They must have saved the ballroom for dessert,” Captain Bates said, when the tube cave segued somewhat abruptly into a portion of clearly identifiable ship’s corridor, complete with separate deck, bulkheads, and ceilings. The carpet and wall coverings were even intact as were the ornate sandblasted-glass double doors leading to the opulent room beyond.
Khorii checked her gauges. The temperature was barely warm enough to sustain life, as was the oxygen level. “There was supposed to be a big dance,” she mused. “But when the plague broke out, people decided to board their private ships and leave. The captain killed them rather than let them spread the epidemic. So the ballroom may have been deserted.”
“There would have been serving staff and musicians, maybe,” Captain Bates said. “Anyhow, that’s how it is on vids I’ve seen advertising the posh liners.”
“They were still people,” Khorii said. “They probably ran out to see what all the fuss was about and got killed, too.”
The ballroom was completely empty, however, and the vast walls, covered in what looked like blue and white marble tiles, was bare of bodies or alien structures of any kind.
Captain Bates tried to activate the light panel on the wall inside the door, but nothing happened, which was not surprising. The power had probably been drained long ago by whatever was transforming the ship into an alien cityscape.
They crossed the ballroom, their boots echoing against the stone. Linyaari helmets permitted the wearer to hear external sounds, though the helmet worn by Captain Bates did not. Their steps on the “digested” material had made no noticeable sound, Khorii realized. If the shifting of the stuff made any kind of noise, they had been too preoccupied by its strangeness and by the psychic alarms drawing them onward to notice.
As they crossed the room, those alarms grew louder, until Khorii realized the distress was no longer merely in her mind, but audible.
“Someone is crying,” she said.
Captain Bates turned deliberately and looked into her face, her eyes widening in alarm.
“Someone else is shushing,” Mikaaye said.
“It’s coming from behind that wall,” Ariin said. “There, do you see the doorway?”
“It probably leads to the kitchens,” Captain Bates said, her breath puffing in shallow counterpoint to her words. “This would have been the large dining room when there was no party.”
They wasted no more time in reaching the door and pushing through it. At the last moment, Captain Bates placed herself in front and held out her arms to restrain the others as she ventured into the room. At the same time, someone screamed.
The three Linyaari trained their glow tubes on the screamer, who was huddled beneath some open counters along with several other people, two women and a dozen or so children.
Khorii knelt and peered at them. “Do not be afraid. We will help you,” she said.
A knife flashed in the hand of one of the women, but Captain Bates seemed to anticipate it and knocked Khorii back through the hatch with a blow of her inflated arm.
The knife tried to cut the captain’s suit, but her boots bounced her out of range, and the knife wielder, as if exhausted by her effort, sank back against the two children tucked into the thermal blanket she clutched like a shawl and clinging to her skirts.
“You can’t trust these people any farther than you can throw them, kids. Any farther than you can throw them under normal gravity conditions,” Captain Bates said.
“But they are in trouble and afraid!” Mikaaye said.
“They are pirates, and you are prey,” the captain said. “I should know. I was raised with them.”
The woman who attacked them was coughing, and her skin had a bluish tinge.
Khorii poked her horn through its hatch. There had to be oxygen, or these people would not be alive, but there were perhaps a dozen of them and there could not, after all of this time, be very much oxygen left anywhere aboard the Blanca. Her horn could convert the carbon monoxide back to oxygen for them as it did for her. She was amazed that there had been enough to sustain these people, but perhaps the rooms were sealed from each other, and each kept its own supply. She recalled that the Blanca’s captain had reversed the airflow in the corridors to kill her mutinous passengers and crew, but Khorii’s party had restored the oxygen when they first investigated the derelict vessel.
Ariin and Mikaaye poked their horns out, too, and in a very short time they saw that the humans were breathing more easily.
Captain Bates took off her helmet and looked down at the women. “So, Nisa, long time no see. Funny isn’t it, how you don’t see or even think of people in years and here in just the last week or two I’ve seen Pauli and Petit and now you and Cleda. You’ve picked a strange place to bring the kids.”
