Chapter 29: Ghost Ship

The tiny thrusters on Chloe's suit swiveled to brake as she drifted through a jagged hole in the battlecruiser's pockmarked hull. She came to a graceful stop, lighting upon the deck as easily and firmly as if it had sported full artificial gravity.

She switched on the searchlight slung over her shoulder.

A corpse floated not a meter away. Ice crystals covered its face, freezing its expression of shock and pain and fear.

Horrified, Chloe sprang back from the corpse, momentarily forgetting she floated in zero gee. Her momentum carried her upwards. Something thudded against her back. She whirled, shining her searchlight on a severed arm that trailed crystallized blood.

She choked back a scream, half-jetted, half-swam away from the limb as it went tumbling toward the vacuum of space.

She slammed into another body. Its frozen, lifeless arms seemed to reach for her, begging for succor or remembrance – or company in the endless frozen sleep of death.

Old screams echoed in her mind. Blind panic. The world going mad. Shouts of anger and cries of fear and sobs of pain. Death, awful death, and this was only the beginning –

Chloe bounced off the corpse and tumbled.

Arms encircled her.

She thrashed in them, wildly, unreasoningly terrified of the awful grip, certain she would turn and see dead eyes leering at her through a shattered flight suit.

"Chloe!"

She stopped struggling.

"Principle," Rudy swore. "You could've killed yourself jetting around like that! It's just some corpses."

Just. Just?

Chloe had seen corpses before. After more than a decade as a salvager's daughter, she knew the myriad ways a person could end up dead in space.

But not so many people at once. Not like this.

Rudy patted her arm. "You gonna keep your cool now?"

"Yeah. Sorry." She gave him a weak smile, though he couldn't see it and she didn't feel it.

A third light bobbed toward them – Slava, the ursid gangster. He settled into a drift that brought him past their position. His huge frame knocked corpses away without noticeable lost momentum. "You are all right, little ones?"

"We're fine," Rudy said. "Petra got a little too close to a corpse for comfort, that's all."

The ursid shrugged, sending his light playing across a far bulkhead. If the slaughterhouse bothered him a bit, he gave no sign.

Chloe froze. Rudy said 'Petra' had gotten a little too close, but he'd shouted 'Chloe' over the comlink when she'd endangered herself.

Slava didn't seem to have noticed. He might not have, or he might be faking it while he waited on instructions from Stephan. Stephan, if he was tuned to the same frequency, surely would have picked up on the slip.

"We should keep moving," Rudy said. "Pet's not comfortable here."

Wasn't that the truth! Chloe couldn't manage to stay in character, and wasn't sure it mattered anymore. Regardless, her alter ego's reactions wouldn't be any different from her own. The battlecruiser hulk and its horrors fell outside both their ranges of experience.

"The shortest route to the nearest mecha bays is through this passage," Rudy said. "According to the schematics we got off the Magpie, it's a long, straight shot, only two airlocks along the way. We can build up a real head of steam and cross the kilometer between us and the mecha in about fifteen minutes."

"I am hoping that is the right mecha bay," Slava said fervently. So the place did affect him. He just handled it better.

Chloe fell in behind the two men. She was a better zero gee maneuverer than either of them, she soon found, but couldn't bear to go first into the dead, darkened passages. Even with Rudy's familiar, comforting red flight suit as a beacon, she imagined the shadows reaching out to snatch her. If she'd had to lead...

She shuddered.

The hallway Rudy described looked more like a highway. Certainly it was bigger than Wellach's thoroughfares. Shining all three of their searchlights down its expanse, they couldn't see the far end and could barely make out the ceiling. It looked mostly intact and mostly empty.

So far, at least, none of the dangers Stephan had warned about – dangers Chloe knew well from a girlhood aboard a salvage ship – had materialized. The battlecruiser seemed completely inert, its broken and dangerous pieces having bled their momentum off into waste heat over the years since its destruction. Despite its gruesome contents, it seemed safer than many of the salvage sites Chloe had seen.

Except for the aura of menace choking the airless halls.

Chloe jetted forward to place herself closer to Rudy and Slava.

They drifted through the cavernous hall, silent as the void around them. Its silence was cathedral – awesome and infectious.

No, not cathedral. Calling it that seemed like blasphemy.

