Death of a Starship Read online

  “Good tool, ah?” said the trader, looking at Albrecht with a suspicious glint in his eye.

  “Yeah. Valve bleeding great.” Albrecht squatted on his heels opposite the trader, looking at today’s merchandise on the solar sail. More small tools, still the Higgs sniffer, along with a new a collection of vacuum-rated bolts, bindings and toggles. The spill of an engineering hardsuit’s utility pouch, he would wager a guess.

  Then he broke the first rule of a marketplace – he asked a stupid question. “Where do you get this stuff from?”

  The trader sat very still for a moment, staring Albrecht down. Then, with a shrug: “Here, everywhere, there. Smart man know where look. I sell you, you sell pawn, what difference?”

  “Look, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I just want to know.”

  “Why you want know if you don’t care, ah?”

  Albrecht sighed. That was a good question. But the codelock key...something was wrong here. Maybe there was more to it, some angle to his benefit. He slipped a too-precious five cred chit out of his pocket, showed it to the old man on the palm of his hand, and said the first thing that popped into his head. “I got curiosity like a monkey, ok? My old man, he died on the ship that codelock key came from. I just want to know.”

  The Alfazhi snatched the chit away. There went a night’s mattress fee, thought Albrecht. The old man grinned, looking half-crazy now. “Beggar auction.”

  “What?”

  “Dead men, ah? They drink, they die, nobody know them, nobody respect for them, bodies go for reprocessing, stuff go for beggar auction. Not for you, ah. You go now, sailor.”

  “Yeah.” He knew from nobody knowing him. “I go now. ‘Ah’ to you too.” He stood up, wincing from a sharp rush of pressure and pain. That takedown in front of the library was making itself known to him.

  “Sailor. One more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe you go down Sixth Wharf. Drink some, talk some. Maybe somebody know your daddy.”

  “Here? From Jenny D?” That seemed dreadfully unlikely. But then again, so did the codelock key, when you got right down to it.

  “We live through our fathers, my people, ah. I give you same respect.” The trader’s face closed into a scowl. “Now go.”

  ‡

  Menard: Nouvelle Avignon, in transit toward c-beacon ∂318-f

  The Chor Episcopos tried to ignore the angel in his ready room and concentrate on the line of thought which had been nagging at him since his conversation with Sister Pelias. The angel was obviously content to ignore him as it slept, after all. Menard prayed briefly to the power of the Holy Spirit for forgiveness of his unkind thoughts regarding a fellow servant of the Patriarch. Mind cleared and soul somewhat eased, he then considered his situation.

  They traveled on the Church fast courier St. Gaatha. Being a c-courier, she was a heavy beast. The ship relied on that strange trade-off of mass and acceleration that decreased transit time and energy required to make the transition to a smear of negative matter and perverse equations, resolving some few dozen lightyears distant as an allegedly identical copy of ship, cargo and crew. As a heavy beast, she sported large, luxurious cabins.

  It was obvious to Menard that his quarters were ordinarily reserved for someone much more senior than he. There was more gold filigree in here than he’d seen in most churches outside the Prime See, and the entire compartment was done over in blue silk upholstery and carpeting, with an ostentation that was just short of bizarre. He had regretfully passed over the ornamented altar with its beautiful iconostasis with Sts. Basil, Gaatha and Tikhon rendered in delicate brushstrokes. Instead, with a hasty prayer and a careful, sacred kiss, he set up his little traveling icon of St. Niphon with his tiny thurible of Athonite incense.

  As strange as his quarters were, they were not so bizarre as the sleeping angel, stretched long and thin with its boots crossed at the ankles. And though Chor Episcopos Menard had made more c-transitions than he could possibly count without resorting to his personnel file, there was still something fundamentally odd about this whole trip. Even without the blesséd angel.

  Still, he’d asked to be here. Meant to be here. Following the shiver in his bones and the pricking in Sister Pelias’ data.

  Even in the face of Menard’s interest Bishop Russe had forced the point – something had been driving His Grace, some pressure invisible to the Chor Episcopos but still real enough to affect the assignment.

