The Mythmakers: An Impulse Power Story Page 3

  “Okay.” Steffi dredged deep to find her calmest tone. “I’ll want two-man teams. Rex and I go first, then McKendrick and Flyte. Alex, you’ll be our eyes and ears in the cockpit. Chance will stay with you.”

  “Someone go wake up Flyte!” Rex whooped and clamped his huge hands on Steffi’s shoulders. “This could be major.”

  Steffi agreed, but that was an awfully portentous word in space.

  Major.

  A prefix to beware.

  *

  Her gentle hop from the tail of the Albatross felt underdone. A spit with no momentum that would dribble down one’s chin. For a brief moment she glimpsed the infinite black sea beneath her, with its untouchable sprinkles of light resting on the bottom. Telling her just how insignificant she was. Telling her she was being a bloody fool. The gap couldn’t have been more than ten feet, yet her glide across seemed to last forever. Her scalp tingled. She focused on the caved-in grey piping in the centre of the damage ahead. One pipe in particular had been rent inward and now lay dead straight, a lucky platform on which she could enter the vessel. Otherwise, what an unholy mess this great impact had made. Slashed and warped metal pocks covered much of the vessel’s exterior around the damage. Definitely not an explosion from inside, as everything was twisted inward: the ranks of piping, the four layers of thick metal, a strange silver mesh that looked razor sharp where it had been severed. Whatever had hit this vessel had done so at a savage velocity and/or with tremendous weight.

  When? Where? What had happened to the occupants?

  She vented oxygen—two gentle squirts—from the booster rig strapped to her back. Enough to swing her up to the horizontal, feet first, a few metres from the pipe above the opening. She had aimed well. One or two tiny course corrections. Dab the brake, dab the brake, and…

  Touchdown. Lock the boots into place. Turn carefully and walk upside down for a few steps. No, don’t look behind. There’s no such thing as ground or ceiling or Isaac Newton out there. Focus on the next step. That’s reality. Easy does it. Now bend down and touch the pipe with both hands. Now loosen both boots at once and push off with your hands. Don’t forget to switch the boots back on.

  There! She was standing upright on the pipe platform. Inside an alien ship. An alien ship. Steffi Savannah, Captain. Was she the first human to boldly go…? Whatever. She heaved a heavy sigh and focused on the minutiae. Simple steps. Hmm. They were anything but that. Without gravity, her reconnaissance would be awkward and painstaking. She gritted her teeth. A little thing like that wasn’t going to dampen her conquest. She was nothing if not a veteran of the spacewalker species.

  How long had this vessel been drifting? It spun on all three axes, out of control, but how had it lost power? Had the crew been forced to abandon it? To seek refuge on the nearest rock, call home from there? Something so big had to have a grand purpose. What was it carrying?

  “Captain? What can you see?” McKendrick blurted out over the comm channel.

  “Not much so far. Looks like the pipe’s collapsed an entire inner panel. Peeled it to one side. There’s a gaping hole I can fit through. Beyond that seems to be dimly lit by some sort of phosphorescence coating the walls of a narrow tunnel. High ceiling. No idea how far in it goes. A long way. Tell Rex to cross over. Then you and Flyte can follow. I’m going on ahead.”

  “Will do. Rex’s having a bit of trouble with his oxygen regulator. Shouldn’t be too long. Watch yourself, Cap.”

  “Affirm that.”

  The farther she crept, the smaller she felt inside this cool cathedral of a ship. Complex spiral patterns embedded in the flat metal floor seemed very alien indeed. The purple phosphorescent walls pulsed ever so gently as she passed, as though they were reacting to her body heat and the light of her torch. She peered up. Oil to mist to darkness. A gargantuan feat of engineering, hundreds of feet high. She glanced down. The readouts on her cuff now suggested a balmy temperature, adequate oxygen, and a significant increase in gravity.

  How could that be?

  She tapped the gauge with the tip of her glove. She took another two steps.

  What?

  The readout had changed all right. But the gravity was now identical to that of the Albatross. Steffi took two steps back. Sure enough, the atmospheres halved.

  The answer had to be an invisible gravity field containing sufficient air and temperature to support life. But how big was the field? If life still existed aboard, what might it be like? Hostile? In cryo-sleep? Should she turn back and declare the salvage over—play it safe?

