Pathfinder (39 page)

“You need sleep, Ariane, but I don’t want to send you to quarters before you see this.” Dalton leaned over her chair and turned her around to face a view port on the bulkhead. She gasped. She’d seen a lot of planets that supported Gaian-based life, so it wasn’t the hovering green-blue-white ball that amazed her, so much as the
thing
that orbited it.

“Yes, it’s as big as rocks we’ve called moons, but no, it’s not natural.” Maria immediately answered some of her questions, while she zoomed in on the orbiting body. “At least, we can’t see how it
can
be natural.”

The object couldn’t be described with ordinary station structural engineering terms, like wheels, struts, modules, and shielding. From their distance, even given the attempt to enlarge their picture, the object looked like a cracked red egg, with the shell expanding about, and not quite hiding, a glowing green core. Periodically, green light moved along and shot out the longitudinal axis, which paralleled the rotational axis of the planet.

The seed is there
. Her Minoan parasite stirred. Ariane tried to sit up and say something, but became dizzy. The N-space drop had affected her more than she realized.

“Don’t worry.” Dalton smiled. “As soon as we’ve established a comm relay back home, we’re heading toward that station—habitat—object.”

“I’ll get her to her quarters,” Maria said firmly.

She protested, but in the end, Maria had to help her. She nearly couldn’t manage the vertical tube descent by herself. Maria opened the hatch to her quarters and helped her step inside.

“Listen carefully,” the tall woman said quietly, while holding Ariane upright against her side. “The entire crew is now awake. After I close this hatch, I want you to throw the disablement switch and lock your hatch manually.
Do you understand, Major?
”

“Yes,” she gasped. It took almost all her strength to get out that word.

“Good.” Maria opened the panel for her and leaned her against the bulkhead. “Don’t trust anyone,” she said as she closed the hatch behind her.

Ariane pulled the disablement switch and then locked the hatch, before stepping backward and falling on her bunk. She let the darkness of deep sleep take her.

 

Matt was watching the FTL data diagram obsessively, and the faint noise coming out of the comm panel nearly caused him to jump out of his skin.

“Calling
Aether’s Touch
.”

Did he really hear that? He’d been playing music because it had only been three hours since the
Pytheas
had left. He shut off his music and moved closer to the comm panel.

“
Aether’s Touch
, this is
Pytheas
. Do you copy?”

He whooped. It
was
Dalton’s voice, and
not
his imagination. “Yes,
Pytheas
, I can hear you,” he answered eagerly, throwing protocol out the airlock.

“We’re here and our N-space pilot is resting. We’ve suffered minimal damage, which shouldn’t stop us. We’ll make another comm check in thirty minutes.
Pytheas
out.”

“Acknowledged.
Aether’s Touch
out.”

Before he registered what had happened, Matt realized he’d gone through the first comm check and hadn’t even notified Dr. Lowry. Besides that, he hadn’t gotten any details—Ari might be resting, but was she really okay? What was in the new solar system, besides a buoy? He called Beta Priamos Command Post to tell them the news, and then woke Dr. Lowry over intercom. She wasn’t happy.

“That’s impossible!” She was irate as she stepped out of the vertical tube to the control deck, stomping as she walked. Perhaps she was one of those people who was always grouchy after waking from naps. One side of her face had a crease pattern that looked like it came from the piping of her sleeve, although she was now wearing a loose equipment vest over her tight Terran coveralls. “The Minoans said nous-transit would be
five hours
.”

“They also said that was an estimate.”

Dr. Lowry turned and saw the large FTL data diagram that Matt had left displayed, near the jump seat behind the consoles. She frowned, causing the fading crease to bend as it went by her eye. “What’s going on?”

“Oh.” Matt didn’t want to frighten her, but she should know what was going on. He walked back to the diagram so he could point at the ships between their position and the
Pilgrimage
. “We’ve got two ships, one from the Terran League and one from AFCAW, that might be involved in some sort of altercation—perhaps even wanting to do something with us, or the Builders’ buoy. Don’t worry, though, because I called for the
Percival
, which should be here before the others.”

