Fool's War (19 page)

She sat where she was for a long moment before she managed to rewrap her hijab and force herself onto her feet.

You still have work to do
. Al Shei pulled her pack out of its drawer.
No matter what else happens, you have work to do.

 
Fastening the straps around her shoulders, she left her cabin to meet Lipinski at the airlock.

The Houston was waiting for her with his tool kit in one hand and a duffle slung over his shoulder. There was something sour in his expression as he clasped the shore-leave band around his wrist.

“Not enough coffee?” inquired Al Shei, putting on her own band. The bands would allow the Farther Kingdom’s satellite system to track them down if someone needed to contact them.

“Not enough something.” He laid his hand against the palm reader. Both of the air lock doors rolled back and Lipinski strode out into the station.

“And you don’t want to talk about it, I can tell,” murmured Al Shei into her hijab as she followed him.

Although it was a populous colony, The Farther Kingdom didn’t see anything approaching the amount of traffic of the Solar system, so The Gate didn’t require the complex organization of the Uranus ports. The Gate, had only a single ring of habitat modules attached to its core. Unlike Oberon, the docking was controlled entirely by the station’s AI. There, Yerusha had proved one advantage of having a freer pilot. For the first time, no one complained about the auto-docking procedures. Yerusha pulled the maneuvers off as smoothly as Al Shei had ever felt.

Also unlike Port Oberon, The Gate was simply a warehouse and workshop. Shippers either stayed berthed in their vessels or went down to the planet surface. There were no hotel or entertainment facilities. There wasn’t even a market. Required goods were bought directly or remotely from the surface and shuttled up to the station where they were held for pick-up. Al Shei felt a sympathetic twinge for Yerusha. Freers could not, or would not, set foot groundside. Most of them drew the line at even entering a planet’s atmosphere. True human freedom, they said, came when humans lived in the environments they created entirely for themselves. Al Shei made a mental note to tell the Sundars that Yerusha would need to be nagged to get off the ship for at least a little while. Freer or not, the human mind did not function well staring at the same walls all the time. A stir-crazy pilot was not what she needed.

The gravity in the port was at most only three-quarters normal. Impatience warred with prudence as Al Shei paced along behind Lipinski in a careful, low-gravity stride. What she really wanted to do was run to the shuttle dock. She wanted to shove her way to the head of the line and leave for the planet immediately. She wanted to deliver Dr. Dane’s packet to the New Medina Central Hospital and to have the download go without incident so that at least one portion of her problems would be over with.

All of which was, of course, impossible. She could only make her way down the curving corridor that had been wrapped in bristly, brown velcro everywhere there wasn’t a green memory board or a door. Short, narrow hallways branched off here and there, leading to holding areas or workspaces that were little more than blisters in the station’s hull. Men and women in sturdy tan coveralls bearing no sign or sigil of allegiance or religion filtered through gaggles of shippers with packs on their shoulders or bundles in their hands. The total lack of marking was the badge of The Gate crew. They went about their tasks with the kind of intensity that came either from concentration or boredom. Every now and again she and Lipinski had to step aside for an automated cart rolling down the corridor, crunching the carpeting under its soft wheels.

Maybe Yerusha should stay aboard the
Pasadena
, thought Al Shei as she and Lipinski skirted another tool cart. There’s almost more to see there.

 
Al Shei understood the need for the total neutrality of their surroundings. The Farther Kingdom needed a functioning port in order to be a functioning world, and that port had to belong to the whole colony. Like any station, though, it would have a crew confined to cramped quarters for a long time. There could not be any risk of feuds that were old before the Fast Burn breaking out up here.

The Farther Kingdom worked, but not easily. Even Resit did not pretend to understand the treaties that governed it. Besides The Gate, there was one other permanent station in orbit around the colony and that one held their diplomatic corps. It housed over eight hundred representatives whose entire lives were spent in the negotiations that kept the peace.

The Farther Kingdom had been founded while the Slow Burn was still going on. Not surprisingly, it had a large Islamic population. Several of Al Shei’s ancestors had emigrated there to save their lives as well as their faith. But so had people from a hundred other faiths. While all the settlers knew they would be living cheek by jowl with people who had been their grandparent’s enemies, the reality of it hit hard sometimes. There had been several full-scale wars, before the diplomatic corps was formed and the formal treaties put into place.

It was a world of pacifists, traditionalists, recluses and fanatics. It was one of the most brittle colonies, but it was also one of the most ambitious and it had somehow managed to survive its own problems for two hundred years.

Terse signs written in five languages guided them to the shuttle docks. They joined the queue of other shippers waiting for passage. Resit spotted them from further up in the line. She waved and then rolled her eyes and opened her hands to Heaven, seeking patience.

Al Shei queued up behind Lipinski and concentrated on reminding herself they had to be patient, that she was the one who decided they all needed a moment’s rest before tackling the problem of flushing the ship’s systems, and that shifting her weight from foot to foot was not doing anything to speed up the line.

Lipinski’s brooding silence was not helping anything. She could almost believe he really was reading the boards of security information that covered the far wall. By the time they reached the head of the line, Al Shei was beginning to get genuinely concerned. Lipinski’s style was to talk to everyone and everything within earshot, not to brood in silence.

Well, you are not exactly encouraging him,
Al Shei reminded herself. Her tired mind tried to come up with a neutral conversational opening, but by the time she decided on “Have you ever been to New Medina, Lipinski?” they had reached the arched security gate.

The line was funnelled through the narrow, off-white space. Al Shei could identify only half-a-dozen of the scanners contained in the ceramic frame. They were looking for weapons, controlled ingestibles or literatures, any encrypted recordings, or any sealed cameras. Dobbs had joked that the members of The Farther Kingdom diplo-corps were funding one final scanner to make their security program complete, except it was proving fiendishly hard to make one that could read minds.

