Death of a Starship Read online

  Golliwog wasn’t certain what else went on at Powell Station, but the training of the bione classes clearly consumed a large amount of attention, resources and energy. Old Anatid was part of that.

  “It’s always a test, boy,” said Old Anatid, dragging a chair from a nearby carrel.

  Golliwog shut off the virteo. “I know.”

  “What would you do cut off from support on a public station? Or in a dirtside city?”

  Golliwog smiled. “Is that a training question?”

  “No.” Anatid waved vaguely. “No more than everything else is in this life. They could have given you a bunk assignment and a meal chitty. Everyone else on station has one. They’re letting you dangle, boy.”

  “And so I dangle, sir.”

  Old Anatid watched him for a while. Golliwog stared back – he was quite good at that. It wasn’t the cold-eyed assessment of Dr. Yee, or a surgeon about to replace his long bones. There was something more like fondness, even kinship in that look.

  “You’ll be briefed...eventually,” Anatid finally said. “But if it were me going out right now, I might take some interest in the xenic question.”

  Golliwog’s training had included an excellent education. He could speak six languages, service a c-drive or a gravimetric trap generator, and synthesize poisons from over two hundred Terran-standard plants. He wasn’t used to being completely uninformed about something. “The xenic question, sir?”

  “You’re in a library. Use it. Just know there’s been some quiet whispers of concern lately, in certain very high offices.” Old Anatid stood up, patted Golliwog on the head and left.

  ‡

  patron17: tell me about xenics

  Library: Would you like a definition?

  patron17: yes

  Library: Xenic, n. and adj., One of or pertaining to nonhuman intelligences rumored to be acting on human affairs and conducting espionage and sabotage within Imperial space.

  patron17: are they real

  Library: The xenic influence has never been verified. Existence of xenics has never been conclusively demonstrated.

  patron17: why do people believe

  Library: Many reasons. These reasons include cultural paranoia, caution in the face of a hostile environment, and the apparent human need for an external enemy. There are also chains of circumstantial evidence which can be accounted for by assuming xenic influence.

  patron17: what is the xenic question

  Library: In its simplest form, the xenic question asks whether xenic intelligences exist.

  patron17: tell me about the more complicated forms of the xenic question

  Library: A librarian will assist you shortly. Please remain where you are.

  ‡

  Albrecht: Halfsummer, Gryphon Landing

  Men were stacked in the godown like inventory, spread out on shelving that ran six layers high, originally configured for something about half a meter tall and slightly longer than the average male human being. Albrecht had scored an upper bunk, not trapped beneath four or five layers of sweating, snoring, muttering indigents, with the odd bed wetter thrown in for variety. Five credits was a lot for a mattress fee, but it bought him a day cycle’s worth of residency permit. Gryphon Landing wasn’t kind to the truly homeless.

  At least he knew something about ship parts and tools. It was living, more or less. Albrecht had no idea how many of the mass of torpid men around him scored their five creds a day. From the dreamtime moaning that went on all night, he didn’t want to know.

  It was hot, of course. Everything was hot on Halfsummer. And the godown had no climate control, just vent fans high up in the rafters among the flittermice and the feral cats. The lucky ones around him snored their way through the eye-watering fug, but a lot of nights, like this one, Albrecht found the stench overwhelming. Every time he opened his mouth to breathe, he felt like he was drowning in sweat, spit, blood, jizz.

  At least he had air above him. If the top bunks were purgatory, the lower bunks were hell. All of them were here for their sins, of course. Planetary citizens had other places to go. Women had other places to go. His neighbors were men who’d tumbled down the gravity well one too many times, without a ticket back up, without the right money or certifications or skills or state of sobriety to climb Jacob’s ladder back to the spare, environmentally-conditioned heaven of a berth on a ship heading outsystem.

  He wasn’t like them, Albrecht told himself. He was a better man, a smarter man, just down on his luck. What kept him awake, even more than the salty, sweaty reek that enveloped him like a mother’s love, was the thought that everyone in this place believed the same thing about himself.