  No way. This was monumental. Only a chicken-shit would bow out now when the exact environmental conditions to support human life had clicked into place around her. She told McKendrick what she’d discovered and pressed on.

  “Copy that, Cap. This is getting weirder by the step. Oh and Rex sends his regards—he’s sorry he was too thick to check his gear beforehand. You might want to hang fire ’til we replace his tank.”

  “Understood.”

  Steffi lumbered on down the endless corridor, four pounding heartbeats to every thumping step. Moments ago, her spacesuit had felt no heavier than her dad’s winter cardigan; now it pulled on her thighs and anchored her lungs like an antique deep-sea diving suit. Clank, scrape, clank, scrape went her boots. The oily Rorschach walls scrambled and swirled while the light from her helmet lamp roved over them. The surface seemed alive, but it was an optical illusion. No sign of an opening. Neither a narrowing nor a widening of the corridor at any height. She wondered how far her curiosity would last.

  Fifteen minutes in and no structural change in the changeling surface. Her palms and neck and the small of her back clung to her thermal undersuit. Moisture streamed down the walls and trickled away through small grids at either side of the convex floor. She checked her readouts again. Gravity and oxygen were the same. The temperature, though, had almost doubled. Thirty-eight degrees Celsius.

  The ceiling of mist lowered to around fifty feet above her. Her helmet fogged. She made a higgledy clear streak with the knuckles of her glove.

  “Moder, jeg er træt, nu vil jeg sove, Lad mig ved dit Hjerte slumre ind; Græd dog ei det maa Du først mig love, Thi Din Taare brænder paa min Kind.”

  “McKendrick, keep it down,” she snapped. “Unless it’s important.”

  “Wasn’t me, Cap.”

  Steffi smacked her helmet. Had her comm receiver gone screwy? She realised the first voice hadn’t sounded like a woman’s anyway. “Rex, you there?”

  “Here, Cap. Everything okay?”

  “Was that you singing?”

  “Nope. Not me. You don’t wanna hear my singing.”

  She paused to untie the knot in her brain. She must have imagined the voice. Was her oxygen mix okay? Hmm, perfectly fine.

  The foreign man’s voice grew louder, like a radio in a slow-approaching sky-cab. Steffi heard every crooned word:

  “Her er koldt og ude Stormen truer, Men i Drømme, der er Alt saa smukt, Og de søde Englebørn jeg skuer Naar jeg har det trætte Øie lukt.

  “Moder, seer Du Englen ved min Side? Hører Du den deilige Musik? See, han har to Vinger smukke hvide, Dem han sikkert af vor Herre fik—”

  Clink. The toe of her left boot scuffed the floor. The song ceased. Her lamplight shone across an incongruous form resting against the right-hand wall ahead. It made her knuckles clench. She stopped and stared until her visor steamed again. What was it—that crouched figure—in front of her?

  She crept, shifting her weight from one boot to the other, careful not to clang them again and scare the creature away.

  “Hello?” she called.

  Water trickled under the floor into some kind of drainage system.

  “What are you?” came the reply. “Have you come to kill us?”

  Steffi had never heard the accent before. It sounded a little like German, though.

  “The light dazzles me. I cannot see your face,” the voice continued. “Are you a man or a woman?”

  �
�A woman.”

  She closed in and saw that he was a trim, pale but handsome man with shoulder-length blond hair. Naked as Adam, he glistened with sweat. No hair anywhere else on his body. His narrow blue eyes squinted further in the beam of her lamp.

  “What do you want here?” he asked, still crouching—solemnly, it seemed to Steffi.

  “We’re just investigating your crippled ship. We saw it spinning aimlessly, and we wanted to find out what had happened. No one builds ships like this. Who are you?”

  “First tell me your name.”

  “Steffi Savannah, captain of the Albatross. And you are?”

  “You have a beautiful voice, Steffi Savannah.” He rose and stood facing her, arms akimbo. “I am Arne.”