Matt’s pride over mitigating a dangerous situation evaporated at seeing a stunner in her hand.

“You idiot,” she said levelly. “You’ve ruined everything.”

His gut twinged in reflex. He shuffled through his brain in panic for tips on dealing with stunners. The one Dr. Lowry held wasn’t a mini-stunner, so it definitely had the range needed for the two meters that yawned between them.
Get as close as you can
, Ari had told him,
because stunners are difficult to use in hand-to-hand
. That sounded good, in theory, but not so much when actually facing a stunner.

“Mayday! Mayday! We’ve got—” Dalton’s voice came suddenly from the comm panel and was cut off.

Matt moved, before he decided to go for the comm panel or for Dr. Lowry, and she pulled the trigger. He
hated
stunners, he thought, as he twitched into unconsciousness.

Although Senator Stephanos has been surprisingly silent, we’ve got exclusive interviews from his staff regarding the scandal of indicting his own great-nephew, Myron Stephanos Pulnik, for treason. These interviews can’t be found anywhere else. . . .

—
Interstellarsystem Events Feed
, 2106.068.12.01 UT, indexed by
Heraclitus 11
under Conflict Imperative

 

 

 

W
hen Ariane woke, she knew something was wrong. Itwasn’t the silence, because she knew her quarters would be quiet due to their location. As she started to stir within her webbing she realized what bothered her. The gravity generator was off, which was an unusual situation for a civilian crew.

“
Command:
Lights, slow.” The lights came up. She loosened her webbing; she must have dragged it over herself at some point, by instinct.

“
Command:
Call Maria.” All she got was Maria’s message queue. She remembered the whisper as darkness overtook her:
Don’t trust anyone
.

Where was the ship? If they were using boost engines, she shouldn’t feel zero gee, unless they were in free fall around a planet. When she’d left the control deck, Dalton had said they were heading toward the egglike station—she felt a jolt of excitement when she thought of visiting it.

As she tapped the bulkhead for a command view port, she noted the time on her sleeve. She’d been asleep about two hours. She felt much better, but as usual after a drop, she was hungry.

Requesting exterior views proved that they’d moved and suddenly there was the object, hanging over the planet. Her breath warmed, her heartbeat quickened, and she felt the blood pound in her neck.
There it is
. The Minoans hadn’t been able to describe how the “homing” function would work, but the intense spike of excitement and anticipation she felt whenever she saw the Builders’ station was obvious. Her parasite quivered and she knew the seed she had to retrieve was
there
. She fought the impulse to immediately push out of her room and find a way, any way, to get to the station that had the glowing green light at its core.

First, she had to talk to Dalton, the mission commander. She lightly pushed across the room to her hygiene closet and inside found dried ration bars and a drink pack she’d stashed there. Their flavors were pungent, tangy, and tastier than she remembered; the crunchy texture of the bar felt stimulating—something she’d never noticed before.

Glancing in the mirror, she almost didn’t recognize herself. Her hair had come off in clumps, mostly on her temples and over her ears. Too bad she didn’t have time to get the rest clipped short—her pulse pounded, reminding her.
Hurry, hurry
.

Remembering Maria’s caution, she paused at her hatch. She tapped for the intercom and listened. No chatter. She pressed her ear against the hatch, and heard faint clicking. It didn’t trigger any memory of ship machinery and every once in a while, there was a disturbing irregularity to it.
Hurry, hurry
.

She unlocked her hatch quietly. Opening it required pushing hard on the frame with one hand while she kept her body close to the heavy hatch as it swung. When it opened, she smelled a strong and familiar metallic odor. Blood. She could almost see the stench riding the air, moving lazily through the corridor, until she felt something dial back her sense of smell. The quivering sensation in her arm made her wonder if the parasite was increasing and decreasing her sensitivities, as necessary.
Hurry
.

