Escape from Enceladus

Chapter 1

The dead body was the first good news they’d had in days.

James Chan, supposed captain of the ship he called the Albatross, was getting desperate. The crew was mutinous, the close confines had become unbearable, and they had used more than half the fuel that had cost them all of their combined savings.

Variam Singh, who gave himself the grandiose title of First Officer and Chief Engineer, looked up from the console in front of him and nodded. “I’m sure,” he said. “It’s a vac suit. Flatlined.” The corpse, and whatever ship had been carrying him, were lost somewhere in the jumble of Saturn’s B Ring. The suit’s transponder, though, would lead the Albatross right in.

Singh gave Chan a tight grin. He had the dark, glittering eyes of a fanatic, his black hair cut short and his beard trimmed to a point under his chin. Back on Coriolis Station he’d always made Chan a bit nervous. Twelve days cooped up in this stinking lifeboat had taught Chan that he’d been right to worry.

“Do you think it’s the Mary Alice?”

Chan turned his gaze to Vogel, the youngest member of the crew, and nodded. Vogel was a mutt from the Belt, with ancestors from every continent on Earth, a planet he’d never set foot on. He had worked beside Chan in the sludge tanks of Saturn’s Coriolis Station, the light in his eyes and his ready grin fading just a little bit every day as they waded through waist-deep crap. Chan didn’t ever want to go back to that life, but above all he wanted to keep Vogel out of it.

“Suit batteries don’t last forever,” Chan told him. “I bet it’s the Mary Alice.” He reached up to pat the grimy bulkhead beside him. “I think the Albatross is coming home.”

The Albatross had been the lifeboat on a water prospector called the Mary Alice. The ship had suffered engine failure and spent a day drifting, getting colder and colder while her crew attempted repairs. At last they’d given up and boarded the lifeboat, arriving at Coriolis Station three days later. There they had abandoned the lifeboat and booked passage on a ship to the inner planets.

The parent corporation was based on Mars, and they wouldn’t be claiming their abandoned property any time soon. James Chan, a former merchant marine officer beached on Coriolis Station and surviving doing day labor, had looked at the abandoned lifeboat, thought of the lost freighter, and seen an opportunity.

It had to be better than cleaning the slime from water filters in the bowels of the station. Anything was better than that. He had recruited a crew, based not on their skills or personal merit, but on their willingness to chip in for gas.

“It better be the Mary Alice,” growled Elizabeth Jones, the pilot. “If I have to spend another day cooped up with you people, I’m going to start breaking necks.”

They called her Liz. She was about thirty, ten years younger than Chan, slim and blonde and pretty in a severe kind of way. He would’ve found her quite attractive if he’d been less afraid of her.

“Have you got a bearing?” Chan asked, and Singh leaned over his console.

“Uhhh… Maybe that way?” Singh made a vague gesture with his hand, then scowled. He’d been in the Mars Navy for fifteen years, and he liked precision. “Sorry, Jim, this civilian crap is just… crap.”

Chan didn’t bother replying. The seat pushed gently against his back as Liz engaged the engines and the Albatross surged forward. They were fifty kilometres or so above the plane of the B Ring, high enough to avoid most of the floating ice chunks. From this perspective the ring was a glittering plain stretching ahead of them for thousands of kilometres, the curve lost in the distance.

The plan had seemed perfectly straightforward back on Coriolis. A five-minute chat with an engine man from the Mary Alice had given Chan a pretty good idea of the ship’s location. The ice miners would have been orbiting Saturn with zero velocity relative to the ice. The engine man had told him they were near the inner edge of the B Ring, in line with Tethys. That gave Chan a pretty good idea of where to look.

A “pretty good idea”, though, had translated to something like a hundred thousand square kilometres of tumbling ice. It was a tiny area compared to the full vastness of the rings, but the huge, trackless expanse had eroded Chan’s natural optimism until almost nothing was left.

“Getting stronger,” Singh said as Liz nudged the ship to port. “Stronger, stronger. Stop! It’s getting weaker.”

She obligingly swung the ship back to starboard, making ever smaller corrections until Singh raised a hand. “That’s it,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s straight ahead.”

Chan peered through the viewport and saw nothing but ice. “Anything on radar yet?”

Singh snorted. “Not a damn thing but ice. The ship must be below the ring.” He peered into his console. “Hold it! Signal’s fading.”

Liz massaged the Albatross’s helm controls. The lifeboat wasn’t designed for delicate manoeuvring, as she’d told them a dozen times or more. It was built to make a straight run from the scene of a disaster to the nearest port. But it had a few manoeuvring thrusters, and she used them as best she could, bringing the Albatross to a halt and then moving it down toward the ring.

Chan gripped the edge of his seat. He was strapped in but downward acceleration still made him feel as if he was flying out of his seat. He wanted to tell Liz to take it easy, to not squander their precious fuel, but he shared her impatience. He was as frantic as she was to get out of the tiny, stinking lifeboat.

Tension rose in the cramped cabin as Liz manoeuvred them closer and closer to the elusive radio signal, Singh guiding her now with grunts and gestures. Then Vogel raised a pointing finger. “Look! What’s that?”

They might never have seen the ship if not for the tumbling field of ice behind it. The long, sleek form was painted matte black, and Singh scratched the fingers of one hand through the greasy thicket of his hair, confusion on his face. “There’s nothing on radar,” he said.

Lifeboat radar was nothing to brag about, but the black ship was barely half a kilometre away. Chan stared, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Modern spacecraft operating this far from Earth tended to be blocky and solid. The black ship was slim, graceful, sleek. “She must have been built for atmosphere,” Chan said. “Either that, or…”

“It’s military,” Singh declared. “Lines like that? She’s built to avoid radar detection.”

“What’s a military ship doing all the way out here?” Chan murmured. The farther you got from Earth, the thinner the population and the less interest the big governments showed.

“If it’s not military,” Singh said, a new tension in his voice, “then she’s ���”

“Oh, shit,” said Liz, her hands moving on the helm controls. “Pirates!”

“Hang on,” Chan said, holding up a hand and leaning forward for a better look.

“What do you mean, hang on?” she sputtered. “YOU hang on! I’m getting us out of here.” But she hesitated, waiting for him to explain.

The black ship drifted a hundred metres or so above the ring, tumbling slowly, giving them a view of the entire hull as it rotated. Chan waited for the nose of the ship to come back into view. “There,” he said, pointing. “Do you see that? Look at the nose.”

Vogel gave a low whistle. “I see what you mean, Cap’n. There’s a hole in it!”

A jagged rupture marred the nose of the mystery ship, a hole that had to be three metres wide. As they stared, a pale shape drifted between the Albatross and the black ship, suddenly visible against the darker background. A human shape, tumbling limp in the void. A vac suit.

“There’s our mystery broadcast,” Singh said, his voice grim. He turned to Chan. “I don’t think these pirates are a current threat, Jim.”

Chan nodded. “It’s not the Mary Alice,” he said, “but we’ve found ourselves some salvage. Bring us in close, Singh.”

Closer examination brought more bodies. Five vac suits floated near the ship, along with scraps of debris. The interior of the Albatross was perpetually too warm, an effect made worse by the fact that all of them wore their vac suits except for helmets, but Chan found himself shivering as he watched bodies drift past.

There were many slow and lonely ways to die in the depths of space. Had the crew survived some calamity, only to float helplessly while their air slowly ran out?

“Creepy,” said Vogel. “What do you think happened?”

“Some of the wreckage doesn’t match,” Singh said, peering out the viewport. “That looks like a hull plate, painted white.” As the chunk of steel floated nearer he corrected himself. “It’s a hatch, with the hinges cut away. I think they attacked someone. I think the other side won.”

“Serves the bastards right, then,” said Liz.

“We should recover the suits,” Chan said. “Leave the bodies, clean up the suits, sell them back on Coriolis.”

There was a long and uncomfortable silence. Finally Vogel said, “I’m not pulling the catheters out of a dead body. Forget it.”

Cleaning the surplus suits on the Albatross before this mission had been the worst part of the preparation by far. It was a shame to let the credits go to waste but Chan didn’t much care for stripping corpses either. He let it go.

“It’s a ghost ship,” said Vogel. “Cool. How long do you think it’s been out here?”

“Those suit radios don’t last forever,” said Singh. “Couple of weeks, maybe a month at the outside.”

Chan thought of the lonely, desperate battle that had been fought here, and wondered why he hadn’t heard anything about it. Either the survivors had made it back to Coriolis Station after the Albatross left, or the other ship hadn’t survived. He didn’t wish that crew any ill, but if there were two ships out here somewhere to salvage, he might never have to shovel sludge again.

###

Chan hovered in vacuum, watching the derelict tumble. It was wonderful to be outside of the lifeboat and thirty or forty glorious metres from most of his crewmates, even if he could still hear them breathing over the suit radio.

There was no name on the matte-black hull. He guessed the length at about thirty-five metres. Stubby protrusions like wings held powerful manoeuvring thrusters a three or four metres from the body of the ship. The main engine was behind the wings, and he felt his pulse quicken as he saw the engine outlets. It looked like a force engine, hydrogen fusion powered, superior in every way to the chemical rocket that powered the Albatross.

She might have been twelve metres wide, or a bit less. She wasn’t very tall, no more than one deck, but there was enough space inside that a man could be completely out of sight of his crewmates, probably for hours at a time. To James Chan at that moment, that sounded like paradise.

A couple of tiny portholes decorated the near side. The only other viewport was on the nose of the ship, but most of the glass was gone. Whatever blow had struck the ship had taken it right between the eyes. Only the edges of the viewport remained, less than a metre of glass on either side. The rest was a gaping, jagged hole.

Vogel hovered beside him with a hook in his gloved hand, connected to several hundred metres of steel cable. They nudged themselves closer and closer to the derelict. There was a steel ring on the nose of the black ship, and the plan was for Vogel to snap the ring into place as the nose went past.

Chan was gritting his teeth to keep himself from telling the boy to be careful. He’d used the word a dozen times in the last five minutes, and Vogel’s amusement was giving way to real irritation. Don’t pester him, Chan thought. Let him concentrate. Oh, but for the love of Buddha, Vogel, be careful.

The nose of the ship came sweeping around, the jagged hole in the glass looking like a terrible cyclopean eye, and Chan saw they were a good three metres too far back. He would stay put, he decided, to give Vogel a fixed point of reference. They’d catch it on the next spin.

The thruster at Vogel’s waist flamed, Chan felt his heart leap into his throat, and Vogel moved into the path of the tumbling ship. Chan’s hand stretched out in a hopeless attempt to pull the boy back out of danger, the nose of the ship swung at Vogel like a hammer, and suddenly Vogel was spinning and screaming.

It took Chan several seconds to figure out that Vogel was whooping in triumph. The cable was moving beside him, and Vogel squirmed around, stopped his spin, and moved back several metres.

When Chan was calm enough to speak he said, “Good job, Vogel.” You reckless idiot, he didn’t add.

Liz was at the controls of the Albatross, and she edged the little lifeboat back until the cable was nearly taut. When the nose of the ship was moving away from her the front thrusters on the Albatross glowed red and the cable tightened. Both ships jerked, the cable went slack, and the thrusters flared again as Liz stabilized the lifeboat.

It took three spins to do it, but at last the black ship hung nearly motionless in the void.

Chan used his suit thrusters to move in close, then grabbed the scorched edge of the hole in the front and pulled himself inside the ship. His helmet light came on, and he looked around as Vogel and Singh floated in behind him.

He was on the bridge of the pirate ship. One pirate remained, or rather half a pirate. The bottom half of a vac suit was buckled into a seat at what looked like a helm station, directly in front of the hole in the viewport. Chan drifted down until the magnets on his boots clicked into contact with the deck, then fumbled for the seatbelt, trying not to look at the gory mess where the suit ended.

It’s no worse than shoveling sludge, right? Nothing’s worse than that. He kept his eyes fixed on the seatbelt buckle, but he could see entirely too much in his peripheral vision. Most of the corpse’s insides were black, bumpy, indistinct, but there was a pale gleam of bone that might have been spinal column. Chan took long, deep breaths, anything to keep his gag reflex in check. Vomiting inside a vac suit would be a disaster.

The sludge was bad, but nobody died. Nobody got cut in half. Nobody floated around in a vac suit, watching their air run out, getting colder and colder���

He got the strap loose and took the pirate by one leg, lifting and shoving, sending the remains floating out through the hole.

“That,” said Liz over the suit radio, “is disgusting.”

“He’s just flying by the seat of his pants,” Vogel joked, then shrugged when nobody laughed.

“All right, people,” Chan said, “let’s focus on the job at hand.” Singh and Vogel touched down on the deck plates beside him and the three of them moved deeper into the bridge.

There were no more bodies, and not much more damage. The blast that had cut the pirate in half had melted the back of the seat and scorched a pressure hatch at the back of the bridge. The power was out, but Singh used a wheel set in the doorframe to crank the doors far enough apart for the three of them to slip through.

The corridor beyond was long, dark, and empty. Hatches lined both sides, all of them closed. The far end of the corridor ended in another hatch, also shut. Singh grabbed the wheel and heaved, then shook his head. “Locked,” he said. “There’s probably atmo on the other side.”

“Atmosphere?” said Vogel. “Could there be survivors?”

“Not likely,” Chan said. It took more than air to sustain life. The ship was icy cold. If there were crew aboard, they were long dead.

Forcing doors open could do nothing more than squander the remaining air. They turned their attention instead to patching the hole in the front of the ship. Back on Coriolis Station they had welded a cargo container to the side of the Albatross and loaded it with every tool and bit of salvage-related equipment any of them owned or could borrow, scavenge, or steal.

The salvage equipment didn’t include anything as extravagant as a three-metre-wide chunk of hardened glass. Or metal, for that matter. There was nothing among their equipment and nothing in the accessible areas of the black ship that was big enough to patch the hole.

Finally Vogel went out and snagged the hatch that had been cut from the other ship, the ship that had escaped. Chan helped him move the hatch into position, and they held it in place while Singh sprayed on Stick-All to glue it in place. Chan and Vogel were able to let go as Singh went to work welding the hatch to the black ship’s frame.

“I must say,” Liz said cheerfully over the radio, “that that looks absolutely terrible.”

Chan didn’t bother replying, but he knew she was right. The gleaming white plate of steel looked ridiculous against the black skin of the pirate ship, and it was going to look worse by the time they were done.

The nose of the ship had a distinct curve, and the hatch was perfectly flat. When Singh was done welding the big patch in place at top and bottom, there were half-metre gaps on both sides. They scrounged bits of metal from everywhere they could reach on the pirate ship and the Albatross, and finally cut the cargo box into pieces.

Stick-All was wonderful stuff, able to glue aluminum to glass, or steel to tin. Singh welded what he could, glued the rest, and put it all together in a hodgepodge of patches that was lumpy, discolored, mismatched, ugly, and, as far as they could tell, airtight.

The three of them re-entered the ship through a hatch in the ceiling of the bridge. It was darker inside with the patch blotting out most of the light from Saturn and the B Ring. They stood unmoving in the middle of the bridge, nervous, afraid to take the next step. Then Singh swept his helmet light across the bridge stations, stopping when he spotted a round handle set underneath the helm controls. He knelt, spun the handle, and a layer of dust rose from his suit as a jet of air sprayed against him.

Chan held one wrist up in front of his face. The suit’s built-in pressure gauge began to flicker, then showed 0.08 atmospheres.

Singh closed the air feed and looked at his own wrist. The seconds crept past while Chan waited for the numbers to fall.

“I don’t see any vapor out here,” Liz reported.

“I think it’s holding,” Singh said, and grinned.

“Good work,” Chan told him. “Let’s bring it up to half an atmosphere.”

Five minutes at half pressure was enough to reassure him that the welds would hold. He nodded to Singh and watched the man’s suit collapse inward as the air pressure rose to a full atmosphere. Frost appeared on every surface, melting quickly from their faceplates, growing thick on the deck plates and bulkheads.

“It’s a bit chilly,” said Vogel, wiping his glove across a bulkhead and starting a miniature snowstorm. “Do you think we can get some power?”

Chan sat at a console, the magnets on his boots keeping him in place, and cleared the frost from a panel. Everything was dark. Well, that was no surprise. Still, a glowing “ON” button would have been nice.

Singh rotated until his feet pointed at the ceiling and peered under a console. He traced some cables along a bulkhead and down the central corridor, then pulled open a panel and tinkered with the machinery inside. Chan could hear him muttering to himself as he worked. The murmurs trailed off and he said, “I think I can get the battery backups working. Hang on.”

“I’ll leave you to it. Vogel, give him a hand.” Chan walked to the front of the bridge and peered through the narrow strips of glass that remained on either side of the patch. There were smears of glue on the glass, but he could see enough to help guide Liz as she nudged the lifeboat closer and closer. Finally the ship trembled and the hull gave a low “bong” as the Albatross bumped gently into the docking ring above the bridge. Chan kicked himself loose from the deck plates, floating up to open the hatch from his side. Then he pushed himself back to the deck as Liz came floating through feet-first.

“I suppose this place smells like the Albatross now,” she said. “I should have cycled the lock.” She stared around, playing her helmet light across the bridge. “Nice ship.” Her light hit the hull plate welded over the hole and stopped. “Even with the patch. Can we keep it?”

Chan grinned in spite of himself. It felt wrong to profit from someone else’s cold and lingering death, but they’d been pirates, after all. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I believe we’ll keep it.”

Chapter 2

Singh and Vogel had left the bridge and were tinkering somewhere aft. Chan knew they had fixed the power when the lights came on, not at full strength but bright enough that the helmet lights shut themselves off. An eddy of dust told Chan that the air was circulating. He watched as the frost slowly shrank and disappeared from the walls and even his own suit. The ship still had to be bitterly cold, but he couldn’t help himself. He unsnapped his helmet and took it off.