  “Jonah,” Russe had said. “This is important. Terribly important. The Metropolitan of Halfsummer will extend you every possible aid and comfort, but that is a rude planet in a rude sector. People who serve on the frontiers don’t understand the logic of empire. Or the importance of our work.” He’d leaned close, breath reeking of onions. “You will take an angel. To watch over you, and deal with the xenics if you meet them.”

  An angel. Menard had never heard of one leaving the Prime See, except in the direct company of the Patriarch himself. He certainly didn’t need an angel to watch over him. To keep watch on him, more like it, in obedience to whatever hidden force Pelias had alluded to and Russe had so obviously been responding to. Politics, of course, to which Menard had too often willfully blinded himself.

  And here was the result of his deliberate ignorance of the machinations of power: the angel. It was pale as all its kind – a hairless, sexless creature, close to three meters tall, wearing red leather body armor, with a red Maltese cross tattooed on its forehead. That cross was like a declaration of war to any decent churchman, bloody and wrong. It had no scent, either, except the faintest aroma of leather from its armor. Right now it was sleeping, or least immobile, but when it was alert the solid pink eyes were perhaps the most disturbing. Like the wing of a beetle made from blood, perhaps, with no white or pupil.

  This thought came to him: We find no xenics among the stars, so we make our own to watch over us.

  The angel was an unfortunate fact of life at the moment, but it was not what had been nagging at him. Rather, his thoughts kept ranging to the Internalist position on xenics. Sister Pelias had been quite insistent about her...well, call it intuition. Menard had climbed over, around and through enough alleged xenic sites to have a thoroughly jaded view of Externalist thinking. To put it somewhat unkindly, he was quite certain that there were no boojums hiding in secret bases at the bottom of craters waiting to either save or destroy the human race.

  That being the case, were the Internalists any closer to the truth?

  He didn’t understand how they could be. Not logically.

  Whatever and wherever the xenics might be, if they truly existed – something he very much wanted to be true. Menard craved that belief – they hadn’t seen fit to announce their existence through leaving behind any conveniently ruined starports or abandoned ship hulls or anything like that. He simply didn’t believe a mature, material, starfaring civilization could have fled before the slow coreward advance of humanity without leaving traces. Consider what humans did to an E-class planet in the course of a few generations. It would take the passage of geological eras to erase the road cuts in inconvenient ridges. Millennia of abandonment to even weather them enough that a planetologist might question the rounded edges.

  If the xenics were out there in some kind of physical force and presence, they’d never spent much time on any world humanity had come to occupy or even bothered to survey carefully. He’d stake his ordination on that, though logically he couldn’t prove a negative assertion. As the old saw ran, absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.

  Of course when cornered by logic, dyed-in-the-wool Externalists simply shifted the argument. The xenics favored asteroid belts, gas giant moonlets, comets, hard vacuum habitats, whatever flights of science fictional fancy were common that year. But if any of those alternative theories about living arrangements were true, they implied, even dictated, morphologies and behaviors which would be barely recognizable to humans as life. Let alone intelligent actors capable of jiggerin
g equity markets and rerouting comm traffic through their influence – the only evidence, indirect as it was, for xenic presence.

  If xenics walked among the worlds of the Empire, the Internalist argument had to be correct, in some form or fashion. And never mind the raging debates over how they stayed hidden, whether they were human in any sense, could they take Eucharist or walk down public streets. As far as Menard was concerned, there was far too much of the human race living outside a state of grace for his peers in the hierarchy to be worried about the theoretical possibility of xenic baptism.

  The angel snorted, muscles rippling in its sleep as it interrupted Menard’s line of thinking. He overcame his discomfort and stared at it hard.

  Canine and equine muscle fibers bundled over spider web reinforced avian bone structures. A narrow brain case not much over 650 cubic centimeters – fatally microcephalic for a human – housing feline-derived neural matter. All that dreadful bioengineering warped into a roughly human shape, of course. Very dangerous creatures.

