My Other Car is a Spaceship (15 page)

“Good. You start
on the lef—”

“Hel-help!”

“Who’s that?” Kalen asked.

“It is me, sir. Marsengar.” The Foren’s voice came from the left of the two men.

“Are you all right?”

“I am injured sir. My left
fore-tentacle. I am trapped under debris. I cannot get out. How long have I been unconscious?”

“I don’t know, Mars. Hold on; we’re coming.”

“If the three of
us
made it,” Hal mused, “I wonder how many
other
survivors there are.”

“Make that four,”
said a deep voice from across the bridge.

“Well, Jern?” Penrod entered his second-in-command’s office on
Smuggler’s Cove
with eyebrows raised.

Ishtawahl shrugged. “Nothing much so far; just a lot of scrap metal flattened against the asteroids
and odd chunks that deflected back into space. The impact smashed the ships so hard against the rock the shield generators and inertial dampeners failed almost instantly. They provided little protection for the equipment and crew inside.”

“Pity. Is it worth salvaging what’s left, or should we just leave it there?”

“It is too soon to tell. At the very least, we need to clean up the large pieces floating free inside the shield wall. They will be a hazard to navigation once we move this fortress back there. Plus there’s the fissionable material from the warheads. It might be worth tracking down.”

“G
ood point. All right, then. Continue salvage and cleanup operations for now.”

“Ow!” Kalen yelped. “Hey, watch that!”

“Sorry, sir.” Environmental Systems Specialist
Gort Ashredahl turned the flashlight away from his Captain’s face. “I did not realize you were there.”

“It’s okay. Just be careful. Our eyes are pretty damned sensitive after all this time in the dark. I’m just glad you found a light finally. We need to assess the situation and we can’t do that if we can’t see.”

“Yes sir.” The Alberian turned the light in a circle around the bridge. “By the Eggs of Merad!”

The devastation was incredible. Hardly a piece of equipment was where it was supposed to be. Nearly everything had been torn free and dashed against the
forward bulkhead of the bridge. Had Hal not closed the blast doors over the immense viewport before the nuke detonated, everyone on the bridge would have died from decompression. As it was, only four had survived among more than a dozen.

“Jeez.”
Hal saw the pilot’s couch amidst the debris and laughed. “When I woke up and found myself still strapped in, I thought all that stuff had piled up around me. I had no idea I was part of the rubble!”

“Same here,” Kalen agreed. He pointed to the comman
d chair halfway across the room, near the outer edge of the debris. “I’m amazed my head’s still attached.”

The hull was squeez
ed inward in places near the prow, as if crushed between gigantic Herculean fingers.

“How the hell did we survive
that
?”

Kalen shook his head at
Hal. “Beats me.
Adventurer’s
a good ship. I guess she’s a lot tougher than we knew.”

He ran his fingertips along a railing that miraculously remained in its original position.
“Well, we’re still airtight—at least on the bridge—for now, anyway. That’s something. And who knows? Maybe some survived on the other ships, too. Get pressure suits and flashlights from the storage lockers and let’s check out the rest of the ship.”

“Aye,
Captain!” Gort Ashredahl and Marsengar said almost simultaneously.

“Roger that,”
Hal chimed in.

“We need to see if we can restore power somehow. This air is go
ing to get stale pretty fast if we can’t get the environmental systems back up and running. Gort, that’s your job.”

“Aye.”

“Hal, go with Gort. If and when we get power restored, tie into the ship’s systems and run diagnostics on everything. We need to know what’s working and what isn’t.”

“Roger.”

“Mars, you’re with me. Let’s see if anyone survived outside the bridge.”

“Tarl?”

“Yes, Jern?” Penrod looked up from the console in his office.

“We have finished examining the wreckage of eight Unity ships. As expected, little can be salvaged other than scrap metal. We recovered one survivor who managed to climb into a pressure suit before the ship lost all atmosphere. The doctor says she is unlikely to survive her injuries and radiation exposure, however.”

“Ah well, that’s the way it goes. Too bad.
Are you shutting down the salvage operation?”

Ishtawahl shook his head. “Perhaps you did not hear me correctly. I said we have finished examining the wreckage of
eight
Unity ships. As you may recall, nine ships penetrated the inner shield wall. We have found only eight wrecks.”

“Eight?”
Penrod frowned. “I don’t understand. They were all caught in the same explosion, weren’t they? So where’s the ninth ship?”

“
Unknown, sir.”

“Over here, sir!” Marsengar pointed with two of his three good tentacles. A pile of debris in a corner of the medical bay seemed to writhe.

Kalen rushed to the spot and helped Mars pull tables and equipment off the blue form underneath. “Nude! Are you all right?”

“Not-not entirely. It feels like I have several broken toes and my shoulder hurts. However, I do not believe I am seriously injured.”

“Good man!”

“Sir, please. Insults are uncalled for.”

Kalen laughed. “Yeah, I guess you
can’t be feeling too bad after all.”

He helped the Chan’Yi to his feet, and then to an examination table that had somehow escaped the carnage.

Nude sat while clearing his head. Then, seeing Marsengar cradling his injured tentacle, Dr. Chalmis’Noud’Ourien hopped down from the table, wincing, and insisted on checking the Foren’s injury.

“
Captain, you may continue your exploration of the ship. I will endeavor to find the proper equipment and supplies to treat our injuries. Go. We will be fine.”

Kalen hesitated before nodding. “Holler if you need me. I don’t know if I’ll hear, but
….”

He shrugged
and headed down the main passageway. He checked every compartment for survivors, but found none in the first dozen he checked. Several were sealed shut, evidently holed from without and automatically sealed against pressure loss.

