Starship Summer (Starship Seasons, #1)(18)

“Alien,” I said.

“Too right.”

He looked at me, then moved along to the next inspection panel. He inserted his head and shoulders and attached the leads of his diagnostic com to whatever it was he had found, and was silent for a time.

I said, “Anything?”

“It’s connected to an energy source,” he reported back. “But I can’t tell what it is or where it’s located. I’m going to go through the rest of the ship, if that’s okay.”

“Be my guest. I’ll be in the galley if you need me. Dinner at eight.”

“Matt coming?”

“I contacted him last night. He said he’d be here just before eight—he was working on something. Maddie’s coming over at seven for a drink.”

Hawk picked up his carricase and paused on his way to the lateral corridor. “I wish Maddie could get over Matt.”

I looked at him. “You’re not jealous?”

He smiled. “I was, in the early days. Now I just don’t like to see Maddie hurt herself, wanting what she can’t have.”

I was about to say that she was adult, and could look after herself, but Hawk just shrugged and made his way along the corridor.

I retired to the galley and set about preparing dinner. I opened an imported red and drank liberally. An hour later the ship was suffused with the heady tang of oriental spices, and I was half cut.

I finished cooking and wandered up to the lounge. Hawk was still poking about in the bowels of the ship. I arranged the table, opened a few bottles of wine, and was about to go in search of Hawk to see if he wanted a drink when Maddie came up the ramp, waving a bottle and calling out, “David, what’s the incredible aroma?”

“Either Hawk’s frying the ship’s circuitry, or it’s the Thai curry.”

“Hawk’s here?”

I told her about the midnight alien visitor.

“Spooky. And he’s exorcising it?”

“Or something. Drink?”

“Wine will be great.”

She was dressed in a trim red trouser suit that, for once, didn’t look as though it had been run up by a blind seamstress. She noticed my glance and said, “I took extra care with this one. What do you think?”

“Suits you.”

“And the gloves. Silk. So if I do accidentally touch something…” She stopped as Hawk entered the lounge, mopping his face with a red bandanna. “The man himself. Found the ghosts?”

He slumped into a couch and accepted a beer. Only after a long drink did he reply, “No ghosts, but I did find a lot of incredible alien technology.” To me he said, “Like I mentioned, the crystal nexus cocoons the ship. My guess is that it’s this that’s projecting the images.”

“Any reason why?” Maddie asked.

“Search me. Something’s malfunctioning? A sub-routine that’s got into repetitive cycle mode? I can’t say. It’s alien. I’d be a fool to make a judgement.”

I gestured through the viewscreen to the bay. “Here’s Matt.”

He approached the headland on his wave-hopper, accelerated up the beach and came to a halt beneath the nose of the ship. He climbed off the hopper and locked the steering mechanism, his body-language tired.

A minute later he joined us, nodding to Hawk and Maddie and passing me a bottle of champagne. “To welcome you to Magenta.”

I thanked him and said, “I’ll save it until we have something jointly to celebrate. Wine?”

He sat down, tiredly, and took a long swallow from the glass I poured for him.

Maddie said, “David was just saying that his ship is haunted.” Matt looked at me, sceptical. “Haunted? I didn’t have you down as the type to see ghosts.”

“I don’t think whatever it is is a ghost,” I said. “But I’ve been having visitors.” And I told him about what I’d seen.

Hawk said, “I’ve checked it out. It’s nothing supernatural, as far as I can see. Something to do with the alien operating system.”

Matt shrugged. “There you are, then. Won’t the Qlax and the others have operating manuals that might tell you how to get rid of your visitors?”

Hawk was smiling. “If only it were that easy, Matt. But this little tub doesn’t belong to any of the alien races so far discovered.”

Matt stared at me. “No kidding?” He thought about it. “You mean the ship belonged to a race either now extinct, or yet to be discovered?”

“That’s about it,” Hawk said. “This galaxy alone is a big place. There’ll be many a race out there that we don’t know about.”

Matt said, more to himself, “Just think of it. All that alien art we’re in ignorance of…”

We thought about that for a time, and then Maddie said, “What about the art of the aliens we know about—the Qlax and the Mathan and those others?”

“The Zexu,” Matt said. “Well, the Mathan don’t produce anything we’d consider art. They look at the world in severely logical terms. They have no room for metaphor, and a race without the understanding of metaphor is unlikely to produce creative works of art. The Qlax are another matter. Everything to them is metaphor—which is fine, but we humans have great difficulty understanding their basic concepts, so we have no real appreciation of their creations.”