Death of a Starship (8 page)

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
interest 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.

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.