Ariadne Page 4

  “I’m not asking for damn compliments,” I snap back at him. “It’s a straightforward process. I ask a question, you answer. Get me?”

  The engineer’s mouth twists into a smile. “Yeah. I get you,” he replies. “There’s seven survivors, not counting the ones Drex and Boyd might find. I don’t hold out much hope that they’ll be able to add anyone.”

  “And why do you think that?”

  “The guests were all in the Hospitality Suite, most of whom are dead. Any surviving crew members would know to make their way to the bridge. No one turned up when we were there, trying to break in.”

  “About that… didn’t you tell Drex that the bridge is designed to keep the Strategist and the crew safe in case of an incursion? It’d take days to get through a bridge door in lock-down mode.”

  Hewlis shrugs again, another long, drawn out affair. “You’ve met Drex. He didn’t want to listen… and what else could we do? You might not want to hear this, but the kid has a point. If we can’t get onto the bridge, there’s no way we can regain control of the ship.”

  I point at his stained overalls. “I thought you were an engineer? Don’t you have an innate knowledge of the Ariadne?”

  His wet brown eyes narrow in the bulbous skin of his face. “I’m just a regular grunt brought in to look after the regular systems,” he says. “I wasn’t part of the advanced bio-team—the new systems, which pervade the ship like a spider’s web, were off-limits to me. I don’t have the right pay grade. I should never have come here. The ship isn’t right. I had a bad feeling about her from the off. And if you’re an engineer, you learn to trust your gut.”

  Engineers are well known for their superstitious beliefs—which is odd for such a qualified profession. He may be sensing Ariadne’s madness as ‘uneasiness’. I can feel the full force of her insanity as a constant wave upon the empathic spectrum, a wave I’m struggling to keep at bay. The look on the engineer’s face tells me he has more to say.

  “Spit it out,” I say to him.

  Hewlis chews his cheeks for a few seconds, anger sparkling in his eyes. “What the Company has done here is evil,” he rasps. “They wrap the thing up in pretty words. Bio-intelligence. Cereb. The brain. But this is human experimentation and nothing else. It’s been outlawed as long as I know. The damn thing is inhumane!”

  My empathy may be off-line, but I can tell he means what he says. I agree with him. It’s no regular human brain squatting at the centre of this bioship, but one of my breed, a breed apart from humans. The Cereb is a genetically engineered control system using the same empathic abilities as myself and others like me.

  “Were you naïve enough to think this kind of thing wasn’t going on?” I ask. “That the Company cares anything about sanctions or laws?”

  Hewlis sags, the anger leaving him. He takes a deep calming breath, his head shaking from side to side. “Of course not. I just never expected to become part of it—to get this close. I’m an engineer. I work with coolant systems and boosters. With hydraulic pressures and fuel quotients. What they’re doing here doesn’t require engineers but goddamn surgeons and psych-teks. I wanted nothing more to do with the project once I learned what was going on. I tried to get reassigned, tried to do anything to get myself transferred off this damn ghost ship… You know the Company. What I wanted meant squat.”

  Listening to the engineer’s words, I can’t help but agree with his sentiment.

  I swipe the wafer and bring up the man’s details.

  Hewlis Gray.

  Age: 45.

  Fourth Engineer.

  Fourth engineer is a low rank for someone of his age in this profession. He has served on an extensive list of ships, too many of them. He’s been moved on more times than has been healthy for his career. Maybe he’s a troublemaker, one of those people who rubs everyone else up the wrong way? He’s a big guy, naturally large. I sure wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of him. So far, all I’ve gotten from the man is good vibes, apart from his obvious disdain at what’s been going on aboard the Ariadne. Yet there is something about him I can’t quite put my finger on. “You didn’t tell me how you survived?”

  Hewlis rubs at his face, his hand, rasping against half a day’s growth of greyed, patchy stubble. “I was in the hold, working in a depressurised service area. Just routine stuff. When I got back into the ship, everyone was dead and that jumped up squirt, Drex, had put himself in charge.”

