John Maddox Roberts - Space Angel (12 page)

"We, on the other hand, are not so limited," K'Stin said to Sphere. "We Vivers can stand gravity that would crush these puny ones. We can breathe air of a thinness that would collapse their lungs, or water that would drown them. Our chitin is impervious to radiation, which would fry their innards, and our beauty would delight the eyes of any discerning races we might meet, while their ugliness would certainly blight the sensibilities of any such."

"That's okay with me," said Finn. "I'd just as soon they took all the risks, anyway."

Enough of this. Here where the stars are so dense there is no need to explore worlds that are only marginally inhabitable by your kind. Thousands exist like your Earth, and will have developed life analogous to your kind or have been colonized by such.

"Well, when do we start?" asked the skipper.

We have. I have jumped to hyper and we are now within a stellar system around a Type G star that is part of a cluster of many thousands of stars. With the primaries in such proximity, the chances of any favorable planet being inhabited are quite high.

They cruised the system but found no planet duplicating Earth's gravity and atmosphere closely enough. They jumped to another system within the same stellar cluster, but had no better luck. Sphere decided to try for a location closer to the Center.

Five

What's the breaking strength of one-ply armor cloth?" Torwald barked at Lafayette.

"Uh, two and one-quarter tons per square centimeter."

Then Torwald pointed to Nancy. "What are the symptoms of fat starvation?"

"Weakness, debilitation, diarrhea, inability to maintain body temperature." Her answer came, as always, without hesitation.

"What's the maximum air speed of our AC fully loaded?" He pointed to Kelly.

"Four hundred kilometers per hour at sea level," said Kelly promptly.

"Only on Earth, dummy!" .Torwald said in exasperation. "How many times do I have to tell you not to rely so heavily on manuals? They're always written for a particular set of conditions. In a different gravity and a different air pressure, you have to compute weight, power, and wind resistance. Then you take a guess:" He threw up his hands in dramatic supplication of the powers that had sent him such an inept student. Kelly did a slow burn. It wasn't just that he made such mistakes; it was that Torwald always made such a production over them. Nancy never seemed to make mistakes, and when Lafayette made one, he always got off with a simple correction. Tor-wald's attitude was blatant favoritism in Kelly's view.

The survival classes occupied much of their time now. By ship's time, they had been under hyper for at least nine months. Everything that could possibly be set in order on the ship had long since been completed and the crew was left with little to do. Michelle was predicting serious incidents within a month if some extraship activity didn't break the monotony.

"All right, everybody, up to the navigation bubble!" The skipper's voice rasped excitedly over the intercom. Everyone dropped what he was doing and sprinted toward Navigation. Torwald, Kelly, Nancy, Lafayette, and Michelle all tried to crowd through the hatch at once.

"You look like a bunch of liner passengers on their first lifeboat drill," the skipper commented. "Ain't it great running a tight, disciplined ship, Ham?"

"What's up?" Torwald asked, ignoring the skipper's comments.

"We've got something on the proximity detector. Scan says it's big but artificial—and it's irregular in shape. We're closing on it now. We should have eyeball contact in a few minutes. If it's a ship, then they build big around these parts. This thing's about a hundred kilometers long."

Several minutes later a speck of matter appeared past the nose of the ship, barely visible against the blaze of stars. It loomed quickly larger as the
Angel
decelerated, until it bulked as big as a medium-sized asteroid. But it wasn't a ship, as Michelle had suggested—it was two ships, one roughly platter-shaped, a long, flattish oval, covered with spires and twisted towers, the other a stubby spindle, as if two cones were joined at the base. In some ancient battle or accident these two had collided, the spindle driven through so forcefully that an apex protruded at least a kilometer past the far side of the oval ship. Against the background of the dense star field they were a dark malignancy, their surfaces glinting metallically with reflected starlight. No lights were visible.

"Are they showing any lights we can't see?" Torwald asked.

"Nothing that registers on our instruments," the skipper answered. "Life-scan system seems confused, but in this sector who can tell?" She scanned the improbable ships. "Lord! Look at the size of those things. I don't think the mass of all the ships I've seen could make two that size."

Information may be stored within the instruments aboard those ships. You will board them, taking me with you. My range of power is extremely limited, now.

"The spindle seems to have sustained the least damage to the exterior," said the skipper. "We'll try that one first. Everybody suit up except Bert and Michelle. He and I'll man the bridge while the rest of you check out those vessels. As soon as two of you get tired, we'll relieve you. Ham, you're in charge. I suggest you divide into two teams to save time."

"Right, Gertie. Tor, get some tools from supply: prybars and shortbeams, at least. I doubt that any gravity's functioning in there, so axes will be useless. I'll hand out weapons. Probably no life aboard, but why take chances?"

Within a few minutes they" were standing in the lock, bristling with equipment and bulking apishly large in their armored suits. The Vivers wore only their small helmets and the light space coveralls they used to avoid losing too much body moisture. For the first time, Kelly experienced the stomach-dropping sensation of no-grav when the field was shut off as the outer hatch cycled open. One by one, Vivers first, the crew drifted out toward man's first contact with an alien spacecraft.

Close up, the sheer size of the things simply wasn't appreciable. The skipper had parked the
Angel
close to what looked like an airlock, and the landing party could see only the lock and two or three acres of surface around it. The curvature of the spindle's sides obscured all the rest. The surface seemed to be of some bronzy dark metal. The alien ship had enough mass to generate a weak gravity, so the boarders were able to drift to a slow, feet-first landing against the craft.

Sergei, on hands and knees, immediately began to make some tests on the metal with a thick meter-long tube while the others made their way toward the hatch, a circle of metal about ten meters wide, with no visible hinge and no indication of how it might be opened.

