16.
The bodies had been arranged in neat floating rows in the crew lounge, the largest space in the ship, and also the closest space to the emergency hatch amidships.
Mors Planch backed away from the entrance, wondering for a moment if he had come upon a scene of torture and piracy. All the bodies were connected by ropes to keep them in place. Tended to, taken care of even in death. The air in the weightless chamber smelled from the decay of several days. Yet he had to make a count, to see if there was any value in searching elsewhere in the ship.
Tritch kept well back from the hatchway. Her red-rimmed eyes stood out above the white handkerchief she held over her nose and mouth. “Who put them in there?” she asked, voice muffled.
“I don’t know,” Mors said grimly. He put on a breather mask and entered to make his count. Several minutes later he emerged, his face wan. “Nobody alive, but not everybody is in there.” He pushed past her and expertly caromed down the corridor, toward the bridge. Reluctantly, Tritch followed, stopping briefly to pass an instruction to Trin.
“They all died within minutes of each other, I’m guessing,” Planch told Tritch as she caught up with him. “Radiation poisoning from the shock front.”
“The ship is heavily shielded,” Tritch said.
“Not against neutrinos.”
“Neutrinos can’t hurt us…They’re like ghosts.”
Planch peered into the darkened officer’s lounge, switched on his torch, played it around the furniture and walls, saw nobody. “Neutrinos in sufficient numbers are what blew away the outer shells of the supernova,” he said tightly. “Under such conditions, in such hordes, they can play strange and deadly tricks with matter, particularly with people’s bodies. Smell the ship?”
“I smell the dead, back there,” Tritch said.
“No. Smell the ship here. What do you smell?”
She took the handkerchief away from her nose and sniffed. “Something burnt. Not flesh.”
“Right,” Planch said. “It’s not a common smell, and I’ve only experienced it once before…in a ship caught in a neutrino surge, but not from a supernova. From a planet being broken up and swallowed by a wormhole. One of the transit-station disasters, thirty years ago. The ship was caught in the emerging jet of converted mass. I investigated, part of a salvage crew. Everybody aboard was dead. The ship smelled scorched, like this…Burnt metal.”
“Pleasant work,” Tritch said, putting the cloth back to her nose.
The hatch to the bridge was open. Planch held out his arm to keep Tritch back. She did not argue. The bridge was illuminated only by starlight from the open direct-view ports. He turned his torch on and shined it on the panels, the captain’s chair, the displays. The displays were all blank. The ship was dead.
“We won’t have much air soon,” he told Tritch. “Keep your crew back.”
“I already have,” Tritch said. “I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to. We can’t salvage anything if the ship can’t be revived.”
“No,” Planch said. The bridge seemed empty, and cold enough to make his breath cloudy. He pushed in farther, flailing briefly against the cold stale air with one hand until he caught a stanchion and rotated. From that vantage, he aimed his beam into the opposite corner. There, he saw a form curled into a fetal ball.
He pulled himself along until he floated a meter from the form. What he had been told was true; this one was alive. The head turned, and he recognized the features of Councilor Lodovik Trema. But it was not Chief Commissioner Chen who had told him Trema would be alive.
When they had first sighted the hulk in deep space, drifting helplessly, he had communicated first with Chen, then with another, who had paid him even more handsomely than Chen: the tall man who had many faces and many names, and who had hired him so often before.
That man was never wrong, and he had not been wrong this time. Where all others might be dead, one might still be alive…And he must not be returned to Chen. He must be reported dead.
Lodovik Trema blinked slowly, calmly, at Planch. Planch held his fingers to his lips, and whispered, “You’re still dead, sir. Don’t move or make a sound.” Then he spoke a coded phrase incorporating both numbers and words that the man of many faces had told him to use.
Tritch watched them from across the bridge. “What did you find?” she asked.
“The man I’m looking for,” Planch said. “He lived a little longer. He must have arranged the others, then come here to die.”
As he brought out Lodovik, Tritch tried to back away, but could not find a grip fast enough. The body, curled and lifeless, floated ahead of Planch, under Tritch’s nose, and she nearly gagged with some reflex expectation.
“Don’t worry,” Planch said. “This one doesn’t smell much. It’s colder on the bridge.”
Tritch could not believe they had come all this way just to retrieve a single body. Back aboard the Flower of Evil, with Lodovik safely stowed in a box in the hold, she passed Planch a bottle of Trillian water of life, and he poured himself a glass and lifted it in cheerless toast.
“The Chief Commissioner wanted to make sure. And now that we know he’s dead, and all the others with him, I’m to take him back to his home world and see him decently buried, with full Imperial honors.”
“And leave all the others? That seems a little bizarre.”
Planch shrugged. “I don’t question my orders.”
“Which world is he from?”
“Madder Loss,” Planch replied.
Tritch shook her head in disbelief. “A man in such high authority, from a planet of disgraced parasites?”
Planch inspected his glass and lifted one finger before finishing its contents. Then he poked glass and finger at Tritch. “I remind you of our contract,” he said. “The death of this man could have political repercussions.”
“I don’t even know his name.”
“People could guess from what little you do know, if you spread it around in the wrong places. And if you do, I’ll find out.”
“I keep my contracts, and I keep my mouth shut.”
“And your crew?”
“You must have known we were trustworthy when you hired us,” Tritch said softly, dangerously.
“Yes, well it’s even more important now.”
Tritch stood and lifted the bottle from the table between them. She corked it firmly. “You’ve insulted me, Mors Planch.”
“An excess of caution, no insult intended.”
“Nevertheless, an insult. And you ask me to go to a world that no self-respecting citizen willingly visits.”
“They’re citizens on Madder Loss, too.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “How long do we stay?”
“Not long. You drop me there and leave at your own pleasure.”
Tritch was finding this harder and harder to believe. “I will ask no more questions,” she said, and tucked the bottle under her arm. Apparently Planch was no longer so attractive to her, and henceforth their relationship would be strictly professional.
Planch regretted this, but only slightly.
When he delivered Lodovik Trema to Madder Loss, he would be a very wealthy man, and he would never have to work for anyone again. He imagined buying his own luxury vessel-one that he could keep in tip-top condition, which was more than could be said for most Imperial ships.
As for the strange and tightly disciplined man in the hold, a man who could stay enclosed in a coffin for days without complaint or need…
The less he thought about that, the better.
Lodovik lay in the darkness, fully alert but quiescent, having heard the coded phrase that alerted him to Daneel’s participation in his rescue. He was to cooperate fully with Mors Planch; eventually, he would be brought back to Trantor.
What would happen to him there, Lodovik did not know. Having performed three self-checks in the coffin-shaped box, he was reasonably certain that his positronic brain had been altered in subtle ways. The results of his self-checks were contradictory, however.