The Mother Goose had visited the Theist Core in Godwin's World orbit once. Chloe's parents had taken her to the soaring, three-kilometer cathedral of crystal and stained glass that splinter sect maintained to venerate an involved and sympathetic Principle. There, she'd been silent from the awesome joy of the place, joy she felt just as keenly despite seeing the Almighty Principle as First Cause rather than involved personal god.

Here, she was silent from almost palatable horror.

She couldn't say why. Unlike the blasted wreck they'd entered through, the hallway held few corpses and no visible signs of the attack. Her fear came from within, growing in the back of her mind and spilling over to her tingling nerves.

Something worse than a slaughter had happened here.

Chloe fought down her animal brain's demands. Flee, it begged, pleaded, demanded. This is a bad place.

I know it's a bad place, she thought, but I need knowledge and power, and Rudy needs them, and this is a place thick with both.

Provided she was willing to pay the price. To accept forbidden knowledge, to wield evil power.

No!

The knowledge and power she sought were not forbidden, not evil. They had belonged to her birth mother. They had, in a way Chloe couldn't begin to understand, saved her and delivered her to Jack and Ellie Hughes. They were her birthright and they were right.

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The battlecruiser's silence mocked her insistence.

"Slow up, Petra," Rudy said. He caught her arm and fired his thrusters in reverse, arresting her flight toward a huge, closed airlock.

She probably wouldn't have hurt herself if she'd hit it.

Probably.

"Can we get this open?" Chloe asked.

"Shouldn't be too hard," Rudy said. "I doubt they were on lockdown when the place got hit. They couldn't very well have fought if they were."

Did they fight, Chloe wondered. Did they get the chance? She saw only Imperial corpses floating through the vacuum.

Maybe their enemies took their dead with them.

Rudy released her and drifted to the airlock's controls. He fumbled with the panel covering them for a moment, until Slava joined him and yanked it back with a single twitch of his arm. Rudy shot a glare at the ursid, who just shrugged again.

Chloe would have found it funny under better circumstances.

Under the present ones, she could easily imagine the two men tearing each other's throats out over that small slight, fighting with hands and feet and mouths until one or the other was dead and the victor collapsed as adrenaline pumped out of control through his shuddering body.

She bit her lip to stifle a gasp. Where had that thought come from?

She glanced nervously over her shoulder, expecting to see… something.

She didn't.

She heaved a sigh of relief.

The airlock's huge door rolled into its housing. On the side with atmosphere, however fouled, it would be thunderously loud, but in vacuum it made no sound at all.

"A third of the way there," Rudy said. His cheer sounded forced.

Chloe followed him and Slava into the airlock.

Rudy extracted a corpse clinging to the inner controls and began the process of pressurizing the airlock. One great door swung down, incongruously silent. Its twin wouldn't be once there was air to transmit the sound to the three tiny figures floating between them.

Slava, his deep voice echoing oddly as both comlink and atmosphere transmitted it, said, "Keep your masks up, yes, little ones? There is air, but we do not know there is good air."

"There isn't," Chloe said.

Both Rudy and the ursid gangster glanced at her.

Everything here is bad, she thought. She said, "Just a hunch."

Slava shrugged and looked away, but Rudy kept eying her. She wondered how much he'd figured out about her hunches. After all, unlike the ursid, he knew she wasn't on any kind of Limiters to prevent the unconscious use of psychic powers. She'd come to the battlecruiser on the strength of a hunch, pressed on in spite of her fears on the strength of a hunch.

The airlock's far door rumbled open.

Most of the emergency lights still glowed in the hallway beyond. They conferred a better sense of the sheer scale of the battlecruiser's halls than man-portable searchlights ever could. The tube-like hall stretched across Chloe's entire field of vision, broken up at the edges by man-sized and mecha-sized hatches and swiftly-moving belts covered with handholds to speed Imperial navy men on their way. The walls were unnervingly clean, a pleasant, pristine off-white except for a few scorch marks.

There were more bodies here.

Lots more.

Chloe stared numbly at them.

At first, she merely comprehended the quantity of the death. Easily hundreds of corpses thronged the hall.

Only when her eyes fully adjusted to the emergency lights and she wrapped her mind around the numbers involved did she comprehend the quality.

She knew where her vision of Rudy and Slava killing each other came from. A dozen pairs of bodies tumbled past in death's-grip embraces, their dead faces twisted in sightless, senseless hate. The combatants all wore Imperial uniforms.

