John Maddox Roberts - Space Angel Read online

  "What's the maximum air speed of our AC fully loaded?" He pointed to Kelly.

  "Four hundred kilometers per hour at sea level," said Kelly promptly.

  "Only on Earth, dummy!" .Torwald said in exasperation. "How many times do I have to tell you not to rely so heavily on manuals? They're always written for a particular set of conditions. In a different gravity and a different air pressure, you have to compute weight, power, and wind resistance. Then you take a guess:" He threw up his hands in dramatic supplication of the powers that had sent him such an inept student. Kelly did a slow burn. It wasn't just that he made such mistakes; it was that Torwald always made such a production over them. Nancy never seemed to make mistakes, and when Lafayette made one, he always got off with a simple correction. Tor-wald's attitude was blatant favoritism in Kelly's view.

  The survival classes occupied much of their time now. By ship's time, they had been under hyper for at least nine months. Everything that could possibly be set in order on the ship had long since been completed and the crew was left with little to do. Michelle was predicting serious incidents within a month if some extraship activity didn't break the monotony.

  "All right, everybody, up to the navigation bubble!" The skipper's voice rasped excitedly over the intercom. Everyone dropped what he was doing and sprinted toward Navigation. Torwald, Kelly, Nancy, Lafayette, and Michelle all tried to crowd through the hatch at once.

  "You look like a bunch of liner passengers on their first lifeboat drill," the skipper commented. "Ain't it great running a tight, disciplined ship, Ham?"

  "What's up?" Torwald asked, ignoring the skipper's comments.

  "We've got something on the proximity detector. Scan says it's big but artificial—and it's irregular in shape. We're closing on it now. We should have eyeball contact in a few minutes. If it's a ship, then they build big around these parts. This thing's about a hundred kilometers long."

  Several minutes later a speck of matter appeared past the nose of the ship, barely visible against the blaze of stars. It loomed quickly larger as the Angel decelerated, until it bulked as big as a medium-sized asteroid. But it wasn't a ship, as Michelle had suggested—it was two ships, one roughly platter-shaped, a long, flattish oval, covered with spires and twisted towers, the other a stubby spindle, as if two cones were joined at the base. In some ancient battle or accident these two had collided, the spindle driven through so forcefully that an apex protruded at least a kilometer past the far side of the oval ship. Against the background of the dense star field they were a dark malignancy, their surfaces glinting metallically with reflected starlight. No lights were visible.

  "Are they showing any lights we can't see?" Torwald asked.

  "Nothing that registers on our instruments," the skipper answered. "Life-scan system seems confused, but in this sector who can tell?" She scanned the improbable ships. "Lord! Look at the size of those things. I don't think the mass of all the ships I've seen could make two that size."

  Information may be stored within the instruments aboard those ships. You will board them, taking me with you. My range of power is extremely limited, now.

  "The spindle seems to have sustained the least damage to the exterior," said the skipper. "We'll try that one first. Everybody suit up except Bert and Michelle. He and I'll man the bridge while the rest of you check out those vessels. As soon as two of you get tired, we'll relieve you. Ham, you're in charge. I suggest you divide into two teams to save time."

  "Right, Gertie. Tor, get some tools from supply: prybars and shortbeams, at least. I doubt that any gravity's functioning in there, so axes will be useless. I'll hand out weapons. Probably no life aboard, but why take chances?"

  Within a few minutes they" were standing in the lock, bristling with equipment and bulking apishly large in their armored suits. The Vivers wore only their small helmets and the light space coveralls they used to avoid losing too much body moisture. For the first time, Kelly experienced the stomach-dropping sensation of no-grav when the field was shut off as the outer hatch cycled open. One by one, Vivers first, the crew drifted out toward man's first contact with an alien spacecraft.

  Close up, the sheer size of the things simply wasn't appreciable. The skipper had parked the Angel close to what looked like an airlock, and the landing party could see only the lock and two or three acres of surface around it. The curvature of the spindle's sides obscured all the rest. The surface seemed to be of some bronzy dark metal. The alien ship had enough mass to generate a weak gravity, so the boarders were able to drift to a slow, feet-first landing against the craft.

