But the chill of age was on the vessel.
Chase sat in the pilot’s seat, perplexed, and perhaps apprehensive. The multichannel was open, sweeping frequencies that would have been available to Corsarius, as though we expected a transmission. But we heard only the clear hiss of the stars. "The histories must be wrong," I said. "Obviously, it wasn’t destroyed off Rigel."
"Obviously." She adjusted the image on the monitors, which needed no adjusting. The Centaur’s computers were matching schematics of the derelict with ancient naval records of Corsarius, again and again, in endless detail. "It makes me wonder what else they might have been wrong about."
"Does this mean Sim might have survived Rigel?"
Chase shook her head. "I’m damned if I know what it means."
I pursued the thought. "If he did, if he lived through it, why would he come out here? Hell, this was a long way from the war zone anyhow: could Corsarius even have made this kind of flight?"
"Oh, yes," Chase said. "The range of any of these vessels is only limited by the quantity of supplies they can get on board. No: they could have done it. The question is why they would want to."
Maybe it wasn’t voluntary. Maybe Sim and his ship somehow fell into the hands of the Ashiyyur. Was it possible that he lived through the Rigel action, but that he was injured in some way, and wandered off afterward, not knowing who he was? Ridiculous. Even if there was something to the notion of the duplicate ships, what would any of them be doing here? Who would have had time, in the worst days of the Resistance, to come so far with a warship that must have been desperately needed at home?
We drifted out over the bow, past the fierce eyes and beak of the harridan, past the weapons clusters bristling in the ship’s snout. Chase turned us in a narrow loop. The hull fell sharply away, and the blue sun-splashed planetary surface swam across the viewports. Then it too dropped off, giving way to the broad sweep of black sky.
We talked a lot. Chattered really. About how well Chase’s leg had healed, about how good it would be to get home, about how much money we would probably make from all this. Neither of us seemed to have any inclination to let the conversation die. And meanwhile we drew alongside the derelict. Chase took us the length of the hull, and stopped by the main entry port. "In case you had any doubts," she said, raising her voice to indicate there was something significant to say, "she’s blind and dead. Her scopes have made no effort to track us."
We put on the helmets to the pressure suits we were wearing, and Chase drew the air from the cockpit. When the green lights went on, she pushed up the canopy, and we drifted out. Chase moved to the entry port, while I paused to look at a set of Cerullian characters stencilled on the hull. They were the ship’s designation, and they matched the characters on the Corsarius of the simulations.
The hatch rotated open, and a yellow light blinked on inside. We stumbled clumsily into the airlock. Red lamps glowed on a status board set into the bulkhead.
"Ship’s on limited power," said Chase, her voice subdued over the commlink. "There’s no gravity. I would guess that it’s in some sort of maintenance mode. Just enough to keep things from freezing."
We activated our boot magnets. The closing cycle for the outer hatch didn’t work. The stud lit up when I touched it, but nothing happened. Worse, the lamps blinked to orange, and air began to hiss into the compartment. Chase tugged on the outer door, pulling it shut. We locked it tight.
Air pressure built up quickly, the bolts on the inner assembly slid out of their wells, the warning lights went to white, and the door into the ship swung noiselessly on oiled hinges.
We looked out into a dimly lit chamber. The interior of the most celebrated warship in history! Chase held out one gloved hand, took mine, and squeezed. Then she stood aside to let me pass.
I ducked my head and stepped through.
The room was filled with cabinets, computer consoles, and large storage enclosures loaded with gauges and meters and electronic wrenches. Pressure suits hung near the airlock, and a computer diagram of the vessel covered one wall. At each end of the room, we could see a sealed hatch of the same design as the one through which we had entered.
Chase glanced at the gauge she wore on her wrist. "Oxygen content is okay," she said. "It’s a bit low, but it’s breathable. The temperature’s not quite three degrees. A trifle cool." She released the studs that secured her helmet, lifted the headpiece, and cautiously inhaled.
"They turned down the heat," I said, removing my own.
"Yes," she agreed. "That’s precisely what it is. Somebody expected to come back." I was having a hard time keeping my eyes off the hatches, as though either of them might swing open at any moment. She advanced on the row of pressure suits, one cautious step at a time, the way someone enters a cold ocean from a beach. When she reached them, she stood counting and then announced there were eight. "They’re all there," she added.
"You didn’t expect that?"
"It was possible that survivors of whatever disaster overtook this ship went outside to make repairs, and were swept away."
"We need to look at the bridge," I said. "That’s where we’ll get some answers."
"In a minute, Alex." She released the after hatch, pulled it open, and passed through. "I’ll be right back," her voice said on the commlink.
"Keep a channel open," I said. "I want to hear what’s happening."
I listened to her footsteps for several minutes thereafter, and then the heavy clank of more hatch bolts sliding back. Considerations of what my position would be were something to happen to Chase left me listening anxiously for her return, wondering whether I should go after her, and trying to recall the steps necessary to pilot the Centaur. My God, I suddenly realized I didn’t even know which way the Confederacy was.
I wandered among the assorted black boxes and cable and God knows what else, stuff I couldn’t even begin to identify, circuit boards, glass rods, and long poles with a greenish viscous liquid in them.
Some of the cabinets seemed to belong to individual crew members. Names were stenciled on them: VanHorn, Ekklinde, Matsumoto, Pornok, Talino, Collander, Smyslov. My God: the seven deserters!
Nothing was locked. I opened the cabinets one by one, and found oscillators, meters, wire, generators, and coveralls. Not much else. Lisa Pornok (whose photo I had seen in the records somewhere, and who was a tiny, dark-skinned woman with huge luminous eyes) had left an antique commlink that would have had to be carried in a pocket, and a comb. Tom Matsumoto had hung a brightly colored period hat on a hook. Manda Collander had owned a few books, written Cerullian. I approached Talino with awe, but there were only a half-dozen journals, filled with fuel usage and shield efficiency reports, a workshirt (he was apparently considerably smaller than I’d been led to believe), and several data clips that turned out to be concerts.
I found only one photo. It was of a woman and a child, left by Tor Smyslov. The child was probably a boy. I couldn’t be sure.
Everything was secured in bands, clamps, or compartments. Nothing to rattle around loose. Equipment was clean and polished. It might have been stowed the day before.
I heard Chase approaching long before she stepped through the hatch. "Well," she said, "there’s one theory blown."
"What was that?"
"I thought maybe they’d gone down to the surface, and there’d been an accident of some sort. Or maybe the lander just quit on them and they couldn’t get back."
"Hell, Chase," I said, dismissing the idea, "they wouldn’t all have left the ship."
"No. Not if there were a full crew on board. But maybe there were only a couple of survivors." She threw up her hands. "Damn, I guess that doesn’t make any sense either. It seems to me they must have come here to hide. The war was lost, and the mutes were probably taking no prisoners. And then the drive quit on them. Battle damage maybe. They couldn’t get home. If the radio was knocked out, it could have happened in a way that no one would have known. In fact, in this kind of ship, the radio’s probably not capable of extreme long-range communications anyhow. So if they got into trouble, they couldn’t get help. At least not from any human world.