  ‡

  Morning found Albrecht on the street again, all his worldly goods in a thigh pack strapped to the leg of his shipsuit like always. The stupid codelock key hadn’t fit, so he was carrying it around in his hand. It had occurred to him to wonder if the Public Safety patrols might interpret it as weapon, sort of a fistpack or sap.

  He decided he didn’t care. It was a bright, sunny day, with those strange, flat Halfsummer clouds in the sky. Gryphon Landing was as low and crumpled as ever, skyline marred by half-built buildings marooned in the last equity crash, lined with peculiar puffy-leaved trees that smelt like old tea bags.

  Something rumbled overhead, staggering through the peak overpressure point of the local speed of sound. Albrecht didn’t bother to look up anymore – nothing flew that wanted his sorry butt on board. Instead he turned the codelock key over in his hand.

  Why would someone file off the ship name but not the keel number? That was fairly pointless. Anyone with nöosphere access could research the keel easily enough.

  What the hell, he thought. It was free day at the library. He could go research the keel number himself. Maybe this had been on a ship he’d built a model of once. The damned steward had dropped his models in the mass converter on the Princess Janivera, along with everything else Albrecht couldn’t carry away in two hands. At any rate, that gave him something to do in the hours before the market got into full swing once more. Spacers weren’t early morning shoppers, and neither were the sort of people who catered to them.

  ‡

  An hour later he was only slightly better informed, but somewhat more curious. Albrecht sat on a park bench in front of the library complex, under some local tree sporting fat leaves like green hands with too many fingers. It made for a complex, mottled shade, which he rather enjoyed, despite the stale incense odor.

  Well-groomed people strolled by in the pale pastel kilts and blouses which were the local fashion for those with money to shop. None of them looked at Albrecht, which was fine with him. He had time to think and relax a little in the shade before heading down to the reeking chaos of the market to make his day’s nut.

  Strangely, the keel number had traced to a Coatimundi-class fast freighter. Civilian hull type, which argued that the codelock key had been repurposed from its original Naval application. Odd, but not unheard of, especially by people who ran fast and loose at the fringes of the world of certified, inspected, insured commerce.

  That class used the old Group 7 c-drives, with the cockeyed Lyne arms that never lasted more than twenty percent of their rated duty cycle without an overhaul – or worse. The keel his codelock key had come off of was originally commissioned as the Jenny’s Diamond Bright out of Panshin, a system in the Karazov sector almost two hundred lights rimward, halfway across the Empire. Another curious aspect of this business was that Jenny was reported lost about twenty baseline years past, in transit between Velox and 4a-Rho Palatine. Also in the Karazov sector. He wasn’t up to accurately converting Imperial baseline to local sidereal in his head, but Albrecht figured that couldn’t be more than forty years ago local. Thirty or forty years later, an essentially undamaged codelock key shows up in a market two hundred lightyears distant from the ship’s last port.

  He turned it over in his hand. This key didn’t look like it had survived a disaster.

>   Albrecht knew insurance fraud when it bit him in the ankle. Not that it was his business. No one in authority on Halfsummer cared what he had to say about anything anyway. He just found himself wondering how it all worked. Intellectual curiosity was one of his few remaining luxuries.

  That was when two men in the dark, bulging kilts and leather coats of Public Safety stopped in front of his bench.

  “Been using the library, friend?” asked one of them. He looks like the smart one, thought Albrecht – his eyes were more than a thumb’s width apart. But in Albrecht’s experience, no one who used the term “friend” that way had ever actually acted like they meant what they said.

  “Yes sir.” Albrecht smiled his dimmest smile. “Checking my mail.”

  “You get mail, bunny boy?” That was the piggy-eyed one. “From who?”

  Albrecht figured he was in for a bad cop-bad cop routine. It seemed a bit much for just sitting on a park bench. “Mail from my copious friends and admirers, okay? Look, I got an appointment. Is there anything else I can do to help you gentlemen?”

