Therefore I Am - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 2 Page 7

  Suddenly, this wasn’t looking like a salvage run anymore. If we could tow the ship back and sell her whole—well, it was looking like we might have made our Big Score. What still made no sense was why the ship had been abandoned in the first place … but we could worry about that after we finished counting our money.

  Saburo updated telemetry and then the laughter stopped: “Revised ETA: thirty-seven hours.”

  “What?”

  “They’re coming in hot,” Saburo explained.

  “Obviously,” Dunny said. “But why?”

  Something else troubled me more. “And how? What crew has engines like that?”

  “Maybe they kept some toys from their last salvage.”

  It still made no sense, unless our rivals knew more about this ship than we did. If the stakes really were that high, they might be a lot more willing to risk a fight—but if the stakes really were that high, then so were we.

  “What could they know?” Gillie asked. “I had to dig just to find the registration. There’s sure as hell nothing public about this ship.”

  “Then let’s make it public,” I suggested.

  Saburo eyed me. “What do you mean?”

  “If the media think there’s any chance at all of a fight, you know damn well there’ll be half a hundred scopes on us—and on them. If they so much as scratch our paint, they won’t be able to port anywhere in the solar system without being arrested for piracy.”

  Sure enough, by the time I was cycling the lock for EVA, our rivals had slowed to a less suspicious, less aggressive speed … but they kept coming.

  Our first priority was to flip-and-brake, slowing the headlong rush toward the sun. Even if this did just end up as another salvage mission, the farther we could stay from old Sol and his gravity well, the easier—and cheaper—it would be to get back home.

  While we were taking care of that, a quick check determined that there was enough reaction mass to get the ship back to Luna—if she was worth the effort. So while everyone else worked on slowing us down, I took Romy and set off exploring. The crew module looked like any other on a cargo transport—like a newer, nicer version of our own. The surprise came when I floated into the hold.

  Whether you carry fuel, chemicals, raw materials, or—like us—pieces of broken ships, all holds look alike. A girderwork shell skinned over with spun carbon maximizes the usable volume and minimizes any internal obstructions that could interfere with loading and storage. Basically, a hold should be as hollow as possible.

  Not this one. I expected to see half a million cubic meters of nothing when I opened the access hatch. What I saw was a hallway.

  A hatch at the other end led to a small room lined with closets full of isosuits. A side door led to a washroom with actual showers—pressure sprayers, suction drains, actual water.

  Someone had spent a lot of money retrofitting a brand new cargo ship, only to abandon it. I couldn’t help but wonder why even while I was busy trying to refigure the trade value of our salvage. The more that number grew, the more suspicious I became.

  The next room was big—very big, but still just a small fraction of the sum. It looked like it had been a workshop or something, but only the benches remained. Whatever equipment had once been there was gone.

  I wandered the maze for half an hour, making a mental catalog of all the nothing I found. Lots of similar workshops, all stripped bare. Living quarters—nice ones—for dozens of crew members or workers meant there would be extra life systems, which would bring high salvage if they hadn’t been removed.

  I finally came to a corridor with a large security door at the far end. With the ship’s power out, the manual failsafe would be engaged, so I popped the access panel and spun the wheel, and floated into the biggest chamber I had found yet. My heads-up told me it was at the center of the hold. There was a lot of junk in there—by the looks of it, nothing valuable, just random junk that hadn’t been worth hauling away, although someone had still gone to the trouble of moving it all and locking it up in here.

  A score of heavy doors ran the length of one wall. I opened the one nearest me.

  If I’d been dirtside, I would have fallen down. Even there in microgravity, with my boots gripping the deck, my knees went all wobbly and I swayed like a wildflower in a spring breeze.

  The comm slapped me back to my senses. “We’re being scanned,” Saburo said.

  “Scanned?” Keno asked. “What the hell do you mean, scanned?”

  “We’re picking up pulses from those other breakers. They’re trying to read us.”

  “No,” Gillie protested, disbelief dripping in his voice. “There’s no breakers out there with that kind of equipment.”

  “Unless they salvaged it.”

  “What breakers would keep that? We got no use for anything like that—any crew that salvaged a scanner array would sell it in a heartbeat.”

  I finally managed to jumpstart my brain. “Those aren’t breakers out there,” I said.

  “No?” Saburo asked. “Then who are they?”

  “Someone who doesn’t want us to find what I just found.”

  “Yeah? And what did you just find?”

  Twenty minutes later, the whole crew had suited up and joined me. Saburo kept the helm but he was watching through our eyes. Everybody could have done the same, of course—but of course, everybody wanted to see it with their own two eyes. Everyone except Parson, that is, who’s had just the one since the Delmont salvage went wrong last year.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Keno asked.

  “Depends on what you think it is,” Gillie told him drily.

  “And on what it is,” Saburo added. “Sluggy, what do you know?”

  It was humanoid. After near half an hour staring at it, that was still all I knew for sure. That, and there were sixteen more of them.

  When I say it was humanoid, I mean it had four limbs and a head so it looked more like a human than like a starfish. But the limbs were all the same, like a starfish—it wasn’t two arms and two legs—and all four limbs had hands. Sort of. Kind of like an orangutan. The head was pretty much human, insofar as it had two things that were probably eyes and something below them that might have been a mouth. Or a mouth and a nose. Or it could just as easily have been an exit.

