Death of a Starship Read online

  Given that his boat’s entire armament consisted of a single two gigawatt/second meteor popgun and an empty weapons locker behind the bridge, it didn’t matter how crotchety that light cruiser was. Once she found a solid vector on him and put on some thrust, he was done for. The probability curves that Pearl’s systems were calculating had a progressively unpleasant trend.

  He should have gotten underway a day ago. But there’d been the shorts in the gravimetric system, which really hadn’t been designed for immersion in brackish water. He wasn’t willing to undergo full acceleration with dodgy inertial compensation in place. And the water tanks were having all kinds of weird valve problems, which affected their utility as heat sink, radiation shielding and mass distribution compensators. Jenny’s Little Pearl must have sucked a bunch of crud through some autocycling intake while he was wallowing around in the swamps prior to take off. At some point he was going to have to purge the filters and strip the valves. As it was, the whole boat stunk of moss and mud.

  And now the Imperial Resident was throwing the local Naval Reserve after him. How pissed could these people be?

  The comm squawked, then issued the shriek that meant a military priority signal. “Jenny’s Little Pearl, this is Lieutenant Svetlana Bourne, commanding officer of the INRS Novy Petrograd. Please acknowledge our hail.”

  He flicked a control on the main panel. “Bugger off, Petrograd.”

  There was about six seconds of lightspeed lag. “It’s Micah Albrecht, isn’t it? Look here, I’ve got a shoot-to-kill from dirtside. You don’t want that, do you?”

  Albrecht set himself a course toward The Necklace, what the locals called their asteroid belt. It was faintly visible at night from the surface of Halfsummer, a silver thread across part of the sky, and as a destination set his pursuers on a stern chase. May as well not make Bourne’s job any easier. “What do you think?”

  Another lag, long enough for him to reflect on the value of being a smartass to the person who would be soon holding a gun to his head. Then: “Well, neither do I. Certain fire control officers on my ship notwithstanding.”

  “Lieutenant, what the hell did I do? Launch without clearance isn’t a capital offense, and I know I didn’t kill anyone.” The dirtside newsfeeds had been clear enough about that, though there were some irritated angry boat owners and dockside businesspeople down there. “I can make a reasonable claim for this boat being salvage. I certainly didn’t steal it from its rightful owners. Why the temper tantrum?”

  He rechecked his course, waiting for her reply, then began to consider the job of stripping the filters and valves from the tankage.

  “My opinion? You got the wrong people arrested. Some of them have powerful friends.”

  That was true enough. There were a lot of people in custody due to his little waterfront adventures, and some of them were quite angry about it. He’d apparently broken open a local cell of the Black Flag while making good his escape. There were some surprising names on that list of anarchist revolutionaries, sending hard ripples through the local politics of Gryphon Landing.

  “But my opinion doesn’t matter,” Bourne continued. “My orders do. And my orders require me to intercept you and your ship, and bring you both into custody. With a shoot-to-kill instruction if you do not render full cooperation.”

  “Come and get me,” said Albrecht. He killed the priority comm job with an engineering override, and went to find the filters. With the course set, Pearl could fly herself in her last few hours of life. The least he could do was keep her in proper shape.

  ‡

  He worked in the cross-passage that connected the port and starboard passages immediately forward of engineering. The main tankage lines ran right above that passage, managing mass and volume distribution between the primary tanks in the boat’s flanks and the secondary storage in the dorsal and ventral hull sections. Albrecht had set grippers on the filter access panel, which was unaccountably placed higher than his head at an acute angle to the deckplane and the relevant gravimetric field. Even low priority systems required maintenance, a little fact which seemed to consistently escape the attention of low-bid naval architects and shipyards across the empire.

  That meant when Albrecht backed the last of the torque screws off, it was going to want to fall, pretty much on his head. Maybe the designers had intended zero gee maintenance for this system, but he needed his burn speed enough that he didn’t want to shut the gravimetrics back down.

  The power driver took the six torque screws out one by one. With each screw the panel settled a little, releasing more of that mud smell. Whatever goop the boat had sucked in had, naturally enough, gone to the filters.

