Into the Sea of Stars Read online

She turned the handle. There was a faint whisper of air as the pressure equalized. Something bumped against him. He wanted to scream, but with a supreme effort he repressed it. Opening his eyes, he discovered that Shelley was up against him.

  He half suspected that she had banged into him on purpose, and a slightly mischievous smile almost con­firmed it. There were no bodies inside, however, and to­gether they pushed into the main corridor and started to explore.

  "Shelley, Ian, this is Stasz. You better prepare for your return. Your in-suit reserve is below twenty percent."

  Ian checked the elapsed time on his arm-mounted watch. Nearly six hours and not one percent of the vessel explored. They hadn't even gotten out of the main shaft area.

  The sheer number of bodies overloaded his senses, but he had slowly grown inured to their presence or he was simply in shock and the reaction would hit later.

  The forms of death were varied and frightening. Every­where the dead leered at them, some gently floating by as the opening of long-locked blast doors and passage­ways triggered gentle currents in air that had not moved for centuries. Most of the cabins still held some air, but neither Shelley nor Ian dared to remove their helmets to try it. The command and control enter had been totally destroyed by a hulling—the impact that had punched a twenty-meter hole clear through the vessel with an egress puncture nearly fifty meters across.

  Most of what they explored were various access pas­sageways, docking terminals, and the guidance center for the ship's sails, where half a dozen desiccated forms were still strapped to their couches.

  "Dr. Lacklin, I'm in what appears to be a communi­cations center on level three, section four. Would you please join me?"

  Turning about, he floated back up the corridor that she had followed only moments before. He pushed past a small body that held an even smaller form to its breast— he didn't look closer.

  There was a faint light coming out of a room. He pushed his way in and to his surprise found that she had managed to locate a backup lighting system that could still function. A soft, diffused light radiated from overhead panels.

  Shelley noticed his look of surprise. "Apparently the power grid hooking into this area is still intact and there are some backup batteries."

  The room was circular with a number of windows on one side that looked out over the docking bay. As Ian went up to the window, he could see the Discovery docked on the next level down, or at least in the direction that his feet were pointing.

  "It looks as if they stayed alive in here for some time after whatever it was hit them." She pointed to a number of boxes and empty emergency food containers that floated in the room along with the four bodies.

  "Poor bastards. Damn it, Shelley, there must have been close to forty thousand living here. I'd have thought that damage control could have brought this ship on line again."

  "I've been thinking about that, Dr. Lacklin. Look at the damage. Primary ship functioning area totally de­stroyed. Power reactor destroyed, main communications, data storage banks, and transport lines to the two wheels, damaged or destroyed. Eight major hull hits, all to vital areas. Two or three at the same time they could have bypassed and still managed to restore service. But not eight at once. Taking out those eight at the same time was fatal, and the occupants stayed trapped in each of their emergency chambers till the oxygen ran out. It's possible some might have lasted for weeks. What a horrible death..." Her voice trailed off.

  "You think there's any chance of calling up ship's rec­ords?"

  "Just a moment, Doc."

  Shelley floated to the far corner of the room and hov­ered next to a body. For several minutes she twisted the body back and forth and suddenly the hand snapped off the body. He could hear a faint cry of dismay and felt at least a little pleasure at the realization that even Shelley was affected by this charnel house.

  "Dr. Lacklin, how good are you at deciphering Old Japanese?"

  "Not too good. I can speak it, but that's about it."

  "Damn, this body had a notebook clutched to it. It might be worth looking at."

  "I have the dictionaries back aboard ship."

  "Speaking of back aboard ship," Stasz interrupted again, "listen, Doc, I have no desire to board that graveyard in search of your bodies. You're down to seventeen percent of reserve so would you kindly get your butts back where they belong. Shelley, at least get your butt back, I like it better than our rotund professor's gludius maximus, or whatever it is that Croce calls it."

