Earth Song: Twilight Serenade by Mark Wandrey Page A

plasma from the ships systems. There is a small detonation charge, but it is impossible for it to go off without any plasma in containment.” As she talked she was tapping commands into the controls, trying to coax information from the long dead system. Seeing her mother watching she explained. “Involved in a task force like this, there are possibilities that the Kaatan was armed with more than shipkillers.”
    “Was it?”
    “I can’t tell. This weapons hardpoint is not communicating with the other that is contained in this hull section. We’ll have to check manually.”
    They moved down the corridor and found a huge gash penetrating from the outside hull through deep into the ship section. “Probably why the systems couldn’t communicate,” Minu suggested. Lilith nodded and flew across to the other side of the gouge, the Beezer right behind her. Minu glanced out the hole in the hull to see stars twinkling. She swallowed and pushed across.
    Lilith found the other access and checked. This hardpoint proved to not be empty. A bit later Minu watched as the Beezer team removed the missiles one at a time. She’d seen the damage those death dealers dealt out and was shocked to see them each only slightly longer than a meter and no thicker than her leg. “So much power in a small package,” she remarked to no one in particular.
    Another pair of Beezers took the medbay consumables and the missiles back across the void to the functioning Kaatan while Minu, her daughter, and the original salvage team floating a half a kilometer to the next large ship hulk. Their ship followed a short time later, remotely piloted by Lilith once the transfer team had their cargo aboard.
    This fragment was a big after section of a ball. Minu had no idea if it came from the same ship they’d been in before. There was likely no way of telling. The shuttle bays were both intact and using her little bots, they made their entrance there. An even half dozen bodies floated there.
    They couldn’t move around them so the Beezers went through them. Like before, the incredible age of the corpses and time they’d been exposed to vacuum made them disintegrate on being touched. Two of them became a dissipating cloud in their suit lights as they moved through.
    Affixed to the rear of the hanger was a pair of shuttles identical to the ones on Lilith’s ship. “Excellent,” Minu’s daughter said and clapped her hands together. It was the first time Minu had seen her excited since they’d come over to these floating tombs. She opened the connecting lock between the bays and found the other also head two shuttles.
    “Good find,” Minu observed.
    “Absolutely,” the other woman agreed. “The Kaatan shuttles are basically lighter versions of the Eseel gunboats and can serve the same purpose in a pinch. All but one of the aggregate wrecks has shuttle bays so we could stand to harvest forty shuttles!” Minu smiled, that was good news.
    The remainder of that ship held nothing more of value so they moved to another section. That one held a medical bay not as large as the first but with full consumables lockers that were salvaged. It did, though, have a full launcher complement of twenty shipkillers that were moved back to the Kaatan.
    They’d been in space for seven hours already. Lilith wanted to keep going indefinitely, but Minu said only one more section. It ended up being a good call.
    The final salvage of the day was almost an entire ball. The rear of the needle was crushed as if from and impact, and the front melted like a candle tip. The ball was burned in a dozen places, the hull melted through providing no entry points, including both shuttle bays. Inside they were a scorched ruin providing no salvage. Eventually, Lilith settled on having to do even more damage to gain entry.
    “Can’t you access the weapons bays from the outside?” Minu asked her.
    “Unfortunately, no.” Lilith explained that the hulls were designed to be nearly seamless.