Shooting the Rift - eARC (9 page)

“Sounds good to me,” I agreed, as we reached a landing and my field of vision became less distractingly callipygian. Beyond another door was a corridor, painted in some muted shade of not-quite white, which was probably supposed to seem warmer and less harsh in the overhead lighting, but didn’t. A strip of carpet, in varying hues of stain, completed the effect, which reminded me of nothing so much as my old student dorm back at Summerhall; certainly the last thing I’d have expected aboard a starship.

“This one’s free,” Clio said, stopping outside a random door and tugging it open. It slid aside easily, and I stepped through, finding myself in a small stateroom, barely the size of Aunt Jenny’s guest quarters. For all that, it was more spacious than I’d expected. “Head’s through here.” She indicated a door I’d taken for a closet, but which indeed led to a small private bathroom, almost big enough for a grown adult to stand in without banging their elbows on both walls at once. “Okay?”

“More than okay,” I assured her. “I’d thought there’d just be a communal one.”

“Guilders like their privacy,” Clio told me. “Especially on a ship this size. Otherwise things can get . . . tense.”

“I guess so,” I agreed, happy to take her word for it. “How many people are there aboard?”

“Seventeen, last time I looked,” Clio said. “Counting you.”

“Seventeen,” I said. I was no expert, but that seemed pretty low for a ship this size. The
Queen Kylie’s Revenge
had almost two hundred officers and ratings aboard; all right, a lot of them were gunners, or other specialists a civilian cargo barge had no use for, but even so . . .

Clio nodded, clearly reading the doubt on my face. “It is a bit high,” she said, “but John’s a soft touch. Doesn’t like to split families.” She shot another appraising glance in my direction. “Or lose the chance of a bit of goodwill from a regular client.”

“I’m sure he and my aunt have the measure of each other,” I said, trying not to think too hard about our earlier conversation on the subject.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Clio agreed, with a faint smile. She glanced at my kitbags, still lying on the bunk where I’d dumped them. “Do you want to unpack now, or go see the skipper?”

“Skipper,” I said. Stowing my few remaining belongings would only take a handful of minutes, and I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with the captain. The trip to Numarkut wouldn’t take very long, and I felt I’d need every moment of it to make a good enough impression to be allowed to join the crew on a permanent basis.

“Skipper it is,” Clio agreed, stepping back into the corridor to make enough room for me to leave.

I followed, and slid the door closed, tripping the latch. “How do you lock it?” I asked, after a moment of fumbling.

“Lock it?” Clio looked surprised. “Why would you want to?” Sure enough, on closer examination, none of the doors in the corridor seemed to have locking plates.

“Security? Privacy?” I ventured.

“No one’s going to steal anything,” Clio told me, looking faintly offended. “Where would they go afterwards? But if it really matters to you . . .” She pulled a reasonably clean handkerchief from her pocket, and draped it over the handle. “No one’ll go in now.”

“Really?” I glanced up and down the corridor; sure enough, a few of the other doors had pieces of cloth tied to them, apparently indicating a desire for privacy on the part of the occupants—as we passed one, I heard what sounded like the echoes of energetic carnal congress within, and I picked up my pace a little, trying to look casual.

Clio smirked. “Not many prudes on a starship,” she said, reading my embarrassment rather too easily.

“I’ll let you know if I find any,” I retorted, failing to fool her for a second.

CHAPTER NINE

In which my first voyage commences, and I’m sent to fetch tea.

Captain Remington was, as I’d expected, on the bridge, though not, as I’d expected, barking orders at his subordinates in the way that my mother would have been. I’d half hoped and half expected Clio to accompany me the whole way, but after steering me back to the stairwell she simply meshed our ‘spheres for a moment and transferred a schematic of the
Stacked Deck
across to mine.

You can’t miss it
, she assured me, and clattered back down the stairs to resume whatever job it was in the cargo hold that my arrival had interrupted.