  Shelley started for the door still holding the notebook with the clawlike hand clinging to one side. Ian turned away for a moment and looked back out the port. His view was framed by the two wheels, above and below him, spinning slowly against the backdrop of an endless sea of stars. All the key points of the vessel struck, prob­ably simultaneously—dooming all aboard. He looked out across the stars and shivered.

  "I figured I should share this with all of you. I must confess that it changes the complexion of this mission"— Ian hesitated for a moment—"perhaps to the point of abandonment."

  He looked around the room at his companions. Coming from a desk-bound civilization where meetings were the form of business, and the form required desks and chairs, the concept of a meeting in zero G had a slightly ridiculous quality. There were no desks to define territory and no seating with the leader at the head. Rather they floated around a room and copies of paperwork were tossed back and forth after being attached to clipboards. Stasz wasn't helping matters any by floating upside down relative to the rest of them.

  Ian tried to gauge their reactions. The meeting was more a ritual; they already knew the information to be discussed and a general feeling had already been arrived at. But he wanted to be sure.

  "Look, Ian," Ellen said quietly, "this happened nearly three hundred years ago. Three hundred years ago our Democratic Bureaucracy was at war with the Chin. Today the Chin are our closest allies."

  "Let me go over it one more time, Ellen. And anyhow, I think you as a collective psychologist should know the theories of Constant Social Lines in relationship to an isolated society."

  "It's a theory and I'm out here to prove it or disprove it, that's why I think this is absurd."

  "Let's hear him out, Ellen, then you can attack him."

  Ellen glared at Richard, who returned her stare with a mock bow that sent him tumbling head over heels until Shelley helped to stabilize him.

  "Here we go then," Ian stated as formally as he could, but his voice was pitched too high and the nervousness showed.

  "I've worked five days straight on the translations. In the interim Stasz and Richard managed to explore part of one torus and I think we can confirm that absolutely no one is left alive in there." He gestured vaguely toward the window where silhouetted on either side were the twin wheels rotating on their endless journey.

  "This unit departed Earth in the year 2083 and is re­ferred to as Unit 181. I've provided you with all my notes concerning its history. We've retrieved some Holo core memories but I don't have the equipment to use them.

  "Several more notebooks have been recovered and I plan to analyze them, but I think the first one is good enough to go on."

  He looked down at the notepad strapped to his knee.

  "Most of the notes in the book were poetry. Rather nice stuff, called haiku. Our long-dead friend Miko was a sensitive individual. A longer poem on page twenty-three of the notebook gives us an interesting clue. He describes the blue sun of his childhood, which he now misses. Stasz and I have checked it out and this vessel could have come out of Delta Sag. Which means these people made it to a star eighty-two light-years from Earth and, as near as I can estimate, spent only twenty-odd years in orbit about that star and then began the long journey back to Earth. There are in fact four references to this sun. The next to the last poem is not a haiku, but more in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Romantics. In that poem the writer speaks of the mission they have set.

  To warn our forefathers in h
alls undreamed,

  And seek again the light that was,

  As we speak to the gods of the sleeping giant,

  Revenge of their sons, long dreamed dead.

  Ian looked around the room again. The rest were silent. He had a brief mental flash of the vacant staring faces that had populated his classroom. But these people were listening to him, and he felt a surge of satisfaction.

  "The last statement is a diary-type entry that makes one thing very plain—they were attacked. I'll read the last entry."

  He knew this was rather pedantic, but he couldn't help but play on the dramatic; after all, he was a historian.

  " 'It is seventy-four hours since the Alpha/ Omega strike. I look out at our twin wheel, our home, our world. The lights are still on in the Ag section, batteries...' The next line is illegible and then picks up again. 'My eyes see, but they cannot make me believe. My entire world is dying, it is dying and they have murdered us. Murdered us. It is the end and there is nothing. Our crypt shall journey across the sea of eternity, a voyager of quiet death. And so I join the others as the lights of my world fade away forever.

  Ian felt a strange turmoil within. The young poet had written this to him, far more sure of the immortality of his verse than any Earthly poet. For in space the script would last, like its poet, for eternity.