  “Gentlemen, he says.” The smart one glanced at piggy. “Yeah. Come on over to the Public Safety Offices with us. Watch commander wants a word with you.”

  “Am I under arrest?” It was stupid, he knew, but this was broad daylight in the nice part of town. They weren’t likely to beat him senseless in front of the consuming classes strolling the sidewalks.

  Piggy snorted. “Not yet.”

  “Then I think I’ll be going.” He stood up, smiled, and tried to shoulder his way between the two cops. That lasted about two paces, then Albrecht was on the ground with a shock stick humming in his ear.

  “So kind of you to agree to assist us in our investigations,” said piggy, leaning over into Albrecht’s limited and pain-hazed line of sight. Someone’s pastel boots stepped over his outstretched arm without pausing.

  ‡

  Golliwog: Powell Station, Leukine Solar Space

  Golliwog arrived at Dr. Yee’s office door at 05:54 hours. It had been an interesting night, or at least informative. He’d left the library a little too quickly, but eventually discovered the ident chip in his arm entitled him to meals at the unrestricted dining halls scattered throughout Powell Station.

  It was the first time he’d moved unescorted through the public areas of the station. “Public” was a relative term, of course. Powell Station was an Imperial Navy base. Deep Navy, no cooperation with the Imperial Guards or civilian contractors here. Well, except perhaps for Froggie and Old Anatid. Their status had never been clear to him.

  Even among uniformed Naval personnel, Golliwog still stood out. He was about two meters, fifteen cents tall, with that certain bulk about him that came from hormone treatments, muscle grafts, and a hideous investment in physical training. But Golliwog could tell from the way other people carried themselves, the way they walked and moved and how their arms swung, that he could have torn any of them limb from limb – even the hard men and women in the dirtside fatigues with the black-on-blue decorations sewn above their pockets. And most of the people he passed clearly saw the same thing. Golliwog moved in a current of muttering silence, always a few decimeters more space around him than the people he passed among gave each other.

  He decided he liked the effect.

  Now he was in front of Dr. Yee’s office, counting the passers-by who turned into the corridor, saw him standing there, and remembered sudden business elsewhere that didn’t take them too close to him. He was up to seven when the hatch said, “Come in, please,” and slid back.

  Dr. Yee had never been one of his surgeons. Golliwog’s relationship with them had been clear. He was meat, they were talent. He had only ever talked to them to respond to assessments or answer factual questions. “Does this hurt?” hadn’t generally been one of those questions.

  No, Dr. Yee was – had been? – his cognitive template engineer. She had come and gone through the last eight years of his training, loading routines into his internal systems, testing his effectiveness, tuning his reflexes and pain tolerance.

  Golliwog didn’t hate or love very much in his life, but Dr. Yee had always brought a certain enthusiasm to her stressing of his systems. Golliwog found himself wondering what last preparations she had for him now, before she signed him over to the Naval Oversight agent.

  The doctor’s office was much like Yee herself – dark and compact, with glittering, dangerous edges. He walked through a shadowed space where spider-armed machines lurked in silhouette. A hatch ahead stood open, overbright, so that Golliwog had to step from the dangerous shadows into the light of her presence.

  Shuddering, he went.

  ‡

  It was a while before she bothered to take note of Golliwog. He stood before her desk and patiently watched. Dr. Yee was wearing a uniform, rather than her usual lab coat and surgical smock. Golliwog studied her insignia. Navy, of course, cream white against her space black skin. Captain, which was a surprise to him. She’d only ever been referred to as “Doctor” within his earshot. But her branch insignia indicated intelligence, not medical.

  More interesting to Golliwog were the service decorations he’d never seen her wear before. Yee, all one meter, fifty-five cents of her, was orbit drop qualified. She also wore the tiny red skull of a Marine pathfinder. A hard woman, in more ways than he’d ever imagined, even in his bloody, miserable dealings with her. And in wearing this uniform, she wanted him to be very clear on that.

  With a sort of fascinated dread, it dawned on Golliwog that she was the senior agent of Naval Oversight who would be managing him on this mission.

