Requiem (36 page)

Seline was back
on Yarfor Station, walking down the Valley, past the bodies lining
the walls, past Death as he stepped over the homeless, scouring the
sunken faces, waiting like a vulture to take whatever it could get
from the dead and the soon to be.

And so Seline
asked herself, 'What was the difference between walking through the
Valley every day and seeing two dead Yurrick on a ruined space
ship?'

But, like the
bodies on Earth, Seline
knew
that the two Yurrick in the
next room were dead and that made all the difference.

Therin was
still staring at Seline.

'I can try,'
Seline said to herself at first and then into the comm.

'Good.' Therin
moved back.

Seline looked
at the arrows printed on the door, indicating which way it would
open. Left. To anchor herself, she pulled her feet up to her chest
and placed against the wall, on the frame either side of the door
so she was straddling it. She hit the key on her forearm and her
feet
thunked
against the wall.

She placed her
fingers in the grooves on the right side of the door and pulled. It
didn't move. She reset her fingers and concentrated on the imagined
muscles within her arm. She could see the metal of the handle bend
beneath her fingers as her grip tightened and she pulled again. It
jarred suddenly but only an inch. She kept pulling. Therin watched
silently next to her. Seline's arm was shaking under the pressure.
It jarred another inch. She leaned forward and yanked back as hard
as she could. The pressure released, the door gave way and flew
back into its cavity in the wall. Therin grabbed hold of Seline to
steady her.

Therin moved
through the open door. Seline turned off her boot magnets and
followed her through. She could see easily enough but instinctively
ran her hand along the wall. She kept expecting something to break
out of the silence of the vacuum. Maybe whatever destroyed the ship
was still on board somewhere and the scanners missed it. Maybe it
was waiting behind her right now, using the bodies as a
distraction. Seline looked back over her shoulder as discretely as
she could. She saw nothing but then... movement, just through the
open door on the other side of the partition. She knew it was
impossible but she could've sworn she heard something. She kept her
eyes on the hole. She was about to tell Therin that they weren't
alone when she noticed that the movement was actually coming from a
chair that had come unbolted from the wall and was turning
aimlessly on itself in the space just next to the door.

'When you're
finished looking for your Boogeyman, Seline, we've got work to do
in here,' said Therin.

Seline turned
reluctantly and Therin's voice crackled over the comm again. This
time she was talking to Mercer. 'The two bodies are... intact. Not
a trace of any superficial damage.'

Seline moved
further into the room. The bodies were on the far side, moving free
from gravity. One of the bodies was frozen with its arms
outstretched, spinning around and around like the hand of an old
clock. Therin reached out and grabbed onto his shoulder to stop the
spinning. She approached his side, leaving his arms outstretched
and looked into his visor. She switched off her night-vision and
activated a torch from the tip of her finger.

'His eyes,' she
said. '… you getting this, Mercer?'

'Receiving your
video feed, Therin.'

The bodies
didn't look as bad as Seline had expected. No gaping wounds, no
severed limbs, not even a scratch. They looked completely unharmed,
as if they had drifted off while they were sleeping. She found that
she couldn't look away from the face Therin was examining. It was
blank, not serene or at peace, just empty, hollow. Seline switched
off her night-vision as well. By Therin's torch light she realised
that the crewman's eyes had been turned a pale, milky white. If the
Yurrick's eyes were those of the dead then what the hell was this?
Not dead, not alive, but caught somewhere in between, in limbo.

'The body has
been drifting here for weeks,' said Therin. 'So it's already well
into the mid stages of decomposition. Locked inside the suit with a
tank full of oxygen... the bacteria in his body have started to eat
away at the flesh. That explains the haze of gas in the suit and
the pale skin colour but not the eyes. The eyes of the dead
normally fade a little but nothing like this.'

Therin moved to
the other body that was held close to the wall. She held her torch
up to his visor and saw the same thing. Pale skin, gasses from
decomposition, and where the blackness of his eyes should have
been, two white screens.

