Death of a Starship Read online

  Nonetheless, there he went dressed as only a spacer would be in his grubby shipsuit and his thigh pack. The wharf was a narrow boardwalk street footing a set of docks jutting out into mold-green water that looked to have the consistency of insulating gel. There were only a few boats tied up, but the docks were covered with ropes, boxes, piles of rusted junk, all of them spilling into the right of way. Grubby and messy enough to give any starship section supervisor heart failure.

  He walked along, breathing in the heavy scent of the river. Just after sidereal noon, none of the few people idling along the Sixth Wharf seemed to be in a fight-picking mood. The regulars must be out doing whatever it was watermen did by daylight by way of earning an honest living.

  The first bar he came to was The Newt Trap. Walking in, there still didn’t seem to be anyone in a fight picking mood, so Albrecht spent two more precious credits on a swamp beer from a dispenser and stared around at the walls a while.

  If this place had a theme to its decor, it eluded him. It certainly wasn’t particularly nautical. There was a stuffed newt chained to the ceiling, one of Halfsummer’s three meter monsters with a terribly oversized mouth full of sticky, pointed cartilage. The walls were practically covered with a mess of everything from old sweaters to children’s toys to flattened ration cartons, all nailed or wired tightly in place.

  “Man goes out on a long cruise, he leaves something of his own to come back to,” said someone behind Albrecht in a voice which squealed like low gears under poor lubrication. “To draw him home.”

  “I get it,” he replied, still gazing at the walls, wondering at the sick-sharp sweat smell.

  “Easier places for a vacuum-brain to drink than a wet sailor’s bar. About midnight, you’d get your nostrils slit just for being in here.”

  Albrecht turned to look his new acquaintance over. The man was fat, in a way that you never saw in space. Planet fat, gland disorder fat, eyes buried in folds of skin like cold-burned rubber, tiny hands on the end of arms that puffed wider than both of Albrecht’s thighs put together. He was wrapped in a damp muslin winding that made him look like a badly-laid corpse. Several badly-laid corpses smashed together, in fact.

  “Don’t matter to me,” the newcomer said in that grinding voice. “I ain’t no waterman neither. But if you’re looking for something, might want to find it before the barges come in.” He grinned, a disturbing effect given the apparent lack of teeth and wide, blackened tongue. “That would be starting around 16:30,” he added helpfully.

  What the hell, thought Albrecht. He wasn’t made of money or time. He might as well ask. “Ever hear of a boat called Jenny D?”

  That drew a long quiet stare. Then: “Funny question, that.” The fat man settled in to the bar next to Albrecht, a process not unlike docking a water boat. “Jenny D’s kind of, oh, a virus around here. What’s your connection to her?”

  The lie carried on. “My father died on that ship.” As far as Albrecht knew, his father was alive and mean as ever back on I-Karlstein.

  The fat man crossed himself with three fingers. “He’s in good company, your old man.”

  Albrecht let that thought ride in silence a moment before asking, “What kind of virus?”

  “Deadly. It’s catching. Too much talking brings it on. Frankly, we’d like the whole thing to go away.” He gave Albrecht a long stare. “You the kind of man who can make it go away?”

  Time to leave, Albrecht thought. Getting tripped on the pavement by cops was one thing, but whatever people were dying – or killing – for down here on the docks wasn’t his cup of tea. “Uh...”

  “Uh is right.” The fat man smiled again. “You ain’t nobody, ser. You ain’t a waterman, you ain’t Public Safety. Maybe you’ll do, without drawing too much fire down upon all our heads.” A great, shivering slab of a hand patted Albrecht on the arm. “Tell you what: since you asked, I got something to show you. For your late father’s sake.”

  He slid away from the bar and waddled out into the sunlight. Albrecht downed his swamp beer and followed. That intellectual curiosity was still nagging. Besides, if this came to nothing he could always head back to the market and scrounge for more junk to resell.

  ‡

  “They build here...” The fat man puffed hard as he walked, bobbing slowly along, sweating rivers. “By digging...” Puff. “Then sticking something...” Puff. “Down a hole...” Puff. “Caisson.” Puff. “You know that word?”

