Seeker

SEVENTEEN

We know that time is elastic. That it passes more quickly on the roof than in the basement, or at rest than in a moving vehicle. We know there are objects that may have occupied a place in the cosmos for several hundred million years although they themselves are not 60 million years old. We are accustomed to watching time take its toll on the physical world. Buildings crumble. People vanish. The pyramids wear down. But in the great vacuum that surrounds us, time seems suspended. Footprints, left ten thousand years ago on a lunar surface, endure.

- Orianda Koval,

Time and Tide, 1407 We almost gave up and went home. If Margolia was not in the system, it seemed unlikely that the Seeker could be there. Somehow, we’d gotten it wrong.

But we’d gone to a lot of trouble. And we had noplace else to look. So we stayed, and turned the Martin telescope loose. Two days later, Belle reported a suspicious object.

“High-albedo source,” she said. Highly reflective.

“Where?” I asked.

She showed me. “Eight AUs from our present position.”

“Can you give us any more information?” asked Alex.

“It’s in solar orbit.”

“That’s it? Can we get an image?”

A point of light appeared on-screen. A dull star.

“Enhance, please,” said Alex.

“It is enhanced.”

He didn’t sound hopeful. But what the hell? “Let’s go take a look,” he said.

Belle adjusted course and began to charge the engines. During the next few hours, she was able to report some details: “Preliminary analysis indicates long elliptical orbit.

It’s currently headed outward from the sun and will reach aphelion at seven point two AUs.”

“Sounds like a comet,” said Alex.

“Albedo’s not right.” We were belting down, getting ready to make the jump. “It looks as if it would require approximately eighty years to complete an orbit.”

Alex finished the coffee he’d been drinking and put the cup in the holder.

“It appears to be metal. Ninety-eight percent probability.”

The jump got us within two days’ travel time, and after about four hours the scopes gave us our first real look at the object. It was, indeed, a derelict. Once we’d established that, Alex beamed. Knew it all along.

It was in a slow tumble, and its exhaust tubes were pointed in the direction of one of the gas giants, which was only a few million kilometers away.

Six hours in, we were able to make out details, the streamlined body, thrusters, sensor mounts. Amidships, it carried the soaring eagle that we’d seen on the cup.

Seeker! “How about that?” said Alex. “But what the hell is it doing out here?”

At nine hours, we were able to make out its name, in the now-familiar English characters, on the hull.

As we drew closer, we became more aware of the sheer enormity of the vessel. It was the size of a small city. Eight giant thruster tubes aft, any one of which could have swallowed the Belle-Marie. Six levels of viewports. A hull that would have taken twenty minutes to circle on foot. An army of pods and antennas.

And“Uh-oh.”

Alex turned my way. “What is it, Chase?”

Two of the eight thruster tubes looked bent. They jutted at odd angles, off a few degrees from the others and from a line drawn down the center of the ship.

I’d seen pictures of the Crossmeer years before, after its jump engines exploded.

Everybody had died, because the blast had ripped holes in the ship and the air supply blew out before the hatches could close. The exhaust tubes had looked like these.

“They had an accident,” I said.

Alex turned back to the monitors. “Yes. That’s what it looks like.” He exhaled, and asked an odd question. “Do you think anybody might have survived?” He was speaking as though it had happened yesterday and there was still a chance to do a rescue. Being off-world can induce a sense of timelessness. Things don’t change much when you get away from wind and rain.

“It’s a big ship,” I said. “I don’t know. Depends on whether it got punctured in the wrong places.”

“Not a good way to go,” he said. “Out here.”

I didn’t think there was a good way to go, but I didn’t say anything.

It was hard to understand how the Seeker had come to be where it was. There was no habitable world in the system. What was it doing there? “It’s been a long time,” said Alex. “Maybe it just drifted in from somewhere else.”

“From where?”

“From wherever Margolia is.”

“The closest star is almost three light-years out. That’s way too far for just floating over.”

“Chase, we’re talking nine thousand years.”

“It’s too far. Under power, without jumping, it would need twenty-five thousand years to travel that kind of distance. At least.”

He shook his head. “Well, maybe they were in hyperspace. The engines blew, and the pilot pulled them out.” He looked the way he always does when confronted with a challenge. “That must be the way it happened.”

“I suppose that’s as good a guess as any. But it seems unlikely.”

There was nothing to be done until we got there, so Alex announced he was going back to his cabin. “Let me know if you see anything more.”

