. He brought the heel down sharply. The
clang
, transmitted through the fabric of their armor, was felt rather than heard by the others.
And then the circular plate was falling slowly, into the darkness of the airlock chamber, and the rough manhole was open so that they could enter.
Grimes was first into the alien ship, followed by Sonya and then Pendeen. It was light enough in the little compartment once they were into it, the beams of their helmet lights reflected from the white-painted walls. On the inner door there was a set of manual controls that worked—once Grimes realized that the spindle of the wheel had a left handed thread. Beyond the inner door there was an alleyway, and standing there was a man.
The Commodore whipped the pistol from his holster, his reflexes more than compensating for the stiffness of the joints of his suit. Then, slowly, he returned the weapon to his belt. This man was dead. Radiation may have killed him, but it had not killed all the bacteria of decay present in his body. Some freak of inertial and centrifugal forces, coming into play when the derelict had been taken in tow, had flung him to a standing posture, and the magnetic soles of his rough sandals—Grimes could see the gleam of metal—had held him to the deck.
So he was dead, and he was decomposing, his skin taut and darkly purple, bulging over the waistband of the loincloth—it looked like sacking—that was his only clothing. He was dead—and Grimes was suddenly grateful for the sealed suit that he was wearing, the suit that earlier he had been cursing, that kept out the stench of him.
Gently, with pity and pointless tenderness, he put his gloved hands to the waist of the corpse, lifted it free of the deck, shifted it to one side.
“We must be just above engineroom level,” said Sonya, her voice deliberately casual.
“Yes,” agreed Grimes. “I wonder if this ship has an axial shaft. If she has, it will be the quickest way of getting to the control room.”
“That will be the best place to start investigations,” she said.
They moved on through the alleyway, using the free fall shuffle that was second nature to all of them, letting the homing instinct that is part of the nature of all spacemen guide them. They found more bodies, women as well as men, sprawled in untidy attitudes, hanging like monstrous mermen and merwomen in a submarine cave. They tried to ignore them, as they tried to ignore the smaller bodies, those of children, and came at last, at the end of a short, radial alleyway, to the stout pillar of the axial shaft.
There was a door in the pillar, and it was open, and one by one they passed through it and then began pulling themselves forward along the central guide rod, ignoring the spiral ramp that lined the tunnel. Finally they came to a conventional enough hatchway, but the valve sealing the end of the shaft was jammed. Grimes and Sonya fell back to let Pendeen use the laser torch. Then they followed him into the control room.
