A Talent for War (37 page)

She tapped the keyboard, and a stored image of the stranger ship unfolded on the monitor. She homed in on the bridge. It was dark, of course. But it looked as alert and deadly as it had in the simulations of the raid on the Spinners, and the action at Rigel. "I was reading his book during the night," she said.

"Man and Olympian?"

"Yes. He was a complex man. I can't say I always agree with him, but he has a forceful way of stating his position. He comes down rather hard, for example, on Socrates."

"I know. Socrates is not one of his favorite people."

Her lips formed a half-smile. "Man had no respect for anybody."

"His critics agreed. But of course Sim blasted them, too, in a second book that he didn't live to finish." Critics have all the advantage, he'd once said, because they wait until you 've died, and then they get the last word.

"It's a pity." She sat back and locked her hands behind her head.

"They never present this side of him in the schools. The Christopher Sim that the kids get to see comes off as perfect, preachy, and unapproachable." Her brow furrowed. "I wonder what he'd have made of that thing out there?"

"He'd have boarded. Or, if he couldn't board, he'd have waited for more information, and found something else to think about in the meantime."

Her hull was seared and blistered and pocked. It had a patchwork quality imposed by the periodic replacement of plates. Navigational and communication pods were scored, shields toward the after section of the ship appeared to have buckled, and the drive housing was missing.

"Nevertheless," said Chase, "I don't see any major damage. There is one strange thing, though."

We were approaching from above and behind in the Centaur's capsule. We were wedged in pretty tight. The capsule itself isn't much more than a plexibubble with a set of magnetics. "The drive housing wasn't blown off. It was removed. And I'm not sure, but it looks as if the drive units themselves are missing." She pointed toward two pod-shaped objects that I'd assumed were the Armstrongs. "No," she said. "They're only the outer shells. I can't see any cores. But they should be visible."

"They have to be there," I said. "Unless someone deliberately disabled the ship after it arrived."

She shrugged. "Who knows? The rest of it doesn't look too good either. I'd bet there's a lot of jury-rigging down there."

"Unfinished repairs," I said.

"Yes. Repairs made in a hurry. Not the way I'd want to take a ship into combat. But, except for the Armstrongs, it looks serviceable enough." The aguan solenoids, through which Corsarius had hurled the lightning, protruded stiff and cold from an array of mounts. "So do they," she added.

But the chill of age was on the vessel.

Chase sat in the pilot's seat, perplexed, and perhaps apprehensive. The multichannel was open, sweeping frequencies that would have been available to Corsarius, as though we expected a transmission. But we heard only the clear hiss of the stars. "The histories must be wrong," I said. "Obviously, it wasn't destroyed off Rigel."

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"Obviously." She adjusted the image on the monitors, which needed no adjusting. The Centaur's computers were matching schematics of the derelict with ancient naval records of Corsarius, again and again, in endless detail. "It makes me wonder what else they might have been wrong about."

"Does this mean Sim might have survived Rigel?"

Chase shook her head. "I'm damned if I know what it means."

I pursued the thought. "If he did, if he lived through it, why would he come out here? Hell, this was a long way from the war zone anyhow: could Corsarius even have made this kind of flight?"

"Oh, yes," Chase said. "The range of any of these vessels is only limited by the quantity of supplies they can get on board. No: they could have done it. The question is why they would want to."

Maybe it wasn't voluntary. Maybe Sim and his ship somehow fell into the hands of the Ashiyyur. Was it possible that he lived through the Rigel action, but that he was injured in some way, and wandered off afterward, not knowing who he was? Ridiculous. Even if there was something to the notion of the duplicate ships, what would any of them be doing here? Who would have had time, in the worst days of the Resistance, to come so far with a warship that must have been desperately needed at home?

We drifted out over the bow, past the fierce eyes and beak of the harridan, past the weapons clusters bristling in the ship's snout. Chase turned us in a narrow loop. The hull fell sharply away, and the blue sun-splashed planetary surface swam across the viewports. Then it too dropped off, giving way to the broad sweep of black sky.

