Chindi

She tried to concentrate on details. Their names. Get their names. Both bodies were in jumpsuits, and their name patches were clear. Saperstein. And Cheveau. She checked her list. A physicist from Bremerhaven, and a biologist from Marseille. Male and female. Twenty-five and twenty-six at the time of their deaths.

“What happened here?” said Hutch. Her voice sounded a few decibels higher than normal.

There were more corpses. Three in the galley, three in cargo, several in the living compartments.

Alyx wondered what had killed them. Had they simply run out of air?

Hutch seemed to know where she wanted to go, and Alyx stayed close. Her ankle was still a problem, but only if she lost track of what she was doing and forgot not to push off on it. Nick’s voice crackled over the commlink, asking what they had found.

Hutch told him. “Must have been a major mechanical malfunction,” she added.

Alyx was still concentrating on thinking about other things. Nick back in the Memphis. The audience reaction at the conclusion of opening night for Grin and Bare It. A prop handler who’d been the most torrid sexual partner she’d had in years.

“You okay?” asked Hutch.

“I’m fine.” She was suddenly aware she was standing with her arms folded across her breast, as if she were fending something off. “Place is a little creepy. But I’m all right.”

“You want to go back?”

“No. Not unless you do.”

Hutch indicated a hatch in the overhead. “Bridge is that way,” she said.

“You first.” Alyx tried to sound lighthearted. Hutch released her grip shoes and floated up, opened the hatch after a brief struggle, and disappeared.

“No ladder,” Alyx commented.

“They didn’t have artificial gravity.”

There were four more corpses. Alyx imagined she could smell them, and that, too, she had to push out of her mind. Hutch threaded her way among them and leaned over a console. She touched the keys, and Alyx was surprised to see a row of lamps blink on.

“Power’s residual,” said Hutch. “The Venture won’t be going anywhere for a while.”

“Can you tell what caused this?”

“No idea.”

“How about asking the AI?”

Her fingers were moving across the keyboard, but nothing much seemed to be happening. “It’s defunct.” A green glow appeared. “But we’ve got a log.”

“You can read it?”

“Don’t know. We don’t seem to have enough power to turn on a screen.” She looked around the console, found a small storage compartment, opened it, and extracted two disks.

“I never saw one like that before,” said Alyx.

“Bill doesn’t think it’ll still hold data. But we can try.” She looked for a slot, found it, inserted one of the disks.

More lamps came on. Hutch produced a power core which she’d apparently brought from the Memphis and co

It took several attempts before she looked satisfied.

“Are you copying the log?” Alyx asked.

“Yes. I think we’re in business.” She extracted the disk and put it in her pocket. “Let’s try some diagnostics.”

She pulled the jack on the core, moved one of the corpses out of the way, slipped into a seat in front of what appeared to be the captain’s console, buckled herself down so she wouldn’t float off, and reco

“Will we be able to read the log when we get back to the Memphis?” Alyx asked.

“We can probably jury-rig something.” She searched the instrument panel, found what she was looking for, and inserted the second disk.

“You couldn’t get the same information,” Alyx asked, “from the other position?”

“If I knew what I was doing.” She threw switches and pressed pads, and the console came to life. She studied it, spoke to it, gave up and tapped the keyboard. A computer display came to life. A parade of images began. “It wasn’t the engines,” she said finally. “They’re okay. Both sets.”

This bridge felt claustrophobic. The lack of a viewport, of a way to see outside, compounded by the darkness, and the presence of the things (one could hardly call them bodies), squeezed her lungs. She held on to the back of the chair that Hutch was using and felt the room move around her.

“It wasn’t the fuel. And apparently not the reactor.”

Alyx was concentrating on trying to breathe normally. She turned her suit temperature down and felt better as soon as the cool air hit. Looking for something to distract her, she turned her lamp toward the rear of the bridge. There was an open hatch, and she recalled from the schematic that there were more living quarters and a common room back there. Without letting go of Hutch’s chair, she pointed her lamp toward it, and saw more moving shadows.

“Hull integrity’s okay.” Hutch sounded puzzled.

“Got to be something,” said Alyx, who was wishing Hutch would get her answer so they could clear out.

The pilot stiffened. “Now this I don’t understand at all.”

Her tone was disquieting. “What’s that?” Alyx asked.

“The hypercomm checks out.”

Alyx needed a moment to understand. The hypercomm was the FTL communication system. If it was okay, and they’d gotten stranded out here, all they had to do was call for help.

“But they never used it, did they?”

“No. They used the radio instead.”

The crew had to know that a radio distress call could never arrive back home during their lifetimes. “Makes no sense,” Alyx said.

Hutch was ru

She moved methodically through the Venture, recording everything. Alyx pursued the assignment she’d given herself, committing the images and sensations to memory, knowing that one day she would relay them in one form or another to an audience. She even had a title: Everything’s Under Control Now.

“Shouldn’t we recover the bodies?” she asked reluctantly. “Before the chindi gets here?”

Hutch nodded.

THEY BROUGHT OUT nineteen corpses in three loads with the lander, and stowed them in the cargo-section freezer. Nick couldn’t help, but Alyx made all three trips, sitting quietly beside the pilot. On the Memphis, Bill turned off the artificial gravity, and they brought in the bagged remains quite easily.

Hutch seemed to get through it okay although her eyes looked a bit strange afterward.

She went below for a while and left Alyx and Nick to have lunch. But Alyx had no appetite, and she satisfied herself with a glass of orange juice while Nick ate his way through a couple of roast beef sandwiches and commented about how gratified he was that the passengers and crew of the Venture would finally get proper disposition.

“It’s a terrible thing,” he said, “when people die in out-of-the-way places, and their families are left to wonder what happened. The consolation of a final ceremony is a very important part of closing the book on a life. Of giving their loved ones a chance to move on.” He looked at her, and she smiled weakly at him. One of the great funeral directors of our time, as he’d occasionally referred to himself. “Even now, so many years later, it’ll help the surviving families, bringing the remains back.” He turned a somber gaze in her direction. “Did you know that every intelligent species for which we have a record engaged in memorial services, funerals, for its dead? Other than the development of religion and tribes, the farewell ceremony seems to be the only true sociological universal.”

Hutch came back wearing a wide smile and holding a standard disk. “I think we’re ready,” she said.

They went into the room no one thought of as mission control anymore, and Hutch inserted the disk into a reader. A couple of screens lit up, and Alyx found herself looking at portraits and biographical information on one, and launch data, passenger lists, inventories, and system status reports on the other. It was all dated May 6, 2182.