Requiem (35 page)

The song you
sang for me.

The song you
sang for me.

The song you
sang for me.

Still, the
memory would not come and when she closed the blackbox and looked
into open space she felt sick for all she could see was an open
wound so large and deep that it could never heal itself.

Everyone had
gathered behind Therin's central console in the bridge while she
brought up the live feeds from the cruiser's exterior cameras.
They'd since passed into the Obal system and the abandoned scout
ship had finally come into view. From where they were the angle of
the scout ship made it look entirely intact. Although, to Seline,
it didn't look like much of a ship at all. While it was much
smaller and thinner than the cruiser, it was still long. There were
compartments, like small cubes that were attached to the central
tube structure of the ship. They protruded from the ship at even
intervals along its length, like leaves sticking from the stalk of
a sapling. She recognised the ring at one end of the ship as the
'collider', part of its own anti-matter engine. If that was the
back of the ship then she couldn't see the front.

Several recon
drones were dispatched from the cruiser towards the scout ship. On
the monitor next to the camera screens the scanned image of the
ship constructed itself as the drones fed the data through. Sear
rotated the model on the screen.

'Shit.'

'That's one big
fucking hole,' said Belameir from behind Tialus.

'Observant as
always,' said Sear. At the back end of the scout ship a hole was
torn in its hull. The scans indicated that it was over four metres
across. Sear read the data appearing on the screen. 'No vitals. No
heat signatures. Obvious decompression of cabin pressure. Emergency
systems are inert. Damage to the ship is catastrophic.'

'Do we have a
body count?'

'Three. Two
intact. One partially intact.'

Seline
cringed.

'I'll have the
drones search the databases,' said Sear.

'Seline. How
are you feeling?' asked Tialus.

Seline looked
back towards Tialus. 'Good, I guess... why?'

'Send the
drones back. Seline, Therin, suit up.'

'Yes ma'am,'
Therin said reluctantly.

'You're sending
them over there?' asked Belameir.

'Is it safe?'
asked Seline.

Tialus looked
at Sear.

'All
preliminary scans indicate that it is,' he said.

Tialus turned
to Seline and Therin. 'You're both going to board the scout ship
and retrieve whatever data you can from the database.'

'What if
there's nothing on the database? It looked pretty damaged,' said
Seline.

'Then that's
what you'll report.' Tialus looked at Therin. 'Make sure she closes
those suit seals properly.'

Therin walked
away to prepare herself. Seline remained where she was, uncertain
if there was a joke she was missing.

'Yes, Seline?
You'd better get a move on. Therin won't wait for you forever,'
said Tialus.

'You'd be lucky
if she waited a minute,' said Sear.

Tialus flicked
her head towards the door, indicating for Seline to leave.

Seline made her
way to the changing station by the ship's airlock. Therin was
already half dressed when she entered. Seline took one of the suits
from the wall and fitted herself into it the way Athene had shown
her.

Therin
approached Seline and looked her up and down. Checked the seals.
Clear.

Seline could
hear the rustling of her body against the fabric of the suit and a
distant ringing sound in her ears as they made their way into the
airlock. The atmosphere was sucked from the tiny room. The voices
of the crew occasionally sputtered over the comm, muttering words
that she didn't bother listening to.

The lights in
the airlock turned off. Seline found the switch for the
night-vision and pressed it. The airlock door, thick and heavy,
pulled away into the emptiness and the body of the scout ship was
right in front of them. It looked much bigger in person. The
cruiser had pulled up parallel to the ruined ship no more than ten
metres away. Seline could see, by the distant stars that were
swinging past in their enormous sweeping arcs, that the scout ship
was spinning and that the cruiser was now spinning with it.
So
that we would have an easier time boarding it
, Seline assumed.
She wanted to reach up and squeeze the stars between her finger and
thumb to extinguish their disorienting light.

Seline started
when Therin's voice buzzed in her ear. 'We're pretty much directly
in line with their airlock,' said Therin. She pointed out to the
side of the scout ship where a round door looked as if it had been
etched into the curved side of its hull. 'I'm going over first.
You'll wait for me to land and then I'll signal for you to follow
me. Understand?'

