FIVE
They entered the wreck through the widest breach. Two teams of two plus transport robots. Bourne was with Iarrey. Their job was to investigate the lower decks, or actually the only section in that part of the ship that hadn’t been totally destroyed. The other team, consisting of Morrisey and Nike, had to check the bow part of the battleship’s upper decks. Annataly was monitoring the operation from the Nomad’s bridge.
They searched cabins, passageways, and holds, loading on the transport drones everything that hadn’t been sucked into space after the crash. Morrisey didn’t seem to attach much importance to searching and opening successive cabins; before Nike had finished loading up the required objects, the captain would disappear into the next passageway, checking the readings on his holopad.
Two standard hours after boarding the wreck, having moved along elevator shafts, they reached the main passageway connecting the bridge to the officers’ living quarters. The arched, undamaged vault stretched away for fifty yards, ending in a massive bulkhead.
“Bingo,” Morrisey muttered, gliding farther down the passageway and shining his torch onto the ceiling, section by section. “The bridge seems unharmed. Give me the coder and a mobile reactor, right now.”
The captain, staring at the wall of solid helon, didn’t take notice of the cadet’s silence at first. Eventually he realized Nike hadn’t heard his instructions. “What the fuck …”
He started to turn around and only then did he see what the beam of light from his partner’s suit torch was pointing at. The door of the nearest elevator wasn’t closed: a boot of a spacesuit was sticking out, the electromagnetic studs on its sole clearly visible.
“Nike?” Morrisey sounded serious. “Can you hear me, boy?”
There was no answer. The cadet hadn’t even moved.
“Nike, you clone-of-a-bitch!” the captain roared, achieving the desired effect.
“Yes, sir?”
“What are you staring at? Never seen a dead body?”
“No, sir, I haven’t.”
“Well, that’s one debut out of the way.” Morrisey flew up to the door, stuck both gloved hands in the gap and tried to move it. It would not budge.
“Annataly, can you hear me?” he switched to the bridge’s frequency. “I need a repair drone.”
There was no response for a few seconds, but the navigator answered before the captain became impatient.
“Iarrey’s breaking into some chambers, he’ll be done in five minutes.”
“Five minutes, galacticunt!” The captain turned around and looked at the bulkhead. “Okay, get me another coder and a reactor. I also have a little door to open.”
“I’m on it, sir.” This time, the answer was fast and concise.
“And you—stop twiddling your thumbs.” Morrisey slapped the cadet on the arm. “Use the scope to check there aren’t any more of these inside.”
Reluctantly, Nike did as he was told. He flew over to the gap, cautiously, and fed a telescopic camera into the cylindrical cage. A moment later, he had an image of the interior. The man whose boot they had seen was in the elevator alone. His suit appeared to be intact, at least on the surface. Nike communicated the information to the captain. It was ignored, just as he had expected. Morrisey, whistling merrily to himself, was unscrewing the casing of the scanner panel by the lock. Nike resumed his observation of the elevator’s interior. In spite of being trained to fight, he shuddered at the presence of a dead person, or, to be more precise, the corpse lying literally at arm’s length. Many people had died in that battle, some sucked out of the mutilated hulls, others burnt alive or vaporized in reactor explosions, but this man must have had a lingering death. He continued to live, imprisoned in the wreck, until the air in his tanks ran out. Six or even ten hours …
“Well?” Morrisey’s voice brought Nike out of his reverie again. “Show me what we’ve got here.”
The captain steered the camera for a while and then suddenly whistled. He looked down the passageway where the coding robot was just plugging into the bulkhead’s panel. The massive cube of the mobile plasma reactor had already been connected up and all the lights in the entire section came on. Morrisey smacked the glowing red call button on the elevator, but it still didn’t react. The mechanism had frozen over a hundred years earlier, so there was no chance of it working.
“Ann!” the captain yelled into the comlink, as though he’d been bitten in the backside. “Get me that drone down here!”
“But Iarrey’s still not—”
“And he’s never going to. Tell him to cut a passage through with your nail file. I’ve got something awesome here and I need that drone right now!”