We talked a lot. Chattered really. About how well Chase's leg had healed, about how good it would be to get home, about how much money we would probably make from all this. Neither of us seemed to have any inclination to let the conversation die. And meanwhile we drew alongside the derelict. Chase took us the length of the hull, and stopped by the main entry port.

"In case you had any doubts," she said, raising her voice to indicate there was something significant to say, "she's blind and dead. Her scopes have made no effort to track us."

We put on the helmets to the pressure suits we were wearing, and Chase drew the air from the cockpit. When the green lights went on, she pushed up the canopy, and we drifted out. Chase moved to the entry port, while I paused to look at a set of Cerullian characters stencilled on the hull. They were the ship's designation, and they matched the characters on the Corsarius of the simulations.

The hatch rotated open, and a yellow light blinked on inside. We stumbled clumsily into the airlock. Red lamps glowed on a status board set into the bulkhead.

"Ship's on limited power," said Chase, her voice subdued over the commlink. "There's no gravity. I would guess that it's in some sort of maintenance mode. Just enough to keep things from freezing."

We activated our boot magnets. The closing cycle for the outer hatch didn't work. The stud lit up when I touched it, but nothing happened. Worse, the lamps blinked to orange, and air began to hiss into the compartment. Chase tugged on the outer door, pulling it shut. We locked it tight.

Air pressure built up quickly, the bolts on the inner assembly slid out of their wells, the warning lights went to white, and the door into the ship swung noiselessly on oiled hinges.

We looked out into a dimly lit chamber. The interior of the most celebrated warship in history!

Chase held out one gloved hand, took mine, and squeezed. Then she stood aside to let me pass.

I ducked my head and stepped through.

The room was filled with cabinets, computer consoles, and large storage enclosures loaded with gauges and meters and electronic wrenches. Pressure suits hung near the airlock, and a computer diagram of the vessel covered one wall. At each end of the room, we could see a sealed hatch of
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the same design as the one through which we had entered.

Chase glanced at the gauge she wore on her wrist. "Oxygen content is okay," she said. "It's a bit low, but it's breathable. The temperature's not quite three degrees. A trifle cool." She released the studs that secured her helmet, lifted the headpiece, and cautiously inhaled.

"They turned down the heat," I said, removing my own.

"Yes," she agreed. "That's precisely what it is. Somebody expected to come back." I was having a hard time keeping my eyes off the hatches, as though either of them might swing open at any moment. She advanced on the row of pressure suits, one cautious step at a time, the way someone enters a cold ocean from a beach. When she reached them, she stood counting and then announced there were eight. "They're all there," she added.

"You didn't expect that?"

"It was possible that survivors of whatever disaster overtook this ship went outside to make repairs, and were swept away."

"We need to look at the bridge," I said. "That's where we'll get some answers."

"In a minute, Alex." She released the after hatch, pulled it open, and passed through. "I'll be right back," her voice said on the commlink.

"Keep a channel open," I said. "I want to hear what's happening."

I listened to her footsteps for several minutes thereafter, and then the heavy clank of more hatch bolts sliding back. Considerations of what my position would be were something to happen to Chase left me listening anxiously for her return, wondering whether I should go after her, and trying to recall the steps necessary to pilot the Centaur. My God, I suddenly realized I didn't even know which way the Confederacy was.

I wandered among the assorted black boxes and cable and God knows what else, stuff I couldn't even begin to identify, circuit boards, glass rods, and long poles with a greenish viscous liquid in them.

Some of the cabinets seemed to belong to individual crew members. Names were stenciled on them: VanHorn, Ekklinde, Matsumoto, Pornok, Talino, Collander, Smyslov. My God: the seven deserters!

