Asimov's SF, June 2009 by Issue 06 # June

Author:Issue 06 # June
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-07-10T14:00:54+00:00

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Short Story: COLD TESTING

by Eric Brown

Eric Brown lives near Cambridge, England, in a seventeenth-century thatched cottage. He’s written over thirty books and a hundred short stories, and has twice won the British Science Fiction Award for best short story. Eric reviews science fiction for the London Guardian. His latest novel is Xenopath (Solaris 2009), and his website can be found at: www.ericbrown.co.uk. His first story for Asimov’s takes an icy look at the various forms of…

I phased A Long Way From Home from the void and brought us down on Nova Charon for a period of cold testing.

“Why the CT now?” Karrie my engineer asked, staring through the viewscreen at the outermost planet in the Antares system. Stark, ice-grey craters and serried peaks stretched across the horizon beyond the concrete apron of the spaceport.

“I’m considering taking the ship to the Epsilon Centauri system,” I told her. “All the planets there are way beyond the Goldilocks Limit.”

Karrie stared at me. “They’re inhabited by Shlocken,” she said. “You’re not thinking of trading with them?”

“Who said anything about trading, Karrie? We’re a salvage ship, remember?”

“And we do a bit of trading on the side. Why else would you take us into Shlocken territory? Surely not to salvage their ships? The shrimps have got their own—”

“I know, I know. And they don’t like outsiders interfering.”

“So…?” she asked, jerking her head forward and staring at me with wide eyes.

I told her what I’d kept to myself until now. “I’ve been talking with Ella about a rumor I heard way back.”

”Ella?” She pronounced the name as if it tasted of Lyran poison-weed. There was no love lost between my long-time engineer and the latest recruit to the team. “What rumor?”

“I heard a story. I was in some bar in the Ophiuchi system and this spacer was telling a tale about an old colleague of his, who’d heard it from an old timer he’d worked with on the lanes.”

Karrie stared at me. “Heard what, for chrissake?”

“That a hundred years ago a Terran ship entered Shlocken territory before we’d had contact with the shrimps, and it went down with drive failure on a sequestered moon. Everyone aboard was killed.”

Karrie leaned back in her sling and regarded me. “And what does Ella know about this?”

I pointed at her. “Ella knows that it’s more than a story. She has records in her files of a report sent by the captain before the ship was lost.”

Karrie sneered. “Lost starships just happen to be another hobby of super-girl, Ed?”

I shrugged. “She has access to information we can only dream of.”

“So…” Karrie laughed. “We breeze in there, under the nose of the bellicose shrimps, and salvage the wreck. Nice dream. But what if the shrimps find us?”

“The Shlocken aren’t that bellicose, Karrie. Only if you cross them. Terran ships aren’t excluded from their system. And anyway, the moon is so far out and insignificant that they don’t patrol it.”

“And,” said a new voice, “the Shlocken know nothing about the crashed exploration vessel.

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