Death of a Starship Page 6

  NILO was Naval Intelligence, Local Observer. Someone named, or code-named, Alma. Who probably had a certain amount of local authority, as in “we looked into it”, but could be anyone from the portmaster to a clerk in the city government. The Church didn’t have a role corresponding directly to LOs. Parish priests were, by definition, everywhere, and made for terrific coverage, even if providing a somewhat spotty reporting network.

  Obviously Alma and Burt were old friends. He wondered if that was significant to the issues at hand.

  What the message didn’t elaborate on was the identity of the visitor, where he was visiting from, how he’d tripped the flag – nöosphere search would be the obvious choice – nor did it say how Alma had made her investigation, and what had been her degree of confidence in the outcome. Menard presumed that most or all of that info was in the missing file attachment.

  More significant to the Chor Episcopos was the fact that one of the classic xenic phenomena was disappearing ships. Father Bernie O’Halloran ran a statistics unit that reported up to Sister Pelias which reviewed shipping losses across the Empire. O’Halloran’s extracts tended to be of greater interest to insurance investigators than to his peers at the Xenic Bureau, unfortunately. But Menard was here at Halfsummer looking for xenic anomalies, and by goodness the missing Jenny’s Diamond Bright was a bona fide potential xenic anomaly. He felt that chill of inspiration once again. Much like the apparent opinions of the NINO operative named Burt, Menard felt that sheer coincidence would be too much in this case.

  Menard composed a note to the Bishop of Halfsummer introducing himself and his credentials, and requesting help from the Bishop’s staff in locating Alma’s model-collecting visitor.

  As he sent it off to be transmitted in-system as part of St. Gaatha’s datastream to the Halfsummer nöosphere, he looked up to find the angel standing behind him, silent as cold death. How had it gotten there? A long-fingered white hand, nail red and narrow and gleaming, stabbed past his shoulder to land on the name Jenny’s Diamond Bright, nearly cracking Menard’s dataslate in the process.

  In spite of himself, Menard jumped in his seat. His scalp crawled with fright as his spine shook.

  “Please–” he began, then stopped. He had to control his reactions to this red-eyed monster. It was his tool, seconded to him by Russe, and by hierarchs far above the Bishop, to be sure. Tool or no tool, there was no negotiating with angels. By definition. They were the Lord’s slaughter weapons of Ezekiel 9:2, made flesh by the modern word of man. They could only be directed by the hand of the godly.

  And this one was not aimed at him. No matter what the gurgling fear in his bowels said.

  He tried again: “I understand. This is a priority for me, too. We serve the same ends, my s-son.”

  The angel glared at him, red-eyed and vibrating, then slowly nodded before stalking out of the ward room.

  How had it known what he was doing? The thing hadn’t stirred from his ready room in the days since they’d boarded.

  Menard called up his favorite passage concerning space travel, from Psalms 19. “ The heavens declare the glory of God;” he read aloud. “And the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night shows knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun.”

  He knelt to pray a while, for peace and wisdom, guidance on the matter of the angel, and if the Lord were especially kind this day, a greater insight into his purposes here at Halfsummer. His knees spoke louder than God, but Menard found peace amid the tingle of incense and the words sent toward Heaven.

  ‡

  Albrecht: Halfsummer, Gryphon Landing

  The buried ship wasn’t Jenny D. Albrecht realized that by the time he cleared the inner hatch. Coatimundi-class freighters weren’t atmosphere-rated, for one thing. They dumped cargo cans at stations, or lightered their manifests down if need be. Jenny’s Diamond Bright would have been hard-pressed to make a hydrogen skimming run through the upper wisps of a J-class planet. Not to mention she would have been a lot bigger than the hole underneath this godown could possibly have fitted.

  No, thought Albrecht with a substantial measure of satisfaction, what he had here was one of Jenny D’s boats. Still substantial proof she hadn’t gone missing on the Velox run – not that he cared too much, he wasn’t a fraud manager. More to the point, this little vessel was something he could pilot on his own.

