Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

An eyeblink is all I’d’ve needed to miss the wreck. I caught the faint energy signal on a sensor I kept tuned to deep space around me. The sensor blipped once and was gone, that fast. But I had been around enough to know that something was there. The energy signal was too far out, too faint to be anything but lost.

As fast as I could, I dropped out of FTL, cutting my sublight speed to nothing in the drop. It still took me two jumps and a half day of searching before I found the blip again and matched its speed and direction.

I had been right. It was a ship. A black lump against the blackness of space.

My single-ship is modified—I don’t have automatic anythings in it, which can make it dangerous (the reason single-ships are completely automatic is so that the sole inhabitant is protected), but which also makes it completely mine. I’ve modified engines and the computers and the communications equipment, so that nothing happens without my permission.

The ship isn’t even linked to me, although it is set to monitor my heart rate, my respiration rate, and my eyes. Should my heart slow, my breathing even, or my eyes close for longer than a minute, the automatic controls take over the entire ship. Unconsciousness isn’t as much of a danger as it would be if the ship were one-hundred-percent manual, but consciousness isn’t a danger either. No one can monitor my thoughts or my movements simply by tapping the ship’s computer.

Which turned out to be a blessing because now there are no records of what I had found in the ship’s functions. Only that I had stopped.

My internal computer attached to the eyelink told me what my brain had already figured out. The wreck had been abandoned long ago. The faint energy signal was no more than a still running current inside the wreck.

My internal computer hypothesized that the wreck was Old Earth make, five thousand years old, maybe older. But I was convinced that estimation was wrong.

In no way could Earthers have made it this far from their own system in a ship like that. Even if the ship had managed to survive all this time floating like a derelict, even if there had been a reason for it to be here, the fact remained: no Earthers had been anywhere near this region five thousand years ago.

So I ignored the computerized hypothesis, and moved my single-ship as close as I could get it to the wreck without compromising safety measures.

Pitted and space-scored, the wreck had some kind of corrosion on the outside and occasional holes in the hull. The thing clearly was old. And it had been floating for a very long time. Nothing lived in it, and nothing seemed to function in it either besides that one faint energy signature, which was another sign of age.

Any other spacer would’ve scanned the thing, but other spacers didn’t have my priorities. I was happy my equipment wasn’t storing information. I needed to keep this wreck and its whereabouts my secret, at least until I could explore it.

I made careful private notes to myself as to location and speed of the wreck, then went home, thinking of nothing but what I had found the entire trip.

In the silence of my free-floating apartment, eighteen stories up on the scattered space-station wheel that orbited Hector One Prime, I compared my eyeball scan to my extensive back-up files.

And got a jolt: The ship was not only Old Earth based, its type had a name:

It was a Dignity Vessel, designed as a stealth warship.

But no Dignity Vessel had made it out of the fifty light-year radius of Earth—they weren’t designed to travel huge distances, at least by current standards, and they weren’t manufactured outside of Earth’s solar system. Even drifting at the speed it was moving, it couldn’t have made it to its location in five thousand years, or even fifty thousand.

A Dignity Vessel.

Impossible, right?

And yet…

There it was. Drifting. Filled with mystery.

Filled with time.

Waiting for someone like me to figure it out.

The team hates my secrecy, but they understand it. They know one person’s space debris is another’s treasure. And they know treasures vanish in deep space. The wrong word to the wrong person and my little discovery would disappear as if it hadn’t existed at all.

Which was why I did the second and third scans myself, all on the way to other missions, all without a word to a soul. Granted, I was taking a chance that someone would notice my drops out of FTL and wonder what I was doing, but I doubted even I was being watched that closely.

When I put this team together, I told them only I had a mystery vessel, one that would tax their knowledge, their beliefs, and their wreck-recovery skills.

Not a soul knows it’s a Dignity Vessel. I don’t want to prejudice them, don’t want to force them along one line of thinking.

Don’t want to be wrong.

The whats, hows and whys I’ll worry about later. The ship’s here.

That’s the only fact I need.

After I was sure I had lost every chance of being tracked, I let the Business slide into a position out of normal scanner and visual range. I matched the speed of the wreck. If my ship’s energy signals were caught on someone else’s scans, they automatically wouldn’t pick up the faint energy signal of the wreck. I had a half dozen cover stories ready, depending on who might spot us. I hoped no one did.

But taking this precaution meant we needed transport to and from the wreck. That was the only drawback of this kind of secrecy.

First mission out, I’m ferry captain—a role I hate, but one I have to play. We’re using the skip instead of the Business . The skip is designed for short trips, no more than four bodies on board at one time.

This trip, there’s only three of us—me, Turtle and Karl. Usually we team-dive wrecks, but this deep and so early, I need two different kinds of players. Turtle can dive anything, and Karl can kill anything. I can fly anything.

We’re set.

I’m flying the skip with the portals unshielded. It looks like we’re inside a piece of black glass moving through open space. Turtle paces most of the way, walking back to front to back again, peering through the portals, hoping to be the first to see the wreck.

Karl monitors the instruments as if he’s flying the thing instead of me. If I hadn’t worked with him before, I’d be freaked. I’m not; I know he’s watching for unusuals, whatever comes our way.

The wreck looms ahead of us—a megaship, from the days when size equaled power. Still, it seems small in the vastness, barely a blip on the front of my sensors.

Turtle bounces in. She’s fighting the grav that I left on for me—that landlocked thing again—and she’s so nervous, someone who doesn’t know her would think she’s on something. She’s too thin, like most divers, but muscular. Strong. I like that. Almost as much as I like her brain.

“What the hell is it?” she asks. “Old Empire?”

“Older.” Karl is bent at the waist, looking courtly as he studies the instruments. He prefers readouts to eyeballing things; he trusts equipment more than he trusts himself.

“There can’t be anything older out here,” Turtle says.

“Can’t is relative,” Karl says.

I let them tough it out. I’m not telling them what I know. The skip slows, shuts down, and bobs with its own momentum. I’m easing in, leaving no trail.

“It’s gonna take more than six of us to dive that puppy,” Turtle says. “Either that, or we’ll spend the rest of our lives here.”

“As old as that thing is,” Karl says, “it’s probably been plundered and replundered.”

“We’re not here for the loot.” I speak softly, reminding them it’s an historical mission.

Karl turns his angular face toward me. In the dim light of the instrument panel, his gray eyes look silver, his skin unnaturally pale. “You know what this is?”