The bridge hatch did not respond to its control, so she tried to pry it open, but something seemed to be blocking it. "I'm sorry, it's the only way," she said to the bodies floating below her, then backed up to the hatch and gave it a one-legged kick. Her legs and feet had the strength of her equinesque forebears and the hatch, though damaged, opened enough for her head and shoulders to pass through. Shining the beam of the flashlight around the perimeter of the hatch frame, she saw what was blocking it. Three bodies had apparently been wedged into the workings. Parts of them drifted in zero G, but they were stacked atop each other, and each had a limb or a bit of clothing trapped in the iris. Sticking the flashlight under her arm, she reached down and as gently as possible-which wasn't very, dislodged the blockages, freeing two of the bodies to float ceilingward. She saw as she released the dead that, unlike the bodies in the corridors, these people had laser burns through the centers of their chests.
Khorii pushed through the broader opening, bracing her hands on the bottom of the iris and pulling her legs over her head in a sort of supported somersault. As she explored the bridge, she had the odd sense of millions of tiny motes fleeing before her, then disappearing again. What was that? It had happened in the stairwell, too. For a moment the things were quite thick in the thin atmosphere, then, poof!
Two officers sat strapped in chairs close to the command console. For a moment she thought perhaps they had survived, but one look at their heads told her otherwise. The darker-haired officer, a man, had a laser burn through the base of his neck that came out the crown of his head. The other, a gray-haired female wearing a captain's epaulet on her uniform, had no mouth, nor was the rest of her face a pretty sight. A laser pistol floated near her hand, which hovered over the still faintly pulsing signal beacon control. On the console behind her hand was a printout. Scrawled across it in ragged handwriting were the words "Forgive me! I had to do it. Now I will die, too."
It appeared to Khorii that the captain had written those words just before turning the laser pistol on herself. Clearly, the last moments on the bridge had not been happy ones for anyone.
Khorii was not sure exactly what she was looking for, or even if it existed other than in the ship's powerless computer. A personnel and passenger list maybe. Surely they had such a list? There were- had been-a lot of people aboard this ship. They'd need to know who was in what cabin and so forth, wouldn't they?
But she saw nothing besides the captain's note that was a printout, or even a scrap of paper, much less a book. She climbed back into the corridor. Some of these bigger ships had special offices for the captain, ready rooms, she thought they were called, where the captain presumably got commands and charts and things ready before taking them onto the bridge. Maybe she should try there?
The first door that she opened led into a space that she thought might be such a room. There were pictures of other space vessels on the walls, and a series of important-looking framed documents. Captain Dolores M. Grimwald's certifications and licenses to fly various sorts of spacecraft, citations, and service awards. These were all arranged in a pyramid, seemingly in chronological order from top to bottom. The top one was up a bit higher than she could read by the beam of her flashlight so she turned the captain's swiveling chair around and stood on the seat, training her light on it.
It was a medical license awarded to Dr. Dolores M. Grimwald, M.D. The captain had been a physician before she'd been a captain. A healer, like the Linyaari. Why had she killed everyone else on the ship, then? Khorii did not understand.
Except for the framed documents and pictures, there were no papers in the room.
She left it reluctantly, because this was the first room that did not contain corpses. Although corpses didn't bother Khorii, really, not at all, she was getting rather tired of bumping into them and found she was anxious to return to the Condor.
The next two cabins were also empty, but in the fourth cabin, she found not only a body but also all manner of nonelectronic record keeping. This was the purser's office, and-to her immense relief-she found the passenger roster she knew had to exist and what cabins the passengers were assigned and what they had paid for them. The purser was evidently someone who liked to have printouts available at all times instead of having to consult electronic devices. Uncle Hafiz was like that as well. She also found a list of crew members along with their cabin assignments, rank, position, and pay scale.
Just what she needed! Now they could notify the families of the victims and perhaps arrange to have them sent to their loved ones for burial or whatever the local custom was. All that remained was to find a ship's log or maybe a personal diary that would give some clue as to how disaster had overtaken these people and what motive a healer/captain might have for murdering her crew and apparently the passengers, too.
From the staircase came the sound of a heavy tread-the clunk of little android feet. They'd sent Elviiz to find her, of course. She was afraid of that, though she'd hoped they would all be too preoccupied to send her back before she was ready. It was okay. She was almost ready anyway. Just one or two more cabins to peek into, then she was sure she would have covered most of the officers.
The next door was another office. There she found more paper lists along with duty rosters held against the walls with magnets. There was also a diagram of the ship and the location of all the cabins, along with notations about each passenger. She couldn't read them because they were written in Spandard, the Spanish version of Standard spoken on the ship's homeworld. She did make out the names of flowers and foods. And one more thing sprang out at her near the end-the letters "S.O.S." Perhaps she held the key in her hands to what had happened on this ship-if only she could read it. She took the papers down and started to put them in one of the pockets of her shipsuit. As she folded, more of the mysterious motes sprayed off the papers. She touched the papers with her horn, and when the air between her and them cleared, she stuffed them into her pocket.
"Khorii, where are you? Khorii!" Elviiz was calling. Then she heard him mumble, "Of the two of them, Khiindi is the more reliable." Then, "Khorii! Come along now. We are returning to the Condor and resuming our journey."
"What?" she asked, popping her head out of the office. "The captain would never abandon this ship!"
Elviiz looked back at her from the hatch to the bridge. Now the iris was more or less neatly opened. "Of course not. He will tow it to one of his private storage asteroids, so that we may continue our journey to Maganos Moonbase. He can report his find and make his claim to the authorities there. Now come on."
Figures, Khorii thought as she followed the android back to the Condor. Just when things were getting interesting.
Chapter 3
The storage asteroid was not far by space-faring standards, basically only a wormhole away. One of the things Uncle Joh was teaching Khorii was how to navigate the way his father Theophilus had taught him, using wormholes and "pleated" space and other anomalies of physics as shortcuts. Of course, Maak knew how to do this, as did her parents, and Elviiz would probably have it in his data banks long before she flew solo for the first time; but at least she sort of understood how it worked, and everyone else didn't know all of the special Becker byways.