Nightflyers and Other Stories

“Take over?” Lommie sounded puzzled. “You been drinking again, Alys?”

“No, I’m serious. Use your system to break into the ship’s control, overwhelm Eris, countermand his orders, make the Nightflyer respond to us, down here. Wouldn’t you feel safer if we were in control?”

“Maybe,” the cyberneticist said doubtfully. “I could try, but why do that?”

“Just in case. We don’t have to use the capacity. Just so we have it, if an emergency arises.”

Lommie Thorne shrugged. “Emergencies and gas giants. I only want to put my mind at rest about Royd, whether he had anything to do with killing Lasamer.” She moved over to a readout panel, where a half-dozen meter-square viewscreens curved around a console, and brought one of them to life. Long fingers ghosted through holographic keys that appeared and disappeared as she used them, the keyboard changing shape again and yet again. The cyberneticist’s pretty face grew thoughtful and serious. “We’re in,” she said. Characters began to flow across a viewscreen, red flickerings in glassy black depths. On a second screen, a schematic of the Nightflyer appeared, revolved, halved; its spheres shifted size and perspective at the whim of Lommie’s fingers, and a line of numerals below gave the specifications. The cyberneticist watched, and finally froze both screens.

“Here,” she said, “here’s my answer about the hardware. You can dismiss your takeover idea, unless those gas giant people of yours are going to help. The Nightflyer’s bigger and smarter than our little system here. Makes sense, when you stop to think about it. Ship’s all automated, except for Royd.”

Her hands moved again, and two more display screens stirred. Lommie Thorne whistled and coaxed her search program with soft words of encouragement. “It looks as though there is a Royd, though. Configurations are all wrong for a robot ship. Damn, I would have bet anything.” The characters began to flow again, Lommie watching the figures as they drifted by. “Here’s life support specs, might tell us something.” A finger jabbed, and one screen froze yet again.

“Nothing unusual,” Alys Northwind said in disappointment.

“Standard waste disposal. Water recycling. Food processor, with protein and vitamin supplements in stores.” She began to whistle. “Tanks of Renny’s moss and neograss to eat up the CO

. Oxygen cycle, then. No methane or ammonia. Sorry about that.”

“Go sex with a computer!”

The cyberneticist smiled. “Ever tried it?” Her fingers moved again. “What else should I look for? You’re the tech, what would be a giveaway? Give me some ideas.”

“Check the specs for nurturant tanks, cloning equipment, that sort of thing,” the xenotech said. “That would tell us whether he was lying.”

“I don’t know,” Lommie Thorne said. “Long time ago. He might have junked that stuff. No use for it.”

“Find Royd’s life history,” Northwind said. “His mother’s. Get a readout on the business they’ve done, all this alleged trading. They must have records. Account books, profit-and-loss, cargo invoices, that kind of thing.” Her voice grew excited, and she gripped the cyberneticist from behind by her shoulders. “A log, a ship’s log! There’s got to be a log. Find it!”

“All right.” Lommie Thorne whistled, happy, at ease with her system, riding the data winds, curious, in control. Then the screen in front of her turned a bright red and began to blink. She smiled, touched a ghost key, and the keyboard melted away and reformed under her. She tried another tack. Three more screens turned red and began to blink. Her smile faded.

“What is it?”

“Security,” said Lommie Thorne. “I’ll get through it in a second. Hold on.” She changed the keyboard yet again, entered another search program, attached on a rider in case it was blocked. Another screen flashed red. She had her machine chew the data she’d gathered, sent out another feeler. More red. Flashing. Blinking. Bright enough to hurt the eyes. All the screens were red now. “A good security program,” she said with admiration. “The log is well protected.”

Alys Northwind grunted. “Are we blocked?”

“Response time is too slow,” Lommie Thorne said, chewing on her lower lip as she thought. “There’s a way to fix that.” She smiled, and rolled back the soft black metal of her sleeve.

“What are you doing?”

“Watch,” she said. She slid her arm under the console, found the prongs, jacked in.

“Ah,” she said, low in her throat. The flashing red blocks vanished from her readout screens, one after the other, as she sent her mind coursing into the Nightflyer’s system, easing through all the blocks. “Nothing like slipping past another system’s security. Like slipping onto a man.” Log entries were flickering past them in a whirling, blurring rush, too fast for Alys Northwind to read. But Lommie read them.