"Not even a doorbell," Michelle observed.

"Okay," said Ham, "start earning your pay, people. Let's have some bright ideas."

"I brought some explosive," K'Stin said. "I designed the charge myself. It might make a hole big enough for us to squeeze through."

"Let's not use explosives until we've exhausted all other possibilities. Sergei, what do you make of it?"

"The hull alloy seems metallic, Ham, but it's an alloy containing several elements that aren't on our table, and it doesn't react with any acid in my kit even though it contains a high percentage of copper."

Place me on the hatch.

Nancy stepped forward and set Sphere down on the hatch, near the seam where it joined the hull. Slowly, Sphere began to roll around the circumference of the hatch. Finally, its motion ceased and the space-suited figures felt a faint vibration through the soles of their boots. Torwald signaled for the others to kneel and put their helmets against the metal of the hull. Faintly, they could hear clicks, groans, and whir-i ings from inside. Sphere rolled off the hatch just as it began to move.

Very gradually, the hatch sank into the hull. When il had retracted about a meter, the metal mass began to move sideways and a crescent-shaped gap gradually widened into a full circle.

"Gertie, you see that?"

"I sure do, Ham. What can you see inside?"

Little was visible in the light from their helmet-torches, just a room about the size of the
Angel's
hold, with six barn-door-sized hatches leading off it. On the walls were pipes or conduits, and metal boxes that might have contained controls or equipment.

"Doesn't look very alien," Ham commented.

"No more so than a loading dock on one of the bigger space stations," said Michelle.

"On such a functional level," Bert mused from the ship, "one might expect little deviation from one culture to another. I'll bet it's not so familiar inside, though."

"First in!" shouted Ham. "Volunteers?"

Kelly began to step forward, but Torwald yanked him back, hard.

"First lesson, me boy," said Finn. "Avoid the word 'volunteer' as if it were the Arcturan Blight. Ham, as ranking officer, I think that you should have the honor. After all, think of the glory, first Earthman to enter an alien spacecraft and all."

"Now, just a minute, one of us has to be in charge of things, to be observing in case the first one down the hatch gets gobbled up by alien space bugs—"

"Ham!" the skipper barked. "Jump into that hole and be quick about it."

"Aye, aye, Gertie." Ham disappeared into the well.

"See anything?" Michelle asked after a few seconds.

"Just what we saw from up top, except from a dif-

ferent angle. Come on down." They followed, not without trepidation.

The interior of the room seemed made of the same bronzy material as the hull. The transparent circular plates in the walls might have been lights. Ham stepped to one of the boxes and opened a lid. Inside were several small stubby levers, with no labels or lettering that they could detect. There was one such box to each hatch.

"What next, Sphere?" asked Ham.

I am making an examination. When a hatch opens, enter and proceed by the easiest route. I shall tell you if I wish a change of direction.

As slowly as it had opened, the hatch overhead closed. There was an inrush of air.

"Gertie, can you hear me? Are we still on visual?"

"I hear you, Ham. All your cameras are recording perfectly. Whatever that metal is, it's not very dense. Proceed as seems proper and let's hope that football can get you all out safely."

No sooner had this benediction been delivered than one of the hatches opened. Through it, they could see a corridor stretching at least a kilometer. They could see that much because, incredibly, the ancient lighting system was beginning to function. A dim bluish light was emanating from more of the circular plates set along the walls.

"What's the atmosphere reading, Michelle?" asked Ham.

"It's mostly Argon, Ham," she said. "And this light would be a lot brighter if we could see infrared."

"Argon!" Ham sounded flabbergasted. "D'you think the people who built this ship could have metabolized such a stable gas?"

"Maybe it was injected as a preservative," Bert said. "That could explain why the ship's interior is so well preserved. An inert gas like that won't react with anything. It'd serve to keep the ship preserved over a long voyage."

"Well, maybe," Ham said. "Let's just wait until we have more data before we draw any conclusions."

A weak gravity field began to cut in, and things began to take on a more definite "up" and "down" orientation. The deck was about twenty meters wide, its surface corrugated and rather soft. The walls curved inward to form a perfect semicircular arch, giving the corridor the appearance of a tunnel. Torwald stepped over to examine one of the lighting plates, but he could find no central lighting element; the light appeared to originate in the plate itself.

"All right, let's go," said Ham, proceeding down the corridor. The others followed, using the peculiar, stilf-kneed, gliding hop that was the best means of locomotion in a low-gravity environment. They covered more than ten kilometers of corridor without finding any breaks in wall or deck.

"What's our orientation relative to the rest of the ship?" asked Sergei.

"Near as I can figure," Finn said, "we're heading straight down the middle of the spindle, and we've traversed about one-third of its length."

Approximately correct.

"Hey!" yelled Kelly, who had gotten a few meters ahead of the rest, "I see something a ways down there. It looks like a hatch."

They sped forward to see what Kelly had spotted. About a hundred meters farther on was another circular hatch, this one in the deck. Placed low on the wall near by, a circular plate protruded about twenty millimeters above the surface.

"Whoever they were, they were fond of circles and sections of circles," Nancy remarked.

"That thing on the wall looks like a pressure plate," Ham said. "Tor, give it a whack and let's see what happens."

Torwald placed his foot against the plate and gingerly pushed it inward. It sank flush with the wall, then slowly reemerged as he removed his' foot. Gradually, the floor hatch slid aside, revealing a well about ten meters deep. About five meters beyond the well was a deck with the same kind of corrugated surface as that of the corridor. A spiral ramp about a meter wide ran around the periphery of the cylindrical well, continued beyond the end of the ramp, and fell freestanding to the deck below.