Death of a Starship Read online

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  Albrecht managed to feed the newt twice more over the next day and half. He had a feeling he might want its help later. The creature seemed to be less enthusiastic about charging the hatch each time he opened it, though the smell could have stunned an AI. Albrecht preferred to ascribe the hanging back to low animal cunning rather than any instinct to be tamed for handfeeding. He’d considered turning the gravimetrics off to confuse it. The repairs he’d been able to make were a bit dodgy, and the animal was by nature a swimmer anyway and thus presumably equipped to cope with moving in three dimensions, so he figured he was best off leaving well enough alone.

  In the idle hours of transit he caught up on his sleep and established that yes, the military newcomer would almost certainly be closing vectors with him in the belt. He still had no idea who the hell that was. Exploring Pearl further in his spare time, he found some of the smuggling compartments, which conveniently yielded to his codelock key. Albrecht suddenly didn’t have money problems any more, though he had shit all to spend it on.

  After he’d counted out a few thousand credits, he tried tapping into the system-wide nöosphere. Dirtside newsfeeds were more attenuated this far out, but it looked like the Imperial Resident had clamped down on the holy heck he’d unleashed back in Gryphon Landing. There was one city he probably shouldn’t expect to ever return to.

  Oddly, though Albrecht had seen his own name in the ‘casts, no one had ever identified his boat. He tried to decide if that was good for him or bad for him. Like everything else lately, the whole business was a bit of a toss-up.

  By the time he made The Necklace and Shorty’s local space, he was heartily sick of Jenny D., Halfsummer, the newt, the Navy, the Church and pretty much everything and everyone else in the universe not named Micah Albrecht.

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  It was, he had to admit, a sight to behold. Albrecht wasn’t really an aficionado of belt industrial complexes. He was a c-spacer, not a local yokel, and his crew time had been aboard liners and high end freighters that moved station-to-station. Still, he’d seen enough adventure virteos set among rough-and-tumble belt miners and their hard-bitten crews to have some notion of what a belt port was supposed to look like.

  The Necklace, and Shorty’s Surprise, did not disappoint.

  For one, The Necklace had an unusually high albedo. That was what made it visible from Halfsummer’s nights. Up close the belt glittered like a sky full of diamonds. Which, in a sense, it was – a significant proportion of ice chunks and a high concentration of metallic salts and crystals in the rocky bodies created the bright reflections of light from the primary, and also made The Necklace a rich environment for mining.

  The individual rocks and snowballs of The Necklace didn’t tumble and shift, like asteroid belts always seemed to do in the virteos. Rather, they were strung along in a staggered line, resembling nothing so much as a poorly-maintained gas giant ring system. Shorty’s Surprise sat embedded in this glittering arc of sky like a jewelry mount waiting for just the right gem cut to come along.

  The core of the mount was a large chunk of hardware – maybe an old ice cracking plant? – to which three rather substantial rocks had been tethered and spun up to rotation. That would produce a useful illusion of gravity via centripetal force, but not normal to the intended gravity plane of the original structure. And of course, the axis of rotation would be in microgravity.

  That was a lot of trouble to go to for some g-force, given the prevalence of gravimetrics, but the whole business made Shorty’s Surprise damned hard to get into in a hurry, Albrecht figured. Also made it less vulnerable to power failures. All that rotation was better than armor, assuming the bad guys didn’t just settle for blowing the whole thing up. Cut down on the armed raids, at any rate, he’d bet.

  He couldn’t quite tell what the station had been made from because it had been built out, ramified, turned into something very unlike the crisp, clean lines he was used to seeing in space operations areas – all the work apparently done by crazy people. As the rocks turned on the ends of their tethers, Albrecht could see they were covered with huge, obscene carvings. Amid the massive, distorted genitalia and assorted protest symbols was a collection of stone buildings, bubble shelters, gutted rock hoppers, a scattering of engine mounts – to manage gyroscopic precession? – and supply dumps, all tethered down to keep it from flying off into space.

