Death of a Starship Read online

  He paused before a gnarled man in a grubby dhoti sitting on a tarp cut from solar sail fabric. Spread out before the old man were an array of oddly-shaped tools and parts, most of them with that dull luster of space-rated equipment.

  Oh ho, thought Albrecht.

  He squatted opposite the old man. Without making eye contact, he scanned the merchandise. These had come from a c-drive ship, Albrecht was certain. There was no mistaking the Higgs sniffer, used for fault tracing in a c-drive secondary transform block. Some of the mechanical tools had wider applications, to be sure – that mil-spec valve corer was out of an environmental maintenance kit.

  He picked up a codelock key, mostly from sheer curiosity.

  “Three creds,” the old man said with a heavy Alfazhi accent.

  “Worthless,” Albrecht responded automatically. In point of fact, a codelock key was worthless only off its programmed ship. He turned the device over in his hand. Also mil-spec, Naval issue. Though it had the oddly-squared look of some previous generation of tech. Most Naval stuff you saw today was streamlined, as if even their coffee makers had to survive re-entry.

  Someone had punched out the smartspot on the inventory tag, then ground the ship’s name off with a file, though a keel number was still mostly visible. A lot of trouble for a thief to go to, patiently whittling at the metal of something which was essentially three hundred grams of junk. “See,” he said, “no ship for it.”

  The old man grinned and waved his hand. “You buy else more, I give you. Nice paperweight for busy man, ah?”

  Albrecht needed a paperweight about as much as he needed a waterlung, but he smiled anyway. He sorted through the rest of the gear. Albrecht knew to the decicredit what the portside pawnshops paid for usable ship’s tools. He couldn’t take the valve corer – pawning mil-spec was illegal. Some of the other stuff was fine. The inertial torsion wrenches were generic, no inventory tags. The Higgs sniffer would be nice, if it worked, but it was tagged. Too easy to trace.

  He touched the three wrenches and a pair of ion coupling spacers. “Five credits all.” They’d be worth fifteen, two, maybe fifteen, five over at Honest Al-Qadi’s. If he could clear five on the deal, that was tonight’s mattress fee paid.

  “Twelve,” the old man said through another smile.

  He only had ten on him to start with...his day’s seed money, tugged from a diminishing stash carefully hidden away in a portside wall. Albrecht held out, and they settled at eight, five. Taking his seed money back out, that left him mattress money and enough to buy a bowl and twenty minutes of seating in front of the stewpot at the Crewman’s Rest that afternoon.

  Eel stew. Every day’s just another day, he told himself, walking away in his perpetual slump.

  “Hey, sailor!” shouted the old man.

  Albrecht turned and to his surprise caught the code key out of the air.

  “For your papers, ah!” The old bastard laughed. Albrecht just nodded, then continued walking.

  ‡

  Menard: Nouvelle Avignon, Prime See

  Conference room Yellow-2 hosted a colloquium of Xenic Bureau division heads. Nothing was more boring than a division executive meeting as far as Menard was concerned. At least, not usually. They were in the dark, a big virteo screen running a rapid series of graphics. It smelled like a meeting, too many people with onions for lunch and the faint sweat of boredom.

  Oh God, Menard prayed, grant me the strength to suffer whatever this is that Your servant and my master has put me up to. He was immediately ashamed at praying for such trivia, but not ashamed enough to express contrition.

  Sister Pelias was talking. She was the lone woman in the entire Bureau, division head of Systems Trend Analysis, which mostly did pattern matching on equity market trades and communications routing. Chor Episcopos Menard privately thought she was a compelling argument against the sheer idiocy of barring women from the hierarchy. It wasn’t his job to comment on that.

  “Chor Episcopos Menard,” she said, her light pen bobbing as she nodded at him. “I was just discussing the Kenilworth-Marsden hypothesis. If one is willing to take K-M analyses at face value, they would indicate a strong possibility of xenic influence in the Front Royal sector. This is based on the, well, bending, of comm routing primarily. We’ve also seen some out-of-norm fluctuation in the futures markets traded in Front Royal and several neighboring sectors, again mapping into K-M.

