Authors: Anne Mccaffrey
“Ahead, Captain Bates, and not dead,” Khorii said. “Whoever it is might even be aboard the
Blanca.
”
“Survivors?” Captain Bates asked incredulously.
“Not from the time we were there,” Khorii said. “My mother and father were there, too, and even if I missed it, they would have known. Elviiz was with us as well, and Uncle Joh had an infrared scope. But obviously this place has been disturbed since our previous visit.”
Captain Bates made a huge shrug, magnifying the gesture with her puffy, oxygen-holding suit, and turned to begin digging through the debris more carefully as the rest of them stepped up to join her.
They cleared only another foot or two, however, when Ariin pulled aside a large hull plate and revealed a long open tunnel, tall enough and wide enough for them to walk into it four abreast.
“That’s luck,” Captain Bates said. “This must be some old ship’s hold—a central corridor maybe, that will take us through the trash without our having to move all of it manually. Now if it’s not collapsed at the other end…”
She switched on the lanterns mounted in her helmet and gauntlets. Each Linyaari suit also carried a small glow tube in an outer pocket as part of its standard equipment.
If it was a ship, it was unlike any she had been on before, though in some ways the interior of the tube reminded her more of the egg-shaped smoothness of the Linyaari ships than the more clumsily constructed human vessels.
The deck, walls, and ceiling were a single piece, without joints or division. Khorii ran a glove along one bulkhead—or was it a wall?
Although the texture of the walls seemed smooth for the most part, there were odd indentations and shadows every few meters in the corridor.
Captain Bates ran her glove over one set. “This is like the handprints you see in some cave painting on elder worlds.”
“Yes!” Khorii said, though she’d never seen the paintings in question. “Except more like a reverse sculpture. Here, you see, this looks like the profile of a human face.”
As they progressed down the hall, they saw other prints, backs of torsos, a leg, a face, more hands, all imprinted in the smooth walls.
“Ugh,” Captain Bates said, as they went farther. “This is creeping me out. It looks like people just stepped out of these walls.”
Although the tubular corridor did not resemble any ship Khorii had ever been aboard, as they continued, it ended in a hatch the size of the entire administration building in Corazon.
All four of them stopped in front of it.
“Look familiar?” Captain Bates asked Khorii.
“Yes, this looks like the hatch to the docking bay on the
Blanca.
”
“It can’t be,” Mikaaye said. He held his glow tube aloft. “It’s part of this corridor—see how the ceiling swoops up to encompass it, then it’s all part of the same structure.”
“At least there aren’t any bits of people imprinted on the hatch,” Ariin said.
“How do we get this son of a gun open now without a ship’s computer telling it to?” Captain Bates wondered.
Mikaaye examined the opening. “We could try pushing,” he said, and before anyone could stop him, did. To their surprise, the gigantic hatch slid open at his touch.
The proportion of the inner space was familiar to Khorii, but that was all. Where she expected to see the docking bay with the silent ships sitting waiting for owners who would never return, instead there was what could have been a small city or a very large and extremely abstract and rather ugly sculpture.
Although Khorii and her parents had cleansed the air of the poisons the
Blanca
’s captain had released to kill the passengers and crew, the suits’ gauges showed that the oxygen level remaining inside the docking bay was so low as to be negligible. Of course, without a functioning airlock, the oxygen in this section would have dissipated once the hatch opened to the outside. Someone would have to restore power before the area could be examined without portable oxygen. That was also assuming they could find any intact and functioning equipment.
What had once been a docking bay had now been morphed into something far more changed than mere indentations in the walls. As far as the explorers could tell from their limited light sources, instead of ships and ramps, the cavernous room was now filled with hillocks and hollows that lumped and humped out into each other. Where the decks had once been, there were steep ramps or perhaps slanted roofs that descended into what seemed to be more of the same forms. Also, although they could see a vast unbroken space overhead, in front of them the hillocks formed walls that loomed up and twisted and turned, making their progress through the area very slow. Once in a while, Khorii thought she recognized another piece of salvage off to the side somewhere, but most of the surrounding structures bore little resemblance to the ship’s interior she remembered. Also, while they watched, the structures seemed to shift slightly, glacially, as if they were expanding even as they sat there.
