Metamorph: The Outbounder Chronicles Read online

  “Looks like she came down hard,” Nolan said, unaware of the conversation channeling through Jex. “Would have lost pressure on the lower deck. The main hull’s no longer tight but it looks like they camped out in the aft section for a while. They’ve reconfigured some of the cargo holds.”

  Ryle powered the ship down but left it in standby mode. “Anyone alive in there, Jex?”

  “There is considerable organic material aboard but the conditions are unsuitable for habitation.”

  “Expect dead bodies, you mean,” Azah said.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a shuttle parked over there,” Toji said. “I wonder why they left all this up here.”

  “They should have three shuttles,” Laryn said, referencing the information she had received at the Cog labs. “They can’t land a transport of this size on Terrica so everything has to be ferried down. I’m guessing they used the smaller ships to evacuate to the planet.”

  “Something’s still ticking in there,” Azah said, pointing to the incoming data. “Something still powered up, in that domed module to the left. Weak, though. Could just be whatever’s left of their life supports.”

  Ryle tested his legs to feel the moon’s gravity. He looked around the room. “Azah, you’re with me.” He gestured at the younger Kalon. “And Toji.”

  “You want to inspect that ship?” Iko said.

  “Isn’t that why we’re here?”

  “Yes, of course.” Iko stretched his thin lips in a smile that looked like he had to remember how that worked. “I thought you would be interested in exploring the planet.”

  “We need to complete the scans,” Laryn said. “No one’s to make contact until we know more.” She looked to Ryle. “I’ll come, too.”

  “Why?” Azah said.

  Laryn wanted to say that she found herself agreeing with the woman that something about Iko just didn’t seem quite right. Despite Nolan’s reassuring company, Laryn felt a strange unease at the thought of remaining aboard with the Kalon. “I know that ship and crew,” she said instead. “It makes sense for me to come along.”

  “Well, true,” Azah said and headed for the door to the main corridor. She glanced over Laryn’s delicate coveralls. “You better lose the regalia, Princess, things get sweaty in the walkabouts.”

  Laryn followed her into the exit area of the ship. Most of the floor was taken up by the cargo elevator and rails led from it into the first of several modular cargo spaces that ran along both sides of the ship. A smaller passenger lift served for quicker exits. One side of the space held tools and gear cabinets along with a row of protective suits. She wondered about the need for the two full space suits. Perhaps they had occasion to make external repairs away from Pendra’s docks.

  She stripped down to her body suit, nodding when Azah offered a small cabinet for her clothes. The comfortable layer covered her from elbows to knees but she was less at ease than Azah with appearing only in the snug-fitting second skin. Ryle also entered the small space, already pulling his loose sweater over his head.

  The black, sleeveless shirt he wore beneath showed him off rather nicely but her attention was caught by the lines of the JX.9 interlink array tattooed into his skin. He had chosen to display the receiver like a series of ocean waves sweeping from his chest, over his shoulder, and then onto his back. He caught her staring and she quickly looked away, almost tempted to deny that her interest was for anything but the device. Azah’s smirk told her that trying any protest would just make things more embarrassing for her and more amusing for Azah. Ryle made serious business of pulling weapons from their storage but a slight grin on his lips told her that he was quite aware of Laryn’s discomfort.

  Neither of them seemed worried about what had taken place since they left the Hub. Not the unexpected attack and not Iko’s peculiar response to the Harla’s presence on this moon. From what Laryn knew about this crew, this had not been the first time they had come to blows with a rival salvage team, and not even the second. Perhaps this was just another day’s work for them, she thought. The Pendra Consortium hosted members of conflicting planetary nations who had sworn to maintain the peace aboard the station or forfeit their right to use it. Out here, far beyond the oversight of anyone who may care, the rules were different. No one made laws out here.

  Chapter Six

  It took a while before the members of their expedition stood on the moon’s fissured surface. The thin atmosphere did not call for extensive pressurization and so they wore the lighter, loose-fitting walkabouts. Used to explore unfamiliar terrain, these EV suits would allow them to move unencumbered while still sealed off from the environment and protected from the cold. It was unlikely that Toji would fit into a full space suit, anyway, given the stringy length of his limbs. The small air packs would do – they would return to the Nefer for refills rather than lug around full tanks. Even in reduced gravity, those things were just awkward after a while.

  “We’re out,” Ryle reported after the airlock closed behind them, testing the link to the Nefer’s com system inside his helmet. He turned to scan the horizon while reading the display of information on the inside of his visor.

  “All systems green here,” Nolan reported from his station aboard the Nefer. “The four of you are reading perfectly. Proceed.”

  “Watch for these cracks,” Azah said to Toji. “The ground scans as solid, but some of these gaps are deep. We’re not looking to deal with broken bones.”

  “Understood,” Toji said. He turned his upper body as if on a swivel to look around the foreign terrain. “This is wonderful. We’re inside a crater?”

  “An old one,” she said with amusement in her voice. The young Kalon’s excitement was clear even through the distortion of his translator.

  Daylight flooded this side of the moon and they did not need more illumination to find their way. Footprints made by frequent traffic crisscrossed the dusty ground. Closer to the massive hull of the parked ship, the surface was packed hard, hinting that the castaways had been here for some time.