  The panel groaned as the last screw came out. Albrecht flipped the switch on the lower grippers, which should have caused the panel to swing forward, hinging on the upper set.

  Instead it burst loose as something large, wet and furious dropped on him, amid a sheet of warm, stinking water.

  Albrecht slammed down on his back. Jaws wide as his shoulders snapped in front of his face as something massing at least a hundred kilos bounced on his chest. He stabbed with the torque driver. It squealed, bit his left wrist, butted him in the groin, then scuttled through the open hatch into the port passage.

  “Christ on a mass converter!” Albrecht shouted at the overhead. “What the hell was that?”

  He was afraid he knew, though. It was two meters at least, maybe three, and heavier than he was, with a mouth full of familiar horror. He’d seen his last newt hanging from the ceiling in the fat man’s bar. Now he’d seen his next, still alive and biting.

  Albrecht caught his breath. “Boat, secure all hatches,” he said, gripping his wrist with his right hand to control the bleeding.

  “Secured,” said Pearl.

  “Where is it?”

  “Where is what?”

  “It! Um...a hundred kilograms of mobile biomass. The lizard with an attitude, you idiot.”

  “There is an unknown party in the portside passageway.”

  “Don’t let it out.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Could he vent the air there? Not in a boat this size, it wouldn’t have the kind of vacuum-rated compartmentalization of a larger ship. Princess Janivera ‘s smallest single vacuum-rated area had been considerably larger than the entire interior volume of Pearl. He could maybe gas the damned creature, but that would require some environmental control tricks that weren’t Albrecht’s specialty. Besides which he wasn’t sure this boat could handle something like that.

  That steward’s nephew would have come in handy about now, he thought. The little bastard could either have killed the newt, or he could have been fed to it.

  “I need medical attention,” he told Pearl. “Please initialize the sick bay systems.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  ‡

  He decided to let the newt rampage for the time being. There wasn’t much he needed from the portside passage. Since that was where the primary airlock was located, it was also the most likely boarding route for whomever Bourne sent after him. Assuming she didn’t blast Jenny’s Little Pearl to scrap and haul Albrecht back to Halfsummer in a number of small plastic bags. Let some Marine reserve sergeant meet that thing head on, angry and hungry as the jarhead came through the lock. Albrecht wouldn’t be surprised to see the big bastard bite through combat armor.

  Of course, the damned mud-and-crud smell was truly everywhere in the air system now.

  The probability curves on the main screen had narrowed considerably. Petrograd had a turn of speed on her, for an antediluvian warhorse. He had maybe four hours to go as a free man. At least he would go out as master of his own vessel, even if it was only a system boat.

  Albrecht decided to amuse himself by pretending he had a future. He started by sorting through Pearl’s log, looking back before the grounding date when the boat had been settled in beneath the godown on the Sixth Wharf.

  Astonishingly, nothing was there.

/>   He ran a debug trace on the memory cores. Logs were write-once, for all kinds of very good reasons. The only way you got a blank log was if someone ripped all the black boxes out and replaced them. Which was almost a capital offense, also for all kinds of very good reasons.

  There was exactly one entry in the log, before the grounding date. Albrecht studied it.

  It was an ephemeris, a detailed position-in-time record for an object in an eccentric orbit that intersected The Necklace at regular intervals. Nothing but the orbital plot, no notes about what was being plotted. A really good astrogator might have been able to work out mass constraints based on the orbital variance reflected in the plot as the object interacted with The Necklace, but that was beyond Albrecht.

  He’d bet good money he was looking at Jenny’s Diamond Bright. Though that was a damned strange orbit to park a freighter in. Obviously, someone hadn’t intended it to be found.

  Had the whole purpose of hiding Jenny’s Little Pearl been simply to provide safe storage for that ephemeris data? The boat, in effect, as key to the missing freighter. The codelock key he’d bought in the market was key to the hidden boat.

  And someone had been mugged, or died in their sleep, and lost that codelock key to the gray market of junk and resold tools. Even to an apolitical civilian like him that was an obvious drawback to the kind of cell systems the terrorists used...it was hard to manage succession of responsibility and chains of custody. He could only imagine the fury of the Black Flag, or whoever had stolen and hidden this boat, at losing track so thoroughly of something so important.