“Probably a trick of the light,” Captain Bates guessed, turning her head so that her helmet lantern danced across the undulations. The structures seemed to shift again, giving Khorii the feeling that her brain had vacated her head for a moment, then reentered her skull turned the wrong way round. Her vision blurred for a moment, as she got the sudden, maddening impression that the entire room was somehow, impossibly alive, moving around them as they walked.
When the sensation lessened but did not pass, she wanted nothing so much as to return to the ship and fly far far away.
Ariin and Mikaaye felt the same, she read, and Captain Bates’s glove rose to her face mask as if to steady her head so it didn’t fall off her shoulders.
Khorii said, trying to lighten everyone’s mood, “At least I’m not seeing any blue particles in the air here.”
“We should check those bodies you said were in the corridor,” Captain Bates said.
“It wasn’t too far when we were here before,” Khorii said. “But the distance seems much greater because of these impediments.”
“Right. I’ve had enough of this,” the captain said, and adjusted her boots again. “Let’s skip over this part, kids, shall we?”
The gravity within the former hold seemed no greater than on the rest of the asteroid, and the four of them bounced to the top of the nearest wall, then jumped from one to another.
Captain Bates’s lantern made their leaping shadows fly, swoop, and undulate grotesquely up onto the overheads and down into the hollows between the humplike structures. The sense of vertigo was still disturbing, but it lessened a little as they kept moving. Twice, when they jumped for the next prominence, it wasn’t there when they landed, and they found themselves halfway down its distant side.
On her last hop, Khorii’s boot went through the top of the structure she landed on and stuck fast. Ariin steadied her while Mikaaye helped her extricate her foot. It came out streaked with what seemed to be a muddy mixture of the gray-brown dust of the asteroid’s surface, melted sand, and taffylike, yellowed plasglass.
“It looks wet,” Ariin said.
“It’s certainly gooier than it was on the other humps,” Mikaaye added.
“Maybe it’s fresher,” Ariin said.
“That explains how the imprints could be there, but not
why
they are,” Captain Bates said. “But I’m starting to form a theory.”
“It’s the ghosts, isn’t it?” Khorii asked. She could think of no other explanation, but suddenly all that she had seen, heard, felt, theorized, or heard others theorize about the plague and its aftermath was starting to meld into a shape or shapes like those into which she’d just inserted her foot. Ariin and Mikaaye had come to the same conclusion, she could tell from the posture of their bodies even before she read their minds. Captain Bates would not be far behind.
“How did ghosts do all this?” Captain Bates asked.
“Digestion,” Mikaaye said.
“Exactly,” Khorii agreed. “I think what we’re seeing is a stage in an alien life cycle. First, these organisms came as the plague virus and killed people and other organic life of certain types. Then they used some of what was left in the bodies of those they’d killed to start to form themselves, except there wasn’t enough useful matter, or perhaps their molecular structure is too loose for them to have manifested themselves as solid individuals. But I think they never intended to become entirely like their victims, although they may have randomly acquired some of their appearance or even memories. I think that’s why even though some of the shuttle was destroyed, neither the
Mana
nor the Federation ship, both of which held plague survivors who were also seasoned spacefarers, was seriously harmed. At some point they entered a stage when the wraithlike organisms needed to ingest inorganic material to achieve solidity. And once they do”—she looked ruefully at her foot—“they keep eating. Maybe the solid form is transitory, so it needs to keep eating to maintain mass. Once it’s overeaten, the excess may be excreted into—er—” She looked meaningfully at the goo which still held her footprint.
“Ewww,” Captain Bates said.
“That theory would also explain the sea monster on LoaLoaKui,” Mikaaye said. “Once the organism had evolved, it also began absorbing matter from the sea, including, of course, the poopuus it might have found. This also coincided with the seeming elimination of the plague carriers as well.”
