Prophets

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Good Samaritans

Surviving the worst will always complicate the matter.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

Truth will sooner come out of error than from confusion.

—FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)

Date: 2526.6.3 (Standard) 750,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534

Everything had been going as smoothly as could be expected, the bridge crew making periodic announcements over the PA system while Parvi sat at her station obsessively nursing as much efficiency as she could out of the damaged damping coil. Things were going better than she had a right to expect, the engines were already down to 50 percent ahead of her projection.

Then every meter on the console before her redlined. The power spike was sudden, and she lost all readout from the damping coil at the same time the emergency klaxons announced a hull breach.

She slammed her hand on the PA broadcast and shouted, “Everyone to the nearest lifeboat/cabin now! We’ve had a critical overload.”

Before she finished her sentence, the drives blew. She could see the displays go critical in the split second before the explosions. Everything lurched out from underneath her as every display went dead, plunging the bridge into darkness.

More explosions, and Parvi could feel her ass drifting out of the seat in the darkness.

Gravity’s gone.

She grabbed the dead console blindly, trying to keep from drifting away. Hull breach, lost gravity, how long before we’re breathing vacuum?

After a moment, emergency lights flickered on around the bridge, bathing them in a red glow. “What the fuck just happened?” Wahid called from the far side of the bridge. Now that there was some light, he kicked off the wall, back toward the console.

“The drives overloaded,” Parvi said, not quite believing it herself.

“Did the damping coil cause it?” Mosasa asked.

Parvi shook her head. “The spike happened before it failed.”

“Someone tached in,” Tsoravitch whispered.

“That’s bullshit,” Wahid said, pulling back into his seat. “They’d have to be right on top of us. You heard Bill.”

Parvi looked down at the pilot’s station, and even under emergency power, all the displays were dead. She tried calling up details on the drives, the maneuvering jets, life support, and structural integrity. She couldn’t get anything except the internal diagnostics of the bridge itself. “I can’t communicate with the ship’s systems. Everything in the pilot’s station is cut off . . .”

“Wahid?” Mosasa snapped.

“I can’t raise the bridge’s nav console.”

“Tsoravitch?”

“It’s dead. Everything’s dead!” She slammed her fists against the console in front of her. “Nothing.”

Parvi stared at Tsoravitch and felt the same edge of panic herself.

“Snap out of it,” Mosasa said. Parvi heard desperation in his voice that went deeper than Tsoravitch’s panic. His voice grew brittle as he yelled at her. “We need the external sensors on-line, and that’s not going to happen with you breaking down!”

Before Parvi could intervene, Wahid said, “Listen.”

The bridge fell silent. After a few seconds, a sound resonated through the skin of the Eclipse, a distant hammer blow echoing though the whole vessel. Another few seconds and the sound repeated.

It took a moment for Parvi to realize what was happening.

“The lifeboats,” Parvi said to Wahid.

“What?”

“The drive failure caused enough damage to trigger the emergency systems to abandon ship.” Another distant hammer blow. “The Eclipse is launching the lifeboats. Everyone locked in the cabins is being evacuated.”

That meant everyone except Bill and the people on the bridge.

Tsoravitch sucked in a ragged breath and asked. “What could make that happen?”

“A catastrophic failure,” Mosasa said quietly. “Complete loss of shipwide life support, imminent structural failure, fire, explosion—”

Another hammer blow, and a slight lurch felt through the floor.

Mosasa pushed away from the bridge console and pulled himself toward the wall. Once there, he began pulling open access panels.

“What are you doing?” Tsoravitch asked.

“A failure in the data lines to the main console,” Mosasa said, “We shouldn’t have lost the feed from the rest of the Eclipse.”

He’s assuming there’s still something out there to get a feed from.

“Tsoravitch,” he shouted, “get over here. I’m going to need your help.”

Another hammer blow, and another lurch.

Parvi could picture the lifeboats bursting from the skin of the Eclipse, like parasitic larvae burrowing out of the flesh of their host.

Tsoravitch pulled herself over to Mosasa, and the two of them began digging into the guts of the bridge’s data network.

Wahid turned to look at Parvi. “Think our boss saw this one coming in his AI crystal ball?”

Parvi shook her head as another hammer blow echoed through the bridge. This one seemed farther away, and the lurch that followed weaker. “No,” she told him. “I don’t think he had any idea.”

Parvi saw strands of optical cable and electronic components floating between Mosasa and Tsoravitch. She wondered if they did get the bridge reconnected to any external sensors whether she would want to know what it showed.

The central holo fuzzed a moment, then came to life. She looked up and found herself staring down a surreal view of one of the Eclipse’s central corridors. For a moment it felt as if she were suddenly floating down somewhere else in the ship.

“They got the security cameras on-line,” Wahid said. He slid over to the comm station and started trying to control the display. The view panned as Wahid manipulated the controls.

The corridor appeared undamaged at first, just dully lit by the emergency lights. Then Parvi noticed the debris floating in the air, shiny flecks of silver. “Ice,” she whispered. Faint clouds of ice crystals floated in the corridor. Something bad had happened to the life-support systems.

The camera panned past one of the emergency lamps and Parvi saw that some dull particulate matter floated alongside the ice crystals—soot, or ash. Then the camera panned to one of the cabin doors.

“Holy fuck,” Wahid whispered.

The cabins were all behind two doors sandwiched together. The outer door was supposed to remain sealed when the lifeboats ejected, but this one had failed, completely. Either the outer door had never closed at all, or the force of the lifeboat ejecting opened it again. The cabin door looked out on empty space.

Wahid cycled through other security cameras, showing more empty corridors. He found the open cargo bay, and Parvi saw the Paralian in his massive life-support equipment, his manipulator arms buried deep in an open control panel.

“Probably trying to do the same thing we are,” Wahid said.

“Can you contact him?” Parvi asked.

He shook his head. “All I got here are the cameras. I don’t even have the PA system yet.”

He cycled though some more cameras until he found a view of the engines. Of what used to be the engines. It took several moments for Parvi to recognize what she saw, only partly because the camera itself was damaged and giving everything blurry rainbow halos and fuzzy unstable outlines.

The tach-drive had torn itself apart. Parvi could only see the anchorages where the massive coils used to be. Nothing recognizable remained of the drive itself. Metal twisted in on itself and melted into odd, puttylike forms. The skin of the Eclipse had peeled back from the engine compartment, exposing everything to the stars.

Parvi stared at the wreckage openmouthed. The tach-drive had completely consumed itself; it was miraculous that they were still alive.