Therin pressed
some keys on her forearm, opened her palm and ran a bright green
scanning light over the body from his head to his feet.

'What are you
doing?' asked Seline.

'Checking for
any physiological anomalies.'

'Such as?'

'Such as an
alien host or symbiote.'

Seline
suppressed a shiver.

Therin finished
running the sliver of light over the first body then turned and did
the same with the other. 'Nothing,' she said. 'They're clear.'

Seline turned
her night-vision back on. She was settling into her suit, feeling a
little more comfortable. 'So what do we do with the bodies?' she
asked. 'Shouldn't we, maybe, check their suit cameras or their
biometrics and find out what happened?'

Therin turned
to Seline. 'It's good to see you're actually using your brain,
Seline.'

Was that a
compliment or an insult? I can never fucking tell with her.

'But,' Therin
continued, 'the suits these two are wearing don't have cameras
installed in the visors. They
do
have biometrics but the
battery supply in the suits has run dead so we'd have to reactivate
the suits in order to get to the data. We can't do that from
here.'

'So do we take
the bodies back to the cruiser?'

'We'll do that
after we've checked the rest of the ship. For now we'll have to
leave them here.' She cast her eyes over the rest of the small lab.
At the sealed display cases covering the walls. 'We'll take some of
their planetary samples with us as well when we come back for
them.'

Therin looked
at the bodies one more time. Seline could see into her visor. She
was speaking but her voice wasn't coming over the comm. Seline was
about to tell her that she couldn't hear her when she realised that
Therin wasn't talking to her. She was talking to the bodies. A
eulogy. Seline waited for Therin to finish then followed her out of
the lab.

Seline followed
her back into the lab then through the broken partition and into
the tank room. The coffin tanks were all empty and apart from the
panels and miscellaneous debris, there was nothing much to see.
Therin didn't give the tanks a second glance. She continued with
Seline through the next partition into quarters and mess hall. It
was sparse. A display screen, a round table, seats bolted to the
floor, a food and drink dispenser, the nozzles of which had all
been torn off. Curdled lumps of paste floated around the room,
clumsily clinging to walls and tables only to break apart into
fibrous particles. All the other liquids would have long since
evaporated in the vacuum. On the side of the room directly opposite
the main table was another door in the floor/ wall leading to
another of the cubicle rooms.

'That's the
navigation room,' said Therin. 'The other body is in here but the
door hasn't been tampered with. The Ordonians didn't bother going
in there either by the looks of things.'

The other
body. The half body.

Seline
swallowed. 'We're going in there aren't we?'

'Soon. I want
to check the bridge first. The primary blackbox is our best chance
at understanding what happened. Besides,' said Therin, 'according
to the scans from our drones, the navigation room is still
pressurised. So as soon as you open the door that body, not to
mention everything inside that room, is going to want out pretty
quick.'

Seline managed
to keep the images from her mind. She looked across at Therin. 'So
there's a body in there but the room's still pressurised? Wouldn't
that mean that whatever destroyed this ship somehow killed this
person without even entering the room?'

'Maybe but we
don't want to jump to conclusions just yet. We don't know the
circumstances of their death.'

'Well, can't we
get the drones to open the door? I'm... I'm really not that good
with bodies.'

'You handled
the other two just fine.'

'Yeah. Whole
bodies, not fractions of bodies.'

Therin pushed
away from the navigation room door towards the hole in the
partition. Seline followed her.

'Therin?' she
asked. 'Can't we use the drones to open the door?'

Still no
response.

They moved
through the thin passage of computer banks, to the very front of
the ship. Therin checked inside one of the open doors, into the
small armoury. A few stray bullets were all the Ordonian scavengers
left behind.

Seline followed
Therin into the bridge. She looked around for some kind of
reference point but the room lacked any real definition. Out of
curiosity, Seline switched off her night-vision and used the torch
on the tip of her finger to light the surrounding space. The entire
room was charred into jet blackness.