After looking around, she floated out into the empty corridor. When she turned to close the hatch, she saw the source of the smell. Bloody handprints covered the access panel, hatch handles, and both the inside and outside of the mechanical disablement panel and pulls. However, since she’d already disabled the door from inside and locked the hatch with steel bolts, whoever had left this panicked, bloody trail couldn’t get inside. Were they trying to warn her or harm her?

The scent trail of blood went both ways from her door. Only the N-space pilot and mission commander were housed on this deck; to the right she could climb to the control deck and to the left was the engineering control center, from where she heard that insistent clicking noise.
Hurry, hurry
. She pushed down the nagging urges of the Minoan parasite to get to the alien station.
No
.
This is important
. She moved down the hall toward engineering, using handholds to control her short movements.

The hatch to the engineering center hung halfway open. Beyond the hatch was darkness. She hesitated, because the first rule for space crew was
secure everything
. The joke was that the second rule was
secure everything again
. Hatches could be secured open or shut—who’d forgotten their most fundamental training? She opened the hatch wide until it fastened to the bulkhead. Leaning in, she asked for lights and recoiled as they came on.

Jonathon Fitzroy, an engineer in the “suspicious four” that Edones had identified, had been garroted so violently that his head floated grotesquely above him. He was against the bulkhead, just opposite the hatch where she stood, and remained hovering there in the zero gee. Pools of blood floated to the side of his head and neck. He’d obviously been killed a meter away from his current position, where there was blood spatter clinging through surface tension to walls. The killer had then moved him out of the way of the consoles.

Although she’d privately viewed Fitzroy with suspicion, he’d seemed friendly and eager to help. Now she felt a spike of sorrow and anger—which suddenly smoothed out to blandness. Was this the parasite again, adjusting hormones and neurochemistry?
Let me feel!
she thought viciously and applied coercion with doubt:
Otherwise, I can’t do my mission
. Immediately, sorrow tightened her chest again, but not with the original intensity.

She pushed to the consoles, grabbing a corner. This engineering control center was probably where the gravity generator had been taken off- line. The console was covered with bloody fingerprints. She dragged the command view ports over to the side that was easier to use, but her fingers still ended up with pungent blood on the tips.

Calling up status, she saw that environmental support—specifically, heat and air—had been shut off in the lower levels, where the scientific mission crew worked. She immediately restored life-preserving service throughout the ship, not knowing where people were at the moment. She started the gravity generator up, which would initialize and slowly apply force. She unlocked the interlevel airlocks. She saw the intercoms light up but before she listened in, she saw another problem. No one was responding from control deck.

Carefully, because the gravity generator was going to gradually ramp up to a half gee, she worked her way out of the engineering control center toward the bow, and the control deck. By the time she was going up the vertical tube and open airlock, there was partial gee. The devastation on the control deck had settled, under half gee, by the time she arrived.

Mission Commander Dalton Lengyel’s body had crumpled awkwardly, his throat cut military style, by stabbing sideways and pushing the blade outward. He had a defensive cut on his forearm, probably made before his throat was sliced. He’d bled out and died quickly. Maria must have been on duty in the copilot and sensor seat, but there was no sign of her. However, some massive hand-to-hand battle involving a knife had occurred. She saw slashes in seats and heavy gouges in the display plastic on the copilot console and next to the exit. On the floor were pieces of webbing and in the far corner lay a TEBI-issue stunner that she guessed had been Maria’s. She put it in the pocket of her coveralls.

Where was Maria? She considered what was available on this level and the one below, since they’d been sealed off from other levels. There were emergency escape modules for the control deck further aft. Turning that way, she smelled blood and started running.

The corridor came to a T, with the escape modules to her left. She didn’t find Maria, but she smelled blood and sweat near the control panel and one module had been ejected. Running to the panel, she punched for comm. “This is
Pytheas
, calling . . .” Who?

“Kedros?” It was Maria, floating out in space, inside an escape module. Her voice sounded weak. “I’m still bleeding. He has a knife.”