The emergency announcement brought with it a clamour of confusion and fear among the small squad of survivors, but Saqr had managed to hold her cool. After their initial angry reactions the group began debating a rush to the escape pods, but Saqr ignored it, flicking through the tabula she had picked up from the captain’s body.

  “They probably don’t work!”

  “The radiation surge!”

  “We’d have to go back through the Nekatra!”

  “We didn’t see any being launched when we came here…”

  “Maybe they were out of our view?”

  “It’s too risky! Our reloads are nearly out and Adam’s hurt!”

  “Everyone! There is a ship!” Saqr yelled, and although no one else heard her small voice Al Hamra noticed, and with a little yelling and gesturing managed to get the team to focus on her. She waved the tabula at them. “Look, the captain’s tabula!” When they looked blankly at her, she explained. “It’s standard practice for the captain to load the basic ship data onto a tabula before a Portal journey. She takes it with her to the stasis hold, so that if there’s an emergency she has all the information immediately ready, separate from the ship’s systems. It’s for ambushes or power failures when you come out of the Portal.” Seeing Al Hamra’s impatient frown, she hastened with her explanation. “Anyway, it wasn’t damaged by the radiation weapon. I guessed it wouldn’t be because the captain didn’t die of radiation burns and –“ Al Hamra’s hand waving for her to hurry “- so it has a list of ships that were docked to the Ghazali when it left Hamurabi station. Look!” She turned the tabula to face them, showing a list of ships, about half a dozen of which had been docked to the outside of the ship when it began its mission, because they were too large to fit in its hangars. “These three are on the starboard side, or the keel, where we don’t want to go because of the cats. This one’s too small. But this one …” She clicked on one and pulled up a schematic. “Look at it! The Fatima’s Bounty. Class 4, docked dorsally a few hundred metres back from here, behind the bridge. It’s big, probably more stable so probably still connected.”

  Adam leaned in to look at the schematic. “It’s heavily armed,” he observed. “It’s probably radiation shielded. Might have survived the surge.”

  “And it’s close!” Saqr waved the tabula again. “We have to go down, along and up again, but we can get there quickly. If it’s already detached or we can’t get it working, then we go down and try the escape pods. What do you say?”

  Al Hamra nodded agreement, clapped her on the shoulder by way of thanks, and turned to his team. “Okay, we have to go down and along. It’ll be dark and maybe there are Nekatra. We’ve got less than an hour. Check your reloads, take a moment to rest and say a word to your Icon, and then we’re on our way.”

  They did as he said, though it was difficult to calm themselves or commune with the Icons against the backdrop of wailing alarms and flashing red lights. Al Hamra and Siladan shared reloads with Olivia and Saqr while Dr. Delecta checked Adam’s injuries. They checked each others’ exo-suits again, confirming everything was vacuum ready on Saqr’s urging (“We might have to go exo for a short trip if the lock is damaged,” she had warned them), and then Siladan found them a course. Into the stairwell directly outside the bridge and down two flights, Adam and Al Hamra leading the way with sweeping arcs of light from their carbines and the rest of them following with their exo-suit lamps on, jerking pools of pale blue light on the floors and walls of the staircase as they descended deeper into the ship’s belly. Then across the middle of the ship, towards the area where the Nekatra roamed, as the graviton projectors began to melt down and gravity waves rippled along the ship, throwing them off their balance and bumping them into walls and each other before the system regained control. Moving in slightly uncontrolled steps in the suddenly weaker gravity after they shocks, they took a much smaller staircase down to a huge, wide corridor that Siladan told them ran almost the entire length of the ship. It was two stories high and wide enough for small vehicles to move abreast along the length of the ship, but in the emergency it was swathed in shadow and lit only by small, flickering green lights in the corners where the walls met the ceiling. As they moved along this corridor the lights of their guns and suits picked out huge public spaces to each side, cafeterias and gyms and a conference center, empty or piled with equipment stockpiled ready for the rescue mission on Taoan that was never going to happen. They reached the staircase Siladan had been aiming for without hearing any howls or seeing any movement, and headed up again.

  Here they found the first bodies, two men still in their stasis clothes, naked from the waist up, who had been shot near the entrance to the staircase. Adam coolly searched them, turning over one blood-soaked body to pull the reload out of an accelerator pistol and handing it to Siladan. They slipped through the doorway into another hall, and followed it a short distance to a doorway.

  “This is it,” Siladan told them. “A reception room and then stairs up to the docking bay.” He nodded to Adam, who pushed the door open and walked them into a scene of carnage. Four people lay dead in the large room behind the door, two near the stairs and two near the door. Blood was smeared around the walls and across the comfortable couches that the people nearest the door had been hiding behind, and splattered in vulcan-explosion patterns across the far wall.

  Adam took a position facing the doorway to the stairs, which was directly across from the entrance, and as the others filed in he said to Al Hamra, “Some kind of fight over the ship?” The squad leader scanned the wreckage, nodding grimly. The two people who had died near the entrance were skimpily dressed in their stasis hold clothes, carrying small pistols, while the two near the entrance to the docking bay stairwell were better dressed, one in protective clothing and one in an exo suit. The woman in protective clothing had not died of a gunshot wound, and as they moved to the door Dr. Delecta told them she had succumbed to radiation poisoning.

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  “They must have come here straight from the stasis hold to defend their ship,” Al Hamra guessed. “But one was sick. Other people maybe fought their way across from the chambers.” He pulled the woman’s carbine out of her blistered, swollen hands and slung it over his shoulder. “Could be more up there,” he warned, and Adam pushed the door to the stairwell open.