  Doctrine regarded the angels as art, of all things, given that much of bioengineering was quite literally anathema in the technical sense of that term. All the way back to its earliest roots, the Ekumen Orthodox church had an uneasy relationship with technology – God had created the heavens and the earth to be contemplated in pursuit of His glory, not remodeled in pursuit of secular riches. At the same time, a practical churchman was forced to recognize that the business of the Empire would grind to a halt without genetic localization of food crops for varying planetary conditions, not to mention the measures required to maintain sealed environments in space. Nevertheless the Church had never been at peace with wholesale genetic manipulation. Even biones with their mainline human DNA were forbidden baptism and sacraments. Yet these angels were perhaps the most extreme chimeras ever bred by man.

  But they were held to be art, like a watered steel sword or a lacquered seat of pain.

  Menard hated the things, for all that they were beloved of the Patriarch. The Church Militant had four million men under arms, thousands of hulls, the third largest fighting force in the Empire. Why the Patriarch needed angels was beyond him.

  And he wouldn’t be able to move a meter anywhere in the Halfsummer system without this thing screaming to the world that he had come from the Prime See, threatening all with judgment and bloody, final absolution.

  “Secure for c-transition,” the cabin told him in a soothing voice. It was mostly a psychological issue, Menard knew. He’d never noticed so much as water spilled in a c-transition, but body and soul rebelled when the moment came.

  The angel slept through the scream of light as they left reality for points negative.

  ‡

  St. Gaatha made Halfsummer space about fourteen elapsed days after leaving Nouvelle Avignon. The ships systems solemnly assured Menard that eighty-seven baseline days had passed – the objective, simultaneous calendar of the Empire, inasmuch as objective simultaneity could be said to apply over relativistic distances and trans-relativistic speeds.

  As far as Menard had ever been able to tell, baseline time was mostly used to mark Imperial observances, coordinate military actions, and game the financial system. None of which was particularly his concern. His own lifetimer chip told Menard and his doctors what they needed to know about his biological rate-of-aging.

  Aging or not, he was bleary-eyed and stretched. C-transition always made Menard feel as if he’d been inexpertly reassembled. Every doctor he’d ever mentioned it to had sworn the physical reactions were purely psychosomatic.

  After kneeling before his icon to give thanks to God for his deliverance once more, Menard mediated a while to bring peace to his heart. Knees aching, when he was done he found his way into St. Gaatha’s ward room. This was another large space, pillared like a seraglio, with a sumptuous galley and a vastly ornate coffee engine all brasswork and valves and shining stopcocks. Someone had thoughtfully bolted a small, plastic consumer-grade coffeemaker next to it, which gave off an entirely welcome warm, brown smell.

  Caffeine. He didn’t usually take coffee, but it would help knit his miserable joints back together.

  “Chor Episcopos,” said Lieutenant Kenneth McNally, sitting at the back of a shadowed booth. McNally was St. Gaatha’s skipper, a young man with a ruddy complexion and a strangely mobile Adam’s apple.

  “Lieutenant,” said Menard. His mouth didn’t feel quite right, either. He fumbled with a stoneware mug and the little coffeemaker, poured himself a steaming cup. The scent alone was worth the trouble, but the way the chilly handle bloomed a little warmer in his palm was comforting as well.

  “That monster’s gorgeous, and worth a small fortune,” said McNally, nodding at the huge coffee engine, “but it takes two people the better part of an hour to produce the first cup. Fun at parties, though.”

  Stirring his coffee to cool it a bit, Menard tried to work that out. “You have parties on board?”

  “Representational work. In port, Chor Episcopos.”

  “Of course.” He sat down opposite McNally. “Tell me, Lieutenant. Do you have a position on xenics?”

  McNally quirked a smile. “I try not to run into any.”

  That answer woke up his lagging synapses. “Pardon?”

  “I’m a Freewaller, sir.”

  “Jonah, please,” said Menard, with a vague wave of the hand. “Freewaller...like the battle?”

  “Yes.” McNally grinned. “Local legend, sir– Jonah. I read your dossier in the public directory. You’ve spent half your career chasing local legends. Ever been to 3-Freewall?”