  "I've backplotted the heading," Stasz interjected, breaking the melancholy silence. "If acceleration ceased at current speed they would have left Delta Sag three hundred and ninety-seven years ago."

  "How far to Delta Sag, Stasz?" Ellen asked.

  "Two months."

  Ellen looked at Ian with a challenging smile.

  Ian hesitated, trying to buy time. "We've got to be logical about this one. First there is a wealth of infor­mation aboard this ship. This could keep an archaeolog­ical team busy for the next century. It's the first time anyone from our modern age has stepped aboard a vessel from the twenty-first century."

  "Come on, Ian, stop being such a historian and start thinking like an explorer," Ellen replied. "I'm not inter­ested in dead things, I want living people to sample. One of those things"—and she shuddered,—"in there might interest you as you cut 'em up to see what they had for breakfast, but that information is useless in my book. They came from this Delta Sag, I want to go there and find out more."

  "There's the next point to consider, as well. This col­ony was murdered. Someone or something out there killed them. They could kill us!"

  Now his emotions were taking hold.

  They hesitated for a moment on that one and Ian pressed in. "I think we should stay here, study this one in further detail, and knowing there is something hostile out here, we have every legitimate excuse to return back home, report our findings, and then get back to our lives."

  "From what I've heard of your Chancellor," Stasz in­terjected, "I don't think the sight of you four would be very welcome."

  "To hell with the welcome," Ian replied. "What can he do to us? We found a colony and that's that."

  "A dead one, Ian," Richard said. "I think our dear Chancellor is more interested in living proof than a float­ing morgue. Remember his famous comment at last year's board meeting: 'I am not an intellectual, I am an admin­istrator.' That administrator will not be pleased with a dead Colonial Unit 181. He'll want live finds, finds that occur after the three years mandated by his office. Any­how, my curiosity is aroused. Hell, we've come this far, why not finish it and go on to Delta Sag?"

  "I'm curious, too," Stasz said.

  Ian knew they were beating him; he had expected that from the beginning. For some strange reason their curi­osity had been whetted. The fear of this attacker now acted like a candle drawing the moth in.

  He looked at Shelley, but her only response was a shrug and a smile. Finally she leaned over and whispered.

  "Come on, Ian, stop acting like a historian. The people aboard that ship are dead. Think of the chance of meeting some that are alive."

  Ian looked back out at the turning wheel. A rumble ran through the Discovery and suddenly there was a faint return of gravity as Stasz piloted them up between the twin toruses. A flickering glow shone through the com­munications bay of Colonial Unit 181, and in the cold light he could make^out the bodies floating on their eternal voyage.

  At least that fear was gone. He had felt himself encased within a haunted fragment of the universe, as the souls of the dead still traveled on a journey that in another seven hundred years would bring them within sight of their an-cestoral home.

  He knew, as well, that even though they were depart­ing, the ghosts would stay with his soul. The ghosts would come to haunt him in his nightmares of bodies floating in out of the darkness.

  Stasz rotated the Discovery, and the nav computers took over. Soon they were pointed straight in at a steady blue light. Ian closed his eyes and braced for the jump that would take them to Delta Sag and the answer that all but he wanted.

  Chapter 6

  Colonial Unit: 27

  First Completion date: 2031

  Primary Function: Friends of the Light Colony. Anglo-American Peace Activist Group. In response to the growing concern over the second Kwajlein incident, this was the first of the "peace experiment" units that led the way for over one hundred Utopian concept col­onies.

  Evacuation Date: According to Copernicus Base Record, June 6, 2086; however, Mars Base Hatley claims unit left nearly nine months later. Beaulieu believes Mars Base confused this with the "Second Friends of the Light Colony."

  Overall Design: Standard Cylinder, first generation, 1200 meters by 300 meters.

  Propulsion: Standard Modification Design, strap-on ion packs mounted to nonrotational central shaft.