  Too bad the boat was sitting under a few hundred tons of building, foundation and associated landfill.

  He made his way forward, to the bridge. As this was a boat, not a ship, space was at something of a premium. The power-to-weight issues for vessels which confined themselves to non-relativistic distances would have been familiar to an early Industrial Age engineer back on old Earth, using only a pocket computer to design steam locomotives and so forth.

  He found a three-seat flight deck, hard shields secured over the view ports. It was clean, all instruments in place. That suggested that the rest of the boat likely hadn’t been gutted for salvage either. Even stranger, ready lights blinked to indicate systems on standby.

  Who would bury a spaceship, then leave it turned on?

  Someone the locals didn’t like, obviously. Or the fat man wouldn’t have brought him here.

  How was a more pertinent question. It wasn’t that great a stretch to imagine landing a cutter in a hole in the ground – he’d bet this was a Shostakovich-class or similar, not more than thirty meters in length. It was a great stretch to imagine landing a cutter in a hole in the ground within port-controlled airspace without that event being taken notice of. Unless somebody had ensured a groundside sensor blackout, for maintenance or training purposes. Even at that, dozens or even hundreds of people equipped with nothing better than a human eyeball would certainly notice a boat dropping out of the sky in the middle of a developed area.

  It was not a subtle thing to do.

  Using the codelock key, Albrecht lit up the crew workstations. The boat had power. It had actual, live system power. A feed from the city mains, probably. It’s how he would have done it. A commercial-industrial area like the Sixth Wharf had all kinds of big customers with weird consumption profiles – a standard two-kilovolt industrial feed would keep a boat this small live and warm on long-term hold.

  A few minutes fiddling with the control panels made things clear enough. This boat was Jenny’s Little Pearl, a Xiao-Gang Ye-class cutter – very similar to the Shostakovich series. The boat definitely thought it had touched down about eleven years ago, though Albrecht wasn’t the least bit prepared to trust the log. Pearl’s systems were at 61% of optimal, which was pretty damned good for something which had been sitting underground for years. No killing failures, though redundancies left a lot to be desired. And it had almost fourteen hundred hours of fuel load, bloc hydrogen stored in ion-lattice sponges. Enough to go skiving around Halfsummer’s inner system, if the boat could get into the air and out of the gravity well in the first place.

  So now he could turn it off and go back to his five credit mattress. Or he could stay on board and eat freeze-dried chow and wait for someone to come find him. Or he could try to figure how the boat was supposed to get back out from under here. As the fat man had said, make it go away.

  As if there was any question what he would do next. This wasn’t as good as being back on a c-transit run, but it was hell of a lot closer to space than he’d come since being busted off Princess Janivera.

  Time to start tracing circuits, Albrecht thought. The bad guys would find him if they wanted him. They probably already knew where he was.

  Before he got to work, Albrecht dismounted the hotwired hatch controls and locked himself in.

  ‡

  Four hours later he had eaten a very bad bag of something which was allegedly chicken fried rice, and established several key facts about Jenny’s Little P
earl. The boat was indeed on the city power mains. He couldn’t see the billing interface from inside the power shunt, but Albrecht would bet his left foot the power authority didn’t know where that particular five kilovolt line was terminated. The same umbilical which brought in power brought in a ten millimeter water line, which kept environmental systems sufficiently hydrated without needing to draw down ship power in order to crack water out of the air. It also brought in a local nöosphere link, which meant Pearl had a comm number and data access.

  Somebody had wanted to be able to send out for pizza.

  And they had, at that. Pearl had four cabins, two port and two starboard. The portside cabins, closest to the hatch, had obviously seen use as cells. There were literally chains welded to the bulkheads. Albrecht wasn’t too keen on examining the stains on the decks in there. The starboard cabins had a more lived-in look. This boat had been a prison and a hideaway both. Not a bad method of keeping out of sight for extended periods. Store a few ships of food upstairs, skim some off for provisions down below, with the unmonitored utility feeds, no one would ever know.