“Okay.”

“I have to get back to work.”

“What work?”

“The Blackmoor Medallions,” he said. “Looted during a civil disturbance three centuries ago on Morinda. Never seen since. They’d be worth millions.”

“You know where they are?” I said.

“I’m working on it.”

We pulled alongside, and even Belle was impressed by the size of the thing. The English symbols spelling out Seeker must have been twenty meters high. The ship was probably three times the volume of the Madrid, which was the biggest vessel currently in service.

The explosion had blown off large chunks of the after section. Several of the exhaust tube mounts had been mangled. A cluster of cables drifted out into the dark.

Belle took us within sixty meters of the damaged area, matched the roll and tumble of the derelict so that all motion relative to us stopped, and inched forward along the hull.

I looked through blast holes into the interior.

“What causes engines to blow?” asked Alex.

“Any of a number of things could happen,” I said. “This thing is pretty primitive, and they probably didn’t have a lot of the safeguards we do. It might have been the fuel.

Might have been an imbalance that can get created if you try to jump before the engines are ready.”

“It was the star drive?”

“Can’t tell. Not from here. And I don’t know enough about these things that I could be sure from the inside either. But that’s where I’d put my money.”

The ship was pocked and torn. Belle trained a light on it, and occasionally it illuminated the interior through one of the holes, but we still couldn’t make out much.

We nosed past cargo hatches. Glided along rows of viewports. Past long narrow wings and a sail whose sole function would have been to serve as a mount for attitude thrusters.

The English letters, black and unadorned, slipped past. I saw a spate of other phrases and a splash of color. A flag symbol. I didn’t recognize the flag. It seemed out of character for the Margolians, but I guessed it came with the ship.

Then we were passing the main airlocks. There were six of them. All sealed.

Finally, we approached the bow.

Alex pointed at an open hatch immediately to starboard. Maybe it was the way the Wescotts got in.

“Alongside,” I told Belle.

Attitude thrusters fired briefly, and we edged in close until I could almost have reached out and touched her.

I looked up at the sheer dark bulk of the thing, and found myself thinking about Delia Wescott, and I understood why she’d been frightened.

We suited up and went over. Alex likes to take charge in these situations, so he instructed me that we were to stay together at all times. He’s entertaining when he gets like that. I’m not sure how much help he’d be if there were a real emergency, but it’s always nice to have a protective male around.

The hatch had not been opened. It was cut. Apparently the Wescotts had been unable to get the manual release to work. But after so much time, I’d have been surprised if anything worked.

They’d also taken down the inner airlock door. We looked through it into a narrow chamber. A bench was fastened to the deck. Bulkheads were lined with cabinets.

There was no gravity, of course. We were getting around in grip shoes.

Alex played his wrist lamp around the chamber, strolled over to a bank of cabinets, and tried to open one. But they were all warped. Frozen.

We moved out into a passageway. It had three doors on either side. Then it connected with a cross corridor with more doors. None of them would open.

Alex picked one arbitrarily and I used a laser to cut it down. When I pulled it clear of the frame, I saw movement inside. Alex jumped. I guess I did, too.

It was drifting debris, spread all over the room, and it took us several minutes to realize that it included a cadaver. Or what remained of one. We watched the pieces climb one bulkhead and start across the overhead as the ship rolled.

There wasn’t enough left to know whether it had been a man or woman, or for that matter adult or child. We stood for a long minute, trying to ignore it, shining the lamps around the room. Other objects were afloat, bits of plastic, pieces of furniture, a comb, shreds of God knew what.

“Stay close,” said Alex. I wished we could have put the door back and resealed the room.

The cross corridor connected with more passageways with more doors. We opened a second cabin and found much the same sort of condition, but this time without the occupant. “Looks like accommodations were for two to a room,” said Alex. “Capacity was, what, about nine hundred?”

“Yes.”

“The quarters would not have been bad. I’d pictured them packed in a bit more closely.”

“Alex,” I said, “why don’t we move directly to the after section? See if we can figure out what happened.”

He stepped aside and made room. “Lead the way.” He seemed unusually subdued.

There’s an inner cockiness about Alex. He’s good, and he knows it. But he tries not to let that knowledge show. During that first hour on board the Seeker, though, it deserted him. He seemed almost overwhelmed.

We wandered aft. We found more pieces and bits of passengers adrift. Hard to know how many.

