“There could still be technical data inside that ship. Readings, measurements of the object. We have to see.”
“No,” I said. “Nothing would have survived. You can see that, can’t you? It’s a husk. Even Magadis wouldn’t be able to get anything out of that now.” My heart was starting to race. Besides the nausea, and the discomfort, there was now a quiet, rising terror. I knew I was in a place where simple, thinking organisms such as myself did not belong. “We failed, Struma. It was the right thing to attempt, but there’s no sense deluding ourselves. Now we have to pray that the ship can slow itself down without any outside help.”
“Let’s not give up without taking a closer look, Captain. You said it yourself—we’ve come this far.”
Without waiting for my assent he powered his pod for the wreck. The Conjoiner ship was much smaller than the Equinoctial, but still his pod diminished to a tiny bright point against its size. I cursed, knowing that he was right, and applied manual thrust control to steer after him. He was heading for a wide void in the side of the hull, the skin peeled back around it like a flower’s petals. He slowed with a pulse of thrust, then drifted inside.
I made one last attempt to get a signal lock from the main ship, then followed Struma.
Maybe he was right, I thought—thinking as hard and furiously as I could, so as to squeeze the fear out of my head. There might still be something inside, however unlikely it looked. A shuttle, protected from the worst of the damage. A spare engine, with its control interface miraculously intact.
Once I was inside, though, I knew that such hopes were forlorn. The interior decay was just as bad, if not worse. The ship had rotted from within, held together by only the flimsiest traces of connective tissue. With my pod’s worklights beaming out at full power, I drifted through a dark, enchanted forest made of broken and buckled struts, severed floors and walls, shattered and mangled machinery.
I was just starting to accept the absolute futility of our expedition when something else occurred to me. There was no sign of Struma’s pod. He had only been a few hundred metres ahead of me when he passed out of sight, and if nothing else I should have picked up the reflections from his worklights and thrusters, even if I had no direct view of his pod.
But when I dimmed my own lights, and eased off on the thruster pod, I fell into total darkness.
“Struma,” I said. “I’ve lost you. Please respond.”
Silence.
“Struma. This is Rauma. Where are you? Flash your lights or thrusters if you can read me.”
Silence and darkness.
I stopped my drift. I must have been halfway into the innards of the Conjoiner ship, and that was far enough. I turned around, rationalising his silence. He must have gone all the way through, come out the other side, and the physical remains of the ship must be blocking our communications.
I fired a thruster pulse, heading out the way I had come in. The ruined forms threw back milky light. Ahead was a flower-shaped patch of stars, swelling larger. Not home, not sanctuary, but still something to aim for, something better than remaining inside the wreck.
I saw him coming just before he hit. He must have used a thruster pulse, just enough to move out of whatever concealment he had found. When he rammed my pod the closing speed could not have been more than five or six metres per second, but it was still enough to jolt the breath from me and send my own pod tumbling. I gasped for air, fighting against the thickening heaviness of my thoughts to retain some clarity of mind. I crashed into something, collision alarms sounding. A pod was sturdy enough to survive the launch boost, but it was not built to withstand an intentional, sustained attack.
I jabbed at the thruster controls, loosened myself. Struma’s pod was coming back around, lit in the strobe-flashes of our thrusters. Each flash lit up a static tableau, pods frozen in mid-space, but from one flash to the next our positions shifted.
I wondered if there was any point reasoning with him.
“Struma. You don’t have to do this. Whatever you think you’re going to achieve…” But then a vast and calm understanding settled over me. It was almost a blessing, to see things so clearly. “This was staged, somehow. This whole takeover attempt. Magadis … the others … it wasn’t them breaking the terms of the Accord, was it?”
His voice took on a pleading, reasoning tone.
“We needed this intelligence, Rauma. More than we needed them, and certainly more than we needed peace.”
Our pods clanged together. We had no weapons beyond mass and speed, no defences beyond thin armour and glass.
“Who, Struma? Who do you speak for?”
“Those who have our better interests in mind, Rauma. That’s all you need to know. All you will know, shortly. I’m sorry you’ve got to die. Sorry about the others, too. It wasn’t meant to be this bad.”
“No government would consent to this, Struma. You’ve been misled. Lied to.”
He came in again, harder than before, keeping thruster control going until the moment of impact. I blacked out for a second or ten, then came around as I drifted to a halt against a thicket of internal spars. Brittle as glass, they snapped into drifting, tumbling whiskers, making a dull music as they clanged and tinkled against my hull.
A fissure showed in my forward dome, pushing out little micro-fractures.
“They’d have found out about the wreck sooner or later, Rauma—just as we did. And they’d have found a way to get here, no matter the costs.”
“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t. Maybe once, they’d have been that ruthless—as would we. But we’ve learned to work together, learned to build a better world.”
“Console yourself. When I make my report, I’ll ensure you get all the credit for the discovery. They’ll name the object after you. Bernsdottir’s Object. Bernsdottir’s Shroud. Which would you prefer?”
“I’d prefer to be alive.” I had to raise my voice over the damage alarm. “By the way, how do you expect to make a report, if we never get home?”
“It’s been taken care of,” Struma said. “They’ll accept my version of events, when I return to the Equinoctial. I’ll say you were trapped in here, and I couldn’t help you. I’ll make it sound suitably heroic.”
“Don’t go to any trouble on my account.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t. But the more they focus on you, the less they’ll focus on me.”
He rammed me one more time, and I was about to try and dive around him when I let my hands drift from the thruster controls. My pod sailed on, careening into deepening thickets of ruined ship. I bounced against something solid, then tumbled on.
“You’d better hope that they manage to stop the drift.”
“Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. I don’t need the ship, though. There’s a plan—a contingency—if all else were to fail. I abandon the ship. Catapult myself out of harm’s way in a reefersleep casket. I’ll put a long-range homing trace on it. Out between the stars, the casket will have no trouble keeping me cold. Eventually they’ll send another ship to find me.”
More thruster flashes, but not from me. For an instant the sharp, jagged architecture of this place was laid stark. Perhaps I saw a body somewhere in that chaos, stirred from rest by our rude intrusion, tumbling like a doll, a fleshless, sharp-crested skull turning its blank eyes to mine.
“I’m glad you trust your masters that well.”
“Oh, I do.”
“Who are they, Struma? A faction within the Demarchists? One of the non-aligned powers?”
“Just people, Rauma. Just good, wise people with our long-term interests in mind.”
Struma came in again, lining up for a final ram. He must have heard that damage alarm, I thought, and took my helpless tumble as evidence that I had suffered some final loss of thruster control.