“You’ve got it, sir.”
Nike looked at the irate captain in confusion.
“What did you see there, sir?” he finally asked.
“It’s one of Tahomey’s staff officers,” Morrisey answered, and added at once, “If you’d looked closer at what’s sticking out from under the body, you’d have seen what might be the last ship’s hololog. And that, my dear, is worth an unbelievable fortune on Earth. And I saw it first. You snooze you lose.” He poked a metal finger into the cadet’s chest.
“Yes, sir!”
A moment later, the shaft through which they had reached the main passageway lit up in a pale-green glow. A massive repair drone emerged from inside and froze two feet away from them. Morrisey plugged the end of his programmer into the reader and the huge robot began moving again. Its long pincers plunged into the gap. For a while nothing happened, or at least it seemed that way. Sound didn’t carry in a vacuum, but the chips of paint floating away from the oval door told the two men that immense force was being applied to its surface. Just in case, Morrisey pulled the cadet farther into the passageway, yet still nothing happened. The mechanism had either jammed for good, or something else was blocking the door.
“We’ll cut it,” the captain decided, and the drone obediently extended a burner.
Twenty seconds later, almost half of the metal plate blocking the way to the elevator was hanging by the wall of the passageway, and Morrisey was dragging the body from the cage through the freshly cut opening. The captain’s triumphant expression vanished in an instant when he saw what the corpse was holding.
“Shit!” he said throwing the obsolete electronic notebook toward the deck. “The diary of …” He looked at the name tag. “Major Visolay, fucking moron, who couldn’t even get into an elevator properly. What kind of name is that anyway?”
“Perhaps it’s worth something.” Nike caught the gliding notebook and connected it to his power pack, but the display remained blank. “I’ll be able to open it up on the Nomad.”
“Who gives a damn what that asshole wrote?” Morrisey snarled.
“I might find something interesting—”
“Strip him,” the captain suddenly ordered.
“Say what?”
“I said, strip the body. Get his suit off him.”
“But …”
“But me no buts. Time is money. An antique, undamaged suit will fetch a good price on Earth.”
“I can’t …” Nike felt genuine horror at the thought of having to touch a dead man. “We can’t just—”
“Yes, we can,” Morrisey interrupted him. “Move it, we still have to check the bridge.”
“No. I won’t do that, sir!”
“You’re starting to piss me off, Cadet. And anybody who pisses me off comes to a sorry end.”
“I … I just can’t …”
It seemed as though the captain would hit the ceiling, but instead he plugged into the drone and when it set off again toward the bulkhead with burners heating up, he seized the corpse’s arm and began to fiddle around with the helmet seal.
“We ought to give him a funeral in line with—” Nike began.
“Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” the captain cut him off. “We’ll give him a funeral, but he’ll have to pay for it first.”
The Nomad’s captain deftly pulled the mummified remains out of the spacesuit. In the ghastly flashes of rapidly setting fountains of plasma from the bulkhead being torn open, Nike saw the non-regulation long hair on the major’s shriveled head. He turned away so as not to see the dead man’s face, but couldn’t ignore Morrisey’s behavior. The captain threw the spacesuit into the transport drone’s container and leaned over the corpse once more. He didn’t go for the dog tags, as might have been expected, but began to struggle with the dead man’s hand. He was pulling off the officer’s ring!
“Don’t say anything!” Morrisey snapped, seeing the expression on the cadet’s face. “Now me and Mr. Visolay are quits.”
He stood up, threw away a piece of finger he had torn off accidentally, and examined the ring, lifting it up close to his visor. “A brainiac, just like you.”
Nike didn’t answer, still feeling contempt for his new commanding officer, but decided not to exacerbate the situation. The Academy had taught him obedience, among other things.
“Oh, yes,” muttered the captain, looking at the plans of the ship on his holopad again.
He pointed at the irregular breach cutting the hull at a sharp angle and marked in red. “If that impact hasn’t depressurized all the chambers on the command subdeck, we have a really big deal in store. The bridge, Tahomey’s cabin … Do you know how much his private archive will be worth?”