  They must have been staking out the warehouse down by the water for a long time. Hoping to get their codelock key back. Albrecht wondered if the fat man had called the Black Flag in on him.

  No, those lunatics had to be the deadly virus the fat man spoken so elliptically of when Albrecht had mentioned the name of the ship.

  And a ship Jenny D. was. If he somehow survived Lieutenant Svetlana Bourne and her flying mortar of a light cruiser, he could finally have a shot at getting out of this damned system. He’d need to pick up some crew – no starship could be flown solo. But there had to be hundreds of busted-out, stranded or retired c-rated spacers in The Necklace.

  Albrecht looked at the probability curves again. The intercept cone was slowly turning into an intercept line.

  ‡

  With an hour and a half to go, the comm bleeped again. Bourne, wanting to talk. His wrist throbbed and burned, he was hungry, and he was going to die soon. Might as well talk. Albrecht flicked her into being. This time he got video as well as audio.

  She was pretty, in a sort of ageing-elf way. Curly white-blonde hair, narrow blue eyes, a Naval uniform cut for someone ten kilos heavier. Behind her in the camera pickup he could see a couple of ratings working on a spaghetti of wiring.

  “Calling to gloat, Lieutenant?”

  Comm lag had shortened, too, he noticed, though she’d probably anticipated his first words. “You’re an interesting man, Micah Albrecht. You have enemies, or possibly friends, in high places.”

  “Excuse me?” Enemies he could believe, but Albrecht had become remarkably short of friends lately. He wondered if he could count the newt.

  Again, she was leading him a little, speaking even ahead of the lightspeed lag. “You and your vessel appear to have come under a Patriarchal Edict of Attainder. Which trumps even my orders.”

  Albrecht’s heart skipped several long, cold beats. “If it’s all the same to you, I think I could see my way clear to surrendering now.” He could imagine a lot of things he’d rather do than be dragged off by goons from the Church’s Security Directorate. Which was pretty much what that Writ of Attainder had to mean.

  They killed people with toothpicks. And worse.

  Her smile crisped into being some seconds later. “I don’t blame you, Ser Albrecht, but you’ve had your chance. I must yield to the tender mercies of the most excellent servants of His Holiness. If it’s any consolation, I shall continue to shadow you in your travels as an observer on behalf of the Imperial Resident.”

  His bowels gurgled. “They’re coming for me now?”

  Another shorter-than-lag response. This woman was good. “Inbound from the Trivagaunte beacon. Forty hours out of Halfsummer orbit, perhaps. I’m transmitting their course profile. Purely as a courtesy, naturally. I don’t suppose you’d consider standing to and awaiting the arrival of your new pursuers.”

  “Uh...no thanks.” The Trivagaunte beacon was about a hundred and fifteen degrees around the ecliptic from his current heading. God seemed to have just given Albrecht a few more days of freedom.

  This time she waited out the entire message lag. She had been giving him a chance. “Well, I thought not. It’s been a pleasure serving you, Ser Albrecht. May I say good luck.”

  He was a dead man sailing. May as well keep heading for The Necklace. Maybe some other even higher power would intervene.

  Albrecht wasn’t a praying man, but he wondered if this was time to start.

  ‡

  Golliwog: Halfsummer Solar Space

  “Someone has called up the Reserves.” Dr. Yee was furious. Golliwog could tell by the way she paced, with a twitch in her step. Her arms were clenched behind her. The three ship’s officers in the briefing room shrank in their station chairs. None of them would meet his eye, but then, none of them had met his eye the entire voyage. The air dampers in the ceiling were clicking madly, trying to ionize the air and scrub out the stress hormones.

  A holographic rendering of the Halfsummer system spun slowly over the conference table. It was distance-compressed, the courses of relevant ships rendered in dopplered color vectors to indicate degree of compression. Golliwog could see three ships of interest: their own heavy cruiser, INS Dmitri Hinton, a Naval Reserve light cruiser – a Ciudad Boise-class ship, from a very old keel series long since decertified for active service – and a civilian boat.

