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.