Death of a Starship Read online

  That made a certain kind of sense. “Unless you’re a rock jockey.”

  “Right.”

  Four kilometers! Menard tried to work those dimensions out in terms he was familiar with. The Patriarch’s personal transport, Sts. Kyril and Methodius, had a keel about nine hundred meters long. He’d been told it was the largest starship in the Empire, even bigger than the Emperor’s flagship. “So why is it that large? This is your big fish, right, Ser Albrecht?”

  “Biggest fish of all. Dictator class battleship.”

  “NSS Enver Hoxha,” said Dillon.

  Hoxha. Hoxha. Why did he know that name? “What’s a battleship doing here in Halfsummer? What’s a battleship doing anywhere? They were all scrapped decades ago, before I was born.”

  “No one knows,” said Dillon. “Been here since the civil war is all I can tell you.”

  “Bloody idiots need a place to refit her,” Albrecht added.

  The light of revelation bloomed in Menard’s head. It was almost as powerful as that moment when God had driven him to his knees at thirteen, and from there into the priesthood. This was what had shivered his bones back when he had been talking to Russe, when this whole mystery had first begun to unfold. He wanted to sing.

  At Your command all things came to be, he thought, the vast expanse of interstellar space. Then, in a whisper: “I know.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I know!” he shouted.

  Dillon twisted in his chair to look at Menard, as Albrecht gave him a long, sideways stare. “You know what?” Dillon finally said.

  The words fought their way out of Menard’s mouth. “McNally, a – well never mind, except that, that he’s a native of 3-Freewall. He told me about Hoxha vanishing from the battle. They’ve got a tradition at 3-Freewall about that. They look for rocks.”

  Dillon turned back to his piloting with a snort of disgust. Albrecht continued to stare at Menard with an expression of mild disbelief. “Rocks?”

  “My job is tracing xenics,” said Menard earnestly. He had to make this make sense. God had handed him what might be the most important discovery in human history. “One, well, idea about xenics is that they are present among us. Internalism, that’s called. One branch of Internalism claims they travel in spaceships, or starships, disguised as rockballs. Asteroids.

  “There’s anecdotal evidence from the second battle of 3-Freewall that Enver Hoxha somehow overtook or was overtaken by a rock which was making its own course corrections, immediately before she vanished. Now you tell me she’s here, several hundred light-years from her last known location. Even though there’s never been a shred of evidence or rumor of her traveling from 3-Freewall to Halfsummer. At best, that’s two dozen c-transitions. There aren’t enough dark beacons in alignment to make that many hidden legs to a journey.

  “And the clincher...ship disappearances, or translocations, are one of the traces we’ve always watched for xenic activity. Here you have the biggest confirmable translocated ship in human history. On top of some other evidence in my bureau that Halfsummer is a focus of xenic activity right now.

  “We might be about to prove the existence of xenics, and answer the Xenic Question, in one move.”

  Menard sighed. He felt spent.

  Albrecht finally filled the long silence that followed. “And here I thought it was insurance fraud.”

  “Fucking xenics,” said Dillon. “Never liked them around.”

  Menard and Albrecht both stared at him.

  ‡

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

  It didn’t work. He had about twenty seconds to go, and the fog wasn’t reacting. Just swirling, shimmering. It knew he was there, it wouldn’t touch him.

  He needed a counterweight, some thing to swing against or throw away.

  Throw away.

  Sixteen seconds.

  Yee or the angel.

  Fourteen seconds.

  Who did he owe? What did he owe?

  Twelve seconds.

  What was he? Who was he?

  Ten seconds.

  The memory of the priest’s sad eyes brought Golliwog to tears.

  Eight seconds.

  “God damn me,” he said, and grabbed the line holding the life bubbles in place.

  Six seconds.

  He strained his muscles to shift his orientation relative to Dr. Yee and the angel, transferring momentum to the two life bubbles.

  Four seconds.

  He swung harder.

  Two seconds.

  He unclipped the line and cast one bubble loose.

  And his trajectory shifted. The nano bloomed bright, the probability curves opened up inside Golliwog’s head, as he hugged the remaining life bubble close.