Seline
nodded.

'You shouldn't
need to use your jets. Just aim for the airlock and push off gently
from the edge of our airlock and let the force carry you over.'

Seline nodded.
She took a step forward to get a better look out the airlock. She
could see the back of the scout ship where the collider was, like a
big ring that the thin ship had passed through the centre of.

Seline looked
back at Therin then stumbled to the side as Therin stepped past
her. Therin pushed off casually over the chasm between the two
ships. She drifted away from the cruiser into the ensuing darkness.
She landed on the other side and placed her hands against the
closed door to brace herself. She grabbed onto the handrail that
ran around the outside of the scout ship's airlock. She turned to
Seline and waved her over.

Seline stepped
to the threshold of the airlock and looked out. She wasn't sure
what she was looking for; deja vu, perhaps. She took a few steps
back and leaned against the airlock's inner door. She closed her
eyes for a moment.

Belameir's
voice spiked in her ear. 'Just imagine the cruiser is on fire, Sel.
That should be enough motivation.'

'Get off the
comm!' Athene yelled.

Seline smiled
to herself and opened her eyes. She exhaled a long breath then took
three steps and pushed off. She had been looking at Therin the
whole time and so was heading directly for her. Therin moved to the
side. Seline slammed into the hull, frantically grabbing at its
smooth surface before Therin took a firm hold of her suit and held
her in place. Seline latched onto Therin's arm, her heart
pounding.

'Good work,'
said Therin.

Sarcasm? Seline
had no way of knowing. She almost asked her to repeat the words but
managed to stop herself. She let go of Therin's arm and immediately
grabbed hold of the rail.

Therin looked
up, past Seline towards the back end of the ship then turned and
looked towards the front. She pulled away from the door and
stretched her body out so that she looked like she was standing on
the surface of the ship. She hit one of the buttons on her forearm
and her feet were pulled hard against the alloy hull.

'Turn on the
magnets in your boots,' she said to Seline.

Seline kept one
fist firmly clenched around the rail, her palm sweating beneath the
fibres of the suit. She pulled her feet up so they were flat on the
face of the airlock door and looked at the small panel on her right
forearm. She knew which key to hit but was reluctant to remove her
hand from the home it had found on the hand rail.

'Do you
remember how to turn the magnets on?' Therin asked.

'Yes,' said
Seline anxiously.

'Then when you
summon up the courage to free up your other hand come join me near
the front of the ship. We're going in through the hull breach.' And
with that Therin turned and walked away. Her footsteps vibrated
through the skin of the hull. Seline looked down at her left hand,
at her fingers clamped so tight that she could already feel a cramp
biting just beneath the skin.

Death and the
fear of death are two completely different things. One forces you
to give in and the other only asks you to. And the longer you keep
talking to your hand the more insane you're going to look.

She glanced up
at Therin. She was still walking away.

Alright. Just
don't. Look. Up.

She held her
feet just above the hull of the ship and unfurled her fingers and
pulled her hand away from the rail, making sure she didn't push or
nudge anything. As if she were balancing an egg on the back of her
hand she brought it across and hit the key for the magnets in her
boots. They were sucked down onto the alloy beneath. Seline finally
exhaled and straightened her back. She trained her eyes directly on
Therin's back and started walking.

Therin had
already stopped at the breach and had walked around the curvature
of the ship to find the easiest point of access. Seline was
steadily getting closer, thinking all the while that all the
training drills in the world couldn't prepare you for the real
thing.
Feeling
that you're going to die and
knowing
it were two very different things.

Seline came
upon the breach which Therin was now leaning over. The wrought
pieces of the ship's side had been bent in all directions like the
flesh of a gaping wound.

'The metal is
bent inward,' said Therin. 'Whatever did this came from the
outside.'

Seline listened
to the sound of her own breathing. Steady and deliberate. Strangely
inorganic. 'Whatever made this must have been pretty big,' said
Seline.