  Course: Galactic Core.

  Political/Social Orientation: Unit 27 was the first of the "Utopian" experiments modeled after the early-nine­teenth-century Utopian movement; as such was the leading model of what would become a significant per­centage of the twenty-first-century colonies. This unit attempted to model its government after consensus, with the guiding principle that a total concensus would be needed for any action. Therefore, a single dissenter could resist or stop an entire process. Second, violence of any kind was abhorred. Third, silent meditation was often the path to understanding.

  The detection alarm did not cause the same thrill of fright that the first one had created, but the fact that it awoke him from a deep sleep caused Ian to flop around in confusion for several minutes until his glasses were in place and he was dressed sufficiently to appear in public.

  The rest of the crew was already gathered around Stasz, with Ellen hanging very close to his shoulder. She had thrown on a light nightgown that clung tightly to her more than ample frame. Richard had already noticed that she was pressing her breasts into Stasz's arm and he gave Ian a sly nudge. Of course, they both knew what was coming, and settled back, anticipating her explosion with as much pleasure as they did the data racing across the monitors and spewing from the hard-copy displays.

  As usual Shelley was in the seat next to Stasz, and she started interpreting the data while Stasz busied himself with ship commands.

  "It's on a near-parallel course," Shelley muttered. "Relative ship trajectory R.A. twenty-one hours, forty-three minutes; declination five degrees north, range es­timate one light-year, more or less."

  "Good lord, Stasz," Richard exclaimed in surprise, "how the hell could we detect that?"

  "Their automatic beacon," Ian replied. "The last one was out because the beacon had been hit in the strike.

  This one is still functioning. It's nothing more than a signal burst and our ship's computer picked it up."

  "Ann, Dr. Lacklin, my printout reads that this thing is definitely Earth origin. Shall we go for it?"

  "What the hell, that's what we're here for, Stasz." Ian shrugged and started to walk away.

  Just before he closed the cabin door a loud smack echoed through the room. With a start Ian looked back, as Stasz staggered away from E
llen.

  "How dare you?" Ellen shrieked, her features flushing scarlet.

  "Listen, lady," Stasz intoned with mock seriousness, "where I come from a woman who presses up against a man who has been deep spaced for three months is ob­viously asking for some support. So I figured my free hand could provide that support."

  Ian held the door open as Ellen glided out of the room in a royal huff. The moment Richard caught his eye they both broke out into rolling peals of laughter. Ian decided it was time for the cracking of another bottle.

  "This looks like two in a row," Ellen said, her comment reflecting the dread they all felt as they surveyed what most likely was a dead colony.

  The unit was less than a thousand meters away, turning slowly, outlined in sharp relief by the starlight and Dis­covery's spotlights.

  "I'm picking up a hot reactor," Stasz said hopefully. "Trace emissions. Their power supply is still good."

  Stasz jockeyed them around the cylinder for a closer examination. There was no direct view into the unit since the colony was coated with heavy shielding in order to cut down the radiation exposure for the inhabitants. Ex­ternal light was admitted to the colony by a complex series of mirrors, and Stasz maneuvered toward one with the hope of getting a reflected view of the inside.

  "There, in that mirror!" Shelley cried. "Look at the one to the right of the main antenna, do you see it?"

  "If we're seeing light," Ian replied, "at least we know their power grid is still up."

  In a vain attempt to appear calm, Ian had started a third read through of the Thermomine Manual. But the possibility of life aboard the ship was too much for him. Returning the manual to his back pocket, he started to pore through the hardcopy charts, quickly looking back at the cylinder for reference.

  "The docking ports are on either end of the cylinder, Stasz. Shall we move in?"

  Stasz started to maneuver in for final approach.

  "Who's going?" Ian asked quietly.

  Shelley turned expectantly and he gave her the nod. He looked at Ellen, half expecting her to back away after the last experience, but to his surprise she mumbled a brief reply about earning her keep. The two women pushed off and floated back to the suit room and docking port.