Battle for the Known Unknown Ch. 16

"Erika's signal's gone dead!" he exclaimed. "There's nothing at all."

"Where did the explosion take place?" asked the aging musician.

The captain's avatar suddenly appeared in the middle of the café as it must have done in every other chamber, room or privy throughout the ship.

"Do not panic," he said in seven different languages, one after the other. "The situation is under control."

And then more information became available, transmitted first in English and then in other languages. Paul reasoned that the passengers who were still in their cabins or suites wouldn't need to be exposed to so many different languages, but he had to listen to the same account repeated in Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Hindi, French and Spanish before the language returned once again to English.

There had been an explosion on board the space ship Ulysses. The life-support systems were intact. The source of the explosion was in a suite in the outermost level that had punctured the ship's hull and the next innermost level. There had been a massive loss of air and water which was currently trailing the ship, but the loss was now being contained. The loss of life was still in the lower hundreds.

Beatrice frowned while Mikhail studied the rather more comprehensive data that was fed to him from the Interplanetary Union's own information service.

"Another assassination attempt?" she guessed.

"The centre of the explosion was your suite," Mikhail confirmed. "In fact, its actual source was Erika."

"Erika? Our guard?" asked Paul who was getting both increasingly weary and ever more anxious at the trail of destruction that was following him wherever he went.

"Erika," confirmed Paul's Saturnian guard. "It was she who was at the heart of the incident. She's exploded!"

"I thought she didn't look well," Beatrice commented wryly.