  Speaking of which, that whole area was a complete mystery. If there were genitals, they weren’t like any kind I’d ever seen. Everything was covered in a thick girdle-like growth, even tougher-looking than the rest of the skin, or shell, or whatever it was.

  Still, something about the thing just seemed too familiar for it to be something else. I said, “I don’t think it’s an alien. I think it’s human. Or at least it used to be.”

  “Then what the hell happened to it? To them?”

  I shook my head. “Well, that would be the real question, wouldn’t it?”

  “That … ,” Saburo said, “ … and who did it to them.”

  In my heads-up, the other ship was still on intercept, moving closer. “Well, I guess we’ll find that out in a couple days.”

  That shut everyone up for a while, until Saburo said, “Okay, everyone back to work. We grab what we can and bug out in 24 hours.”

  “No, we should leave now,” Romy protested, “if they’re trying to cover this up.”

  “A ship as fast as theirs, it won’t make a difference,” I warned.

  “That’s a point,” Saburo said. “If they really want to catch us, they will. And something tells me they will really want to catch us.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Maybe it was because I was senior, or maybe it was because I’d been the one to make the find, but everyone turned to look at me like I had some kind of answer. And maybe I did. If it worked—and if they weren’t too trigger-happy.

  Saburo sensed it. “Sluggy, what you got?”

  It was a good idea, and a better one after some back and forth. We did what we had to do, then headed back to the Terrapin while Saburo took care of the
rest of the details. We didn’t bother breaking the salvage—if my plan worked, we wouldn’t need to. If it didn’t, I doubted we’d make it home. Either way, there was no point taking the risk that breaking a ship always brings.

  And then we had nothing to do but wait.

  Breaking always comes with a lot of down time: waiting to find a ship or boosting toward it or back to base once the salvage is done. Normally, it’s just boring—lots of vids and card games and routine maintenance work. I’ve even known a few breakers who spend their time making sculptures out of scrap—anything at all to pass the days. Not this time.

  We were all too tense to do anything. Keno and Gillie came to blows, and Romy and I almost did. It wasn’t the wait that got to us—it was waiting for them. It was even worse than relying on luck. We were stuck in the position of having to rely on someone else, someone outside the crew. And that’s a hell of a lot more unpredictable—and dangerous—than luck.

  My plan was a good one; I knew that. It had just one flaw. This other ship, whoever they were— they had to talk to us before they blew us into stardust. If they were only interested in shutting us up, nothing would save us … and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do except wait and find out which way it was going to go.

  Eventually, it was too much for me—the griping, the sniping, the yelling and threats and confrontations over nothing at all—and I hid myself away from the rest of the crew. You don’t survive as a breaker for as long as I have without learning your way around a sickbay, and I had a thing or two to find out.

  What I found out didn’t surprise me—it was a lot more believable than the alternative—but it did disturb me, and it was a lot more disturbing than the alternative. It made me want to hurt whoever was chasing us, and whoever had sent them. It made me want to hurt them all very, very badly.

  Fortunately, I got the chance.

  The ship finally hailed us as they were heaving to.

  “Attention scavenger vessel. You are ordered to cease your illegal operations on a privately registered ship.”

  Saburo silenced everyone’s grumbling with a look, but made his face casual for the camera. “This is registered Salvage Vessel Terrapin,” he said evenly. “We found this ship clearly abandoned—crewless, beaconless, well outside established space lanes, and with no registered flight plan. It conforms to all international treaty requirements for establishing salvage rights. Sorry, fellas, but we won her fair.”

  “Terrapin, prepare to be boarded.”

  I could see the muscles in his cheeks rope up as he clenched his jaw. “I don’t think so.”

  The comm went dark. We looked around at one another, worried, wondering what was coming next.

  The screen lit up again, and the uniform said, “Request a private meeting with your captain.”

  “This is Acting Captain Saburo Arai. We are a collective crew sharing equal status. What you say to one, you say to us all.”

  The picture switched to a different uniform, older, with captain’s pips at her collar. She did not mask her displeasure nearly as well as Saburo.

  “Captain Arai,” she said testily, “I will happily meet with whatever delegation you decide upon—or your entire crew—but it is imperative that I speak to you in private. In person.” She inclined her head almost imperceptibly in deference. “On neutral territory, if you wish.”

  Saburo’s mouth didn’t so much as twitch, but I could see a smile creeping into his eyes. “Neutral territory? We are in deep space, Captain. There is nothing here but your ship, our ship, and the salvaged property that belongs to us by right of legal taking. However, in order to facilitate this meeting—since you seem reluctant to talk over open broadcast—we will welcome you and your escort aboard the salvaged ship in one hour. Terrapin out.”

  He broke the link and turned to us with a grim look. “Suit up,” he said.

  Exactly one hour later, the airlock cycled open and the Captain and her four backups stepped stiffly into the accessway. It had escaped no one’s notice that she had identified neither herself nor her ship, and she did neither now.

