Reynolds, Alastair - Redemption Ark

[Clavain.]

One of the sweep-team members was waiting for him. Clavain angled himself so that his face was aligned with the woman’s and then hitched himself against the interior wall.

What have you found?

[Not much. All dead.]

Every last one of them?

The woman’s thoughts arrived in his head like bullets, clipped and precise. [Recently. No sign of injury. Appears deliberate.]

No sign of a single survivor? We thought there might be one, at least.

[No survivors, Clavain.] She offered him a feed into her memories. He accepted it, steeling himself for what he was about to see.

It was every bit bad as he had feared. It was like uncovering the scene of an atrocious mass suicide. There were no signs of struggle or coercion; no signs even of hesitation. The crew had died at their respective duty stations, as if someone had been delegated to tour the ship with suicide pills. An even more horrific possibility was that the crew had convened at some central location, been handed the means of euthanasia and had then returned to their assigned niches. Perhaps they had continued to perform their tasks until the shipmaster ordered the mass suicide.

In zero gravity, heads did not loll lifelessly. Even mouths did not drop open. Dead bodies continued to assume more or less lifelike postures, whether restrained by webbing or allowed to drift untethered from wall to wall. It was one of the earliest and most chilling lessons of space warfare: in space, the dead were often difficult to tell from the living.

The crew were all thin and starved-looking, as if they had been living on emergency rations for many months. Some of them had skin sores or the bruised evidence of earlier wounds that had not healed properly. Perhaps some had even died before now, and had been dumped from the ship so that the mass of their bodies could be traded against fuel savings. Beneath their caps and headsets none of them had more than a greyish fuzz of scalp stubble. They were clothed uniformly, carrying only insignia of technical specialisation rather than rank. Under the bleak emergency lights their skin hues merged into some grey-green average.

Through his own eyes now Clavain saw a corpse drift into view. The man appeared to paw himself through the air, his mouth barely open, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate spot several metres ahead of him. The man thudded into one wall, and Clavain felt the faint reverberation where he was hitched.

Clavain projected a request into the woman’s head. Secure that corpse, will you?

The woman did as she was asked. Then Clavain ordered all the sweep-team members to tether themselves and hold still. There were no other corpses drifting around, so there should not have been any other objects to impart any motion to the ship itself. Clavain waited a moment for an update from Nightshade, which was still spotting the enemy with range-finding lasers.

At first he doubted what he was being shown.

It made no sense, but something was still moving around inside the enemy ship.

Antoinette knew that tone of voice very well, and the omens were not auspicious. Pressed back into her acceleration couch, she grunted a reply that would have been incomprehensible to anyone or anything other than Beast.

“Something’s up, isn’t it?”

“Regrettably so, Little Miss. One cannot be certain, but there appears to be a problem with the main fusion core.”

Beast threw a head-up-display schematic of the fusion system on to the bridge window, superimposed against the cloud layers Storm Bird was punching through as it climbed back to space. Elements of the fusion motor were blocked in ominous pulsing red.

“Holy shit. Tokamak, is it?”

“That would appear to be the case, Little Miss.”

“Fuck. I knew we should have swapped it during the last heavy-general.”

“Language, Little Miss. And a polite reminder that what’s done is done.”

Antoinette cycled through some of the other diagnostic feeds, but the news did not get any better. “It’s Xavier’s fault,” she said.

“Xavier, Little Miss? In what way is Mr. Liu culpable?”

“Xave swore the tok was at least three trips away from life-expiry.”

“Perhaps, Little Miss. But before you ascribe too much blame to Mr. Liu, perhaps you should keep in mind the enforced main-engine cut-off that the police demanded of us as we were departing the Rust Belt. The hard shutdown did the tokamak no favours at all. Then there was the additional matter of the vibrational damage sustained during the atmospheric insertion.”

Antoinette scowled. Sometimes she wondered whose side Beast was really on. “All right,” she said. “Xave’s off the hook. For now. But that doesn’t help me much, does it?”

“A failure is predicted, Little Miss, but not guaranteed.”

Antoinette checked the read-outs. “We’ll need another ten klicks per second just to make orbit. Can you manage that, Beast?”

“One is doing one’s utmost, Little Miss.”

She nodded, accepting that this was all that could be asked of her ship. Above, the clouds were beginning to thin out, the sky darkening to a deep midnight blue. Space looked close enough to touch.

But she still had a long way to go.

Finding the survivor had been much easier than Clavain had expected. It had only taken thirty minutes to pinpoint the location, narrowing down the search with acoustic and biosensor scanners. Thereafter, it had simply been a question of stripping away panels and equipment until they found the concealed niche, a volume about the size of two cupboards placed back to back. It was in a part of the ship that the human crew would have avoided visiting too often, bathed as it was in elevated radiation from the fusion engines.

The hideaway, Clavain quickly decided, looked like a hastily arranged brig; a place of confinement in a ship never designed to carry prisoners. The captive must have been placed in the hole and the panelling and equipment bolted and glued back into place around him, leaving only a conduit along which to pass air, water and food. The hole was filthy. Clavain had his suit sample the air and pass a little through to his nose: it reeked of human waste. He wondered if the prisoner had been neglected all the while, or only since the crew’s attention had been diverted by Nightshade ’s arrival.

In other respects, the prisoner seemed to have been well looked after. The walls of the hole were padded, with a couple of restraining hoops that could have been used to avoid injury during combat manoeuvres. There was a microphone rigged through for communication, though as far as Clavain could tell it only worked one way, allowing the prisoner to be talked to. There were blankets and the remains of a meal. Clavain had seen worse places of confinement. He had even been a guest in some of them.

He pushed a thought into the head of the soldier with the torch. Get that blanket off him, will you? I want to see who we’ve found.

The soldier reached into the hole. Clavain wondered who the prisoner would turn out to be, his mind flashing through the possibilities. He was not aware of any Conjoiners having been taken prisoner lately, and doubted that the enemy would have gone to this much trouble to keep one alive. A prisoner from the enemy’s own ranks was the next most likely thing: a traitor or deserter, perhaps.

The soldier whipped the blanket away from the huddled figure.

The prisoner, crouched into a small foetal shape, squealed against the sudden intrusion of light, hiding its dark-adapted eyes.

Clavain stared. The prisoner was nothing that he had been expecting. At first glance it might have been taken for an adolescent human, for the proportions and size were roughly analogous. A naked human at that—unclothed pink human-looking flesh folded away into the hole. There was a horrid expanse of burned skin around its upper arm, all ridges and whorls of pink and deathly white.