“But that is good!” Ariin said. “It means they are in the postplague portion of their life cycle and are no longer a danger to humans or Linyaari. If that is so, there will be no plague indicators here, and our parents can be released from quarantine.”
“Provided there are no new organisms starting the life cycle all over again,” Captain Bates agreed. “Based on what we know so far, this theory of yours sounds plausible enough, Khorii, and explains a lot of what has happened, but I don’t think we’re safe in predicting what will happen next based on it.” She stuck out her arm, pointed forward.
The diagram of the ship near the airlock was gone, as was the airlock, for that matter; but the corridor where Khorii had first found the bodies was just beyond.
It had become another tube like the one through which they had entered, round and smooth but with many indentations giving the appearance that people had just stepped out of them. They saw no other signs of the hundreds of bodies that had floated amid the plague particles when Khorii and her family first boarded the
Blanca
.
The miasma of death had been replaced by one of fear, and it was as thick as the matter that had trapped Khorii’s foot.
“Whoever it is, they woke up,” Mikaaye said. “I think it’s coming from a little way down and to the left.”
“Port,” Captain Bates corrected automatically, her word bracketed by loud huffs of breath in their earbuds. She gestured forward with her arm, and they bounced forward while their shadows capered ahead of them.
T
hey must have saved the ballroom for dessert,” Captain Bates said, when the tube cave segued somewhat abruptly into a portion of clearly identifiable ship’s corridor, complete with separate deck, bulkheads, and ceilings. The carpet and wall coverings were even intact as were the ornate sandblasted-glass double doors leading to the opulent room beyond.
Khorii checked her gauges. The temperature was barely warm enough to sustain life, as was the oxygen level. “There was supposed to be a big dance,” she mused. “But when the plague broke out, people decided to board their private ships and leave. The captain killed them rather than let them spread the epidemic. So the ballroom may have been deserted.”
“There would have been serving staff and musicians, maybe,” Captain Bates said. “Anyhow, that’s how it is on vids I’ve seen advertising the posh liners.”
“They were still people,” Khorii said. “They probably ran out to see what all the fuss was about and got killed, too.”
The ballroom was completely empty, however, and the vast walls, covered in what looked like blue and white marble tiles, was bare of bodies or alien structures of any kind.
Captain Bates tried to activate the light panel on the wall inside the door, but nothing happened, which was not surprising. The power had probably been drained long ago by whatever was transforming the ship into an alien cityscape.
They crossed the ballroom, their boots echoing against the stone. Linyaari helmets permitted the wearer to hear external sounds, though the helmet worn by Captain Bates did not. Their steps on the “digested” material had made no noticeable sound, Khorii realized. If the shifting of the stuff made any kind of noise, they had been too preoccupied by its strangeness and by the psychic alarms drawing them onward to notice.
As they crossed the room, those alarms grew louder, until Khorii realized the distress was no longer merely in her mind, but audible.
“Someone is crying,” she said.
Captain Bates turned deliberately and looked into her face, her eyes widening in alarm.
“Someone else is shushing,” Mikaaye said.
“It’s coming from behind that wall,” Ariin said. “There, do you see the doorway?”
“It probably leads to the kitchens,” Captain Bates said, her breath puffing in shallow counterpoint to her words. “This would have been the large dining room when there was no party.”
They wasted no more time in reaching the door and pushing through it. At the last moment, Captain Bates placed herself in front and held out her arms to restrain the others as she ventured into the room. At the same time, someone screamed.
The three Linyaari trained their glow tubes on the screamer, who was huddled beneath some open counters along with several other people, two women and a dozen or so children.
Khorii knelt and peered at them. “Do not be afraid. We will help you,” she said.
A knife flashed in the hand of one of the women, but Captain Bates seemed to anticipate it and knocked Khorii back through the hatch with a blow of her inflated arm.
The knife tried to cut the captain’s suit, but her boots bounced her out of range, and the knife wielder, as if exhausted by her effort, sank back against the two children tucked into the thermal blanket she clutched like a shawl and clinging to her skirts.