The impact was surprisingly gentle. They settled into place with a sigh and a whisper and only the smallest of bumps. Haviland Tuf killed their engines, and spent a moment studying the instruments and the scenes on his telescreens. Then he turned to face the others. “We are docked,” he announced, “and the time has come to make our plans.”
Celise Waan was busily unstrapping herself. “I want to get out of here,” she said, “find Nevis and that bitch Rica, and give them both a good piece of my mind.”
“A good piece of your mind might be considered an oxymoron,” said Haviland Tuf. “I think your proposed course of action unwise in the extreme. Our former colleagues must now be considered our rivals. Having just abandoned us to death, they shall undoubtedly be nonplussed to discover us still alive, and might very well take steps to rectify this contradiction.”
“Tuf is right,” Jefri Lion said. He was moving from one screen to another, peering at them with fascination. The ancient seedship had rekindled his spirit and his imagination, and he was bristling with energy. “It’s us against them, Celise. This is war. They’ll kill us if they can, have no doubt of it. We must be similarly ruthless! This is a time for clever tactics.”
“I bow to your martial expertise,” Tuf said. “What strategies do you suggest?”
Jefri Lion tugged on his beard. “Well,” he said, “well, let me think. What’s the situation here? They have Anittas. The man’s half-computer himself. Once he interfaces with the shipboard systems, he should be able to determine how much of the Ark is functional, yes, and perhaps to exercise some control over its functioning, too. That could be dangerous. He might be trying it right now. We know they got aboard first. They may or may not know we’re aboard. We have the advantage of surprise, perhaps!”
“They have the advantage of having all the weaponry,” said Haviland Tuf.
“No problem!” said Jefri Lion. He rubbed his hands together eagerly. “This is a warship, after all. The EEC specialized in biowar, true, but this was a military vessel and I’m sure the crew had personal sidearms, that sort of thing. There’s got to be an armory. All we have to do is find it.”
“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf.
Lion was rolling now. “Our advantage, well, not to be immodest about it, but our advantage is me. Aside from what Anittas can discover from the computers, they’ll be blundering about in the dark. But I’ve studied the old Federal Empire ships. I know everything about them.” He frowned. “Well, everything that wasn’t lost or classified, anyway. At least I know a few things about the general plans of these seedships. We’ll have to find the armory first, and it should be close. It was standard procedure to store weaponry near the landing deck, for ground parties and such. After we’re armed, we ought to look for—hmmrnm, let me think—well, yes, the cell library, that’s crucial. The seedships had vast cell libraries, cloning material from literally thousands of worlds preserved in a stasis field. We must discover if the cells are still viable! If the stasis field has failed, and the samples have decayed, all we have gained is a very large ship. But if the systems are still operational, the Ark is literally priceless!”
“While I appreciate the importance of the cell library,” Tuf said, “it strikes me that a more immediate priority might be the location of the bridge. Making the perhaps unwarranted but nonetheless attractive assumption that none of the original crew of the Ark is alive after the passage of a millennium, we are then alone on this vessel with our enemies, and whichever party gains control of shipboard functions first will enjoy a rather formidable advantage.”
“A good point, Tuf!” Lion exclaimed. “Well then, let’s get to it.”
“Right,” said Celise Waan. “I want out of this cat trap.”
Haviland Tuf raised a finger. “A moment, please. A problem presents itself. We are three in number, and possess only a single pressure suit among us.”
“We’re inside a ship,” Celise Waan said in a voice that dripped sarcasm. “What do we need with suits?”
“Perhaps nothing,” Tuf admitted. “It is true, as you imply, that the landing field seems to function as a very large airlock; my instruments indicate that we are now surrounded by an entirely breathable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, pumped in when the closure of the dome was complete.”
“So what’s the problem, Tuf?”
“No doubt I am being overcautious,” Haviland Tuf said. “I admit to some disquiet, however. This Ark, though perhaps abandoned and derelict, is nonetheless dutiful. Witness the plagues it still regularly visits on Hro B’rana. Witness the efficiency with which it defended itself against our approach. We cannot know, as yet, why this ship was abandoned, nor how the last of the crew met their end, but it seems clear that it was their intent that the Ark live on. Perhaps the external defense sphere was only the first of several lines of automatic defense.”