Other, still more bizarre sights afflicted her.

Some of the pairs and trios and quartets were not attached by grips made clawlike by death. Some appeared melted together, their forms folded into a single grotesque. They had, from the looks of it, literally torn themselves apart trying to escape the prisons of each others' flesh.

Others protruded from the composite walls, their corpses seamlessly joined to their ship. One, his fate perhaps more merciful than most, was suspended from the bulkhead by his neck, his head one with the metal. Another drifted past, chest and stomach speared by the legs and part of the seat of a metal chair.

None of the meldings showed any signs of external bleeding, though most must have quickly and painfully killed the men whose internal organs had been mangled by them. Whatever had afflicted them had not done so with raw force.

The ship's plants, monstrously overgrown, shrouded other corpses. Chloe couldn't tell if the unnaturally thick, thorny vines had grown over the dead men or if they had become fused like the others.

"Merciful Principle," Rudy whispered.

No, Chloe thought, blaspheming and not caring that she did. Not merciful at all, to allow the pattern of these men's days to end thus.

"What could do this?" Rudy asked. He reached out and brushed hands with an amalgam of two Imperial officers whose arms joined at the elbow. "What in the hell could do this? Look at this!"

"I don't know," Chloe said.

Rudy whirled around, jetted to her side, grabbed her shoulders. "You have to know," he said. "You're the nob. You're the psychic. You're the one whose mecha is here. You have to know."

"You know better," Chloe said. Her voice sounded strangely calm. She realized she was too horrified to even fear. "I know as much about whatever powers I have as you do – nothing."

Rudy didn't move for a long time. She supposed he was staring through his flight suit's mask, and wished she could see his face.

Abruptly, he pulled her tightly into his arms and clung desperately.

"Principle, Chloe, the bodies…!"

She returned his embrace, cradling his head and pressing him close. Mechanically, she stroked the shaking muscles of his back.

"And the minds," he continued, oblivious to her efforts to comfort him. "The ones who weren't twisted outside, they killed each other."

A powerful shudder passed through him. Chloe felt the motion pass into her, imagined taking all the revulsion and terror with it. She felt the oppressive aura close in around her and choke her breath and tear her flesh and twist her mind –

– and pass as quickly as it came.

"It's okay, Rudy," she said gently. She kept kneading his tense muscles. She pressed her lips to his forehead and mimed kissing him through two layers of flight suit. "Whatever happened here, it was awful beyond anything we can understand, but it was a long time ago. We just feel the echoes of it because so much terror and pain flooded these halls all at once, a lot of it from psychics. It's just a memory, and however bad a memory may be, it can't hurt us."

He raised his masked face to hers. "Clo…?"

She nodded. "It's okay, Rudy," she repeated.

She glanced at Slava. The ursid had neither spoken nor moved since they entered the hallway. Chloe wondered if she would have to snap him out of more than natural fear, too.

She realized how many times she and Rudy had used each others names.

She just couldn't find it in her to care anymore. It seemed such a small thing, compared to the enormity of the battlecruiser. They didn't need to fool Stephan. Either she would find her mother's mecha and have nothing to fear from the gangsters, or she would fail and Rudy would fight them like he'd planned from the outset.

With a start, Chloe realized the only initiative she'd shown since her parents' kidnapping came when Rudy needed her help. The rest of the time, she trusted him to sort things out.

She wondered if he would have to sort out Slava.

She hoped not. Though she knew it was irrational, she couldn't wrap her head around the idea of a hybrid as her enemy. It wasn't just that Chloe loved her mom and thought well of hybrids because of her. For years, other hybrids had crewed the Mother Goose and treated Chloe like a little sister.

"Slava," she said, "is everything all right?"

"No," the ursid said.

Chloe gulped. Here it came. Either the psychic turbulence of the place or the arguably justified wrath of a gangster who'd been lied to.

She felt Rudy extricate himself from her arms, already tensing in a zero gee fighting crouch she thought worthy of Jack Hughes himself. The highest praise she could give.

Slava surprised them both, though. Instead of enraged, he sounded downright nervous. "I have heard from Sir Kyrillos," he said. Chloe wondered at the new name, but before she could ask, he continued. "We have company."

"Who?" Rudy asked. He was all business now, shutting out the surrounding horrors, focusing on the new threat.

"Sir Kyrillos says," Slava said, "it is the Reformer."