  The cables connecting the rocks to the core were clear and unobstructed, either out of some rudimentary notion of safety, or perhaps as a transitway. The core itself was a jumble of metal sculptures – he spotted a giant, eyeless face spinning past, lips curled in disdain, nostrils flared wide – boat hulls welded or tethered into place, biofactory pods and glowing spots where something arced free with a purple-blue glow he wouldn’t care to be any closer to.

  It was a station as designed by the artistic and the insane. It was junk and movement and life, and even to Albrecht’s prosaic and battered soul, an obvious shout against the cold darkness of life in hard vacuum. It was also a maintenance nightmare and a cold metal deathtrap that wouldn’t pass a restaurant health inspection.

  “Boat, what’s our approach?”

  “System info says under local control. There is no standard approach documented.”

  Uh huh. “Well, would you please patch me in to localspace approach control.”

  “Of course,” said Pearl. “Stand by.”

  A few moments later a rough female voice crackled through the bridge. No video or virteo feed, of course. “Shorty’s. Whaddayawan’?”

  “Jenny’s Little Pearl requesting approach vector and docking instructions.”

  There was snort. Then: “You must be new here.” She launched into what was obviously a prepared speech. “Come in dead slow, don’t hit nothing. Park it off the celestial north axis and walk in. No weapons. Someone will shake you down at the airlock. They prolly won’t be gentle.”

  “Uh...thank you, Shorty’s.”

  “Whaddeva.”

  Albrecht had always worked major ports. The flight instructions here represented a fairly unique traffic control policy, in his experience. On the other hand, a station the size of Shorty’s Surprise didn’t come with the sort of entrenched bureaucracy that infested the class I and II ports Princess Janivera had called at. He cycled his main screen through the closing vectors on his two pursuing bogies...six point one hours for the God squad, and seven point eight hours for the stealthy combat unit. Hammer and anvil. With Novy Petrograd nearby to document the destruction. He wondered how mad the station administrators at Shorty’s Surprise would be at him for bringing in that kind of trouble.

  With any luck, he’d be long gone before either of the bad guys got here.

  Albrecht cycled his screen back to approach view, and went in on instruments rather than the usual port control. Dead slow was dead slow. Given the sheer amount of junk tethered to or orbiting Shorty’s Surprise, and that three-balled bola whirling demonically just beneath his line of travel, that was a fine speed for his peace of mind.

  He didn’t hit nothing, either. Or at least Pearl’s autopilot systems didn’t. Albrecht found a place to park Pearl, tucked in fairly close to a derelict gasbag apparently long retired from outer system towing runs. The gasbag seemed to be stationkeeping with respect to Shorty’s Surprise via an odd assortment of strapped-on thrusters, as were the rather numerous collections of rock tugs, orbit hoppers, runabouts, broom sticks and jack-built scooters parked in a rough array around Shorty’s axis of rotation. Albrecht set Pearl up to keep station with respect to the gasbag, with breakaway orders to go to a ten-thousand meter standoff if the immediate area got violent or junky, either one.

  All he had to do now was walk in. Which was to say, take a short, slow controlled excursion from Pearl’s airlock through the crap-filled vacuum of immediate localspace to the lock at the celestial north end of Shorty’s axis of rotation. Easy enough.

  Then he realized his problem. The main airlock was of
f the portside passage. The spacesuit locker was off the portside passage. The portside passage was currently occupied by a hundred kilos of pissed-off Halfsummer newt.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” shouted Albrecht at the empty, uncaring bridge of his little boat.

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  Ten minutes later he’d worked it out. A couple of kilos of that horrid chicken fried rice in the aft cross-passage, in front of the engineering section. Then have Pearl open the connecting hatch. The newt would go in to feed, he’d slip through the portside passage into the suit locker and on to the airlock.

  Simple enough. All he had to do was preprogram the sequence of his movements about the boat into Pearl’s systems. Albrecht figured on taking the codelock key with him, as well as a pile of those credits he’d stumbled over, while securing all the boards and boat systems against unexpected visitors. Assuming they survived the newt, they still wouldn’t be able to do so much as get a hatch opened without the key.

  He decided to leave the aft cross-passage open to the portside passage. When he needed to get back, he’d deal with the newt, probably by having Pearl shift hatches ‘til the newt moved on somewhere else.