“An intriguing notion,” said Jefri Lion. “Traps?”
“Of a particular kind. The atmosphere that awaits us may seethe with pestilence, plague, and biogenetic contagion. Dare we risk it? I would be more comfortable in a pressure suit, myself, though each of you is free to decide otherwise.”
Celise Waan looked uncomfortable. “I should get the suit,” she said. “We only have one, and you owe it to me, after the beastly way I’ve been treated.”
“We need not enter into that discussion again, madam,” said Tuf. “We are on a landing deck. Around us, I observe nine other spacecraft of varying design. One is a Hruun fighter, one a Rhiannese merchant; two are of designs unfamiliar to me. And five are plainly shuttlecraft of some sort, identical to each other, larger than my own poor vessel here, undoubtedly part of the Ark’s own original equipment. It is my experience that spacecraft invariably are equipped with pressure suits. It is my intention, therefore, to don our single remaining suit, exit, and search these neighboring ships until I have found suits for each of you.”
“I don’t like it,” Celise Waan snapped. “You get out, and we’re still stuck here. “
“Such are the vicissitudes of life,” Tuf said, “that each of us must sometimes accept that which he does not like.”
The airlock gave them a bit of trouble. It was a small emergency lock, with manual controls. They had no difficulty opening the outer door, entering, and sealing it behind them. The inner door was another and more difficult proposition.
Atmosphere came flooding back into the large chamber as soon as the outer door was closed, but the inner door was jammed somehow. Rica Dawnstar tried it first; the huge metal wheel refused to turn, the lever would not depress. “OUT OF MY WAY,” Kaj Nevis said, his voice twisted into a rasping croak by the alien comm circuits built into the Unquin battlesuit, and boosted to deafening levels by external speakers. He trundled past her, the huge saucer feet ringing loudly on the deck, and the battlesuit’s great upper arms seized the wheel and turned. The wheel resisted for a moment, then twisted and buckled, and finally came loose of the door entirely.
“Good work,” Rica said over her suit speaker. She laughed.
Kaj Nevis growled something thunderously unintelligible. He seized the lever and tried to move it, and succeeded only in breaking it off.
Anittas moved closer to the stubborn inner lock mechanism. “A set of code buttons,” he said, pointing. “The proper code sequence, if we knew it, would no doubt gain us entry automatically. There’s a computer outlet, too. If I could interface, perhaps I could pull the correct code out of the system.”
“WHAT’S STOPPING YOU?” Kaj Nevis demanded. His faceplate glowed balefully.
Anittas lifted his arms, turned his hands over helplessly. With the more obviously organic portions of his body covered by the silver-blue of his pressure suit, and his silver metallic eyes peering out through the plastic, he looked more like a robot than ever. Kaj Nevis, standing huge above him, looked like a much larger robot. “This suit,” Anittas said, “is improperly designed. I cannot interface directly without removing it.”
“REMOVE IT
, THEN,” Nevis said.
“Will that be safe?” asked Anittas. “I am unsure.”
“There’s air in here,” Rica Dawnstar put in. She gestured toward the appropriate bank of indicators.
“Neither of you has removed your suit,” Anittas pointed out. “Were I to make a mistake, and open the outer door instead of the inner one, I might die before I could seal up again.”
“DON’T MAKE A MISTAKE,” Kaj Nevis boomed.
Anittas crossed his arms. “The air might be unhealthy. This ship has been derelict for a thousand standard years, Kaj Nevis. Even the most sophisticated system goes down from time to time, experiences failures and glitches. I am unwilling to risk my person.”
“OH?” Nevis thundered. There was a grinding sound. One of the lower arms came up slowly; the serrated metal pincer opened, seized Anittas about the middle, and pinned him against the nearest wall. The cybertech squawked protest. An upper arm came across, and a huge metal-gloved hand dug in under the collar of the pressure suit. It pulled. The helmet and the entire top of the suit came ripping off Anittas. His head almost came off, as well.
“I LIKE THIS SUIT,” Kaj Nevis announced. He gave the cybertech a little squeeze with the pincer.