  Damn lousy waste of a good ship’s boat, but at the same time, Albrecht had to appreciate the ingenuity involved.

  It wasn’t the only ingenuity on board, either. He also found a soft control stack loaded in the engineering panel which was highly customized and utterly uncommented. Albrecht traced the circuit routings and eventually located a second outside connection down in the engineering section – a hand-built job which didn’t strike him as very trustworthy, but there it was.

  In effect, the unmarked control stack was a big red button labeled, “Push Me.” Either you were supposed to know what it did, or you weren’t supposed to push it. Albrecht figured the control had to launch some process which extracted Pearl out of the hole in the ground – somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to keep her up and spaceworthy – but he was darned if he could see how the boat was supposed to get out. Blow up the godown and lift from the crater? Any explosion powerful enough to shatter the poured concrete floor upstairs would seriously endanger the boat.

  He decided to ask for an opinion. Albrecht used the command panel to open up a generic nöosphere access and asked for a connection to The Newt Trap, along Sixth Wharf.

  “Thank you for calling The Newt Trap,” said the bar’s comm system, displaying a sort of titchy fractal screen saver.

  “I want to talk to–” Albrecht stopped. What was the man’s name. “The fat man. You know the fat man?”

  “There is no one here by that name.”

  Damned machines. Any human would have known exactly who he meant. How many four hundred kilo monsters could there be hanging around the Sixth Wharf? “Let me speak to a live person, then. Anyone.”

  “Please wait.” The comm switched him over to a syrupy hold music which went on for about two minutes before the screen flickered and the fat man came on.

  “Oh...it’s you,” he said. “Enjoying yourself?”

  “More fun than a barrel of junkies,” Albrecht replied. “I think I can make your problem go away, but I need to understand something.”

  The fat man’s piggy eyes narrowed to flickering slits. “What would that be?”

  “Someone wired this thing to leave. If it can find clear air, the right hands can make it go away for good.” He flexed his fingers in front of the pickup. “Mine, for example. But what happens when I press the go button? I don’t see how it works.”

  “You don’t–” The fat man cut himself off, glanced at something out of the pickup range. When he looked back again his eyes had narrowed, his face pale. “Go now, boy. They’re coming.” The connection dropped.

  Albrecht sat and thought that one over. Less than a minute later, the boat’s systems warbled. Someone was trying the hatch.

  “Guess you got my address,” he told no one in particular. “Time to press the big red button.” He initiated hot-start pre-flight sequencing from the command panel. It would take about twenty minutes to get Pearl ready. Unless his visitors had brought a thermic lance or some serious machine tools with them, they weren’t getting in that fast. Not now that he’d secured the hatch.

  The command panel bleeped. Incoming comm link.

  He tried to imagine a downside to answering. Whoever was out there knew he was in here. The fat man wouldn’t be hard to sweat. Public Safety had already shaken Albrecht down once, a month or so ago after the library incident. If they had been following him around, they knew it was him, and they knew he was down here.

  If it was the bad guys, whoever they might be, well...same logic. No one was getting in without some damned hard work, and he wasn’t coming out now. Albrecht felt oddly cheerful. It was sort of like jumping off the cliff and hoping like hell there was more water than rock under that mist down there.

  He answered the call about the time a dull banging began echoing through the hull. “Jenny’s Little Pearl, flight deck.”

  A hard, familiar face flickered into being on the panel. Of course – it was the Public Safety watch commander who’d briefly interrogated him those weeks ago.

  “Oh,” she said, almost sadly. “It is you. I’ve just lost a hundred credit bet.”

  “Hello, ma’am,” said Albrecht with a sort of preternatural cheerfulness. If he didn’t get Pearl into orbit quite soon, he was going down so hard and so far he’d have to tunnel up to find a shallow grave. “I’d make it up to you if I could.”

