The False Admiral (20 page)

“Leave it—we don't want them to think we're hostile.”

“There's nobody here to think it,” Deilani said, sounding lost.

“It's a big ship, Lieutenant. Look, there aren't any bodies—so if there was a fight, someone's cleaned up after it.”

“Doesn't look cleaned up—did you see those rooms back there?” she replied. “Either there was a war in here, or somebody picked up the ship and shook it. It's a disaster.”

“It's a disaster with power, and we're guests in it. Do we need to take this lift?”

“No, we should be able to get to engineering from down here.”

“Did you set the path right?”

“How should I know?” Nils sounded disgusted.

Our confusion only grew when we reached engineering. We'd assumed there had to be a maintenance reason for the depressurization—perhaps temperature control—and I'd hoped to find techs in pressure suits working to get things in order.

Instead we found nothing but empty rooms and unmanned consoles. The hatches to the reactor chamber stood wide open. Aside from a few items knocked about, everything seemed to be normal. There was no blood, and no sign of weapons fire. Everything that mattered was in its place. Even the chairs at their stations looked neat and orderly.

“Can't we get a break?” Nils groaned.

“This is a break, Ensign. The consoles are online. Activate the seals and get some air in here before you run out.”

“Can we do that?”

“I don't see anybody telling us not to.” I shrugged. “If anybody tries to stop you, let me know. I'll talk to them.”

“I'm not even going to think about the political ramifications here. I'm just following orders.”

“Do what he says,” Deilani told him.

“Following orders,” Nils repeated firmly. “That's what I do. Because that excuse has worked so well throughout history.”

I let him whine; it was his way of coping.

I turned to Salmagard, catching her eyeing her readout. We were cutting this close. I could only hope Nils could figure out the Ganraen systems before he turned blue.

“Private, are you all right?”

“Just conserving oxygen, sir.”

“Keep an eye on the ensign while he works. Lieutenant, with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“We need to look around a little. Keep in touch.”

There were tools left out as if forgotten. A broken monitor. There were dents in some of the bulkheads near the airlock, and it was nearby that we found the body.

“He can't be alive, can he?” Deilani said.

We stood in an open hatchway to a control room. In a chair on the far end was a figure sitting up, his back to us. We'd have missed him if I hadn't seen his limp hand dangling over the armrest.

“Not unless he's wearing an invisible pressure suit,” I replied.

“He must've been dead before they depressurized.”

“Safe bet. There's a suit over there.” I pointed.

“I'm in the system, Admiral,” Nils reported over the com.

“Keep at it, Ensign. Are you all right?”

“Got a few minutes left,” he replied distractedly.

“What about you, Private?”

“Four percent.”

“Deilani, take this suit to them. I'll find another one.”

“What about this guy?” she asked, taking the suit from me.

“He's not going anywhere.”

“You found someone?” Nils asked, sounding hopeful.

“Just a body. Stay focused.”

“What is going
on
?” he moaned.

“Focus. Take that to him. There'll be another one in the next core chamber. I'll get it.” These suits were meant to protect techs from radiation if something went wrong, but they'd work well enough for getting breathable air to Nils and Salmagard.

Deilani and I split up. I resisted the urge to enter the control room and examine the body; there were more pressing things to do. I found another suit, but before I could return to the trainees, Nils let out a shout of triumph over the com, and the doors dropped, sealing me in.

“I've got it!”

“What have you got?” I asked warily. I noticed my right hand reaching back, like I was wearing trousers and a jacket, and I had a waistband with a pistol in it.

But I was wearing a pressure suit, and I'd gotten rid of my gun hours ago.

I swallowed, looking around the chamber. There were only two sets of doors, both firmly sealed. I might be able to get out through a maintenance hatch, but even if I did, I'd still have Private Salmagard's combat scanner to think about.

“The diagnostic's running. It's deciding which parts of the ship are compromised,” Nils said.

Ah. So he hadn't sealed me in deliberately; this was just part of the system. That was a good decision on his part; the suit I was holding was his lifeline. I let my breath out slowly. I wasn't sure when the trainees would've found the time to make a plan to detain me once we got here, but they were resourceful. They could've done it.

