schematics of the old ship.
Sky tapped the thrusters lightly, sending them cruising slowly past the command sphere and then the cylindrical module that followed it, the one that would have held the Caleuche’s own shuttles and freight stores. Everything looked exactly as it should have done. Even the entry ports were situated in the same places.
‘I’m not seeing any major damage,’ Gomez said. ‘I thought the radar showed—’
‘It did,’ Sky said. ‘But the damage was all on the other side. We’ll loop around to the engine section and come back up.’
They tracked slowly down the spine, the searchlights revealing circles of bright detail amidst greater darkness. Sleeper module after sleeper module passed by. Sky had started counting them, half expecting that some might be missing, but after a while he knew there was no point. They were all still present and correct; the ship — apart from the minor abrasive weathering — was still exactly as she had been when launched.
‘There’s something about her, though,’ Gomez said, squinting. ‘Something that doesn’t look quite right.’
‘I don’t see anything out of place,’ Sky said.
‘She looks normal enough to me, too,’ Norquinco said, looking up momentarily from the far more interesting prospect of his data schematics.
‘No, she doesn’t. She looks like she’s not quite in focus. Can’t you see that as well?’
‘It’s a contrast effect,’ Sky said. ‘Your eyes can’t deal with the difference in illumination between the lit and unlit parts.’
‘If you say so.’
They continued in silence, not really wanting to acknowledge that what Gomez had said was true and that there was something not quite right about the Caleuche. Sky remembered what Norquinco had told him about the ghost ship story; how it was said that the old sailing ship had been able to surround itself with mist so that no one ever saw it clearly. Thankfully, Norquinco refrained from reminding him of that. It would have been about all he could take.
‘There’s no infra-red from the sleeper berths,’ Gomez said eventually, when they were most of the way down the spine. ‘I don’t think that’s a good sign, Sky. If the berths were still operational, we’d see the infra-red from the cooling systems. You can’t keep something cold without making heat somewhere else. The momios can’t still be alive.’
‘Then cheer up,’ Sky said. ‘You wanted a ghost ship; now you’ve got one.’
‘I don’t think there are ghosts on it, Sky. Just a lot of dead people.’
They passed the end of the spine, where it coupled to the propulsion unit. They were closer now — only ten or fifteen metres from the hull — and the details should have been pin-sharp, but there was no denying what Gomez had pointed out. It was as if the ship was being seen behind a screen of slightly mottled glass, blurring every edge except the one between the ship and space. It was as if the ship had melted slightly and then resolidified.
It wasn’t right.
‘Well, there’s no sign of major damage to the propulsion section, ’ Gomez said. ‘The antimatter must still be inside, kept penned on residual power.’
‘But there’s no sign of any power at all. Not a single running light.’
‘So she’s turned off every non-essential system. But the antimatter has to be inside her, Sky. That means whatever happens here, our journey won’t have been completely in vain.’
‘Let’s see what she looks like on the other side. We know there’s something wrong with her there.’
They curved around, executing a hairpin turn beyond the gaping mouths of the exhaust vents. Gomez was right, of course — the antimatter had to be there, and that had never been in doubt. Had her engines exploded the way the Islamabad’s had done, there would have been nothing left at all except for a few unusual trace elements added to the interstellar medium. There must still be enough antimatter inside her to slow down the whole ship, and all the containment systems must still be operating normally. Sky’s people could use that antimatter. They could either experiment with it in place, testing the Caleuche’s engines in ways they would never have risked with their own ship — thereby finding a way to squeeze more efficiency from them — or they could use the ghost ship as a single huge rocket stage, tethering it to the Santiago and enormously boosting their deceleration curve, before discarding the Caleuche at some still significant fraction of the speed of light. But there was a third way that appealed to Sky more than either of those two possibilities: gain experience with the handling of antimatter aboard the ghost ship, and then transfer only the reservoir back to the Santiago, where it could be connected up to their own fuel supply. That way, no fuel would be wasted decelerating dead mass — and the whole thing could be kept reasonably secret as well.
Now they turned around and began to track up the other side. The radar scans had forewarned them that there would be some kind of asymmetry; something different about this side of the ship, but when they saw what it was they had trouble believing their eyes. Gomez swore softly, Sky echoing the sentiment with a slow nod. All along her length, from the bulbous command sphere to the rear of the propulsion section, the ship’s side had erupted outwards in a queasy leprous mass: a froth of globular blisters packed as dense as frogspawn. They studied it wordlessly for at least a minute, trying to rationalise what they saw with what they believed the sixth ship to be.
‘Something strange happened here,’ Gomez said, the first to speak. ‘Something very, very strange. I’m not sure I like it, Sky.’
‘You think I like it any more than you do?’ Sky answered.
‘Take us away from the hull,’ Norquinco said, and for once Sky obeyed him without question. He tapped the thrusters, pushing the shuttle out to two hundred metres. They waited silently until they could get a better look at the ghost ship. The more he looked at it, the more it looked like blistered flesh, Sky thought, or possibly badly healed scar tissue. It certainly did not look like anything he would have expected.
‘There’s something up ahead,’ Gomez said, pointing. ‘Look. Tucked away near the command sphere. It doesn’t seem to be part of her.’
‘It’s another ship,’ Sky said.
They crept closer, nervously probing the dark mass with searchlights. Almost lost within the bubbled explosion of fleshlike hull was a much smaller, intact spacecraft. It was the same size as their shuttle — the same basic shape, in fact. Only its markings and details were different.
‘Shit. Someone got here ahead of us,’ Gomez said.
‘Perhaps,’ Sky said. ‘But they could have been here for decades.’
‘He’s right,’ Norquinco said. ‘I don’t think it’s one of ours, though.’
They crept closer to the other shuttle, wary now of a trap, but the other ship looked equally as dead as the much larger craft alongside it. It was guyed to the Caleuche — moored to her hull by three lines which had been fired into the hull with penetrating grapples. That was standard emergency equipment on a shuttle, but Sky had never expected to see it used in this fashion. There were intact docking hatches on the Caleuche’s far side — why had the shuttle not used those?
‘Bring us in nice and slowly,’ Gomez said.
‘I’m doing it, aren’t I?’ But docking with the derelict shuttle was much harder than it looked — their own thrusters kept blowing it away. When the two ships did finally come together, it was with a good deal more violence than Sky would have wished. But the hatch seals held, and he was able to divert some of their own power to the other craft, booting up its own systems which must only have been sleeping. It felt too easy, but the shuttles had always been designed for complete compatibility across the docking systems of all the ships.
Lights stammered on and the airlock began to establish equal pressure on either side of the lock.
The three of them suited up and strapped on the specialised sensors and comms equipment they had brought along for the expedition, and then each took one of the security-issue machine-guns with torches strapped to them which Sky had appropriated. With Sky leading they floated through the connecting tunnel until they were emerging in a well-lit shuttle cabin superficially similar to the one they had left. There were no cobwebs or floating veils of dust to suggest that any time at all had passed since the shuttle had been vacated. A few status displays had even come back online.
There was, however, a body.
It was spacesuited, and very obviously dead — although none of them wanted to look at the grinning skull behind the faceplate longer than necessary. But the figure seemed not to have died violently. It was seated calmly in the pilot’s position, with the two arms of the spacesuit folded across its lap, gloved fingers touching as if in quiet
