Private Towing and Salvage Vessel: Clara
Crew: Five
Cargo: 300,000 tonnes of mineral ore plus unidentified bio-material samples
Course: The Hub
The first thing Gambell thought was that the new diet Kathryn had him on was working, because he’d never before come out of cryosleep not feeling like he’d gone ten rounds with a particularly malicious heavyweight who took great delight in punching him in the gut until his insides turned to water.
As he sat up in the pod, rubbing his eyes and pulling off his monitors and catheter, he actually felt great. No cryo-hangover meant no lost, achy, blurry days when they made planetfall, and maybe he could actually take Kathryn out for their wedding anniversary tomorrow night for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long.
The other pods radiating out from the central life-support hub weren’t yet hissing and opening. Gambell’s always opened first—captain’s prerogative. His daddy always said that the skipper should be up first to welcome the crew in good times, and to protect them in bad. Well, it was good times at last for the crew of the STSV Clara, and for Gambell Reclamations.
The lights on the cryodeck were at full strength already. Gambell could hear them buzzing and flickering to life in the corridors that led off to the communal areas, quarters, and flight deck. Seemed like the Clara was recovering more quickly, as well. Gambell gingerly stepped out of his pod to test the strength of his legs—surprisingly good—and wondered if Kathryn had the old girl on a diet as well.
Gambell yawned and stretched and reached for the stew of post-sleep nutrients that was already gushing into the paper cup in the vending hatch at the front of his tube. He needed to pee, which he knew was totally a psychological thing, because the cryotube had been draining his bladder for the best part of the past three months. Then a shower, and a shave, and get out of these sleep shorts and vest… He sniffed at the front of his vest, suspiciously. Had Kathryn’s diet stopped him sweating?
There was something else, as well.
Was it too quiet?
“Mother?” Gambell called, his voice croaky and his throat dry. “Where’s my wake-up song?”
There was a hum and a pause, and then it started. “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Gambell’s daddy had always come out of cryosleep to it, and so did he after taking over the family business. MU/TH/UR said nothing, though. Gambell’s frown deepened. Was she sulking about something?
She’d always been a bit temperamental, that old computer. For a crazy moment, he wondered if Mother was jealous, then barked a laugh out loud that surprised even him. Computers didn’t have feelings—but she would have seen on the bioscans what Gambell saw after finishing the last planet-side job, before they all went into the chambers. He was glad to have his skipper’s hour before the rest of the crew woke up, to think about it, and decide whether he should tell Kathryn.
“Coffee in my quarters, Mother,” Gambell called, his legs now steady enough to take him out of the sleep deck. “I’m going to freshen up. Start waking the others in fifteen minutes.”
* * *
To be honest, the job had come as a godsend for Gambell Reclamations. They’d been cruising around the Frontier for the best part of five years, picking up bits and pieces of legit work, acting on rumors and tip-offs. Sometimes they were the first to the sites of salvage opportunities, more often than not second or third. It had been a pretty hand-to-mouth existence.
Gambell wasn’t even sure why they’d been approached to do the job on the tiny little satellite at the ass-end of nowhere. It had come through a third-party commissioner, and he neither knew nor cared who was the prime client. It was a lucrative little number, retrieving a cargo of oil-rich minerals from a crashed freighter. They were being paid handsomely, but not a fraction of the worth of the stuff sloshing about in the containers they were towing. After the Oil Wars had cooled off, the old black gold had been in great demand all over the colonies, as well as on Earth. Those that had it were keeping hold of it, and selling it for top dollar.
More than once since they’d done the straightforward salvage job, Gambell had flirted with the idea of just going dark and selling it themselves. But he guessed that whoever was behind the contract had the kind of influence and muscle to make things very, very difficult for them if that happened. Best to stay aboveboard.
Plus, there was the matter of the unexpected bonus they’d picked up on that barren rock.
Gambell toweled off and inspected his face in the mirror. He had the space-farer’s pallor, accentuating the lines on his face and the bags under his eyes. When was the last time he’d seen some sun, other than filtered through the viewing screens? Five years was a long time to be zipping about the frontier. He wondered if he should shave his beard, then decided to leave it. They were all due a break, and after what he’d seen when he put the others into cryosleep—”Be the last man to sleep and the first man to wake,” he heard his daddy’s voice say—there were some serious talks to be had.