A low chime sounded and the station’s AI spoke up in a clear, contralto voice from the top of the arch. “Passenger Rurik Lipinski will please step to Terminal 12 to supply further information.”

“All right, all right.” Lipinski tightened his grip on his tool kit. “You want to know what I’ve got in the box. I know the drill, and I’ve registered all of it.”

“All information must be directed to the security terminal,” replied the station. Al Shei suppressed a smile. Lipinski turned towards her and with an exaggerated grimace, bit his tongue.

Al Shei shook her head as he marched over towards the clusters of security booths. She wondered if the AI had a special sub-routine to deal with malcontents.

Probably. The Farther Kingdom has not managed this long by being sloppy.

 
The AI might do the talking, but alert crew members stood at regular intervals along the corridor. They weren’t carrying any weapons Al Shei could see, but that meant little.

No one else in the immediate vicinity seemed to be carrying anything identifiably objectionable, so the alarms and the station’s AI kept silent. Al Shei moved out from under the arch, trying hard not to step on the heels of the people in front of her.

The shuttle waiting at the end of the airlock was as basic as the station. It was a single stage rocket designed for nothing more than short flights. Al Shei strapped herself into a seat that in the local gravity made her feel like she was lying on her back with her knees trying to curl up into her chest.

“Five minutes to launch,” said a voice that was a twin to the one in the security arch. “Please consult your individual seats to make sure your straps are arranged for maximum safety and comfort.”

There was a buzzing of soft, mechanical voices around her. Al Shei had no intention of consulting her seat about anything. There was nothing it could do to make itself something other than cramped and undignified.

At last, Lipinski climbed through the forward hatch and shuffled to his seat. His duffle and tool kit were still in his possession, so he must really have registered everything properly. Al Shei tried to tell herself she had not expected anything less, but too much had gone wrong since they left the Solar system for her to make that really stick in her mind.

Then came the predictable half-dozen announcements: two minutes to launch, check your straps, security monitors are fully operational in case there are problems, if you have any questions, consult your seat immediately, thirty seconds to launch, ten, nine, eight…

A soft grating sounded under the floor and the ship fell away from the station. Al Shei’s body told her she fell with it. The couch was no longer uncomfortable, it was only gently swaddling. Al Shei’s joints began to relax, even though her stomach lurched at the sudden absence of gravity.

Al Shei hated shuttle flights. They were a boring interval in between events. Usually, however, it took fifteen or twenty minutes before the irritation build up. This time, though, they hadn’t been in free fall for ten seconds before she fidgeted with her chafing straps, drummed her fingers against her chair arms, and let her gaze dart around her tiny space, looking moodily for something to distract her.

 
There was a memory board and a view screen in front of her. She could call up some entertainment, or work over the
Pasadena
’s schedule one more time and see if she could get an optimistic projection to hang her hopes on.

Or she could just hang here and try for the thousandth time to understand why Ruqaiyya had married Marcus Tully.

She could remember Tully the way she first saw him. His eyes had all but glowed with energy. He talked animatedly about human potential and the unlimited possibilities that all lay in the sky. “God has created more wonders than we’ll ever know about,” he used to say. “But there’s no harm in trying!” He used to smile at Ruqaiyya when he talked like that, and Al Shei could feel her sister’s admiration for Tully’s boldness like the sun against her skin. She admired him herself. His dreams ran so close to hers. A ship of his own, freedom to pursue his own ideas, but not as a vagrant or a lone hero. That was the man Ruqaiyya had married before Al Shei had enough experience to warn her sister that Tully was too naive to be trusted with such giddy dreams.

Reality sneaked in soon enough. Tully began to see how corporate interests were valued above individual skill, how the daily business of living could make money vanish like smoke and how no one would give him a ship when all he had were dreams in his head and burns on his hands.

That was when he started to change. She had watched the glow dim in Tully’s eyes, and in her sister’s. He had stopped talking about human potential and started talking about human greed. He began to lower his sights from the secrets of the universe and focus on the secrets of the corporations that he thought were hemming him in. He began to take pride in making their systems leak. He began to enjoy it, and that joy gave him enough comfort that he forgot what he was, and allowed him to tell himself that he was still pursuing his dream of life in space, even though his wife was marooned on Earth because she had no skills he could use and he could not afford to take along a non-working passenger. Tully’s budgets ran even tighter than Al Shei’s did.

Al Shei sometimes wondered why Ruqaiyya didn’t get training as a nurse, or a steward, or even a lawyer so she could pay her own way. The
Pasadena
was not palatial, but it was liveable. She thought she knew the answer, but she did not like it. Ruqaiyya did not want to see what her husband did while he was away from her. She did not really want to know how far he had fallen from the dreams she had married. That was why she stayed on the ground, so she could pretend to herself and the family that nothing had changed.

And that is why I never said anything, isn’t it?

 
Al Shei ran her hands over the chair’s arm rests. I didn’t want to have to be the one to strip the last of her pride away.

 
She was so far gone in her reverie, Al Shei barely noticed when the shuttle hit the atmosphere, until the thrusters roared to life and brought gravity back down with a vengeance.

Al Shei did not request the view screen to show her the outside. She had no trouble with flying under any conditions, but something inside her rebelled at landings. She never got comfortable watching the ground rise up to meet her.

The roar grew louder and the thrust shoved Al Shei back into the padded seat until her spine pressed against the couch frame. Her lungs labored against a ribcage that wanted to collapse. Then, the pressure was gone and she could breathe and sit up, and, very soon, get impatient about the exit procedures. The ship’s voice reeled off a set of seat numbers and all the passengers in the named seats had to be out of the shuttle and on their way before the next set could be called.