But they hadn't. Maybe we finally had trust.

“I've got it spiraling out from engineering . . . recyclers online. It'll take a few minutes to get air pumped in, but we should be all right. It'll take even longer to get the temperature back up, but I can deal with being cold. I think we're good, Admiral. We're in business.” Nils was elated, and I didn't blame him. For the first time since we'd come out of our sleepers, things were looking up.

“Contact the bridge. Let them know we're here, and why we've done this—we don't want them to shut it down.”

“On it. Um—wow, I don't even know what to say. Uh, reactor section to bridge. Reactor section to bridge, we're a little low on air down here, so we're . . . Admiral, there's no one on the com. I'm showing no active stations,” Nils said. “My terminal is the only one on this entire boat that isn't idle.”

“That can't be right.” I looked around as though there was someone I could glare at for an explanation. It would take time to kill that sense of entitlement.

“Where could they be?” Deilani asked.

“Town meeting?” Nils suggested.

“Try the security net, look through the feeds. Find me
someone
,” I ordered.

“Security systems are locked. Or down. I can't tell with this thing. Admiral, these systems are ridiculous.”

“Is it because we're on emergency power?”

“I don't think so. I'm getting an error code. But I can't tell if something's broken or if I'm just locked out.”

The doors reopened; this part of the ship had been declared intact, and life support was back online. I checked the Ganraen suit's atmosphere gauge. It still wasn't safe to breathe, but it would be soon.

“If this is a ghost ship,” Deilani was saying, “how did it get this way?”

“Something must have gone wrong, something that made the colonists relocate to one of the other ships. Crowded, but better than whatever's the matter here?” Nils speculated.

“We've got air and power. What more do you want?” I asked, making my way back through the gray corridors.

I found them all clustered around the console, looking intently at the readouts. They were as anxious as I was to get their helmets off. I dumped the suit over the console and waited with them. Why not? They weren't going to be able to concentrate until the helmets were deactivated anyway.

I couldn't make sense of what we'd walked into. Even I couldn't have predicted exactly how the colonists would have reacted to us—but I'd been ready for anything. Finding
no one
was about the only thing I didn't have an answer for. Typical.

My suit declared the air safe to breathe, so I broke the seal and stripped out of the Ganraen pressure suit. Deilani was doing the same, and Nils and Salmagard had already collapsed their helmets back into their neckpieces. It was freezing cold, but none of us cared.

How long had we had those helmets up? Twelve hours? Eighteen? More? I didn't know. The others breathed deeply and appreciatively. I did too, and rubbed at my face—I always seemed to develop an itch when I had a helmet on. It was cold, but it would warm up quickly.

“I can't believe it,” Nils said, looking down at his gloves. “We made it.”

Deilani was giving me a funny look, and Salmagard was smiling.

Finally, they appreciated me. Then Deilani's expression became one of suspicion, and the moment was gone. I cleared my throat.

“If there's no security, we just have to get creative. If there's anyone else on this ship, they must be in pressure suits, so track active suits.”

“You got it, Admiral.” Nils grinned at me, popped his knuckles, and turned back to the console. This from the guy who'd been ready to throw in the towel just a few short hours ago? Good. “The only active suits I'm showing are in this room.”

“Then there we go. We've got the place to ourselves. And the other ships don't know we're here, because in a place like this, who would just come walking up to the door? Security's down because it doesn't need to be up, that's all.”

“Supposing there was some kind of conflict,” Deilani said. “And these people fought among themselves—what would they do with the bodies?”

“Each ship will have an infirmary and a morgue,” I told her. “There, or incinerated—depending on how long ago this happened.”

“How can we tell?”

“We can't unless we can get into the computers. If it's been in vacuum the whole time, it'll be preserved. But that fellow in the
other bay didn't make it to the morgue. We should probably go see why,” I suggested.

“Is that safe?” Nils asked.

“How long are your decon nanomachines good, Lieutenant?”

“A while longer. Let's have a look.”

We retraced our steps, this time with Salmagard and Nils in tow. The body hadn't moved. Nils stayed by the doorway. Squeamish?

