“You’ve got a gun that was mounted on a truck?” said Grace.
“It was more of a large car,” said Kohl. “They had it stuck on the roof, and it seemed a shame to leave it there. I mean, hell, they didn’t need it anymore, you know what I mean?”
“I really think I do,” said Grace, looking to Nate. “Tyche says there’s nothing but hard vacuum on the other side of this lock. Gladiator’s dock was clean, systems are go. She’s still got power, but no air.”
“Hmm,” said Nate. “Okay. Kohl?”
“Yeah.”
“You can go first,” said Nate. “And if you see any closed doors, don’t just open ’em. Knock first.”
“Yeah,” said Kohl. “Might be air inside. Knock us on our asses.”
“There might be crew inside,” said Nate. He sighed. “Kohl? There are probably lots of crew inside. They’re not floating in space. Rescuing the Navy? Does us a lot of favors.”
“That too,” said Kohl. “Forgot about that.”
“Great,” said Nate. He turned on the comm. “Tyche? We’re heading across. You know the drill. Don’t open this door unless it’s one of us knocking.”
“Got you,” said El. “I won’t open it even if it’s you if you’ve got a hundred assholes after you.”
“No, you can open it then,” said Nate. “Definitely open it then.”
“What if they get on board?” said El.
“You know,” said Nate, “I’m not liking where this conversation’s going.”
“We’re wasting air,” said Kohl. “There’s killing to be done.”
“If there are pirates,” said Nate. “Pirates, Kohl.”
“Don’t worry,” said Kohl. “I don’t need another bounty.”
“Another?” said Grace.
“Long story,” said Nate. “Let’s go.” He slid his visor closed, checked his blaster again, and nodded to her. She cycled Tyche’s inner lock, and they stepped through. His eyes were drawn to her sword, and he thought of his own, safe in his cabin. It’d been a long time since he’d held a blade.
Probably never would again, at that. His kind of sword drew the wrong kind of attention.
The Tyche said goodbye with a hiss of air, and the outer lock opened into hard vacuum. Nate took his first step onto the Gladiator.
• • •
His breath sounded loud in his ears. It always did; that was the nature of breathing into a bucket, but it was more eerie when you were walking through the inside of a dead ship. Twice now, the Ravana first, and now the Gladiator. The Ravana had run from something in this system; an Icarus that flew too close to the sun, and everyone had died in their haste to get away. The Gladiator had run to something, and through some freak of chance an asteroid had cored her hull.
Probably an asteroid. Pirates didn’t throw rocks as a general rule, but pirates might have taken advantage of a damaged ship.
The weird thing, if you wanted to call it that, was the lack of bodies. Pirates collected stuff, like weapons, fuel, supplies. They didn’t collect corpses.
Decompression was a harsh master. The air and most things that weren’t bolted down would get blown out whatever breach you had in your hull. It’d spit bodies and paperclips and coffee cups into the void. Tyche had seen nothing but paperclips and coffee cups, not a single floating body in space.
Stood to reason they’d find bodies in the breached sections, and living souls in areas with air. Nate shone his light at a door, open to vacuum. Lights were still on, the ship still had power, just no air, because of doors like this. It had been opened. Or it, and every other door they’d found, had failed to seal automatically when the hull breached.
“I don’t get it,” said Kohl. “All the doors are open. Who would go through a ship and open every door to space?”
“We won’t find anyone alive here,” said Grace. “This whole ship is dead.” Nate watched as her hand gripped her sword hilt.
“Could be pirates,” said Nate. “They might have got on board, same way we did. Popped the seals, vented the crew into space.” He pointed to the wall with his light, the distinctive chalk-and-black of a plasma burn evident. “There was fighting.”
“Fighting,” said Kohl, “but not a lot of dying. I mean, look at this.” He pointed at the blaster burn Nate had his light on. “Looks heavy. I’d say rifle, not pistol, you get me?”
“Looks like,” agreed Nate.
“Last time I shot a man with a rifle, he came down in two big pieces. There was a lot of him that came out as dust, other parts that came out like grilled chunks. You see any grilled chunks, Cap?” He turned to look at Grace. “How about you? I’m not finding any grilled chunks. And that bothers me. Corridors of a ship, it’s like shooting into a tunnel. You’re either hitting the walls, or what you’re shooting at. No one hit nothin’ but wall, because they’re ain’t no bodies. Not Team Navy, and not whichever assholes came on their ship. Not even the Navy are that bad at shooting.”
“Okay,” said Nate. “Let’s keep going. We’ve covered about a percent of the Gladiator. Might just be more we’ve yet to see.”
“No,” said Grace. “They’re all gone.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Could still be salvage.”
• • •
“It’s not pirates,” said Nate, looking around the hangar.
Still no bodies. What they had was a big hangar bay; the Gladiator was one of the Republic’s configurable destroyers, able to be outfitted for a variety of different missions. She appeared to be in a send-in-the-Marines configuration, the bay holding space for two dropships. One was missing, and one was parked, doors open, fueled, and ready to fly. One was missing, sure, but that could just mean there was a dropship of Marines that someone had forgotten to pick up in all the excitement of their destroyer being … destroyed.
“We should claim that as salvage,” said Kohl. “Fetch a good price, a Navy dropship.”
“Might draw some attention,” said Grace. “’Hey, we’d like to sell you the dropship from a mission where all hands were lost. But trust us, we don’t know anything about that mess. We just want to sell this fine, Republic-issue dropship. One careful owner.’ What could go wrong?”
“When you put it like that,” said Kohl, “a lot.”
“Exactly,” she said, moving across the bay. Stride certain, like she had nothing to fear. The way Nate figured it, that was true — not a soul was left on this ship. They’d been walking the Gladiator for two hours. They’d found the bridge (empty), Engineering (empty), sleeping quarters (empty). Hell, even the mess deck had been empty. That last was strange, as it showed signs of previous habitation — flash-frozen meals scattered about the room, like a bunch of the crew had been in the middle of chow when the hull breached. It didn’t add up — breaching the hull would have slammed all the damn doors down and left survivors in the mess deck. But there were no survivors, just the remains of some of the Navy’s finest crew meals. Which didn’t look fine: standard soy-instead-of-meat, fake cornbread, a paste that might have pretended to be gravy before cold space had turned it into shriveled brown ice and fiber.
The officer’s mess had fared no better. Except the food had been higher quality — still no meat, but someone had taken the time to prepare almost real food before they’d been spaced.