  Albrecht wanted to ask the fat man to stop, to breathe, to talk in sentences, not to keel over onto the wooden street next to him like three hundred kilos of bad vat-flesh. “Yeah. Pressure vessel, right?”

  “Right.” Puff. “But anything that...” Puff. “Will hold out the...” Puff. “Water table...” Puff. “Will do.” Puff. “Anchor the found...” Puff. “...ation to.”

  “Right.” Inasmuch as he’d ever thought about dirtside engineering, that made a certain muddy kind of sense. Starships didn’t have foundations, but they had keels and hull frames.

  They drifted to a stop in front of a godown not much different from the meat rack where Albrecht spent his nights. Maybe a little rattier. A few more posters on the walls, not pulled down by the owners or the Public Safety work crews. The fat man leaned against a door and let his chuffing breath idle down to something almost human. After a while he smiled that black-hole smile again and opened the door with a mechanical key. “Come on in.”

  Inside wasn’t particularly large for a Gryphon Landing warehouse, but it was particularly empty. Albrecht looked up through the cross-braced girders to a roof full of bright holes. Shafts of sunlight speared through, becoming grubby in the dusty air. A slightly rippled quality to the shadows between the bright, glimmering columns promised a truly astonishing number of flittermice come dusk.

  “Space,” he said. “But not my kind. Aren’t these buildings usually full of...something?”

  “Sometimes a building is just a building.” The fat man waddled slowly across the empty concrete floor to a little office framed in at the back corner of the godown. Albrecht trailed after, wondering what a human being had to do to reach that kind of end state. The thought was sobering.

  The fat man opened the door, then stood aside.

  Albrecht looked in. Two desks, some file cabinets, a ratty old rug with three chairs parked on it.

  “Throw back the rug,” said the fat man. “Then tell me what you can do about Jenny D.”

  Armstrong’s ghost, this was nuts, thought Albrecht. He scooted the chairs aside and flipped back the rug. Not much to his surprise, there was a trap door. He glanced at the old man, then tugged at the inset ring.

  The door opened more smoothly than he’d imagined it would. Below was a shaft, like a wooden chimney. Iron rungs were set in one side. Albrecht shrugged. “You got a light?”

  The fat man said, “Glow stick in the desk, maybe.”

  Albrecht tugged open a couple of drawers to expose various nests of pens, tools and a very ancient sandwich ascending its own private evolutionary ladder before he found a pile of glow sticks. He stuck several in his sleeve pocket, snapped one, bit it gently between his teeth, nodded at the fat man, then began climbing down.

  Nothing ventured, nothing lost. It wasn’t like he had much left to lose, either.

  He wasn’t the least bit surprised when he found a vacuum-rated hatch at the bottom of the shaft, hull vanishing into a damp darkness in each direction from the opening in the shaft. The access pad with the oversized suit glove keys had been torn out and replaced with a little hand-wired codelock interface.

  “Jenny D,” said Albrecht, mumbling through the glowstick. “As I live and breathe. Two hundred lights from your lost grave.”

  He might not know much about killings and dockside life, the issues which had worried the fat man, but he knew ships. Albrecht set the codelock key against the interface and watched the hatch of the buried ship swing inward.

  ‡

  Menard: Halfsummer Solar Space

/>   The Chor Episcopos didn’t usually travel by fast courier, just hopped whatever Church or commercial hauler was headed wherever he was going.

  The concept of too much space on a starship continued to strike Jonah as odd. Yet here was an enormous bridge, with dozens of duty stations and enough floor space to host a low-gee badminton tournament. McNally hadn’t been kidding about being able to hold a midnight mass. And the entire space was occupied by McNally, two harried ensigns and Kewitt, the ship’s elderly chief petty officer who seemed to be mostly sleeping.

  “He’s handling the on-course station keeping,” McNally said, following the line of Menard’s gaze. “Rock watch. Things too big for our clearing masers or defensive nano to cope with.”

  “With his eyes closed?”

  “Yes. He’s tracking nearby junk on audibles. System control’s already got us on our assigned trajectory inward from the c-beacon. They preload those, of course, but they’re not fine-corrected. Kewitt’s keeping an eye on our progress through immediate localspace.”