The cold burned his throat and lungs. He could feel it sharp against the edges of his ears, and he thought about putting his helmet back on. The novelty of comparatively fresh air was too much to resist, though. He sniffed, smelling dust and metal and burned plastic. He could hear the hum of the ship and the clank of boot magnets on metal.

There was something else, too. He heard the sibilant rustle of a pocket door retracting and turned, looking down the corridor, wondering what Vogel or Singh was getting into.

Vogel’s shout was a muffled noise that Chan heard distantly through the earpiece in the helmet in his hands. A burly shape erupted from the doorway beside Vogel, slamming into him and knocking his boots loose from the deck plates. The shape rebounded expertly, bumping the wall and coming to a stop floating in the middle of the corridor.

It was a man. Chan was able to register that much. A man without a vac suit, wild-eyed and wild-haired, his face a bristling mass of tangled brown beard with gleams of white from his bared teeth and his wide, staring eyes. The sense of wildness was deepened by the blanket tied around his shoulders like a cape.

Then Chan saw the gun, and found himself unable to look at anything else. It was an energy pistol of some sort, hard yellow plastic with black trim, and the barrel was pointed directly between Chan’s eyes. The man was drifting slightly in the air, turning with the last bits of momentum from his attack, but the barrel of the gun didn’t waver.

“Nobody move.” The man’s voice was gravelly and rough, as if he hadn���t spoken in a few days. It was also tight with strain. “Anybody moves, and I’ll kill you!”

“What did he say?” Singh’s voice, faint and tinny, came from the helmet in Chan’s hands.

“I don’t know,” Vogel replied. “I’m afraid to take my helmet off.”

“Who are you people?” the man asked. Then, “Never mind. I don’t care. I want you all off of my ship. Now!”

Chan nodded, relief flooding him. The man was going to let them leave. They would survive. He grinned, turned to Liz, and felt the grin freeze on his face.

There was no relief on her face, no fear. Just anger. No, fury. She was glaring at the gunman, her eyes more terrifying than the pistol.

“I don’t take orders from pirates!” she snapped.

He responded by shifting his aim to her.

“You’re scum,” she said, completely undaunted. “Scum like you don’t let witnesses go. The gun’s empty, isn’t it? You’re facing four of us with an empty gun, and you’re hoping you can bluff your way through. Well, it’s not going to work.”

The pirate straightened his arm, taking aim at the middle of her body. “Last chance,” he said, his voice as cold as the air in the bridge.

Liz flexed her fingers. “You better put that gun away, little man,” she said, “because I’m going to make you eat it.”

She took a single step toward him, the clank of her boots echoing as the magnets let go, then reattached. And the pirate pulled the trigger. There was a flash of light, Liz shrieked, and Chan flinched, squeezing his eyes shut for an instant.

He opened them in time to see the pirate twist in the air and slam both feet into Vogel’s chest. Vogel went tumbling down the corridor while the pirate, in complete control, sailed toward the bridge. He caught Liz by the shoulders to stop himself, and her limp body flopped backward. For an instant the pirate and Chan were eye to eye.

“I’m going to kill you,” the man hissed. “I’m going to kill you all.” The gun in his hand gave a low ‘pop’ and a spark flew to Chan’s chest. It gave him a shock, enough that he flinched, nothing more. The pirate flung the pistol at him, and Chan ducked, blocking with his helmet. When he lowered the helmet the pirate was gone.

“I want my ship back.” The man’s voice had a strange echo, and Chan realized it was coming from the Albatross. “You haven’t seen the last of me!”

For an instant Chan stared up at the hatch, frozen in indecision. He could swarm into the Albatross and face the pirate. The idea terrified him.

Both ships vibrated as the engines of the Albatross revved up, and Chan moved, kicking loose from the deck plates. He flew up, stopping himself against the ceiling of the bridge, and swung the hatch shut. He was barely in time. Metal squealed and the ship lurched as the Albatross tore itself free and thundered away.

Chan spent a moment locking the hatch, then let his muscles go limp. Something moved at the edge of his vision, and he tilted his head back, the breath catching in his throat as he saw Liz straightening up. A brief, bright surge of joy faded as he felt the ceiling of the bridge press against his knees. The Albatross as it tore loose had set the pirate ship spinning, and centrifugal force was pulling at Liz. Her lifeless body was hanging from the magnets that held her boots to the deck.

Snaps clicked somewhere behind Chan as someone removed a helmet. Then Vogel said, “Holy Hell, who was that guy?”

Chan made himself turn. Vogel was clumping down the corridor, helmet under his arm. “Are you all right?” Chan asked him.

Vogel nodded. “I wouldn’t mind getting another crack at that guy. He caught me by surprise.”

You haven’t seen the last of me. “You may get your chance,” Chan told him. “Let’s hope you don’t.”

Someone groaned, a hoarse, dragging sound of extreme suffering, and Chan peered past Vogel at Singh, who was pulling his helmet off. “Singh! What’s wrong with you?”

Singh gave him a blank look, and then Liz’s voice, ragged with pain, said, “I’m going to kill that miserable cockroach.”

“Liz!” Chan knew from the way his cheeks hurt that he was grinning like an idiot, but he couldn’t make himself stop. “You’re alive!”

She nodded, grimacing. “I told you the pistol was empty. Well, practically empty. Vac me, that hurt.” She rubbed her stomach through the suit, then held her arms above her head and stretched. “Everything seems to be functioning,” she said. “Did he take the Albatross?”

Chan nodded.

“Well, good riddance. I guess we better get busy fixing this thing, then.”

They made a tour of the ship, the four of them clustered together, Chan gripping the empty pistol in case he could use it to bluff. Vogel grabbed a wrench, and Liz had her fists. Singh opened doors one at a time, and they braced themselves each time, but no more pirates came bursting out.

It was a lovely ship, at least by the standards of the departed, unlamented Albatross. There were no fewer than six passenger cabins, each one with three or even three and a half glorious square metres of floor space and, incredibly, its own bathroom. The galley had an extensive freezer and a small cooler, and an oven with almost half a cubic metre of capacity.

The doors at the far end of the corridor opened on an engine room. Liz and Singh looked over the banks of controls and reported that the reactor was in working order with enough fuel to run the ship for at least another year. The automated systems had kept the reactor running safely in standby mode. Singh announced that it would keep for a while as he browsed the user manual. He wasn’t going to bring up the power level until he was sure he knew what he was doing.

“Shouldn’t take more than a few hours,” he assured them. “These things are complicated to build, but they’re dead easy to run.”

The lights had gone dim and the cold was seeping back in when Chan felt the deck plates start to vibrate under his boots. The vibration never quite went away, but it was so constant that, before long, Chan couldn’t feel it at all.

Singh brought the gravity up gently, giving everyone time to get their feet on the deck and to secure anything heavy or fragile. Force engines had revolutionized space flight. They could provide an artificial gravity of one g while the ship accelerated at a rate that in the old days would have reduced the crew to a red paste on the walls. Chan smiled happily. A ship with a working force engine! And it was all theirs!

The four of them gathered on the bridge. Liz sat at the helm station, grimacing as she leaned back against the charred and blistered chair where the pirate helmsman had died. She ran her hands over the controls, then pressed a couple of buttons and drew back on a joystick. There was nothing visible straight ahead, of course, not with the hatch of anther ship welded on as a patch. Chan walked to the edge of the patch and peered out through the narrow strip of glass.

The stars were reeling past, but their motion slowed as Liz stopped the ship from spinning. At last the stars were dead still and he turned, giving her a thumbs-up.

She brought the ship around in a sweeping curve, then swung in low over the ring, matching velocity with the tumbling chunks of ice. When the ship was stationary relative to the B Ring, she turned in her chair, grinning. “Everything seems to be working, Captain.”

Singh was bent over another station, and he straightened up at her words. “Everything looks normal with the engine, Jim. I think she’s space worthy and ready to go.”

They were all looking at him, Chan realized. He’d been nominally in command since they’d left Coriolis Station, but it felt more real all of a sudden. He squared his shoulders. “Okay,” he said. “The first order of business is to get out of the immediate neighborhood. That bastard who took the Albatross might have friends nearby and he for damn sure wants his ship back. So let’s make sure we’re not here when he arrives.”

Liz nodded, her hands moving across the controls, and Chan marvelled at how he felt no movement at all as the ring started to race by beneath the ship.

“A couple of hundred thousand kilometres should do it,” he said. “And bring us below the plane of the ring, but keep us in close. We know this ship is hard to spot.”

She nodded.

“In the meantime, I have an assignment for you two, and myself.” He ran his eyes over Vogel and Singh, and made a face. “We are a disgrace to this fine ship. As soon as enough water has heated up, I order showers all around. I don���t know about you guys, but I’m going to scrounge through the passenger cabins and find myself something clean to wear. I’m looking forward to getting out of this suit and not putting it back on for a good long time.”

By unspoken consent the others left the biggest cabin for him. He felt vaguely embarrassed as he palmed the door open and stepped inside. Still, it was nice to be taken almost seriously as captain. Three short weeks before, he’d been crawling around inside water pipes in grimy, ill-fitting, company-issued coveralls, wondering how much longer he could stand it. And now he was��� what exactly? Captain of a pirate ship? Leader of a band of misfits crowded together in a piece of stolen property, living out their final hours before the pirate leader tracked them down and exacted a bloody vengeance?

He felt himself grinning. He’d felt insignificant as a day laborer. Like the decisions he could make didn’t matter. He’d felt like nothing. He wasn’t sure quite what he was now, but he was something, and that was a big step up.

There was a bunk folded into the wall to maximize the floor area. He left it up, stripping off the vac suit and leaving it in a heap against one wall. He stood naked in the middle of the little room, scanning his new home, grinning like a kid who just got out of school.

Shallow drawers were set into the wall beneath the hinges of the bunk. He went through the drawers, relieved to find men’s clothing. He hadn’t thought to check before taking the room. Mostly it was plain jumpsuits, with one or two fine outfits, all of it wrinkled from being crammed into the tiny drawers.

For a long moment he just stared into the drawers, savoring the idea of actual clean clothing. Then he walked into the bathroom and wedged himself into the tiny shower.

The water was piping hot, and there was a spigot that gave shampoo. Chan whistled cheerfully while he lathered up, rinsed, lathered again, and kept repeating. When the water running from his body was clear he gave himself a final lather and rinse, then reluctantly turned the water off.

Jets of air dried him while he combed his hair with his fingers and peered into the tiny mirror over the sink. He really needed a shave. Still, he was looking better than he had in a long time.

Back in the bedroom he chose a pair of baggy blue underpants and pulled them on. The suit in the corner stank. He ignored it, sniffing, testing the air. There was a faint hint of ozone, and a peppery scent that might have belonged to the last pirate who’d lived here. Chan wrinkled his nose. Was that the faintest hint of rotting plants?

He lifted his hands to his nose and sniffed at his fingernails. The smell didn’t get any stronger, and he started to think it was in his mind. The stench of sludge on Coriolis Station was part of him. It was no longer something he could just wash off. He’d spent too many days wading through the muck, watched too many dreams succumb and drown while he immersed himself in some of the foulest substances known to man.

Chan ran his eyes over the walls of the little cabin and murmured, “This is mine. Mine.” It didn’t feel like his, though. He felt like an intruder, ready to flee or grovel if the room’s real owner showed up. He didn’t belong in a captain’s cabin. He belonged on the lowest ring of a dirty space station, shovelling up crap.

“I can do this,” he murmured, looking around the cabin. “I can be a captain. I can make this mine.” In front of the others he would act as if he believed it, but here, alone, it felt like a lie.

He thought about dressing, but a strange lethargy was dragging at his limbs. Part of it was being under gravity for the first time in weeks, but that wasn’t all. He tried to remember how long he’d been awake. He couldn’t figure it out, but it had been a good long time. He looked at the bunk, then at the drawers of clothes. Then at the bunk again. Finally he shrugged. The ship was hidden, there was nothing that needed to be done right away, and he would make better decisions if he was rested. He reached up and hit the release button on the bunk.

The bunk dropped, faster than he would have expected, and a figure erupted from it, hurtling straight at him. He tried to duck, a shoulder crashed into him, and he fell to the deck with a crushing weight on his chest.

Chapter 3

Through a fog of shock and pain he became aware of a pair of eyes staring into his own at a range of a few centimetres. He’d banged his head on either the bulkhead or the deck as he fell, and the face above him swam in and out of focus. The impact had driven the air out of his lungs, and with someone’s weight on his chest he couldn’t inhale, so the dizzy blur was only getting worse.

The memory of the pirate was fresh in his mind, and he lashed out blindly, feeling his fist connect with the side of someone’s head. Then he pulled his heels up close to his buttocks and thrust upward, rising up on heels and shoulder blades, bending his body into an arc and propelling his attacker off of him and into the air.

There wasn’t room to fly very far. The figure above him bounced from a bulkhead and landed back on top of him, but he managed to draw a ragged breath. A muffled curse came from his attacker, and slender hands went up to clutch the blurry head.

Chan took advantage of the opportunity to hammer his fists at the face above him. Arms blocked his blows, but the person tumbled backward, retreating. When the weight was gone he slid along the deck until his back was against the hatch, then pushed himself up into a crouch. He brought his arms up to protect his face, shook his head to clear it, and glared at the stowaway.

He was expecting another homicidal pirate, but it was a girl, no more than a teenager by the look of her, who crouched at the opposite end of the cabin, her arms curled protectively around her head. She was slender, almost frail, hardly big enough to have scared him half to death. She had sandy hair in a cloud around her head, and pale freckled skin on the arms that extended from the rolled-up sleeves of a jumpsuit that was much too big for her.

Chan could see very little of her face, just a big hazel eye peeking between her elbows. The skin around the eye was dark and beginning to swell, and Chan’s knuckles throbbed in sympathy. Shame flooded through him, washing away the rage and terror of a moment before. What kind of brute was he, to terrorize a little girl?

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice small and frightened.

“Um, my name is Chan. James Chan. My crew and I salvaged this ship. It’s ours now. I mean, unless it’s yours. Who are you? You don’t look like a pirate.”

The big hazel eye blinked. “I’m Joss. I was a prisoner of those horrible pirates. They destroyed my ship, they killed everybody.” The eye closed and a single tear leaked from the corner. When she spoke again, her voice held a quaver. “Thank you for saving me.”

Chan felt his chest expanding with an unfamiliar emotion. Pride. “Think nothing of it,” he said, getting up. “I’m glad I could help.”

She looked even smaller when he was standing. She brushed some of the hair from her face, peered up at him with wide eyes, and said, “What are you going to do with me?” And her eyes flickered downward.

That was when Chan, to his horror, realized that he was wearing nothing but sagging boxer shorts, and they had been jostled somewhat downward during the struggle. Blood rushed into his face and he dropped to a sitting position, hiding behind his own knees. The wretched girl just kept looking at him, and he looked down, mortified to see that his entire chest and stomach had turned pink.

“Er, sorry. Ah, I wasn’t exactly expecting to meet a lady. Thought I was alone, actually.”

She didn’t say anything, just stared at him, and he slid his way toward her, bending his legs so his feet didn’t touch hers. She arched one sandy eyebrow, and Chan’s face, already hot enough to cook toast, grew hotter.

He stretched out one arm, snagging the handle of the closest drawer, and pulled out the first clothing he could reach. Unfortunately it was more underwear. He scooted closer, pulled out a second drawer, and focussed his attention on the clothing, doing his best to pretend the girl didn’t exist.

I’ve travelled through deep space and been shot by a pirate, surely I can’t be so completely flustered by one small girl. Pull yourself together, Chan. He found a jumpsuit and retreated gratefully to the door. This damn thing better fit me. I don’t think I could bear it if���

The gray jumpsuit was baggy but the arms and legs were about right. In fact, it fit better than the uniform he’d worn back on Coriolis Station. He did his best to wriggle into the suit without exposing himself, zipped up, and finally stood. He took a couple of deep breaths, gathered what dignity he had left, and squared his shoulders. “Come along,” he said. “You might as well meet the crew.”

“My name is Jocelyn O’Reilly,” she said. “My friends call me Joss.” She sat at the galley table, her hands curled around a mug of cocoa, the crew standing around her. Chan had revised his age estimate upward, at least a bit. She was no teenager, but she was quite young.

“Our ship was called the Dawn Treader.”

“Like the Narnia books?” Liz said, open skepticism in her voice, and Chan frowned. The woman had all the sensitivity of a charging rhinoceros.

“I didn’t name the ship,” Joss replied. “I was just a passenger. With Norbert, my husband. We came out from Mars so he could work on Coriolis Station.” She gazed sadly at her unadorned fingers. “They even took my wedding ring.”

Chan felt a lump in his throat. He looked around at the others. Liz’s face was expressionless, but sympathy was hardly her strong suit. Singh wore the hint of a sneer. Vogel was staring at Joss, enraptured. He looked completely smitten. Joss was the first real woman he’d seen in almost three weeks. Liz didn’t count; she inspired fear in a man, not desire.

Chan was forty, and his blood had cooled with age. Singh was even older, pushing fifty. But Vogel was barely into his twenties, and the sight of Joss and her big hazel eyes seemed to have driven rational thought right out of his brain.

“They killed my husband,” Joss said, her voice catching. “They killed the entire crew. The leader was this huge man with a terrible beard.” She gestured with her hands, tracing the shape of an enormous growth around her chin. “He put me in his cabin.” She stared up at them, her eyes haunted. “I don’t like to think of what he was planning to do with me.”