  Ryle stopped to inspect the shuttle parked not far from the main entrance portal to the Harla. Far more compact than the Nefer, this class of shuttle was not made to travel any great distance. But it could go where the mammoth migrant ship could not and most transports took them along on the voyage. Someone had removed a panel above the left drive and tossed it aside. Ryle peered into the compartment.

  “What do you make of this, Nolie,” he said, making sure the cameras above his visor and on his chest captured the interior. “Looks like it’s missing pieces.”

  “Looks like it,” Nolan replied after a moment of conferring with Jex. “Anything useful’s been stripped out. But they took care to do it right.”

  Ryle tried a lever on what he assumed to be coolant valves. Stuck. “Powerpack’s gone, too.”

  “I’ve found a debris pile on the other side of the transport,” Jex reported. “Waste material, for the most part. It appears that the Harla passengers were here for a while. No appreciable salvage.”

  “Lucky us,” Azah muttered. “Not the kind of gunk I like to poke around in.”

  The expedition turned from the little cruiser and walked to the main entry of the transport. Whoever had landed the ship had set it down heavily. They either had no plans for taking off again or the Harla simply did not have the landing struts necessary for touching down on this terrain. The entire tail section sat on the ground where it had plowed up a ridge of dust.

  Laryn turned to let her eyes roam the horizon defined by the edge of the crater. Tracks led here and there, likely made by someone with an interest in exploring the moon, but there was nothing to be seen but rocks and dust, and the star-filled depths of space beyond. The stillness, broken only by the sound of breathing made by the others, was unnerving. Although she had trained for this, she had experienced this sort of atmosphere only once or twice.

  Ryle touched the doors of the Harla and found them disabled and ajar. His gloved ha
nd fit into the gap and he leaned against one of the panels to force them open.

  Laryn followed him across the threshold and into the dark beyond, pausing a moment for the sensors on her suit to activate the light emitters on her chest, helmet and wrists. Like the others, she scanned the hallway leading from the doors to the interior and read the information appearing on the screen of her visor.

  “This place is messier than Nolan’s cabin,” Azah said, stepping over a stack of loose pipes and some rags to lead the way along the hall. At least it appeared to be a hall - most of the panels had been removed, revealing the ship’s innards. Air conduits and lengths of power cables cluttered the space, and large swaths of the stuff that kept things from vibrating had been pulled out as if something had tried to make a nest in the bulkheads.

  An open door led to some sort of crew lounge or perhaps reception room, bare of furnishings. A storage bay across the hall had also been emptied to the last crate. The silence felt oppressive and old.

  Azah poked into a rectangular gap in a wall panel that had once held a communications console. “Looks like they took the place apart and headed to the planet,” she concluded.

  “Seems likely.” Ryle checked his scanner for the source of the power signature deeper inside the ship. Following the weak reading, they made their way along the corridor, aware that, gradually, the spaces appeared less neglected. Much of the interior construction was still missing, but no further debris lay scattered in the way, waiting to trip them. In places, the clutter had been piled along the side of the corridor or into abandoned cabins.

  They turned onto a ramp leading a half level down and came upon a static display wall showing the grid of cabins that lay ahead. Like an orderly town, the rooms clustered in sections, each with facilities and common areas. The names of the people assigned to these spaces had disappeared when the power had failed.

  “There would have been four hundred and thirty seven migrants, and about forty staff and crew,” Laryn said. “Sent to augment the Kiliana settlement on Terrica.”

  The scanners detected organic matter in the cabin closest to this entrance, this time in great quantity. Ryle moved to the half-open door to let the light from his helmet sweep the room.

  “Damn,” he said, exhaling the word like an invocation.

  Laryn stepped inside, steeling herself for what he had discovered. Her visor amplified the light to show what she wanted to believe was a heap of clothing and equipment. But these were bodies, of men and women, piled carelessly on the floor and even atop what seemed to be a service counter. Swallowing whatever threatened to rise in her throat, she crouched beside the body of a woman to scan for the cause of all this. Except for the creased, moistureless skin, she, like the others here, seemed little disturbed by time or decay in the airless environment.

  Toji muttered something no one understood when he and Azah crowded the doorway.

  “Frozen, but slowly,” Laryn said. “No sign of trauma. But look at this.”

  Ryle bent to direct a targeted beam of light where she pointed. A line of some pale substance lay across the woman’s body like someone had thrown a rope at her and it stuck where it landed. It crossed her chest and another had caught in her hair. He moved his light to find the same strings on the bodies of the others left here.

  Laryn caught his hand when he reached to touch the thread. “What do you make of this, Jex?” she said, focusing her scanner on it. “What happened here?”

  “I cannot extrapolate without a thorough autopsy. All seven bodies are in remarkable condition, other than the desiccation. If they can be moved and examined without re-introduction moisture, the cause of their deaths will likely come to light.”

  Laryn widened the sweep radius of her scanner, but found no other pockets of matter that might be bodies in this part of the ship.

  “Looks deliberate, whatever happened here,” Azah said. “And then they just stacked them here.”

