Chapter 5: Body Parts and Writing

Reece picked her way through the mess of equipment the salvage crews were laying out on the destroyer's hangar bay. She bent down to look closely at some of the panels.

"Shouldn't you be looking at the circuitry?" A voice behind her asked. "Or the computers?"

She didn't turn around. Lieutenant Commander Thieu had made no secret of the fact he considered patrol duty a gross injustice, with his skills with computers.

"Notice anything about these panels?"

"They're not too badly damaged."

"Right. They're also internal panels. See this? Bracket marks, and this one has part of a light panel attached to it."

"So they're internal panels and not part of the hull. So what?"

"This one here is about the fiftieth I've looked at. Not one of them has anything on it."

"It has a lighting panel."

"No writing. No labels. I can understand that they might not have manufacturers' marks or batch numbers on them, but how could any crew hope to remember what was behind the panels if they weren't labelled? There's no sign of anything, any form of writing at all, in this lot."

"So?"

"There's also been absolutely nothing we recognise as body parts. So maybe this ship was completely automated. Which might explain why it attacked like that - maybe our ships and satellites fit its criteria for something dangerous."

"Or it was remote-controlled, or there were bodies and we just haven't found them, or the life forms on board didn't leave a residue we'd recognise."

"Always possible - but we've got people analysing the spectra of the explosions and so far they've found no sign of organic compounds beyond simple synthetics and plastics. This stuff is primitive." She waved eloquently. "This hull panel? We were using this stuff round about the time we first ran into the Kangas. Most of this materials technology is four or five hundred years behind ours."

"Which explains why we won so easily."

"Yes, but was this a huge probe, a minor probe, a warship or an almost insignificant old boat?" Reese asked. "That's the crucial question."

Thieu snorted. "We'll find out soon enough. We have pretty much all their transmissions recorded, for one thing."

"How'd they manage that?"

"They fell into the limits we normally use to run the SETI program. We didn't know about it until half an hour ago when some bright intern pulled the satellite records and checked them."

"Yeah. That old program was about as much use as a chocolate teapot when it came to hearing Kanga transmissions. No wonder we didn't check. We'll have to downscale our thinking." She paused, drumming her fingers on her thigh. "Lieutenant Commander, in your opinion, would this craft have been a danger to a colony less well protected than ours?"

"Absolutely, Captain," he responded to the change in attitude at once. "Avarin is a lucky colony; we're right out at the Edge, so we could get a large chunk of the old military equipment the Old Worlds were replacing after we finished up the Kanga Wars. Most colonies this size have two satellites with minimal missile platforms and an armoury of hunting weapons in the central town. We've got ships, a garrison and ground emplacements. A normal colony might easily have damaged the ship but not destroyed it; it was a highly manoeuvrable design for its technology level and almost ludicrously well-armed."

She paused. "If there was no real need for a life support system on board, would that account for the extra speed and firepower?"

"Huh. I'll run the figures. It could account for it. But if that's right, we're going to need our edge of better technology. It may be the only one we've got."