Then he found a Melphim female in the aft armory, and a male Blensian in the galley, covered in a red sauce that he mistook for blood
at first—until he remembered that Blensians have blue-green blood. He had to help the froglike creature limp back to the medical bay for treatment. The Melphim, despite two broken arms and a dislocated shoulder, made it back on her own.

Finally,
Kalen reached the engine room. The back half was crushed in, destroying the sublight drive, but amazingly the room was still airtight.
So much for flying home.

Kalen discovered a woman sitting on the floor and leaning back against part of the hyperflight drive,
coughing up blood. She had a two-foot length of parasteel pipe sticking out of her abdomen.

“Di-did we
….” She coughed up more blood. “...win, sir?

Kalen couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth.
Without a working sickbay and proper medical equipment, there was no hope of saving her. He sat beside her and put his arm around her. “Yes, Mary-Lou,” he said softly, “we kicked their asses up one side and down the other.”

“Goo-good,” she gurgled. “Damn pirates
….” She shuddered once, and was still.

Kalen closed her eyes and wiped the blood from her mouth. Then he laid her gently on the deck
. Closing his own eyes, he briefly allowed himself the luxury of tears—not only for her but for all the crew he’d lost over the past three years.

“I think I figured out what happened to the ninth Unity ship, Tarl.” Ishtawahl paused with a triumphant expression on his face.

“
Well?” Penrod, asked after a beat. “Are you going to make me guess?”

“Look at this holo footage one of the salvage ships just sent back.” He clicked the remote control button for the viewscreen opposite Penrod’s desk. The wall lit up with a view of torn and flattened metal jutting from the face of an asteroid.

“So? I see wreckage. It doesn’t look any different from the footage I watched earlier.”

“It’s not. But keep watching.” The holocam panned across the debris field.
The Alberian paused the footage. “See the markings there?” He pointed to the center of the screen.

“Sure. It’s the tail number of the ship.”

“Right. Now keep watching as the cam passes over the wreckage.” He advanced the holo slowly and then hit pause again. “There. See that?” He pointed now to the top left edge of the screen.

“
Again, tail numbers.”

“Exactly. Now watch.” He manipulated the controls to split the screen and rotate the two images.
“On the left is the first set of markings we saw and on the right the second, digitally enhanced.”

“They’re different. But
….”

“Exactly. They are not from the same ship.”

Penrod nodded with lips pursed. “Good catch.”

“Thank you, sir.” He neglected to point out that it was a crewmember of the salvage ship that actually spotted the
discrepancy.

“So that’s it, then. They were both crushed against the asteroid. End of story. End of salvage.”

“No, sir.”

“No?” Penrod wore a frown. “I don’t follow.”

“The debris field here is no thicker than anywhere else a ship crashed.”

“So
…what? This is just a piece of the tail of the ninth ship, and the rest is elsewhere?”

“No, this
is
the tail of the ninth ship. See here?” He pointed to the top edge of the screen, and then to the bottom. “What you see is part of a crevasse in the asteroid—a small ravine, if you will—mostly obscured by the wreckage from the smashed ship. What I believe happened is that the ninth ship was hurled into the ravine, prow first and wedged between the walls, like a stopper in a bottle. The narrowing walls would have slowed the ship and then stopped it, perhaps before reaching the bottom of the crevasse. Then the other ship smashed into the asteroid crosswise, forcing the ninth ship further into the crevasse and nearly covering the entrance to the ravine and the tail of the ninth ship.”

Penrod’s eyebrows shot up. “And that’s why we see only
part
of the tail of the ninth ship, flattened. Excellent. So, perhaps most of the ship is in one piece. What do you think are the odds?”

Ishtawahl shrugged. “Impossible to say, sir. It all depends on how deep the ravine is. The prow may be smashed flat, or not.”

Penrod nodded. “If not, we may be able to access the ship’s computer and access its data. There’s no telling what we might learn. Do we know if this ship fired its nukes?”

Ishtawahl shook his head.
“It is too soon to tell which did and which did not. There is a definite radiation signature in the area consistent with at least two nuclear warheads; however there is no way to tell yet from which of the two ships the radiation is emanating.”

“
By all means, let’s see if we can recover them. Nuclear-tipped missiles would make an excellent addition to our munitions stockpile. I daresay we could find a use for them.” He smiled. “Continue salvage operations. Let’s open that tin can and see what’s inside.”

With everyone patched up, the seven survivors aboard
Adventurer
gathered in the medical bay. Nude and the Blensian, Fesel Pharetha Shoh, were arguing about something trivial.

“Aren’t
we
a sorry excuse for a crew,” Kalen interrupted. He shook his head in frustration. “Two humans, a Chan’Yi, a Blensian, a Foren, a Melphim, and an Alberian, all of us injured to one degree or another. Still, we’re all we have—and yet we can’t seem to get along. That’s going to stop right now. If we’re to stand a chance of surviving this debacle, we have to work together as a team.

“With more than ninety of our comrades gone, we’ve all lost friends. I’d like to have a moment of silence to remember them.” He bowed his head.

The nonhuman crewmembers grieved in their own ways. Fesel skipped the customary throat-sac thrum customary to his people, in deference to his Captain’s wishes, and limited himself to changing the color of his skin in creative patterns designed to soothe the soul. Senten Po, the Melphim, began mouthing what Kalen took to be an epic poem she was composing in her head, honoring her fallen comrades. Nude likewise did nothing outwardly visible, however Kalen knew he’d be remembering something special or noteworthy about each of those he was close to. Gort expanded and contracted his dorsal fringe in the ritualistic funereal pulse of the Alberians.