  “The strands of foreign material appear to be inert,” Jex said. “You can sample them for analysis.”

  Ryle fished a clear bag from a pocket on his thigh and held it open when Laryn poked at the thread. “Hard, like plastic or something,” she said. A piece of the stuff broke off only after she used both hands to dislodge it. “Really hard!”

  “Yes, but look,” Ryle said. “The line follows the contours of her jacket perfectly. This stuff was liquid when it stuck to them.”

  Laryn moved to peer into the face of a young man wearing the comfortable one-piece suit favored on long voyages. The pale thread crossed his face and would not budge when she tried to move it. She left it, afraid to damage the dead man’s frozen skin. “Joel Tablyn, passenger,” she said, recognizing the features from the images she had been shown during her last session with CogSys. “That one is a tour officer, Olivia Courin. None of these are senior staff.”

  Azah returned to the main hallway and switched the display on the inside of her visor to search for evidence of what might have taken place here. Some indication that the ship’s crew and contents had been taken by force, perhaps. She recorded traces of organic material, long dead, and the sort of DNA bits that were deposited anywhere living things moved. No weapons damage marked the walls, unseen or not, and nothing here seemed deliberately broken in some battle or explosion. “Suicide? Maybe they ran out of supplies. Or air.”

  “So where is the weapon, then?” Ryle gestured to Toji and Laryn to continue their careful exploration of the ship. “You all right?” he said to the Kalon.

  “Yes. It is… unsettling.”

  Laryn reached up to place a comforting hand on Toji’s arm. It felt leathery and unyielding even through the walkabout suit. He acknowledged her touch with what looked like a fleeting smile.

  “Jex,” Ryle said. “Nothing else on this moon? Bodies? Other structures?”

  “The probes have found nothing more,” Jex replied.

  “Sign says the bridge is that way,” Azah said, standing on the lip of an open pressure door leading to another segment of the ship. “Also the clinic and main processors. Something’s still powered up there.”

  Toji bent toward Ryle. “Why does she carry a gun, Captain?” he whispered, pointing to the weapon in Azah’s hand.

  “Because that’s her job,” Azah said sharply before Ryle could reply. “And because this place is damn disturbing.”

  Laryn saw that Ryle, too, kept his hand near his holster, perhaps out of instinct. The lights attached to their suits played over the walls and doorways with their movements, letting her envision shadowy figures peering from the corners only to draw back in stealth or fright. Her foot encountered something on the floor and sent it spinning into the shadows, causing Ryle to flinch. They were all unnerved by this place.

  A door to their left looked somewhat official and Azah nudged it aside. “Looks like their com center. The bridge must be through that way.”

  Ryle walked into the narrow room and shifted a small backpack from his shoulder. He set it on a workstation to rummage through the tools he had brought aboard. “Barely any juice left,” he said after running his scanner over a mellow light seeping from the console. “Are you familiar with this? Laryn? Jex?”

  “I am.” Laryn saw the power pack in his hands and guessed his intent. A panel at the end of the console opened when she touched it, allowing her to attach the booster. After some guesswork an overhead screen came alive to confirm the connection.

  “Jex,” Ryle said. “Can you reach the AI? It should have some intel on what went on here.”

  “No, Ryle. It’s been removed.”

  “Removed?” Azah said. “You can’t just remove an AI like that. What’s the point of even doing that? They’re not exactly meant to be portable.”

  “It can be done, if you just take the processor, not the peripherals,” Nolan said. “They knew they weren’t going to get the Harla off the ground again. Maybe they took it to the planet rather than leave it for whatever was threatening them up here.”
>
  “Sounds sensible,” Laryn said. “Its principal neural control link was to the captain and the chief mate. I didn’t see either of them among the bodies. It wouldn’t function for long without them.”

  Toji looked up at the screen now showing a series of error messages. “It seems to me a great risk to depend on the health of just a few individuals to operate the entire ship. I understand that the AI will self-destruct if its link to its master is severed. A kill switch of sorts. Is that wise?”

  “There are failsafes,” Laryn said. “The more important or powerful the system, the more people are linked with it. As long as one of them has a working brain and heart, the AI will continue to live as well. I think ANN, the main Pendra artificial neural network on the station, has at least five engineers available. It receives their biotelemetry even at a distance. The system keeps AIs from disengaging from their masters and acting on their own.”

  Toji regarded her with an expression she had come to recognize as bafflement. “Why would they want to do that?”

  She shrugged. “Because the things we do aren’t always logical to the AIs, but we like to think we’re in charge. Large ships like the Harla have a manual backup system to return to the Hub, as long as their pilot knows what he’s doing. If they hadn’t crashed it, that is.”

  “Does your ship?” Toji asked Ryle. “The Nefer?”

  “Nope,” Ryle said. “Just me and Azah. Nolan never did learn how to fly.”

  “Really?” Laryn said. “Isn’t that that risky?”

  He grinned. “Yeah. If we go, Jex goes.”

  “Nolan is correct,” Jex interrupted. “The secondary systems were rerouted to the backup processors. You should be able to engage emergency lighting.”