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“Okay, Captain,” Alex said. “I’ve got a seal. The standard security override isn’t working, so give me a second… to… ”
“Problem?” Holden said.
“Got it. I’ve got it. We have a connection,” Alex said. Then, a moment later: “Ah. It doesn’t look like there’s much to breathe over there.”
“Anything?” Holden asked.
“Nope. Hard vacuum,” Alex said. “Both her lock doors are open.”
“All right, folks,” Holden said, “keep an eye on your air supply. Let’s go.”
Miller took a long breath. The external airlock went from soft red to soft green. Holden slid it open, and Amos launched forward, the captain just behind him. Miller gestured to Naomi with a nod. Ladies first.
The connecting gantry was reinforced, ready to deflect enemy lasers or slow down slugs. Amos landed on the other ship as the hatch to the Rocinante closed behind them. Miller had a moment’s vertigo, the ship before them suddenly clicking from ahead to down in his perception, as if they were falling into something.
“You all right?” Naomi asked.
Miller nodded, and Amos passed into the other ship’s hatch. One by one, they went in.
The ship was dead. The lights coming off their environment suits played over the soft, almost streamlined curves of the bulkheads, the cushioned walls, the gray suit lockers. One locker was bent out of shape, like someone or something had forced its way out from within. Amos pushed off slow. Under normal circumstances, hard vacuum would have been assurance enough that nothing was about to jump out at them. Right now, Miller figured it was only even money.
“Whole place is shut down,” Holden said.
“Might be backups in the engine room,” Amos said.
“So the ass end of the ship from here,” Holden said.
“Pretty much.”
“Let’s be careful,” Holden said.
“I’m heading up to ops,” Naomi said. “If there’s anything running off battery, I can—”
“No, you aren’t,” Holden said. “We aren’t splitting up the group until we know what we’re looking at. Stay together.”
Amos moved down, sinking into the darkness. Holden pushed off after him. Miller followed. He couldn’t tell from Naomi’s body language whether she was annoyed or relieved.
The galley was empty, but signs of struggle showed here and there. A chair with a bent leg. A long, jagged scratch down the wall where something sharp had flaked the paint. Two bullet holes set high along one bulkhead where a shot had gone wide. Miller put a hand out, grabbed one of the tables, and swung slowly.
“Miller?” Holden said. “Are you coming?”
“Look at this,” Miller said.
The dark spill was the color of amber, flaky and shining like glass in his flashlight beam. Holden hovered closer.
“Zombie vomit?” Holden said.
“Think so.”
“Well. I guess we’re on the right ship. For some value of right.”
The crew quarters hung silent and empty. They went through each of them, but there were no personal markings—no terminals, no pictures, no clues to the names of the men and women who had lived and breathed and presumably died on the ship. Even the captain’s cabin was indicated only by a slightly larger bunk and the face of a locked safe.
There was a massive central compartment as high and wide as the hull of the Rocinante, the darkness dominated by twelve huge cylinders encrusted with narrow catwalks and scaffolds. Miller saw Naomi’s expression harden.
“What are they?” Miller asked.
“Torpedo tubes,” she said.
“Torpedo tubes?” he said. “Jesus Christ, how many are they packing? A million?”
“Twelve,” she said. “Just twelve.”
“Capital-ship busters,” Amos said. “Built to pretty much kill whatever you’re aiming at with the first shot.”
“Something like the Donnager?” Miller asked.
Holden looked back at him, the glow of his heads-up display lighting his features.
“Or the Canterbury,” he said.
The four of them passed between the wide black tubes in silence.
In the machine and fabrication shops, the signs of violence were more pronounced. There was blood on the floor and walls, along with wide swaths of the glassy gold resin that had once been vomit. A uniform lay in a ball. The cloth had been wadded and soaked in something before the cold of space had frozen it. Habits formed from years of walking through crime scenes put a dozen small things in place: the pattern of scratches on the floor and lift doors, the spatter of blood and vomit, the footprints. They all told the story.
“They’re in engineering,” Miller said.
“Who?” Holden said.
“The crew. Whoever was on the ship. All except that one,” he said, gesturing at half a footprint that led toward the lift. “You see how her footprints are over the top of everything else. And there, where she stepped in that blood, it was already dry. Flaked instead of smearing.”
“How you know it was a girl?” Holden asked.
“Because it was Julie,” Miller said.
“Well, whoever’s in there, they’ve been sucking vacuum for a long time,” Amos said. “Want to go see?”
No one said yes, but they all floated forward. The hatch stood open. If the darkness beyond it seemed more solid, more ominous, more personal than the rest of the dead ship had, it was only Miller’s imagination playing tricks. He hesitated, trying to summon up the image of Julie, but she wouldn’t come.
Floating into the engineering deck was like swimming into a cave. Miller saw the other flashlights playing over walls and panels, looking for live controls, or else controls that could come alive. He aimed his own beam into the body of the room, the dark swallowing it.
“We got batteries, Cap’n,” Amos said. “And… looks like the reactor got shut down. Intentional.”
“Think you can get it back up?”
“Want to run some diagnostics,” Amos said. “There could be a reason they shut it off, and I don’t want to find out the hard way.”
“Good point.”
“But I can at least get us… some… come on, you bastard.”
All around the deck, blue-white lights flared up. The sudden brilliance blinded Miller for a half second. His vision returned with a sense of growing confusion. Naomi gasped, and Holden yelped. Something in the back of Miller’s own mind started to shriek, and he forced it into silence. It was just a crime scene. They were only bodies.
