Dalton was a better pilot than me. He had actual training, while I winged it based upon watching a thousand pilots do their job. So I let him take the shuttle controls, while I nudged Darb out of the way so I could reach the co-pilot seat.
“You really had to bring them?” Dalton asked. I could tell from his tone that it wasn’t an idle question.
I fitted myself into the co-pilot chair. We were all wearing environmental suits, even Fiori, who sat on the passenger bench running down the side of the compartment behind us. Vara sat obediently beside her.
The suit made the chair a tight fit.
“We’re in suits, and they aren’t,” Dalton pointed out.
“Yep.” I brushed a lock of hair out of my eyes with an irritable wave.
“Gut talking?” Dalton asked softly.
“Yep.”
He drew a breath. Let it out. “Okay.” He raised his chin and spoke into the air. “Release when ready, Lyssa.”
“Detaching,” Lyssa’s voice said, emerging from the speaker overhead.
The shuttle gave the little lurch that announced we were free of the overhead gantry and independently moving.
Dalton nosed the shuttle forward.
A few kilometers could normally be covered in less than a handful of minutes. I said, “Dead slow, Dalton.”
He didn’t argue, even though it would triple the time it took to cross over to the Ige Ibas.
I pulled up the short-range scanners and got them going. Lyssa would be scanning, too, but I wanted the redundancy. My heart was clipping along way too fast for sitting on my ass.
As I worked, I could feel the distance between us and the Lythion increasing. My uneasiness built the farther we got. We were vulnerable out here. At least while on board the Lythion, no matter what the threat, we could turn tail and run like hell.
While we were on the shuttle and, in a few minutes, on the Ige Ibas, running wasn’t an option.
Vara gave a soft whine. She sensed my jitters.
I drew in a breath, just as Dalton had. And another one.
“Hey,” Dalton said.
“I’m fine,” I said shortly.
“Your heart rate is elevated,” Fiori said.
Checking over one’s shoulder while wearing a suit was near impossible. Doing it strapped into a tight-fitting maneuvers chair upped the difficulty factor, but I managed to turn my head enough to glare at her. “You’re monitoring me?”
She lifted her forearm to indicate the flat panel mounted on the sleeve of the suit. “Medical panel.”
“Great.” I looked at the ship we approached, my middle winding up into a good, hard knot. I needed a distraction. “What was Mace doing, running with wildcatters, anyway?” I put the question out there between the two of them.
Silence.
Fiori cleared her throat. “He’s an adult. Capable of making his own decisions.” But her tone was apologetic.
“I let him go,” Dalton said, his tone flat.
I looked at him, surprised. “With wildcatters?”
Dalton didn’t look at me. “If I hadn’t said yes, he would have gone anyway. This way, I could check the ship out, talk to the captain…I know Eliot Byrne slightly—he’s opened up two of the worlds we’ve lived on. He’s sensible, for a wildcatter.”
“Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
Dalton rolled his eyes. “He’s had two good finds. He doesn’t need to prove himself or fight to make it.” He shrugged.
That did make a difference. If the captain was already successful, already raking in the royalties, then he wouldn’t feel the need to take stupid risks.
“So Mace wanted adventure,” I murmured. “Sounds just like you.”
Dalton’s smile was small, but it was there.
I sat back and watched the Ige Ibas creep closer and tried to keep my heart steady. It had been a very long while since I’d shipped out with a medic watching my tell-tale vitals. I was out of practice.
The ship drew closer and details grew clearer. There were a lot of probes and scanners—some of them I could name and some of them were like nothing I’d ever seen before. I even spotted an ancient radar scanner.
If your job entailed exploring unknown dirtballs, it made sense to scan the shit out of the place first. If we had this vast range of scanning choices aboard the Lythion, perhaps we might have been able to figure out the mystery of the Ige Ibas without actually going there.
The shuttle drifted up close to the hull of the Ige Ibas. I could see score marks from meteorites and space debris. If the hull had ever held a color, it was gone now. The metal was raw and dull.
The hull was convex. My heart sank.
“Curved hull,” Dalton said. “We can’t connect directly, then. We could use a molecular barrier tunnel to cross.”
“I’m going over alone.” I pointed. “Get as close as your nerves will let you.” I unclipped the belts and struggled out of the chair.
“You shouldn’t go alone,” Fiori protested. “What if something happens to you?”
“That’s why I want you two to stay here. You’re my backup. If something happens to me, you either come in with guns blazing, or you run like hell. Dalton gets to make that call.” I paused to let that sink in. “Clear?”
Fiori’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded. “Clear, Colonel.”
I moved into the compartment and over to the security panel next to the big side door. There was a matching door on the other side of the compartment, but this one faced the Ige Ibas. I punched up the molecular barrier controls and set up the barrier as a cylinder, then extended it out until the control panel told me it had reached a metal barrier.
“Bridge is built. Pumping air into it now. Keep it steady, Dalton.” I put my helmet on and seated it. While the suit prepped for vacuum and linked the helmet to my comms, I moved over to the door.
“Why do you need your helmet if you have air in the tunnel?” Fiori asked.
“She doesn’t trust molecular barriers,” Dalton replied.
Both their voices were soft and distant, filtering through my suit’s comms.
Fiori tilted her head, considering me. “Have you ever seen one break and expose someone to vacuum?”
“Doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” I growled. It was no answer at all, but I wasn’t in the mood for intellectual debate. I checked the shriver’s charge and shoved it back on the clip on my hip, then picked up the torrent shriver from the far side bench and hefted it.
“Ready.”
“Be careful,” Dalton told me.
The door opened and a soft breeze tugged at me as the atmosphere inside the tunnel and the one inside the ship equalized. Ten meters of space separated me from the scratched, pitted and dented hull of the Ige Ibas. Dalton had lined up with the man-sized hatch on the side, which was likely the primary boarding port. A ship like this wouldn’t run to a full sized freight bay and ramp. It was a personnel carrier, and by its size, I judged it would be a cramped berth for anyone aboard her.
“Lyssa?”
“Here,” she whispered in my ear.
“Can you open the Ige Ibas’s primary hatch from there?”
“I’ll have to connect with the ship’s AI.”
“No,” I said quickly. “If the AI didn’t answer your hails, then I don’t want to stir it until I know what happened over there. Slide in under the AI and manipulate the hatch algorithms yourself.”
After a pause of several seconds, Lyssa said, “Let me see what I can do.” She didn’t sound upset, but I knew I had surprised her. And perhaps I had just challenged her, too. She might have orange hair and a temper, but she was still a conservative youngster. It wouldn’t occur to her to by-pass the shipmind because that was rude.
I had no problem being rude when it was required and, often, when it was not.
“No resistance at all…” Lyssa murmured.
I got the torrent shriver up as the hatch on the Ige Ibas slid open and revealed a dark airlock chamber. My heart slammed around, and I cursed silently. Fiori would read too much into that spiking beat.
I waited, my gaze not shifting away from that black hatch.
Nothing moved.
“Going in,” I warned. I said to Fiori, “Shut the door as soon as I move beyond it.” I didn’t look at her.
“Yes, Colonel.” Her tone was close to Lyssa’s meek one and it didn’t fool me any more than Lyssa’s did.
I moved to the very edge of the open door, then pushed myself off into the weightless ether between me and the yawning mystery of the Ige Ibas.