In that, at least, she was right; a couple of flights further up, and I was in the nerve center of the entire ship. I must admit that, crossing the threshold, I felt a little tingle of excitement—which fizzled out almost immediately, as soon as the realization sank in that actually it was just a room full of stuff not doing anything particularly interesting, including the captain. Unlike the virts, no one was striding purposefully across the middle of the room with an urgent message, or gazing intently at complicated instrument panels. Indeed, there were very few of those, mostly powered down, and the ones that were activated were simply repeating dataflow that was cascading through the fringes of my ‘sphere. The ship, it seemed, was flown by neuroware interface, with the physical controls just there for backup.

“You made it, then,” Remington greeted me, glancing up from the chair in which he was sprawled, a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. He licked a smear of escaping mayonnaise from his fingers.

“Simon Forrester, reporting for duty,” I said, suppressing the urge to bow formally as I spoke. Clio’s reaction to my Avalonian greeting had put me on my guard, and I resolved to act a little more casually around my new shipmates, at least until I got a handle on the Guild way of doing things.

“Right.” Remington nodded, and slurped from a tea mug. “Found the crew quarters?”

I echoed the gesture. “Clio showed me. I’ve already picked out a room.”

“Good. You meet Rennau on the way in?”

“Her father?” Remington inclined his head in confirmation, still apparently more interested in his snack than in me. “He sent me up here to report in.”

“In a few well-chosen words, no doubt.” Remington chewed and swallowed the last of his sandwich. “Not one for diplomacy, our Mik. But a good man to have at your back.”

I found myself reflecting that if Rennau had Remington’s back he’d slip a knife into it as likely as not, but Guilders apparently had their own ways of looking at things, so perhaps the Captain’s confidence was justified.

Remington looked at me for a second or two, as though surprised to find me still there. “Cut along, then. Tell him to find you something to do.”

“Yes, sir.” I hesitated, wondering if I was supposed to salute or something, and Remington sighed.

“Call me Sir if I get a knighthood. Till then, stick to Skipper. Or Captain, if you’re feeling formal, or we’re trying to impress a dirtwalker.”

“Yes s . . . Skipper.”

I left the bridge, and descended the stairs, once again wondering what I’d got myself into.

I’d like to say I found my feet quickly, but I spent most of the next few days getting in the way of people who knew what they were doing, and following the instructions they’d given me in varying tones of tolerance or exasperation. Rennau had started me off by stowing cargo, heaving the pallets the drones had delivered the last few inches into place and securing them, under the direction of Rolf and Lena, a couple of transgeners who’d clearly gone all out for physical strength. Both quite literally bulged with muscle, lugging crates larger than I was with scant sign of visible effort. Despite their intimidating appearance, however, they welcomed me aboard with surprisingly delicate handshakes, and spent their breaks discussing philosophy and literature in terms so abstruse as to leave me floundering within minutes.

On the whole, I felt I did a reasonable job, and the simple physical work seemed to agree with me: by the time we were ready for departure I’d regained the muscle tone I’d been in danger of losing after neglecting my regular training regime for so long, and resolved to continue working out in order to keep it.

Not that lugging boxes around was my sole occupation in the days leading up to our departure. (And days it was: Remington’s implied threat to leave me behind having turned out to be either a test of my resolve, or a negotiating tactic to wring some unspecified further concession from my aunt.) If anything needed to be fetched, I went for it. If anyone needed a spare pair of hands, mine were the ones required; I saw a lot of the ship’s internal systems while passing tools to people wedged into awkward corners. But cargo stowage took up the greater part of my days for the greater part of a week. It was almost a surprise when Rolf stood back from the containers we’d been securing, and I turned to find the last of the drones humming away towards the hatch.

“That’s it,” he said, nodding in approval, then smiled in my direction. “Till we shift the whole lot out again at the other end, of course.”

