Curse of the Iris (3 page)

“Quarterdeck, we're opening the outer lock.”

Grigsby moved the sampler aside, thumbed the hatch controls, then drew his carbine and clicked the safety off. Tycho did the same. The weight of the blaster felt reassuring in his hands. The
Comet
's thick outer airlock door retracted into her hull.

“Let's go then,” Carlo said, activating the lamp on his helmet but leaving the pistols in his belt. He took a step forward into the derelict, with Grigsby by his side. Their feet gently lifted from the deck, leaving the two men floating. Once again Richards and Porco hesitated, peering into the darkness with their carbines raised.

“Honestly, you two,” Carlo said. “We're the most dangerous things within a million kilometers. Now come on.”

The five moved ahead in a line, using the magnets in their gloves to pull themselves along the corridor. Their lamps revealed no movement, while their earpieces recorded no sounds except the huff of their breath and the dull thunk of magnets on metal.

“Standard layout for a Jennet,” Carlo said from his place at the front of the line. “Bridge should be right ahead, and . . .”

He was silent for a moment, then spoke again, in a quiet voice. “I found the crew.”

Tycho followed Richards and Porco onto the dark bridge, locating Carlo and Grigsby by their helmet lamps. He turned his head left and right, his lamp sweeping across the bridge.

The members of the bridge crew were still strapped into their chairs, but their faces had collapsed into leathery ruins. The skin was paper-thin across the skulls, the mouths agape and empty, the eye sockets hollowed pits. Tycho let his lamp play over the navigator's station. It was like looking at his own console back on the
Comet
, only transformed by horror.

“What happened to them?” Tycho asked.

“No idea,” Carlo said as he drifted by the captain's chair. “We'll need a generator to get the computer up and running. Mr. Grigsby, take a look aft—maybe we'll find our answer in the hold. And check the crew cabins.”

“Will do, Master Carlo,” Grigsby said, turning to find Richards and Porco flattened against the back wall of the bridge, as far from the bodies as possible.

“What a sorry pair,” the warrant officer growled. “Quit hangin' a leg and get to it. Dead men don't bite, but I sure as thunder do.”

The hold contained neither platinum nor viruses—it was empty. The ore boat's cabins, unfortunately, were not. Richards and Porco found the other six members of the crew in their bunks, mummified by time and cold.

With the initial survey of the ore boat complete, Mavry crossed over and joined them with a portable generator. Tycho sighed with relief as the emergency lighting flickered on and the artificial gravity returned, though his suit sensors warned that the air remained unbreathable and perilously cold. He still felt like he was intruding in a tomb, but at least now the bodies were out of sight, covered with tarps in the empty hold.

As the bridge consoles flickered to life, Carlo settled into the captain's chair, with Mavry looking over his shoulder. Tycho admired his brother's easy confidence but found he couldn't bring himself to sit in the navigator's seat. Instead, he chose to lean over the dead man's console and peer at the screen.

“Want me to pull up her logs?” Carlo asked their father, fingers already hovering over the keyboard.

“Not yet,” Mavry said. “Prospectors are paranoid—you could trigger a software trap and erase everything. Plus we'll only get a few hours out of our generator. First thing is to see if we can figure out what malfunctioned and fix it.”

Carlo pulled up the main diagnostics screen, and Mavry let out a low whistle.

“Look at that—the air scrubbers are off,” he said. “Carlo, see if you can reset them. It'd be nice to able to breathe.”

Carlo typed a command, tried again, then shook his head.

“Let's take a peek in the engine room,” Mavry said.

Mavry was already on his way aft. Carlo and Tycho hurried down the dim, silent corridors after their father.

“What happened to the others?” Tycho asked.

“I sent them back to the
Comet
,” Mavry said, then smiled. “Richards and Porco made the crossing in record time.”

Carlo scoffed, the noise a little burst of static in their ears. “I don't understand. They're from belowdecks—it's not like they've never seen dead men before.”

“Take it easy on them, Carlo,” Mavry said after a moment. “Dying in a fight doesn't scare them—it's the life they chose, just like their parents and grandparents did. But a slow death in deep space, with no one back home ever knowing what became of you? That frightens them, and there's no shame in it. It frightens me too.”