  “Go with God, Dr. Yee,” he whispered.

  If someone bothered to pick her up in the minutes of life remaining to her, they might be willing to help. The angel was a made thing, like him. They both stood outside the kind regard of both God and man.

  Any sane human would kill it on sight.

  And besides, whispered his traitor voice, she would have cut him open for the secret of c-transition.

  Clutching the angel close, trailed by a blaze of defensive nano, Golliwog headed for the mass hauler. From there he could make a hop to Jenny’s Little Pearl.

  He’d already made his hop away from being human.

  Golliwog wept.

  ‡

  He was almost five minutes into his ten-minute reserve when he made Pearl’s main airlock, the angel once more lashed to his left shoulder. Golliwog could go a long time without breathing, but his skin still respired, and even he needed his next breath. Maybe he had a ten minute margin once his oxygen ran flat. Sitting in all that carbon dioxide wasn’t going to do him much good.

  Golliwog studied the access panel. Locked and dark. No wonder his benefactors had slipped him the codelock key.

  If he guessed wrong about which ship it was for, he wouldn’t have very much time for regrets.

  Golliwog slipped the codelock key from the utility bag. The bag itself wasn’t vacuum-rated, and the fibers were brittle and crumbling. Much like his life. Golliwog felt a shudder run through his chest, painful against his distressed ribs.

  The codelock key slotted into the data port on the access panel. Status lights cycled and the lock opened obediently.

  No passwords, no overrides. Maybe he’d live.

  He towed the angel into the lock, the two of them crowded – this was a small boarding lock, deliberately undersized to discourage rude strangers in combat armor, he imagined. The outer hatch shut and the chamber began to pressurize. As soon as the ambient air became thick enough for him to hear the hissing of the valves, Golliwog stripped the baggie helmet free.

  He promptly gagged, clenching his mouth against the bile that threatened to come up. The stench in the air was unbelievable.

  What the hell had happened here?

  There was no helping it. He was pretty sure he’d seen the angel breathing vacuum, right before they fought, but in its current state it wasn’t likely to be nearly so tough. It needed air, too. He mumbled an apology and popped the seals on the angel’s life bubble.

  Blood red eyes blinked at him from within. It was curled like a fried eel, tight and small for something so freakishly tall. The angel stared, but did not move.

  “Why’d you try to kill us?” Golliwog asked.

  Something tickled his carrier, briefly, that same feeling as before, but that was all. The angel blinked once, then continued to stare.

  “I think you’re dying, friend.” Golliwog stared back a moment longer. “I’m sorry.”

  He cycled the inner hatch. The stink was worse. As he stepped through, something swept him off his feet with a ear-rending screech, dumping him into too much swampy, foetid water.

  On a spaceship!? was Golliwog’s thought as a great weight pressed against his damaged ribs and huge set of stinking jaws closed on his face.
>
  ‡

  He wasn’t unconscious for more than a few seconds, he knew that already. But something was very wrong with his eyes. Golliwog tried to blink, couldn’t make it happen. There was a terrible thrashing squeal nearby, then a crack which made the deckplates vibrate beneath his back. Something sloshed through the stench, picked him up gently, and sloshed more, carrying him along.

  A few moments later a hatch hissed. The angel – it had to be the angel, Golliwog told himself – carried him through and laid him in a chair.

  “My eyes,” Golliwog tried to say, and discovered his lips were not working well either.

  There were various clicking noises, and the hum of systems coming to life. Something touched his shoulder, and the carrier tingled in his head again. Nano? The angel?

  Golliwog concentrated, trying to find sense in the patterns. It was like getting a new implant from the surgeons, the nerves had to learn their way into the interface. He knew that his brain had never been allowed to canalize in the classic juvenile developmental sense – he’d always been able to grow new connections, route around damage or hardened processes.

  This had been tickling him for a while.

  “Hey...” he mumbled softly.

  Now, whispered a voice almost like his traitor thoughts. But it was from outside.