  “Another convenient story,” I say. Hewlis doesn’t react. He’s either very much in control of himself or he doesn’t care.

  We continue along the ship’s central corridor until we reach the elevator and stairwell. The elevator doors are decorated in a cool art-deco design. Stylised and like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

  The air here is even more cloying, accompanied by the aroma of… “Is that burning?” I ask.

  Velez sniffs the air, a worried look on her face, her neck starting to twitch again. “Smells like cooked meat.”

  We follow the growing stench, entering a side corridor until we arrive at a service panel. “It seems to be coming from here,” I say to Hewlis.

  We look at each other.

  “Open it,” I say. “It’s your goddamn ship, even if you hate it.”

  Hewlis pulls at the hatch. “Hot,” he says, producing an oily rag from his pocket and wrapping it around his hand. “That ain’t right.” He pulls again at the hatch, straining. “It’s jammed.”

  For a big man, he seems peculiarly weak. “Put your damn back into it!”

  Hewlis gives me a sideways look and braces against the wall. The hatch opens with a pop and we are hit by a cloud of sweet-smelling steam, heavy with the aroma of cooked flesh. I shutdown my olfactory system and diminish my breathing to nothing more than a rasp. Hewlis seems unaffected, although Velez starts to retch. The fog clears and Hewlis peers inside. “What the goddamn hell?”

  I PUSH Hewlis aside and stare into the open hatch. A mixture of tubes, wires and… burnt flesh. A pipe glows red and what looks like charred, burnt meat has peeled away from it, accompanied by a network of shrivelled nerves and other organic tissue. “Part of the bio-systems?” I ask Hewlis, allowing myself to breathe normally again, expecting his trademark shrug.

  “Shit,” he says, flicking through his wafer. “I think this is why the ship is so goddamn hot. “It’s the air-con system.”

  “Air-con?” I reply. “You mean the supply of oxygen? Sounds serious.”

  Hewlis ignores me for a few more moments while he flicks at his wafer. “No, these are environmental controls,” he says finally. “The system that regulates temperature throughout the ship. It’s responsible for air circulation, for diverting warm air from the engines and other systems to the colder outer hull areas and vice-versa.”

  “And it’s failed?”

  Hewlis pokes inside the hatch, a grimace across his face. “Yeah, the organic component has literally been fried.”

  “What caused this?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Hewlis spits back at me. “Like I said, all this stuff is way past my pay-grade.”

  “But it’s not serious? Not life-threatening?”

  He shakes his head. “No, it just means that some parts of the ship will be either warmer or colder than is comfortable, which we’ve already discovered.”

  “Could other systems be affected?”

  “Who knows? Unless there’s a system-wide failure, that information won’t be sent to my wafer. Instead, everything is monitored from the bridge. We’d need to get inside for a damage report and that ain’t possible.”

  “There’s no other data-centres or terminals?”

  “The ship ain’t a conventional design,” Hewlis explains, sounding annoyed. “Normally there’d be hook-ups we could use to interrogate the computer. To get access and readouts. But not on the Ariadne.”

  I stare back into the open hatch—the flesh extends past the inspection panel and into the superstructure. “Could this be the syst
em that was used to gas the crew and everybody else on board?”

  Hewlis shuffles his feet beside me. “Yeah. But not anymore. Not with this damage.”

  I turn to face him. “Did someone wilfully sabotage Ariadne to prevent her gassing the ship again?”

  Hewlis rubs at his grizzled chin, the loose flesh of his cheeks bulging. “Possibly. But who?”

  “That’s what I’m gonna find out. Someone is fighting back, which is the first good news I’ve heard since I’ve arrived on this goddamn ship. Let’s get out of here.”

  We return to the elevator. “This is usually off-limits to the likes of you and me,” Hewlis says with a smile. “What do you say we travel in style?”

  “How many floors up to the bridge?” I ask.

  Hewlis hits the call button. “Too many.”

  The elevator arrives with a hum and the doors open to reveal golden walls decorated with more art-deco fluting. “So, this is for bridge officers only, huh?”

