Death of a Starship Page 14

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

  They moved fast through the station, amid the smells and sounds and movements of thousands of crowded human beings. Albrecht followed Dillon, who had picked up the largest ballspitter he’d ever seen. The priest struggled along behind, but kept up. People who saw them coming through the tall, crowded caves of humanity got out of the way. There were a few struggles as some kept others from interfering.

  “Coup?” Albrecht panted with the effort of their rapid flight.

  “Disagreement,” Dillon said shortly. “Past versus future.”

  “Black Flag.”

  A grunt from ahead of Albrecht.

  Then they were in a utility passageway. Dillon snap spun to orient himself feet forward on their direction of travel and loosed a burst from the ballspitter. The high-elasticity projectiles rattled and thumped as they shot down the passageway, to a startled yelp from ahead, as Dillon staggered in his flight before recovering his forward momentum.

  Albrecht was starting to feel a “down” to the right. He grabbed a rung, twisted himself ninety degrees, and adopted the long, low-gravity lope of a spaceman. They came to a hatch in what was now the floor without further opposition.

  Dillon turned. “Listen. It’s point three gees at the bottom of this shaft, about a hundred meters down. You lose control, it’s going to hurt on impact. Kill you if you come down wrong. Don’t screw up.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just keyed the hatch open to an underlit hole with a faint red glow, like distant fire down below. Dillon dropped in with one hand on a ladder rail and the other aiming his ballspitter downward.

  Albrecht waved Menard in next. “I’ll follow, Chor Episcopos.”

  “Bless you, my son. Fall safely.” Menard, for all that his face showed his nerves, kicked himself over the hatch lip headfirst like a Marine, reaching for the rail as he went.

  Albrecht glanced up the corridor to see someone with a flechette rifle watching him. At least they weren’t shooting. Right now, anything was possible. Worlds turned on moments like this. He waved maniacally, then followed the priest headfirst, swallowing his stomach.

  The hatch cycled shut behind them.

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  He hit bottom hard enough to wish he hadn’t. Chor Episcopos Menard had gotten out of the way, thankfully, and was hustling spinward through the girdered shadows of some ancient equipment bay toward another open hatch, red-lit in the floor.

  “I believe this is Ser Dillon’s rock hopper,” Menard said with a glance over his shoulder.

  Albrecht looked around. This space had been something different once, though he had no idea what. Now it was filled with groaning masses of metal and carbonmesh chained against the coreward bulkheads, straining with the force of the rotation. A third of a gee was enough to send something loose sailing outward at close to three meters per second per second. He didn’t want to think about how many tons were hanging over his head, great blunt Damoclean plowshares. If there was a problem, they couldn’t just turn off the gravimetrics and shift things looking for his body.

  Something clanged in the distance, as Dillon bellowed unintelligibly from below.

  “Go,” said Albrecht.

  Menard went. Albrecht followed.

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  Gravity was wrong inside. They were being pulled towards what should have been the bow. The crash couches were set perpendicular to the current normal plane. Dillon was already strapped into the central seat, his ballspitter racked above his head. Albrecht noted the barrel was pointing straight at him and the hatch behind.

  “Strap in, now,” said Dillon. “We’re twenty-four seconds from drop.”

  Menard was clambering awkwardly down into the portside seat, so Albrecht dropped onto starboard seat. “Where’s the rest of the boat?” This cabin was smaller than Pearl’s bridge, about forty percent of the bulkheads actually translucent panels which currently showed a crisscross of cables and girders. They were going to launch into that?

  “This is it. Secure for drop.”

  “Secured,” said Menard.

  Albrecht finished clicking his mechanical restraints in place. “Starboard seat secured.” Looking around, he saw his hardsuit lashed in just forward of the hatch he’d tumbled through. Someone had thought ahead. He wondered where the cash had gotten to, then felt vaguely ashamed of the thought.