Nike shook his head inside his spacious helmet, although he doubted that moony Morrisey could see it.
“Boy, we have the chance of getting our hands on a fortune, the size of which no one has ever dreamed of.”
“How much?” Nike asked, more to keep the conversation going than out of curiosity.
Standing idly in a passageway of the moribund ship, lit up by showers of sparks, sent shivers down his spine, particularly now, in the company of Major Visolay’s corpse.
“They won’t pay less for the Admiral’s logs on Earth than—”
Morrisey didn’t manage to say anything else because Annataly’s voice drowned him out.
“Captain, we’ve got a problem,” the navigator said in her usual expressionless tone.
“Be more precise, honey,” Morrisey snapped.
“A large lump of a rebel corvette is on a collision course―”
“Get out of its way, or do some target practice and don’t bother me with crap like that!” Morrisey said furiously and returned to watching the bulkhead being ripped open.
“But, sir … It’s a collision course with the wreck of the Odin …”
“What?!” the captain roared. Even through the fogged-up crystallite his eyes could clearly be seen shining. “We’re going to be on the bridge in five, six minutes. Can’t you destroy that shit? Or at least knock it a few degrees off course—”
“I’ve done the maths three times already. No chance,” the navigator retorted. “It’s a gutted, but almost complete Samurai class corvette. Two hundred and fifty thousand tons of fucking helon composite, and going at a fair lick—”
“Do something!” Morrisey yelled. “I’ll give you an extra three … no, wait, five percent!”
“You have eight minutes to get back into space,” Annataly’s voice was flat as though a computer and not a living creature were speaking.
“That’s an order—” the captain began.
“Seven minutes, fifty-five seconds …”
“Galacticunt! We’re so close!”
“Seven minutes fifty seconds to impact.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it sooner, bitch?!” Morrisey roared.
“Because the object entered the collision course literally two minutes ago, after hitting a fucking asteroid which turned into a cloud of dust in front of my eyes, you stupid prick!” That response from the Nomad was much more emotional, at least the latter part.
Annataly got a grip on herself and added calmly, “The second team are already withdrawing, sir.”
“Give me ten minutes, just ten fucking minutes and we’ll be on the bridge!”
“You won’t manage to search it in three minutes, and then it’ll be too late to spend what you’ve collected in your swag bag. You won’t just be losing a hand this time.”
A little anxious, Nike flew over to Morrisey and placed his hand on the commanding officer’s armored shoulder.
“We can come back after the impact,” he suggested. “Perhaps we’ll be able to—”
“Like fuck we will,” Morrisey bristled. “Do you know what a quarter-ton lump of metal will do to this wreck?”
“Not much, maybe,” Nike calmly replied. “It depends on how fast it’s flying and what the angle of approach is.”
“Knowing Ann, that bloody corvette’s flying fucking fast,” the captain muttered, looking down at his prosthesis. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have made such a fuss—”
“Extremely fucking fast, or even faster,” the chief navigator interrupted him. “The impact will probably destroy both wrecks. At best, the remains will be pushed out of the zone; at worst they’ll end up in Delta’s atmosphere. Get your asses out of there while you still can. Six minutes twenty seconds.”
Morrisey spat, quite simply spat inside his crystallite helmet, and then keyed in the sequence to stop the robot’s work. Finally, he kicked the major’s mummified remains with all his strength.
“It’s your fault, you cretinous clone-of-a-bitching stiff. It’s your fault …”
For a moment Nike didn’t know what to do. Fly after the soldier’s body gliding down the passageway, or help to disconnect the robots. Morrisey solved his dilemma by pulling him onto the repair drone, which was already moving toward the elevator. They both seized its arms and shot down the arched passageway toward the nearest breach. Nike turned the comlink volume almost all the way down, so as not to hear the captain’s colorful oaths, cursing the conspiracy of the late major, his lame crew, and all the gods known to Humankind.
They entered space a minute and a half before the collision of the two giants. Morrisey, continuing to curse through clenched teeth, didn’t even turn around to look at the incredible spectacle. Nike, on the other hand, could not take his eyes off it.