  Her turn to be dazzled. His extraordinarily athletic physique would have been enough to make her shiver with delight, but he was also well endowed. No cuts or abrasions anywhere on his skin that she could see—unheard of among deep-space crews, due to the multitasking nature of maintaining a ship—and he stood without slouch, without pose, and without inhibition. Steffi highlighted every part of his anatomy with her torchlight. He was one hell of a fine specimen. Maybe too perfect.

  “You are human, right?”

  Arne offered her his hand without hesitation. “Yes and no.”

  The gentle tugs of her conscience would at one time have been powerful yanks to rip the carpet out from under her, make her step back and exercise caution. But she was not that girl anymore. Diving into risk from a platform of indifference had kept her in the smuggling trade for a decade. It should not have, but it had. It was her peculiar knack. She accepted his hand and let him lead her twenty feet along the corridor. Neither of them spoke. Suddenly he faced the wall and, with the spidery grip of his free hand, pressed against the phosphorous. The wall spiralled open from the point of contact to reveal a navy blue passageway shimmering with turquoise light. She gasped and gripped him tighter. Where was he leading her? His living quarters? To see his captain? Hmm…what if he wasn’t as benign as he seemed?

  With her free hand, she flicked the toggle for Internal Comm Only on her cuff. At the very least, she had to keep her crew apprised of the situation.

  “Rex? You there?” She spoke into the side of her helmet away from Arne.

  “Go ahead, Cap.”

  “I’ve found a member of the crew. A foreigner. He seems friendly but I’ve never seen anything like this place, so tread softly. In fact, don’t come up here ’til I give the green light. We don’t want to alarm them. You copy that?”

  “Loud and clear. I’ll hang back ’til you holler, but, Cap…don’t wander too far.”

  “I’ll buzz you in fifteen,” Steffi explained. “If I don’t, make sure you’re armed before you come get me.”

  “Roger that.” Rex’s curt, emphatic voice lent steel to her resolve. He might not be keen on her plan, but Rex knew what an order meant, and there was no one she’d rather have backing her up if things got tight.

  She glanced down to flick the audio toggle to External and…wow.

  Steffi widened her eyes. Speaking of tight.

  Arne’s ass was a thing of beauty. A sporting ass. It seemed unusual for a man to have no leg hair, but then she remembered where she was. And he’d said he was only part human. What could that mean? What did it matter when he looked this good?

  “Where are we going?”

  “To where we live.”

  “We?”

  “Me and my kind.”

  She was about to ask him what exactly that might be when the smooth curved passageway opened up to a vast, breathtaking lake overgrown with evergreen trees and multicoloured, fruit-bearing plants. The banks had at one time been smooth and artificial—some sort of a giant reservoir or swimming pool—but vegetation had almost completely hidden them. A low vapour cloud hovered a hundred and fifty feet above the water. Lying around the water’s edge, on a blanket of spongy green grass, dozens of naked men and women seemed to be basking or sleeping. All of them were breathtaking to behold.

  “I think you should take your clothes off, Steffi,” Arne said matter-of-factly.

  “Why? How do I know the air isn’t poisonous to my kind?” That last part sounded dopey. Her kind?

  “I do not know what you mean.”

  “You said you’re not fully human.”

  “But all humans breathe the same air. I think you will be very uncomfortable here if you do not undress.”

  She might have taken that for a threat, but Arne had a way about him, a forthrightness that seemed almost child-like. At least, that was how she perceived him.

  “First, tell me what you’re doing here. What is this place? Who built your ship? What is its purpose?”

  A boyish smile dimpled his cheeks, bared his perfect teeth. “If I reveal all that you want to know, will you undress?”

  “Yes.” She smiled back with no intention of honouring that promise. There was something unreal about this whole setup, this quasi-human paradise, that screamed, “Get the fuck out, right now!”

  But first she had to know its secret.

  Chapter Four

  “I don’t recognize that accent. German?” Steffi asked her gorgeous chaperon.

  “Danish.” Arne led her back through the aqua tunnel. “We speak fluent Danish and English and Latin.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Is it? I am afraid we have lost touch with modern linguistics. What do people speak now?”

  “Um, Russian, bullshit and bad English.” Steffi watched his reaction, a from-the-gut, infectious laugh, from the corner of her eye. Such a sweet guy. Guileless. No hint of a façade. But how could anyone not know that fifty percent of the colonies spoke Russian? Arne sang again while he led her back through the turquoise passageway, this time of dolphins and fjords and a beautiful woman called Steffi. He admitted he’d improvised the latter. But it sounded cute.