“You’re safe now,” Chan reassured her, and she gave him a grateful smile. Vogel glared at Chan over her head.

“Then, I don’t know how long ago,” she continued, “there was a lot of noise and shouting. The pirate leader came in, and he shoved me into the bunk and closed it.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, trembling. “It was awful. I could barely breathe. I passed out, and every time I woke up it was pitch dark, and stifling, and I couldn���t move���”

Vogel reached out to pat her on the shoulder. “There, there,” he said. “It’s okay now. We’ll protect you.” And he shot Chan another unpleasant look.

“Thank you,” she said, patting Vogel’s hand and smiling up at him. Vogel turned pink, while Liz rolled her eyes and Singh gave a quiet snort.

“Anyway,” Joss said, “the next thing I knew, the bunk flew open.” Her gaze swung to Chan. “I landed on Captain Chan here, and now here I am.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Singh gave Chan a pointed glance and stepped into the corridor. Chan said, “Just make yourself comfortable, Joss. Vogel, give her space.” That drew him a hurt, indignant look from Vogel, which Chan ignored. “Excuse me for a minute.”

Chan followed Singh out of the galley, Liz on his heels. As soon as the door hissed shut, Singh said, “We can’t trust her.”

“He’s right,” said Liz.

Chan raised his hands in a helpless gesture. “You heard her story!”

“It’s easy to tell stories,” Singh snapped. “The last person we found hiding on this ship shot half the crew and stole our lifeboat.”

Liz nodded. “Taking that stinking deathtrap was doing us a favor, but still, he’s right. You find someone hiding on a pirate ship, you don’t think she might be, oh, I don’t know, a pirate?”

“She’s a helpless victim,” Chan sputtered. “She doesn’t look like a pirate, does she?”

“They don’t all have crazy beards,” Singh said. “We should lock her up.”

“Or space her,” Liz added.

Chan’s jaw dropped. “We���re not spacing anybody!” he snapped. “And we’re not locking her up. Where are we going to put her, back in a bunk?”

“We should,” said Singh. “We all might live longer. At the very least we need to keep an eye on her.”

Chan grinned in spite of himself. “Well, that’s one less thing to worry about. I don’t think Vogel’s going to let her out of his sight any time soon. She’ll be lucky if she manages to shower without him there.”

Singh chuckled, but Liz scowled, muttering under her breath. Chan wasn’t sure, but he thought she might have said, “I don’t trust Vogel either.”

“All right,” said Chan, “we’ll keep an eye on her. Now, we’ve got a working ship and plenty of fuel. What’s our next step?”

“Go through the rest of the ship,” said Liz. “See how many more bloody passengers we have.”

Chan nodded. “Okay. And after that?”

Singh scratched his beard. “Actually, I have an idea about that,” he said. “Come with me to the bridge. I want to show you something.”

He led them to a console on the starboard side. There were no dedicated stations other than the helm. The touch screens could be reconfigured to control any part of the ship’s functions. Singh dropped into a chair and tapped the screen in front of him, bringing it to life.

“Looks like coms,” Chan said.

“Not quite.” Singh expanded part of the display. “They were tracking a transponder. It’s the last setting they had before the final battle. So it must be the transponder of the ship they attacked.”

Liz had a predatory grin on her face, but Chan just shook his head. “What are you trying to say?”

“We can find the other ship,” Singh said. “The one that shot a hole in the window.” He jerked a thumb at the patch in the front of the bridge. “The one that hatch came from.”

“The ship’s probably dead in space by now,” said Liz, an unhealthy relish in her voice. “Packed full of treasure.”

“Treasure?” Chan said skeptically.

She shrugged. “Some kind of juicy salvage, anyway. The pirates had to be after something. Whatever it is, we can still get it.”

“Whoever they are, they put a hole in the ship last time,” Chan pointed out. “If we fly up in this ship, they’re likely to finish us off.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “It was a lucky shot.”

“How do you know that?”

Liz pointed at the patch in the front of the bridge. “You don’t get your hatches cut off if you’re winning a battle. It’s probably another ship full of dead bodies by now. If not,” and she flexed her fingers in a disturbingly hungry way, “they won’t be in any shape to defend themselves. And there isn’t another witness in a million kilometres.”

“We’re not turning pirate!”

“Joking,” she said, “I’m joking.” But she looked disappointed.

“However, you’re right about one thing.” Chan scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “They must be damaged. They could still be out here, and they might be in trouble. We should probably check up on them.” Liz gave him a doubtful look, and he grinned. “And, if it turns out that the ship really is a derelict, well, it would be a shame to let all that salvage go to waste.”

She grinned, and he raised a warning finger. “But we go in carefully,” he said. “If they’re okay, we back off. We don’t pick any fights.”

Her face dropped a bit, but she nodded. Chan turned to Singh. “Can you find the ship?”

“I can get a direction,” he said. “The instruments on this ship are about a thousand times better than the Albatross, may she rust in pieces. We’ll find her in no time.”

###

It took about two hours. The bridge didn’t have a captain’s station as such, so Chan dropped into an empty seat and used the display to browse the technical specs of the ship while Singh navigated and Liz flew. The ship had guns, he saw, though he didn’t know how to fire them. There was a rail gun on either side, running the length of the body on the underside of the hull, with separate magazines for ballistic rounds, exploding rounds, incendiaries, and tracers. All the magazines registered as empty. There was also a laser, mounted on top of the hull just behind the bridge. The laser ran directly on engine power, so they had effectively unlimited ammo for it.

“I think it’s coming from Enceladus,” Singh said at last. “The signal fades in and out but it doesn’t move very far. I bet they’re in orbit.”

“We’ll get there in about forty minutes,” Liz reported.

“Good work,” Chan said. He felt a bit silly praising them, but if they insisted on taking him seriously as captain, the least he could do was play the part.

Liz nodded, but Singh frowned before turning back to his console. He was older than Chan, with more than a decade of experience in the navy. He might resent having Chan as his superior.

Chan shrugged. There was nothing he could do about Singh’s ruffled feelings except lead with a light hand and try to keep them all in profit.

“Can you tell me anything about this ship we’re tracking, Singh?” Chan asked.

Singh scowled at his console. “Not a thing, Jim. Her transponder’s not in the database.”

Chan frowned thoughtfully. “Interesting. Either the ship’s new, or she has something to hide.” The black ship’s transponder would almost certainly not be in any database, but a cargo or passenger ship ought to be.

“So we don’t know what she’s called,” Chan said. “For that matter, I can’t figure out what this ship is called.” He patted his armrest. “I can’t find her name anywhere. That doesn’t seem right.”

“Let’s call her the Dawn Treader,” Liz said with a touch of sarcasm. “I hear that name just came available.”

“Well, she’s painted all black,” said Chan. “What’s a bird that’s black?”

“Penguin!” Liz said. “Let’s call her the Penguin.”

“The Dirty Ostrich?” Singh suggested. “That has kind of a ring to it.”

Chan winced. “Do you mind if we stick to birds that fly?”

“I knew a guy once,” said Liz. “He had a yacht called the Flamingo. Are those black?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, I know!” Singh said. “The Dirty Buzzard. Those are black, right?”

Chan shook his head, feeling suddenly tired. “I’d kind of like to forget about all the dead bodies we’ve seen,” he said.

Singh gave him a blank look, and Chan sighed. People born off of Earth just didn’t get certain things.

“The Blackbird?” Liz asked. “I’m almost certain those are black.”

“How about the Raven?” said Chan. “You know, like in the poem.”

That drew blank stares from both of them.

“It’s a bird,” he said. “A black one. They live on the fringes of human society, like us. And no one ever puts them in cages.”

Liz smile and nodded, but Singh frowned again. “Seems kind of short,” he said. “How about the Dirty Raven?”

“Well, she’s a lot cleaner than our last ship.” Chan scratched his head. “What else could we call her? The Bold Raven? The Striking Raven? What’s another word for, I don’t know, simple and striking?”

Singh tapped his touchscreen and looked up. “Stark?”

“The Stark Raven,” Chan said. Something about it sounded not quite right, but he hated to keep contradicting Singh. “All right. Sounds good.” He patted the console in front of him. “I dub thee Stark Raven.”

When Enceladus came into view it was a pale grey half-sphere streaked with blue and pocked with craters, like a mottled dome showing above the plane of the rings. Saturn was a dirty yellow dome in the background, vast enough to make the little moon seem inconsequential. Chan and Singh left their seats, standing on either side of the patch, peering out through the remaining strips of glass.

The Stark Raven sped forward, flying just above the rings, which looked like a field of icy boulders racing past beneath them. Enceladus loomed larger and larger, until they could see the creases of the vast rifts that lined the surface.

“Where’s the ship?” Singh demanded.

“On the far side,” Liz told him. “I think it’s in an equatorial orbit. We should see it in about ten minutes.”

The mystery ship was a tiny speck when it came into view. The ice particles here in the E Ring were tiny, microscopic in fact, making the ring into a smooth white sheet. When Liz brought the Raven higher the other ship was highlighted against the ice like a butterfly displayed in a box. Liz nudged the joystick in her hand and the view tilted. “Hang on,” she said, “it’s finally time to do some real flying.”

There was no need to hang on, not with the force engine compensating for their inertia. Still, it was hard not to lean as the rings tilted and turned. Liz brought them in close to Enceladus and swept across the moon’s equator, matching trajectories with the mystery ship and coming up on it from behind.

“Scan it, will you?” Chan said to Singh. “See what you can find. I’m going to see if she answers the radio.” He reluctantly left the window and took the nearest bridge station.

“Looks like a small cargo ship,” Singh reported, peering into a screen. “The transponder’s still on, but I don’t see any running lights. I can’t see any damage, but she’s too far to make out much detail.”

There was no response to the radio ping. Chan punched in a quick text message, explaining that they were not in fact pirates and were offering aid. Then he transmitted the message and sat back, not really expecting a response.

“Wow,” said Singh. “This ship does thermal scans. Can you believe it?” He tapped away at the screen in front of him. “The ship’s pretty cold. There’s a tiny bit of heat left in the engines, but the rest of it reads sub-zero.” He looked up. “Either there’s no one left alive, or they’ve got good insulation. I can’t tell which.”

Chan stood and walked to the strip of glass on his side. The mystery ship was close now, and getting closer as Liz moved the Raven forward. The ship was a bulky rectangle with a pair of thrust nozzles showing on the back. It was painted white, just like the hatch that was now part of the Raven.

When they were within a hundred metres Liz moved the ship higher and Chan got his first glimpse of the top of the freighter. The Raven’s running lights played across the hull and he saw her name, painted in neat black letters. She was called the Mixatonic.

There was a depression in the hull’s top, as if a component had been removed. When he saw the ring shape of a hatch he understood. “The lifeboat’s gone,” he said. “I think she’s abandoned.”

They moved farther forward, and pretty soon Chan was sure. There were holes in the freighter’s hull, jagged punctures that would be from the rail guns, and neat, precise circles from the laser. After a dozen holes he stopped counting. There wouldn’t be a single pressurized compartment left in the entire ship. A dark square yawned on the starboard side where the hatch had been cut away.

Liz said, “So, she’s all ours, then, right?”

Chan sighed. “I can see this tragedy has affected you deeply, Liz, but try not to get too emotional.”

A flicker of motion caught his eye. It was Liz, faintly reflected in the glass, making a rude gesture.

He returned to his seat and scanned through the usual emergency frequencies. “I’m not seeing a distress beacon,” he said. “Let’s go aboard and look for survivors.” He glanced at the ceiling, where the bearded pirate had damaged the hatch escaping in the Albatross. “I guess we’ll be using the lower lock.”

The Raven had a dozen nav cameras in strategic locations around the hull, and Liz used them to ease the ship in close. She lined up the two locks, then grinned in triumph as a metallic clatter echoed through the ship. “We’re docked,” she said.

“Oh, damn,” said Chan. Liz and Singh looked at him, surprised, and he gave them a bleak grin. “This means I have to put my suit back on.”

In the end they all went together. Exploring the freighter didn’t require five people, but no one wanted to stay behind, so they all suited up. The ventral lock was a tiny ring set in the floor in the corridor behind the bridge. There was only room for one person at a time, and Chan, claiming the privilege of rank, went in first. The lock was like a barrel that he lowered himself into, with his knees against his chest and his head curled forward. The hatch pressed the back of his helmet as it closed, and he felt the vibration of the fans pulling air back into the Raven. When all the air that could be recovered was gone, the hatch beneath him slid open and he dropped into the freighter.

The Raven’s gravity field faded as he fell, until only momentum pushed his feet against the deck. His boot magnets clicked, and he looked around. He was in a big square room with a high ceiling. Pale emergency lights lit everything with a soft glow. Crates were stacked against the walls, held in place by cargo nets. A jagged, fist-sized hole in the ceiling gave him a view of the stars.

He could hear the others on the suit radio, bickering over who would come through next. Liz and Singh didn’t want to leave Joss alone on the Raven, but wouldn’t say so in so many words. Finally Joss moved into the airlock.

Chan walked into the cargo ship, falling back into the habits of weightless movement. He ran a covetous eye over the crates, wondering what they contained. Salvage could wait, though.

There was no sound when the airlock opened behind him, but the room brightened momentarily. He turned to see Joss coming through, flailing as she left the Raven’s gravity field. She had found an extra vac suit in a storage locker. It was too big for her, making her look strangely thick-bodied, and her eyes barely reached the bottom of the helmet’s visor. She gave him a wave, then clumped over to stand beside him.

He was glad of her company. The silent, empty ship was spooky.

“What do you guys see?” Liz asked over the radio. “Are you okay?”

“We’re fine,” Chan reported. “So far all I see is a big empty room.”

He walked deeper into the ship, Joss at his heels. On the far side of the room there was a closed hatch. He tapped the door panel, not expecting much, but the door slid open.

By the time he stepped into the corridor beyond, Vogel was hurrying through the cargo room behind him. The three of them explored the corridor, stepping around holes in the deck. The corridor opened onto a galley with seats for a dozen people. A cupboard door had come open, and several plates floated just below the ceiling.

“This place creeps me out,” Vogel muttered.

“I know what you mean,” Liz said, stepping into the galley. “Still, there are no bodies. I wonder where they went?”

It didn’t take long to tour the rest of the ship. There were no crew cabins, just coffin-sized capsules for sleeping. The bridge was tiny, a pod with room for two seats and banks of controls. The Mixatonic was bigger than the Raven, but everything was built on a smaller scale to maximize room for cargo.

And there was very little cargo aboard. The main hold was a dark void running the length of the ship. There were empty shelves and stacks of partitions lashed against the bulkheads. The crates they’d passed were empty. Aside from an electric cargo mover, that was all they found.

“They must’ve dropped their cargo off,” Vogel said. “They were on their way back when the pirates attacked them.” He chuckled. “Old Hairy Face would’ve been pretty ticked off when he found out the ship was empty.”

“Bloody hell,” Liz muttered. “No cargo, and the ship’s so full of holes she’s not worth much for salvage.”

“We already traded the Albatross for the Raven,” Chan said. “It’s been a brilliant day. Let’s not complain.”

Liz didn’t reply, and Chan shrugged inside his suit, trying to get rid of a crawling sensation between his shoulder blades. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d stumbled into something far bigger than he realized. Two ships had been destroyed, two crews had either died or disappeared, and Chan had a nagging suspicion that it was just the tip of the comet’s tail.

Maybe their part in this drama was over, though. He brightened at the thought. There was no sign of the crew, and no way to tell where the lifeboat had gone. They could tow the Mixatonic back to Coriolis Station and sell her for scrap. So long as no one found anything else���

“Hey,” Singh said over the radio, “I found something! I think I know where the lifeboat went.”

He was on the bridge, wedged into one of the seats, and he gestured at the screen in front of him. “There’s some sort of base on Enceladus. That must be where they went.”

The crawling sensation worsened, and Chan frowned. There had been a research station on Enceladus once, but it had been abandoned for more than a decade. Who had the resources to build a base on a frozen moon? Why keep it secret?

“We could pretend we don’t know,” said Liz. “Claim the ship for salvage.” Chan wanted to agree with her. He felt like a fly surrounded by the invisible strands of a spider’s web. The last thing he wanted to do was move deeper into the trap. Still, he had to do what he had to do.

He opened his mouth to object, but Liz spoke first. “No, I guess we can’t leave those poor bastards down there.” She sounded angry. “Stupid survivors. Let’s go rescue them. Maybe if we’re lucky, they crash-landed.”

Chapter 4

They left the Mixatonic in orbit and swept in low over the surface of Enceladus. Even knowing the coordinates, they had a hard time spotting the station. It was the lifeboat that they saw first, parked in the middle of what seemed to be a blank, snowy plain.

Liz landed the Raven beside the lifeboat. When Chan peered through the glass he could see the station just beyond the lifeboat. The corrugated walls were painted white, and the roof had a thick coating of frost, making it invisible from above. It all blended into the snowy background, and he found it impossible to judge the size of the station.

“Liz, I want you to stay with the ship,” Chan said. She opened her mouth to argue, and he interrupted her. “I don’t know what we’re going to find, and I’m not leaving the ship empty. I want you to stay on the bridge with the engines warm, ready to lift off at a moment’s notice.”

She glared at him, and he braced himself for an argument, but she surprised him by nodding. “All right, Captain.”

“Singh, I want you to grab a first aid kit and a stretcher. Vogel, you look for a weapon. I wish the pirates had left us some guns.” Chan shrugged. “Get a couple of big wrenches, or whatever you can find.”

Vogel nodded and the two men left the bridge. Joss put her hands on her hips and said, “what about me?”