  For some reason, Menard found this amusing. “Listening for xenics. Keeping an ear, as it were.”

  “Exactly.”

  The Chor Episcopos nodded, looking at the main screens. St. Gaatha had a triple bank. One showed a schematic of their current course, distance-distorted for casual viewing to collapse the projected eleven-day transit toward the inner planets. Another showed a distance-corrected system plot, while the third displayed an animated flyby of the Halfsummer system.

  Halfsummer-, the primary, was a fairly typical G2 star. Classic human-friendly, and therefore precious. The solar system was also stereotypical, four inner E-class planets, an asteroid belt, with one super-J, two J-class, and one sub-J standing outside the belt. Only one of the rockballs was solidly within the Goldilocks zone – the world of Halfsummer itself. The others weren’t worth the bother of terraforming, though there was some mining activity scattered around all three of them. Fairly clean system, from a junk perspective. Kewitt’s rock watch spoke more to the Lieutenant’s caution, or superstition, than to any outstanding local traffic hazards.

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?” McNally said, disturbing Menard’s thoughts.

  “Of course,” said the Chor Episcopos. More rocks, he wondered?

  “I’ve made, oh, thirty runs as skipper on the St. Gaatha. Another sixty or so as a junior officer on three other rotations. And...well...I’ve never carried an angel before. Never even seen one up close before yours came on board.”

  Menard thought that over, decided to let the question of who controlled whom lie fallow. He’d said too much previously as it was, and did not want to project disrespect for his superiors in the hierarchy. “Mmm?”

  McNally sounded distressed. “Why...why am I bringing an angel to Halfsummer? What have these people done?”

  Ah ha. “Rest easy, Lieutenant. The angel is my security detail.”

  “You planning to start a war, sir? Or possibly stop one?”

  “I really can’t say what I’m doing here.” Not even if I knew what that was, he thought. “But no, no wars. Nothing dreadful.”

  McNally crossed himself. “Thank you, Chor Episcopos.”

  “We are each servants of God, my son,” Menard said kindly. “Both the word and the blade are His tools in their time.”

  “I’m an officer of the Church Militant, sir. I am sworn to this.” McNally glanced over his shoulder, aft toward where the angel slept. “But some things don’t feel so godly to me.”

  Menard couldn’t have agreed more, but he wasn’t in a position to say that now. The Chor Episcopos ignored the tweak in his gut. “We all move at the Lord’s will.”

  McNally’s usual smile flickered back across his face. “Mysteriously, at any rate.”

  ‡

  Golliwog: In c-space

  Though Golliwog had been on dozens of ships of many sizes and ratings for training exercises, he’d never before left the space around Powell Station. He had been through simulation after simulation of the dangerous period of emergence from c-transition, when a lack of human alertness and an inherent unreliability in ship’s systems placed vessels at risk, but no one had ever warned him about what happened during c-transition.

  Unbuckling the safety straps, Golliwog smiled into the colors. The hatch of his cabin was some infinite, purpled distance from his bunk. What luck his legs were infinitely long. He had trouble fitting his planetary fingers to the hatch controls. It was easier to step through the bulkhead. The wind of his passage thundered a hard, dry lemon.

  The passageway outside was uncomfortably thin, bulkheads as close as Casimir plates. Something was wrong with the dimensions. But Golliwog tunneled between them like a decaying alpha particle, looking for Dr. Yee.

  He found her soon enough, a puddle of plaid improbability in a roiling maw of cayenne that was probably her cabin. He wasn’t sure this was how c-transit was supposed to work. Golliwog looked around the echoes of her workspace until he found something that tasted like paper. A stylus took longer, though he finally decided the cold pressure near the paper-taste might be it. Golliwog wrote “WOKE DURING C-TRNST TRIED TO REACH YOU – G”, then drifted among the wounded stars back to the infinite reaches of his personal universe, where sleep reclaimed him brutally as any surgeon on a deadline.

  ‡

  Menard: Halfsummer Solar Space

  After a polite but boring period watching the bridge crew watch their screens, the Chor Episcopos retired to the ward room to work. He’d been avoiding his ready room, even though it was part of his quarters, because the angel had spent the entire journey thus far lurking there.

