Salvage by MJ Kobernus Read Free Book Online Page B

abdomen, smaller thorax and tiny head. Each section
was bigger than the previous, and all were connected by multiple
limbs and tubes.
    Only the third section had
gravity. The General Population pod was based upon a design from
the twentieth century; a Bernal sphere. The entire core of the
sphere was hollow and housed the majority of the ship’s crew and
personnel. There were no passengers. If your ancestors were not
specialists or would not work, they did not go. A constant three
quarter gee was maintained by spinning it along a central axis
ensuring that the population could maintain sufficient muscle and
bone mass throughout the long journey to their new home.
    The salvage team led by Jensen
continued through various corridors, some of them entirely dark,
requiring them to use their light beams on scatter setting,
creating odd, looming shadows out of nothing. It was in one dark
passage that they found the first Argoss crewman; or what was left
of him. The synthetic material of his uniform was perfectly intact,
in contrast to the skeletal remains within. It looked to Jensen as
if the man had died leaning against the bulkhead, then simply
fallen over.
    The Med Tech drew a handheld
scanner and went to work. She looked up, face grave. She said just
one word, but it chilled them all.
    “Radiation.”
    At that moment Jensen’s ear comm
chirped, announcing an incoming signal. He keyed it to relay, so
the others could hear the drive tech through their own comms.
    “Chief, there’s something not
right here. We’re at the engine control centre. There’s no sign of
any activity, but the nav system shows that a containment coil was
aligned recently.”
    Jensen understood enough about
the singularity drive to know what a containment coil was, but he
did not understand why this was important.
    So?”
    “So, the procedure is not
automated. It has to be done manually.”
    Jensen let the significance of
the words filter through. Someone must have been performing the
alignment. “Well, that’s good news. There must still be some crew
alive, right?”
    “Well, that’s the thing chief. I
can access the main control comp system from here. There’s a
secondary interface in engineering as a backup. I requested a head
count.”
    Each person aboard a colony ship
had a tiny sub dermal implant, which allowed the CCS to track their
location as well as the individuals’ bio readings. It would also
provide a running census on how many people were aboard.
    “I may regret asking this. How
many are there?”
    “Zero chief. There are no
crewmen currently registered.”
    “But you said that the alignment
was done manually.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Hmm. Okay, thanks Finn.”
    The implants were inserted into
the gluteus maximus of all new-borns. This was protocol. Everyone
had one. If there were people aboard that did not have the bio
tracker, then that could only mean one thing. He turned to his
team. “There may be a break in the social structure. It could be
they had a mutiny. Keep on your toes.”
    The group nodded in response.
They continued along the corridor, coming upon more of the hapless
crew that had died suddenly, killed by a flash radiation burst,
most likely from the ship’s own reactor.
    When they reached the junction
to the Control Centre Pod, the most forward part of the ship,
Jensen felt a sense of relief. He opened the connecting portal. It
was an airlock, since the control pod was effectively a separate
system to the rest of the ship. Although cramped, the Bitter Sea
personnel squeezed into the small chamber. They cycled through and
as the adjoining portal opened, they got their first glimpse of the
ship’s control centre, the bridge.
    A dozen of the Argoss crew were
arrayed around the room, some still at their workstations, others
haphazardly fallen, or sitting slumped against a bulkhead. The
blast of radiation that had killed them had been over in a second.
They probably did not even feel a thing.
    But the gen-pop sphere