“I think you should stay here,” Chan said, and Joss scowled.

Liz gave him a meaningful look. “Maybe she should go with you.”

What you mean is, you don’t trust her on the Raven without someone to keep an eye on her. Chan sighed. “All right. Why don’t you come with us, Joss?”

Her face lit up. “Great! I’ll go find a big wrench.”

She hurried out, and Liz murmured, “If it turned out that she got left behind, it might not be such a bad thing.”

Chan ignored her and went in search of his helmet.

The Raven had a large aft airlock, one without a docking ring, designed for stepping out onto the surface of a planet or space station. All four of them were able to fit in the lock. Vogel had a hammer, and he passed a heavy pipe wrench to Chan. Joss had a wrench of her own, a huge thing longer than her arm that she held in both hands.

The hatch to the outside cracked open, and Chan felt a slight push as the thin atmosphere of Enceladus rushed in. The hatch dropped, becoming a ramp as it came into contact with the surface. Chan walked down the ramp, feeling the ship’s gravity field fall away, and stepped onto the surface of the little moon. He was standing on snow, and he knew that if he dug down deep enough he would find ice underneath. His boots sank in a finger’s width or more, and he wondered just how deep he would have sunk in Earth-normal gravity.

The gravity on Enceladus was about one percent of a gee, and he made a great, bounding leap with every step. He bounced toward the closest wall of the station, taking in details as he went.

The walls were mostly featureless. He guessed the building to be about thirty metres wide. There was an occasional small window, and a section of wall that stuck out four metres or so. He headed for the protrusion, and found an airlock on the section that was perpendicular to the main wall. He pressed his palm to a panel beside the lock.

Nothing happened.

“There’s a window,” said Joss on the radio. He followed her pointing finger. There was a small pane of glass, badly frosted over, set in the lock at eye level. He scraped the worst of the ice away, cupped his hands around the visor of his helmet, and peered in.

It was dim inside, making details hard to pick out, but he could see that the lock’s inner door was open. A dark shape was caught at the bottom edge of the door, keeping it from closing. He peered closer, waiting for his eyes to adjust, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

“Buddha’s buttocks,” he swore.

There was a chorus of voices over the radio, and someone jostled him, wanting to look.

“I think it’s a body,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Vogel’s voice was high-pitched, almost panicky.

“No, actually,” said Chan. “It’s dark in there. It could be an empty vac suit.” He stepped back from the little window. “All I know for sure is, we’re not getting in this way.”

They walked around the protruding section of wall. On the opposite side of the protrusion, no more than ten or twelve metres from the first airlock, they found a second airlock. Chan checked the window and saw nothing but an empty, closed chamber. He gestured at Vogel, who was closest to the control panel. Vogel tapped the panel and the lock slid open.

For a long moment Chan stood unmoving, staring into the lock. This is your last chance. You can turn around, go back to the ship. You know it’s the sensible thing to do. Don’t go in!

“Jim?” Singh said. “It’s kind of cold out here.”

Chan stepped into the lock, and the others followed.

There was another window on the inside of the lock, and Chan peered through, but all he could see was a blank wall two metres away. The lock was already cycling, air rushing in. They were committed. Chan tightened his grip on the pipe wrench, took a deep breath, and waited for the lock to open.

The inner hatch slid open and he stepped into the station. The ceiling was too low for bounding leaps, but the magnets on his boots let him take small, controlled steps. He was in a dressing room, brightly lit, with racks on the walls for helmets and frames for hanging spacesuits. There were safety posters reminding people to check their seals, and a mat for cleaning the snow from your boots. Eight or ten suits hung in tidy rows, and there was a matching number of helmets.

“Clean spacesuits!” said Vogel. “I’m taking one on the way out.”

Chan looked at the readout on his sleeve. The air pressure was one atmosphere, the temperature was a comfortable 22 degrees Celsius, and all the readouts were green. Singh was checking his own sleeve, and he met Chan’s eyes and nodded. “Looks good.”

A nervous voice in the back of Chan’s head told him to keep his helmet on. The protective shell of metal and hardened plastic was comforting. But the helmet made it difficult to see, nearly impossible to hear, and impossible to smell. He unsnapped the helmet and pulled it free.

The others followed suit, and put their helmets in the racks on the wall. They kept their suits on, and looked to Chan for guidance.

He sniffed the air. It was humid, with a faint aroma that made him think of flatulence. That would be the residual Enceladus atmosphere that had come in with them. Beyond that, all he could smell was the reek of unwashed spacesuits.

There were two doors at the far end of the dressing room. Chan crossed to the door on the left, trying not to be obvious as he hefted his wrench. He listened briefly at the door, then grabbed the handle and yanked it open.

He found himself staring into a drab, industrial-looking corridor with gray carpet on the floor and doors on either side. He stepped forward, the magnets on his boots no longer connecting, and tried the first door. It was a tiny bedroom, just a bunk and a small sink. The others floated after him as he tried one door after another. There were nine of the tiny bedrooms, three bedrooms that were slightly larger and had private bathrooms, and three big, Spartan rooms with half a dozen bunks each.

There were family pictures pinned to the walls, and potted plants not yet wilting. One room had a coffee cup beside the sink, still half full.

“This gets creepier and creepier,” Vogel whispered. They were all being as quiet as they could.

At the end of the corridor a larger door led to the next section of the building. Chan turned in a slow circle, getting his bearings. They were following the perimeter of the building, moving farther from the blocked airlock. When he was sure he was oriented, he grabbed the handle and swung the door open.

The carpet ended, replaced by some sort of linoleum. It was an office area with cubicles and desks. Here he saw the first sign of disorder, some loose paper strewn across the floor. The magnets in his boots were able to connect through the linoleum, but the soft surface let him move quietly. He crept through the cubicles, the others close behind him.

Private offices lined one wall. He glanced in, seeing desks and chairs and holos of kids graduating or booting soccer balls back on Earth.

“This terminal’s live,” Singh said, plunking himself down behind a desk. He tapped at the screen. “Looks like most of the files are bio-locked. But there’s a live connection to Earth-net.”

“Live” was a relative condition, of course. Earth was almost an hour and a half away by radio. Still, it meant databases and newsfeeds that were practically up-to-date. Chan was aware of a sudden tension in Joss as she stepped behind Singh, watching the screen over his shoulder. Singh slid his chair sideways, keeping Joss in his peripheral vision.

“Well, would you look at this.” His voice held a layer of satisfaction over an underlying strain. “There doesn’t seem to be a passenger ship called the Dawn Treader registered anywhere in the solar system. No ships at all with that name, in fact.” He tapped the screen some more. “Now, let’s look at news reports for pirate attacks. Let me see. A couple of prospectors in the asteroid belt. A freighter on the Mars to Venus run, but that ship escaped. And a water hauler by Titan.” He gave Chan a grim look, and edged his chair a bit farther from Joss.

“Now, it might not have been reported as piracy,” Chan said, trying to ignore the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Sometimes ships just disappear.”

“You’re right,” Singh said with an unpleasant smile. “Let’s take a look at ship disappearances in the last couple of weeks.”

“Don’t bother,” Joss said. There was no guilt in her voice, no distress. She just sounded tired. “I didn’t know who you were when I first met you. I certainly didn’t trust you.”

“I know the feeling,” said Singh. She ignored him.

“You might have been allies of the pirates. After all, you were right there on their ship. I wasn’t about to tell you I was a cop.”

Singh gave a derisive snort. Chan, though, felt the twist in his guts ease slightly. He glanced at Vogel. The young man looked ill. By Vogel’s standards, a cop was worse than a pirate.

“I work for IPBI,” she said. “It stands for Interplanetary Bureau of-”

“We know what it stands for,” interrupted Singh. His voice dripped skepticism. “I don’t suppose you have a badge?”

“On an undercover assignment?” she retorted. “Of course not.”

“And is ‘Jocelyn O’Reilly’ your real name?”

“No. My name is Special Agent Jocelyn Greene.” The ghost of a smile touched her lips. “My friends really do call me Joss, though.”

Vogel’s forehead puckered while he processed this new information. “So you’re an undercover cop? Going after pirates?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” He shrugged. “I guess that’s kind of cool.”

“Now,” said Joss, her voice chilly, “if you’re done checking up on me, let’s see if we can find those survivors.”

She turned and walked off, Vogel following her like a loyal puppy. Singh stayed put, tapping at the screen, and Chan edged over to take a look.

Singh was composing a message to the IPBI office on Coriolis Station. I have encountered a young woman who claims to be an agent of your Bureau, but she doesn’t have a badge. Do you have a Special Agent Jocelyn Green?

“You don’t need to do that,” said Chan. “She’s telling the truth.”

“Well then, I guess you’ll be able to say that you told me so.” Singh sent the message and stood.

“Hey, guys?” There was a strange tremor in Vogel’s voice. “I think you better come see this.”

They hurried past the cubicles and up to the doorway of a meeting room. Vogel and Joss stood on either side of the doorway, staring at something on the floor. Chan stepped into the doorway and froze, moving only when Singh gave him an impatient shove.

The only furniture was a shattered table near the side wall. That wasn’t what held everyone’s attention, though. There was a tentacle in the middle of the floor. It was smooth, more than a metre long, and tapered from the thickness of a fat man’s leg to a delicate tip. It was blue-gray in color, and the thick end was ragged and torn. The flesh inside was dark blue, almost purple. Purple blood was splashed all over the floor around it.

Chan’s eyes followed the blood splatter across the floor to the wall. The wall was a mess. It looked as if it had been hosed down in litres of purple blood. There were holes in the wall, dozens of them, most of them no bigger than a wedding ring. He stared, baffled.

“Those are bullet holes,” said Singh. “Full automatic. Someone had a machine gun.”

Chan looked at the holes, thought of the desperate battle that had been fought here, and wondered why he suddenly felt good. He was standing straighter than he usually did, and it came to him that the others were waiting for him to take charge.

It was the coppery smell of blood and the faintest hint of gunpowder, little more than a memory in the sterile, recycled air, that finally chased the last vestige of sludge from his nostrils. It was over. The long months knee-deep in stinking green crap finally came to an end while he stood there looking down at a place where someone had died.

He smothered something that was almost like a smile. It was wrong, surely, to feel good in this place, at this time. Wrong to revel in the death, in the peril that his people faced. But there it was. I’m not the sludge man anymore. I’m not that loser. I have responsibilities that actually matter.

“Look at that,” said Vogel, pointing at the floor on the opposite side of the tentacle. Cartridge casings littered the floor, and a purple smear ran across the linoleum, as if something had been dragged through the blood. It led to an office doorway on the far wall. The door to the office had been smashed from its hinges. Bits of broken door littered the office floor.

The four of them moved forward in a group. Chan had his hand on Singh’s shoulder, and Joss, both hands wrapped around her wrench, kept her shoulder against Chan’s other arm. Vogel was right behind him, with a hand on Chan’s back.

Singh stopped, and the others froze. He shook his head. “We’re acting like a bunch of amateurs,” he said, and brushed Chan’s hand away. Then he plucked the wrench from Joss’s hand. “Give me room. I might need to swing this thing.”

The others spread out, looking sheepish, and Chan hefted his pipe wrench. Singh stepped into the office. When nothing leaped out at him, the others followed. Cartridge casings and bits of the broken door crunched under their feet. There was more blood in here, some of it purple, some of it red. Clearly the machine gun hadn’t been enough.

“He shot it up,” said Singh in a low voice. “It didn’t die. So he crawled in here, and it smashed its way in. Then it finished him off.”

“But what happened to him?” Chan asked. “There’s no body.”

“Not him,” said Vogel, sounding a bit sick. “Her.” He was staring into the corner, and the others followed his gaze.

At first Chan thought he was looking at another potted plant. There were yellowish tufts that might have been leaves. It took him a long, ghastly moment to realize that he was looking at the blonde hair on a severed human head.

Joss screamed and turned, clutching the first person she saw, which happened to be Vogel. His hands rose automatically to hold her, and he looked at the others over the top of her head, his face a strange mixture of queasy horror and smugness.

“What’s the matter there, Special Agent?” Singh sneered. “Never seen a dead body before?”

She stiffened in Vogel’s arms, then squared her shoulders and lifted her head. She stared at Vogel’s chest for a moment as she composed herself, then stepped back out of the circle of his arms. “I’ve seen bodies before,” she said, her voice brittle. “I’ll admit that this is my first severed head.” She took a deep breath. “All right. This whole station is a crime scene. Try not to touch anything.” She looked at the mess on the floor. “In particular, try to stay out of the blood.”

“I’m way ahead of you there,” Chan muttered.

Joss was rapidly regaining her composure. She stepped across a dried rivulet of human blood and squatted close to the head. She didn’t touch it, just peered intently, craning her neck to see the head from several angles. “There’s no cuts,” she said.

“Huh?” Singh was clearly torn between scorn and curiosity.

“This head wasn’t cut off,” she said.

Singh gave a snort. “Well, it sure doesn’t seem to be attached.”

She didn’t bother looking at him as she replied. “There are no cut marks. No hacking, no chopping, no laser burns. It wasn’t cut off. This head looks like it was��� ripped off.”

An uneasy silence settled over the room. Vogel said, “But what could���” His voice trailed off as his eyes went to the tentacle behind them.

“Well, I’ve seen enough,” Chan said. “We looked for survivors, we didn’t find any. We’re getting out of here.”

There was no argument from the others. Singh nodded, and Vogel looked relieved. Joss’s face was thoughtful. Her eyes scanned the room one last time, and she turned toward the door.

And froze.

“What is it?” Chan said, his heart starting to beat faster. “Whatever it is, forget about it. We need to go.”

She was staring at the floor near the side wall, and Chan followed her gaze in spite of himself. There was a clear shoe print in the blood, as if someone had stood facing the wall.

Except that it wasn’t a wall, Chan realized. There was a cabinet built into the wall. It seemed obvious now that he looked at it, but with the blood and the body parts, he hadn’t noticed.

Joss took a step toward the cabinet, then another, doing her best to step around the blood splatter on the floor.

“Now, hang on,” Chan said. “Are you sure that’s a good���”

She swung the door open. There was nothing inside but a rumpled pile of clothing, and Chan made his fingers loosen their deathgrip on the handle of the pipe wrench. Then Joss reached down and laid her hand on the top of the laundry heap.

Something stirred.

Chan took an involuntary step back, but Joss didn’t even flinch. She murmured something in a low, soothing voice, and made a patting motion with her hand. The fabric under her hand trembled. Chan could see now that it was someone’s back, someone curled forward, kneeling, arms covering the hidden head. Other garments had tumbled from the hangers that lined the top of the cabinet, and jackets and sweaters fell away as the trembling figure straightened up.

It was a man, with the stick-thin limbs of someone who’d been a long time in microgravity. He was on his knees in the bottom of the cabinet, and he rose slowly, uncurling his spine one hesitant centimetre at a time until he was kneeling, blinking up at them. He was in his fifties, with several days of salt-and-pepper stubble, mussed gray hair, and wide, frightened eyes. He wore a blood-caked lab coat and an expression of equal parts mystification and terror.

“Who…” He cleared his throat, then said, “Who are you?”

“We’re from a salvage ship,” Chan said. “I’m Captain Chan.”

The man leaned sideways, trying to see past them. “What have you done with the creatures?” He grabbed the top of the cabinet and climbed out, wincing as his legs straightened.

“We haven’t seen any creatures,” Chan told him. “Not any whole ones, anyway. You’re the first living thing we’ve found.”

The man leaned in close, staring into Chan’s eyes. His breath was hot and foul. “You haven’t seen them?”

“No.”

“You just walked in here?”

Chan leaned back, trying not to be obvious about it. “Yes.”

“You’re an idiot,” the man said calmly. His eyes swept over the others. “All of you are idiots.” His voice rose. “You’re going to die, and die badly. If you had any sense you’d shoot yourselves, because the alternative is much, much worse!”

“We can’t shoot ourselves,” Chan said, trying to sound soothing. “We’re not armed.”

The man barked a laugh. “Morons! You’re all dead!” He looked wildly around the room. “Dead!” He lunged for the door, kicking off too hard and rebounding from the ceiling. Before his feet reached the floor his hands clutched the door frame and he dragged himself through. They heard echoing thumps and thuds as he hurtled through the office area, heading back the way they had come.

Singh gave Chan a sardonic grin. “I guess he agrees with you about getting out of here.”

Chan nodded. “We better see where he’s gone.”

They trouped out of the office. Joss looked around at the terminals. “I guess I better report this,” she said.

“You could use this terminal here,” Singh said, walking over to the desk he’d used before. He leaned over the desk and tapped the screen. “Oh, look! A reply to my message.”

The look of malicious glee on his face told Chan all that he needed to know. The unpleasant lump was back in his stomach before Singh began to speak.

“From Special Agent Millicent Dobbs, officer in charge of blah blah blah, dear Mister Smith,” and he looked up with a nasty grin. “I lied to Ms. Dobbs about my name. I know, I know, what kind of a person would do that?” He returned his gaze to the screen.

“The IPBI has no agents or employees named Jocelyn Green. Impersonating a Bureau agent is a serious offense, and blah blah blah���”

Chan looked at Joss, aware of the hurt, bewildered look on his face but unable to hide it. Singh’s expression was all grim satisfaction. Only Vogel was smiling. “I knew you weren’t a cop,” he said. “You’re too cool.”

Joss ignored the other two and turned her gaze to Chan. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said. “This is a highly classified operation. I wasn’t allowed to tell you the truth.”

“Oh, come on,” said Singh, and she silenced him with a raised hand.

