The Year's Top Short SF Novels 3 by Allan Kaster

Author:Allan Kaster [Kaster, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioText
Published: 2013-10-23T05:00:00+00:00

Sergeant Pangari’s find-me blipped her through a series of passageways and down a hole cut in the deck. Cannon wasn’t sure if the hole was part of current events or a relic of the last living hours of this place.

She’d been right about the bodies, though. In the glare of their handlights, she could see the dead sitting at station chairs, many with their heads tucked into their folded arms. Others were clustered in small groups of two or three or four, holding one another. Some were simply lying down, taking their rest.

They’d known, then. They’d seen it coming. Whatever the Mistake had been, whatever had actually happened, the crew of Themiscyra orbital had known.

Which was more than Cannon could say for herself.

These were the best-preserved casualties she’d ever encountered, at least since the very first days on 9-Rossiter. Over the centuries, Cannon had occasionally discovered bones here and there, trapped inside of spacesuits or in crashed hulls. But this…. The ones she hurried past seemed to have died well, at least.

Little pocks and holes from the kinetic strikes were everywhere. It was as if the station’s infrastructure had contracted a case of the metallic measles. Debris had collected along the centrifugal force vectors of the odd rotational axis.

Followed closely by Lieutenant Shinka, Cannon came upon Sergeant Pangari outside a large airlock with two of the Goon Squad. Cargo handling, or maybe a maintenance bay. Cannon couldn’t figure why else the designers would have placed such a substantial lock facing an interior passage.

“What do you have, Sergeant?”

“Ma’am, we don’t know. Private Fidelo here picked up a power source on her sweep down this passageway. Behind this hatch.”

Fidelo managed to radiate embarrassment, even from inside the armor of a powered suit. Body language was an amazing thing.

“What sort of power source?” Cannon momentarily feigned patience. She had not thought Pangari to be much given to dramatics.

Pangari passed his tablet over. Cannon scanned the sensor metrics. Low-grade radiation with a profile similar to that of an ion-coupler cell. But not quite.

Ion-coupler cells were current tech. The Polity hadn’t used them.

“Someone’s been here before us,” she said.

“That’s what we thought at first, too.” Pangari seemed to be contracting Fidelo’s embarrassment through some chain-of-command contagion. “But look at the sizing. Ion-couplers are big. We use ‘em in static power plants, habitats, refineries and the like. No one builds them small enough to drag around in the field. And the radiation signature is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than expected.”

“So it’s not an ion-coupler. Or not quite….” She stared at the closed hatch, her heart pounding. “Can we get that open?”

“In a hurry, yes, but we’ll make a mess.” It was obvious from Pangari’s tone of voice that he had a different answer in mind.

“Then open it without a mess, Sergeant.”

Cannon knew Befores who could have just walked through the bulkhead. The Before Raisa Siddiq, back in her day, wouldn’t have thought twice about that. Cannon herself sported some fairly heavy combat modifications, but she’d never been a blow-through-the-walls kind of girl.

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