  Sergei, on hands and knees, immediately began to make some tests on the metal with a thick meter-long tube while the others made their way toward the hatch, a circle of metal about ten meters wide, with no visible hinge and no indication of how it might be opened.

  "Not even a doorbell," Michelle observed.

  "Okay," said Ham, "start earning your pay, people. Let's have some bright ideas."

  "I brought some explosive," K'Stin said. "I designed the charge myself. It might make a hole big enough for us to squeeze through."

  "Let's not use explosives until we've exhausted all other possibilities. Sergei, what do you make of it?"

  "The hull alloy seems metallic, Ham, but it's an alloy containing several elements that aren't on our table, and it doesn't react with any acid in my kit even though it contains a high percentage of copper."

  Place me on the hatch.

  Nancy stepped forward and set Sphere down on the hatch, near the seam where it joined the hull. Slowly, Sphere began to roll around the circumference of the hatch. Finally, its motion ceased and the space-suited figures felt a faint vibration through the soles of their boots. Torwald signaled for the others to kneel and put their helmets against the metal of the hull. Faintly, they could hear clicks, groans, and whir-i ings from inside. Sphere rolled off the hatch just as it began to move.

  Very gradually, the hatch sank into the hull. When il had retracted about a meter, the metal mass began to move sideways and a crescent-shaped gap gradually widened into a full circle.

  "Gertie, you see that?"

  "I sure do, Ham. What can you see inside?"

  Little was visible in the light from their helmet-torches, just a room about the size of the Angel's hold, with six barn-door-sized hatches leading off it. On the walls were pipes or conduits, and metal boxes that might have contained controls or equipment.

  "Doesn't look very alien," Ham commented.

  "No more so than a loading dock on one of the bigger space stations," said Michelle.

  "On such a functional level," Bert mused from the ship, "one might expect little deviation from one culture to another. I'll bet it's not so familiar inside, though."

  "First in!" shouted Ham. "Volunteers?"

  Kelly began to step forward, but Torwald yanked him back, hard.

  "First lesson, me boy," said Finn. "Avoid the word 'volunteer' as if it were the Arcturan Blight. Ham, as ranking officer, I think that you should have the honor. After all, think of the glory, first Earthman to enter an alien spacecraft and all."

  "Now, just a minute, one of us has to be in charge of things, to be observing in case the first one down the hatch gets gobbled up by alien space bugs—"

  "Ham!" the skipper barked. "Jump into that hole and be quick about it."

  "Aye, aye, Gertie." Ham disappeared into the well.

  "See anything?" Michelle asked after a few seconds.

  "Just what we saw from up top, except from a dif-

  ferent angle. Come on down." They followed, not without trepidation.

  The interior of the room seemed made of the same bronzy material as the hull. The transparent circular plates in the walls might have been lights. Ham stepped to one of the boxes and opened a lid. Inside were several small stubby levers, with no labels or lettering that they could detect. There was one such box to each hatch.

  "What next, Sphere?" asked Ham.

  I am ma
king an examination. When a hatch opens, enter and proceed by the easiest route. I shall tell you if I wish a change of direction.

  As slowly as it had opened, the hatch overhead closed. There was an inrush of air.

  "Gertie, can you hear me? Are we still on visual?"

  "I hear you, Ham. All your cameras are recording perfectly. Whatever that metal is, it's not very dense. Proceed as seems proper and let's hope that football can get you all out safely."

  No sooner had this benediction been delivered than one of the hatches opened. Through it, they could see a corridor stretching at least a kilometer. They could see that much because, incredibly, the ancient lighting system was beginning to function. A dim bluish light was emanating from more of the circular plates set along the walls.

  "What's the atmosphere reading, Michelle?" asked Ham.

  "It's mostly Argon, Ham," she said. "And this light would be a lot brighter if we could see infrared."