“You’ve seen what’s going on here,” she said. “Illegal and highly dangerous experiments. Solar Force has been hearing rumors about it for months. We knew the pirates were involved, but we didn’t know what the connection was. The agency sent me out to infiltrate the pirate crew and try to find out what’s really going on.”

Singh gave a sarcastic chuckle. “Do you really expect us to believe this malarkey?”

“No,” she said, looking at him for the first time. “But it happens to be the truth.”

“So your name isn’t really Jocelyn Green,” Chan said wearily.

“It’s Jocelyn Fleming. You can still call me Joss.”

“Of course.” He sighed. “Now, if everyone’s done playing silly games, I’d like to get out of here before something tears my head off.”

They followed him through the offices and down the corridor that led through the dormitory section. A scuff mark from a shoe, in the middle of the wall at eye level, told them that the wild-eyed man had come this way.

Chan had just stepped into the dressing room when the floor trembled ever so slightly under his feet. A faint rumble reached his ears, and his stomach sank. His eyes scanned the room, and he saw a small window in the wall near the airlock. He hurried to the window and peered outside. And swore.

The Stark Raven was lifting off. They were trapped.

Chapter 5

Liz paced back and forth on the bridge of the Raven, fuming. After eighteen claustrophobic days on the Albatross, the Raven had seemed enormous. With no one on board but Liz, it should’ve been even better. But somehow the presence of a moon just outside, the open ground and blowing snow, made the ship seem unbearably confining.

She walked to the front of the bridge and peered through the glass. Nothing was moving. Nothing had changed. She stomped back to her chair, hit the microphone button, and said, “Is anyone on the air?”

No response. They’d left their helmets behind, or they were all dead. “We really need hand radios,” she muttered.

She stood up and resumed pacing. The clank of her boot magnets was starting to get on her nerves. She was more than ready to get off this rock and back into space, out of the vac suit and into some comfortable clothes.

Stomp. Clank. Stomp. Clank. And she froze. Was that a muffled thud?

She held her breath, looking around the empty bridge. Nothing moved.

There was a clumping sound, then a rustle of cloth. Her eyes went to the panes of glass. The atmosphere outside was thin, but would it carry sound? If not, there had to be someone on the ship with her.

She heard breathing, quick, urgent gasps that raised the hair on the back of her neck. It was too loud to come through the walls. There was someone on the bridge with her.

Her eyes went to the helm station, and she released the breath she’d been holding, not knowing whether to laugh or snarl. Someone had put their helmet back on. She hit the microphone button. “Welcome back. Want to tell me what’s going on?”

The answer was a startled grunt, followed by the unmistakable sound of an airlock door sliding open.

“Hello?” she said. “Are you there? Anybody? Oh, for���”

She stood and walked to the front of the bridge. There was nothing to be seen but flat white snow and the pale walls of the station. Then a slice of light appeared on the ground, growing rapidly into a rectangle as the outside door of the lock slid open. Someone squirmed through the gap as the door was still opening, casting a huge, grotesque shadow across the snow. And then a figure in a red and white vac suit came bounding across the snow toward her.

Liz frowned. No one on the ship had been wearing red and white. Everyone looked the same in a vac suit, though. She couldn’t tell who it was.

Whoever he was, he was in a hurry. The first leap carried him a good eight metres, and his legs made running motions in the air before he even reached the ground. His feet touched down…

And the snow seemed to erupt in front of him. Something blue and white burst upward in a cloud of white flakes, and the figure in the red and white vac suit jumped. In the microgravity of Enceladus, a startled jump was something to see. He sprang straight up, and he just kept rising.

The thing, the creature from the snow, jumped with him. He was seven metres in the air when a tentacle closed around his ankle and the creature yanked him close. They wrestled as they continued to rise. They must have been fifteen metres up before they drifted to a halt and slowly began to descend. They looked almost graceful as they floated downward, but the one in the vac suit was no longer moving.

The blue and white shape was monstrous, alien, bizarre. There was a torso and a head that looked vaguely human, but the rest was a perverse eruption of writhing, squirming tentacles. Liz stared, rigid with shock, watching tentacles wrap themselves around the arms and legs of the vac suit. One leg stuck out at an impossible angle, and she saw a puff of vapor as the suit tore at the shoulder seam. A single urgent thought began to penetrate the fog around her brain. In a moment that thing would reach the ground, and she didn’t know what it would do next.

She tore herself away from the window, lurching toward the helm console, distantly aware that she was making an embarrassing keening sound in the back of her throat. She threw herself into her seat and slapped a hand down on the main thrust controls. The white horizon of Enceladus vanished as the ship blasted upward, and she took a long, ragged breath, telling herself that she was safe.

She saw the black of space through the transparent strips on either side of the patch. The view turned white, then black again, and she swore, her hands moving on the controls without conscious thought. Her mind was still filled with visions of tentacles and death, but her training kicked in and took control. Rising vertically with a force engine took a delicate touch to balance thrust against the unevenly-distributed mass of the ship. Her sudden takeoff had been the equivalent of slapping the end of a spoon, launching it upward but giving it a wild spin. She fought for control, fought for her life, as the ship tumbled madly toward the surface of Enceladus.

Chan’s voice babbled at her over the radio, and she broke the connection before he could distract her. She cut thrust, then turned on the maneuvering thruster in the nose of the ship. It would stop the spin, given enough time. As she was tumbling toward the surface, though, time was rapidly running out.

At any meaningful distance from the surface the small gravity of Enceladus became inconsequential. She didn’t have to fight against gravity, just the mad velocity of the tumbling ship. Her eyes scanned readouts, her fingers danced over the controls, and a corner of her mind was grateful for the patch that mostly kept her from seeing out the front of the ship. The sight of the horizon flashing past once per second might have pushed her over the edge into full-blown panic.

Enceladus’s thin atmosphere played a part in saving her, creating a bit of drag that slowed the spinning of the ship. In the end it wasn’t enough. The ship was still revolving end over end as the surface rushed up. The spin was slow enough, though, that Liz was able to choose her moment and hit main thrust when the ship was pointing upward. She cut the thrust almost immediately and brought the ship under control a comfortable hundred kilometres above the moon.

Then she sat and stared at nothing until her hands stopped shaking. She didn’t know what to do, and when her hands went to the controls she wasn’t sure why. But she guided the ship down and landed alongside a ridge of ice half way between the equator and the moon’s north pole. The sun was below the horizon, but the sun didn’t amount to much this far out. Saturn gave a yellow light that was more than adequate to see by. When she walked to the front of the bridge and peered out, she could see the expanse of the ring, back-lit by the distant sun, glittering like a field of diamonds whenever a ray of sunlight broke through. The beauty of it soothed her, and she stood watching until her pulse returned to normal.

A faint clicking sound came to her ears. Someone was fooling around with a suit radio. With any luck that meant most of them were alive. Maybe even all of them. That red and white suit could have belonged to one of those annoying survivors who were causing so much trouble. She walked over to the helm station and reached for the microphone button.

And froze, her finger a centimetre above the button. The radio was off.

She straightened. Her first thought was of tentacled monsters, but they couldn’t be everywhere. She was a hundred kilometres or more from the research station. No, her wild flight had broken something or pulled something loose. She would have to figure out what was wrong before she dared take off again.

The sound was definitely coming from aft. Liz walked to the back of the bridge, and the noise got louder as the hatch slid open. She moved down the corridor, listening, moving farther and farther aft.

She didn’t get really worried until she reached the aft airlock. Still, there was no reason to think that anything was in the airlock. The lock would have been open, the ramp down, when she made her emergency takeoff. If anything was going to tear loose, it would be the hydraulics for the ramp. There was a hose loose, flapping in the wind. That was all.

I need a weapon. She shook her head at the thought. Vogel and Joss had gone over the ship trying to arm themselves, and what had they come up with? A hammer and a pipe wrench? The monstrosity that had burst from the snow and killed the man in red and white wouldn’t have been fazed by anything less than an assault rifle, and maybe not even by that. Thumping it with a wrench wasn’t going to do much.

She put her hands on her hips and glared at the lock. There was no way she was going to be intimidated by something as trivial as a knocking sound, monster or no monster. She was, however, going to put her helmet on. The readouts showed that the lock was closed, but the noise told her something was malfunctioning. She wouldn’t take a chance on the ship depressurizing.

Her helmet clicked into place and the radio turned itself on. She called out a tentative “Hello” and got no response. Shrugging, she walked back to the aft lock. If the others had been watching, she would have hit the button right away. Since no one could see her, she hesitated, working up her courage. Finally she told herself she was being silly, and laid her hand across the panel.

The hatch slid open. The lock was empty, and she let her shoulders sag in relief.

Then a writhing, squirming form came boiling around the edge of the hatch. Liz had time for one brief scream, and then it was on her.

Chapter 6

“This is bad. This is very bad. Oh, Gaia, this is really bad.”

“Shut up, Vogel,” Chan snapped. “I’m trying to think.”

Vogel opened his mouth as if he wanted to argue. Then his eyes slid to Joss, who was staring at him with wide, solemn eyes, and he flushed and closed his mouth.

“What the hell is she playing at?” Singh muttered. “I knew she was cold-blooded, but leaving us here?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Chan snapped. “Maybe she’ll be back. Maybe she won’t. What we need to figure out is what to do next.”

“We’re going to die,” said Vogel in a small voice. Chan looked at him, and Vogel lowered his eyes. After a moment he cleared his throat. “Sorry, Captain. So, what do we do next?”

Chan, to his dismay, found that all three of them were looking at him. I’m a glorified janitor, for Buddha’s sake! What makes you think I know what to do about monsters in a secret base on Enceladus? I’m only captain because claiming an abandoned lifeboat was my idea. Considering how it’s worked out, that should make you less likely to follow me, not more.

He stared back at them, waiting for someone to take charge, someone who actually knew what to do. The moment stretched out, and nobody moved. When he couldn’t stand it any longer he said, “All right. First thing we’ll do is go back to the office area and send a message, call for help. Then we’ll come back here. The airlock is the strongest place on the entire base. We’ll just wait inside the lock until help arrives.”

They nodded as if his plan wasn’t full of holes and followed him back into the base.

No one said a word as they worked their way through the dormitory section. When they reached the door to the office area, Chan held his hand up and everyone froze. He leaned close to the door and listened.

There was a distinct dragging sound. All four of them heard it. But it didn’t come from the offices. It came from behind them, in the changing room. Chan stared at the others, seeing his horror reflected in their faces, trying to tell himself that it was nothing to be afraid of. It was another survivor, or the same man coming back. But that dragging noise, now mixed with a quiet snuffling, sounded like nothing human.

His mind flashed to the other door leading from the dressing room, the one they had never opened. They had made too much noise, and something on the other side had come to investigate.

Well, it wasn’t a mistake he was about to repeat. He was silent now, all four of them were. He didn’t move. In fact, he didn’t think he could make his rigid muscles move if his life depended on it.

It turned out he was wrong. Something rubbed against the door between the dressing room and the dorm area. The door rustled, then creaked as the pressure increased. When the door frame started to crack, Chan tore open the door in front of him and launched himself through it.

He bounded through the office area, stooping low as he nearly hit the ceiling, eyes scanning frantically for a place to hide, a door strong enough to keep out a creature that could rip a woman’s head from her body.

Terror makes one percent gravity the same as zero gee. Chan passed through the office without touching the floor, grabbing at corners and doorknobs and desktops to propel himself forward. The others were right behind him, bumping into him when he turned corners. He had no idea if they were being followed, but he tore along as if monsters were on his heels. He sailed through the meeting room with the bullet-riddled walls, passing over the severed tentacle, and pulled himself through a doorway on the far side.

There was a security booth of some sort, and a door with a turnstile. He went over the turnstile in a low dive, rolled to his feet, and darted into a corridor that opened on the right. He went through the first doorway he came to. It opened on a room full of chrome and gleaming white paint. There were no other exits, so he dove over a counter and huddled on the floor on the far side. More bodies came flying over the counter. In moments the four of them were a tangle of limbs, clinging to one another and staring around, the only sound their panicky breathing.

After a while Chan whispered, “What was behind us? Did anybody see it?”

Silence.

“Did anyone see anything?”

“No,” said Vogel, “but I heard it. Oh, my good Gaia, this is not good.”

“Don’t start that again,” Chan snapped. “Where are we?”

Their close huddle broke apart, and the four of them re-arranged themselves. Singh had landed on his stomach with Vogel on top of him, and he rose to a crouch, giving Vogel a dirty look and smoothing his vac suit.

They were in a narrow gap between a counter and a wall. The room was brightly lit. Every surface seemed to be stainless steel or stark, antiseptic white plastic.

“I think it’s some sort of lab,” Joss whispered, examining the shelves under the counter. There were metal trays, forceps, and bottles with stoppers. She lifted her head just high enough to see over the counter, gave the room a quick scan, and ducked back down. “Definitely a lab.”

“Did you see a data terminal?” Chan asked. “The sooner we get a message out, the better.”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “We may have to stand up.”

“I’m not standing up!” Vogel hissed. “Are you crazy?”

“We can’t stay here,” Chan replied. “Face it, this isn’t much of a hiding place. If something is looking for us, it’s going to find us. We have to get a message out.” He looked at the others. No one argued. Great. Chan took a deep breath and stood.

The room was free of monsters, for the moment at least. He walked around the counter, his boots making low scuffing noises on the linoleum, and surveyed the room. A glass-walled cubicle filled one corner. There was a long steel table with instruments dangling from the ceiling above it, a row of sinks along one wall, and a little desk with a data terminal and a couple of chairs. He picked up one chair, stepped over to the open door, eased the door shut as quietly as he could, and braced the chair under the knob.

“There’s no outside connection,” Joss announced. She was sitting at the terminal. “Let me see…”

Chan walked over and stood behind her chair as she tapped the screen. She found a file menu and started to explore. There were cryptic documents full of technical jargon about Hox genes and protein transcription, all of it far over Chan’s head. It seemed to be vaguely medical in tone, though. She brought up diagrams of complex molecules and spreadsheets of data with incomprehensible labels.

Eventually she found a letter, obviously an early draft, filled with corrections and margin notes. Some of it was too technical to understand, using words that Chan was willing to bet were made up. One section of the letter was only too clear.

The transition to human subjects has been more successful than we ever could have anticipated. Although we continue to experience challenges, they are no more than what must be expected for such a revolutionary breakthrough. Fatality among test subjects has fallen below 30%, and more than half of subjects successfully reach Stage 3.

It is difficult to overstate the ramifications of our discoveries. Test subjects are able to survive extremes of temperature from -120 degrees to in excess of 225 degrees, and pressures below 0.1 atmospheres. Six subjects have survived in hard vacuum for an average of over nineteen minutes, none less than twelve minutes and one for nearly thirty minutes.

We are nearing a point where our findings and our methods can be made public. Soon we will reach a threshold where the significance of what we have accomplished will be enough to trivialize the legal and ethical concerns which the public may express.

Joss pushed her chair back from the terminal. “Good God,” she said. “Thirty percent fatality among test subjects? Ethical concerns?”

Chan thought of the severed head in the office area and sincerely hoped it belonged to the author of this letter.

Vogel shook his head. “So, that tentacle? It came from some kind of, what? Altered human being?” The others stared at him, not answering, and he shuddered. “That’s sick!”

“It’s pretty illegal, too,” Joss said. “When we get to a console with a live connection, we better think carefully about who we call.”

Vogel turned to her. “You must know some people in your spy agency. We can call them, right?”

Chan told himself he was imagining the furtive look in her eyes as she nodded. “We can contact Solar Force, yes. That’s a good idea.”

Singh snickered, and she ignored him, turning back to the terminal. After a moment she brought up another document.

Subject: Technician Warshawski

Date: May 3

Test subject 58 escaped from confinement during Level 2 treatment and proved quite difficult to contain. A security team eventually managed to destroy Subject 58, but one of our technicians suffered skin lacerations from direct contact with the appendages of Subject 58.

Technician Warshawski began to display symptoms of the Barnes Effect almost immediately. He died 76 hours after first exposure. Physical changes were inconsistent, and concentrated near the site of the lacerations. Successful conversion seems unlikely when contagion is introduced in such a haphazard manner.

The unfortunate demise of Technician Warshawski has provided a wealth of data. Still, we have modified our security procedures to ensure there are no more unscheduled exposures.

There was a photograph below the text. Warshawski was a young man, thin and pale, his eyes open and blank in death. The left side of his body looked perfectly normal except for some bruises on his ribs and thigh. His right leg was almost normal, with a strange lump just below his hip.

After that, all normality ended. His right arm was gone. It seemed to have split, forming a pair of tentacles, gray skin showing through as pink human skin peeled away.

Smaller tentacles erupted from the side of his neck, just above where his shoulder should have been. His rib cage was deformed, growths sprouting across his chest and stomach. Something was in his abdomen, stretching the skin outward on his right side. His navel had been pulled several centimetres to the right, the skin stretched so tight it looked ready to tear.

Half of his face looked normal, and his eyes and forehead were unchanged, but the skin was gone from the right side of his jaw, and the jawbone was deformed, twisting downward like nothing Chan had ever seen.

“Holy Hell,” breathed Vogel. “That girl in the office. The severed head. She was lucky.”

“We definitely need to think about leaving,” Singh said. “I say we throw the door open and make a run for it.” He strode to the door, put a hand on the back of the chair, and froze. He leaned closer to the door, frowning in concentration.

And the door vibrated as something thumped against it from outside.

“On second thought,” Singh said, “let’s keep the door closed.” He backpedalled, scanning the room as if an exit might have appeared while they were talking. Then he headed for the glass-walled booth in the corner.

Chan stood frozen, his thoughts chasing themselves in a terrified circle, and Vogel pushed past him, heading for the door. Chan had a bad moment, thinking that the boy was panicking, and he started after Vogel, knowing he would be too late.