  Menard knew that art or no art, anything with eyes and a brain certainly qualified as one of God’s creatures. It was a trial set before him to love, or at least respect, the angel. Had Bishop Russe possessed anything resembling a sense of humor, Menard might have believed that his supervisor had set the angel upon him as a reminder of the Chor Episcopos’ own failings. But McNally had been correct in his fears for Halfsummer – angels never traveled away from the Prime See, except when the Patriarch took it upon himself to conduct a peregrination. The creatures went wherever His Holiness traveled, of course, scouring evil so that His Holiness’ feet might tread only on sacred ground. Their wrath was legendary.

  Enough, he thought. He was being uncharitable at best. Menard offered a small prayer for forgiveness, then looked at the dataslate on the table in front of him. Once she’d shifted down from c-space, St. Gaatha had followed ordinary procedure and done a beacon interchange. The vast majority of that process was highly standardized information, read-writes of updated shipping schedules, various sorts of low-priority news and information from the last beacons she had passed by, as well as dropping off and picking up whatever mail was needful. Being a Church ship, she didn’t go through the rounds of time-dependent information auctioning which were a basis of a major portion of the Imperial economic system. A complex interplay of scarcity, distinctiveness, demand, degree-of-confidence and timeliness governed a multi-trillion credit per year futures market which the Church considered her flight crews to be above.

  What the Treasurer-General did to manage the Church’s fortunes was another matter entirely, of course. Menard didn’t doubt that some expert system deep in the bowels of the ship’s small-scale nöosphere had been auctioning off commodity and political-legal futures data since they’d first dropped out of c-transition. That activity simply wasn’t conducted on behalf of St. Gaatha, her crew or passengers.

  As for the mail, since St. Gaatha had moved ahead of her own information wavefront in heading for Halfsummer, no one knew they were coming. Therefore neither the ship nor Chor Episcopos Menard had any individually addressed messages waiting. There was a small classified Church packet which Menard took upon himself to review.

  There were a handful of parish report summaries intended to be passed along to the Prime See. He ignored them. There were three disciplinary files, also of no i
nterest to him. He marked them anyway, in case he found sufficient idle time before planetfall to go back and check if any of the troublesome priests had been found to be xenics in disguise. There were a whole series of financial logs, which would probably bore him beyond tears, but Menard felt that he ought to analyze for anything reflecting Sister Pelias’ K-M curves. Finally, there was a security report with a route flag that included the Xenic Bureau.

  Curious, the timing of that. The hand of the Lord, or the xenics finally showing themselves as more than data ghosts? With a slight shiver of his spine, Menard went to the security file first.

  Somewhat strangely, it was a copy of a Naval intelligence message. Beneath the Church codes, the message itself was in clear text. Also stranger, but useful as well, since he didn’t have any way here aboard St. Gaatha to crack Naval codes. Menard couldn’t tell from the headers whether the message had wound up in Church files as an intercept or a friendly tip-off – that sort of thing varied wildly from system to system, as well as depending on the vagaries of budget battles and political tension.

  ‡

  To: NINO Front Royal/New Bellona/Front Royal

  Fr: NILO Front Royal/Gryphon Landing/Halfsummer

  Re: Shipping Watch List Flag

  Burt –

  Be advised we had a data flag trip on the shipping watch list here. Keel number PNSH017FA2900045661, registered IBY57 as Jenny’s Diamond Bright, lost IBY98 in transit Karazov/Velox to Karazov/4a-Rho Palatine. We looked into it, some visitor checking keel histories for his model collection. I know you hate coincidences, so I’m forwarding his file to you, but I’m certain there’s nothing to this one. My love to Roger and come visit sometime. We can go wetwater sailing on Southport Bay.

  – Alma

  ‡

  The message was a lot more interesting for what it didn’t say than what it did say. Menard doodled on his slate, decoding.

  NINO was Naval Intelligence, Naval Oversight. NO were the hard men inside the Imperial Navy, a combination of internal affairs investigators, system auditors and hit teams. Burt, whoever he was, would be a tough nut indeed if Menard ever ran across him.