Richard Russo - Ship of Fools

“Sorry if I’m disturbing you,” she said. “I need to speak to you, privately.”

A churning began in my stomach. I had no idea what she would say, but I figured it couldn’t be good. “Close the door.”

She shut the door and held herself against the wall, facing me. I’d always admired Cardenas, partly because she was a member of the crew—I admired everyone in the crew, to an extent, because they were so much their own people, staying outside of all the social and political machinations on the Argonos —but also because of the way she represented them on the Executive Council. Like Geller, she always argued for what was best for the ship as a whole, not for herself or for any one faction. Although I would never have said we were friends, she was one of the few people who I believed did not actively dislike me—that was worth a lot.

“All right,” I said. “Give me the bad news.”

“Oh, I don’t know that it’s bad , exactly. Weird. Three things, and you should know about them. Nikos ordered me not to speak of one, and he doesn’t know I’m aware of the other; I don’t think he’s even aware of the third. But I won’t keep them secret any longer. Not when we’re about to start explorations tomorrow.” She cocked her head. “Whether you choose to tell the others, I leave to you. It probably doesn’t matter. But you should know, since you’re in charge.”

“I’m glad someone thinks so.”

She smiled, but only briefly. “This first thing is mostly just a mystery, maybe some physical phenomenon that we don’t recognize, but it could have some significance we can’t yet determine. We also can’t do anything about it, but it’s worth being aware of.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “We maintain a steady three-thousand kilometer distance between the Argonos and the alien ship. The problem is this: every couple of days we have to retreat a bit, because the Argonos drifts closer to the ship.” Another shrug. “Well, we drift closer to it, or it drifts closer to us, or we’re drifting together, it doesn’t matter which.”

“Frame of reference,” I said.

“Yes. However you chose to view it, every two days we have to make a several-minute burn of some of the attitude jets to pull back to three thousand kilometers.”

That was weird, all right. And disturbing.

“What’s the mass of the alien ship?” I asked.

“We’ve already run that, and it doesn’t work. That damned ship is huge, dense in some sections, and it’s got significant mass, but not enough to account for this, not at three thousand kilometers.”

Cardenas may have thought it was just a mystery, but I didn’t like it.

“Any ideas?”

“No. We still don’t pick up anything from the ship except a hint of ambient heat, which isn’t much higher than its surroundings. No one’s been able to suggest an explanation.”

“That’s encouraging.” I shook my head. “What about the shuttle? We’ll drift into the ship as well, won’t we?

She nodded. “Probably. A couple of choices. We can set down on the ship’s hull, anchor the shuttle with a few cables. Since there’s no rotation, and there will be a tiny bit of natural gravity, it wouldn’t take much to secure us. The cargo hold has all the necessary equipment.”

“Thinking ahead.”

She gave me a quick shrug. “Just wanted to be prepared. The other choice is to tell the pilots that the mass of the ship is enough to cause a small attraction, and let them use the shuttle engines regularly to keep us parked.”

I nodded. “Preference?”

“Land on the ship and anchor to the hull. If that ship is dangerous, being seventy-five meters away won’t make much difference.”

“I agree. We’ll make a final decision tomorrow.” I sighed. “Okay, what else?”

Cardenas hesitated a long time before answering, which only increased my anxiety.

“Did you ever wonder how it was we found this ship?”

Sure, I had wondered—a dark mental creature of doubt had gnawed away at my thoughts, although I had always managed to suppress it for a time. I hadn’t wanted to think about it too much. I knew something was wrong.

“Just coincidence,” I tried. “On our way out from Antioch, it was just there, near our flight path. Coincidence. Luck.”

Cardenas made a kind of snorting noise. “This ship, this alien vessel, is nowhere near anything . You take all the possible flight paths we could have charted out from Antioch’s system, and just by chance we choose the one that takes us right to this starship.”

“Were we on a flight path to make a jump to the bishop’s next star?”

She shook her head. “The bishop hadn’t made a selection yet. He doesn’t usually make one immediately, but he’d never hold off that long. Either Captain Costa somehow convinced him to postpone his selection, or the bishop and the captain worked together on this. I don’t know how it played out between them.”

“Tell me.”

“A few hours after you entered the chamber on Antioch, the transmitter at the original landing site sent off a long, highly directional signal burst. It stayed on long enough for Communications to chart its path. Didn’t seem to be directed at anything in particular—the nearest star in its path was hundreds of light-years away. Working backwards in time, it still would have been a couple thousand years ago before anything would have been much closer.”

“So Nikos got curious.”

“Apparently. He set course to follow the signal path, and we stayed under conventional propulsion all those months until we picked up the alien ship. Even so, we almost missed it; we nearly went right on by. The only reason we didn’t is because the captain had all the ship sensors on full alert, looking .”

“So you think the signal was directed at the alien ship.”

“What do you think, Bartolomeo?”

“And Nikos doesn’t know you know about this?”

“No. He ordered the people in Communications not to speak of it to anyone. When he set our course, he gave no explanation, just gave the orders to the navigators.”

“Then how did you learn about it?”

She hesitated. “The crew obeys most of the captain’s orders, but not in certain matters. We have open communication among ourselves. We keep no secrets from one another.”

“Any ideas about the signal?” I asked. I had a couple myself, but they were only partially formed, and I wanted to hear what Cardenas thought.

“We talked about it. The crew. A number of suggestions, but most extremely unlikely. Two primary possibilities, we concluded.” She held up a finger. “One, it was a signal to the alien starship that the chamber had been discovered. Or breached.”

“But you said the signal wasn’t sent until several hours after we’d entered. Why the delay?”

Cardenas smiled. “We worked that out. Long enough for Antioch to rotate and bring the transmitter into a position where it could send the signal to the correct location.”

I nodded. “Second possibility.”

She held up another finger. “The signal was meant to lead us here.”

“A trap.”

“Of sorts. Except there’s no one left alive on the ship. The trap, if that’s what it was, can’t be sprung.”

“That’s what we think. Maybe it’s what we’re supposed to think.”

Cardenas shrugged. “Haven’t seen any signs of life yet.”

“There’s always tomorrow,” I said. “You said there were three things.”

“Yes. The third bothers me the most. It’s the bishop.”

My gut tightened still further. “Go ahead.”

“Not sure what to tell you. It’s been three weeks now since exploration of the alien ship was suspended. During that time, the bishop has made three excursions of his own, three trips here with a shuttle and a crew. I’m fairly certain Nikos doesn’t know about the trips, and the bishop probably thinks no one does—he managed to override all the security alarms, took circuitous flight paths, arranged for the bridge to shut down sensors and detection equipment until the shuttle was far from the Argonos, that kind of thing. Very thorough.”