I waited for a few moments, staring into the darkest corner I could find, then turned back to the walls of the great open hold.
Now I could make out some shapes lining the bulkheads of the enormous blankness before me. There was nothing in the center of the emptiness, though I could dimly make out the irisation where petal-like covers would spiral in to close the hold. They were open now, and I had a sickening sensation I knew where the ship’s atmosphere had gone when she had blown.
Where the atmosphere had gone, and all her crew. And anything not nailed down inside the ship. And anything that might have been stored in here, as well. All sailed out through this cavernous cargo space, and the wide-open bay doors beyond.
I could feel Singer and Connla monitoring my senso, but neither spoke. None of us, I supposed, could find much to say in light of the awfulness I’d just discovered. How had it happened, though? Misadventure?
Sabotage?
Everything was gone. Except for whatever lined the edges of the hold, because that was fixed into place. Those were the shapes that had drawn my attention. Something reflective, perhaps transparent. Modules or egg-shapes, each about as big as a two-passenger ground vehicle, say. Cargo containers, probably. Their reflective surfaces caught the starlight and held it still.
I leaned out around the edge of the hatchway, and turned my headlamp on again.
Like endless strings of green glass beads, they arrayed the edges of the hull. There were hatchways, all closed, every ten meters or so, tesseracting the surface of the hold. Between them were those ranks and stacks of cargo containers. In some places they were stacked multiple modules deep. All identical, except for the swirls of indigo and emerald and teal that might have been markings indicating their contents… .
No.
The containers weren’t green, I realized. The malachite and indigo colors reflected through transparent modules from the cargo inside.
“I have to get off this ship,” I said, nausea rising in my gut for reasons that had nothing to do with vertigo. “I have to get off this ship now.”
Suddenly, I understood the mutilated Ativahika, in orbit around this small, artificial heavy spot in the universe; I understood why both things had been stuck out here in the middle of nowhere when something went terribly wrong; and I understood why the ship was so big, and so empty in the middle. I started backing away, leaving the hatch open, all my pity for the former crew replaced with horror and the raw, animal need to escape an abattoir.
“Haimey?” Connla said.
Singer was silent. I could feel his revulsion, too, procedurally generated but as real as mine. He’d figured it out as well.
“Haimey,” Connla repeated. “Your vital signs are very distressed. Do you require assistance, or can you self-extract?”
“Oh, I’m leaving,” I choked. I couldn’t turn my back on the things in the hold, so I kept backing away. I felt the next hatch behind me, groped through it. “You try to stop me.”
“All right.” Soothing voice.
He bumped me, remotely, or Singer did, and suddenly I felt my atavistic terror cool. The revulsion didn’t change in the slightest.
Connla said, “Be careful. Don’t hurt yourself extricating. What’s wrong?”
There are places in the wide galaxy where all sorts of exotic “luxuries” are considered indispensable despite—or perhaps because of—the simple fact that they are rare, or difficult to obtain, or ethically deranged. There are people who operate out of the Freeport bases and concealed colony worlds to meet those needs and drive that demand.
This wasn’t a pirate ship, exactly. Nor was it a smuggler, though it was a ship that doubtless operated out of a Republic of Pirates Freeport, because no one in the Synarche would give this kind of abomination home. And now I knew we had to bring it back to the Synarche.
Because it was a crime scene. The whole ship was a crime scene.
“It’s a factory ship,” I told him. “They killed that Ativahika, Connla. And they were rendering it down for asura.”
“Asura?” Connla asked. Spartacus didn’t have much of an illegal drug culture.
I got a breath, finally, a full one, though it tasted like vomit. “Devashare. They’re manufacturing devashare. The real stuff. That’s a hold full of illegal organohallucinogens out there.”
I felt a lot less bad for the dead crew of the Milk Chocolate Marauder as I made my way—hastily, but cautiously—toward the exit. And a lot more like they had gotten exactly what was coming to them. An uncharitable thought. But it’s been noted for generations that karma is a bitch.
I was moving quickly, and I was not checking for further evidence of misadventure as I had been on the way in, because I was feeling pretty satisfied with my deductions, even though we hadn’t figured out yet what caused the blow.
Connla and Singer had taken firm control of my chemistry, so I was calm. I knew I’d be angry later that they hadn’t asked, but right now, I was too full of my own natural anxiolytics to feel pissed. I hated it when somebody else told me what to feel.
Perhaps it was that bumped calmness that made me notice something I hadn’t seen before. Or perhaps it was just that I was looking at the cabin from the other direction; reversal of perspective can have stunning effects.
What I saw, tucked behind the superfluous ceiling hatch in the first corridor I passed through after I left the rendering hold behind, was a small device that looked entirely out of place on this particular ship. It was inside a panel on the ceiling that had been left open, but it had been concealed from me by the angle of the cover when I was going the other way. If the panel had been closed, it would have been completely hidden.
As soon as I spotted it, it stopped me cold.
It was a perfectly standard Terran-model relay switch, a miniaturized but not nanoscale piece of hardware you could pick up ringside at any dock. It was white, with a red rocker switch and a black rocker switch on it, and English lettering. And it was spliced, on either side, into a bit of wire that had been pulled through a raw-edged drilled hole in the bulkhead. It looked like a smudge of cookie filling and couple of candy sprinkles against all that chocolate.
I couldn’t reach it. But I could see that both of the switches were set to the same position. And if I went into the next chamber, I could undog a giant tuffet-type thing from its position in the corner and haul it in—it was inflated membrane, and supremely light—and climb up on it.
“Haimey, what are you doing?” Connla asked.
“You sound worried,” I said. “Maybe you better bump.”
Okay, maybe I was managing to feel a little angry.
“Haimey—”
“I’m just checking something.”
I reached up, and rocked both switches at once.
There was no air to evacuate, and that was what saved me, because when all the hatches popped open simultaneously and I floated unceremoniously off the cube—and the cube floated softly away from what had, a moment before, been the floor—there was no massive exhalation to blow me free of the prize’s hull and expel me out the open cargo bay, thumping off random objects and hatchway edges along the way. I just drifted, spinning a little from reactive force, and watched in vacuum silence while the rockers, about thirty seconds later, rocked back and reset themselves.
I hit the floor with a stunning blow as the gravity came back on and the hatches slammed shut. I was lucky there hadn’t been one in the once-and-future floor, or it would have cut something off me.
I barely thought about it until later, though, because I was watching a red, red bead of very human blood run down my space suit glove.