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 anti matter? 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 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.
“There’s no infra-red from the sleeper berths,” Gomez said eventually, when they were most of the way down the spine. “I don’t think that’s a good sign, Sky. If the berths were stil
l operational, we’d see the infra-red from the cooling systems. You can’t keep something cold without making heat somewhere else. The momios can’t still be alive.”
“Then cheer up,” Sky said. “You wanted a ghost ship; now you’ve got one.”
“I don’t think there are ghosts on it, Sky. Just a lot of dead people.”
They passed the end of the spine, where it coupled to the propulsion unit. They were closer now—only ten or fifteen metres from the hull—and the details should have been pinsharp, but there was no denying what Gomez had pointed out. It was as if the ship was being seen behind a screen of slightly mottled glass, blurring every edge except the one between the ship and space. It was as if the ship had melted slightly and then resolidified.
It wasn’t right.
“Well, there’s no sign of major damage to the propulsion section,” Gomez said. “The antimatter must still be inside, kept penned on residual power.”
“But there’s no sign of any power at all. Not a single running light.”
“So she’s turned off every non-essential system. But the antimatter has to be inside her, Sky. That means whatever happens here, our journey won’t have been completely in vain.”
“Let’s see what she looks like on the other side. We know there’s something wrong with her there.”
They curved around, executing a hairpin turn beyond the gaping mouths of the exhaust vents. Gomez was right, of course—the antimatter had to be there, and that had never been in doubt. Had her engines exploded the way the Islamabad ’s had done, there would have been nothing left at all except for a few unusual trace elements added to the interstellar medium. There must still be enough antimatter inside her to slow down the whole ship, and all the containment systems must still be operating normally. Sky’s people could use that antimatter. They could either experiment with it in place, testing the Caleuche’s engines in ways they would never have risked with their own ship—thereby finding a way to squeeze more efficiency from them—or they could use the ghost ship as a single huge rocket stage, tethering it to the Santiago and enormously boosting their deceleration curve, before discarding the Caleuche at some still significant fraction of the speed of light. But there was a third way that appealed to Sky more than either of those two possibilities: gain experience with the handling of antimatter aboard the ghost ship, and then transfer only the reservoir back to the Santiago, where it could be connected up to their own fuel supply. That way, no fuel would be wasted decelerating dead mass—and the whole thing could be kept reasonably secret as well.
Now they turned around and began to track up the other side. The radar scans had forewarned them that there would be some kind of asymmetry; something different about this side of the ship, but when they saw what it was they had trouble believing their eyes. Gomez swore softly, Sky echoing the sentiment with a slow nod. All along her length, from the bulbous command sphere to the rear of the propulsion section, the ship’s side had erupted outwards in a queasy leprous mass:
a froth of globular blisters packed as dense as frogspawn. They studied it wordlessly for at least a minute, trying to rationalise what they saw with what they believed the sixth ship to be.
“Something strange happened here,” Gomez said, the first to speak. “Something very, very strange. I’m not sure I like it, Sky.”
“You think I like it any more than you do?” Sky answered.
“Take us away from the hull,” Norquinco said, and for once Sky obeyed him without question. He tapped the thrusters, pushing the shuttle out to two hundred metres. They waited silently until they could get a better look at the ghost ship. The more he looked at it, the more it looked like blistered flesh, Sky thought, or possibly badly healed scar tissue. It certainly did not look like anything he would have expected.
“There’s something up ahead,” Gomez said, pointing. “Look. Tucked away near the command sphere. It doesn’t seem to be part of her.”
“It’s another ship,” Sky said.
They crept closer, nervously probing the dark mass with searchlights. Almost lost within the bubbled explosion of fleshlike hull was a much smaller, intact spacecraft. It was the same size as their shuttle—the same basic shape, in fact. Only its markings and details were different.
“Shit. Someone got here ahead of us,” Gomez said.
“Perhaps,” Sky said. “But they could have been here for decades.”
“He’s right,” Norquinco said. “I don’t think it’s one of ours, though.”
They crept closer to the other shuttle, wary now of a trap, but the other ship looked equally as dead as the much larger craft alongside it. It was guyed to the Caleuche—moored to her hull by three lines which had been fired into the hull with penetrating grapples. That was standard emergency equipment on a shuttle, but Sky had never expected to see it used in this fashion. There were intact docking hatches on the Caleuche’s far side—why had the shuttle not used those?
“Bring us in nice and slowly,” Gomez said.