The sidearm hanging from the Ganraen's hand didn't leave much uncertainty about how the hole had gotten in his head. He had been about Nils' age, and his uniform was that of a tech.

“Why?” Deilani asked, turning very pale.

I looked at the console in front of the dead man. “I think he's the one that vented the ship.”

“He'll thaw out now. Should we do something with him?”

“Leave him. The colonists wouldn't like us touching their people, but they must have left in a hurry if they didn't take him with them.”

“What do we do?” Deilani was looking to me for an answer.

“We get to the bridge and see if we can get in touch with the other ships.”

The trainees were starting to realize that maybe we weren't out of danger yet. The urgent but straightforward threat of asphyxiation had been replaced by a new threat, this one more ambiguous. Were we in danger from the colonists? Ordinarily we wouldn't be, but circumstances on this ship were anything but ordinary. These people
could
be a threat, and if they weren't, what about whatever had driven them off this ship? We didn't know. During our trek across the surface, this colony had represented safety.

Now that we were here, we weren't feeling very safe.

ON the way to the bridge we saw more of the same general disorder that characterized the ship's corridors and common areas. There were some stains that had to be blood, but not enough of it to account for even a fraction of the crew.

There was more evidence of weapons fire, and more structural damage—though the parts of the ship that were seriously compromised were sealed off completely to preserve atmosphere.

We saw more of the inexplicable burns and corrosion. Through a window into a sealed area, I could see damage that looked as if the colonists had literally torn the walls open.

There were no bodies, but there were occasional indicators of how suddenly the trouble must have struck. Objects thrown aside, hatches left open, and even a frozen, half-eaten calorie bar lying on the deck.

The shields over emergency alarms were smashed everywhere.
This was the colony's science vessel, and according to Deilani, the ship's infirmary had seen some use.

The trainees were distracted from the possible danger by the fact that they were strolling through an enemy ship as though they owned it. Even with the cease-fire in place, no one was going to just forget about the war. Even if the Empress' peace talks went as well as they possibly could, there would still be bad blood for a very long time. For the talks, the stakes were high.

There was more to worry about than just preventing the war from flaring up again here and now—there was also the danger that we'd just have another one in ten years when encroachment into Free Trade space became an issue again.

It wouldn't be enough to call off hostilities. Relations had to actually heal.

And that wouldn't be easy. I could see the trainees' prejudices, and it went without saying that they were mirrored by their counterparts, young people entering the assorted branches of the Commonwealth armed forces.

The Commonwealth was not happy, and neither was the Empire. The Empress had a big job ahead of her.

What surprised the trainees most was how things weren't that different from what they were used to. The colony ship wasn't as pretty as an Evagardian vessel, but it wasn't as much of a step down as they expected.

Cash-strapped Ganrae had never been able to do much about imperial propaganda during the war. Now the trainees were seeing firsthand that maybe reports about the primitive Ganraen way of life might have been exaggerated.

The bridge was on the uppermost deck. It was smaller than an
Evagardian bridge, but it had all the same action stations, even if they were in different places. The chairs were empty, but the screens were glowing.

“Ensign, get on the com. Open up a channel to the other ships.”

“Where are they?”

“They can't be far.” I went to the viewport and switched it on. There was nothing but green mist. The valley was full of it. I hadn't seen any mist inside the ship, though it had been essentially sitting open. Perhaps without the light of the green star, the mist was colorless, and less noticeable.

“Admiral, I'm not familiar with these systems.”

“None of us are, Ensign.”

“I mean I'm not a bridge officer, sir.”

“And I am?” I shot back. Deilani gave me an arch look. “Honorary title,” I reminded her. “Just figure it out, Ensign.” The withdrawal was starting to get the best of me. I caught myself irritably reaching up to brush back my hair again. I gave my hand a little shake and folded my arms.

“Yes, sir.”

“There's no hurry now.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat. “Uh—attention, Ganraen colonists? This is Evagardian imperial personnel aboard your science vessel. We're not here in a hostile capacity. Uh, we'd like to talk to you. Please respond.” He took his hand off the screen and waited. There was nothing.

“Did you send?”