“Is that what you think happened, Dad?” Tycho asked as they entered the engine room, now once again vibrating faintly with the thrum of a living ship. “You think they died slowly?”

Mavry's eyes traced the conduits where they ran along the ceiling.

“Slowly at first, then all at once,” he said.

“What does that mean?” Carlo asked.

“I'll show you. Power up the engineer's console and get me an atmosphere reading.”

Tycho tapped out the commands, and Mavry shoved a red valve hard to the right, grunting with the effort.

“Dad, the air scrubbers—” Tycho began.

“Are back on,” Mavry said. “I know.”

“They were working?” Carlo asked. “Then why turn them off? That's suicide!”

“Yes, that's exactly what it was,” Mavry said. He crept along on his knees, hands tracing a conduit's route from the main reactor behind them to a boxlike vault about a meter high. He popped open the vault's doors and sat back on his haunches as much as his bulky spacesuit allowed.

“The energy feeds run from the main reactor to the power converters,” Mavry said. “Notice anything?”

Tycho and Carlo peered over his shoulders, accidentally bumped their helmets together, and glared at each other. The converters inside the vault should have been gleaming metal but were a dull black instead.

“They're cooked,” Tycho said.

“And upside down,” Carlo said. “Which is
why
they're cooked.”

“So why didn't they install backups?” Tycho asked.

“Good question,” Mavry said. “Let's see if we can figure out the answer.”

Carlo saw the converters first, lying on the deck beneath the engineer's station. He returned to find Mavry had dug out the scorched ones and used his utility knife to scrape the contacts clean.

“Put them in, Carlo,” Mavry said. “Preferably not backwards. Tycho, check the monitor.”

Carlo fitted the converters into their sockets.

“Monitor shows no charge,” Tycho said.

“That's what I thought,” Mavry said. “Their primary converters overloaded, which happens—every reactor suffers from the occasional flux or surge. They had backup converters, like any sane spacer would, but they installed them wrong and cooked them. And then they had nothing.”

“But it's crazy to only have one backup set of converters,” Tycho said. “We probably have a dozen on the
Comet
.”

“Prospectors do things differently,” Mavry said. “Their crews are smaller, and they spend their money on chemical sniffers and buying old ship logs instead of on maintenance.”

“And they install power converters upside down,” Carlo said with a snort.

“It was dark and they were scared,” Mavry said quietly.

“But they must have called for help,” Tycho said, imagining the engine room filling with smoke, then the ship left in silent darkness, with the chill of space beginning to creep into the deck.

“Probably not at first,” Mavry said, digging the dead converters out of the vault and getting to his feet. “A distress call might have tipped off other prospectors to their position. They probably thought they had another set of converters somewhere, or that they could fix the main pair. And by the time they realized they were wrong, there was too little power left to send a distress call far enough.”

“And then they were dead in space,” Carlo said. “It was freeze to death or starve.”

“Or shut off the air scrubbers and let the carbon dioxide levels rise,” Mavry said. “If they were lucky, it was like falling asleep.”

“Do you think they were lucky, Dad?” Tycho asked.

Mavry looked down at the dead converters.

“No,” he said. “I don't think they were.”

“She's called the
Lucia
,” Mavry said. “Registered to a Captain Lumbaba, out of Titan, and last seen twenty-four years ago.”

He took a sip of coffee and looked around at the other Hashoones where they sat in the cuddy aboard the
Comet
, warming their hands with their own drinks.

“So the next step is to find out if anyone has an insurance claim on her,” Diocletia said.

Yana looked up from her mediapad with a smile.

“I checked—she's clean. Insurance money was paid out ten years after she disappeared, to Eurydice Lumbaba and her son, Japhet. They live on Titan, at Kraken Station—that's a refinery run by the Huygens-Cassini Corporation. The ship's up for grabs as salvage.”

“An' what a prize she is,” muttered Huff, standing in the doorway. “One rusty ore boat, tanks half empty, hold clean as a new middie's mind. Arrr, truly these be the glory days of piratin'.”

“Privateering,” Diocletia corrected him. “It may not be much, but it's more than we've run across in months. Nice work, Yana. Mavry, what have you found in the logs?”