“I’m doing it, aren’t I?” But docking with the derelict shuttle was much harder than it looked—their own thrusters kept blowing it away. When the two ships did finally come together, it was with a good deal more violence than Sky would have wished. But the hatch seals held, and he was able to divert some of their own power to the other craft, booting up its own systems which must only have been sleeping. It felt too easy, but the shuttles had always been designed for complete compatibility across the docking systems of all the ships.
Lights stammered on and the airlock began to establish equal pressure on either side of the lock.
The three of them suited up and strapped on the specialised sensors and comms equipment they had brought along for the expedition, and then each took one of the security-issue machine-guns with torches strapped to them which Sky had appropriated. With Sky leading they floated through the connecting tunnel until they were emerging in a well-lit shuttle cabin superficially similar to the one they had left. There were no cobwebs or floating veils of dust to suggest that any time at all had passed since the shuttle had been vacated. A few status displays had even come back online.
There was, however, a body.
It was spacesuited, and very obviously dead—although none of them wanted to look at the grinning skull behind the faceplate longer than necessary. But the figure seemed not to have died violently. It was seated calmly in the pilot’s position, with the two arms of the spacesuit folded across its lap, gloved fingers touching as if in quiet prayer.
“Oliveira,” said Gomez, reading the nameplate on the helmet. “That’s a Portuguese name. He must have come from the Brazilia.”
“Why did he die here?” said Norquinco. “He had power, didn’t he? He could have made it back home.”
“Not necessarily.” Sky pointed to one of the status displays. “He might have had power, but he certainly didn’t have any fuel. He must have burned it all getting here in a hurry.”
“So what? There must still be dozens of shuttles inside the Caleuche. He could have ditched this one and taken another one back.”
Gradually they formed a working hypothesis to explain the dead man’s presence. No one had heard of Oliveira, but then again he was from another ship and he would certainly have vanished many years ago.
Oliveira must have learned about the Caleuche as well, perhaps in the same way Sky had: a slow accretion of rumour which had eventually hardened into fact. Like Sky, he had decided to go back and see what the ghost ship had to offer, perhaps hoping to score some massive advantage for his own crew, or—just possibly—himself. So he had taken a shuttle, secretly, one presumed, but he had also decided to make the dash at a high fuel expenditure. Perhaps he was forced into this strategy by a narrow window in which his absence would not be noticed. It must have seemed a reasonable risk to take. After all, as Gomez had said, there would be fuel supplies aboard the Caleuche—other shuttles, for that matter. Getting back ought not to have proved problematic.
Yet evidently it had.
“There’s a message here,” Norquinco said, peering over one of the read-outs.
“What?”
“Like I said. A message. From, um, him, I presume.” Before there was any time for Sky to ask him, Norquinco had called up the message, translated it through several software protocols and then piped it through to their suits, with the audio track playing over the normal comms channel and the visual component projected as a head-up display, making Oliveira’s ghostly form seem to join them in the cabin. He was still wearing the same suit he had died in, but now he had the helmet visor raised over the helmet’s crown so that they could see his face properly. He was a young-looking man with dark skin and a look in his eyes of both horror and profound resignation.
“I think I’m going to kill myself,” he said, speaking Portuguese. “I think that’s what I’m going to do. I think it’s the only sensible course of action. I think, in my circumstances, that’s what you would have done. It won’t take any great courage on my behalf. There are a dozen painless ways to kill yourself in a spacesuit. Some of them are better than painless, I’m told. I’ll know soon enough. Let me know if I died with a smile on my face, won’t you? I hope I do. Anything else just wouldn’t be fair, would it?”
Sky had to concentrate to follow the words, but it was not insurmountably difficult. As security officer it had been his duty to have a good grasp of the Flotilla’s other languages—and Portuguese was a lot closer to Castellano than Arabic.
“I’m going to assume that you—whoever you are—have come here for much the same reason I did. Sheer, unadulterated greed. Well, I can’t really blame you for that—and if you’ve come here for some infinitely more altruistic reason, you must accept my very humble apologies. But somehow I doubt it. Like me, you must have heard about the ghost ship and wondered what she had on board worth plundering. I just hope that you didn’t make quite the same miscalculation I did, concerning her fuel supplies. Or maybe you did, and you already understand exactly what I’m talking about, because you’ve been inside her. And if you do need the fuel, and you haven’t been inside her yet, well—I’m sorry—but you have something of a disappointment coming. If that’s quite the word I’m looking for.” He paused, glancing down at the top of his suit’s life-support tabard. “Because she isn’t quite what you thought she is. She’s infinitely less. And infinitely more. I should know. I’ve been inside her. We both have.”