But Vogel grabbed the chair and wedged it harder under the doorknob, then held it steady. The door thumped again and again, but so far it was holding.

Chan reached Vogel’s side and pressed his hands against the door. The faux wood surface thrummed through his gloves as something battered away on the far side. He thought of the woman’s head, ripped from her body, and wondered how long the door would last.

“I’m sorry,” Vogel murmured, barely loud enough for Chan to hear.

“Sorry? For what?”

“About before. I was scared. I let you down.”

Chan stared down at the top of Vogel’s head, nonplussed. Finally he said, “Don’t be silly. And anyway, you’ve made up for it now.”

Vogel looked up at him, something like wistfulness in his eyes. He looked impossibly young, and Chan was filled with a fierce and hopeless urge to keep him safe. “Really?” he said.

Something slapped against the door, the plastic hit Chan’s palms hard enough to sting through his gloves, and the chair slid several centimetres across the floor. Vogel kicked it back into place and wedged a knee against the front of the seat, his face white with strain.

“When something needed to be done, you were the first one there,” Chan said. “You were the only one heading toward danger instead of away from it.”

Vogel turned his attention from the door long enough to flash an uncertain grin at Chan. Then he took a deep breath and leaned hard on the chair.

The door shook with the biggest blow yet. A horizontal crack appeared just below Chan’s hands, running from just above the middle hinge to the center of the door. A moment later the door seemed to jump toward them. There was a loud cracking noise, and Vogel straightened up, his eyes wide, the back of the chair in two pieces in his hands.

Chan grabbed him, dragged him to the side, and the remains of the chair sailed across the room as the door swung inward. Chan, acting on impulse, wrapped his arms around Vogel and pulled him against the wall. The fractured door hit them, and he let go of Vogel, grabbing the doorknob. They stood breathless, half hidden, as monsters from a nightmare came swarming in.

At first it seemed like a horde, dozens if not hundreds of twisted creatures. Eventually Chan realized there were only three of them. He would have taken them for aliens if he hadn’t known better. Nothing noticeably human remained. Each creature had about the mass of a man, and a torso with a head above it. Everything else was changed. Limbs sprouted everywhere, and they writhed across the floor instead of walking. The lack of legs made them shorter, but tentacles that sprouted straight upward and waved in the air gave an illusion of height.

For some reason, tentacles sprouted thickest where a human neck should have been. Each creature had a misshapen head with bulbous eyes and an elongated jaw, surrounded by a ring of squirming blue worms.

A quiet corner of Chan’s brain reported signals of pain coming from his right hand. He was squeezing the doorknob as if he meant to crush it. He was distantly grateful for the vac suit, because his bladder was releasing itself. In the corner of his eye he could see Vogel, mouth open, frozen.

The creatures squirmed past, no more than half a metre from the cowering men, and kept on going. Singh was inside the glass-walled booth, and Joss gave a shriek and sprang in behind him. The door of the booth clicked shut behind her an instant before the creatures arrived. Tentacles slammed against the glass, all three creatures battering madly, their attention focused on Singh and Joss.

The door to the booth opened outward. The creatures were effectively holding the door shut, but the glass was already cracking beneath their blows. Joss had the big wrench high over her head, trembling as she waited for the glass to break.

It’s time to go. Come on, James, you can do it. Two steps will take you around the door and out of the room. You can’t save Singh and Joss. But you can save Vogel. You just have to move. Move!

Every muscle in his body was rigid. Chan wasn’t sure he was even breathing. Then he caught a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye. Vogel swallowed, then took a deep breath. The boy was about to panic, to scream or make a run for it, and Chan opened his mouth to whisper a quiet warning.

He never got the chance. Vogel moved, deliberately and without panic. He strode across the floor, directly toward the creatures.

Chan watched him go. His mind scrambled through a thousand scenarios. He could charge after the boy, achieve nothing, and die with his friends. He could slip outside while the creatures were distracted, and try to live with himself afterward. His eyes flicked over the contents of the room, searching for a weapon. His pipe wrench lay on the counter, but against these creatures? He might as well use harsh language.

His eyes fell on a bright green button protected by a plastic case just inside the doorway. He’d seen the same thing on Coriolis Station, and on various spaceships. It was a gas-based fire suppression system. It would be enough to suffocate every human being in the room. These creatures, though, could survive twenty minutes of hard vacuum.

They were, for all practical purposes, indestructible.

Vogel reached the creatures and threw himself forward in a dive. He extended his arms, catching two of them where a human might have had a waist. In an instant there were tentacles around his arms, his legs, his head. He screamed, “Run, Joss!” Then the tentacles tightened, and he just screamed.

Chan reached the doorway in two steps. He thought he was leaving until he saw his hands flip the plastic casing up. He slapped his palm down on the green button.

The result was instantaneous. Vogel’s screams were drowned out by the peal of a siren. A gray fog came jetting from a dozen hidden nozzles in the ceiling. Chan dropped to his knees, coughing, as the room filled with billowing gray clouds.

Something screamed, a voice completely inhuman, and a shape emerged from the fog. Chan flinched back, and a tentacle brushed him as one of the creatures fled the lab. The second one was just a disturbance in the mist as it went by. He heard the third creature hit the door frame, the tentacles gripping the wall for an instant before the creature flitted outside.

Chan pressed his cheek to the floor, sucked in a breath, and banged his forehead on the floor as he started to cough. He reached out blindly, fumbled until he felt the doorframe, and dragged himself into the hall.

Clouds of gas billowed from the lab, but the air in the corridor was mostly clear. Chan stayed on hands and knees long enough to take three or four good, deep breaths, then stood.

The creatures were gone. The corridor was empty.

He took a deep breath, stepped to the doorway of the lab, and stuck his head inside. Almost immediately he saw Singh, sagging against the wall and coughing. Chan held his breath, kept a hand on the doorframe, and reached in, grabbing Singh by the wrist. He dragged Singh into the hallway, where the other man dropped into a sitting position, coughing and gasping.

After that, Chan spent a long moment staring into the gas-filled lab, hoping to see Joss and Vogel come staggering out. Five seconds was enough to persuade him that he was only making things worse, and for him to work up his nerve. He breathed deeply, oxygenating his blood, then took a deep breath, held it, and charged into the fog.

He almost immediately tripped and fell sprawling. He groped blindly, trying to make sense of what he’d hit. He discovered he’d landed on top of Vogel, who was stretched full-length on the floor. Joss was on her knees by his shoulders, sagged forward with her forehead against the floor. She must have been dragging him toward the door when she collapsed.

He scooped her up. He couldn’t see the doorway, but he could see eddies in the fog that told him where the doorway had to be. Three strides brought him to the corridor, where he dropped her. A moment later he was back with Vogel.

Chapter 7

The siren shut itself off and the gas stopped pumping as they carried Vogel into the next room. It was another lab, this one filled with state-of-the-art 3-D imaging equipment. They set Vogel on a projector table and Singh set to work removing his suit. The boy didn’t look good. His face was white and bloodless, except for a crimson line across his left temple where the skin was torn. He was limp, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. He didn’t react as Singh moved him back and forth, working the suit down over his shoulders.

“There’s an emergency station in the hallway,” Singh said, not lifting his eyes from his work. “There’s probably a first aid kit.”

Joss hurried out. Chan didn’t move. He felt drained, lifeless. All he could do was stare at Vogel’s slack face.

“Get his head,” Singh snapped, and Chan moved to the end of the table. He supported Vogel’s head and shoulders while Singh worked the vac suit down over the boy’s body.

“You have no business being in command if you’re going to fall apart in a crisis.” There was real venom in Singh’s voice. “Who put you in charge, anyway?”

Joss came in with a first aid kit in one hand and a fire axe in the other. She dropped the axe by the door and opened the kit. Chan set Vogel’s head down and stepped back as Singh gave terse orders, asking for parts from the kit.

There were more lacerations across Vogel’s chest and left shoulder. None of it looked deep, but bright red blood was pooling on the table top. Chan watched, numb, as Singh sprayed the wounds first with an antiseptic, and then with a coagulant.

Chan picked up the axe and stepped into the hallway, telling himself that he couldn’t help, that he was only in the way. His hands tightened on the axe handle. He wanted to find the creatures, to lash out, to DO something.

Somewhere behind him Vogel moaned, and Chan set off down the hall, desperate to be out of earshot. He was filled with a sudden yearning for the honest smell of sludge. Life on Coriolis Station had been bad, but it had been life. Vogel had been there, alive, healthy.

He had a sudden, bitter memory of their last conversation on the station. Vogel, his eyes shining, had been so grateful. “I can’t tell you what this means to me, James. It’s a brilliant idea. If I never come back to this station again, it’ll be because of you.”

Another moan echoed down the corridor, and Chan squeezed the axe handle until his knuckles cracked. He threw open the next door in the corridor, telling himself he was scouting, desperate to distract himself.

He was in a morgue. It wasn’t what the room had been designed for, but that was the use it served now. He wasn’t sure how many bodies he saw. More than ten, fewer than twenty, but bodies of every description. He could almost trace how things had gone wrong by the changes in the corpses.

Three of them were zipped neatly into white body bags. Once they might have been laid out on gurneys, but now they were laid out side-by-side on the floor in one corner. They had been moved because the gurneys were needed. There were four gurneys. A young Chinese woman in a blue medical gown lay peacefully, eyes closed, with a tag around her big toe. Next to her was a stocky white man, also in a hospital gown. There was a line of stitches along his cheek, tracing the path of a half-healed gash. His neck bulged. Chan could see five or six different points where growing tentacles were on the verge of bursting through. He was strapped to the gurney, with lines of bruise on his arms and legs where he’d tried to break free. No one had bothered to close his eyes or tag his toe.

The third gurney held a woman with fresh lacerations on her arms and hands. There were no stitches. No one had tried to close the wounds, or even cleaned the blood from her hands. She wore blue scrubs, and he could see a bullet hole between her breasts.

The last gurney was a mess. He thought it might have once contained a brawny young man in green fatigues. The legs were still largely intact, held down by a broad canvas strap. There were more restraints, but they were in tatters. The upper part of the body was a shredded mess. Chan could see tentacles, and chunks of tentacles. Someone had sprayed the body with bullets until there wasn’t much left. The gurney sagged in the middle, so full of holes that, even in microgravity, it could barely support itself.

After that, the survivors must have been too busy for body bags and gurneys. The rest of the corpses were in two piles, one for humans and one for monsters.

Chan shivered. At first he thought it was nerves, until he noticed his breath misting in front of him. Someone had turned off the heat to this room. It was the excuse he needed to get out of there. He headed for the door, turning his back on the carnage, wishing he could erase it from his mind’s eye.

The corridor ended in a hairpin turn. The building had to be triangular, then. Pretty soon he would reach the other airlock, the one with the body blocking the hatch. There were three doors in this section of the corridor, and he opened them one at a time. There was a storage room full of mysterious boxes and bottles, and a mechanical room with the base’s surprisingly small power plant.

The third door opened onto a staircase. There was a pool of blood under the stairs, as if some hurt person had gone there to hide. A trail of blood, trickles and spatters, led from the pool of blood up the stairs.

Chan shifted his grip on the axe and followed.

He found a body at the top of the stairs. It was a woman of about sixty, dressed in a lab coat. Her left hand was a mangled mess with the stubs of tentacles beginning to show. She was huddled in a corner of the landing with her knees drawn up to her chest and a pistol in her hand. She had shot herself in the throat.

Chan just looked at her for a while. Liz would say that she deserved it, he supposed. She might even be right. Still, this woman who reminded Chan of his mother had died alone and afraid, with as much courage and dignity as she could muster.

He took the gun from her hand. It was an old-school gunpowder weapon with lead slugs. Chan slid it into the pouch on his thigh. Then he looked at the hatch at the top of the stairs.

Escape pod.

The text on the hatch was simple and to the point. Beyond the hatch was a one-person escape pod with enough power to escape the gravity of Enceladus and at least get moving toward Coriolis Station. Chan stared at the hatch for a long time, yearning to open it.

“Who the hell planned this?” he muttered. “Thirty people on the base, and there’s an escape pod for one?” He shook his head, turned his back on the hatch, and clumped his way down the stairs.

A side corridor led to another changing room. A figure in a vac suit lay sprawled on the floor, halfway into the airlock, keeping the hatch from closing. Chan hit the hatch controls, opening the door fully, and dragged the body out of the way. He dropped the body in the corner of the dressing room without looking at the face inside the helmet. He’d seen enough.

Then he stopped, hands on his hips, thinking. In his mind he traced the route he’d taken through the base. Most of the rooms he’d gone through had been up against the outside walls. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that there was a large triangular area in the center of the base that he hadn’t explored.

He retraced his steps and returned to the lab where he’d left the others. He found Singh and Joss slumped in chairs, looking haggard and spent. Vogel was stretched on the table, a silver emergency blanket covering him from toes to chin. His face was still bone-white, his eyes still closed, but his lips were moving. He was murmuring, and occasionally moaning, and sometimes his head thrashed from side to side. His hands and feet twitched, making the blanket rustle. He was not resting easy.

There was relief in Joss’s eyes when she looked up at him, and that disturbed him. Couldn’t she see that he was in over his head?

“What now?” he said. They just looked at him, not speaking, so he sighed. Waiting for the creatures to come back wasn’t an idea with much appeal. This lab didn’t have a fire suppression system, either. The next encounter with the monsters would be the last.

“We can’t stay here,” he said. “Let’s carry Vogel to the airlock, like we talked about before. Then I’ll go over to the office area and call for help.” He glanced uneasily at the boy as he thrashed on the table. If Vogel was going to turn into one of those creatures, in the close confines of an airlock or a rescue ship…

Well, he wasn’t going to leave the boy behind. He walked to the end of the table. “Somebody get his feet.”

Joss said, “Maybe we should go to the safe room instead.”

He stared at her blankly. “The what?”

She gestured to the doorway, and he turned. There was a little map, less than fifteen centimetres square, beside the door. He had a vague memory of seeing the same thing in several different rooms. It was just part of the furnishings, invisible until he made himself look at it.

It was a map of the base, with the lab they were in outlined in blue. A dotted red line led from their lab, down the corridor to the left, past the escape pod stairwell, through a door that Chan hadn’t noticed, and into a red-outlined triangular room in the center of the base. The triangular room was labeled “Safe Room.”

“Now that you mention it,” said Chan, “let’s go there.”

They left Singh with Vogel. Chan led the way, axe in hand, with Joss right behind him. She was armed with the pipe wrench this time. They moved down the corridor, trying to be quick but quiet, Chan cringing every time their boot magnets clanked on the floor. The base was eerily quiet, and he wondered where the creatures had gone. A safe room should have sturdy doors, though. And communication equipment, and likely food and water and first aid equipment. They might be home free in a matter of moments. They would scout the room, then bring Vogel over. If the monsters would just stay in hiding for a few more minutes���

“What’s in there?” Joss gestured at the door with the staircase.

“Death,” Chan said, and kept walking.

In the corner of the building the corridor made a tight turn. Chan had missed a doorway on the inside of the curve. He opened it now, and stepped into a short corridor. A solid-looking steel hatch filled the opposite end of the corridor.

A wheel was set in the middle of the hatch, and he gave it a twist. The hatch was already unlocked. He put a hand on the hatch and pushed.

The hatch swung inward, and he caught a brief glimpse of the interior. Benches lined the walls, there were rows of cabinets, and he thought he saw a simple kitchen. Then motion caught his eye. A familiar shape was writhing across the floor toward him. Another shape sprang from behind a cabinet, and a tentacle dropped from the ceiling, reached through the hatch, and snaked toward his wrist.

With a hoarse cry, Chan slammed the hatch shut on the tentacle. He dropped the axe, pulling on the wheel with both hands, and the creature made a bestial squealing noise. The tentacle flailed, the tip no more than a couple of centimetres from the back of his hand, and he brought his foot up, bracing it against the frame of the hatch. He pulled for all he was worth.

Joss reached under his leg to pick up the axe. There wasn’t much room to swing, but she did her best. She grazed his head with her first chop, and he swore, leaning down and to one side to give her room. She swung with a will, aiming for the point where the tentacle was caught between the hatch and the frame. She hit the frame, the steel rang like a church bell, and Joss swore. She swung again, and the axe hit the tentacle, denting it but not breaking the gray skin.

“Hit it like you mean it,” Chan grunted, and she swung again. This time the skin broke, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the spray of blood. He kept his eyes shut as she chopped and chopped. Finally the hatch moved toward him, and he heard Joss say, “There. It’s shut.”

He spun the wheel clockwise, locking it, then held on with one hand while he used the sleeve of his suit to wipe his face. He heard the clack of footsteps as Joss hurried away, then returned a moment later. She pushed something into his hand, and he touched it to his face. It was some sort of tissue, and he used it to wipe his face clean. Only then did he open his eyes.

The hatch was spattered with blood, and a strip of flesh hung from the top edge. The rest of the tentacle was on the floor at his feet, still twitching. There was blood all over the front of his suit, and he could feel more of it dripping down his neck.

“Are you all right?” she asked, and he nodded.

“Thanks, Joss. I’m glad you were here.”

The compliment seemed to fluster her, so he changed the subject. “Hand me that pipe wrench, would you?”

The hatch couldn’t be locked from the outside, but he tightened the wrench on the wheel with the wrench handle against the frame of the hatch. “That should hold them,” he said.

They trudged back to the lab, limp and spent in the aftermath of the adrenaline surge. “I think that’s all of them,” Chan said. “It better be. I don’t know how much more I can take.”