Metal fabric tore and blood began oozing through. “YOU’RE BREATHING, AREN’T YOU?”
Anittas was almost hyperventilating, in fact. He nodded.
The battlesuit flung him to the floor. “THEN GET TO WORK,” Nevis told him.
That was when Rica Dawnstar began to feel nervous. She backed away casually, leaned against the outer door as far from Nevis as she could get, and considered the situation while Anittas removed his gloves and the shards of his ruined suit and slid the bluesteel fingers of his right hand into the waiting computer plugs. She had strapped her shoulder holster on over her pressure suit, so her needler would be accessible, but suddenly its presence didn’t seem entirely as reassuring as it usually did. She studied the thickness of the Unquin armor, and wondered if maybe she had been unwise in her choice of ally. A three-way split was much better than Jefri Lion’s small fee, to be sure. But what if Nevis decided he didn’t like a three-way split?
They heard a sharp, sudden pop and the inner door began to slide open. Beyond was a narrow corridor leading down into blackness. Kaj Nevis moved to the doorway and peered into the dark, his glowing red faceplate throwing scarlet reflections on the walls. Then he turned ponderously. “YOU, HIRELING!” he boomed at Rica Dawnstar, “GO SCOUT IT OUT.”
She came to a decision. “Aye, aye, bossman,” she said. She drew her needler, moved quickly to the door and down the corridor, followed it about ten meters to a cross-corridor. From there she looked back. Nevis, hugely armored, filled the airlock door. Anittas stood beside him. The cybertech, normally so silent, still, and efficient, was shaking. “Stay right there,” Rica called back to them. “It’s not safe!” Then she turned and picked a direction at random and began to run like hell.
It took Haviland Tuf much longer than he had anticipated to locate the suits. The nearest of the other spacecraft was the Hruun fighter, a chunky green machine bristling with weaponry. It was sealed up securely, however, and although Tuf circled it several times and studied the various instruments that seemed designed to command access, none of his tugging, prodding, pushing, or fiddling produced the desired result, and he was forced to give it up finally and proceed onward.
The second ship, one of the strange ones, was wide open, and he wandered through it with a certain amount of intellectual fascination. Its interior was a maze of narrow corridors whose walls were as irregular and pebbly as a cave, and soft to the touch. Its instruments were incomprehensible. Its pressure suits, when he located what looked to be pressure suits, might have been functional, but could never have been worn by anyone over a meter tall or bilaterally symmetrical.
The Rhiannese merchant, his third try, had been gutted; Tuf could locate nothing useful.
Finally, there was nothing to be done for it but to hike all the way to one of the five distant shuttlecraft that stood side by side, snug in custom launching berths. They were big ships, larger than the Cornucopia of Excellent Goods at Low Prices, with black pitted hulls and rakish wings, but they were clearly of human design and seemingly in good repair. Tuf finally puzzled his way into one of them, whose berth bore a metal plate with an engraved silhouette of some fanciful animal and a legend proclaiming it to be named Griffin. Pressure suits were located where they should have been located. They were in excellent shape, considering that they were a thousand years old, and quite striking as well: a deep green in color, with golden helmet, gloves, and boots, and a golden theta emblazoned upon the breast of each. Tuf selected two of them and carried them back across the echoing twilit plain of the landing deck, to where the scarred, crippled teardrop that was his Cornucopia squatted on its three splayed legs.
When he got to the base of the ramp that led up to the main lock, he almost stumbled over Mushroom.
The big tom was sitting on the deck. He got up and made a plaintive noise, rubbing himself against Tuf’s booted leg.
Haviland Tuf stopped for an instant and stared down at the old gray tom. He bent awkwardly, gathered up the cat, and stroked him for a time. When he climbed the ramp to the airlock, Mushroom followed, and Tuf found it necessary to shoo him away. He cycled through with a pressure suit under each arm.
“It’s about time,” Celise Waan said when Tuf entered.
“I told you Tuf hadn’t abandoned us,” Jefri Lion said.
Haviland Tuf let the pressure suits fall to the deck, where they lay like a puddle of green and gold. “Mushroom is outside,” Tuf said in a flat, passionless voice.