  "Argon!" Ham sounded flabbergasted. "D'you think the people who built this ship could have metabolized such a stable gas?"

  "Maybe it was injected as a preservative," Bert said. "That could explain why the ship's interior is so well preserved. An inert gas like that won't react with anything. It'd serve to keep the ship preserved over a long voyage."

  "Well, maybe," Ham said. "Let's just wait until we have more data before we draw any conclusions."

  A weak gravity field began to cut in, and things began to take on a more definite "up" and "down" orientation. The deck was about twenty meters wide, its surface corrugated and rather soft. The walls curved inward to form a perfect semicircular arch, giving the corridor the appearance of a tunnel. Torwald stepped over to examine one of the lighting plates, but he could find no central lighting element; the light appeared to originate in the plate itself.

  "All right, let's go," said Ham, proceeding down the corridor. The others followed, using the peculiar, stilf-kneed, gliding hop that was the best means of locomotion in a low-gravity environment. They covered more than ten kilometers of corridor without finding any breaks in wall or deck.

  "What's our orientation relative to the rest of the ship?" asked Sergei.

  "Near as I can figure," Finn said, "we're heading straight down the middle of the spindle, and we've traversed about one-third of its length."

  Approximately correct.

  "Hey!" yelled Kelly, who had gotten a few meters ahead of the rest, "I see something a ways down there. It looks like a hatch."

  They sped forward to see what Kelly had spotted. About a hundred meters farther on was another circular hatch, this one in the deck. Placed low on the wall near by, a circular plate protruded about twenty millimeters above the surface.

  "Whoever they were, they were fond of circles and sections of circles," Nancy remarked.

  "That thing on the wall looks like a pressure plate," Ham said. "Tor, give it a whack and let's see what happens."

  Torwald placed his foot against the plate and gingerly pushed it inward. It sank flush with the wall, then slowly reemerged as he removed his' foot. Gradually, the floor hatch slid aside, revealing a well about ten meters deep. About five meters beyond the well was a deck with the same kind of corrugated surface as that of the corridor. A spiral ramp about a meter wide ran around the periphery of the cylindrical well, continued beyond the end of the ramp, and fell freestanding to the deck below.

  "If the ramp was their access to the deck below," said Nancy, "then they couldn't have been more than a meter high. Look how close together the levels of the ramp are."

  "They probably weren't very quick, either," said Achmed. "Everything we've seen move, moves slowly."

  "Last one down's a landsman." With that, Ham stepped over the edge. The rest followed suit, taking about six seconds to make the drop to the deck. When they landed, they looked about in wonder.

  "I think we've found them," said Michelle.

  They were standing in another, narrower, corridor, in the biggest room any of them had seen. It seemed to stretch to infinity in both directions, like the corridor above, but it wasn't confined between walls. Along both sides were racks of glasslike cylinders, stacked almost to the ceiling. At regular intervals, narrow lanes ran at right angles from the main corridor into rows of racks as far as the eye could see.

  The cylinders lay on their sides, about one and one-half meters long and two-thirds meter in diameter. One end sprouted a system of wires and tubes, the other was flat and featureless. Inside, beings floated in a clear liquid.

  The creatures were flattish and circular, slightly domed on the upper surface, the lower surface was flat and covered with tiny-mushroom-shaped protrusions, possibly the creatures' feet. Around the circumference of the body were dozens of appendages ranging from threadlike cilia to tentacles as thick as a man's thumb and sixty centimeters long. The bigger tentacles were flat on the lower side and ridged on the top, apparently for gripping power. The skin was smooth and peach-colored. The small nodules between certain tentacles might have been eyes or sensory organs of some other kind.

  "Anybody see a mouth?"

  "There's a small slit between two of the smaller tentacles on this one, Ham," Nancy said. "Could be a mouth."

  "Will some of you kindly hold still long enough for me to get a look at one of those things?" the skipper asked. "Nancy, do a slow scan and show me every part of one. Ham, will those cylinders lift free?"