They heard Vogel long before they reached the door. He was moaning, almost wailing, and Chan felt his stomach churn. He pushed open the door of the lab.

Singh had put a canvas strap across Vogel’s chest, and it was the only thing keeping the boy on the table. Vogel thrashed and flailed, his eyes open, staring unseeing at the ceiling. He was covered in sweat, and fresh blood seeped from his wounds.

“Hey,” said Chan, making himself approach the table. “Hey, kid, hang in there. It’s going to be all right.” He took Vogel’s hand, shocked by how hot the boy’s skin was. “It’ll be all right.”

There was a smell coming from Vogel. There was sweat and blood and the astringent tang of the antiseptic, but there was something else. A sickly-sweet smell that made him think of compost-rich soil. He looked at Vogel’s hand, then ran his eyes up the boy’s arm to the seeping gash on his shoulder.

Something moved under Vogel’s skin.

Chan flinched, fighting the urge to recoil. Vogel moaned again, and Chan squeezed his hand. “It’s going to be all right,” he lied. “Everything is going to be okay.”

Then he let go of Vogel’s fever-hot hand and hurried out of the lab. Joss said something as he brushed past her, he couldn’t make out the words, and he ignored her, desperate to be out of that awful, stifling little room.

Things had quieted down in the lab next door. The splintered door hung half open, and the air inside was clear. He could smell the gas, like a greasy taste on the back of his tongue, but he had no trouble breathing. He marched past the lab without stopping.

He dropped into a chair in the office area and tapped the screen in front of him. He looked for a coms icon, and frowned. The familiar microphone symbol was surrounded by a circle with a bar across it. No connection.

Chan switched to the desk Singh had used and tapped the screen to wake it up. The same symbol appeared. He tapped the microphone image anyway, and the screen filled with an error message. No connection possible at this time. Contact your technical lead.

It took him ten minutes to track the problem down. A tiny closet between two cubicles contained a rat’s nest of cables and half a dozen network components. The uplink box was the key element for off-planet transmissions. It was a simple plastic box no bigger than Chan’s two gloved hands, and it was broken. Not accidentally, either. Someone had rammed a screwdriver through the case.

He stared at the uplink box for a long time, lost in thought. If Vogel had even a ghost of a chance, it depended on rapid intervention by a good medical team. He didn’t really believe that anything in the solar system could save the boy now, but he still had hopes that the rest of them could survive. All they had to do was call for help.

Without the uplink box, all three of them were dead. Well, two of them were, anyway. The third person would presumably survive, rescued by whoever was behind it all. One member of the team still had a chance.

Whoever it was who had destroyed the uplink box.

He plodded back through the office, his mind whirling, trying to find another conclusion. The simple fact, though, was that they were alone in the station. Liz had never made it inside. The wild-eyed scientist hadn’t spent more than five seconds in the office area as he tore through on the way to the airlock.

The saboteur was Vogel, or Singh, or Joss.

He thought of the pistol in his thigh pocket. He thought about killing the others. Everyone who was innocent was doomed. Shooting everyone was the only way to be sure the guilty one didn’t get away.

He chuckled grimly. “That’s some stellar leadership, buddy. Shoot everyone who follows you. Great plan.”

The gravity on Enceladus was so slight as to be inconsequential, but Chan felt as if he weighed a thousand kilos. Every step was an effort. He left the office block and opened the door to the lab area, wondering if things could possibly get worse.

Things were worse. Vogel was screaming now. Chan heard it as soon as he opened the door. The screams grew louder with every step he took, and when he pushed open the door to the lab, he wanted to cover his ears.

Singh was doing exactly that, sitting by the wall, staring at his feet, hands pressed over his ears. Joss was holding one of Vogel’s hands in both of hers, and it took both of her hands to maintain a grip as he thrashed and flailed. Vogel’s face was bright red, and flecks of spittle flew from his mouth as he convulsed. The skin was stretched tight over several protrusions in his shoulder, and there were lumps growing under the skin of his neck.

Joss stared up at Chan, despair in her eyes along with the faintest tinge of hope. She still seemed to think he might find a solution. Singh didn’t look up. He knew better.

“There’s no coms,” Chan told them. “We can’t call for help.”

Joss’s eyes widened. Singh looked up, gave Chan a long, bleak stare, then put his hands back over his ears and resumed staring at his feet.

Vogel kept screaming, and Joss turned her attention back to him, speaking in a low, soothing voice, clinging to his hand as if she could physically drag him out of the hell he’d sunk into. The sweet, alien smell coming from his body was stronger now. It clogged Chan’s nostrils, choking him, making him yearn for the honest stink of Coriolis sludge.

He stepped out into the hall, closing the door, but he could still hear the screams. For a moment he stood, every muscle in his body rigid, fighting against the decision he had already made. Then he set off down the hall, through the office, and into the changing room, where he found his helmet in the rack. “Last chance,” he murmured, then pulled the helmet on.

The radio earpiece gave a low hiss. “Liz?” he said. “You out there? Liz? Anybody?”

Static was his only reply.

Leaving the helmet on, he walked back through the dormitory, the offices, and finally the labs. He didn’t open the door to the lab where Vogel lay dying. The helmet muffled the screams, but didn’t block them out. He went past the lab as quickly as he could and kept walking. He rounded the corner, pushed open a door, and started up the stairs. The door swung shut behind him, but he could still hear Vogel screaming.

The dead woman on the landing seemed to stare up at him reproachfully. “Mind your own business,” he told her, and opened the hatch marked “Escape Pod.”

The pod was tiny. He wedged himself inside, watching as the hatch slid shut. The hatch was airtight, and it looked fairly thick. There was no way he could still hear Vogel screaming in the lab. It had to be his imagination. It would fade. It had to fade.

He scanned the pod’s control panel. There was a big red button to launch the thing, a joystick, and a throttle. If there was an emergency beacon or a radio they had to be automatic, because he didn’t see any other controls.

He shrugged and wriggled his fingers inside his gloves. It was time to go. There was only one sensible course of action left to him, and this was it.

You can’t do it, Jim. You can’t abandon your crew. If there’s one line you can’t cross, this has got to be it. You’ve had your little hissy fit. Now get out of this pod and go back to your crew. They need you.

“Need me for what?” he shouted. “What am I going to do for them?” A memory flashed through his mind, of taking Vogel aside during a break, ignoring the stink of sludge rising from their boots while he told the kid about his plan. Watching Vogel’s face light up as he thought of the possibilities. A ship of our own. We’ll call it the Albatross. We’ll go in search of salvage, and we’ll come back rich.

“Enough,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’ve done enough.” He found the big red button by touch, took a deep breath, and pushed it.

Chapter 8

Liz lay in darkness, curled into a tight fetal position, blood and snot running down her cheek and pooling under her right ear. She was crying, from fear and pain and despair, her whole body shaking with sobs. Only the cold steel walls closing in on every side kept her from kicking her feet and sliding into a full-blown tantrum.

Her helmet was shattered, a shard of glass from the faceplate embedded in her face a centimetre below her eye. That she was still alive felt like a miracle, but it was a miracle of very short duration. She wasn’t going to live much longer. She still couldn’t believe the freakish strength of the thing that had attacked her. Hell, she couldn’t believe anything about the creature. It was something from a nightmare, it couldn’t be real. She had fought as hard as she could and achieved nothing, and now it had free run of the ship.

She sniffled, and the helmet rattled as her head moved. The helmet had kept her alive. The creature had wrapped its tentacles around her head and tried to crush her skull, and it had damn near succeeded. Modern vac suit helmets could survive incredible impacts, but this helmet had splintered around her.

Hammering the thing with her fists had done nothing. She doubted the creature had even noticed. Finally she’d wrapped her arms around that hard, repulsive body, lifted the lower tentacles clear of the floor, and thrown herself at the edge of the hatch, head-first. Slammed the thing into the steel with all her strength. The impact had rattled her clear to her heels, and the thing had let go, just for an instant. The blow would have crippled a strong man, but the creature had recovered immediately. It had been right on her heels as she flung herself down the corridor and into the only bolt-hole she could reach.

The ventral airlock.

Her hand went to the hatch beneath her, tracing the protective cover over the fat red button that would open the hatch. She wanted desperately to flip the cover up and give the button a push. The hatch would fall open beneath her, she would drop to the surface of Enceladus, and death would come in minutes.

It was in the middle of a fantasy about her funeral that the first pangs of embarrassment started to penetrate the all-encompassing misery. “Elizabeth Jones, bad-ass pilot, dies crying,” she muttered. “Kicked off of three different ships for fighting, banned from four space stations and the entire planet Mars for kicking too much ass, no longer welcome in the roughest bar on Ganymede because she put three grown men in the hospital. And now she meets one lousy alien, and she decides to end it all?”

She gave a low chuckle. Her shame was fading, washed away by a familiar rising anger. “Slap me around on my own ship, will you?” she snarled. “I’ll show you a thing or two.” Her hand moved from the hatch below her to the hatch above, the one that would let her back into the ship.

Her fingers ached with the need to press the small green button that would open the top hatch, but she made herself hesitate. She couldn’t defeat the thing with her fists, however satisfying it might be to try. She needed a better strategy if she was going to have her revenge, and by the black and frozen gods of the space lanes she was.

So she lay still, and she thought furiously, and she listened. There was an occasional metallic vibration through the deck plates, but she hadn’t actually heard the creature in quite some time. If it was still in the corridor above her, she was dead. If it had gone aft, she would live an extra thirty seconds or so. Then she’d be dead. If it had gone forward, though���

She kept herself perfectly still, held her breath, listened with every scrap of concentration she could muster. And she decided that she had no idea at all where the creature was. So she jammed her right thumb against the green button. The hatch slid open with a hiss, light flooded in, and she pushed herself up. She uncurled her body as soon as she was clear of the lock.

The corridor ahead of her was empty. She whipped around, looking behind her.

Empty. She got to live for a few more seconds.

She was making plenty of noise, though. It was best to assume the creature was coming. She lunged to her feet, ignoring the protest of her muscles, and raced aft. Her legs had gone to sleep, but she made them move, ignoring the tingling that quickly sharpened into pain. Her run turned into a drunken stumble on numb feet, but she reached the hatch at the end of the corridor and slapped her hand down on the panel.

The thing was somewhere behind her. She could hear tentacles thumping against metal, then a hiss as a hatch slid open. She didn’t turn to look, just sprang through the hatch in front of her and fell to her knees. She turned as the hatch slid shut, and pressed her thumb against the emergency locking button.

Tentacles battered the hatch, and she heard an angry squeal from the other side. She made a rude gesture at the hatch, then dragged herself to her feet. It was time to get to work.

Singh, she saw, had been sloppy with his tools. There was a niche in the wall for the welder, but he’d left it sitting on the deck. She checked the charge. There was more than enough juice left to toast one small alien.

She set to work rummaging. There was a space station orbiting Mars, where someone had actually imported guard dogs from Earth to keep people out of a warehouse. One night, Liz, after too many drinks, had broken in with a couple of other drunken morons. They hadn’t even found the Scotch before the dogs came after them.

Liz had made it onto a pile of crates, but the guy beside her wasn’t as quick. She couldn’t remember his name, but she remembered what had happened to him. He’d thrown an arm up, instinctively covering his throat. The dog had latched onto his forearm, and wouldn’t let go.

That was what she needed now. Something for the creature to grab onto, and not her arm, either. Something long enough that she could keep the thing at a distance.

Something that would conduct electricity.

The creature was, she thought, largely mindless in its attacks. It grabbed to the first thing it could lay a tentacle on and just hung on. Her helmet was proof of that. All she needed was the right bait.

The biggest wrench on the ship was gone, taken by Joss for use as a weapon. There was, however, a heap of scrap metal that Singh hadn’t needed for the bridge window. She rummaged through the heap and came up with a metre-and-a-half length of rebar.

The Stick-All was on the deck beside the welder. Sloppy. Singh was going to need a good talking-to. She picked up the tube and used it to seal one of the metal clamps that led from the welder onto the end of the rebar. She gave it a minute to set, then slathered Stick-All along the length of the rebar, leaving a twenty-centimetre gap for her hand.

There was silence in the corridor outside, so she booted the hatch. Tentacles slapped the hatch on the other side, and she kicked a few more times. She wanted the thing in a mindless frenzy. Then she popped out the lock button on the hatch, picked up the welder’s other clamp, turned on the power to the welder, and tapped her knee against the touch panel.

The hatch slid open. For an instant the creature froze, as if startled. Then it lunged at her, and she jabbed it with her rebar.

It ripped the bar from her grasp. Something yanked her forward, and she stumbled toward the creature, cursing. The clamp fell from her right hand. Her left hand was still wrapped around the rebar. Some of the Stick-All had dribbled onto her glove, and she was effectively glued to the metal.

The creature squealed, trying to toss the rebar away and reach for her. For an instant a tentacle touched the side of her face. Then the tentacle pulled back, wrapping around the rebar and jerking it aside. It gave an angry squeal as it found that it was stuck.

For an endless, nightmarish time the creature thrashed the rebar back and forth. Liz lurched to and fro, almost crashing into the creature, using her free hand to fumble desperately for the zipper that sealed her glove to the rest of her suit. Each time her fingers touched the zipper, the creature would yank her arm away.

The creature paused, tentacles clenching to twist the rebar. Liz got her thumb and forefinger onto the zipper pull, tugged it a few centimetres to the side ���

And the creature sprang backward, yanking her along so that she almost pitched onto her face. The welder crashed into her, and she breathed a fervent prayer that nothing had broken. The creature backed through the hatch and into the corridor, dragging Liz by her glove and the welder by the cable. She used her free arm to scoop the welder up and hold it against her side, protecting it as best she could.

There was a sound like tearing fabric, and she felt cool air against her wrist. The pressure on her glove was pulling the zipper open and tearing away the seals underneath. The creature gave another mighty tug, Liz sprawled forward onto her stomach, it tugged again, and her glove tore free.

The fall had knocked the wind out of her, but there was no time to worry about details like breathing. She scrambled to her feet, staying close to the creature, not letting it break the cable on the welder. Free of her weight, the creature went wild, raging from one side of the corridor to the other as it tried to tear itself free of the rebar. It reached the open hatch to the ventral airlock and fell back, writhing. With a loud tearing noise it ripped one fat tentacle free of the glue, spattering the wall with blood as its skin tore. Four or five more tentacles still held the bar, and Liz stepped in close. She scooped up the dangling clamp on the red cable, squeezed the handle, and snapped it onto the end of the rebar.

There was a fat blue spark, bright enough to leave an after-image each time she blinked. The creature squealed.

And that was all.

Liz didn���t see the tentacle that swept her feet out from under her. She lay on her back, watching the creature thrash, and saw another tentacle come free.

It didn’t work. She’d been so sure! She’d done everything right, and the stupid creature refused to be electrocuted.

It wasn’t fair!

Tears filled her eyes, the flailing monstrosity blurred, and then the world turned pink. Pain faded away, and fear, and a familiar emotion swept in to replace them.

Rage.

She’d done her part. She’d been clever and determined and brave, and the fact that the creature refused to die was utterly unforgiveable. Fury suffused her, a roaring filled her ears, and the ship, the moon, the entire universe faded away. Nothing existed but an all-consuming wrath. She was distantly aware that she was screaming, her throat growing raw. There was a strange pain in her hands, and it grew and grew until finally it became a distraction big enough to pierce the red cloud around her mind.

Liz tried to move her fingers, discovered they were clenched tight, and made herself relax them. That made the pain worse, and she gasped. She blinked, shook her head, and blinked again, and suddenly she could see.

The creature was still in the ventral lock. She was standing over it, one fat cable from the welder looped around the thing’s neck, with her hands wrapped around the cord on either side. She’d torn the skin on her fingers from pulling too hard, and she could feel knots in the muscles along her shoulders and back.

Her foot was on the side of the alien’s head, jamming the misshapen skull against the deck plates. The welder cord was twisted deeply into the flesh of the thing’s neck. The alien was dead, the head flopping sideways as she relaxed the cable. She seemed to have broken its neck.

The tip of one tentacle twitched against the deck plates. Two more tentacles had come free of the rebar, and she saw rips in the legs of her vac suit. The thing had put up a good fight.

But it had lost.

“Well,” she said, her voice husky from screaming, “I guess that’ll teach you.”

Liz stood over the thing, looking down, feeling her anger ebb away. She drew back her foot to kick the creature, then lowered her foot to the deck. After a while she turned off the welder.

It was easier than she had expected to get the black clamp free from the rebar. The glue had burned and become brittle, and a couple of good twists let her pull the clamp loose. She grabbed the end of the rebar, heaved the creature out of the lock, and dragged it down the corridor. She put it back in the aft airlock where she’d found it and sealed the inner hatch.

She stripped off the remains of her helmet, then peeled off the suit as well. She was confined to the ship until she found another suit. She pulled the piece of glass out of her cheek, sealed the cut in her cheek and the tears on her fingers, and washed her face. Then she limped to the bridge, lowered herself into the battered remains of the helmsman’s seat, and turned on the radio.

“Hello? Anybody out there? Captain?”

Silence.

“Damn it.” She tapped the screen on her console. Air pressure was holding steady. Everything seemed to be functional. It didn’t look as if the creature had done any harm, except to Liz and her vac suit.

Something pinged.

Liz tapped her screen, bringing up an alert message. A ship was approaching Enceladus.

She felt a brief surge of joy. They were rescued! The people in this new ship would have vac suits. They would be able to go into the base and look for Chan and the others. She opened a command menu and hovered her finger over the radio icon.

And hesitated. She was painfully aware that she had no idea what was really going on. There were pirates, unregistered ships, and a hidden base. Aliens, dead bodies, disappearing crew. Suddenly she didn’t want to reveal her presence until she knew who these new arrivals were.