'Big compared
to a Yurrick or a human maybe but big enough to take down a whole
ship? It's a little hard to believe at the moment.'

'Right. So
where are the bodies?' asked Seline.

'It was a small
crew. Only five according to the brief.' Therin pointed out into
empty space but Seline's eyes never left the hole. 'Some would have
been lost out here when the hull was breached. And according to the
scanners, there's still two and a half bodies on board.'

Two and a
half. As if they were a fraction in a maths test. “If five people
entered the ship and all of them were killed but only half were
sucked out the air-lock exactly how many bodies would be left on
the ship? Please show your working.”

'I'm going in
first and you're going to follow directly behind me,' said Therin.
'Once we're inside, don't touch anything unless I say otherwise.'
She didn't wait for a response. She placed her hands on the broken
edge, switched off the magnets in her boots and pulled herself
around and into the ship. 'Be careful of the sharp edges,'
cautioned Therin from inside the ship, 'the last thing we want is a
suit rupture.'

Seline followed
Therin in the same manner, this time finding it easier to negotiate
the transition between magnets and free flight. The room they were
in looked like it might be a laboratory of some kind.

Seline had
expected the layout of the ship to be the same as the cruiser but
the seats and tables and various consoles, at least those which
were bolted down, were instead attached to the internal cylinder
walls of the ships indicating that it likely relied on centrifugal
force to create its artificial gravity.

Seline looked
closely at the remaining internals of the lab. Panels on the walls
and consoles had been removed and floated in the air while frayed
cables poked out from the spaces they had once covered like the
stripped tendons of a severed hand, waving at no one in particular.
Therin pushed aside a small cloud of debris with her hand. Seline
grabbed one of the shards of metal. She flicked it out through the
massive hole and watched it drift away.

About five
metres to her left was a wall that served as a partition between
the lab and the rest of the ship. Seline guessed the partitions ran
down the length of the ship like a series of ribs although there
was a hole in this one about the same size as the hole in the
ship's hull. Seline floated into the centre of the room and looked
through the circular hole. There were tanks in the next room.
Seline recognised them as the tanks the Yurrick use for rapid
acceleration and deceleration on the cruiser, the ones she'd
initially thought were coffins.

Therin's voice
came over the comm.

'I knew Tialus
sent you with me for a reason. Come help me open this door.'

Therin waved
Seline over.

'You could say
please every now and again,' said Belameir from the comm.

'And you could
say nothing every now and again,' said Therin. 'How about you do
your job and get him off the comm,' she said to Mercer.

Seline moved
towards Therin. She was floating alongside the wall/ floor next to
an oval shaped door. Seline assumed that it must lead into one of
the cube rooms she'd seen from outside that protruded from the side
of the ship.

'It's closed,'
said Seline. 'Most of the other doors are all open. Why not this
one?'

'This is the
secondary lab. One of the three changeable modules attached to the
ship before it was sent through the Tryil Gate. There may still be
some of the rock and planetary samples from some of the exo-planets
that the crew probed.'

'Then wouldn't
this be one of the first places the scavengers would want to go?'
asked Seline.

'Maybe if the
two bodies weren't in there,' said Therin.

Seline's breath
caught in her throat. Her jaw clamped shut. She cleared her throat
and asked Therin to clarify.

'Many Ordonians
are incredibly superstitious when it comes to dead bodies. Of
course, they would have told Gliphen that they searched the whole
ship over, head to toe, but my bet would be that they avoided this
room because of the bodies.'

'What kind of
scavengers are afraid of dead bodies?'

'Ordonian
bodies they can deal with no problem, in fact they're very fond of
blood sports,' said Therin. 'On the other hand most of them believe
that seeing or touching Yurrick and human bodies will give them bad
luck or some terminal disease. I'm not sure where or when the
belief got started. Probably just another rumour spread by the
Ordonian hierarchy as a reason to keep us off their planet. Anyway,
how strong is that arm of yours? Think you can open this door?'