  “I think it was for Chandrasekhar’s personal use,” Hewlis says with disdain. “Although I’ve seen others use the elevator. And if you believe Drex and Boyd, they got stuck between floors in it.”

  “You think they were lying?” I ask.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Hewlis replies. “You’re the investigator… I’m just an engineer, remember?”

  I’m weak, still emaciated from my extended time in hypersleep, but I’m not the type to take the easy route. It’s not in my DNA… literally. “We’ll use the stairs.”

  Hewlis points to the open elevator. “We can be there in seconds.”

  “Like I said, we’ll use the damn stairs! I can’t risk the thing malfunctioning for a second time, you get me? Is everyone on this ship as belligerent as each other?”

  Hewlis grimaces. “You’re in charge.”

  The spiral stairs twist around the outside of the elevator, a dizzying drop over a simple handrail to the bottom deck many floors below. We start to climb, and I immediately regret my decision. My legs are wobbly and my heart pounds in my ears. I’m also starting to feel the effect of that bruising landing in the cargo bay. I check my system. Everything is in balance, I’m just undernourished and a little battered. I increase oxygen intake, tone down my pain receptors even further—any more and I’ll be almost numb—and trudge on.

  The air becomes dramatically cooler as we climb. I wipe my forehead, ridding it of cold sweat and shaking it away. We’re closer to the hull, shown by the tightening of the ship’s natural curves. The deep cold of hyperspace is leaking into the ship. I’m still suffering from the effects of my prolonged hypersleep—but then again cold, hard space is only a few feet away. In that regard, hyperspace is no different. There’s still a vacuum. It’s still hundreds of degrees below zero and it will still kill you if you go out there unprotected.

  Next to me, Hewlis also seems to be struggling. His bulk is about twice that of mine. He has a lot more weight to shift. “Shouldn’t you be used to moving around a spaceship this way?” I ask him.

  All I get in reply is his habitual shrug.

  We ascend the floors and finally emerge on the command deck. I’m out of breath and wheezing.

  “You okay?” Velez ventures. She’s not even winded.

  “I’m fine,” I reply. “It’s been a long couple of days. Nothing that a shot of whisky wouldn’t cure.” I nod for Hewlis to lead us on.

  More bodies lie in the central corridor up here. I stop and examine each one of them, adding their details to my wafer. I’m in a rush to sort out this mess aboard the Ariadne, but a Skilled never leaves a stone unturned. Or a body. It’s a ridiculous cliché, but true of my breed. The need to examine everything and everyone is a compulsion hardwired into us at the genetic level.

  More jumbled corpses inhabit a darkened side corridor. I enter, crouching down to check them out.

  “I’m not sure what you’re hoping to find,” says Velez coming up behind me.

  “This,” I say, turning over one of the bodies. A tall, imposing-looking woman wearing a long black jacket, white shirt and ruffles—dressed for tonight’s party. Her stomach is an empty bloodied hole, the obvious result of a buzz-gun shot.

  A QUICK search of the dead woman’s clothing reveals a few personal items and her Company ID. Her rather pompous name is Mandibald Glaxtinian, one of the grandees invited to the party and an impressive one at that.

  I take out my wafer and search for the woman.

  Mandibald Glaxtinian.

  Age: 46.

  Projects Arbiter.

  Arbiter? The title is a Company euphemism for ball-breaker. Someone brought into a project with the sole intention of knocking a few heads together or shutting it down. Having her aboard would’ve made everyone nervous, especially Professor Chandrasekhar who oversaw the ship and its construction. There’re a few details of Glaxtinian’s Company history—all very impressive. She was on a steep Company career curve, until someone shot her in the gut that is, and, judging by the wound, quite badly at that. This woman was taken out by an amateur or that’s what they wanted everyone to think.

  The death of someone like this will cause quite a wave, but the Company is willing to kill everyone aboard the Ariadne to prevent her from reaching rival company space. When it comes to the Company, everyone is expendable.

  I check the other bodies around her. They all died via asphyxiation and none of them are carrying weapons.

  “Looks like you were right,” says Hewlis. “Someone was murdered.”