  With suit helmets on they climbed the stairs, looking for signs of combat or movement, Adam’s carbine pointed upward at every turn. Here the stairs switched back on themselves every three metres, a steep climb upward to the docking hold of the ship. At the ship’s entrance they found one more person, in an exo-suit smeared with blood and vomit, another tortured victim of the radiation surge. The docking bay door was jammed partially on her body so they slipped inside, Olivia stopping behind to push her body out of the doorway and down the stairs.

  The ship was empty and silent, a series of dark corridors lit only by suit lamps and the orange glow of torches. The Fatima’s Bounty was small for a class 4 ship, not even two hundred metres long, and it was an easy and short climb to the small bridge, which was silent and dead, its shadowy recesses suddenly brilliantly lit moments after they entered as the Hamura system’s white sun swung across the plexiglass viewing screen at the front of the room. Adam took position at the door as Saqr and Siladan tried to establish communications with the ship, working from the captain’s control panel directly under the viewshield. The bridge had four control panels, two of which were for gunners, the whole space small and practical with a distinctly military atmosphere.

  “Impossible,” Siladan said finally, slumping back in his seat. “We can get emergency life support power, but not the reactor.” As he said this a line of small blue lights flickered to life in the ceiling, casting the bridge in a pale, spectral glow.

  Saqr asked if it was radiation damage, but Siladan shook his head. “It’s radiation hardened like you guessed. But the security is wicked.”

  “Come on!” Al Hamra almost snarled. “There’s got to be a way!”

  “Sorry Al Hamra,” Saqr backed up the sensor operator. “I think it’s a pirate ship.” She gestured to a small trackpad on the captain’s control panel. “It’s bio-coded, needs the captain’s hand to authorize system control.”

  “That explains the weapons,” Adam observed.

  “Doesn’t help us though does it?” Al Hamra snapped. “By all the Icons, is there no way off this accursed ship?!” He turned to Olivia. “Olivia, take your toolkit, get outside with Adam to protect you, and cut off one hand from everyone in the docking area. If they were defending the ship maybe one of them was the captain.”

  Olivia looked at him for a moment, one eyebrow raised as if to suggest the man could not be serious, and then with a sigh pushed herself off the wall. She gestured to Adam and they tramped out the way they had come. The rest of the group waited in the bridge, slumped in chairs staring at useless control panels. Saqr’s stomach rumbled loudly, and Siladan nudged her, grinning slightly. Although cryo-sleep prevented wasting over short periods, three days under had left them all ravenously hungry, and they had found nothing on their journey through the crumbling ship. After a moment Dr. Delecta levered herself out of her chair and stumped off down the stairs, calling back to them that she was going to dig up some food. They waited.

  Adam and Olivia returned after what seemed like an age, carrying a pair of dhoti soaked in blood. They unrolled the loincloth on the floor to reveal a trove of severed hands, and started testing them on the trackpad while Siladan worked the controls. None of them worked, and after a few minutes of diligent effort they gave up, Olivia slinging one of the hands moodily across the room to hit the plexiglass viewscreen with an unpleasant, visceral smacking sound. Hamura’s white star slid back into the viewscreen, throwing the bridge into bright relief streaked with shadows from the blood smeared there. They sat in silent frustration as Dr. Delecta slipped back into the room and handed them all chunks of stale flat bread from the ship’s kitchen. She stared at the pile of severed hands in disgust as she slumped into the corner near the door, gnawing on old bread.

  “I’m not repeating that with every body in the stasis holds,” Olivia said finally, giving Al Hamra a scowling glance.

  “We don’t have time anyway,” Al Hamra said in a small voice, waving a hand in Olivia’s direction by way of apology. “Looks like we’re going to have to risk the escape pods.” He checked his watch. “We have a maximum of twenty minutes.”

  “That’s cutting it fine,” Adam grunted. “For a lottery at the end. Trust our luck to try the only pirate’s ship in the complement.”

  Saqr was always an optimist, and had no fear of space, though the Dark Between the Stars terrified her, and she remembered refusing to give in to the fugue that took the rest of the team. She looked around at them, their dejected expressions and slumped, defeated gestures, and returned to the captain’s tabula, flicking back to the schematics of the Fatima’s Bounty as if looking at them would somehow give her a clue about how to bypass the pirate’s security. With a start, she suddenly realized a way.

  “Maybe we don’t have to!” She announced. They looked wearily up at her, waving the tabula at them. “This ship has a hangar! Which means it could have ship’s boats, or a small fighter. Pirates steal things don’t they? Maybe they have a ship that isn’t theirs!”

  Al Hamra perked up. “Or a ship that they don’t have security on. Even a ship’s boat is enough, we just need to get away from here.” He pulled himself to his feet, talking through the last of his flatbread. “Can we open the hangar with emergency power?” He asked her, and she nodded. “Right then, let’s get down there and see what they have!”

  They dragged themselves to their feet and ran as fast as their tired legs would carry them towards the rear of the ship, down a spiral staircase and across the sparsely-appointed living area where Dr. Delecta had found their food, through a narrow medlab to another set of stairs down, and down again. The vacuum-secured door at the bottom opened into the hangar, a long, wide and airy space running along the ventral center of the ship, maybe half the length of the ship and about thirty metres deep. Saqr had been right about the pirates: in the middle of the hangar there was a small ship, about fifty metres long and ten metres in diameter, its forward entrance open with the entrance elevator lowered as if already welcoming them in. The ship’s name was written above it in large, black letters, and Al Hamra read it aloud in a voice filled with joy.

  “Hello, Beast of Burden!”