  “Now, in and of itself, these aren’t terribly significant. I can pull positive K-M events out of any corner of the empire within any annualized data set. But...” She paused to switch viewing modes on the display. “If we track public health reporting across Front Royal, we can correlate incidents of schizophrenia, paranoia and...well...please excuse me Bishop, religious mania. This is, of course, the classic Whitley hypothesis. Much like K-M curves, I can build a Whitley curve in any number of places.”

  The images on the virteo flickered again, the two curves overlaying with a potentially meaningful degree of fidelity. Menard found himself interested despite his skepticism about the meeting.

  Sister Pelias continued. “What is significant is how these two map together. We’re seeing at least five other indicators trending on similar curves. In other words, gentlemen, the ghosts we’ve been tracking in our machines all these years are lining up. I can’t tell you what it means. Quite probably it signifies nothing whatsoever, but we must attend to the possibility.”

  Bishop Russe cleared his throat. “Thank you, Sister Pelias.” His dry tones managed to make her name into something insulting. “Chor Episcopos Menard has finally arranged to join us.” Jonah winced at that. “Perhaps Father Bainbridge would care to enlighten the Very Reverend Jonah as to what his Signals Analysis team has uncovered.”

  It went on for several hours like that, elusive clues and strange possibilities which almost made sense when you tried to match them up. Nothing as strong as Sister Pelias’ data, tenuous as even that was. Nonetheless, Menard was itching to talk privately to her, while the Bishop continued to drag them through the whole formal protocol of the meeting. That suggested something important was up, something that Russe wanted to have his backside covered for in the Bureau’s records. This whole lights-and-orbit show was for the future report-reading benefit of someone higher up in the Grand Ekumenical Security Directorate.

  When the meeting finally broke up, Menard managed to duck Russe and follow Sister Pelias out into the hallway. “Magda,” he said, catching up to her.

  “Jonah,” she said. “Nice to see you again.”

  Sister Pelias was a slim woman worn through by time. Menard had never seen her without her wimple, so he had no idea about her hair, but her eyebrows were a pale gold shot with silver. She wore no tattoo at all, unusual for someone with any seniority in the hierarchy. But then, a woman anywhere in the hierarchy outside the female orders was unusual.

  “What do you really think,” he asked as they walked along, air dampers clicking and thumping above them, pumping out a vaguely moldy breeze. “About your section’s findings?”

  “I think I could correlate the price of eggs in the local marketplace with the surface temperatures on Jojoba if I wished to. Do these data sets mean anything?” She shrugged, a sort of odd movement as she walked. “I don’t know. It is our job to look for significance, and so we see significance. Whether what we discover corresponds to reality, well, that is someone else’s problem.”

  “My problem, I’m afraid,” said Menard.

  “Well, yes. Pareidolia is wired deep into human perception. We see what we want to see, everywhere we look.” She walked for a moment in silence, her low heels sliding against the floor. “Jonah...”

  This was what he was waiting for. She knew something. “Whatever it is,” he said softly, “I would very much like to hear it.”

  “I’m...you know I’m not an Externalist.”

  “Right.” Menard found Externalism laughingly improbable. It was wish fulfillment from people who looked beyond the margi
ns of the Empire for something better. As if xenics haunted human space in untraceable ships, ever on the verge of revealing miracles and wonders if only poor man proved himself worthy. A poor substitute for God’s hand in creation. Unfortunately, about a third of Bishop Russe’s division heads were Externalists. Including, perhaps, Russe himself.

  “Even so, something’s up. Something’s moving out there.”

  “By the pricking of your thumbs?”

  She gave him a sharp-eyed look. “By the pricking of my data, more like it. But no, if you must know, by the pricking of Bishop Russe’s thumbs. I’m reasoning from effect, not cause, in this case. There’s too much interest flowing down from the upper reaches of the Security Directorate. For years, we’ve been a joke, a line item in the budget. The rest of the Church sees this Bureau as a collection of nutcases serving as some kind of low-ball insurance policy against any of this being real. The last couple of months you’ve been gone, we’ve become, well...important.”

  “What do you believe, Sister?” Menard trusted this woman’s intuition.