  “Thank you all for meeting with me,” she began without preamble. “This is a very delicate situation, I’m sure you’re aware, and—”

  “Welcome aboard,” I broke in. “Before we begin, I just want you to know that you are welcome as well aboard the Terrapin. The airlocks are all greenlit, so no one needs to torch or blow their way in, please. The ship is in bad enough shape already,” I added with a defiant grin, “which is why we’re so pleased to have obtained this new barge.”

  “This ship—” Captain Nemo began, but I cut her off again—this was my show, not hers.

  “I also want to mention that we sent a tightbeam message back to Luna two days ago, after sighting you, and another shortly before radio contact with you. As I’m sure you know.”

  Her level glare showed not a trace of reaction, which told me I was right.

  “Those tightbeams contained sealed files. They have been distributed to several of our representatives. If the Terrapin or any member of its crew experiences any sort of ‘accident’, those files will be opened and made public. I say this just in case those pistols are only still in their holsters because you wanted to take out our crew members on the Terrapin first so nobody could send any kind of distress call. It occurred to me—to all of us, really—that if someone killed us all and set the Terrapin homeward but something happened halfway there … well, it would be impossible to make a piracy charge stick if the evidence somehow exploded in the deep.”

  I said it casually, lightly, but the Captain knew better. Her jaw clenched so hard I wondered how she didn’t crack any teeth. Other than that, she didn’t react, but I saw one of her goon’s lips move as he obviously belayed an order to someone.

  I hadn’t realized just how tense I was until then. With that taken care of—with the plan working and everyone safe—I suddenly felt my body relax so much that the lack of gravity alone kept me upright. I didn’t even care if the Captain knew it.

  It took me a few more breaths before I trusted myself to speak again. “Now that we all understand one another,” I told her, “I’ll bet you’re just dying to know what’s in those files.”

  The Captain already knew that we knew, of course, but she didn’t know how much, and I still had a trick up my sleeve.

  “It’s unsettling, isn’t it? Disturbing. Frightening,” I said, even though the Captain and her cohort still stood steely-faced and without emotion beyond their visible annoyance at having left us alive.

  We were all in that large central chamber, staring at those grotesque bodies. No one had said anything—no one had even moved—for several minutes.

  “You will not be permitted to leave here with them,” the Captain eventually said, very quietly. She turned to face me and added, “Whatever else happens. I’m telling you this as a simple fact, woman to woman. These specimens are—”

  “Oh, you can have them,” I told her. “They creep me the hell out. Please, get them off our ship!”

  “The ship—”

  “The ship is ours. I’m telling you this, as a simple fact, woman to woman. It is ours by right of salvage. See, that’s what we do, salvage things. You wouldn’t believe some of the things we’ve managed to salvage. For instance, we’ve got a worlds-class med unit—probably the best of any breakers’. It’s beyond overkill for our needs, really, but salvaged medicals can’t be certified, so there’s no salvage value in them. So we just kept it. You’d really be impressed at what we can do.”

  The Captain was smart enough to figure I had a point, and she waited for me to make it. She didn’t look happy about it, though.

  “When we first found these … things, some of us thought they might be alien,” I went on. “But some of us thought they couldn’t be—if anybody had actually found aliens, why destroy them? Then again, what else could they be? They sure as hell don’t look human.”

  I pointed to a small mark on the thing in front
of me. More than a mark—a nick. “See that? It wasn’t easy cutting through that … shell, carapace, whatever it is. But we took a sample from this specimen and ran a genescan.”

  The Captain’s eyes momentarily flashed wide with alarm. I nodded and gave her a smile. “See, I told you you’d be surprised. Dunny was, too—he has to cover a week of my cleaning duty. Turns out these buggers are human after all. And whatever happened to them—whatever was done to them—well, it wasn’t surgical. These poor bastards were modified genetically.”

  I faced her square on. “But you already knew that, of course. And now, so do we. So tell me, what is it? It looks like they’ve been … adapted … to microgee, to working in the deep without suits. That certainly would make for a cheaper labor force, wouldn’t it?”

  She didn’t say a word, just stared back at me with pure hate.

  I waved a glove. “Well, fine, the purpose isn’t really important now, I guess. What is important—which I know you’ve already figured out for yourself—is that we didn’t just send video in those tightbeams. The first one, sure. But the second contains a full report, including the genescans. I know what you were thinking: video is easy to fake, so you were considering taking your chances with that ‘accident’. But a genescan—well, now if anything happens to us, that gets out too. Not just that these are—were—human. Those scans are complete—people will be able to match them to records, find out exactly who these folks were. That will make it a lot easier to find out who’s responsible for what was done to them … and I’m guessing your bosses wouldn’t want that.”

  Her lips were moving as she turned away from me, but nothing came over the suit-to-suit. I figured she was talking to her ship, probably relaying a message home. It would take 13 or 14 minutes to get there, and the same for a reply. I was pretty certain someone would be standing by—someone important—and that it wouldn’t take them long to make a decision, but it was still going to be a long, tense half hour.

  A long, tense, dull half hour. For about ten minutes, everyone just stood around silently and nothing at all happened. Then the Captain turned to face me again, another challenge.