“I was sending. Everybody on this rock should've heard it. Provided our array's up, and it's all green, which it is.” He leaned over, keyed a second time, and repeated himself. No reply.

“Find us a red line and put us through to somebody directly,” I said, feeling my heart sink.

“I can go straight through to the executive ship. It's an emergency code, though. They might not like that.”

“It'll be the least of their worries. If an empty ship isn't an emergency, I don't know what is,” I told him. “Do it.”

Nils did something, and the screen resolved itself into the image of a bridge not too different from the one we were standing on. The Ganraen Royal crest was clear on the bulkhead behind the empty command chair.

There was no one there.

“Is that live?” Deilani asked.

“It ought to be,” I said.

“But even the Ganraens keep . . . Hey, we've got charts,” Nils said, tapping keys. He'd been about to say that even the Ganraens always kept someone on the command bridge. The practice was more or less universal. Obviously there was no one, a fairly damning indication that things were every bit as bad as they looked.

“Put them up,” I said.

He did so. We all moved closer to the large screen. “Then that's the executive ship, about two kilometers north of us. Well, it's not north—no, I don't care. It's north if I say it is. And there are the other two—what are they doing over there?” Nils pointed.

“Shouldn't they be closer together?” I asked.

“Much closer together. Much, much closer,” Deilani said. “This makes no sense. This isn't how you set up a colony. I don't care where you're from.”

“What were these people doing?” Nils squinted at the screen, zooming in on the valley. “Look at this. There's something at the
edge of the valley, they were setting up around it. Look at the sampling tents.”

“Forget that. Ensign, set that message to repeat at interval, then if our beacon hasn't been activated, get it online.”

“Yes, sir. That was the first thing I did. It's active now.”

“Good.” I blew out my breath. “We might get off this rock yet. Now, why would the ships be so far apart? That hardly seems efficient.”

“Seismic activity,” Salmagard said, surprising all three of us. “They wanted stable ground.”

“That's the only explanation,” Deilani agreed. “They wouldn't set up like this unless they had no other choice.”

I nodded. “The ships are more or less self-contained, and they would have brought plenty of vehicles. So the distance would be an inconvenience, but not a deal breaker. Then where'd they go?”

“Where is there
to
go?” Nils asked.

“Nowhere,” I said, shrugging. “Yet they aren't here.”

“Sabotage,” Deilani said. “Or terrorism. Mutiny. Something from the inside.”

“Like what?”

“A chemical weapon. Something to instigate . . . unruly behavior. That could account for the damage and inconsistencies. There are a lot of bioweapons that can do it, and plenty of precedent.”

“But there would be both bodies and survivors. There were twenty thousand colonists on this planet, probably four thousand on this ship, and we have one—
one
—dead engineer. And if he hadn't strapped in before shooting himself, his body might've blown out when the ship depressurized.”

“That could be something,” Nils pointed out. “A lot of evidence
could've been lost that way. Sucked out of the ship. We weren't looking for it out there.”

I knew exactly how easily humans could be swept up and carried during a violent depressurization.

“I think you're right. But we've got what we've got, and that's a planet that looks to me as though it's found a way to make a lot of people disappear.”

“Not us,” Nils said, swallowing.

“Not yet. We've only been out of our sleepers for a little while, so don't get comfortable.”

“Why not? We've got control of the ship,” he pointed out. “And the beacon's on. All we have to do is wait. Admiral, we have to sleep.”

“Not until we clear the ship,” I told him. It hurt, but there was too much wrong with all of this.

“Of what?”

“Of suspicion. We're going to look around.”

“That'll take ages,” Nils complained.

“You were about to die a few minutes ago, and now you're going to complain about this? We need to make sure we're not missing something. Security's offline. That means we do it the old-fashioned way. I know we've done a lot of walking, but this is the Service. Come on.”

“He's right,” Deilani told Nils. “Can't let our guard down until we know what happened.”

“It'll go faster if we split up.”

“But we're not splitting up. We need rest, I know. And we've been stuck together for a while, so a few minutes to ourselves wouldn't hurt, but not until we know where we stand. Then we can borrow some living quarters and take it easy.”

