Warlord of the Spinward Reaches, page 13
They walked down the telescoped corridor that was the extended airlock. The colors were a welcome surprise when they got to the other airlock, a thing Haydar had identified from pictures, though nobody could be certain it would work.
Still, everyone had faith that the ship was powered and working. Waiting patiently for someone to come rescue it from the black moon.
The hatch felt perfectly normal, which was itself perfectly weird.
Dan was used to their Ononguli ship, where the decks and hatches tended to be taller and skinnier than a similar Human vessel. Khet were just the opposite, more short and wide than anything she’d grown up with.
Everyone had a peculiarity to their naval architecture.
Next to the hatch, a box of twelve buttons in a format she recognized, three across and four deep, where Humans counted from the top left and had a pair of function buttons bracketing the zero at the bottom center. Nothing she could read.
And nothing jumped out at them as they got close. They were in vacuum, snugged up against the side of the derelict, which also sheltered them from the black hole on the far side.
Dan studied the buttons. Whoever had built this place had been the size and scale of a Human, so they were on the right at stomach level. Perfectly natural.
Looking closer, she could see a clear screen over them. Protecting the buttons from wear?
“Thoughts?” she asked on the team line, everyone shifted about to see.
“Dan, if I may?” Suka Kuri replied.
She slid to the side so the taller woman could step up, then kneel down so she was at a better level to see.
“Ah,” Suka Kuri replied. “There.”
She pushed on the clear screen itself and it opened by pivoting out and up on a hinge. Inside, Dan could see a series of letters etched into the hull itself. Or numbers in this case. A code.
It matched the numbers on the buttons.
“Should I?” Suka Kuri asked, looking up.
“Go ahead,” Dan said. “Everyone spread out a bit.”
She stayed put, but the others moved back and away, in case something happened.
What, she had no idea, but best to be prepared.
Suka Kuri moved deliberately, entering the sequence. 1-5-9-3-7-# if this was a Human keyboard. Easy enough to remember. Someone had put it here forever for someone else to find.
What did it do?
A moment later, the hatch lit up all the way around, save for one bulb that had apparently failed on the bottom right. Then the entire thing slid sideways into the hull, revealing a room beyond.
Dan knew that Uly and others were watching over her shoulder from her helmet cam, so she turned and steadied.
“Uly, we appear to have opened the outer airlock hatch,” she said. “Ciah and I will make entry at present, then see if we can get the others cycled in as well.”
“Understood,” he said. “Be careful.”
She nodded, knowing he’d see that.
Her mission. She was in charge until she was back aboard the Fox.
What she really wanted out of life.
Ciah had already moved in. Dan followed her. Corridor or airlock, more like the latter. Three meters on the square by six deep. Nothing in here, but there were hooks and clamps about shoulder height down both sides, like she might want to store suits in here.
Ciah moved to the far end and located an identical control system.
“Open it?” she asked.
“Go ahead,” Dan answered.
Like before, pressure on the clear plate caused it to open, revealing a code beneath the set of keys. 2-5-8-4-6-# this time, so someone was intelligent about it. Obvious, but different.
The outer hatch slid shut exactly how Dan expected. Lights came on a few moments later, but her external sensors didn’t read any atmosphere. Possibly those tanks had bled fully dry by now.
However long that had taken.
“Inner door is opening now,” Dan announced to everyone listening. “We have lights coming on. They feel comfortable.”
“Comfortable?” Uly asked.
“Like I was back on Marshall Castillon, Uly,” she said.
“Weird,” he replied.
And he was right.
Another room beyond. Felt like the mud room where you stored suits. Lockers and hooks around walls. Same rainbow metal for the walls and ceiling. Deck was a raised grate design like a standard diamond, done in a brown that wouldn’t show dirt. Good traction, because there was gravity in here.
Power, like the ship was still alive.
Dan reached down and dialed the magnets in her boots to a lower setting. Not off, just in case, but easier to walk with only a little stickiness. Ciah did the same.
“Nasrin, your turn to cycle the lock, as we’re in the chamber beyond,” Dan said, gesturing Ciah to keep watch on the only hatch, opposite the airlock.
Right where she’d have put it for efficiency.
Even Corsac Fox had been built a little weird that way, but she knew enough Ononguli these days to understand that it felt perfectly normal to them, and a Human ship would have thrown them off instead.
The airlock hatch flashed several times then began to close. Presumably, atmosphere would have revealed an alarm hooting as well.
Like she’d have done it.
Dan waited. A few minutes later, the inner hatch slid open, revealing the rest of her team. Nasrin. Yanouk. Katya. Anari. Yeong-Suk. And Suka Kuri.
The ceilings were high enough for the three Emro women. The hatches would be a closer fit, but more manageable than the Fox.
“Uly, we’re inside,” Dan announced. “No atmosphere, but gravity is working. Feels almost human standard. Lights are mostly working, with about one in twenty failed as I look around. No indications of life or movement. What can you see?”
“Stand by,” he said. “No changes on sensors as we approached. No movement from the ship at all. Outwardly, it remains a derelict. What are your next steps?”