“Multiple entries are protected, as you'd expect with prospectors,” Mavry said. “But mostly they did runs in and out of the Themistians and the Cybeles. Captain Lumbaba was a platinum hunter—all the
Lucia
's gear is calibrated for that chemical signature.”

“Platinum hunter?” Huff rumbled in surprise. “Then what was he doin' out here?”

“Looking for Carlo's lost New Potosi hoard, obviously,” Yana said with a grin.

Eight bells clang-clanged the time—it was 2000 hours, the end of the second dog watch.

“Ain't no platinum left in the Hildas worth huntin',” Huff said. “After the New Potosi claim, every rock hound in the solar system scoured these asteroids for a generation. They were played out during my grandfather's time.”

“Maybe Captain Lumbaba heard differently,” Tycho said. “Or maybe he had a tip that there was something else out here worth finding—something interesting enough to make a platinum hunter try a new region of space.”

“Or maybe he was as crazy as an outhouse rat, like most prospectors,” Huff said. “Half of 'em are geology professors what can't fly a ship, an' half would rather talk to rocks than people, an' half of 'em will fly to the Oort cloud chasin' a rumor.”

“That's three halves,” Carlo pointed out.

“Don't get mathematical with me, boy,” Huff growled.

Diocletia rolled her empty coffee cup back and forth in her hands, brows knit. Tycho found himself listening to the hum of the
Comet
's air scrubbers. He'd barely noticed the sound before today; now he swore he'd cherish it forever.

“Carlo, transmit a salvage claim on the
Lucia
,” Diocletia said. “She ought to fetch enough at auction to pay for this cruise, at least. Tycho, set course for Saturn—we'll sell her at Enceladus.”

“Enceladus?” Carlo asked. “That's a lot farther than Jupiter. The fuel costs—”

“I'm familiar with the geography of the solar system, Carlo,” Diocletia said. “Enceladus is the best secondhand ship market in the Jovian Union, and it's a jumping-off point for prospectors heading for Uranus and beyond. Plus we should visit Titan and tell Captain Lumbaba's family what happened to him.”

“Now don't go developin' a conscience, Dio—it's unbecoming in a pirate,” Huff said.

“We'd want the same done for us,” Diocletia said. Then the corners of her mouth twitched. “Besides, while one of you is consoling the widow Lumbaba, conversation might be made. Topics might be discussed.”

Mavry grinned. “Such as lesser-known points of interest for platinum hunters in the Hildas?”

“It could come up,” Diocletia said innocently. Then her smile faded, and she was all business again. “All right then. Tomorrow morning we'll do a final checkout of the
Lucia
. I'll figure out the prize crew later, but assuming she's green to fly, I want engines lit by 1030. Anything else?”

“There is something, actually,” Mavry said. “It's the crewers. They're scared of the ship—think finding her was a bad omen and opening her up was worse. They say we've invited ghosts aboard the
Comet
.”

“They'd never put up with this in the Defense Force,” Carlo said. “Orders are orders. If they don't like it, cashier them.”

“And if we get in the habit of doing that, how many of our crewers will put up with a run of bad luck like ours?” Diocletia asked. “Let alone risk their lives for us in battle?”

“All of them,” Carlo said stubbornly. “Or at least all the ones we want serving with us.”

Diocletia shook her head. “I'd rather not take that chance. Where are the bodies of the
Lucia
's crewers?”

“Still in her hold,” Tycho said.

“Make shrouds for them,” Diocletia said. “And do it right—no slapdash work. Then we'll bury them in space. You remember the Spacer's Farewell, Dad?”

Huff grunted. “Ain't I said them words a hundred times before?”

“At least,” Diocletia said. “We'll have the ceremony as soon as we can, then. At the risk of being accused of developing a conscience again, it's the decent thing to do.”

Tycho had expected only the most superstitious crewers to turn out for the hastily arranged funeral, but he was wrong. Best as he could tell, the entire complement of sixty-six was assembled in the
Comet
's hold, arranged in lines that would have infuriated a military officer but were pretty respectable for a bunch of roughnecks and vaguely reformed pirates.