Death of a Starship (7 page)

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.