Question was, what was the protocol on this? It felt only right that it should be Kathryn to tell him she was pregnant, not the other way round, but when you knew something like that, what were you meant to do? Wait another month or however long it took her body to tell her what was going on, and then act surprised when she told him?
He dressed in his fatigues and buckled on his watch. Mother should have started the wake-up for the crew thirty minutes ago. They’d be emerging from cryosleep now.
“Mother, get some coffee on in the mess.”
Gambell felt that dry, electric pause again, that hum of almost… uncertainty? Which was ridiculous. MU/TH/UR was an old AI, nothing like the sophisticated ones they had now—and which Gambell could never afford. He’d grown up with her. She was attuned to his ways, and knew more about him than even Kathryn. Even so, she was still just a—
The lights dimmed and switched to a slowly pulsing red, just as an alarm began to sound in a low, insistent, whoop-whoop-whoop.
“Mother? What the hell?” Gambell said, pulling on his boots. But it wasn’t Mother that answered. The intercom crackled into life and it was Currie’s deep, Southern voice that rumbled out.
“Skipper? You dressed? Either way, you better get your ass to the flight deck pronto.”
* * *
“And where the hell is that?” DJ said, running a hand through her close-cropped hair and glaring at the viewing window as though the planet filling it was some kind of personal affront.
“Sure as hell not where we’re supposed to be,” Simpson said, his thin, pale hands cupped around his coffee.
DJ turned her gaze on him. “No shit,” she said witheringly. “Why is it you’re on this crew again? It ain’t for your incisive insights or your sparkling personality or your—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Currie said, hunched over a monitor and saving Gambell the job of intervening in the endless, infinite squabble-fest that Paul Simpson and DJ Roberts had been carrying on as long as they’d been on the crew.
“David, where are we?” Gambell said to Currie. He glanced at Kathryn, standing with her arms folded over her stomach, silhouetted in front of the big viewing window, against the yellow orb of the planet that was most decidedly not the Hub.
“LV-593,” Currie said, looking up at him. “Weyland Isles System.”
“The fuck?” DJ said. “That means we’re… what, six fucking weeks out from the Hub?”
“Eight, more like,” Simpson said. He turned his thin face to Gambell. “Why’d you wake us up, skip?”
It was a damn good question. Gambell felt Kathryn looking at him. They’d not had much chance to talk since she woke, but she had mentioned that she’d been throwing up. She put it down to a bad cryosleep, yet Gambell thought he knew better. Now wasn’t the time, of course, but he felt more disquiet than usual that things weren’t following the ordained path.
“Mother,” he said measuredly. “Why’d you wake me early?”
That pause again. Like she wanted to tell him something, but didn’t know how. He pushed the thought away. At least he knew why he hadn’t got the usual cryo-hangover now. He’d only been under for a little over a fortnight.
“I had an overriding… directive,” Mother said.
Gambell frowned. “From?”
“I… cannot say.”
“The fuck?” DJ spat.
Gambell suddenly had a very bad feeling. “DJ, Simpson, go and check the cargo.”
“I checked it,” Currie said. “We’re still towing.”
“Not that cargo.”
DJ nodded, hauled the thin frame of Simpson off his stool, and dragged him off the flight deck.
“Mother,” Gambell said evenly. “Who did the override come from?”
“I… cannot say,” Mother repeated. “I’m sorry, Jamie.”
Jamie. Mother hadn’t called him that since he was a kid. Did she sound… sad?
“There’s something wrong,” Kathryn murmured, sliding on to the stool Simpson had vacated. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
“It’s fine,” Gambell whispered. “As soon as we get to the Hub, I’ll get Mother looked at and—”
“I don’t mean that, Jamie,” Kathryn said. She still had her arms wrapped around her waist. “I mean something feels different… inside. Inside me.”
Gambell opened his mouth to say he had no idea what. Then the intercom spluttered.
“Skip,” DJ crackled. “We have one fuck of a problem.”
* * *
In the cargo bay there was a bank of mini-cryotubes, mainly for the transportation of small animals. Sometimes the colonies traded livestock, and one time the Clara had been paid a ridiculous amount of money to take a rich old lady and her five Chihuahuas to Earth. They’d used twenty-seven of them for the unexpected little bonus cargo they’d found in that crashed freighter.