We also found washrooms, common rooms, VR areas, and a gym. English signs were everywhere. I showed them to Belle and she translated:

The interior airlocks had closed, presumably when the engines blew. But someone, very likely the Wescotts, had burned through. “Other than that,” I said. “there doesn’t seem to be any damage in the forward sections that would date to the time of the accident. Anybody who was on board would have survived until the air ran out.”

The doors in the after section were generally spaced farther apart. We opened one and looked into what must have been an acceleration chamber. Twenty couches, four across, five deep.

All filled.

My God.

I recalled Mattie Clendennon. “A dead ship.” Her gray-green eyes had grown large as she said it. “Carrying a full complement.”

The remains, most of them, were still buckled down, although body parts had broken loose and were adrift in the room. A few of the victims had gotten loose.

We got a better idea who they’d been.

“Kids,” said Alex.

We found three more such places during the next few minutes. All were filled with children. After that we left the doors shut.

We were grateful, at last, to reach the engineering spaces. The bulkhead was peeled away by the force of the blast. The main engines were blackened, but otherwise relatively whole. The star-drive unit had erupted. The damage was so extensive, and the specifics of the ship itself so unfamiliar, there was no way to know for certain what had happened. “I’d say they were trying either to enter or exit hyperspace.”

He nodded.

“Not that it matters,” I added.

“No,” Alex said. “It matters. If we can figure out what happened here, maybe we can figure out where Margolia is.”

I didn’t argue the point. I just didn’t much care where Margolia was, not at that moment. And I know those kids died thousands of years ago, and it was foolish to feel anything at that point, but I kept thinking what the scene on the ship during those final moments must have been like.

“Don’t,” said Alex. “It was over quickly.”

We looked out through the ruptured hull at the stars and the nearby gas giant, and the distant sun, pale and cold at this range. It was barely more than a bright star in the firmament. When I leaned outside and looked toward the bow, I could see the BelleMarie.

“Can you tell why it happened?” asked Alex.

I shook my head. “Not really. The passengers were buckled in. That confirms that they were performing a maneuver. That’s all I can say for sure.”

We descended to the lower decks and wandered the passageways. We came across a workout area. Devices that allowed passengers to jog, or to pump pedals, or to simulate weight lifting. The nature of the equipment suggested they hadn’t had artificial gravity. I checked with Belle, and she told me it hadn’t been developed for centuries after the Seeker.

Most of the equipment was still secured to the deck and bulkheads, but some was adrift. In addition there were towels and sweat clothes.

Acceleration chambers in the forward areas, away from the sections that had been damaged, were empty. The airlocks had saved them. Temporarily. Those sections were filled with floating human debris.

It was becoming apparent that the Seeker had indeed been carrying a full load of passengers. Nine hundred people. Had they all been kids? “Where were they going?” I asked. “I don’t think any of the original flights out to the colony carried mostly children.”

“An evacuation,” said Alex.

“From what?”

“I’ve no idea.” He pushed away something that had floated in front of his helmet. “It would have been slower up here.”

I knew what he meant, and I didn’t even want to think about it.

He pressed a gloved hand against the bulkhead as if to read its secrets. “Where were they coming from?”

Our air supply was dwindling, so we went back to the Belle-Marie. Neither of us said much. If I’d had my way, we would have called the whole thing off at that point and gone home. Let Survey or somebody else deal with it. It was odd. I’ve gone into more than a few archeological sites with Alex, but this was different from anything I’d experienced before. Or ever would again.

But he was determined to find out what had happened. So after an hour or so, and showers, we got fresh air tanks and went back.

First stop that trip was the bridge. We found it on deck four. It was smaller than I’d expected. And that surprised me. Big ship, you figure oversized bridge. There was nobody strapped in the seats, for which I was grateful. God knows what had gone through the captain’s mind during all that.

I didn’t recognize much about the equipment. There were some toggles and push buttons. But with the power off, the space wasn’t much more than two chairs in an otherwise empty room with a blank control panel and blank bulkheads, and I couldn’t have read the language without help anyhow.

“Any chance of getting the log?” Alex asked.

“No. Whatever was recorded isn’t still there after all this time.”

“Pity.” He was looking around, hoping to find something reassuring in the midst of that disaster. There was a plaque mounted on the bulkhead to the left of the pilot’s seat. It had a silhouette of the Seeker, and when we gave Belle a look, she said it was an award for carrying the first settlers to Abudai.