  “I don’t often admit to what I’m about to say, but I believe you need to consider it. If I have a position, I suppose you’d say I was an Internalist. It doesn’t affect my work, I have come to that position from a perspective of intellectual consistency more than anything. Nonetheless, here I am, wondering if that thought exercise of mine has the ring of truth somewhere inside it.”

  That was a fascinating position for someone as hard-headed as Sister Pelias. “Internalism is difficult to demonstrate logically. How do you explain the supposed presence of xenics in the halls of government and commerce?”

  “No explanation. Insufficient data, and too much speculation in the literature.”

  “I...don’t take either position, Sister. As you probably know.” Menard’s specialty was physical evidence of xenic presence. Of which there was remarkably little, and none of that incontrovertible. In practice, that meant he spent a lot of time looking at oddly-shaped asteroids or wandering through overgrown jungle sites. He’d made a sideline in profiling xenic methods and motives. It was something to do during the long periods of travel. “But you believe something’s up.”

  “I believe something’s up.”

  After all the centuries, was it possible? Was the human race finally about to meet someone else? Angels might well have once walked the earth, in Biblical times, but Homo sapiens had been alone in space since Gagarin first went to Mars.

  The thought chilled Menard’s bones, a mixture of thrill and fear. Maybe it was real. He thanked God that this possibility had come in his lifetime, and prayed that he might have a role.

  ‡

  Bishop Russe walked into Menard’s office as Menard was checking the timestamps and action receipts on his filings. Menard had sent his mission report in from system transit, as soon as the Church courier he’d hitched a ride with had dropped in from c-space to decelerate toward Nouvelle Avignon.

  “What did you find on Ancira?” Russe asked.

  Menard sighed. Russe had already receipt-and-acknowledged the reports. “What do I ever find? Enormous stone blocks deep in a jungle more green than death, snakes thicker than your waist. Proof? If I wanted to wish hard enough, I could have convinced myself they’d been carved by xenics.”

  Russe laughed. “We might be on to a change.”

  I’ll bet, thought Menard. I was in the same meeting you were in. “Your Grace?”

  A thin, spidery arm slid across Menard’s shoulders. “This could make all our reputations. All the way into the Grand Basilica. If we uncover evidence of a threat to the Empire, a threat to the Church, a threat to our very souls, if we expose the serpents that walk freely among us already...we will be heroes, Jonah. Saints someday, perhaps.”

  Menard didn’t particularly want to be a saint. And the Bishop wasn’t inspiring his confidence. But this was his moment, a potential tipping point in history. Perhaps God had set Russe’s obsessions into motion as a sign to Menard. Though he hated the politics of office and hierarchy, he tried to play the games when they needed to be played. He had to secure leave to pursue this. “Indeed, sir?”

  “Think, Chor Episcopos. Our own people say the data indicates it’s happening in the Front Royal sector. Halfsummer seems likely. The xenics are gathering at Halfsummer, looking for something. Will you go there and lend your expertise?”

  Menard almost shivered once more from the chill in his bones. He could feel the prickle of inspiration. “It would be an honor, Your Grace. A calling, perhaps.”

  Russe smiled. “I knew you could be counted on, Jonah. Go there and find me a xenic.”

  “Oh, believe me, I shall.” With God as my witness. Menard knew he suffered from the sin of pride, but sometimes pride was necessary to drive a man to new heights.

  ‡

  Golliwog: Powell Station, Leukine Solar Space

  Golliwog was strapped in on his back in the question chair in one of the exam rooms, at the bottom of a step-sided funnel. This resulted in his looking up into a rounded, widening space as the examiners leaned over their individual podiums and looked down upon him. A bank of lights at the far end of the room glared too-brightly, while the metal and carbonmesh tiers rising above him looked like something on the verge of collapsing downward.

  All in all, a masterpiece of psychological architecture. The view was profoundly disconcerting. As was the persistent rumor that particularly unlucky examinees were dropped out of the bottom of the funnel and into somewhere terminally unpleasant deep within the convoluted bowels of Powell Station.