  “Seven... six...” Someone began banging on the hatch as a hull section slid open in front of them, showing the glittering fog of Shorty’s Surprise localspace beyond. “Fuck... you... three... two... one...” Dillon pulled a red toggle with a strain that had to be spring-locked. There was a very loud clang, then the apparent gravity essentially reversed, going from tugging Albrecht forward against his straps to pulling him backward and slightly up as they tumbled screaming into the bright fog of active defense nano.

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

  It was a strange exit. He had made it from the storeroom into the passageways unchallenged. The life bubbles massed, of course, but they didn’t pull in any particular direction in the microgravity at Shorty’s core. He’d worked his way toward the skin, fighting the increasing pull of Yee and the angel – who were both thankfully light on mass – until he’d run into another pair of those giant men. The flechette pistol had gutted them before they realized who he was, but alarms hooted moments after.

  He had to assume the bells tolled for him.

  Someone was herding Golliwog, though. Some hatches opened at his approach, others stayed resolutely shut even when he banged on emergency overrides. He’d found himself in an elevator shaft, a skeletal little car wrapped around a ten-centimeter cable that glittered of woven diamond carbonmesh. One of the rockball cables, of course.

  He’d taken the hint, sealed all three life support systems and begun counting minutes. The cage left a little clanking airlock, the noise of which faded with the air pressure, lifting him against gravity into the whirling junk cloud around Shorty’s Surprise. From inside the elevator, the rockballs and the huge, cluttered central cylinder appeared absolutely steady, while The Necklace beyond them moved quickly enough to catch his eye. Scanning the area, Golliwog watched another hatch further around the sidewall arc of the central core open.

  A stubby, fat-tailed boat shot out of Shorty’s Surprise. It spun twice, trailing bright fire in the glittering fog, then thrusters puffed as the boat oriented itself and made a course clear of the whirling rockballs, the multiple parked ships and the general chaos of localspace here.

  “Good-bye, Ser Albrecht,” he whispered into the collapsed bag of his disposable helmet. “We will meet soon.” With that, the elevator fell into a hole in the rockball beneath his feet.

  Time to find a way out. Jenny’s Little Pearl awaited.

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  The rockball was crazy-crowded, interior laid out in marked contrast to the purposeful architecture of the core. It was another country, so to speak, where people moved in groups and gangs, and air seemed to be sold by the minute or the day. There was gravity here, too much of it frankly, but the corridors twisted and coiled in defiance. They were lined with ropes and cables and ladders and cargo nets, a sort of infinite gymnasium inhabited by the hungry and the hopeless.

  As oddly patched and put together as the core had been, Shorty’s balls were dark and dangerous, and filled with dark, dangerous people. No wonder they’d grown them big back in the core.

  Golliwog struggled through the heavier gravity with the life bubbles slung over his left shoulder, connecting cable wrapped once around his left arm. He let the pistol show in his right hand. Everything else was stuffed in the utility bag over his right shoulder.

  He was conscious of the minutes remaining. Minutes ‘til the life ran out of canned air and heat. Minutes ‘til his disposable suit gave up. Minutes that Albrecht was almost certainly using to get away. Golliwog didn’t care about t
he mythical Enver Hoxha. He didn’t care about Jenny D. He just wanted out.

  Stay here, whispered the rebel voice in his head.

  Golliwog shrugged it off and worked his way toward the lighter gravity of the coreward hemisphere. Stepping out of a hatch on the spinward side would simply cause him to repeat Albrecht’s departure from the core, except without the benefit of a spaceship wrapped around his body. Stepping out on the coreward side would allow him to control his jumping off point.

  He held something between a hope and a prayer that he could recognize and make his way to Jenny’s Little Pearl in the few minutes that remained to him and his charges by the time he got back into vacuum. It struck Golliwog that his unknown benefactors had already accomplished their aims. He was out of the core, as were Yee and the angel, and Albrecht was gone, too. There was no guarantee they’d given him enough air, tools and supplies to make his own climb.

  Stop now, said that voice, and live among these hard men a while. You’ll find a place, they’ll welcome your talents once they stop trying to kill you. Yee and the angel are done, and who is Albrecht to you? What are those missing ships to you?