  No point in not giving it the run of the ship, at least in the areas where any intruders were likely to come in. There wasn’t much he could do if the bad guys decided to cut through the hull.

  He flexed his aching wrist and wished whoever came after him the joy of the chase. Then Albrecht finished setting his instructions into the systems, fired off his letter to Public Safety Lieutenant Alma Gorova, primed the lockdown routines, and went about luring the newt out of his way.

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  “How much can one lizard piss?” Albrecht grumbled, wading through the water toward the airlock. The newt thumped against the closed hatch from the aft cross-passage, trying to get back to its erstwhile home. His nose was being assaulted by a rank, swampy odor that made his eyes water. He didn’t want to think about what this stuff was doing to his boots.

  No wonder the watermen of Gryphon landing were such an ill-tempered bunch of piss-takers. If this was what their canals and marshes smelled like, they could hardly be anything else. Not with spending their days out there breathing this god-awful crud.

  He cycled open the suit locker. All the repair work he had done before he’d been chased out of Halfsummer orbit by Petrograd meant that Albrecht had experienced a good opportunity to work with the inventory. He’d actually managed to cobble together an engineering hardsuit that more-or-less fit him – the closest thing to combat armor a civilian could legally use. Albrecht unclipped the welder and power feed attachments currently in place on the suit arms. He figured whoever did the shakedowns at Shorty’s front door would consider them weapons, regardless of the manufacturer’s intended use.

  He strapped in to the suit while still standing ankle-deep in the mucky water in the passageway. That meant his suit liner became wet, being infiltrated with that same hideous smell. Albrecht was not very pleased with life by the time he squeezed himself into the airlock.

  Time to go for a walk.

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  Golliwog: Halfsummer Solar Space, In Transit

  They flew wrapped in an inner darkness which mimicked the world outside, breathing stale air and the edge of one another’s sweat. Yee’s boat, nameless and unregistered, was stealthy across all systems Golliwog could analyze, stripped to the essentials except for a few operational flourishes. Much of the hull was transparent to visible light – inbound only, based on what he had seen in the boat deck – but still the interior was quite shadowed. Golliwog presumed this avoided light leakage through potential hull flaws, but more to the point the low illumination kept the occupants extremely focused on their surroundings.

  It was sort of like being projected through space in a reasonably comfortable chair.

  Ahead of them The Necklace gleamed, a bright spill of water braiding its way through space. Golliwog knew that Halfsummer’s belt was considered beautiful, but his aesthetic criteria had always been largely functional. Like this boat, for example. If something cut well, without wasted material or motion, it was elegant. Even so there was something moving about the sight, that spoke to the human soul buried somewhere beneath all the gene grafts and surgeries and biomechanical enhancements that made him the bione Golliwog instead of one of Eve’s grandchildren.

  Or perhaps great-grandchildren?

  The traitor voice which was slowly unfolding in his mind wondered if the feeling created by this view was what Holy Communion tasted like.

  Holy or not, Yee’s little vessel was the finest boat he’d ever flown. Golliwog felt the sheer joy of the overpowered drives reacting to his touch. Nothing that moved had unlimited acceleration – no matter how efficiently the hydrogen conversion process was tuned, physics and fuel capacity set limits – but Yee’s dark, illegal little craft was close as he’d ever come to that experience.

  “We’re going to miss him by about an hour,” Yee muttered. She was watching a low-lux screen that plotted their intercept. “I expected to do better than this.”

  Golliwog heard the reproof in her voice. “It flies, ma’am. And quite quickly. But that’s all it does.” Nothing beyond the possible.

  “Not your error, Golliwog. We could perhaps have optimized a launch curve from Hinton, but I didn’t assess the need quickly enough. Captain Hawking is worthless.”

  “Ma’am.” He didn’t need to comment further on Naval politics. Golliwog was perfectly aware that he existed on the sufferance of his late training partners, the various Examining Boards, and distant committees of men and women much like both Yee and Hawking.

  “I’ve been going through the files on our destination. Shorty’s Surprise. Typical belter crap.”