“Asha?” Nisa rolled her eyes. “Why didn’t you say these aliens were with you? How were we supposed to know with you in that suit? How’s your mama?”
“I dunno. You’ve probably seen her more recently than I have.”
“You saw Pauli?”
“Yes, he was going to shoot me, but I talked him out of it.”
“Sure you did. Did you shoot him?”
“No, Nisa, I didn’t. A friend of mine almost did, though. He and Petit are on another ship.”
“Going to jail?”
Captain Bates shrugged a big-suited shrug. “Jail doesn’t mean a lot with no Federation to enforce things. He and Petit will probably find their way home one of these days.”
“Yeah, well, you know how Coco feels about widows and orphans,” Nisa said, and made an ugly noise while running her long and very dirty red fingernail across her neck. “I wasn’t looking for it, you know? My man’s been his first mate for twenty years. So I believed him when he told me the ghosts had damaged the ship, and he was loading us women and children into the shuttles. Only the only families he loaded were Cleda’s and mine, and the only place the shuttle had to go was this creation-forsaken rock.”
“How did you get in here?” Captain Bates asked.
“We were running out of fuel and oxygen—the extra canisters and our suits had somehow disappeared from the shuttle. I spotted what looked like a hatch in all that junk out there. Turned out to be the servo-hatch for the galley, and we were able to dock the shuttle. Our instruments showed that there was still some oxygen in here and that if we bundled up, we could withstand the temperature for a little while and conserve what little remained on the shuttle, so we got out. I hoped there might be some food, but if there is, none of us have found it.”
While Captain Bates was questioning the woman, who seemed to be an old friend, about how and why she and the others had come into the Blanca’s galley, Khorii knelt to try to comfort some of the children. They ranged in age from an infant in Cleda’s arms to two kids, one in each family, Khorii guessed, close to her age or Jaya’s. Khorii wondered if the mothers, who looked close to Captain Bates’s age, had older children, had started their families late, or had been bearing young yearly. She was too unfamiliar with human family structure to know, but the children were small, and though most of them tried to look tough and even mean, they were frightened and had to have been damaged by the lack of oxygen.
Sitting down beside them, she took one of the younger ones who had been crowded away from the mother by its siblings and pulled it into her lap, laying her horn against the child’s head and saying silly things that the child seemed to find comforting. It was very dirty and had been quite cold, so Khorii wrapped her arms around it—him, she learned when she investigated a certain squishiness in its nether regions that indicated it—he—was eliminating properly, and so must not be starving. Her horn was not quite prepared to do that sort of cleansing. Other children, seeing that she was not eating their brother, crowded closer. One started rifling her pockets. Others besieged Ariin, who protected her pockets with one hand while trying to pat heads awkwardly with the other. Mikaaye was engaged in a mock—at least on his side—battle with one of the older boys, a child of about seven.
“Nice horsie,” said a small girl, stroking Khorii’s mane.
In the course of all of this activity, she lost track of the conversation between Captain Bates and Nisa until the captain said, “Okay, gang, we’re going to have to get these folks back to the Mana, back through the area with no oxygen. Khorii, why don’t you and I go back for the shuttle while Ariin and Mikaaye keep the air sweet here?”
Khorii looked up. “Either that or perhaps Jaya could bring the shuttle to us.”
“She doesn’t know what it’s like,” Captain Bates said. “The docking bay and tubes have plenty of clearance above those whatever they ares, but I’d rather go back and make sure everything is still navigable and bring it back ourselves.”
Khorii started to rise, and the child she had been cuddling bellowed and grabbed her horn.
“I’ll come with you,” Ariin said, batting little hands away from her pockets and the hands of an older boy away from other areas of her shipsuit. “Khorii is busy with her little friends.”
But as Captain Bates and Ariin headed back for the door, they heard footsteps clomping unmistakably across the marble floor toward them.
The door flung wide and four men in shipsuits and helmets entered, then closed the door behind them. “Hah! Thought you’d take the bait!” a male voice rasped through the helmet’s speaker. “Now tell me, where is all the treasure the punk was blathering about?”