  “No, can’t say I have.”

  “It’s in trailing space. Give us a couple of centuries, we’ll be a ghost world somewhere behind the Empire. But we’re historic. Still important, for now. Shiploads of tourists coming and going. So many memorials in solar and planetary orbit we have a uniformed service keeping them maintained and on station. Funny place, sir.”

  “So what’s your legend?”

  “Asteroids, sir.”

  He’d heard that one a few dozen times. Ancient ruins tumbling in eccentric orbits out in the Deep Dark. “Externalists, eh?”

  “No, not exactly. Within Freewall space, in the right bars late at night, people will tell you the xenics fly around in ships fitted out like asteroids.”

  That certainly wasn’t the stupidest theory Menard had ever heard, but it wasn’t going to win any prizes, either. “Doing anything in particular? Or just orbiting with balletic grace?”

  “Wouldn’t know, sir. I just keep an extra watch out for rocks when I’m making a c-transition run. Just in case there’s any moving faster than my ship. Local superstition, I suppose.”

  Lord, save me from superstition, Menard prayed. It looks enough like faith to fool the unprepared mind. “Well, it never hurts to watch for rocks, I suppose.”

  McNally leaned close. “You ever get to wondering, read the Ulaan Ude transcripts. From the battle. Last couple of minutes, when the Hoxha blew, right before the old Navy struck their colors to the Imperial fleet. That’s what started it all.”

  “Ulaan Ude.” Menard made a mental note of the name, whatever it might mean. He didn’t have anything like the right dataset with him on this transit, but this certainly was another one of those odd leads that had kept the xenic question alive over the centuries. “Bless you, my son, and my thanks. Creation is ever full of mysteries.”

  “Indeed, sir. Thankfully my job is to get my ship where she needs to be, and fulfill the mission requirements of the run as a whole.”

  Menard smiled at the other man’s tact. “The ‘run as a whole’ being me and my nanny.”

  “Well, yes. We’re a fast courier. People usually aren’t that anxious just to see their paperwork, so mostly we carry VIPs.” The Lieutenant crossed himself. “Holy relics, sometimes.”

  “And sometimes those are one and the same, eh?”

  McNally grinned. “Nothing like a Churchman, Chor Episcopos.”

>   “Nothing like.”

  “Indeed. Look, do you want to come up on the bridge in about twenty minutes or so? We’ve already done our initial post-arrival orientation. We’re ballistic right now for a systems shake-down and crew wake-up, but we’ll be pulling the beacon chatter, setting our course toward the inner planets and so forth. If you’d like to observe.”

  Menard sipped his coffee. Advantage of a small ship, he supposed. “I wouldn’t want to be in your crew’s way.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” McNally said cheerfully. “We could probably hold midnight mass on St. Gaatha’s bridge.”

  ‡

  Albrecht: Halfsummer, Gryphon Landing

  It took him almost a month to work up the nerve to go down to the Sixth Wharf. He had to make mattress money every day. Most days he made food money as well, sometimes he ate his seed money. It was a losing game. The whole time, Albrecht hung on to the codelock key. He’d taken a beating over this, by damn that made the stupid thing his. He had been avoiding the old Alfazhi in the marketplace, though. The bugger was too strange by half.

  Somehow the Sixth Wharf was never far from Albrecht’s mind.

  Eventually he had a day where the morning came too soon and he was actually a few credits ahead of his never-ending financial game.

  He decided to go looking for Jenny D. It was something to do, some direction to take other than this endless circling at the bottom of a well of both poverty and gravity.

  The Sixth Wharf was a riverside dock. It was haunted by the watermen who moved barges up and down the silted, hummocked swamps extending hundreds of kilometers around Gryphon Landing. As far as Albrecht was concerned, countryside was the colored stuff around a spaceport, but these men lived among the creeper vines and the large, carnivorous cousins of the hand trees which dotted the city. And watermen hated spacers, with a sort of genial venom borne out of the mists of history.