control room is two floors up. We can watch what they do from there.”
I followed the colonel into the elevator. A moment later, we entered a universe that bore no resemblance to the traffic control floors below. The sterile glare of fluorescent lights lit an endless expanse of cubicles. People didn’t just speak on this floor, they shouted at each other.
“Hey, Clarence, this isn’t a good time. We have a ghost ship,” somebody yelled at the colonel as we stepped off the elevator. A short, chubby man in a messy white shirt and dark blue pants came toward us.
“That’s why we’re here,” the colonel said. “Harris here is familiar with that ship. He’s Klyber’s head of security. Maybe he can help.”
The colonel turned to me. “Just don’t get in the way,” he said. We followed the colonel’s friend into a control room lined with video monitors.
A bank of four monitors along the wall displayed the scene in full color. The first screen showed only Klyber’s ship, which hung in mid-space, silent and motionless. I saw light through the portholes but no movement. Strobe lights along the tail and the wings of the ship flashed white then red.
The next screen showed a five-man security ship approaching the derelict transport from the rear. The security ship was tiny compared to the C-64. It looked like a minnow approaching a whale. I became mesmerized by the glow of the transports’ strobes as it reflected along the hull of the transport …red, then white, red, then white. When the security ship shined a powerful searchlight on the hull, the glow of the strobes seemed to vanish.
All of this took place in the eerie silence of space.
The third screen was a close-up of Klyber’s ship, illuminated by the bleaching eye of that searchlight.
“Are you bringing the ship in?” I asked the man who led us to this bank of screens.
“Hell, no. We don’t know what killed them. That ship could be leaking radiation. That’s all I need, a dirty bomb in the middle of my landing field. They could have been killed with some kind of germ agent.”
“You scanned it,” I said to the colonel.
“We must have missed something,” he answered.
“McAvoy.” Somebody stuck his head out of an office and called to the colonel. The colonel walked over to that office for a chat.
“Scanning the target,” a voice said. It came from a small speaker below the bank of screens. The man who led the boarding team pressed a button, changing the view of one of the screens on the wall. “Keep sharp, boys. They ran a scan on this bird before it left the docks and it came up empty.”
“Roger,” the voice said over the speakers. “Scanning for bombs.”
The background in the scanning screen turned red. Everything on the screen turned red. The space around the exterior of the ship was empty and black with a slight red tint. The Mercury Class transport showed a bold red. The nose of the transport turned bright pink as a laser shined on it. Three columns of text appeared across the bottom of the screen displaying an on-the-spot object, substance, and element analysis.
The laser beam moved ever so slowly as it scanned the ship. I watched, nearly needing to bite my tongue to stop myself from screaming. There was no bomb on that ship. If there had been a bomb, the ship would have blown up.
“Harris,” the colonel returned, “you sure you saw Halverson?”
I nodded.
“Rear Admiral Thomas Halverson?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, now feeling a little frustrated. I was tense to begin with, and I did not think there were many admirals in the U.A. Navy with the last name Halverson.
“That can’t be,” the colonel said. “He’s registered as a passenger on Klyber’s ship.”
“You have the passenger manifest?” I asked.
The colonel nodded.
“Can I see it? We might get some answers by comparing the list of passengers with the people we find on the ship.”
“I’ll get a printout,” the colonel said. “And I’ll put out an all-points bulletin for Halverson. If he’s still in the Dry Dock facility, we’ll find him.”
I nodded. “Can you run another DNA search in the apartment they blew up last night?” I asked. “Maybe you missed something. If you find anything, compare it to Halverson’s file.”
“You think that was Halverson?” the colonel asked.
“Or some of his friends,” I said.
“The room was pretty well scorched, but we’ll give it a try.”
“Okay, explosives came up clean. Let’s run for chemicals and anomalies,” the tech at the screens said.
As the chemical scan began, the single color on the screen turned from red to white. A line pulsed across the face of the screen, and a three-dimensional wire frame diagram replaced the video image of the transport. The lines in the image changed color as the security ship scanned for chemicals, radiation, power surges, and temperature fluctuations. This scan moved more quickly, but not by much.
“Can you bring it in now?” I asked.
“No,” the controller said without looking away from his monitor.
“Admiral Klyber could still be alive,” I said.
“We don’t know what happened on that ship. We can’t risk it.”
I felt my insides coiling. I clenched my fists and rapped my knuckles against my thigh.
“Ready to board the ship,” the voice said over the speaker.
I looked back at the screens on the walls. Dry dock emergency must have sent two teams out to the transport, one to run scans and the other to board the ship. The smaller ship, the one that had looked like a minnow beside the C-64, had attached itself to the transport. Now that it sat snuggly connected just behind the cone-shaped cockpit section of the big transport, it looked more like an enormous tick.
This was a civilian operation. Instead of giving orders, the guy at the screen growled suggestions such as, “Let’s have a look.”
The first three screens now showed nothing but static shots of the outside of Admiral Klyber’s transport. All the action took place on the fourth screen, which was mostly dark. This screen showed a helmet camera view of the action. It showed the accordion walls and temporary gangway that connected the Triple E ship to the transport. The only light on the screen came from the torches in the evaluation crew’s helmets.
One of the engineers pressed a three-pronged key into a slot on the side of the C-64’s hull, and the hatch opened. There was a brief blast of air as the cabin repressurized. A loud slurping noise blasted over the speakers, then stopped as suddenly as it began.
“Okay, we’re moving in.”
The cabin within was brightly lit. I recognized the ivory-colored carpeting in the quick glance that I got.
“I’ll check the cockpit. You search the ship,” the lead engineer said.
On the screen, the eye of a single torch beam lit the door to the cockpit as a hand came out of nowhere and tried the handle. The door opened.
The pilot and copilot sat upright in their seats, their heads hanging chin to chest as if they were asleep. Lights winked on and off in the dimly-lit space. The pilot’s coloring was off—the blue tones in his skin more pronounced then before. I might have mistaken it for bad lighting had his brownish black hair not looked the right hue.
“Any idea what killed him?” the colonel asked into a microphone.
“I can guess,” the voice over the speaker said. “It seems pretty obvious. Want me to take a tissue sample or wait for the medics to arrive?”
“Take it,” the controller said.
On the screen, the camera drew closer to the pilot. A gloved hand reached under the pilot’s chin and drew his head up. Blank, glassy eyes and blue lips faced the camera. “Any vital signs on your end?”
“He’s dead,” the controller said. “Jab him.”
The gloved hand released the pilot and his head flopped back toward the floor, bobbing with the whiplash of the neck. The gloved hand on the screen dug through a small pouch and produced a plastic packet. The hand tore the packet open and pulled a three-inch long needle with a little hilt on one end.
“God, I hate this shit,” the controller said.
On the screen, the tech pressed the needle into the fleshy area just under the pilot’s jaw. The point was sharp