All of them were now empty, the plasteel fronts smashed.
Gambell stared wordlessly for a moment at the carnage. The planet where they’d salvaged the freighter had a sub-Earth atmosphere, but they’d suited up fully anyway, given the storm that had been raging and the marked acidity of the precipitation. Which was fortunate, because in the hold of the freighter, which they’d given a cursory sweep after attaching the towing containers filled with ore, they’d found… well, he didn’t know what they were.
Which was the whole point.
Eggs, had been his first thought. Soft and organic. Pulsing slightly. About as tall as his waist. Not hugely pleasant to handle, even with their thick gloves. There were twenty-seven of them in total, and both Currie and Kathryn had wanted to leave them, but Gambell had a hunch. Whatever these things were, they were going to be worth something to somebody. Biotech was quite the thing at the moment. Everybody had heard the tales of black goo raining down on frontier worlds, even if nobody really knew what it was or what happened afterward. But the word in the bars and on the salvage chatter streams was that everybody was looking for bioweapons.
True, these egg things didn’t appear particularly dangerous, but what was he, an expert in this kind of shit? Never look a gift horse in the mouth, his daddy always said. So Gambell had had the crew load them up into the mini-cryos for the journey to the Hub. Once he’d delivered the ore he’d start putting the feelers out to find a buyer for whatever the hell these things were.
Or at least, that had been the plan. Now there were twenty-seven busted mini-cryos, and no eggs.
“Maybe they hatched,” Simpson said, looking around warily. As though he expected to see… Gambell had no idea what sort of thing would come out of an egg like that, if they were indeed eggs. A bird seemed doubtful. He got a mental image of something spider-like, which he brushed away.
“Mother!” Gambell yelled. “What am I looking at, here?”
It seemed as if there was a trembling in the air, but Mother said nothing. Gambell felt Kathryn’s heavy stare on him, and did his best to ignore it.
“The fucking things hatched and broke out and they’re running around somewhere,” Simpson said, his eyes wide.
“Dick.” DJ sighed. “If they were eggs there’d still be eggs wouldn’t there? Even if they’d hatched. Or… eggshells.”
“What fucking things?” Currie said, an undertone of menace in the big man’s voice. “What do you know, Simpson?”
“I hear stuff,” Simpson said, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “We all hear stuff, right?”
Kathryn was standing by one of the empty mini-cryos, fingering the glass shards in the broken panel. Gambell wanted to yell to her to put it down. God knows what those things were, and what… what chemicals were on them. She had to be careful now. In her condition.
“Jamie,” she said, turning to him and frowning. “Most of the glass is on the inside. Nothing broke out of these cryos. Someone smashed them from the outside.”
“Mother!” Gambell roared, looking around as though he could see the presence of the invisible AI in the air around him. “Who has been on my ship? Were we boarded?”
“Override forbids—”
“Mother!”
They all looked at him, head thrown back, fists clenched, the scream dying on his lips.
“Jamie, I’m scared,” Kathryn whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Mother said, and Gambell couldn’t deny sensing a sadness in her electronic voice. “I’m sorry. You should make your peace with your gods and say your goodbyes.”
The Clara had been bought by Gambell’s father Dennis when his wife died and he sold up every inch of property they had on Earth, ploughing his last cent into setting up Gambell Reclamations. Dennis had left his only son with his sister until Jamie was nine, and then took him out into space and taught him the ropes of the business he would inherit when the old man died—which happened ten years ago.
Gambell could barely remember his mother, and couldn’t recall their life on Earth much at all. He’d been brought up on the ship, he’d spent most of his life in space. The Clara was his home.
Whump!
The charges clamped to the drive at the rear of the ship exploded, setting off a chain reaction that caused the Clara to list sharply to starboard, ripping a hole in the hull. The ship went into a spin toward the planet below them, a series of smaller explosions bursting through the vessel, taking all the major networks and life-support systems off-line.
When the lights went out in the cargo bay, Gambell drew Kathryn close to him and told her he loved her, and would always love her, and that he was sorry for what had happened to her, to him, and to the life that grew in her belly. And he held her tight as she fought and wailed until it was all over, and the Clara was no more.