“Where?” Alex asked.

“Abudai.”

He looked at me. “You ever hear of it?”

“Nope.”

“The settlement shut down after forty years or so,” said Belle. “It consisted of a group that disapproved of technology. They were trying to hold on to the old days.”

“What happened to it?”

“It didn’t work. As the children matured, they packed up and went back to Earth.”

I’d brought a generator with me and managed to tie it in, but it was a fool’s errand.

The system wasn’t going to take a charge. The ship was dead as a rock.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Alex, “if Survey made a monument out of the thing.

Or an historic preserve.”

I wasn’t sure which was the pilot’s seat. I imagined Taja and Abraham Faulkner sitting there during the long flights out from Earth. I wondered what they’d talked about. What they’d thought of Harry Williams. How they’d felt about their passengers.

If either of them had been on board during this final flight.

I must have mentioned the pilots’ names because Alex pointed out that we really didn’t know when the Seeker had come to rest where it was. “It might have been a long time after the settlers arrived,” he said. “Taja and Faulkner could have been dead a hundred years before this happened.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “It’s not likely the Seeker would have lasted out here more than a century. Even with world-class maintenance.”

I opened some of the panels and looked inside, to see what condition the black boxes were in. These were the control systems for communication, navigation, power, life support, and so on. And probably for the AI. If they’d had one.

And I noticed something odd.

The boxes were marked. Plates carried symbols that probably indicated a manufacturer and a part number. And maybe a date. Some also had the group of characters that I now knew translated to Seeker. Several others had a different group of symbols, but done in the same style. It was always the same group. “Belle,” I said, “what’s this mean?”

“Please hold it higher so I can see. Ah, yes. That says Bremerhaven.”

“Bremerhaven?” said Alex.

“That is correct.”

“The other ship on the mission.” He frowned. “But this is the Seeker. ”

“Yeah.”

“Then those are parts from the Bremerhaven? Is that what it means, Chase?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

“Are they critical parts?”

“I don’t know anything about third-millennium ships. I mean this thing’s an antique.”

“Best guess.”

“They’re part of the basic package. On the bridge. Connected to whatever controls the captain has. Yeah. I’d say they were probably critical.”

There were storerooms, some filled with supplies that had never been used, others lined with cabinets. We broke into a few of the cabinets and found lots of baggage. It was all frozen rock solid.

There was no shortage of artifacts. Mugs and glasses, like the one Amy Kolmer had brought to the office, were stored in cabinets in the dining areas. Most of the glasses were cracked, but some had survived intact. We filled several containers with them.

“No problem about our deal with Shara,” he said. “There’s plenty here for everybody.”

Our customers were going to love this stuff. We took some lamps, dinnerware, pens, whatever. We especially liked anything that was marked with the Seeker ’s name. The ship also had a substantial stock of toys. Stuffed animals and books designed for children and pull-toys and sets of blocks and play pistols. Not much of it was in what you’d call pristine condition. But considering the age of everything, it was pretty good.

I’d have preferred to complete an investigation before we started taking things out, but the ship was so big, and there was so much. We’d go from space to space, and Alex would say, look, there’s a reader, or maybe a device that we didn’t recognize, or maybe a towel-stiff as a board but still recognizably a towel-and we’d pick it up and soon we were hauling a lot of stuff around with us. We took what we had back to the Belle Marie. When we got outside, Alex, his arms full, lost his grip on the load.

Everything drifted away, but he managed to save the Abudai plaque.

I mention all this to impress on the reader that there was a fair degree of disorganization in the way we went about things. We were driven by competing motives, by our desire to know what had happened to the Seeker, and consequently to Margolia itself; and also by our hunt for salable artifacts. And maybe a little guilt associated with taking things from this particular site. Don’t ask me why. We’d never had that problem before.

“I almost wish there weren’t so much here,” said Alex. I knew what he meant. If only a limited number of artifacts from the Seeker existed, they would command extraordinary prices. But if a boatload came back, even if that boatload were restricted by Survey to museums and exhibits, their very existence would reduce the value of what we had to sell.

Well, no help for it.

We’d just gotten inside when Belle called over. “I think I sighted another ship.”

“Where, Belle?”

“It’s gone now. Might have been just a blip. It wasn’t on the scope long enough to get a fix.”

“Nearby?”

“Thirty million klicks. There’s an asteroid ring at that range.”

“Okay. Let us know if it shows up again.”