DREADNOUGHT 2165 Read Online Free PDF Page A

secret, his officers didn't get it. He explained,
"The Charon is the ship that
will take Mr. Devlin to the Dreadnought's hull," Cozen
said.
    Dana Sellis nodded at the projection
of the approaching transport. "I'm reading IFF tags from over 5000 exosuits on that ship, but... but they're
all reporting ice cold."
    "Perth-remote left the heat off for now,"
Cozen said. "Mr. Devlin knows why. Tell them, Mr. Devlin."
    "I imagine that's to keep the crew fresh,"
Ram said. "Apparently, everyone on-board my new command is already
dead."
    *****
    Bolo and Pardue piloted the longboat
over from Hardway . Ram and
Lucy Elan stood behind them with Hollis and Chief Horcheese and a
half-team of redsuits. After they cleared the bays and the carrier
and came about, Charon loomed
large in the cockpit canopy. "Don't bother to take your helmets
off," Ram told them over local suit comms. "We're going in through
the airlocks near the topside pads. And there's pressurized atmo
inside, but the air is still too cold to breathe
comfortably."
    "Why not use the landing bay?" Lucy
asked.
    "You'll see."
    Bolo took them straight in at
the Charon's port side. Faces
stared out the portholes of that mammoth ship, hundreds, of them.
Ram zoomed in using his helmet. They'd been posed there to look as
if they were alive, but their mouths were wide-open in death like
something had pried their jaws open to escape. If you didn't know
they were dead, then their morbid faces expressed terror and
surprise. The Squidies would never know the difference, he thought.
We're as alien to them as they are to us.
    Pardue said, "Where did Cozen find
five-thousand..."
    The port side of Charon fell away as Bolo flew up the transport's
hull. He turned the longboat and set her down on the forward,
topside pad, right behind the tower on the bow, the ship's command
section.
    The airlocks were right in front of the pads
and the longboat's running lights illuminated the two dead crewmen
that had been fixed to ladder rungs outside. Their arms extended in
welcome. "That ain't right," Pardue said.
    "Woods. Khazir." Chief Horcheese
half-whispered it on comms. "Cut 'em down. We'll bring them inside
with us."
    The dead had been posed everywhere
inside Charon , seemingly in
mockery of the living. They'd been leaned up against bulkheads in
pairs all along the passageways as if they were having
conversations and chatting each other up at a party.
    The bodies had been posed on Charon 's bridge as well. The one at
NAV had his hands fixed to the console. "Mr. Devlin," Khazir asked,
"Do you want us to move these bodies out of the way?"
    "Leave them," he said. "We're going to
run the ship from the boarding craft. We don't want to be up here
on the bridge when the shooting starts." Ram found Charon 's vault set in the aft
bulkhead. Inside it was an input pad for his command codes. After
he used them to take control of the ship, the remote command
console unit tied in to Engineering, OPS and NAV blinked at him
from where it had been taped to the bulkhead. He plugged the remote
into his suit and gestured through the menus projected in his
visor. He found the command interface for all the suit heaters and
started warming up the five-thousand bodies on board. By the time
they got to where they were going, those corpses had to appear more
or less alive at first glance.
    "They won't stay posed like this," Pardue
said. "Not when they thaw."
    Bolo backed into the body at the
ship's OPS console and accidentally knocked it off its seat to the
deck. When it hit, a voice cried out on local suit comms. It
shouted in all their ears, "This is Lt. Barker of SCS Charon ! Help us! We're under
attack!"
    "What the shite!" Pardue kicked the frozen
body out of fright and reflex. In the low gees it bounced off the
console and came back at her.
    "Easy!" Ram told the pilot, "It's just a
computer generated voice. Must be tied to the suit's
accelerometers."
    "That's sick," Pardue said.
" Why would they do that?"
    "So I can yuk it up