  Golliwog relaxed his own vocal cords and just thought about talking. Now. Sure.

  Now.

  Yes, he thought. Now. Go. Follow them. It’s what you want, right?

  Now. But this time, a different tone.

  He heard the angel moving around the bridge, felt a shift in the vibrations as Jenny’s Little Pearl brought her engines online. It all made sense. Dmitri Hinton would follow Pearl. So would the priest’s ship, whenever it showed.

  They would all come to him.

  Smiling, Golliwog slept.

  ‡

  Albrecht: Halfsummer Solar Space, The Necklace, In transit

  “You’re both nuts,” he said. “Delusional bastards. Xenics this, Black Flag that. Everything’s a plot to you people!”

  “Does your recent experience suggest otherwise?” Menard asked.

  The priest’s calm only annoyed Albrecht further, but the man had a point. “I don’t know,” he said. Control, control. “Some of this is way too convenient. I happen to find the codelock key, you happen to show up knowing about this McNally and his rocks.”

  “Things happen,” said Dillon. “We have about twenty-two hours, by the way. Hoxha is very close to crossing over the plane of the ecliptic, so it is not a difficult trip. You may wish to sleep at some point.”

  “Thanks.” Albrecht stared outward at the quiet stars. He couldn’t escape properly, he couldn’t even get killed properly. Most people drank themselves to death, or got fatally mugged in some dockside corridor. Not him. He had to get involved in revolutions. Or maybe counterrevolutions. “Is someone pushing our buttons?”

  “Anything is possible with xenics,” said Menard. “If they’re here, they’ve evaded official contact all the centuries of the human experience in space.” He added in a satisfied voice: “Until now.”

  A thought flashed through Albrecht’s mind. “Proxies.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Proxies.” It made a weird kind of sense. “Every loudmouth in a spaceport bar thinks the Black Flag is a Naval proxy. Provocations to justify the budgets.” Dillon snorted loudly but said nothing to this. Albrecht continued, “What if the xenics are using proxies? What if they have their own disagreements? One set knows where Hoxha is, doesn’t want another set of xenics to have her. Maybe the way to keep her out of their hands is to let the ship become public knowledge once more. Navy would be on that like stink on a recycling tank. So they tip and nudge various of us to find this thing.”

  “You’re in the wrong line of work, my son,” said Menard.

  Albrecht couldn’t decide whether to laugh or shriek at that. “No, I was in the right line of work. Far away from all that wheels-within-wheels crap. Now I’m in the wrong line of work.”

  “Xenics are real enough,” said Dillon, finally re-entering the conversation. “People just don’t talk about them. Like a lot of things out here in the Deep Dark. World looks different down a gravity well than it does out here.”

  “So you seem to have said.” Menard’s tone was polite, but tense with barely-masked fascination. “But you say xenics are real, as in with evidence? We’ve been searching for centuries.”

  “From the bottom of your well, Chor Episcopos. Atmospheres bend light. They also bend information. Too much insulation from reality. We won’t be a true spacefaring species ‘til our masters are born, live and die in space. That’s what the xenics are waiting for.”

  “Tell me, Ser Dillon,” Menard asked quietly. “Have you ever spoken to a xenic?”

  “Yes,” said Dillon slowly. “And so have you.”

  “Delusional.” Albrecht laughed. “It’s all insurance fraud and rebel scams.”

  Dillon laughed too, his rumble rolling right over Albrecht. “Can be both at the same time. Xenics need money too.”

  Menard sighed. “If only it were true.”

  ‡

  Some hours later, Dillon woke Albrecht by the simple expedient of shouting his name until sleep sped away. “You’re stacking up a message queue, Ser Albrecht,” the pilot said once Albrecht had blinked away enough sleep to respond.

  “From who?”

  “From whom. As it happens, inbound traffic from INS Dmitri Hinton, INRS Novy Petrograd and PSS St. Gaatha. Oh, and CRS Swamp Rat.”

  Even through the clearing muddle of sleep in his head, Albrecht could spot a new player. “Who the hell is that?”

  “Fast charter from Halfsummer. Somebody named Gorova on board.”