  The boat was heading for the Halfsummer system’s asteroid belt, the light cruiser tailing but not overtaking. Hinton was on an intercept from c-beacon 005 a, locally known as the Feodora beacon. Their least-time course involved arriving at the civilian’s belt destination some nine hours after both the civilian and the Reserve cruiser were there.

  Yee paused in her pacing, a finger stabbing down toward the display. “That was bad enough. Someone else then interdicted the Reserves. That, gentlemen, is worse. We look incompetent in the eyes of the locals. We draw attention to our purposes here, and to the Navy’s involvement in events.” She stared around the table, finally settling her glare on one luckless officer. “Commander Marek, you will interface with the Naval Intelligence local observer here on Halfsummer and determine whose idiocy has put our movements on center stage of this system’s newsfeeds.” Her stare shifted. “Captain Hawking, I’d very much appreciate a fast boat at our disposal. Golliwog and I need to be at the course intercept point prior to the civilian’s arrival.”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Hawking and Marek together.

  “Go.”

  They went, leaving behind Lieutenant Spinks. He straightened up, brushed off his cuffs, and smiled at Yee. “You’ve put the fear into them, Suzanne.”

  Yee sniffed. She still looked angry to Golliwog, but he could see her relaxing already. “Motivational,” she said.

  Spinks glanced pointedly at Golliwog. Golliwog stared back. Spinks resembled Yee...small build, big eyes, very dark, very tough.

  “He’s mine.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Spinks gave Golliwog a quick wink.

  So, thought Golliwog. They weren’t that much alike. That was something he’d bet his left thumb Yee would never have done. But still, a connection.

  “Jenny’s Diamond Bright,” snapped Yee, obviously picking up a prior thread of conversation.

  Shaking his head, Spinks said, “Not with that drive trace. A system boat. Quite possibly off Jenny D. Too much of a coincidence not to be connected. But public newsfeeds aren’t nam
ing ship names right now and we haven’t got a packet from Novy Petrograd or the NILO yet.”

  “Is the big girl here, though?”

  Spinks once more glanced briefly at Golliwog. “We’ve been over that, Suze. Time and again.”

  “She’s somewhere, night take her.” Yee stepped closer to the hologram, stared into it as if wisdom might be found there.

  “Maybe...” said Spinks. “Maybe. That’s an inconclusive analysis at best.”

  The worm of rebellion stirred once in Golliwog’s heart. He spoke up: “What analysis?”

  Yee snapped him a glare as Spinks grinned. “We’re looking for a missing ship,” she said.

  “Jenny D?” Golliwog asked.

  “No. NSS Enver Hoxha.”

  Golliwog had never heard of that ship. He wasn’t even sure what an NSS designation was. He gave Yee his blank look.

  She sighed. She knew him too well. “Artemis Powers-class battleship. One of the old dictators, from the pre-Imperial Navy.”

  “There is no battleship class in service,” Golliwog said.

  “Precisely. Do you see the problem?”

  Golliwog thought that over. “That class must have mustered more than two hundred terawatt/seconds of firepower, to be considered a battleship. More than four times the throw wattage of anything in service now. And big. Right?”

  “Big,” snapped Yee.

  “Long-lost as well,” Spinks added. “Most of us who work on these problems consider it a permanent loss. Best it stay that way.”

  Yee whirled on him. “But what if you’re wrong? What if it’s out there somewhere? What if the Black Flag or some third-generation Republican cell gets their hands on it? Or just a run of the mill shipping mob, for Armstrong’s sake! It would take half the fleet to stop one of those old battlewagons. And we could break the Navy’s back trying.”

  She was talking a lot. That meant she was angry again. “How do you know it’s here?” asked Golliwog.

  Spinks caught Golliwog’s eye, shaking his head slightly. “She doesn’t, my friend. No one does. If we knew, we’d have caught up to it long ago. We worry because a ship like that could restart the Civil War. All the other dictator-class ships were broken up after the Long Parliament dissolved, under His Imperial Majesty Ivan the First. Enver Hoxha was reported lost during Second Freewall. The question hinges on the fact that no one’s ever found a large enough debris field to account for her mass.”