Maeken Kea and Donalt Trace both looked up and quickly identified the security officer standing beside his station to get their attention. Mystified, they hurried over to him as he returned to his seat.
“Trouble, Lieutenant?” Trace asked.
“Trouble, sir,” the junior officer agreed. “The Kalfethki are fighting.”
“Each other?”
“Yes, sir. They have someone cornered in a C Chamber on their level. They seem to be engaged in ritual challenge, and he must be holding his own very well.”
“Seal their section,” Trace ordered sharply.
“Yes, sir.” The young officer hit a master switch. On the maplike schematic on his monitor, the handful of open doors in the Kalfethki section sealed and locked.
“Now what?” Maeken Kea demanded impatiently. “We are not very likely to get them back under control once they start fighting. And if they decide to come after us, not even airlock doors will hold them long.”
“Yes, you are right. The Kalfethki are of no more use to us.” Commander Trace turned abruptly to the security officer. “Vacate the entire sector.”
Sixteen Kalfethki warriors were advancing to do battle when they stopped short to look around. Velmeran, helmetless, heard it as well. Airlock doors were being slammed shut. He thought that he could guess what it meant, while the Kalfethki knew beyond any doubt. They were about to die, suddenly and without honor, and there was nothing they could do about it. They stood, calm and silent, with their swords held in a final salute as they waited for death to come.
Their wait was not long. A slight breeze stirred within the chamber, the air whistling softly as it was drawn away. Soon even that quiet, ominous sound faded as the air became too thin. Decompression was usually a violent death, but the Kalfethki were too solid, their armored hides too thick, for them to simply explode. The only apparent damage was that their ears ruptured, leaving thin, red trails from the almost invisible holes in the sides of their heads. But their lungs were ripped apart in the growing vacuum. They began to fall unconscious within seconds.
Kelvessan were even tougher organisms. Their lungs did share the same vulnerability. However, they possessed by design a secondary valve that closed their trachea as tightly as an airlock. Since it was also an automatic function, Velmeran had no choice but to hold his breath until he was safely inside his helmet.
“What happened?” Consherra asked as soon as he could hear her.
“Somebody up there likes me,” he said, indicating the front of the ship. “They obviously thought that the Kalfethki were fighting among themselves.”
He walked over to the dead warriors and tried to pull one over to the area of the fight. His problem was not one of strength but a serious lack of traction in moving half a ton of inert weight. Baress realized what he intended and hurried to help. Together they pulled one back to the base of the steps and arranged limbs and weapons to suggest that this warrior had been fighting his fellows.
The three Starwolves made their way through the maze of saurian bodies and ascended to the alcove above the opposite end of the great chamber. Velmeran stopped before the closed airlock and began his remote manipulation of the controls. He had only begun when the doors snapped open unexpectedly, and a blast of air and a Kalfethki exploded outward at him. Although caught off-guard, Velmeran reacted quickly enough to catch the warrior by a massive arm and flip him overhead. The warrior crashed heavily on his back a good four meters away. His ears already bleeding from decompression, he rose shakily and staggered forward in a final charge. He made it only four uncertain steps.
“Inside!” Velmeran ordered them into the airlock and shut the door, immediately cycling air into the chamber. “Deliberate decompression of an airlock. You can bet that set off alarms all the way to the bridge.”
“Why did he do it?” Consherra asked, still shaken by it all. “He could have lived.”
“No, he would have been dead within minutes by his own hand anyway,” he explained, pausing to trigger the outer doors and wave them through. “Honor, you know. But there was some honor to be won in at least trying.”
Before they could scramble for cover, a lift door only three meters ahead opened suddenly and a sentry stepped out, no doubt on its way to investigate the disturbance. The automaton did not see the Starwolves until it stepped into the hall and turned to face them. Then it found itself eye-to-eye with Velmeran and paused in midstride.
“You did not see anyone,” he told the machine.
The sentry made no reply, but neither did it open fire. Velmeran gestured the others past and slipped by the sentry when they were clear. They froze along the wall behind it, but the machine took no notice as it trotted awkwardly down the corridor the way they had come.
“What do you make of it?” Maeken Kea inquired.
The security officer shrugged. “I can only guess, but it was no malfunction. A Kalfethki was inside the airlock when they were sealed. Perhaps he tried to open the wrong door. Perhaps he simply wanted to die with his companions. Any survivor would not have been a willing one, knowing that his death was ordered.”
“Just keep watch until the sentries have a chance to tally the dead,” she told him. “I do not want any of those licentious lizards wandering about the ship. There is no telling what strange ideas some survivor might dream up.”
Maeken Kea was not particularly pleased with the situation, nor with Donalt Trace. She had not liked the idea of two thousand Kalfethki on board her ship in the first place. She liked even less to have them decompressed at the first provocation, as much as she had to admit to the necessity. Needless to say, she still had no idea that Trace had ordered a nuclear strike on Tryalna; he had contrived to have her off the bridge at that time. As it was, she got along with him as well as she did because she was under the mistaken impression that he did not interfere with her command of the ship.
“Captain?”
Maeken looked over and saw that the security officer monitoring and directing the sentries had called her. The officer was one of several Faldennye who made up a third of the Challenger’s crew. Maeken was not adept at reading their expressions, but she had the impression that this young lady had just been profoundly surprised.
“What is it?”
“Captain, I… I have just received a communication from a sentry,” she explained hesitantly in her rich, purring voice. “It called in to report that it had just not seen anyone.”
Maeken reacted to that with predictable mystification. “I take it that there is something unusual in this?”
“Captain, sentries relay reports only when called for, or when they have something definite to report. They do not make contact spontaneously to report nothing.”
Maeken nodded in understanding. “I see what you are getting at.”
“There is also a problem in syntax,” the Feldennye continued. “The sentry said that it had just not seen anyone. As if it had seen something important enough to report, and that it was nothing. Something is wrong.”
“A malfunction?”
She nodded in resignation. “That would have to be it, although a remote internal check reveals nothing. I have ordered another sentry to reinforce that one, in the event it is failing.”
“Where did this occur?”
“Here, just as it came off the lift.” She indicated the place on the map projected on her monitor.
Maeken drew back in surprise. “Not fifty meters from an airlock that was decompressed. And it is now standing guard outside that very lock.”
“It is so,” the Feldennye agreed. “Could the two incidents be related?”
“If you can figure out how, then you tell me. The airlock only opened on the other side.” Maeken glanced at the ceiling, rubbing an aching neck as she considered the matter. “Keep your eyes open.”
Maeken saw that Commander Trace had returned and hurried to join him on the central bridge.
“Did you see Lieutenant Skerri?” She asked.
“No, he wasn’t there. He must have returned to his cabin. I didn’t think to ask for him.”
“Captain!”
She turned in time to see the same Feldennye officer pull off her headphones and throw them down on her console. The entire bridge crew stared in open amazement. Feldennye were extraordinarily calm, eventempered people, and it took a great deal to frustrate them to the point of being upset. Maeken hurried to her station, the Sector Commander close behind.
“Captain, I was making a complete scan of the location and activity of all the sentries when I found one unit far from its assigned place,” she explained. “It belongs near the middle of the ship, but found it as far forward as it can get. I asked it to explain itself, and it… it told me to shut up and mind my own business.”
Maeken glanced up at Donalt Trace, but he had missed the previous report and was even more mystified. She turned back to the security officer. “That is no simple malfunction, is it?”
“No, Captain.”