  “Figured it out, did you?” She glanced up at him. “I know you can go almost seventeen minutes without breathing. Yet even with that much control, I could hear the catch when you realized who your supervisor was. You’re going to have to be better, Golliwog, if you’re going out in the field with me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Dr. Yee set down her light pen and stared him up and down. “Do you think you could kill me, Golliwog?”

  He opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. Dr. Yee didn’t waste words, nor effort. She was a trap. “I don’t know, ma’am,” he finally said.

  She simply stared him down.

  “No, ma’am.” Not yet, he added mentally.

  “Not yet, indeed,” she responded, a tiny smile quirking across her face. “Remember, Golliwog, I built you. I know what you’re thinking before you do. Someday you will surprise me, but not this day.”

  “Someday, ma’am.” Then, on impulse. “That’s a promise, ma’am.”

  She caught his gaze and held it with her own. Her eyes were pit-black, Golliwog realized. “Good.” Yee breathed the words out as if she were biting off pieces of her life. “And if you succeed in killing me, then I don’t deserve to live.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Yee made a flickering gesture with her fingers. The lighting shifted, becoming less harsh, and a station chair popped up out of the deck in front of her desk. “Sit, Golliwog. Let me tell you where we’re going and why.”

  Golliwog sat. Somehow, he realized he had just passed his true final examination.

  “Tell me,” she said in a voice that was eerily conversational. “I know you’ve studied ship types. That will be important later. But have you ever heard of a system called Halfsummer?”

  ‡

  Albrecht: Halfsummer, Gryphon Landing

  He got dragged into the watch commander’s office without being strip-searched, which amazed Albrecht. They’d taken his thigh pack, the credits in his pocket, day permit, voided crew card and the codelock key and stuffed them in a plastic bag. Albrecht still clutched the receipt chitty.

  “Micah Albrecht,” said the watch commander. It wasn’t a question. She was a big woman, heavy gravity in her genes or a hell of a lot of gym time. She didn’t look pleased to see him. Her office was eerily clean, devoid of paperwork, personal decorations, or really, much of anything but a desk and a s
ingle chair with her in it.

  So he stood where piggy and the smart guy had left him. “Ma’am.”

  She stared at him for a while, then shook her head. “People are idiots.”

  That didn’t seem to call for a response.

  “You care to explain to me, Mister Micah Albrecht, why I got a hotshot detain-and-question order from an expert legal system looking for people committing insurance fraud on interstellar shipping? With respect, friend, you don’t look like an interstellar shipping magnate to me.”

  So we are all friends here at Public Safety, Albrecht thought. At least he’d guessed right on the fraud, though he couldn’t imagine why there was a flag on that data. “I’m a c-drive engineer, ma’am. Old ship types are my hobby. Just reading up.”

  “Grounded, right? No union card, no engineer’s papers.” She grinned nastily. “You want to read up on old ship types? Buy a hardbook, read on the can. Stay out of my library and don’t waste my officers’ time.”

  He stood, breathing hard, his knees aching from the takedown. At least they hadn’t actually used the shockstick.

  She continued to stare. “Why are you still breathing my air, Micah Albrecht?”

  “I’ll just be leaving, ma’am.” He stepped backward, unwilling to turn away from her.

  “Good idea. Don’t let me see you again. Ever.”

  “No ma’am.”

  Then he was in the hall, being stared down in turn by piggy. The cop said nothing at all, just trailed Albrecht back to the front desk where his belongings were returned, then to the front doors.

  It was a long walk to the market, but Albrecht didn’t want to stay anywhere near the shade of the fat-leaved trees.

  ‡

  He almost threw the codelock key in the trash, but decided to hold off. The tool’s presence bothered him. Instead Albrecht headed to the market to find the old Alfazhi trader. The day was heating up and the crowd was thickening as he made his way into the maze of stalls and booths and small-lot auctions. Somehow he expected the old man to have vanished, but the trader was right where he had been the previous day.