Nothing was locked. I opened the cabinets one by one, and found oscillators, meters, wire, generators, and coveralls. Not much else. Lisa Pornok (whose photo I had seen in the records somewhere, and who was a tiny, dark-skinned woman with huge luminous eyes) had left an antique commlink that would have had to be carried in a pocket, and a comb. Tom Matsumoto had hung a brightly colored period hat on a hook. Manda Collander had owned a few books, written Cerullian. I approached Talino with awe, but there were only a half-dozen journals, filled with fuel usage and shield efficiency reports, a workshirt (he was apparently considerably smaller than I'd been led to believe), and several data clips that turned out to be concerts.

I found only one photo. It was of a woman and a child, left by Tor Smyslov. The child was probably a boy. I couldn't be sure.

Everything was secured in bands, clamps, or compartments. Nothing to rattle around loose.

Equipment was clean and polished. It might have been stowed the day before.

I heard Chase approaching long before she stepped through the hatch. "Well," she said, "there's one theory blown."

"What was that?"

"I thought maybe they'd gone down to the surface, and there'd been an accident of some sort.

Or maybe the lander just quit on them and they couldn't get back."

"Hell, Chase," I said, dismissing the idea, "they wouldn't all have left the ship."

"No. Not if there were a full crew on board. But maybe there were only a couple of survivors."

She threw up her hands. "Damn, I guess that doesn't make any sense either. It seems to me they must have come here to hide. The war was lost, and the mutes were probably taking no
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prisoners. And then the drive quit on them. Battle damage maybe. They couldn't get home. If the radio was knocked out, it could have happened in a way that no one would have known. In fact, in this kind of ship, the radio's probably not capable of extreme long-range communications anyhow. So if they got into trouble, they couldn't get help. At least not from any human world.

"Something else, too: I was right the Armstrong units. They're missing. There's nothing here but housings. This goddam thing has no stardrive. It's got magnetics for linear propulsion, but you wouldn't want to do any long distance traveling in it. The thing that's really strange is that they had to patch the overhead when the units came out. That's heavy duty work. It couldn't have happened here."

"Then how'd the ship get here?"

"I have no idea," she said. "By the way, the lander's still in its bay. Pressure suits are all accounted for. How'd the crew get off?"

"There might have been a second ship," I said.

"Or they're still here. Somewhere."

Most of the luminous panels had failed. The corridors were filled with shadows which retreated before the beams cast by our handheld lamps. None of the elevators worked, and there was a trace of ozone in the air, suggesting that one of the compressors was overheating. One compartment was full of drifting water-globes; another was scorched where an electrical fire had burned itself out. From somewhere deep in the ship came a slow, ponderous heartbeat. "It's a hatch opening and closing," Chase said. "Another malfunction."

Progress was slow. Getting around in null gravity is cumbersome, and we had trouble with most of the hatches. All were shut. Some responded to their controls; others had to be winched open.

Chase tried twice to establish normal power from auxiliary boards, but had no luck on either occasion. Both times the green lamps went on, indicating that the functions had been executed, but nothing happened. So we continued to clump about in the semi-dark. One hatch resisted our efforts so fiercely that we wondered whether there wasn't a vacuum behind it, although the gauges read normal. In the end, we went down one level and bypassed it.

We talked little, and we kept our voices down.

"Chow hall."

"This looks like an operations center. Computers seem to be working."

"Private quarters."

"No clothes or personal gear."

"There wasn't much back in the storage units either. They must have taken everything with them when they left."

It's been a good many years now since Chase and I took that walk through the belly of the ship.

The chill that lay heavy in Corsarius on that occasion pervades my nights still.

"Showers."

"Damn, look at this, Alex. It's an armory."

Lasers, disrupters, beam generators, needlepoints. Nukes. There were a dozen or so fist-sized nukes.

We stopped in front of another closed hatch. "This should be it," she said.

And I wondered also whether, like Scott, I was about to become a driven man.

The door responded to the controls and opened.

Stars were visible in a wraparound plexiglass viewport, and lamps blinked in the dark.

"Christopher Sim's bridge," one of us whispered.

"Hold on a second," said Chase. The lights came on.

I recognized its type immediately from the simuls: the three stations; the overhead bubble like the one in which I'd sat during the raid on Hrinwhar; the banks of navigation, communications, and fire control equipment.