  “Oh, joy. They can fight over who gets to arrest my dead body.”

  “You want to read any of that?”

  “Do they say anything besides, ‘Stop or I’ll shoot’?”

  Dillon snorted once more. “Not really. Shorty’s Surprise has informed Hinton that some of their crew committed murder and public endangerment while under the parole of St. Gaatha’s crew. The Chor Episcopos, they mean.” Albrecht glanced at Menard ,who was snoring. “Hinton has blamed you, as has St. Gaatha. It goes on like that for a while.”

  “Whoever wanted everything to be public has certainly gotten their wish,” Albrecht said. It did make him smile. “Admiralty and the Prime See will be fighting this out for years to come.”

  “We’ve got another problem.”

  “Oh, sure, just like a shuttle, always room for one more. What’s that?”

  “Your message queue is being forwarded from Jenny’s Little Pearl. Which is right now on the fastest intercept of all our little friends. Pearl is forwarding, but they’re not actually talking. I don’t know who’s flying her.”

  A plot popped up on Albrecht’s panel, shunted over from Dillon’s command console. The probability curves were much cruder than what Pearl had been able to give him, but Dillon was probably working with a lot less data and certainly working with less sophisticated systems.

  Nonetheless, it was a wonder to behold. Hinton, Petrograd and St. Gaatha were all closing on Pearl. Albrecht’s recent boat was in turn closing on their rock hopper, with Swamp Rat coming up on the inside, much like the dark horse in a yacht race. Pearl was going to overhaul their rock hopper before they got to Hoxha, or possibly beat them directly to Hoxha, by a number of hours if she made the least-time effort – her course was still open to both outcomes.

  “Nice,” said Albrecht. All his air leaks were coming home for a patch. Then a question occurred to him. “How did Menard get here ahead of St. Gaatha?”

  “Rode a message torpedo in ahead of his ship, essentially. Along with his angel.”

  “Angel? What angel? What the hell is an angel?”

  “Hot shit Church security. The thing that we let beat the crap out of the Naval Oversight team hunting you. Including a hot-wired bion
e that I wouldn’t care to tangle with. You owe the good Chor Episcopos over there a big one. Or maybe his angel.”

  Albrecht glanced at the sleeping Menard. The priest didn’t look like a killer. Or even a killer’s handler. He was a slightly fussy, overfocused Church bureaucrat who seemed to hear God talking in his head. “Why? Why was the angel keeping them away from me?”

  “I wish we knew,” said Dillon.

  “I just don’t want to go down hard over this.”

  “Too late, Ser Albrecht. Too late for all of us, I fear.”

  Albrecht wondered precisely who ‘us’ was. He hoped like hell it didn’t include the inhabitants of Shorty’s Surprise. They deserved better than his mistakes.

  ‡

  Golliwog: Halfsummer Solar Space, Orbit of NSS Enver Hoxha

  Kill, said the angel in his head.

  “Me?” asked Golliwog. His voice seemed to be working, a little bit, though his face was a mask of stiff, tight pain. Nothing wrong with his nose. Pearl still smelled like wrong end of six kilometers of swampland.

  Them.

  Them...Albrecht...Menard...the civilians back at Shorty’s Surprise. There were so many thems. “Why?”

  ...

  He could actually feel the blank surprise. As if he’d asked, why is there vacuum outside the hull? “Why kill them?”

  ...

  “Is your priest coming?”

  Yes.

  “Ask him for permission.”

  ...

  Golliwog slipped away for a while.

  ‡

  The next time he knew where he was, the tone of the ship had changed. Had it been changed the last time? “Are we here?” he asked.

  Yes.

  “Where you want to kill?”

  Yes.

  Made thing, he thought. “You can choose not to kill, you know. You can choose. You are better than whoever made you.”

  ...

  “Where is here?” He struggled for the name. That itself frightened Golliwog deeply. His memory was by definition perfect. Was this what it meant to be human? To forget? “Hoxha,” he finally said. “What Yee and Spinks were looking for.”

  Them.

  “Them who?”