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

to reach the vault where the artificial sentience that had been the ship’s Navigator was housed. But first I’d explore this deck and see what there was to salvage. This would also give me a chance to blink away the tears that were blurring my vision and blow the soot from my nostrils.

I also wanted to try and get the lighting back online. I had no idea how much charge was left in the flashlight and didn’t want to end up wandering the labyrinth in total darkness. The fact that the machineguns were working meant there was still power in the ship.

I headed towards the crew’s quarters, trying to shake off that uncomfortable feeling that always seems to come up in situations like this.

Chapter Seven

At the first T-junction in the corridor, there was a narrow door that opened into a maintenance cubbyhole. There was just enough room for a plumber or an electrician to squeeze inside and fix whatever problem was plaguing this section of the ship. Luckily I was more or less the same size as a plumber and had some of the skills of an electrician.

The power sub-systems on this deck weren’t protected by anything more than basic security protocols and the only reason it took me a whole five minutes to bypass them was because I had a sneezing fit. It was going to be days before I got the smell of smoke out of my clothes and hair.

The little orange and black screen showed me that the ship’s systems were mostly in hibernation mode. Drawing just enough power from the batteries to keep things ticking over, but ready to respond almost instantly if stirred by external threat. After a couple of tries, I pulled up the correct menu and told the system to kick things up into minimal habitation mode. That would be enough to get the air circulating and the lights on. I hoped. I could hear a humming sound and feel a slight vibration through the soles of my boots. Perhaps these were good signs. Outside in the corridor, the lights flickered on and off a few times and then settled down to a subdued bluish light. That must mean we were in a daylight phase – at least as far as the Celestia was concerned. I felt sure it must be night outside the ship now. Who knows what time zone she was mimicking?

The environmental control unit was connected into the ship’s main systems and also offered proximity connection, so I let Trixie offer a handshake. Neither of us was surprised when the battleship gave it the cold shoulder. Just because we were inside didn’t mean she was going to let us in. That required access to security protocols that we didn’t have. We were just going to have to wait until we got into the Navigator’s vault where we could force a direct connection.

Behind me there was a loud clicking sound and the lights went out again. After a few seconds the corridor was lit again, but by red emergency lighting only. Some sort of circuit breaker had been tripped – hardly surprising after forty years in the dark. I could try and fix it, but I’d be off this deck soon and heading down to the next one, so decided I could manage with the emergency lighting. While I was exploring this deck, I could keep an eye out for additional flashlights, in case I needed them later.

Back in the corridor, I got a sense that the air was still moving, if only sluggishly, so life support was functioning at some level. As well as smoke there was a whiff of decay in the air, but it was no worse than the jungle outside. My eyes quickly adjusted to the red lighting. Everything around me was painted battleship grey so I wasn’t really missing anything colour-wise.

The Celestia had nose-dived into the dirt from a great height. We aren’t talking about a minor fender-bender. The ground would have shaken like a major earthquake. Anything loose inside the ship must have been tossed around like a bingo caller’s balls. It should have looked like a garbage truck exploded in here. But it was tidier than a politician’s alibi. Someone or something had been through the ship from stem to stern and cleaned it up. And they had carried on maintaining it for the last forty years. If you ignored the fact that she was broken into three pieces, the Celestia looked like she was ready to take flight tomorrow.

This made me uncomfortable, because it meant my feeling of not being alone couldn’t be written off as simple paranoia. I was not alone here, I felt sure of that.

Most of the rooms off the corridor were crew quarters. Narrow cubicles containing two bunks, one above the other, or slightly wider rooms with four bunks. This was where the pilots and the engineers that maintained their fighters would have slept. It was functional living space with few creature comforts. Typical military accommodation. There were pictures on the walls of most of the bunks. Curled photographs of family members. Faded pin-ups of actresses, motor vehicles, and porn stars – all of them decades old. There were small toys hanging in some of the bunks, meagre attempts at personalising the space. It was like looking into rooms that had been preserved for a museum exhibit. A hermetically sealed time capsule.

I didn’t open any of the lockers or drawers. It would have been disrespectful. ‘Treasure hunter’ is just a polite euphemism for tomb robber. This was the uneasy feeling I’d had since I came on board. I was intruding in a place that belonged to the dead.

I was seeing little evidence of the impact. There were a few things scattered on the floor or piled in corners, but nothing more. I had expected to see corpses. Though most of the crew from this deck had probably been on duty when the Celestia was hit. As I