Another ping. She peered at the message, baffled. It was something she had never encountered in all of her years as a pilot.

Incoming encrypted message.

She tapped the “Accept” icon on the message, and a burst of static filled her ears. Then a man’s voice, low and gravelly, with some sort of refined Earth accent.

“Blackbird One, this is Blackbird Seven. Do you copy?”

Blackbird! Liz thought. I knew we should have called it Blackbird.

“We’re coming in hot,” said the man. “If you’re still intact, you’d better let us know, because we’re going to sterilize everything that moves.”

Liz stared at the console, her mouth going dry.

“Blackbird One, are you there? Does anyone copy?”

The radio went silent. Liz sat alone on the bridge, her mind racing, weighing her options. If the Raven could receive encrypted messages, then the new arrivals were allies of the pirates. She thought of the Mixatonic, riddled with holes, everyone gone, and decided that she really didn’t want to meet anyone the pirates counted as friends.

“Jim,” she murmured. “Where are you? If you’re still alive, you’re in a world of trouble.”

Chapter 9

“I’m going for help,” Chan said. “That’s what I’m doing.”

He didn’t move, though. Enceladus tumbled by beneath him, so beautiful it brought an ache to his chest, and beyond it the rings, glittering in the light of Saturn and the distant light of the sun. He was in a low, fast orbit, and the view changed quickly, but it was always beautiful.

“I mean, what can I do?” Chan said. “Down there, I can do nothing. Nothing except harm. Up here, I can go for help.”

He tried to imagine it. The life pod might reach Coriolis Station in two days. It would take another day to come back with help. He might shave off a few hours by radioing ahead, once the station was in range. So long as the wrong people didn’t hear him, a rescue mission might reach Enceladus in as little as sixty hours.

He floated, telling himself that two and a half days wasn’t so long, that the others would be okay, that it wasn’t James Chan’s responsibility, that there wasn’t anything else he could do. He watched the endless plain of ice go past outside his window and yearned for his old life, where his blunders didn’t hurt anyone but himself. He remembered the smell of sludge, and it seemed like a bouquet.

The controls in the life pod were designed to be idiot-proof. The pod computer had already calculated that Coriolis Station was the nearest refuge. There was a tiny touchscreen built into the dash, and it showed a giant red button marked “Take Me to Coriolis Station.” He put his fingertip a millimetre over the button and held it there, shaking with the desire to press it. Then he wrapped his hand around the joystick and cranked it to one side.

Landing was rough. The pod wasn’t designed to maneuver, and bringing it back to the base turned into a thirty-minute chore. He burned a lot of fuel doing it, too. The pod was close to empty when he finally crashed into the snow half a kilometre from the base.

He entered through the same airlock they had used the first time, and left his helmet besides Singh’s on the rack. He could hear Vogel’s screams from the moment he left the dormitory area, and he fished the pistol out of his thigh pocket as he walked through the cubicles. Vogel was still strapped to the table, his muscles straining as he fought the strap, finger-thick tentacle sprouting from his neck. Joss, her cheeks wet with tears, clung to his hand. She looked up as Chan came in, pure anguish on her face.

Chan walked up to the table, put the barrel of the pistol against Vogel’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

Vogel went limp, and Chan’s ears rang in the sudden silence. He set the pistol on the table. He never wanted to touch another gun.

Joss slowly released Vogel’s hand. Her hand was dark with bruises from his fingers. She lowered her forehead to the table and sobbed quietly.

Vogel was limp, finally at peace. His face, at least, still looked almost entirely human. His eyes were bloodshot, the whites almost completely eradicated by red, and Chan closed them. He wanted to remember Vogel’s eyes the way they had been back on Coriolis Station, dancing with excitement because he was finally going to escape from the sludge.

Chan cupped his hand around the boy’s cheek. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “By all that’s holy, I’m so sorry.”

Joss reached across and squeezed Chan’s forearm. She didn’t say anything, just held on, and he put his hand over top of hers and squeezed back.

They covered Vogel with the emergency blanket, and then they walked out into the corridor. “Where’s Singh?” Chan asked.

“I don’t know,” Joss said, her voice dull and lifeless.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

She stared up at him, her face unreadable. “Not so far as I know.”

“You’re not a spy for Solar Force, are you?”

After a long, silent moment, she shook her head. “I’m���”

“Never mind. Spare me. You know, I actually believed you. All three times. But when you smashed the communication gear, you went too far.”

There was hurt in her face. It might even have been real. He shook his head, disgusted with himself for his gullibility. “Goodbye, Joss.”

“What?” Her eyes went wide. “What do you��� You’re leaving?”

Chan nodded. “I’m going into the office area,” he said. “I’m going to try to find a spare uplink box.” He turned his back, walking slowly, making it easy for her. Singh was dead, of course. Joss was the saboteur, and now she was armed. He hadn’t seen her pick up the pistol, but it was missing when he tucked the blanket around Vogel’s body.

He’d thought about shooting her, but she held Vogel’s hand while he was dying. There was no one else that she could hurt except Chan.

“Captain? Jim?”

He paused at the end of the corridor, his hand on the doorknob, but he didn’t turn. “Goodbye, Joss.”

He glanced at the ceiling, thinking of the stark beauty of the rings and wishing he could see it one last time. On the other hand, he would never have to smell the sludge of Coriolis Station again, or remember what he had done to Vogel.

He opened the door.

And stepped through, and the door closed behind him. He stopped, puzzled, trying to figure out why he was still alive.

Feet scuffed on carpet somewhere ahead of him, and Singh came around the corner. There was a cold wariness in his eyes, and he kept one hand out of sight behind his hip. Singh, who had fled the first lab while Joss risked her life trying to save Vogel. Singh, who had never quite accepted Chan’s authority. Singh, who had always known that Joss was lying.

And what kind of person couldn’t trust those around him? What kind of person saw lies on every side?

A liar.

Chan tried to keep his face blank, circling to Singh’s right, and Singh turned with him, keeping his right hand hidden. “I heard a shot.”

Chan chose a cubicle, pretending it had been his goal all along, and leaned down to tap the screen. “Coms are still down,” he said.

“I heard a gunshot,” Singh repeated.

“I killed Joss.” The lie felt preposterous on his tongue, but a man who would betray his crewmates and leave them to die was a man ready to believe the worst.

“She wasn’t a spy at all,” Chan said. “She finally told me the truth. You wouldn’t believe the things she’s done.” He stood and walked deeper into the office, and Singh kept turning with him. When Singh had his back to the lab area, Chan stopped.

“I never trusted her,” said Singh.

Behind him, the door to the lab area moved ever so slightly. That would be Joss, eavesdropping. Chan raised his voice. “Why did you do it, Singh?”

In reply, Singh brought his right hand into view. He held the pirate’s capacitor gun.

“I see you have a pistol,” Chan said, for Joss’s benefit.

“They offered me a lot of money,” Singh said. He looked almost apologetic. “You wouldn’t believe how much. They called on the radio, when I was on the bridge of the Mixatonic. At first all they wanted was the location of the ship. Then they said there couldn’t be any witnesses.” He raised his hands in a half shrug, in a mute plea for understanding, and for a moment the pistol was pointed at the wall beside him. In that moment, Joss shot him twice in the back.

Chan stepped forward, plucking the pistol from his hand, and put an arm around Singh, holding him up. He looked into Singh’s eyes, and saw nothing there but a deep, profound sadness. Chan lowered his friend to the floor and held his hand while he died.

Joss walked up, squatted beside him, and offered him the gun.

“I’ve got one of my own. You keep it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Chan shrugged. “He wasn’t a good man. Don’t worry about it.”

They left Singh where he lay and walked together to the airlock. Chan picked up his helmet and put it on. Without much hope, he murmured, “Liz, do you copy?”

“Captain! Where the hell have you been? Never mind. Listen, you’ve got trouble. There’s another ship coming in, friends of the pirates. If they find you in there, I’m pretty sure they’re going to kill you.”

“Well, if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Can you come and pick us up?”

“I’m not sure. But you better get outside. Hide over the next ridge, or something. And try not to leave any tracks.”

“Roger that.” He finished snapping his helmet into place and hurried into the airlock. Joss was already there, peering through the little window, and she said, “I think we’re too late.”

Chapter 10

“I’m not afraid of the likes of you.”

The words were a lie, but speaking them aloud helped Liz feel brave. The ship was huge. Vast and enigmatic. It was another mystery ship, with an unregistered transponder. How could you hope to keep a ship that size a secret? She had to call it something, so in her head she referred to it as The Juggernaut.

Right now The Juggernaut was in an equatorial orbit around Enceladus. It wasn’t built to land. Instead, it had sent down a shuttle fully half the size of the Raven. Liz and Chan were maintaining radio silence, and she told herself that the continuing silence was a good thing. Surely Chan would’ve told her if he was dying.

In the meantime, she had work to do. She tapped the screen in front of her, scrolling through the video feeds, trying to find a navigation camera that showed her something other than the hull of the Mixatonic. The Raven was clamped to the derelict ship. Once the Mixatonic had gone by half a dozen times, she figured the crew of The Juggernaut would be ignoring it. So she had waited until the big ship was on the far side of Enceladus from her and the little derelict freighter was just coming over the horizon, and she’d taken off. By the time The Juggernaut was in view the Raven was pressed against the Mixatonic with her engines powered down.

Her plan was to wait for the orbit of the ship to bring her in close to The Juggernaut and launch a surprise attack. The only problem was, she was blind.

At last she found a couple of cameras on the aft of the Raven pointing to the sides, one port and one starboard. She toggled between them until she caught a glimpse of the other ship, high above. It was a giant silver cylinder, blocky and graceless, built to operate in vacuum, not atmosphere.

She switched to the targeting system for the ship’s laser. Immediately, an image of The Juggernaut appeared with a red rectangle around it. Liz swore as she realized the Raven was using radar for targeting. If the crew of The Juggernaut was paying attention���

They were. Warning lights flashed all over her screen as radar from The Juggernaut lashed the Raven. She saw flashes of light on the ship high above her, and the bridge trembled as shots slammed home. No fresh lights appeared on her screen. There was no damage. The Juggernaut was shooting up the Mixatonic, but that wouldn’t last.

Liz fired the laser. The rectangle around The Juggernaut briefly turned green. Then more lights flashed, and the ship shook around her. A warning light came on, indicating a blow to the hull. Not every shot was hitting the freighter.

She fired again, and again, then kept her finger mashed against the screen. There was no good reason to pause between shots. She was happy to cut The Juggernaut in half, if she could manage it.

More and more weapons opened up on The Juggernaut. The big ship was freakishly well-armed. The Raven vibrated with the impact of rail gun rounds, jerked and shook with the explosive impact of missiles, and shifted in her orbit as laser beams sliced parts of the Mixatonic away. Only the fact that the other ship was targeting the derelict freighter kept Liz alive.

The Raven’s automated systems kept the laser beam focused on The Juggernaut, and Liz kept the laser firing. When the other ship vanished from her targeting screen she had a brief surge of joy, until she realized that the last explosion had set her spinning. The Mixatonic was between her and The Juggernaut. She lifted her finger from the button, flexed her fingers, and waited for the spin to bring the other ship back into range.

Two targets appeared on the screen, then a third, and none of them looked like The Juggernaut. Liz switched views to the navigational camera and whistled.

The end of the cylinder was gone. The ship was now a jagged, irregular cone with a huge chunk of wreckage floating beside it. A life pod was dropping toward Enceladus, and she saw another pod eject from the ship, then another.

Liz brought up a damage report. The Raven probably had a dent on her port side, but the hull was intact. There was no real damage.

“Yo ho, yo ho,” she murmured, and grinned. “The pirate’s life for me.”

She turned on the radio. “Captain?” she said. “You there?”

The answer was immediate. “We’re on the roof of the base. We could really use a lift out of here.”

“Coming right up.” She released the magnetic clamps, dropped away from the Mixatonic, and dove for the surface of Enceladus. She skimmed low over the ice and came sweeping up on the site of the base.

There was some sort of hatch on the roof, and a cradle that looked like it was designed to hold a lifeboat. Four men in dark green vac suits were crouched around the cradle, using it for cover. A dozen metres away were two more figures. She recognized Chan and Joss by their vac suits. He was crouched behind a low chimney, a pistol in his hand. Joss was off to one side, lying flat behind some sort of metal fixture.

Liz swung the Raven around so she was facing the four men in green. That put the aft airlock closest to Chan and Joss. She hit the controls for the airlock as she brought the ship down.

“Buddha’s backside!” Chan sounded deeply rattled. “Liz, you won’t believe what just fell out of the airlock.”

“Oh, him,” she said. “I forgot about that. Don’t worry, he was the only one.”

Small arms fire rattled on the hatch plate welded across the front of the bridge. Liz ignored it, bringing the ship down slowly, waiting for the thud of impact, but before she touched down she heard Chan on the radio. “We’re on board. Get us out of here.”

“What about Singh and Vogel?”

His voice was as cold as the surface of Enceladus. “They won’t be coming.”

“Roger that,” she said. A ping told her that the airlock was closed. She took the ship straight up and left Enceladus and its monsters behind.

Chapter 11

When Enceladus was lost in the darkness behind them Liz put them into a slow orbit around Saturn, moving at the same speed as the ice below them. The three of them sat at different bridge stations, looking at one another as the silence stretched out.

“You’re bleeding,” Chan said, looking at Liz’s hands. The web of skin between thumb and index finger was torn on both hands.

“Oh, yeah.” She flexed her hands. “Scab broke, I guess. I’ll clean it up later.” She looked at him, shrugged, and gave him a lopsided grin. “You should see the other guy.”

He thought of the broken corpse that had tumbled out the aft lock. “I think I did. How did you kill it, anyway?”

She fidgeted, not meeting his eyes. “I came up with a cunning plan to electrocute it. When it didn’t work I just wrung the damn thing’s neck.” She looked up. “That reminds me. We need a new welder.”

He blinked at the non-sequitur. “Okay.”

She scowled. “Never mind that. What the hell have you two been up to? What happened to Vogel and Singh?”

Now it was Chan’s turn to squirm. “Singh sold us out,” he said. “We had to shoot him.”

Liz shrugged. “He was an asshole. I thought about shooting him myself.”

Chan chuckled in spite of himself. Then he told her the story of the base on Enceladus. When he reached the part about Vogel’s infection his voice broke, and Joss took over. She glossed over his absence, made it sound as if he’d never even thought about running off. She made him sound strong and brave. He could hear the strain in her voice as she told Liz how Vogel had died. She’d liked Vogel.

Everyone did.

At last Joss described how they’d fled up the stairs and onto the roof. “Then you picked us up,” she said.

“The jerks on the roof,” Liz said. “We shouldn’t have left them alive.”

Chan shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Singh already told them about us. We don’t even know who they are, but they’ll be hunting us.”

The three of them looked at one another, grim-faced.

“So what do we do?” Liz asked. “Go back to Coriolis? Keep looking for the Mary Alice? We never did find it.”

Both women looked at Chan, and he stared back, waiting for them to make a decision. But they just kept waiting.

I just lost half my crew. I broke under pressure. I did my best to run out. You don’t know the details, but you must be able to tell. You can’t still want me to be in charge.

“Captain?” Liz said. “What are we going to do?”

He opened his mouth to tell them that he wasn’t a captain anymore, but no sound came out. I ran out once before. If you actually want me for a captain��� I guess I won’t run out again. “Not Coriolis,” he said at last. “It’s the only place they know to look for us.” He shook his head. “Even that hairy-faced pirate would go to Coriolis first.” He stood up and paced to the edge of the steel plate over the front window. The rings made a glittering plain, with Saturn rising like a golden wall beyond.

“It’s a big solar system,” he said, “and we have a fine ship. We’ll find another port, we’ll find cargo or passengers, and then we’ll get the hell away from Saturn for a while. Neptune, maybe, or in toward the belt. Wherever the cargo or the passengers take us.”

His hand stretched up to trace the ugly seam where glass met the hatch welded onto the front of the ship. Repairs were going to cost a fortune. “Actually,” he said, “belay that. We’re going back to Enceladus. Just for a moment.”

Joss and Liz gazed at him, not protesting, waiting for him to finish.

“We’re picking up what’s left of the Mixatonic.” He patted the hatch beside him. “We have a fine ship, but we need some cash. We’ll sell the wreck for scrap. Then we’ll head for the back of beyond. We have the Raven, and it’s a big, wide solar system full of opportunity.”

“Aye aye,” said Liz, and brought the ship around.

Chan turned and watched the ice in the rings race past. “I’m sorry, Vogel,” he murmured. “You won’t get to see what comes next. But we’ll keep the dream alive.”

Author Notes

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your comments. Go to http://jakeelwoodwriter.com to leave me a note or to learn about other stories, or sign up for my newsletter to hear about new releases. I can be reached by email at author@jakeelwoodwriter.com.

Voyage Two, Takedown on Titan, is available now.

I’m also the author of Star Raider, a serial now collected into one volume, available from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00W0E1KOO. Cassandra Marx is a thief, and a good one. This time she got greedy, though. She swiped a priceless artifact from Carmody, the most powerful man on Hesperus. He’s been beating his daughter, Lark, so Cassie took the kid too.

Now Carmody is tearing the galaxy apart hunting Cassie down. The artifact isn’t just a priceless relic of a lost civilization. It’s the key to a galaxy-wide conspiracy. Cassie needs to figure out the significance of the ancient egg, but with bounty hunters and mercenaries hounding her from one end of the galaxy to the other, she and Lark have another puzzle to solve — how to stay alive.