Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

His prose acquires a brooding quality during his account of the destruction of Athens, and the needless loss of life during the misguided effort to defend the Parthenon. And, if I’d been at all inclined to sleep, he would have blasted that possibility by his denunciation of the Spartansfor Thermopylae: The Hellenes knew for years that the Persians would be coming, and in any case they had advance knowledge of the formation of the invasion force. Yet they prepared no league, and set no defenses, until the deluge was on them. Then they sent Leonidas and his men, and their handful of allies, to compensate with their lives for the neglect and stupidity of the politicians.

It was a grim coincidence: those words had been written before the Mutes had launched their attack, and in a broad sense it fell to Sim to play the role of Leonidas. He led the holding action for the frontier worlds, while Tarien sounded the alarm and began the immense task of forging an alliance that could stand against the invaders.

I don’t know whether I ever actually got to sleep. Persians and Mutes got confused with each other, and then I was looking up into Saje McIras’ solemn eyes. Her hand was on my shoulder. “Hugh,” she said, “we’re going to send over a boarding party.”

“Okay. I’ve got a few people who should go.”

“No. I want to keep it small. Just you and me.”

I watched her, unable to believe she was serious. Just you and me ? “Why?”

Her face was a mask, but the reflections that flickered across it had acquired a somber pulse. “I don’t really know. I’m afraid of what we might find, maybe.”

The hull was seared and blistered and pocked. It had a patchwork quality from periodic replacement of plates. Navigational and communication pods were scored, after-section shields appeared to have buckled, and the drive housing was missing, exposing the Armstrong unit. “Nevertheless,” said McIras, “I don’t see any major damage. There is one strange thing though.” We were in a shuttle, approaching from behind and above. “The drive housing was removed . It wasn’t blown off.”

“Unfinished repairs,” I suggested.

“Yes. Or repairs made in a hurry. Not the way I’d want to take a ship on a long mission. But it looks serviceable enough.” The aguan solenoids, through which the Corsarius had hurled the lightning, protruded stiff and cold from an array of mounts. “So do they ,” she added.

But the chill of age was on the vessel.

McIras sat in the pilot’s seat, thoughtful and apprehensive. The multi-channel was open, sweeping frequencies that would have been available for automated responses from Corsarius . “The histories must be wrong,” I said. “Obviously, it wasn’t destroyed at Rigel.” She adjusted the contrast on the navigational display. One of the computers on the Tenandrome was matching the ship’s schematics with ancient naval records, again and again, in endless detail. “It makes me wonder what else they might have been wrong about,” she said.

I looked at her. “Assume Sim survived Rigel. Why did he disappear afterward? Why come out here anyhow? Saje, could the Corsarius have made this kind of flight?”

“Oh, yes. Hugh, the range of any of these vessels was only limited by the quantity of supplies they could get on board. No, they could have done it. Obviously, they did do it. But it would have taken the better part of a year, coming from the zone of operations. And presumably in the middle of a war. Why? Why in hell did they do it?” She stared down at the spine of the ship.

I’d always thought of the Corsarius as a large vessel, and the records confirm that opinion. She was large, for a frigate. But she was almost negligible against the square-cut bulk of the Tenandrome . “I wonder if, somehow, Sim and his ship fell into the hands of the Mutes?”

We drifted out over the bow, past the fierce eyes and curved beak of the harridan, past the weapons clusters bristling in the ship’s snout. McIras took us higher. The hull fell sharply away, and the blue sunsplashed planetary surface swam across the viewports. Then it too was swallowed by the broad sweep of star-strewn black sky. We swung around and started a fresh approach.

McIras was talking in a flat emotionless voice. “Blind and dead,” she was saying. “No effort to track.”

The curious Cerullian characters stenciled on her hull slipped past. They gave us the ship’s designator. “It checks,” came Carmody’s voice. “It’s the Corsarius .”

The hatch rotated open to McIras’ touch, and yellow light showed around its edges. We floated into the airlock. Red lamps glowed on an elegant status board. “Seems to be in working order,” I said.

“Ship’s got power,” she replied. “Not much. Enough to run the maintenance systems.” Not enough to generate artificial gravity. Once we were inside, the hatch closed, lights blinked to orange, and air hissed into the compartment. Carmody did a comm check and wished us luck. The bolts on the inner hatch slid out of their wells, warning lamps went to red, and the door swung open.

We looked out into a dimly-lit chamber. The bulkheads were lined with cabinets and storage enclosures and pressure suits. Two benches and an engineering console were anchored to the deck. Oxygen content was okay, a little low, but breathable. Temperature was not quite three degrees. Cool. McIras released her helmet, lifted it, and inhaled.

“They turned down the heat,” I said, removing my own.

“Yes. That’s precisely what they did. They left the ship, expecting to come back.” She drifted awkwardly across the deck, counting the pressure suits. There were eight. “All there,” she said.

“We need to look at the bridge.”

“In a minute, Hugh.” She disappeared down a corridor. I waited several minutes, contemplating shadowy passageways. The cabinets were filled with oscillators, meters, cable, generators. One yielded a book of poetry, written in Cerullian. Another, a holo of a young woman and a child.

Everything was secured in bands, clamps, or compartments. The equipment was clean and polished, as though it had been stowed the day before.

I was looking at the holo when she returned. “Well,” she said, “there’s one theory blown.”

“What was that?”

“I thought maybe they’d gone down to the surface and got stranded.”

“Hell, Saje, they wouldn’t all have left the ship.”

“I suppose. Anyhow, it’s a moot point. The lander’s in its bay.”

“That means there was a second ship involved. They were taken off.”

“Or,” she said, “they’re still here. Somewhere.”

Some of the lights had failed. None of the elevators worked, and the air had a trace of ozone, as though one of the compressors was overheating. One compartment was full of drifting water-globes; another was scorched where an electrical fire had burned itself out. From somewhere deep in the ship came a slow, ponderous heartbeat, growing stronger as we penetrated the interior. “It’s a hatch opening and closing,” she said. “One of the circuits has malfunctioned.”

Progress was slow. Moving around in null gravity is cumbersome, and every hatch had to be winched open. McIras tried to establish normal power from an auxiliary board. Green lamps went on, indicating that the functions had been executed, but nothing changed. So we floated through the ship, unable to get leverage, and unable to pass through the hatches without a lot of effort. One resisted us so fiercely that we wondered, even though the gauges read normal, whether there wasn’t a vacuum behind it. In the end we went down one level and bypassed it.