It was dark above the airlock. The lights did not come on, and there was no atmosphere. Diem and the others floated up the tunnel from the lock, their hood lights flickering this way and that. They looked out from the tunnels into empty rooms, into rooms with partitions blasted away, gutted fifty meters deep. This was supposed to be theundamaged ship. A coldness grew inside Diem. The enemy had come in after the battle and sucked it dry, left a dead hulk.
Behind him, Tsufe said, “Jimmy, theTreasure is moving.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a solid contact with the wall here. Sounds like it’s twisting on its mooring point.”
Diem reached out from the ladderline and pressed his hood against the wall. Yes. If there had been atmosphere, the place would be full of the sounds of ringing destruction. So the Relight was causing more shifting than anyone had guessed. A day ago that knowledge would have terrorized. Now… “I don’t think it matters, Tsufe. Come on.” He led Do and Patil still faster up the ladderline. So Pham Trinli had been right, and the plan was doomed. But one way or another, he was going to discover what had been done to them. And just maybe he could get the truth out to the others.
The interior locks had been ripped out and vacuum extended to every room. They floated up past what should have been repair bays and workshops, past deep holes that should have held the ram’s startup injectors.
High abaft, in the shielded heart of theFar Treasure that was where the sickbay had been, that was where there should be coldsleep tanks. Now… Jimmy and the others moved sideways through the shielding. When their hands touched the walls, they could hear the creaking of the hull, feel its slow motion. So far, the close-tethered starships had not collided-though Jimmy wasn’t sure if they could really know that. The ships were so large, so massive, if they collided at a few centimeters per second the hulls would just slide into each other with scarcely a jolt.
They had reached the entrance to the sickbay. Where the Emergents claimed to hold the surviving armsmen.
More emptiness? Another lie?
Jimmy slipped through the door. Their head lamps flickered around the room.
Tsufe Do cried out.
Not empty. Bodies. He swept his light about, and everywhere… the coldsleep boxes had been removed, but the room was… filled with corpses. Diem pulled the lamp from his head and stuck it to an open patch of wall. Their shadows still danced and twisted, but now he could see it all.
“Th-they’re all dead, aren’t they?” Pham Patil’s voice was dreamy, the question simply an expression of horror.
Diem moved among the dead. They were neatly stacked. Hundreds, but in a small volume. He recognized some armsmen. Qiwi’s mom. Only a few showed violent decompression damage.When did the rest die? Some of the faces were peaceful, but others—He stopped, frozen by a pair of glittering dead eyes that stared out at him. The face was emaciated; there were frozen bruises across the forehead. This one had lived some time after the ambush. And Jimmy recognized the face.
Tsufe came across the room, her shadow skittering across the horror. “That’s one of the Trilanders, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. One of the geologists, I think.” One of the academics supposedly being held on Hammerfest. Diem moved back toward the light he had set on the wall. How many were here? The bodies stretched off into the dimness beyond where once there had been walls.Did they kill everyone? Nausea clawed its way up his throat.
Patil had floated motionless since that first inane question. But Tsufe was shaking, her voice going from dullness to a giddy wavering. “We thought they had so many hostages. And all the time they had nothing but deaders.” She laughed, high-pitched. “But it didn’t matter, did it? We believed, and that served them as well as the truth.”
“Maybe not.” And suddenly the nausea was gone. The trap had been sprung. No doubt, he and Tsufe and Patil would die very soon. But if they lived even seconds, perhaps the monsters could be unmasked. He pulled an audio box from his coveralls, found a clean piece of wall to make contact.Another banned I/O device. Death is the penalty for possession. Yeah. Yeah. But now he could talk the length of theTreasure, to the broadcaster he had left at the rim airlock. The nearside of the temp would be bathed in his message. Embedded utilities would detect it. Surely some would respond to its priority, would squirt the message to where Qeng Ho would hear it.
And Jimmy began talking. “Qeng Ho! Listen! I’m aboard theFar Treasure. It’s gutted. They’ve killed everyone we thought was here….”
Ezr—everyone in the temp’s auditorium—waited a silent second as Ritser Brughel set up the connection. Then Jimmy began talking:
“Qeng Ho! Listen! I’m—”
“Crewleader!” Tomas Nau interrupted. “Are you all right? We can’t see you outside.”
Jimmy laughed. “That’s because I’m aboard theFar Treasure. “
The look on Nau’s face was puzzled. “I don’t understand. The
“Of course they haven’t.” Ezr could almost hear the smile behind Jimmy’s words. “You see,
Shock and joy spread across the faces Ezr could see. So that was the plan! A working starship, perhaps with its original weapons. The main Emergent sickbay, the armsmen and senior crew who survived the ambush.We have a chance now!
Tomas Nau seemed to realize the same. His puzzled expression changed to an angry, frightened scowl. “Brughel?” He said to the air.
“Podmaster, I think he’s telling the truth. He’s on theTreasure ’s maintenance channel, and I can’t raise anyone else there.”
The power graph in the main window hovered just under 145kW/m?? The light reflected between One and Two was beginning to boil snow and ice in the shadows. Thousand- and hundred-thousand-tonne boulders of ore and ice were shifting in the clefts between the great diamonds. The motion was almost imperceptible, a few centimeters per second. But some of the boulders were now floating free. However slow-moving, they could destroy whatever human work they collided with.
Nau stared out the window for a couple of seconds. When he spoke his voice seemed more intense than commanding: “Look, Diem. It can’t work. The Relight is causing a lot more damage than anyone could have known—”
A harsh laugh came from the other end of the connection. “Anyone? Not really. We retuned the stationkeeping network to shake things up a bit. Whatever instabilities there were, we gave them an extra nudge.”
Qiwi’s hand tightened on Ezr’s. The girl’s eyes were wide with surprise. And Ezr felt a little sick. The stationkeeping grid couldn’t have done much one way or another, but why make thingsworse ?
Around them, people with full-press coveralls and hoods were zipping up; others were diving out the doors of the auditorium. A huge ore boulder floated just a hundred meters off. It was rising slowly, its top dazzling in direct sunlight. It would just miss the top of the temp.
“But, but—” For a moment the glib Podmaster seemed speechless. “Your own people could die! And we’ve taken the weapons off theTreasure. It’s our hospital ship, for God’s sake!”
There was no answer for a moment, just the sound of mumbled argument. Ezr noticed that the Emergent flight technician, Xin, hadn’t said a word. He watched his Podmaster with a wide-eyed, stricken look.
Then Jimmy was back on the link: “Damnyou. So you gutted the weapons systems. But it doesn’t matter, little man. We’ve prepared four kilos of S7. You never guessed we had access to explosives, did you? Lots of things were in with those electric jets that you never guessed.”
“No, no.” Nau was shaking his head almost aimlessly.
“As you say, Podmaster, this is your hospital ship. There are your own people here besides our armsmen in coldsleep. Even without the ship’s guns, I’d say we have some negotiating leverage.”
Nau glanced beseechingly at Ezr and Qiwi. “A truce. Until we’ve settled the rockpile.”