  “So what was that you were singing in the corridor outside?” she asked him.

  “It was ‘The Dying Child’, an old verse by Hans Christian Andersen. It is quite sad, but if you would like to learn it, I would be glad to—”

  “Maybe later?” Steffi glanced left at the main corridor, hoping Rex and the others had kept their distance. Things were going so well with Arne, and his habitat appeared so peaceful, she didn’t want someone brazen like McKendrick fouling up this acquaintance. She remembered her own words—tread softly.

  Good, Rex had kept his word. Nothing but shadow and dim, jiving patterns. Yet, her crew would be on tenterhooks back there, wondering what the hell was going on. It hadn’t been fifteen minutes, but Steffi reopened her private comm channel. “Rex, Cap here.”

  “Go on, Cap.”

  “Everything’s okay. The compartment holds some sort of lagoon. Vegetation. Dozens of personnel sunbathing inside.”

  “Sorry, did you say sunbathing?”

  Steffi snickered. “Copy that. The place appears benign. Repeat, the place appears completely benign. One of the crew is giving me a guided tour. I might be gone a while, so switch your e-bands on and I’ll flash you every half hour to let you know I’m good.” She rolled her eyes. McKendrick would be tittering at the use of the word flash.

  “What do you want us to do, Cap?” asked Rex.

  Hmm. Could she risk some kind of set-to? Her crew would have to meet the lake dwellers sooner or later, but it would be better if she and Arne were there to make the introductions. Without that, the chances of overreaction were too great.

  “You’re to cool your heels ’til I come get you,” Steffi ordered. “We can’t risk alarming them.” She paused to think. “But I tell you what, if I’m not back in one hour, you’re to head back to the Albatross. No sense in you sitting there, wasting oxygen. Whatever happens, I’ll keep in touch. And remember, every thirty.”

  “Copy,” affirmed Rex.

  Arne led her a long way down the main corridor. The phosphorescent flanks took on a magical aura, and she loved the new ti
ngle inside her. Even the clank-clank of her boots seemed soft and welcome. The mysterious vessel now held no opportunity for conquest or salvage, only some kind of beating heart.

  He may have been without guile or guise or even pubic hair, but Arne was a man all right. She felt it in the tug of his fingers on her wrist, the purpose in his stride, the way his blue eyes struck sparks in her whenever he turned, enflaming her loins like no one had since Hellespont. He gripped the wall again with his fingertips. Another panel spiralled open to reveal a similar blue passageway. Much darker inside this one. Her gauge reckoned the temperature had fallen to ten degrees Celsius. But Arne didn’t appear to be cold. No goose bumps that she could see. No shrivelling.

  He said, “Do not be afraid. We are quite safe.”

  Whatever that meant. Steffi felt sure nothing would surprise her after what she’d just seen.

  Take that back. She rocked on her heels, gasping as she looked up.

  A gargantuan tank full of water—she couldn’t see how high or how wide—stood before her. Sub-aqua creepers climbed the inside of the glass, their loose limbs jiving in an unseen current. The tank’s bed consisted of dark sand and rocks and the skeletons of medium-sized fish. She had never been to an aquarium, although this was no aquarium. It was simply too big, and the insanity of holding this much water on a spaceship defied all logic.

  “It’s amazing. What’s it for?”

  “Keep looking.” He let go of her hand for a moment and left to touch a pattern on the wall behind them. When he returned, the water’s pigment had already begun to lighten as though it was a swimming pool in one of the hoity-toity October resorts, lit at night from underneath. It took a few minutes for the entire tank to glow turquoise, the higher echelons far brighter than the deep. As she was about to remark on the extraordinary sea garden—its array of fish and colour, its lack of murk and mulch—a long, slender silhouette snaked toward her from the distant depths. Undulating through the water like a giant eel, it had huge flippers and a bulky midsection. She stepped back, swallowing all the dampness from her mouth. The behemoth cruised, watching her from the mystery of its silhouette, before it dove to the bottom and, gathering frightening momentum, whooshed up right in front of her.