  The priest. The priest who had called him “son” would expect more. Golliwog owed the priest nothing, either, but...he had to start somewhere. He knew he wasn’t going back, but he could do his job before he left. He would be more than a piece of equipment, more than a weapon, whatever law and regs said about biones.

  Whether the Navy would recognize his departure was another issue entirely, but he would blow that airlock when he came to it.

  And here was one final upward climb, a shoal of starving-thin boys scattering at a spray of needles from Golliwog’s pistol. He tucked the weapon into the lashed fold of his left arm and began the last one-handed ascent. Even here, in two thirds gravity, it was a strain. Had he been an ordinary human, Golliwog would already have failed.

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  The top of the ladder was indeed an airlock, some strange helical design ripped from a long-vanished ship and welded into place here. Like all the other hatches inside the rockball, it opened at the press of a button. Whatever security they had here certainly wasn’t enforced by architecture or facilities design.

  This lock had a long, tubular chamber. Had it once fired projectiles, he wondered? Ignoring the burning in his chest, Golliwog hauled the life bubbles to the top as the air pumped out, then opened the last hatch.

  The view above was wrenching. Shorty’s core was absolutely still two hundred meters above his head, filling the central arc of his personal sky. The other two balls were visible beyond it. Various ships and hulks kept some kind of position with respect to the primary. The rest of the world rotated, the bright ribbon of the Necklace moving visibly.

  Fourteen minutes, eleven point four seconds since he’d activated the angel’s life bubble. Yee was seven seconds behind. Well within the margin of error of the crude systems.

  When they’d parked the dark boat, Golliwog and Yee had spotted Jenny’s Little Pearl tucked against some old mass hauler. That hulk wasn’t hard to find now, either. It was the biggest thing in localspace after Shorty’s balls and the core of the Surprise itself. It was between his current and the next rockball, more or less.

  He tried to calculate the jumping off vector and velocity he’d require to make the leap, realized he simply didn’t know his own mass with enough precision. Not when the mass included Yee and the angel hanging from his body. And this damned suit had no thrusters at all. Another flaw to go with its five minutes of air.

  The first time Golliwog had ever tried to play catch, as a juvenile, he’d nearly had a seizure calculating intercepts and probability curves. Humans, true humans, didn’t calculate trajectories. They just leapt and trusted.

  He was good now, too. Better than any human, even one as overtrained as Dr. Yee. But this was a time to leap and trust, himself, Chor Episcopos Menard’s God, whatever fate there was that watched over him.

  “And so I jump,” said Golliwog. He closed his eyes and kicked off, the most human act he had ever committed.

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  Golliwog opened his eyes again. He was at least making headway toward the mass hauler. He was also falling away, in a natural reaction to the angular momentum imparted him by Shorty’s ball. Nano glittered around him as the defensive cloud reacted to his passage. It had trapped Golliwog once before, immobilizing him to be hauled into the core after his fight with the angel.

  He tried his carrier signal again. He wanted to modulate the nano formations, get them to accumulate on his rimward side, millions of tiny thrusters each exercising a few millimeter/milligrams of thrust to correct his arc toward the mass hauler.

  Once more the fog rippled at his mental touch, but he didn’t see the Naval countersigns. It was hacked, or homebrewed, he already knew that, but the fact that it reacted to him meant the underlying tech was similar.

  It didn’t matter. His course was moving further and further away from the target. In about thirty-five seconds he would pass a point of no return, where there wasn’t any reasonable correction to bring him back to the mass hauler and to Jenny’s Little Pearl.

  What was left to him?

  What was left to any human in extremis?

  “God,” Golliwog said, his voice muffled inside his baggie helmet. “You are not for me, and I am not Your creation. But if your priest Menard saw something of worth in me, perhaps You do too.”

  Nothing happened. He became angry at the thought of dying, of wasting himself out hear.

  “Move, damn it!” he shouted at the nano. He could see the point of no return on his trajectory fast approaching. “Move!”