  “Either of you know who she is?” I ask.

  Hewlis shrugs whilst Velez says nothing.

  “You deaf, Velez?” I bark, standing up on shaky legs.

  Velez stares at the blooded corpse, a pleased look on her face. “She’s just another grandee,” she says as if a dead Company VIP was a good thing. “But who killed her?” she asks, baffled.

  It’s my turn to shrug. “The body hasn’t been moved, although I guess these guys were in the process of doing that when the gas struck, two of them are medics. She was shot here, where she fell. Is this place significant?”

  “We’re close to the bridge,” Hewlis answers. “But there’s nothing here except system hatches. No cabins on this level.”

  “Mandibald could’ve been on her way to see the Strategist. That would explain why she wasn’t at the party.”

  “Or she could’ve been heading from the bridge to the elevator?” Hewlis adds.

  “Either way, she was intercepted, and someone put a buzz-gun in her gut.”

  “And not very professionally,” Hewlis adds. “Unless the murderer wanted the woman to suffer.”

  I turn on him. “And what would you know about that?”

  This time, Hewlis doesn’t shrug. His face shows no emotion—impossible to read. “I was a foot-soldier for a brief time during the war,” he says finally. “They trained me to shoot-to-kill. To the head or chest. The gut is a sucker shot.”

  “That wasn’t on your record,” I say. I’m lying. I’ve no idea what may or may not be on his record. My wafer only contains the headlines.

  The shrug returns. “I ain’t in charge of what the Company wants to write or not write about me. But after the training, I went back to engineering. Apparently, foot-soldiers are more expendable than ship engineers.”

  I take another look at the body. Mandibald Glaxtinian was killed before everyone was gassed. Before the ship went into lock-down. Was her death the cause of what happened here? It’s possible I suppose. One thing is for sure though, Ariadne didn’t shoot her. I can’t lay that charge at her door.

  I examine the other bodies again. Medics and lower rank crew-members. I add their details to my wafer and, when satisfied, we carry on past them to the Command Floor. An expansive, curved reception area at one end of which is the bridge, closed off by a large, circular brass-like door—like some underground vault—and just as impenetrable. Five bodies lie outside. I spot the insignia of Strategist amongst the other officers.

>   I bring up her name on my roster.

  Strategist Faraji Adebowale

  Age: 31.

  She’s young to be a strategist, although for typical high-fliers in the Company fleet, reaching the rank of strategist before your fortieth birthday is a career must. Her career history is patchy, but this was her first ship. She’s attractive… or was. Faraji Adebowale is in full dress uniform.

  What was she doing up here when she should have been at the party?

  Dealing with the murder, is my best guess.

  I quickly tap through the other officers’ info. I’m surprised to find that they have all served together before on another ship. I search their records for any other similarities but find nothing.

  “Boyd mentioned that the Strategist and Professor Chandrasekhar didn’t get along. Do you two know anything about that?”

  A brief shake of heads. Another dead-end.

  “Where’s the bridge-com Drex mentioned?”

  “This way.” Hewlis leads me past various equipment. A laser and an arc-welding heat device. I’m no engineer, but you’d need a ship’s external cannon to blast through the bridge door. The only problem? Using a laser cannon inside Ariadne would take out the front of the ship. These toys employed by Drex and Hewlis wouldn’t have made a scratch.

  We enter an alcove with a rudimentary com, a few readout devices and a screen. I punch it into life and stare into the bridge via an internal camera. It’s as Drex described it to me. What remains of the bridge crew sit slumped over in their chairs, gassed and dead, like everyone else on this goddamn death ship.

  I count the bodies and, from where they sit and from what my roster tells me, I’m able to identify them. The ship’s systems appear to be working without any alarms. I take a closer look at the com controls, hoping there’s a record function, but the feed is live only. A simple two-way to communicate with the crew should the ship ever be in lock-down. There’re other cameras on this ship, but the only way to get access to their footage would be to get access to the bridge, which ain’t happening anytime soon. With Ariadne in lock-down, access to all coms is bridge crew only. Another security measure.