“Okay,” I said. “I feel better now.”
There wasn’t much else interesting along the way to the core. A string of cabins like a string of beads, punctuated by short corridors similar to the first one, with somewhere between two hatches and five. There were hatches in what had become the floors and ceilings; inconvenient for now, and more evidence of a retrofit. It looked like the corridors served as storage and as pressure locks, but if so, they hadn’t worked: the hatches were almost all closed, but nowhere within the chambers was there atmosphere.
Or people.
Or bodies.
Or, I realized, any clutter. I mean, sure, space. We are all tidy, or we don’t last long. You tuck things away, hang them in nets, magnetize them to bulkheads, clip them to strings. But these people had been living under gravity for at least the duration of this voyage—okay, that was an assumption, but a pretty safe one—and they would have left something lying around. Alien socks rolled under bunks. Hairbrushes, toothbrushes, scale brushes, feather oil, hoof picks, claw combs. The organic dust that living bodies all seemed to shed, no matter what the integument holding their innards together is.
This ship was clean. I swiped a glove along a brown-anodized metal surface in what looked like a bio or chemistry lab. Not even a trace of powder showed in my headlamp. Maybe it was a survey ship from another galaxy that had met a terrible accident, and not smugglers at all? That would also explain why it was so strange and far away.
“I think they got decompressed,” Connla said, putting voice to my nausea.
“And then somebody came through and closed all the hatches and turned off the lights?”
“The hatches are probably on an emergency override,” he said reasonably. “Would you want a hatch that didn’t shut when the next chamber decompressed?”
“But these didn’t. Or not quite fast enough.”
All three of us were silent for a moment, contemplating being explosively decompressed out of a ship while it was inside folded space. Would you even feel anything? Would you have time to be scared?
I shook my head, trying to mix my wits together. “And the lights are probably on a timer. So . . . sure. The ship blew, somehow? And having blown, the safety interlocks belatedly kicked in and it just shut itself down and waited?”
“How would it blow that fast? It’s big. Lot of atmosphere volume.”
I touched the next hatch. Opened it.
Looked out through a doorway over a precipice into nothingness and brilliant, folded stars.
CHAPTER 4
I FORGOT THE PAIN IN MY afthands for a moment, and was fiercely grateful for the intensity of the gravity pinning them to the corridor floor. Because I was leaned out precariously over the Empty, and my stomach felt like it was dropping into it. I leaned on the hatch, which also dragged me forward. My upper body was weightless, while my lower body was heavy—in the most peculiar, spine-stretching way. I stabilized the hatch door, relaxed my grip, and let the hand drift. Then slowly, with my core muscles, I reeled myself back in.
The beam of my headlamp vanished into blackness, revealing nothing. Beyond its light, though, I could discern what must be the vast bubble of emptiness at the heart of the alien ship—and that the far side of it was open to space. There, framed in darkness, was the shimmering platinum band of the white coils, and there were the streaked rings of lensed light: the twisted images of stars and the whole long arm of the Milky Way.
I turned off my headlamp. It didn’t illuminate anything, and the reflection off the hatch and the hatchway weren’t helping my adaptation to the darkness.
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.