Together, the four colony ships were the size of a space station. Apart, they were still massive.

There were closetlike living quarters for single colonists, cramped rooms for couples, and tiny apartments for families. Every deck contained a certain number of each, along with communal features, like recreation and VR rooms.

It was harder to colonize a world like this, where people needed suits to go outside. It took time to build structures and expand the safe zone, and even longer to put up atmosphere domes and start true terraforming. This colony hadn't been here nearly long enough. Everyone would still have been living exclusively in the ships.

The science vessel boasted an enormous medical bay, and a huge battery of laboratories. The faster the colonists understood their new world, the faster it became home. The science vessel was the core of the colonial tetrad.

Colonial authorities tended to be wealthy businesspeople and aristocrats; the colonists themselves more often came from humble birth. Sometimes you'd have a colony that was widely coveted, like on an attractive world that supported human life easily. In that situation you'd have qualified and overqualified people lining up to come along.

But a lot of the time, choosing to become a colonist was a last resort.

In most cultures, joining the military was often a career move reserved for people without better prospects. Only in Evagard did military service offer the level of prestige and reward that made it attractive to even the best imperials.

Colonization was a similar situation—the colony would be founded by someone wealthy, but the colonists themselves were
usually people from a much lower social stratum, recruited with modest incentives. It was often a one-way trip, or at the very least carried a long commitment, so the types of people who signed up for these things usually came from a scenario that wasn't overflowing with options.

Much of the galaxy viewed becoming a colonist as being only one step up from selling oneself into indentured servitude, which was legal in Free Trade space.

I didn't think it was so bad. Being a first-generation colonist offered a lot of upward mobility, if you had some patience. Someone had to do it, and for every colony in a terrible place like this, there was one someplace promising. No one really appreciated these people, but they were doing a good thing.

And for many of them, even life aboard a ship like this was an improvement.

One deck was much like another. Some areas were pristine, seemingly untouched. The deck itself was often marred, though we still weren't sure what was doing it. Carbon plating wouldn't corrode like metal, and it couldn't be burned—but something had been eating at it all over the ship. If it was just in one place, that would be a chemical spill—but it was everywhere.

There were also signs that I secretly believed pointed toward a full evacuation. A hasty one. I didn't want to scare the trainees. If there
had
been an evacuation, what had caused it? It could hardly have been completely successful, but in that case, where were the people who hadn't made it?

We didn't find any more bodies, but we weren't trying to be thorough. I had my suspicions about what we'd find if we went through every cabin. What puzzled me the most were the dusty
clothes lying everywhere. Boots, personal devices, even weapons. There was no pattern; it was all just scattered around.

“One dead guy,” Nils said, shaking his head. “Why would he kill himself?”

“I don't care where they went anymore,” Deilani said. “I just want to know why they left.”

“They were afraid. Maybe afraid the ship would fall like ours did,” I said.

“Then why'd that guy vent the ship before he shot himself?” Nils countered.

That was a good question. We moved on, but Salmagard stayed behind.

“Private?” She was still standing in the last junction. I watched her gaze intently down the cross-passage. “What is it?”

“I thought I heard something, sir.” She said it without looking at me. Deilani and I exchanged a glance. Nils didn't look pleased.

“Let's have a look,” I said. We followed the passage all the way to the next junction, but there was nothing to see. Nils called out, but no one replied. We stood in the intersection, listening to the echoes of his voice fade away. There was more mysterious damage to the ship, more corroded panels, more mangled doorways. A couple of lights were out, which I didn't care for.

There was a plush toy on the deck, a chubby lobster. I nudged it with my toe, exposing a dark stain.

“You still have your scanner?” I asked Salmagard, who nodded.

I watched Deilani open a hatch and peer through. She looked back and shrugged. Nils didn't look good. The circles under his eyes looked bad, but I probably didn't look any better.

“Go ahead and put it on,” I told the private. “Someone did
this. And just because we haven't seen them doesn't mean they aren't still here.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

We finished our sweep without finding any answers. More than once we heard noises from other parts of the ship, as though there was someone moving around. We searched, but didn't find anything.