  Inspiration struck. Golliwog grabbed the pistol from where it was tucked inside his dead left arm. He aimed it opposite his desired line of travel, into the axis of thrust he wanted from the nano. It might react, it might trap him, shred him, shock him, do nothing.

  “Hey God! Are you listening?” Twenty-four seconds from the point of no return, Golliwog pulled the trigger.

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  Menard: Halfsummer Solar Space, The Necklace, In transit

  It was a while before the inside of Dillon’s rock hopper stopped smelling like rank, dank fear. Menard had been inside prisons more pleasant than this. To his right, Albrecht rubbed his left wrist obsessively and muttered. All he could see of Dillon was a three-quarter rear profile of the pilot’s crash couch, and most of Dillon’s left arm.

  At least gravity was in the floor now, though something hummed with an ozone crackle that fought the fear-stink and promised extended future microgravity. And the view was amazing. Menard gave thanks to God that the Creator had not seen fit to endow His priest with agoraphobia. Instead, he saw all the diamonds of The Necklace as if they had been arrayed for his delight.

  “We just want to get rid of it, you know,” Dillon said into the long silence which had stretched since launch. “Well, most of us,” he added after another thoughtful pause.

  “I just wanted out of here,” Albrecht answered. “Now I’m the target of multiple manhunts. But...” He stopped, thinking of the people crowded within Shorty’s Surprise. “You belters. There’s a world and more here, isn’t there?”

  “The lack of one, more like it,” Dillon muttered, but Menard could hear the humor in his voice, matching the tension in Albrecht’s tone.

  “I never thought to found anything worthwhile in this damned system,” Albrecht said quietly. “Speaking of Halfsummer, where’s Novy Petrograd, anyway?”

  “Still hanging around Shorty’s, watching Jenny’s Little Pearl.”

  “I don’t suppose your geniuses wiped that ephemeridian data when they pulled it out.”

  “No.” Dillon’s tone suggested further questioning was unwise – that was obvious to Menard. He cut Albrecht off even as the spacer opened his mouth for more. “What are you two talking about?”

  “Give me thirty minutes, Chor Episcopos, and I’ll show you.”

  “We’re not nearly that
close,” muttered Albrecht.

  “You want to drive?”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up.”

  “Gentlemen,” Menard said slowly in his best staff meeting voice. “We have our lives, and freedom of movement. Whatever, ah, coup, was under way back there did not stop us from making our exit in good order.”

  “The Black Flag,” said Dillon. “Our dark side. This may be putting them over the top.”

  The top of what, Menard wondered, but he held his counsel. St. Gaatha would be on the scene soon enough, and Lieutenant McNally would take a keen interest in learning his whereabouts. Unless whoever was behind Captain Yee from Naval Oversight showed up with a bigger ship, of course. He wondered what had become of her and that wretched bione in the company of the angel. “Do you know the fate of my prisoners?”

  “Wrong people got ‘em,” Dillon snapped. “Could be free, could be dead.”

  “Ah.” Menard bowed his head and began to pray for the souls of the probably departed.

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  A while later Dillon rolled the rock hopper. The sky precessed in front of the view ports until they were facing at a low, reverse angle to their line of travel. “Watch,” said Dillon, and tapped a code sequence into one of his panels.

  Out there in the Deep Dark, a sequence of blue lights lit up, one after another, a ripple effect that went on for about ten seconds.

  It seemed big, and it was blesséd invisible without the lights. There was no way to achieve a sense of scale out here, though.

  “What is it?” asked Menard.

  “Refitting yard,” Albrecht said sourly.

  “A yard? For tugs, or ice crackers or some such?”

  Albrecht again: “Yes. Idiots. Now show him the rest of it, Dillon.”

  Dillon tapped another sequence. This time, the lights rippled almost forty seconds. The perspective was much deeper.

  “That, Your Reverence,” said Albrecht, “is about four kilometers of refitting frames.”

  “Four kilometers?” Menard was shocked. “And no one ever noticed it?”

  “Even the inspectors only come here in our ships,” Dillon said. “They use our instruments. No one ever looks out the window in space. Nothing to see.”