Battleship Raider by Paul Tomlinson (book recommendations website .txt) 📗

inside, locking it shut. If the lock got stuck again it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t be going out that way. I leaned back against the door, gasping for breath. That had been a real squit in the pants moment.

“Let’s have some light,” I said.

The drones turned on their mini searchlights but they provided only narrow beams of light. The circles of light explored the space we were in. The bare metal room was maybe ten feet square. It was basically an airlock – an airtight room between the outside of the ship and one of its inner chambers. It was strange to think that I was the first person to set foot in here for forty years. Then Mozzie’s light passed over something that made me realise I wasn’t. I reached into my pack and drew out a flashlight, shining it towards the thing the drone had found.

It was a human skeleton and there were still bits of flesh clinging to it. It wasn’t a fresh corpse, but it wasn’t forty years old either. One of Old Jack Sterling’s team, perhaps? I directed the flashlight beam downwards and saw three good-sized and evenly spaced circular burn marks in the front of its jacket. Bullet hits. He’d either been shot by a rival treasure hunter or... Or he’d triggered the Celestia’s automatic defences.

These old ships were rigged with all sorts of defence mechanisms and even a self-destruct to prevent them falling into the hands – or claws – of the enemy. We didn’t want them to have access to our technology in case they worked out how to defeat us. The Celestia’s defences would have been activated after the crash – as soon as the ship’s Navigator sensed that all of the crew were dead.

I called Gnat and Mozzie back to me. “Don’t touch anything,” I said.

Chapter Six

The scratching at the outer door had stopped so I assumed the dragon had gone off in search of an eyepatch. Or perhaps it was sitting there wracking its reptilian brain trying to figure out how to operate the crank to open the hatch. I wasn’t worried on that score. I’d wedged the mechanism shut with the biggest wrench from my tool roll. No one was getting in that way – not a dragon and not a human bounty hunter. There was a thick glass porthole in the door that led into the battleship, but there was only darkness on the other side.

The air in the bare metal room was stale and there was a whiff of dead flesh that I was trying to ignore. Assuming the seals on both airlock doors were still intact, I had a limited amount of oxygen, but I wasn’t too worried about that. I could always use the laser cutter to make a hole in the bulkhead and let air in from outside. Of more immediate concern was my new friend Mr. Skellington. What had killed him? Had he triggered the ship’s automatic defence systems? If he had, I very much wanted to avoid doing the same thing. I wasn’t sure what my next move should be, but I was going to be very, very cautious. I pulled on my jacket and buckled my gun belt. Mainly because this gave me something to do.

I wanted to set the drones to scanning for weapons, but the ship might interpret their scans as a hostile act and respond accordingly. I told them to power down and save their energy and then I stashed them in my backpack. I’d already warned Trixie not to try connecting to any of the ship’s systems. I felt it was safe for her to operate in stand-alone mode, but she had instructions to shut down completely at the first sign of danger. She was currently pulling up the schematics of the battleship that she’d downloaded from an external database. The Celestia was old technology and her blueprints and manuals had been declassified more than a decade ago, of interest now only to those who studied historical military technology.

I shone the beam of the flashlight around the room, checking each wall carefully and then the ceiling, trying to see if the weapon that had shot the earlier intruder in the chest was located inside the airlock. I couldn’t see anything that might be a hatch. The walls were smooth metal, riveted together and painted with thick layers of pale grey paint.

Turning the flashlight on the dead man again, I tried to figure out what had happened to him. He was slumped against the wall opposite the door that opened into the ship. My best guess was that he had opened the airlock door and been shot in the chest. The force of the three projectiles had thrown him backwards and slammed him against the inside wall. He slid down and into the half-sitting half-lying position he was in now and the door had automatically closed and locked. He’d probably been shot by someone with a gun who had stood outside the airlock or by automatic weapons that were permanently installed there. It would be helpful to know which.

I looked at the schematics Trixie had retrieved. As the images flashed up I swiped them aside, digging deeper and deeper into the battleship’s systems, trying to see what surprises she might have in store for me. All I found was a reference to a protocol adopted early in the war to the effect that all combat ships should be retrofitted with defences and self-destruct mechanisms to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. The generals didn’t want the aliens taking apart our technology to see how it ticked, in case they figured out how to defeat it. I suppose it was left to the captains of individual ships to decide what internal defences to install.

I closed the technical schematics and pulled up an image that showed the basic layout of the ship. I still had no way of knowing where my airlock was situated. I cast the