“There’s only one way an entire shipmind can be removed. Someone purged the systems,” Lyssa said.
Now I understood why she sounded so unhappy. “There’s not even a backup anywhere?”
“The ship is literally just a shell. There is no life of any sort on it that I can detect.”
I frowned at the dead screens.
“Why would anyone purge their ship systems?” Fiori whispered, horror twisting her voice. “That’s life support, emergency systems, even food, deleted beyond recall.”
I nodded. “There’s one reason I could think of for doing that, but you’re not going to like it.”
Fiori grimaced, which made her pert nose turn up. “I already don’t like this. Tell me.”
“As a captain, I would order the purging of all intelligence and information about my ship and my crew, even the general database, if I didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”
“What wrong hands are there, out here?” Fiori’s voice was nearly a squeak. “Everyone has access to all human knowledge.”
I shrugged. “It was likely he was in a hurry. A full purge is faster than picking out sections and deleting them.”
“In a hurry over what?”
“To delete critical data before they were boarded.”
Fiori blinked. “Boarded…” She let out a sigh. “You don’t know that.”
“It’s a pretty good guess,” I told her.
“It’s one of only three possible scenarios that fit the facts we’ve learned,” Lyssa added, her voice emerging from the control panels on our forearms. “And the most likely one, too. The crew have left the ship. They didn’t use the shuttle, and this craft cannot navigate atmosphere and gravity. Therefore, they must have transferred to a second ship.”
“What second ship? This is the very end of nowhere!”
I held up my hand. “Let’s think about it later. First, I want to check the engineering section, then get back to the Lythion.” The need to head back was a siren song in my mind. I was well beyond gut instinct now. Silent alerts were screaming in my mind. I had to stop myself from checking behind me every few seconds.
I moved down the corridor, Vara trotting beside me, and Fiori behind us.
Dalton stood beside the turned steel railing of the stairs down to Engineering. He leaned against them, his shriver resting on the other elbow. “Another wildcatter ship, a competitor, might have taken them somewhere.”
“That would explain why the captain wanted to delete his data,” I said, as we came up to him. “He might have been trying to stop the other ship from grabbing it. Do you have any idea how long they’ve been here? Would they have had time to land dirtside and complete mineral surveys?”
Dalton grimaced. “There’s no logs for us to check if the shuttle was used recently.”
“Or to tell if that planet out there has the strike of the century,” I added. “We could be hanging over a goldmine and wouldn’t know it.”
“Isn’t deleting all the ship systems to just halt a competitor…isn’t that a bit desperate?” Fiori asked.
“It’s extreme, but again, we don’t know how rushed he was. Maybe they forgot to watch their back while they were turning rocks over, down there, and the other guys crept up and surprised them.” I bent over the railing to peer into the dim light below. “Emergency light only. Fantastic.” Although I was only mildly annoyed about the lack of bright light. We were lucky to have gravity and any light at all—and the only reason we had either was because both were autonomic systems, independent of computer control.
Dalton flicked his fingers at Darb. “Send them down first,” he suggested.
I nodded and told Vara to go with Darb and check the compartment was clear.
She and Darb climbed down the steps in unison. They were narrow steps and they filled the width of them, their shoulders brushing against each other.
We waited for thirty seconds, then I felt Vara’s assurance. “Clear,” I said, as Dalton murmured the same word.
“Stay behind us,” I told Fiori.
She just nodded, her expression strained.
We trod a step at a time, down into the gloom. My eyes adjusted quickly. I moved the shriver around as I scanned the cramped room. Unlike the Lythion, this ship didn’t have discrete compartments or even a decent bulkhead. It was all one room, taking up the narrow space at the bottom of the hull. If there was a containment breach or an ion spill, nothing would stop it reaching the crew, above.
We studied the hulking shapes of servers and motors and other mystery equipment that Sauli, had he been here, would have been able to identify without issue. But this was terra incognita for me.
“Nothing,” Dalton whispered.
I relaxed and clipped my shriver to my belt. “I guess it’s official. It’s an abandoned ship. Not that it’s worth even salvage rights, without the ship systems in place. We’d have to tow—”
Alarm crashed into my mind at the same instant Vara and Darb both growled, the sounds rumbling in their chests, making the small hairs on the back of my neck stand up painfully.
I yanked at the shriver, fumbling it, for both parawolves were facing a bank of some sort of machinery, enclosed with flat panels of metal adorned with warning signs. Radiation. High pressure. High voltage risk.
The side of the paneling had an inspection hatch built into it and both wolves were snarling at the door, their rows of serrated teeth on display, their lips curled back.
—10—
My heart running hard and fast, I signaled to Dalton to move around in a big circle over to the hatch and open it. The big circle was to keep him out of the line of fire if whoever was behind the hatch was clever enough to shoot through it. I moved over to one side myself and pushed Fiori with me.
I mentally urged Vara to stay down low. She sank to her belly but didn’t stop growling.
Darb dropped down with