“Which you can worry about when we arrive,” Lena chided, folding forearms thicker than my thighs across her chest. She smiled at me too. “Not a bad job for a little ‘un.” Which isn’t an appellation I’d have been happy with from most people, but since she and her husband topped me by a head and a half, and two of me could easily have stood in the space either of them normally occupied, I suppose from their perspective she had a point. I’d certainly learned early on that if you met either of them head on in a corridor, the only way forward was back.

Simon, to the bridge.
The message dropped into my ‘sphere without warning, which at least saved me from having to continue a conversation which was bound to end in embarrassment for one of us.

“Wonder what he wants?” Rolf said, picking the message up too. Remington had simply bounced it off the central node, so anyone in my vicinity could have passed it on if I’d been disconnected or asleep. (Or both. Like most people, I’d found incoming messages didn’t always wake me if they arrived while I was sleeping, but they could generally be relied on to induce some disturbing dreams.)

“Only one way to find out,” I said, pinging back a brief acknowledgement as I spoke, and went trotting off to do so.

“Thought you might like to see us cast off,” Remington greeted me as I entered the bridge. “Seeing as it’s your first time.” He took in my rumpled, and somewhat breathless, appearance, the inevitable result of taking the stairs two at a time after several hours putting my shoulder to crates heavier than I was. “You didn’t have to run.”

“You didn’t say it wasn’t urgent,” I said, earning a derisive snort from Rennau, who was watching one of the boards which had been powered down the last time I was in here. In the last few days I’d learned that he was officially the first mate, second in authority only to Remington, but the loss of the top spot clearly still rankled. And, since he regarded me as Remington’s protégé, a lot of that resentment was coming my way by default. Clio had assured me it was only a matter of time before he came round, but that looked like it would be a long way off from where I was standing.

“When I call, it’s always urgent,” Remington said, with a hint of amusement, though which one of us it was directed at I couldn’t have said. He indicated a spare seat. “Sit down, mesh in, and keep quiet.”

“Keeping quiet. Right,” I responded, and parked myself in the somewhat dilapidated chair he’d waved towards, which turned out to be almost as uncomfortable as it looked. Not that I really noticed, diving headlong into the datasphere and meshing with the
Stacked Deck
’s central node as soon as my buttocks hit the upholstery. (What little there was left of it.)

Don’t fiddle with anything
, Rennau sent, although I had more sense than to try. Datastreams were blizzarding past to and from the boards ranged around the bridge, and through them to the neuroware ‘spheres of the operators. As well as Remington and Rennau, I could make out the distinctive haze of complex algorithms surrounding Sowerby, the chief engineer, who wasn’t actually physically present, but meshing in from the power plant on the lower decks, no doubt with her largest wrench poised to deal with any unforeseen difficulties: Sowerby was a great believer in percussive maintenance. One of her assistants was manning the board on the bridge, although I doubted he’d have much to do with his boss on the job.

“Take us out,” Remington said, and a virtual image appeared in my ‘sphere, apparently being relayed from a vantage point somewhere on the exterior hull. Nothing but pitch darkness at first; then a ring of light appeared, growing rapidly, until it filled the whole field of vision. After a second or two I was able to make out a hemispherical indentation, lined with bright, reflective metal, and realized I was looking at the interior of our cradle on the outer hull of the docking arm, from which we’d just disengaged. As the
Stacked Deck
pulled further away from its starting point, our shadow shank slowly to an almost imperceptible stain at the bottom of the hollow. A moment later, as the field of vision continued to expand, I was able to make out the domes of other ships, still nestled into their docking ports, and the metallic craters of the nearest unoccupied ones, their smooth, curving sides indented with the outlines of docking hatches and umbilical sockets.

“We’re clear,” Rennau reported, although that much was obvious from the supplementary data streams; later, I was to be more grateful than I could possibly have imagined for the Guild tradition of reporting verbally and keeping an eye on the manual boards in spite of the instant awareness of all the ship’s systems meshing in gave you, but at the time I really couldn’t see the point.