“Wide end still feels like Engineering and thrusters,” she replied. “Going to head forward and maybe up a bit to see if we can locate the bridge and discover what we might learn.”
“Understood,” he said. “We’ll be monitoring your progress, but your signal isn’t even as degraded as it would be aboard Marshall Castillon.”
Dan nodded.
Every ship was a Faraday cage, insulated on a variety of wavelengths to protect the crew from harmful radiation. That usually included simple radio propagation, but not today. Not this hull.
At the same time, none of her sensors were indicating any dangerous levels of radiation to worry about.
If there was air and heat, she could walk around in her usual uniform.
“Dan, take a look at this,” Nasrin called.
Dan followed over to where Nasrin and Ciah had the inner hatch. Same control next to it, but only one button, with a small fisheye lens below it, like you might hold out a hand to be scanned.
None of them would be in whatever databanks still worked, but something was alive around them. Or at least working.
“Try the button,” Dan said.
Ciah did. Nasrin had a Firesphere loaded, pointed at the hatch as it opened smoothly.
No monsters emerged.
Ciah leaned out and looked both ways.
“Corridor,” she said simply. “Feels like the main port corridor. Nobody visible.”
And no atmosphere present. Temperature was a shade above open space, but their suits were designed to protect them in this sort of environment for several days.
“We’re about midship from the bow,” Dan reminded the Khet woman. “Turn left and start counting steps. Katya, you have the rear behind Yanouk.”
That put Nasrin, Anari, and Suka Kuri in the middle, where the Mazhin woman had her Omnibow and the Exemplar was protected. Anari deserved to be up where she could see what her efforts had yielded.
And it was only going to get better.
They walked deeper into the semi-derelict.
THIRTY-SIX
Nasrin would have liked to have her helmet off. Or at least her louvers open. She was half-blind, stuck inside her boarding armor. Almost as bad as everyone else, save that she could at least listen to their breathing with her tentacles and track their physical and emotional status as they traversed the alien vessel.
The natives were Human-sized. Mazhin were generally skinny like Ononguli. Khet tended to be broader, and shorter. Even the big ones. Emro were Emro.
This corridor was three Humans comfortably walking side-by-side wide. Tall enough for an Emro with some room to spare, but the lights were recessed, so the only time Yanouk and Anari had to duck was at the frame hatches, all of which had worked thus far.
Colors were pretty in here. Someone with an acute visual sense had taken pains to align hull metal into one long mural of abstract art that was incredibly soothing to watch.
Most ships were gray. Even Corsac Fox was only a little better, generally done in whole-wall tones of colors that Omid had approved before they were painted on.
This was the metal itself. Nasrin couldn’t wait until they had enough atmosphere that she could lean into one of the walls and let her tentacles taste it.
She was willing to bet it tasted as pretty as it looked to her eyes.
A hand on her elbow caused Nasrin to pause.
“Hold here,” Nasrin said quietly, looking back to see what Suka Kuri had seen.
The Elder had dropped to one knee, studying the wall intently. They had opened a few hatches along this long corridor, but those had been offices or cabins. Nothing important, save that they’d all been in decent shape.
No organic remains anywhere to be seen. That was good. Probably.
Suka Kuri studied a hatch controller. Nasrin had the center, so she watched while both flanks covered.
“I believe this is a stairwell,” the Elder announced. Then pushed the button and revealed that she was right. She stood and Nasrin could hear the smile in her voice. “The language is not all that far removed from Isann. More complex, as if our friends took to using fewer letters and spelling certain words more phonetically.”
“Can you read that?” Dan asked.
“I have made a few breakthroughs,” Suka Kuri replied. “Translating the Karaŋgılıkka has helped. Yanouk and Anari, the words are longer, possibly more descriptive, but still with a similar meaning.”
Nasrin nodded. She hadn’t bothered learning it, since the book was going to be available soon, but maybe she’d need to learn Yarikh?
Especially if Uly was somehow successful in retrieving this ship from its eternal tomb.
“Dan?” she asked.
Ciah and Dan slipped around and started up the stairs. This felt like the bottom deck, though the way the external hull rounded, there might be one more below them that only ran down the middle, instead of the full width of the ship.
“Dan, how many decks are we ascending?” Ciah asked as they got to the first switchback.
“Three,” came the reply. “I’m working on my old ship for scale, and things feel like that. The bow section slopes down some from the shoulders, so the bridge might look forward from the flat hillside of the hull.”
Nasrin paused to visualize what Dan had seen. The front was an arrowhead, separated from the middle with something like a neck. And slightly lower, as if shoulders. The bridge as eyes?
Or a type of land lizard that was wider than it was tall. The big, meat-eating predators like Dan had once described an alligator. Tailless in this case, with big engines aft where it flared out again.
They climbed. Things were a bit heavier than she was used to.
“Dan, how close to Human standard gravity is this?” she asked, knowing that Uly kept Corsac Fox lighter for all the other species.
“Just about exact,” Dan replied. “Two percent heavier than normal for a Batyr ship.”
Nasrin nodded.
She didn’t think Humans had been out in the galaxy that long ago, but nobody really knew. Even Dan and Uly had admitted that the Human homeworld had been lost to history at some point.