'What happened
in here?' she asked, more to herself than to Therin.

Seline ran her
fingers over what had been the main bridge console. She could hear
the coarseness grading against her fingertips.

Therin was
examining the controls. She knelt down and looked beneath where the
console stuck out from the wall.

'Shit. The
vultures took it,' she said.

'You mean the
black box?'

Therin pulled
some loose cables from beneath the charred face of the bridge
console. She threw the burnt strands of metal behind her. They
drifted past Seline's head. Therin looked further into the cavity
behind where the panel had been and felt around inside.

'Yes,' she
said. 'It's supposed to be hidden in here behind a panel.'

Seline looked
around the room as if she might see the black box floating in plain
sight but saw only burnt pieces of lining and broken ship
internals.

'Would they
even be able to access it? This room has been totally scorched,'
said Seline.

'The
information on it will still be intact but it will take them a few
generations to access it. They probably took it so they could try
to sell it back to us... or just out of spite.'

Seline recalled
what Therin had said earlier. 'Didn't you say that this was
supposed to be the primary black box? Does that mean there's a
secondary one or something?'

Therin stood up
and examined the rest of the room. 'Yes. The secondary black box in
the navigation room. Luckily the Ordonians didn't go in there.'

'Yeah, lucky
us,' said Seline.

'Anything else
in there?' asked Mercer over the comm.

'Nothing you
haven't seen already,' said Therin. She began to move from the
room. 'Our only chance of finding out what happened will be on the
camera footage stored on the secondary black box.'

'Right.' Seline
turned and headed back towards the sealed door to the navigation
room.

They pushed
through the centre of ship, moving much faster this time.

'So what do you
think did this?' asked Seline.

'Impossible to
say. Something big.'

'NeoCorp?'

'No. I've never
seen or heard of something that could do this to a ship. At least
not one of our ships.'

'Couldn't
NeoCorp have developed something?'

'If they did
then we would know about it.'

'What about the
Ordonians?'

'Even less
likely.'

They came to
the navigation room door once again.

'So... about
these bodies,' began Seline. 'Can't we use the drones to open the
door?'

Therin,
floating at the door, turned to face Seline, 'Tialus sent
us
over here to sort this out, not the drones.'

'Yeah, I
noticed. I'm still kind of wondering why she did that.'

'Things are
different when you aren't looking through the eyes of a machine,
and you need the experience. Just be thankful she didn't send you
here by yourself.'

Seline looked
at the door then back to Therin. 'Right... thanks.'

Therin motioned
to the door with her head. 'Let's get this thing opened. Make sure
you stand behind the door as you pull it. As soon as it opens it's
going to depressurise the room and everything's going to come
flying out at once. You're also going to have to hold back a bit.
We only want the door opened enough to let the air out. We want to
keep the body from flying out.'

Seline nodded
gravely. Therin stood to the side as she held her feet to the wall
and turned on the magnets in her boots. She steadied her footing
and reached towards the door handle, curling her fingers around the
grip. Seline took a deep breath then gave the door a half hearted
tug but nothing happened. She shuffled her feet into a steadier
position. She closed her eyes and started counting.

'Ten...
ni-'

'There is no
way you're starting all the way from ten!' interrupted Therin.
'Grab hold again. I'm going to count you down from three.' Therin
floated behind Seline. 'Three...'

Seline's heart
thumped violently in her chest.

'Two...'

She realised
she really needed to take a piss.

'One...'

For the
remaining split second she wished she'd stayed on Earth with
NeoCorp.

'Now!'

She yanked as
hard as she could at the door. The contents of the room rushed
through the slit that had been made. Seline recoiled from the
rushing air, tinged as it was with fragments of glass and metal and
a redness of blood. She almost fell back into Therin's arms but
managed to keep herself upright.