Then she stiffened. “Oh,” she said. It was almost a whimper. “Cold,” she said. She shook her head and it was gone, but there was a sound in her ears, a terrible whooping sound. “Damn,” she said, “that’ll wake everyone.” She glanced up when she felt Alys’s fingers dig painfully into her shoulder, squeezing, hurting.

A grey steel panel slid almost silently across the access to the corridor, cutting off the whooping cry of the alarm. “What?” Lommie Thorne said.

“That’s an emergency airseal,” said Alys Northwind in a dead voice. She knew starships. “It closes where they’re about to load or unload cargo in vacuum.”

Their eyes went to the huge curving outer airlock above their heads. The inner lock was almost completely open, and as they watched it clicked into place, and the seal on the outer door cracked, and now it was open half a meter, sliding, and beyond was twisted nothingness so burning-bright it seared the eyes.

“Oh,” said Lommie Thorne, as the cold coursed up her arm. She had stopped whistling.

Alarms were hooting everywhere. The passengers began to stir. Melantha Jhirl tumbled from her sleepweb and darted into the corridor, nude, frantic, alert. Karoly d’Branin sat up drowsily. The psipsych muttered fitfully in drug-induced sleep. Rojan Christopheris cried out in alarm.

Far away metal crunched and tore, and a violent shudder ran through the ship, throwing the linguists out of their sleepwebs, knocking Melantha from her feet.

In the command quarters out of the Nightflyer was a spherical room with featureless white walls, a lesser sphere – a suspended control console – floating in its center. The walls were always blank when the ship was in drive; the warped and glaring underside of spacetime was painful to behold.

But now darkness woke in the room, a holoscope coming to life, cold black and stars everywhere, points of icy unwinking brilliance, no up and no down and no direction, the floating control sphere the only feature in the simulated sea of night.

The Nightflyer had shifted out of drive.

Melantha Jhirl found her feet again and thumbed on a communicator. The alarms were still hooting, and it was hard to hear. “Captain,” she shouted, “what’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Royd’s voice replied. “I’m trying to find out. Wait.”

Melantha waited. Karoly d’Branin came staggering out into the corridor, blinking and rubbing his eyes. Rojan Christopheris was not long behind him. “What is it? What’s wrong?” he demanded, but Melantha just shook her head. Lindran and Dannel soon appeared as well. There was no sign of Marij-Black, Alys Northwind, or Lommie Thorne. The academicians looked uneasily at the seal that blocked cargo hold three. Finally Melantha told Christopheris to go look. He returned a few minutes later. “Agatha is still unconscious,” he said, talking at the top of his voice to be heard over the alarms. “The drugs still have her. She’s moving around, though. Crying out.”

“Alys and Lommie?”

Christopheris shrugged. “I can’t find them. Ask your friend Royd.”

The communicator came back to life as the alarms died. “We have returned to normal space,” Royd’s voice said, “but the ship is damaged. Hold three, your computer room, was breached while we were under drive. It was ripped apart by the flux. The computer dropped us out of drive automatically, fortunately for us, or the drive forces might have torn my entire ship apart.”

“Royd,” said Melantha, “Northwind and Thorne are missing.”

“It appears your computer was in use when the hold was breached,” Royd said carefully. “I would presume them dead, although I cannot say that with certainty. At Melantha’s request I have deactivated most of my monitors, retaining only the lounge input. I do not know what transpired. But this is a small ship, and if they are not with you, we must assume the worst.” He paused briefly. “If it is any consolation, they died swiftly and painlessly.”

“You killed them,” Christopheris said, his face red and angry. He started to say more, but Melantha slipped her hand firmly over his mouth. The two linguists exchanged a long, meaningful look. “Do we know how it happened, captain?” Melantha asked.

“Yes,” he said, reluctantly.

The xenobiologist had taken the hint, and Melantha took away her hand to let him breathe. “Royd?” she prompted.

“It sounds insane, Melantha,” his voice replied, “but it appears your colleagues opened the hold’s loading lock. I doubt they did so deliberately, of course. They were using the system interface to gain entry to the Nightflyer’s data storage and controls, and they shunted aside all the safeties.”

“I see,” Melantha said. “A terrible tragedy.”

“Yes. Perhaps more terrible than you think. I have yet to discover the extent of damage to my ship.”

“We should not keep you if you have duties to perform,” Melantha said. “All of us are shocked, and it is difficult to talk now. Investigate the condition of your ship, and we’ll continue our discussion at a more opportune time. Agreed?”

“Yes,” said Royd.

Melantha turned off the communicator. Now, in theory, the device was dead; Royd could neither see nor hear them.