Presumably somewhere over in Sector Seventeen.
Right?
Or were they from Fourteen, and all those folks were more colonists that had somehow gotten all the way over there and never encountered the Auga or anyone else?
So much they didn’t know. And Nasrin had smelled Uly to understand that he didn’t , and was occasionally angered that he didn’t .
Third deck up, they exited the stairwell, though it kept going up at least two more.
Big ship. Empty as a looted tomb. Quiet.
Nasrin kept a Firesphere loaded and followed Ciah deeper.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Suka Kuri once again blessed whichever gods might listen that she’d been alive in a time to know Uly and Dan. There was simply no other way to handle it, if one ascribed chaos as the only backing feature of Creation.
They were walking on a ship that was a Yarikh relic. Left here by someone so long ago that Zamir Aytiev had followed a trail of clues, given up, and conveyed the Karaŋgılıkka to eternity, that someone might return later and succeed.
Of course it would be Uly.
She paid attention to the hull and corridors, noting that Dan considered this to be a close match in dimensions to her original vessel, one Marshall Castillon in Batyr service. That suggested that the largely unknown Yarikh were similar in size and shape to Humans, themselves a bit of an anomaly that way. Not Khet. Not Mazhin or Ononguli.
“What do you think?” Ciah Dambe asked on the general frequency.
Suka Kuri perked up. They had approached another hatch, but one that felt much heavier, looking closely.
Six meters wide, with a smaller hatch set into it, matching this particular corridor. The first one had been smaller. Dan had mentioned that this one felt like the main spinal corridor, running the length of the vessel once they had ascended to this deck and made their way inward.
“Nasrin, how close are we to the slope of the forward hull?” Dan asked.
“Another fifteen or twenty meters, Dan,” the Mazhin woman replied.
Suka Kuri visualized it as Dan had explained. The entire bow section, sloping gently down from the neck like an amphitheater, providing an exceptional view forward. Except that in space, things would normally be so incredibly distant as to largely be nothing more than brighter stars against the background.
But the Isann were sailors. And descendant from sailors, it seemed. Would they want a proper cockpit bridge, from which they could watch the stars as they traveled?
That sounded correct to Suka Kuri.
“This might be the dead end, then,” Dan announced. “Everybody stand by. I’m about to open the smaller hatch.”
Suka Kuri didn’t have anything to do except stand by and enjoy herself, surrounded by Dan’s Combat Team, all heavily armed, well trained, and eager.
The hatch opened as the others had, by sliding into the wall as a single unit, revealing a chamber beyond from Suka Kuri’s vantage.
“Making entry,” Ciah told everyone as she stepped through.
Suka Kuri wasn’t last, but only because Katya waited.
Inside, it was a small auditorium. That was the thought that immediately crossed her mind.
The group stood on something of a balcony, with ramps down both sides of a V-shaped room that narrowed as it went forward. Everyone else had split, so Suka Kuri walked up and stood next to Dan looking down.
One station at the center, in front of doors back into the wall beneath her feet. Possibly a toilet and a storage closet. Or a day office like Uly had.
Four stations in a straight line in front of the commander, all facing forward. More stations around the walls of the balcony and inset on little platforms raised from the ramp.
The forward view was utterly stunning. A single window that followed the slope of the hillside, perhaps twenty meters from front to back and more than ten wide at the bottom.
From up here, Suka Kuri could see the entire bow of the vessel laid out like a field of flowers.
It was a pity that this was nothing more than a museum.
At least today.
Looking down, Suka Kuri could see all five of the workstations with lights on. Something was working here.
“It appears to be the bridge,” Dan announced unnecessarily, but Suka Kuri presumed that she was talking for Uly’s benefit. And everyone else back on Corsac Fox.
“Things working?” Uly asked.
“I see consoles operational,” Dan replied, even as Suka Kuri moved to take the closer ramp.
She wanted to see things up close.
Some of the side stations were intended for someone to stand at, while others had chairs.
Odd chairs, too. Too wide for Ononguli. Too tall for Khet.
Human-sized? Or at least Yarikh who were a close match physically?
Yes, that fit her sensibilities.
“Suka Kuri is investigating,” Dan announced. “Her camera is on channel twenty-nine.”
It was? Oh, how delightful. Everyone could follow along, though she supposed that she’d have to watch her language when talking to herself.
didn’t need those sailors suddenly discovering that she wasn’t a quaint, old woman. They might grow embarrassed at having to learn new profanities.
She suppressed a mad giggle and got down to the commander’s level. That was how she saw it. One person overseeing four others, though she wasn’t entirely sure what those four would do. Corsac Fox had Drew as a Pilot and Sterling as a Gunner, with the other stations around the outside of an oval space.
But then, it would make perfect sense to the Yarikh, whatever it was. And the Karaŋgılıkka would possibly provide clues.
“Anari, I have four stations,” Suka Kuri announced, glancing around.
Anari and Dan had joined her below, with the others up on that balcony, presumably on guard against whatever.
“Who would the Isann station here?” Suka Kuri asked, knowing that Anari Supasei had gone the furthest in translation, apparently a natural in ways that had surprised the young woman.