“Well, yes,” Celise Waan said. She grabbed a suit and began squeezing into the green metallic fabric. It bound her tightly about the middle; the members of the Ecological Engineering Corps had seemingly been less fleshy than she. “Couldn’t you have gotten me a larger size?” she complained. “Are you sure these suits still work?”
“The construction seems sound,” Tuf said. “It will be necessary to infuse the airpacs with whatever living bacteria remain from the ship’s cultures. How did Mushroom come to be outside?”
Jefri Lion cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Uh, yes,” he said. “Celise was afraid you weren’t coming back, Tuf. You were gone so long. She thought you’d left us here.”
“A base and foundless suspicion,” said Tuf.
“Uh, yes,” said Lion. He looked away, reached for his own suit.
Celise Waan pulled on a golden boot, sealed it. “It’s your fault,” she said to Tuf. “If you hadn’t been gone so long, I wouldn’t have gotten restless.”
“Indeed,” said Tuf. “What, might I venture to ask, has your restlessness to do with Mushroom?”
“Well, I thought you weren’t coming back, and we had to get out of here,” the anthropologist said. She sealed up her second boot. “But you made me nervous, you know, with all your talk of plagues. So I cycled the cat through the airlock. I tried to get that damned black-and-white one, but it kept running away and hissing at me. The gray one just let me pick it up. I dumped it out and we’ve been watching it through the screens. I figured we could see whether or not it got sick. If it didn’t show any symptoms, well, then probably it would be safe for us to risk coming out.”
“I grasp the principle,” said Haviland Tuf.
Havoc came bounding in the room, playing with something. She saw Tuf and headed toward him, walking with a pronounced kittenish swagger.
“Jefri Lion,” said Tuf, “if you would, please apprehend Havoc, take her back to the living quarters, and confine her there.”
“Uh, certainly,” Lion said. He caught up Havoc as she went by him. “Why?”
“I would prefer henceforth to keep Havoc secure and separated from Celise Waan,” Tuf said.
Celise Waan, helmet cradled under her arm, made a noise of derision. “Oh, stuff and nonsense. The gray one is fine.”
“
Permit me to mention a concept with which you are perhaps unfamiliar,” said Haviland Tuf. “It is referred to as an incubation period.”
“I’m going to kill that bitch,” Kaj Nevis threatened as he and Anittas made their way down a dark hallway. “Damn her. You can’t get a decent mercenary anymore.” The battlesuit’s huge head turned to search for the cybertech, the faceplate glowing. “Hurry up.”
“I cannot match your strides,” Anittas said as he hurried up. His sides ached from the effort of keeping up with Nevis’s pace; his cyberhalf was strong as metal and quick as electronic circuitry, but his biohalf was poor tired wounded flesh, and blood still oozed from the cuts Nevis had opened around his midsection. He was feeling dizzy and hot, as well. “It’s not far now,” he said. “Down this corridor and to the left, third door. It is a substantial substation. I felt it when I was plugged in. I will be able to meld with the main system.” And rest, he thought. He was incredibly weary, and his biohalf ached and throbbed.
“I WANT THE DAMN LIGHTS ON,” Nevis commanded. “AND THEN I WANT YOU TO FIND HER FOR ME. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
Anittas nodded, and pushed himself harder. Two small hot pinpoints of red burned on his cheeks, unseen by his silver-metal eyes, and for an instant his vision blurred and wavered, and he heard a loud buzzing in his ears. He stopped.
“WHAT’S WRONG NOW?” Nevis demanded.
“I am experiencing some loss of function,” Anittas said. “I must reach the computer room and run a check on my systems.” He started forward again, and staggered. Then his balance deserted him totally, and he fell.
Rica Dawnstar was positive that she had lost them. Kaj Nevis was pretty formidable in his giant metal monkey suit, no doubt of that, but he was anything but silent. Rica had eyes like one of Tuf’s cats, another advantage in her profession. Where she could see, she ran; in the corridors that were totally black, she felt her way along, as quickly and quietly as she could. Down here the Ark was a maze of rooms and hallways. She threaded her way through the labyrinth, turning and twisting and turning once again, doubling back on herself, and listening carefully as Nevis’s clanging tread grew steadily fainter and finally faded altogether.