  She leaned into her pickup, eyes large and bright on his panel. “What the hell are you doing? I’m getting screamed at from several unexpected directions, my little ship type collector. I can’t even get a decent trace on this comm number yet. I don’t know if you appreciate how truly annoying that is for someone in my position.”

  “So it’s not your goons knocking down my door?” Albrecht asked, surprised.

  “Micah Albrecht, I don’t even know where your door is.”

  “Hmm.” Was there harm in telling her? “Might want to get a rapid response team down to The Newt Trap. It’s a waterman’s bar down along the Sixth Wharf.”

  “I know the place.” She glanced away, catching the eye of someone out of his view and nodding. Then: “You’re not there, are you?”

  “Close by. Let’s just say bad people knocked over The Newt Trap a few minutes ago looking for me.”

  “Black Flag,” she muttered, then looked away from the pickup again and shook her head before returning her attention to Albrecht. “What about you?”

  Black Flag, he thought. Of course. No wonder the fat man had been worried. Vicious anarchists, one and all, with deep pockets. Albrecht had never understood what they wanted. It might explain how this boat had wound up under a building. Their kind of move, slick and clever and undetectable. But the cop had asked him a question. “It seems I’ve accidentally landed in the middle of your insurance fraud problem. Despite not being...um...what was the term? An interstellar shipping magnate?”

  She looked interested in spite of herself. “Do you plan to survive the experience?”

  The echoing bangs intensified. Serious machine tools it was, perhaps. “We’ll both know in about fifteen minutes. In the meantime, if the fat man tells you to duck and cover, I’d listen very carefully.”

  “Listen...” She closed her eyes and sighed, then shot him a hard glare. “I’m Public Safety Lieutenant Alma Gorova. You live long enough to tell more of the story, you call and ask for me. I’ll listen.”

  “You’re about to know a lot more than you realize,” Albrecht said. “That’s a prediction, not a promise, but I’m standing behind it with my life.”

  “Good luck, Micah Albrecht. Don’t do anything I’ll have to kill you for later.”

  “My fondest wish, ma’am.”

  When she signed off, Albrecht amused himself by arming the antipersonnel defenses around the main hatch. About fifteen seconds later, the banging on the hull stopped.

  He had thirteen minutes to go. That time went by without further terribl
e ado, and with a relieving absence of additional distressing comm links. Albrecht kept a close eye on the hot-start protocols and on the upward and downward jumps in systems readiness. All he had to do was make orbit. Then he could effect repairs if need be. He tried not to think about hunter-seekers running him down. Surely the Halfsummer system had never bothered to arm to that degree?

  When the hot-start was ready, Albrecht put it on ten-second hold, then shifted to the engineering panel. He looked at the anonymous, jerry-rigged control again, then initiated its sequence.

  The damned thing didn’t even have a password. It just kicked off a wailing alarm as something began to boom loudly outside his hull. He lit up all the screens and watched Pearl’s structural integrity very carefully.

  Much to Albrecht’s amazement, hull sensors showed outside pressure and temperature changing. He toggled through various external camera views until he found something visible.

  Water was rushing in around the hull. He could feel the deck rocking slightly.

  That wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t immediately disastrous. More to the point, why? He studied the screen. All he could see was shadowed water and foaming mud. Something fairly large surged in and clunked against the hull.

  Wood.

  “Oh, crap,” Albrecht whispered. He called up the nöosphere window and searched for a map of the Sixth Wharf. Zoning overlays, he thought.

  Light bloomed on the viewscreen. Sunlight. Outside air.

  What the hell had happened to the godown above his head? Obviously this was Pearl’s escape process, but what was he supposed to do?

  The control stack on the engineering panel warbled its ready state.

  Ready. Yeah, right. As far as he could tell, he was still under a building. Igniting Pearl’s atmosphere drives would simply destroy ship, building and Albrecht in one go. But here was light, and water.