Then, unexpectedly, he glanced in my direction.
Enjoying the show?
His expression was still sardonic, and the ping was as devoid of emotional overtones as they always were, but even so it was the first thing he’d done since I came aboard that seemed even remotely affable. So I nodded a reply, determined to take the overture at face value.

Never seen anything like it
, I sent back.

“That I can believe.” His tone was as dry as ever, but I thought I could detect a hint of amusement beneath it. Besides, it was perfectly true: I hadn’t.

I’d seen the exterior of Skyhaven before, of course, but only from viewing ports in the orbital itself, or from a surface to orbit passenger boat. The commercial side, with its array of freight docks, was entirely new to me.

As the image widened still further, the sheer size of the cargo port began to become apparent; the docking arm we’d just disengaged from must have been a good half a mile from end to end all on its own, and there were four more of them jutting from the habitat’s main hull in its immediate vicinity, casting shadows across the nearby superstructure that looked curiously like a smudged handprint. And the sky around them was full of ships, over a thousand if the datastream from the sensor array could be relied on. (Which, of course, it could, otherwise we’d never have been able to navigate safely through the swarm.)

I’d been expecting us to continue separating from the habitat along the same vector until we were completely clear of it, but we were still only a few hundred yards from the vast cylinder of the docking arm when Sowerby booted the gravitics (possibly quite literally, knowing her) against the weak gravity field of the orbital, bouncing us into a neat parabola over the curving metal horizon.

Avalon rose into view, and I caught my breath, abruptly conscious for the first time on a truly visceral level that I was leaving my homeworld, and the system of which it was a part, possibly for ever. If Remington really decided to dump me on Numarkut, I could be stuck there for good. On the other hand, if I impressed him enough to offer the apprenticeship he’d half promised, there was no telling where the
Stacked Deck
would be heading for next. True, he seemed to do business with Aunt Jenny on a fairly regular basis, but there was no guarantee they always met on Avalon—since she’d revealed her avocation to me, I felt I could take nothing about her for granted any more.

The planet was three quarters full, a lush blue crescent, the muted greens and browns of its land masses veiled by wisps of cloud: white for the most part, though in one or two places its face was marred by the mottled bruising of thunderheads. On the night side, amid the phosphorescent tendrils of cities and roads, I caught a brief flicker of lightning out in the rural hinterlands, and felt a momentary flare of nostalgia—the Forrester estates would be engulfed in the torrential autumn rains now, the drops hammering against the window of my old room, with no one there to listen to it.

“Know why we’re not heading straight for the rift point?” Rennau asked, in a tone that made it clear he expected a negative answer.

I nodded. “The planet’s got more mass for the gravitics to kick against.” We could just have boosted against the orbital, but we’d have accelerated a great deal more slowly that way. “And the sooner we get to the rift point, the sooner we get to Numarkut. The sooner we get to Numarkut, the sooner we get paid for the cargo.”

Remington laughed, although whether at my answer or Rennau’s expression of surprise I couldn’t be sure. “Thinking like a Guilder already,” he said.

“Up to a point.” Rennau sent an orbital dynamics graphic to my ‘sphere.
We can get an additional boost from slingshotting round it before Sowerby powers up.
Which I already knew, of course, from listening to Naval gossip behind the drawing room door as a child, once I was old enough to sneak out of bed during Mother’s dinner parties, and the cramming I’d done for the Academy entrance exam. But I’d attended enough soirees as an adult, where I was expected merely to be decorative and laugh at the right people’s jokes, to realize that letting on how much you know isn’t always a good idea.

“I see,” I said, after pretending to study the diagram for a moment. “That way we get to use the planet’s mass twice.” Then it struck me that was the second time I’d thought of my old home as just “the planet,” rather than “Avalon.” Perhaps I was beginning to adjust to my new life as a spacefarer faster than I’d thought.