  He looked up at Froggie, Admiral Penrose and Dr. Yee. Old Anatid wasn’t in the room, which worried Golliwog. Old Anatid was the only one who would have approved of his solution. Froggie he trusted, Admiral Penrose was just doing her job, and Dr. Yee was...Dr. Yee. To be avoided whenever possible.

  But by vacuum, he’d succeeded. Golliwog smiled. For some reason, the three above him shifted.

  “Golliwog,” said Froggie in his sternest mentor voice. The teacher was the oldest human Golliwog had ever met, but also one of the strongest. “We are here to score your exercise performance. That score, and the opinions of this Examining Board, will weigh into your next duty detail.”

  Golliwog’s smile slipped away at that statement. Training, training, training. He had been training, yes he had, since he could remember. Once there had been so many of him he couldn’t count them all. Then there were fewer, and fewer. He’d first killed himself at the age of seven. Now, well, there was only one of him left. Though Golliwog knew with a cold, sometimes comforting certainty, that there were other classes of biones in Powell Station going through the surgeries, the training, the bone-grinding pain – other clutches of same-faced killers committing serial murder-suicide. Others unlike him, striving to reach...something.

  “I am ready, sir and ma’ams.”

  Froggie glanced at Admiral Penrose. The Admiral, who was an apparently unremarkable woman except for her rank, nodded. “GLW 317,” she said slowly, “in the matter of the recent exercise, this Board deems that you have passed by right of survival.” She leaned a little further over. “This is known informally as the last man standing clause. While some of us may not endorse your methods, the results make their own case.” She glanced briefly back at Froggie. “Speaking personally, I found your conduct of the exercise refreshing and even somewhat original. It is the judgment of this Board that you are to be granted a passing grade, without censure or demerit.”

  Golliwog had never doubted that he had passed. The fact that he was still breathing was proof of that. But they could have bounced him back down the training cycle.

  Dr. Yee took up a paper in her hand. She was a tiny woman, skin almost space-black, with huge round eyes. She was also one of the few people who frightened Golliwog. “It is further the recommendation of this Board that you be released to an operational mission. Your assignment will be on a brevet basis, working under a senior agent of the Office of Nav
al Oversight. That agent will have complete authority over you as an asset, including the right to order your termination. Do you accept this assignment?”

  An assignment. To be free of training after almost two decades. In spite of himself, Golliwog smiled once more. He would finally be out of Powell Station. “Yes, ma’am. I accept.”

  “You will report to me at 06:00 hours tomorrow. You are free to go.”

  Froggie shook his head.

  The restraints unsnapped. The Examining Board filed out of an exit on their tier. Golliwog sat alone at the bottom of the room, which seemed filled with ghosts and echoes. All of him, at all different ages. He’d reached something they’d all been straining for since before memory began.

  He just wasn’t sure what it was.

  No proctors came for him. After a while, Golliwog pulled himself up out of the chair and stood on the rim of the lowest level of the exam room.

  Free to go where, Golliwog wondered. He’d never been free to do anything.

  ‡

  Golliwog sat in a study carrel in the research library. The room was high-ceilinged, three decks, one of the few decorative spaces he’d ever seen. Most compartments on Powell Station were functional. Sometimes that function was behind the eyes of the beholder. He thought that might be the case here, but Golliwog didn’t have many semiotic associations for the idea of “library.” It was just a quiet place, trimmed with wood pillars and long falls of fabric, featuring many terminals and a few hardbooks. And sometimes people who helped you learn to ask better questions of the systems.

  He wasn’t here studying anything, he just didn’t know where else to go. His training cadre’s suite was shut down for cleaning, so he’d come here. He was looking at a randomly-selected virteo about the nut trade on Fentress-IIb when Old Anatid found him.

  Golliwog suspected that Anatid was younger than Froggie, but the mentor had been through something somewhere that had fried a lot of his systems, both human-norm biological and bione enhanced. The mentor’s skin was puckered with worm-track scars, and he sometimes smelled of ozone. All through Golliwog’s life, Old Anatid had disappeared for a few days every month or so for deep medical treatment. The Navy wouldn’t waste this much effort on a bione if he wasn’t exceptionally valuable, but Old Anatid had a way with the Golliwogs of Powell Station.