  His scalp prickled. Yee rarely used profanity.

  She continued: “We could make a hard entry, but that would not serve our purposes. They have a fairly crude protocol which we can walk through. I am an information smuggler, you are my muscle. I will make sure to carry sufficient credits in hardmoney to get us past the door wardens. Stick to your class three armament, but don’t argue if they take anything away from you.”

  “Ma’am, yes ma’am.”

  “Inside...we want to speak to Ser Albrecht privately, at some length. We do not wish to terminate him unless he seems to be breaking free of our control in some irrevocable manner. Are we in agreement?”

  “Ma’am, yes ma’am.” Golliwog wondered where she had gone while he was waiting in the boat bay, what Spinks had told her or what comm signal Yee had received which now made her so furiously, dangerously tense. “Ma’am?”

  “Yes?”

  “What do I do if something happens to you?” Free, walk free, said the voice inside his head. Don’t let them strap you down and study whatever’s wrong with your mind in c-space.

  She laughed. It was an edgy sound, buzzed, full of hormones and little knives. “Anything that happens to me will have to finish happening to you first, Golliwog.”

  “Ma’am, yes ma’am.”

  He concentrated on flying. Golliwog found himself sincerely hoping that Captain Hawking had managed to extract some additional acceleration out of Dmitri Hinton. He wasn’t feeling very confident in the face of Yee’s obvious stress.

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  Menard: Halfsummer Solar Space, In Transit

  McNally had not been jesting about Menard finding the experience unenjoyable. Menard wondered if he could hold his breath for the next several hours. Doubtless the angel could.

  The two of them lay close together, stretched out flat, side by side in a simple, enclosed tube. Menard wore a skinsuit, with softbubble helmet and a ninety-minute bottle stowed somewhere just above his head. The angel still wore its red leather armor, which strongly implied the blesséd thing was vacuum-rated.

  Their fast packet was just that: a fast packet. A single h-q conversion engine, just enough gravimetrics to keep the inside of the tube from being filled with passenger jelly upon maneuvering, and some li
ttle idiot AI pilot. Building small was expensive. Menard shuddered to think what this thing cost. The equivalent of a significant portion of St. Gaatha’s entire construction budget, he’d wager.

  The same peculiar math that required the fast courier to be massive in order to optimize the process of entering and emerging from c-transition worked against the ship in realspace. A couple of equation values flipped back to what Einstein or even Newton might have understood. Once that happened, down in normal space St. Gaatha was a big, slow chunk of metal being pushed around on an exhaust column.

  Hence fast packets. When something, or someone, had to get somewhere without delay. C-transitions simply weren’t possible too deep within gravity wells. Otherwise the Church Militant vessel could have just skipped like a stone across the Halfsummer system. That was a piece of math and engineering that had eluded the hopeful for over a thousand years.

  So here he was, scooting across too many light-seconds’ distance stuffed in a pipe with a stone killer committed to the glory of God.

  This was why God had given man prayer. As a comfort in times of trial.

  “Be mindful, O Lord,” the Chor Episcopos began, then wondered why he was muttering. This was an angel next to him, crowded up against him. Surely it did not resent prayer. At least his knees did not burn, folded in here. He addressed himself to God: “Mindful of those who travel by land, by sea, by air and by space; of the old and young, the sick, the suffering, the sorrowing, the afflicted, the captives, the needy and the poor; and upon them all send forth Thy mercies, for Thou art the Giver of all good things.”

  From there he slid into silent mediation, considering the life of St. Niphon as that venerable’s earthly works and place in Heaven applied to one frightened priest sliding through vacuum in the company of terror, bound for what might be the greatest discovery of his age. Hope, and pride, were a spark beneath his fear and worry.

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  Albrecht: Halfsummer Solar Space, The Necklace, Shorty’s Surprise

  He’d be damned if he understood how they got anything done out here. The immediate localspace around the station was a fog of dust, ice crystals, loose tools, stray scrap. He even saw a mummified cat drift by as his engineering hardsuit’s tiny attitude jets eased Albrecht toward the airlock at the top of the axis of Shorty’s Surprise.