Blake’s 7: Warship (9 page)

Cally sat at a control console within the semi-circle of oblong boxes. As Blake approached, she rose to show him what she’d found. She had scraped the dust from the nearest three boxes to reveal a glass partition on top of each of them.

Behind the glass of the first one was a human body. She had been a young woman with medium-length brown hair and pale skin. Paler still in death, thought Blake. Her sapphire eyes were glazed and unseeing. Protected from the dust, the woman’s purple uniform looked as pressed and clean as the moment she had first put it on. All the signs indicated that had been a very long time ago. The right-hand side of her tunic was emblazoned with the five-armed Federation logo.

The next box along contained the body of a young man, about the same age.

‘Corpses,’ Blake said. ‘Which would explain why they’re in coffins.’

Cally nodded at the boxes, and encouraged Blake to look again. ‘Are you sure?’

‘They’ve got commemorative plaques,’ he said. Each one had a neatly printed sign attached to it. ‘Maykel Coleman, Barni Stafford, Geraint Jones… and look, it shows the date they died.’ He scraped the dust off a fourth box to reveal an older man. ‘This one’s called Roshan Nichani.’

Cally pointed at the signs. ‘They are in adjacent cabinets…’

‘Coffins,’ Blake insisted.

‘All right, adjacent coffins. But their supposed dates of death are years apart. Decades, in some cases.’

Blake looked blankly at Cally.

She tutted at him. ‘They are dates of birth. And those are not coffins. They’re life-support cabinets.’

Vila reached back into his toolkit for an adjuster. The work was fiddly, because the delicate instruments were hard to manipulate in his clumsy gloves.

He made the modification to the tool, and applied it to the outer edge of the next limpet mine, at the point where it had attached to the
Liberator
. The mine was a flattened sphere with odd blotches across its surface. Vila didn’t know if this was alien writing or some kind of design. Whatever it was, they were different on each of the mines. He had successfully detached a couple of the devices, and found that these alien things were not just clamped to the surface, they had managed to dig themselves in. Once he had prised each mine away, he saw the
Liberator
auto-repair kick in as it began to re-cover the outer surface, and the ship’s protective skin began to reform. Until then, auto-repair seemed unable to dislodge these foreign bodies.

Vila kept up a commentary on what he was doing. In part this was so that Jenna understood what he was up to – she could take over when he needed a break. But mostly, it was to keep his own spirits up, and not to think too much about the implications of what he was doing. In the middle distance, a patch of hull was brilliantly illuminated as one of the mines exploded. He dreaded that one of the other, nearer devices might explode beside him. Or worse, in his hand.

He tried to concentrate on this latest one. There was a click beneath his fingers as he pried it loose. ‘That’s another one done.’ He flicked it up and away, so that it vanished into the darkness. There was something very satisfying about flinging them into space. He shuffled along a few metres and removed another one.

Jenna had patched Avon in to the communications, so that they could keep him informed of progress.
‘How’s it going?’
his voice asked in Vila’s earpiece.

‘Ten down,’
Jenna’s voice replied.

‘Two hundred to go,’ added Vila.

‘There’s certainly plenty of this alien ordnance up here,’
agreed Jenna.
‘That explosion scattered it over quite a wide area.’

Vila twisted his head and shoulders to take in a wider view of the hull. ‘Are you getting these images, Avon?’

‘Keep your head still. It makes the scan easier.’

‘OK. How’s that?’ Vila bent back to face the hull, and paused over the nearest mine. He remained motionless for several seconds, to allow his suit sensors to capture the data. ‘See the marks they leave? They’re burrowing into the outer hull.’

‘Like ticks on an animal,’
suggested Jenna.

Vila didn’t like the suggestion. He shuffled along on his hands and knees, and began to apply his tools to the next one. ‘Avon, I hope you’re getting all of this. Have you worked out what’s powering these things yet?’

‘Orac is analysing your scanner data. He might have something.’

‘Or he might just be sulking.’ The limpet mine clicked out of its slot. Vila tugged it free, and cast it away into the darkness. He flexed his fingers inside his thick gloves. ‘Oh, it’s going to take forever. My hands are starting to spasm already.’

‘Let me have a go,’
suggested Jenna.
‘I’ve seen how you do it.’

