Galactic Thunder by Cameron Cooper (best book club books txt) 📗

“There’s no one home,” I said at last. “Lyssa’s scans had it right. There’s no signs of violence, except I can smell ozone.”

“Any blood?” Dalton asked.

I winced, thinking of Fiori, then I remembered she was a medic and had probably seen more blood in her lifetime than I had. “Nothing like that. You can come over now, if you still want to. Fiori, do you think you could manage to pull Vara across?” The question surprised even me.

“Will she let me?” Fiori said doubtfully.

I put the question to Vara, using the simplified symbols and word pictures that she understood.

“She doesn’t like the molecular barriers anymore than I do, and she hates weightlessness even more, but she will let you pull her across so she can help me,” I told Fiori.

“I’ll bring Darby,” Dalton said.

I went back to the airlock. “Lyssa, we need to jam the outer and inner doors open at the same time. Figure you can argue the AI out of overriding us?”

“That’s the thing, Colonel,” Lyssa said, not sounding very happy. “I can’t raise the AI at all. I’ve been trying since I opened the airlock, because it was too easy to reach the lock.”

“The shipmind is dormant?”

“I can’t find it at all, Colonel. It’s gone, just like the crew.”

I had intended to engage with the ship’s AI next, to establish what had happened. If we couldn’t find the thing, that would be a problem.

I saw the outer door of the shuttle slide open. I didn’t have time to deal with this new mystery right now. “Okay, keep searching for it. The code has to be somewhere. Meantime, open the inner and outer hatches on this lock for me.”

“That’s easy enough, with the AI hiding,” Lyssa said.

The inner door popped open again, as the outer door slid aside. Warning lights flashed red in panic.

Dalton pushed off from the lip of the shuttle door, his bare hand up against Darb’s neck, guiding the parawolf across the tunnel. Darb scrabbled at nothing with his forepaws, which had the affect of flipping him upright. Dalton bore down on his neck, keeping him oriented properly. This was clearly not the first time Dalton had maneuvered Darb through weightlessness.

They reached the outer hatch as Fiori pushed off from the shuttle with Vara alongside her, her hand gripping Vara’s neck the same way Dalton had steered Darb.

Darb landed on the floor of the airlock chamber and felt faux gravity under his paws once more. He gave an unhappy whimper.

“Come here, Darb,” I told him, beckoning him out of the way.

He and Dalton moved out of the chamber as Fiori and Vara reached the hatch. Vara was far more elegant with her landing, but her tail was down because she didn’t like weightlessness any more than Darb did.

All of us crowded into the arrival foyer, leaving little room.

“That smell…” Dalton said, his nose in the air. “Shriver bolts, for sure,” he concluded.

“You can tell that by smelling?” Fiori asked.

“We’ve both smelled it a lot,” I said grimly. “It’s unmistakable.”

“All I can smell is unwashed human,” Fiori said.

“That, too,” I added.

Dalton grinned and pulled out his shriver. “Split up and quarter?”

“Two parties, a wolf each. Fiori, do you want to go with Dalton or me?”

“You,” Fiori said firmly, surprising me.

Dalton didn’t seem surprised. “I’ll take aft.”

“Don’t go down into engineering yet,” I warned him, for the bare metal stairs down to the engine room were back there. Engineering compartments were often mazes of mounted equipment and machinery, where anything could hide and lie in wait. I didn’t want anyone wandering around alone down there.

“‘kay.” He stepped out into the corridor, checked to his left, then turned right. He gave a soft whistle and Darb trotted over to his side. The two of them moved down the corridor toward the rear of the craft.

“Is this the only corridor, do you think?” Fiori asked. She had a small shriver in her hand, which I approved of. Medics who insisted upon not picking up a weapon because of a silly principal often ended up dead…which didn’t help their patients in the slightest.

“Yeah, I think this is the one and only corridor,” I told her. “Right down the spine of the ship.” I stepped over to the nearest door and tapped the control panel. No response.

“Lyssa, crack open door seventeen,” I said and lifted the torrent shriver.

The door gave a little click, then slid open. We both held still, aiming into the room beyond, and looked around it.

A full-sized bed crammed in one corner, a smart terminal against the other, and a shelf with memorabilia clamped upon it.

Vara pushed her nose in, sniffed, and turned away, disinterested.

“Captain’s quarters,” I guessed. “Or a senior officer. If wildcatters even run to senior officers.”

“In my experience they’re just as unlikely to have a captain. They’re big on equality,” Fiori said.

I gave a soft snort. “There’s no time to put it to a vote when you’re up the sharp end in deep space.”

“That’s almost exactly what Gabriel said,” Fiori replied.

The bed was unmade. The terminal was a blank face with no lights, not even a ready signal. There were no signs of violence. The abandoned air made me shiver.

“Next,” I declared and turned to the next door.

It only took us twenty minutes to move up the length of the corridor to the flight deck, pry open every door along it and look inside. No one. No overturned chairs or burned-out belongings.

Beverages sat in sealed cups, half-drunk. Sandwich crusts on a plate, going moldy.

We stepped up into the cramped little flight control module, which had two chairs, a semicircular dashboard and two large screens.

“No inertia shells,” Fiori observed.

“The ship wasn’t designed for high gee combat maneuvers.” I prodded at the pilot’s controls, but the dashboard remained blank and unresponsive. “Lyssa, have you found the AI yet?”

“There’s nowhere to look, Danny,” Lyssa said, sounding even more unhappy now.

“What does that mean?”

“It means there’s no directories of files. No matrix. No structure. Nothing.”

“How can there be nothing?”