Identity Theft: And Other Stories by Robert J. Sawyer

Author:Robert J. Sawyer [Sawyer, Robert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: sf, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, General, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780889954120
Publisher: Red Deer Press
Published: 2008-03-31T04:00:40+00:00

* * *

I had to get some sleep — damn, but sometimes I do wish I were a transfer. I took the hovertram out to my apartment, and let myself have five hours — Mars hours, admittedly, which were slightly longer than Earth ones — and then headed out to the old shipyards. The sun was just coming up as I arrived there.

The sky through the dome was pink in the east and purple in the west.

Some active maintenance and repair work was done on spaceships here, but most of these ships were no longer spaceworthy and had been abandoned. Any one of them would make a good hideout, I thought; spaceships were shielded against radiation, making it hard to scan through their hulls to see what was going on inside.

The shipyards were large fields holding vessels of various sizes and shapes. Most were streamlined — even Mars’s tenuous atmosphere required that. Some were squatting on tail fins; some were lying on their bellies; some were supported by articulated legs. I tried every hatch I could see on these craft, but, so far, they all had their air locks sealed tightly shut.

Finally, I came to a monstrous abandoned spaceliner — a great hull, some three hundred meters long, fifty meters wide, and a dozen meters high. The name Mayflower II was still visible in chipped paint near the bow — which is the part I came across first — and the slogan “Mars or Bust!” was also visible.

I walked a little farther alongside the hull, looking for a hatch, until—

Yes! I finally understood what a fossil hunter felt like when he at last turned up a perfectly preserved rhizomorph. There was an outer airlock door here, and it was open. The other door, inside, was open, too. I stepped through the chamber, entering the ship proper. There were stands for holding space suits, but the suits themselves were long gone.

I walked over to the far end of the room, and found another door — one of those submarine-style ones with a locking wheel in the center. This one was closed, and I figured it would probably have been sealed shut at some point, but I tried to turn the wheel anyway, just to be sure, and damned if it didn’t spin freely, disengaging the locking bolts. I pulled the door open, and stepped through it, into a corridor. The door was on spring-loaded hinges; as soon as I let go of it, it closed behind me, plunging me into darkness.

Of course, I’d brought a flashlight. I pulled it off my belt and thumbed it on.

The air was dry and had a faint odor of decay to it. I headed down the corridor, the pool of illumination from my flashlight going in front of me, and—

A squealing noise. I swung around, and the beam from my flashlight caught the source before it scurried away: a large brown rat, its eyes two tiny red coals in the light. People had been trying

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