Angel weighed about sixty-three kilos in gravity norm, and was used to slightly more in the heavier gravity of the world where she’d been working, but now she bounced along as if she weighed almost nothing. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as it felt, she realized, but not only was gravity well down in the tube, as Kincaid had warned her, it also varied, sometimes significantly, as you went along. It was disorienting enough that she found herself grasping the handrail and going nice and slow.
Kincaid certainly had been a godsend in this emergency, she reflected. If he hadn’t been aboard, what might have happened to all of them? Not that they were out of the woods yet, but what had seemed icy, alienlike distance and fearsome hatred had been transformed by circumstances into just the kind of confident authority she and probably most of the other passengers would need.
… godsend in this emergency…
This wasn’t an emergency! she realized with a start. Somehow, Kincaid had known, or at least suspected, that something bad was going to happen. That was why he was aboard. And if he’d devoted his entire existence to hunting down and destroying one of the legendary evils of history, then…
Didn’t that Rithian say the would-be Conqueror of the Universe was a water breather?
She didn’t catch up with the two, but did have them in sight, tiny figures in the distance whom she made out mostly by the fact that they moved.
Angel quickly discovered that to walk without getting dizzy and sick along this passage, she had to keep her eyes steadily on that vanishing point ahead. The tube was transparent; in null-space there was a Great Void, a nothingness that the brain interpreted as jet-black because it had no other way to depict it. Otherwise, there was only the ship, bathed in an energy glow that kept it insulated from the Great Void beyond.
She didn’t think she was going to make it, but eventually she did. Out of breath, disoriented, with some nausea to boot, she finally reached the end and a solid section with a double airlock. She stepped inside the one, heard it close behind her, and felt gravity of almost ship’s normal return. When the aft lock was closed, the forward one opened, and she walked into one huge wretched-looking mess.
There was the smell of electricity in the air, and a lot of the instrumentation on the big semicircular control panel was blinking red or simply shorted out. The whole place seemed covered with rusty reds and bleach-white and granular yellow scum, the undoubted residue of what was in the water. A computer pad, some papers, and a few customized real printed books—rare in this day and age, but common, she knew, among starship captains—were waterlogged, twisted, and ruined.
The whole place smelled like it had just been fumigated and not properly aired.
“Don’t mind the smell!” Kincaid called to her from a slightly elevated platform in the rear of the bridge. “I’m afraid it’ll get worse before it gets better, but the computer probe assures me that it won’t really damage any of us, just annoy the hell out of our lungs.”
She saw the big, padded command chair in front of the bridge, definitely the seat of authority, its high back blocking the view of anyone who might occupy it. It had controls and circuitry in the arms, and a set of modules on arms that could be brought in front or to one side. A series of monitors, six of them, were directly in front, although only a couple were working. She had the sudden, uneasy feeling that somebody was in that chair. Without saying a word, she walked toward it, slowly, almost as if expecting some monster to leap out from it at her throat, and for some reason she couldn’t explain, she began reciting the prayer of comfort to the Blessed Virgin over and over again. Still, she was drawn to the command chair.
Kincaid looked up, saw her and shouted, “I think you’d better not!”
But it was too late, nor could she have stopped if she wanted to. She came around the side of the chair, saw the occupant, stifled a scream, and looked away. She felt like throwing up, and couldn’t stop it. That nice dinner mixed with the mess and ooze on the deck.
The occupant of the chair was quite dead, and was almost certainly the late and heretofore missing Captain Dukodny. At least he hadn’t drowned, for all the good that meant. Clearly, whoever had done it hadn’t wanted the ship’s Master to have any idea of what was going on, nor any opportunity to stop it. They’d blown an airlock, probably from the tug, once they’d bypassed the ship’s computer, and Captain Dukodny had essentially imploded.
Captain Kincaid was by her side in a moment. “Are you all right? I tried to stop you—”
“No, no, I’m okay,” she assured him. “It was just—I hadn’t ever seen anybody dead like that. I’m all right now.”
“Hmm… I don’t know… Great Scott! Are you bare-foof?” he exclaimed, looking at the prints in the sludge.
It hadn’t occurred to her. “Yes, I—I just didn’t think I needed anything when I came to the lounge to have dinner and get the briefing.”
“It never occurred to me that anybody would walk barefoot around this crud.”
“Is it toxic?”
“Probably not, but I’d wash it all off as quickly as possible when I could get to some plain water, and watch for any reactions just in case. Not toxic doesn’t mean that it might not be caustic. If it starts to burn or feel inflamed, get to the medical station.”
“It feels all right. I admit to feeling foolish now at not thinking of it myself, but things happened so fast…”
He nodded. “Good girl. You are some kind of priest or nun?”
“Some kind, yes. I am Angel Kobe. You could call me Sister Kobe if you would feel more comfortable doing so, but Angel is fine.”
“Okay—Sister. You got guts or faith or maybe both, and that’s a handy set of attributes to have right now.”
“I’m afraid I’m beginning to think you may need a naval escort instead of a woman of God,” she commented. “Or am I wrong in what I am thinking here?”
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I wish you were. And I’m afraid we haven’t any idea how many of our fellow passengers know all about this as well. Our Rithian friend seemed less surprised by the condition of the bridge or the Captain, for example, than in checking out how much damage might have been done.”
She got the hint. “Where is he now?”
“Teynal is helping the main computer by running temporary lines back in here independent of the usual systems. He can move through those ducts rather handily. We’ll need to get this up and running and also run down the taps and bypasses that allowed them to do all this right in plain sight. The computer thinks it’s got most of them now, but we’ll see.”
She looked over at the chair. “What will you do with—” She nodded toward the body.
“It is a tradition that if you die in the line of duty, you are given to space. We’ll pass him through to the fuel chambers, where his mortal remains will be consumed and then output as exhaust gasses that will join with and return to the universe. One day some tiny fragment of him may become part of a new star, a new world, or who knows what? It’s what he would have wanted.”
“I know nothing of him or his faith, if he had one, but I should like to perform a basic funeral rite and prayer for him as this is done.”
“It’s not necessary.”
She looked into those hollow eyes. “Yes it is. His place in the universe was as Master of this ship. My place is to perform what God has made me to perform.”
He sighed and nodded. “All right, then, Sister. It won’t do any harm. Now, though, you should go back if you can and see to those feet, and then you can do best in this circumstance by calming and informing the others. Don’t give too much away, but give them enough.”
“I cannot lie,” she told him.