Vila shunted sideways so that he could see her properly. He was usually reluctant to let others do his job, let alone explain to them how he worked his magic. But at the moment, his professional pride hurt less than his cramped fingers.

He cautiously held out the tool he had been using. ‘Be careful with this,’ he said. ‘It’s a sub-atomic probe. Can be dangerous.’ He indicated a limpet mine to her left. ‘Use it on that one there.’

Jenna waggled the probe in her gloved hand and her helmet moved from side to side as she considered several options.
‘Which one?’

Vila gestured with one gloved hand. ‘There. The one that’s…’ He stared at the limpet mine. ‘The one that’s moving!’

His helmet prevented him from rubbing his eyes in disbelief, so he blinked several times to dispel the illusion. It did not. He let out a little cry of alarm. Two of the blotches on the flat round top of the limpet mine had sprung up. They rotated, as though searching for something. Or, Vila thought, like a pair of eyes.

‘It’s looking at us!’

Jenna shuffled aside, and bumped into Vila. He clutched for a handhold, terrified of being dislodged from the hull and floating off into space – where, no doubt, the limpet mines he had thrown overboard would be waiting, peering at him with their eyes on stalks.

Vila saw more movement in the corner of his eye. Several of the alien devices had sprouted legs, and begun to sidle sideways, scratching the surface as they dragged along.

‘They’re all starting to move,’
Jenna said.

Right across the hull, the limpet mines were popping up antennae. Some had short, stubby protuberances that barely broke the surface. Others had longer, more slender feelers stretching curiously into the vacuum.

Revealed by the lights in her helmet, Jenna’s eyes were wide in amazement.
‘D’you know what I think, Vila?’

‘That it’s time to leave?’

‘I think that these aren’t just bits of ordnance left by the aliens,’
she continued.
‘These are the aliens!’

Vila gulped. The sound was disconcertingly loud inside his helmet. ‘They’re burrowing into
Liberator
, ready to explode. Avon?’

The brief pause seemed to last forever.

‘Answer, Avon! These things have all spotted us.’

‘What is it?’

‘Trouble, that’s what! We’re surrounded by alien suicide ticks!’

There was no pause this time. Avon had obviously seen the sensor readings from their hull suits.
‘You should get back inside, Vila. Now.’

‘Oh, d’you think so?’

‘Orac says he’s worked out how dislodge them all.’
Avon sounded muffled, as though he had his head buried in something he was working on. Unless he was hiding under a table.
‘We’re going to reflect our radiation flare shield back onto the hull.’

‘Very clever,’ said Vila.

‘Very dangerous,’
Avon told him.

Even as Avon spoke, Vila felt a tremor underneath his body. The hull was vibrating. The audio channel on his earpiece crackled like sizzling bacon. ‘When were you planning on doing this, Avon?’

‘No time like the present.’

The alien limpets nearby quivered and clung to the hull. Vila decided it was a good idea to do exactly the same.

‘It’s working!’
shouted Jenna in his ear. ‘Look, Vila – at the far end.’ He followed her outstretched arm.
‘The aliens are detaching from the hull.’

It was an autumn leaf fall in reverse. At the farthest part of the
Liberator
‘s scarred exterior, limpet mines came loose and floated off like specks until they vanished into space. One of them, as it span away, exploded in a magnesium flare of light.

‘So much for them,’ Vila told Jenna. ‘But what about you and me? What happens when the flare shield reaches us?’

‘Like I said…
‘ Avon’s voice was calm but insistent.
‘Get back inside.’

Avon’s words were starting to vanish into the comms background crackle. Vila could still just hear Jenna’s urgent voice. ‘
Vila! We have to get to the airlock. Now!’

He twisted to look back at the doorway in the middle distance. A crowd of alien creatures bristled and shivered, and started to converge on his position.

Cally studied Blake’s reaction. He’d been so confident that these were corpses, and he was evidently finding it hard to believe they could have survived.

‘No,’ Blake told her emphatically. ‘Look at this one. He can’t possibly be alive.’