  "I think so."

  "Good. Then bring a couple back with you. They shouldn't be too heavy to carry in that gravity. Do you think those are the creatures that built the ship?"

  "The size is in keeping with the spiral ramp," Nancy said.

  "They look even softer than you people!" K'Stin noted. "Still, if they did build this ship, then they were a great and powerful race, and not to be despised."

  "Could be livestock," Torwald said. "Or maybe embryos."

  "Useless to speculate," said Ham. "Kelly, you and Lafayette each take an end of this thing and hoist it off the rack. Be sure to take care of the little box those wires go into."

  The two did as they were instructed, lifting one of the cylinders free and carrying it to the bottom of the spiral ramp. They then attached lines around it, climbed to the main corridor deck, and hoisted the thing up, an easy task in the weak gravity field. Carrying the cylinder back to the ship was a tedious task, and Kelly fretted because he was missing the further exploration of the alien vessel. Soon after they had the cylinder stowed, under the skipper's careful direction, Finn and Achmed showed up with a second, which was similarly disposed of.

  The exploration of the alien vessel proceeded for the next few days, the Angel's crew making as complete a visual record as they could manage, and picking up a few souvenirs here and there. They were compelled, for lack of space, to confine their gathering to small items. Sphere found nothing to his interest in the ship's memory banks, but informed them that the builders of the ship had been in search of a new home planet, in anticipation of the blowup of their own sun. The derelict had been one of thousands of identical vessels.

  The second ship was different.

  "What is this thing, Skipper, a flying palace?" Torwald asked as he scanned the towering spires around him.

  "That's what we're here to find out, Tor."

  They were standing in the center of what appeared to be a plaza, surrounded by towers, domes, tetrahe-dra, and structures in the shape of just about every possible configuration of solid geometry. A gravity field was still working at full efficiency, and they were standing comfortably at something near Earth-normal. They faced the center of the platter-shaped craft, where a cluster of structures towered kilometers upward. Beyond the central cluster, the crew could make out the bulk of the immigrant ship, which had impaled the platter near the far edge.

  "They must have maintained a field that kept in their atmosphere," said Bert.

  "It didn't keep that ship out, though," the skipper observed. "I'd say that central complex is the best place to
start looking. Let's go." They began the long walk to the center of the platter, their boots making prints in the thin layer of dust that the ship's gravity had attracted over thousands of years. They passed what appeared to be parks or gardens, their plantings long since turned to dust. All longed to examine the buildings they were passing, but the huge structures at the center promised better pickings.

  From time to time, they came upon sculptures, but most seemed abstract and probably conveyed no idea of what the inhabitants of the ship had looked like. At regular intervals, they passed large, skeletal structures that looked as if they had once supported something, but all were empty. A good deal was speculated about the function of these objects, until Torwald hit upon the likely explanation. "I'll bet those things are lifeboat racks. The crew and passengers must have had time to evacuate before the other ship struck. That's why they're all empty."

  The skipper agreed. "You're probably right. If so, they must have left plenty behind. You don't take much except necessities on a lifeboat—what have we here?" Before them another statue occupied a low pedestal; this sculpture was not abstract, but a realistic representation of a being remarkably human in appearance, though the legs and arms were very long and slender and its torso much too thin in the eyes of humans. The hands each bore six long, tapered fingers, and the fingers had at least four joints each. The head was quite human, with rather rectangular eyes. The nose consisted of two vertical slits, and the mouth was lipless and very wide. The alien seemed to be smiling. There was some graceful lettering on the pedestal.

  "So that's what they looked like," said Torwald. "At least it's more reassuring than those giant oysters on the other ship."

  After several minutes of, excited discussion and frenetic recording, the crew hurried onward to the platter's center.

  The first building of the central cluster was a few paces beyond the statue. The main doorway was sealed by an airlock, which proved easy to decipher and operate. Once again, they stood inside an alien airlock as it filled with air.