It was a small thing at first; just a smudge of phosphors on the deep radar screen. But it signified volumes. For the first time since leaving the Flotilla they had encountered something that lay behind them; something other than light years of empty space. Sky turned up the beam intensity and focused the phased-array on the specific region where the echo had come back from.
‘It’s got to be it,’ Gomez said, leaning over his shoulder. ‘Got to be the Caleuche. There can’t be anything else out there.’
‘Maybe we’re just seeing another piece of discarded junk,’ Norquinco said.
‘No.’ Sky watched as the phased-array teased out details, turning the smudge into something with density and shape. ‘It’s much too big for that. I think it is the ghost ship. Nothing else that big could be trailing us.’
‘How big is it, exactly?’
‘Wide enough,’ Sky said. ‘But I can’t get an estimate of the length. She’s keeping her long axis aligned with us, just as if she still has some navigational control.’ He tapped keys, squinting as more numbers popped up next to the echo. ‘Width is spot-on for a Flotilla ship. Same profile too — the radar’s even picking out some asymmetries which line up with where we’d expect the antennae clusters to be on the forward sphere. She doesn’t seem to be rotating — they must have sapped her spin for some reason.’
‘Maybe they got bored with gravity. How far away is she?’
‘Sixteen thousand klicks. Which, considering we’ve come half a light second, isn’t bad. We can reach her in a few hours at minimal burn.’
They debated it for a few minutes, then agreed that a quiet approach made the best sense now. The fact that the ship had kept herself aligned with the Flotilla meant that it was no longer possible to think of her as a drifting, dead hulk. She still had some autonomy. Sky doubted that there could be living crew aboard her, but it must now be considered a real — if remote — possibility. At the very least, automated defence systems might be functioning. And they might or might not take kindly to the swift, unannounced approach of another ship.
‘We could always announce ourselves,’ Gomez said.
Sky shook his head. ‘They’ve been following us quietly for the best part of a century without ever making any attempt to talk to us. Call me paranoid, but I think that just might suggest they’re not particularly interested in visitors, whether they announce themselves or not. Anyway, I don’t believe for one minute that there’s anyone aboard. She has some systems still running, that’s all — just enough to keep her antimatter safe and make sure she doesn’t drift too far from the Flotilla.’
‘We’ll know soon enough,’ Norquinco said. ‘As soon as we get within visual range. Then we can take a look at the damage.’
The next two hours passed agonisingly slowly. Sky modified their approach trajectory to take them slightly to one side, so that the phased-array could begin to pick out some elongation in the radar echo. The results, when they came in, were no surprise: the Caleuche fitted the profile of a Flotilla ship almost exactly, except for some small but puzzling deviations.
‘Probably damage marks,’ Gomez said. He looked at the radar echo, bright now, and the absence of anything else on the screen only served to emphasise how isolated they were. There had not even been any response from the rest of the Flotilla; no sign that any of the other ships had noticed anything going on. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m almost disappointed.’
‘You are?’
‘At the back of my mind I kept wondering if it wouldn’t turn out to be something stranger.’
‘A ghost ship isn’t strange enough for you?’ Sky adjusted the course again, swinging them around to approach the ship from the other side.
‘Yes, but now that we know what it is, so many possibilities are ruled out. You know what I used to think it might be? Another ship sent out from home, much later than the Flotilla — something a lot faster and more advanced. Sent here to follow us at a safe distance — maybe just to observe us, but perhaps to step in and help us if anything went seriously wrong.’
Sky did his best to look contemptuous, but secretly he shared some of Gomez’s feelings. What if it got worse, he thought? What if the Caleuche turned out to have no useful supplies on her at all, and no safe way of exploiting her antimatter? Just because something had spawned a myth did not automatically mean it had to contain anything of substance. He thought of the original Caleuche: the ghost ship which was to supposed to haunt the waters of southern Chile, the dead aboard her trapped in an eternal and grisly celebration, sending mournful accordion music out across the waves. But whenever the real Caleuche was sighted, it always had the magical ability to turn into a seaweed-infested lump of rock or a piece of driftwood.
Maybe that was all they were going to find now.
The final hour passed as slowly as those that had preceded it, but at the end of that time they were rewarded with their first faint glimpse of the ghost ship. It was a Flotilla vessel all right — they might have been approaching the Santiago, except that the Caleuche had no lights on her at all. They could only see her by shining the shuttle’s searchlights, and by the time they had come closer — to within a few hundred metres of the drifting ship’s hull — they could pick out details just one tantalising spot at a time.
‘Command looks intact,’ Gomez said as the searchlight tracked across the huge sphere at the front of the ship. The sphere was dotted with dark windows and sensor apertures, with comms antennae protruding from circular pits, but there was no sign of any inhabitation or power. The front hemisphere of the globe was pored with countless tiny impact craters, too, but that was also the case for the Santiago, and at first glance this ship seemed not to have suffered any more damage than that.
‘Take us further down the spine,’ Gomez said. Norquinco, behind them, was busying himself with more schematics of the old ship.
Sky tapped the thrusters lightly, sending them cruising slowly past the command sphere and then the cylindrical module that followed it, the one that would have held the Caleuche’s own shuttles and freight stores. Everything looked exactly as it should have done. Even the entry ports were situated in the same places.
‘I’m not seeing any major damage,’ Gomez said. ‘I thought the radar showed—’
‘It did,’ Sky said. ‘But the damage was all on the other side. We’ll loop around to the engine section and come back up.’
They tracked slowly down the spine, the searchlights revealing circles of bright detail amidst greater darkness. Sleeper module after sleeper module passed by. Sky had started counting them, half expecting that some might be missing, but after a while he knew there was no point. They were all still present and correct; the ship — apart from the minor abrasive weathering — was still exactly as she had been when launched.
‘There’s something about her, though,’ Gomez said, squinting. ‘Something that doesn’t look quite right.’
‘I don’t see anything out of place,’ Sky said.
‘She looks normal enough to me, too,’ Norquinco said, looking up momentarily from the far more interesting prospect of his data schematics.
‘No, she doesn’t. She looks like she’s not quite in focus. Can’t you see that as well?’
‘It’s a contrast effect,’ Sky said. ‘Your eyes can’t deal with the difference in illumination between the lit and unlit parts.’
‘If you say so.’
They continued in silence, not really wanting to acknowledge that what Gomez had said was true and that there was something not quite right about the Caleuche. Sky remembered what Norquinco had told him about the ghost ship story; how it was said that the old sailing ship had been able to surround itself with mist so that no one ever saw it clearly. Thankfully, Norquinco refrained from reminding him of that. It would have been about all he could take.