Cally could sympathise. If those were dates of birth, then these people had been in the life capsules for hundreds of years. And Blake obviously thought he knew enough about this whole facility to realise how improbable that was. After all, he’d already told her that he recognised a lot of the equipment, even if it pre-dated his own experience of Federation technology. And if this sort of thing wasn’t feasible when Blake was working for the Federation, how could even older technology achieve it?

Blake edged further around the semi-circle. Cally watched him wipe the red-brown dust of centuries from the glass covers of several more cabinets. ‘All these others are the same. Eyes wide open, but sightless. No breath. No visible pulse.’

He reached across the nearest cabinet. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles. Cally smiled at the thought Blake might wake the man from his deathly slumber.

‘See? No reactions whatsoever. There’s no respiration on the other side of the glass.’ Blake bent down to examine the box more closely, his head pressed against the side panel. ‘It’s making a faint ticking sound. Some kind of machinery.’ He ran his fingers along one side of the casket, and slid them to the other edge. His fingers fumbled for a release catch.

Cally jumped up from her chair, alarmed. ‘Don’t open it!’

She was too late. Blake had located a clasp on the left-hand side of the casket. He stood up, very pleased with his discovery. The locking mechanism clicked under the pressure of his fingers.

The casket lid creaked briefly. As it opened, Cally heard the sucking sound of a vacuum breach, the sharp hiss of air. For an awful moment, it was as though the occupant of the cabinet had tried to take in one last whooping gasp of breath. And then there was a noise like a dull explosion.

A cloud of greyish, foul-smelling dust spewed from the casket, forced out beneath the half-removed lid. Blake leaped back with a startled cry, dropping the lid as he did so. It slammed back into position on the casket, wafting the disgusting cloud of grey dust across the room. It hung in the air for a while, before starting to settle slowly on all the surfaces around them.

Cally clasped her scarf to her nose and mouth, in a futile attempt to stave off the dreadful smell. At least she wouldn’t inhale any more of the cloud, whatever it was. Though she thought she could guess.

Blake coughed an apology. He wafted the remaining cloud out of his view, despite Cally’s renewed protests, and peered into the cabinet through the glass.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that one’s certainly dead now.’

‘Oh, Blake!’ Cally slapped him on his arm, outraged by his cavalier attitude.

Blake had the decency to look slightly ashamed. ‘I’m sorry. His body just… disintegrated.’ He peered in at the occupant of an adjacent casket. When he saw Cally’s infuriated expression, he raised his hands to indicate that he had no intention of opening this one. ‘So if the others aren’t dead, what’s happened to them?’

Cally removed the scarf from her face. ‘It is a form of profound sleep.’

‘You mean stasis? Suspended animation?’

‘No,’ Cally explained. ‘This is not a cryogenic system. These men and women are on the extreme periphery of life.’ She considered what this meant. ‘Perhaps that’s what I could hear. The whispers. It could be these people, a hair’s breadth from death.’

Blake pondered this. ‘They’re like Archangels, then?’

Cally considered this. ‘No,’ she concluded. ‘This is not cybernetics. And Kodyn’s project was long after this. You said it yourself – this is much older.’

‘And that’s my point.’ Blake stared around the huge cavern disbelievingly. ‘Just look at this place. Look at the age of the equipment. If the people in those coffins…’

‘Cabinets.’

‘Yes, all right. If they’re still alive, then they must have been like that for…’

Cally nodded. ‘For hundreds of years, yes.’

Blake set one of the fallen chairs upright, and beckoned for Cally to sit down again next to him. He stroked his chin in a gesture she found both familiar and reassuring.

‘Why do you think that is, Cally?’

Cally sat a little straighter in her chair, and closed her eyes in preparation. ‘I shall try to find out.’

‘What do you mean?’

She shushed him. ‘I need to concentrate.’

‘Is this more of your intelligent guesswork?’ he asked.

His voice was already getting fainter, along with the noises of the room as the background hum slipped beyond her hearing. The stark lighting filtering through her eyelids darkened. The acrid stench from the cabinet faded from her nostrils. She could no longer feel the warmth of the thermal suit against her body. It was like she was floating… floating…

She was in the cabinet. She was… in all of them.

She knew all people. She knew each of them. She
was
each of them. Coleman, Stafford, Nichani, Mattro… and all the others. Faint at first, so weak, but strengthening as she reached out. And from so long ago, so very long ago.