Sliding Void (10 page)

I left my sword behind, too
. ‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘Over there,’ said the chief. He pointed to a thick curtain with woodblock prints from the Confucian
Analects
hanging down to make a wall in front of a compartment off the central atrium. ‘Instructions inside for you, too.’

‘We’re getting ready to make a jump,’ said Calder, walking away from the command table. ‘To somewhere called Transference. That’s what Zeno says.’

‘Big world,’ said Paopao. ‘Old world, too, with large station in orbit. More station than orbit, these days. Lots of traffic. Captain Fiveworlds always finds cargo at Transference.’ He laughed. A raw, bitter sound. ‘Not always legal cargo. But then, Transference is not always a legal place.’

Calder didn’t like the sound of that. He had imagined his new life as a peaceful exile. That was the point of exile, wasn’t it? Your old existence ripped out from under your snowshoes while you were banished to some distant village on a faraway shore where catching a fish in an ice hole was news most weeks. That old fraud Matobo the Magnificent hadn’t passed him from the frying pan to the fire, had he? Besides, Calder had spent long enough as a federal agent to know that you didn’t want to be pulling the kind of shit that would bring the Hard TAP knocking on your airlock door. Lifting aside the curtain, Calder was surprised to find the room behind – little more than an annexe formed by the overhang of the engineering deck above – had been made into a makeshift den. There was a cot pushed against the walls, rugs thrown on the metal decking, plastic warehouse shelving filled with clothes and personal items. A door led through to a bathroom, and against one wall, a long bank of domestic appliances that would have had an Amish farmer flagellating his spine with a horsewhip in disgusted envy. It wasn’t a part of the engine room’s original specification, not if the makeshift orange butane bottles piled near the cooker were any guide.

‘You actually live here? You do know there a couple of thousand spare liner-grade cabins on the other side of the radiation shield?’

Paopao turned from the command table and stamped a boot on the deck. ‘Covered by insufficient liner-grade hull armour and a two petawatt deflector field. Here we are safe. X-ray laser head missiles and kinetic-kill shells may detonate off our surface and we will feel not a tremor inside drive rooms. There are only two rules a wise man should observe, Mister Fighting Fourth. One: never leave drive rooms. Two: never get off ship. Nothing but trouble, every time I leave drive rooms.’ He pointed to a space under a deck opposite his own, still filled with console banks and robots moving to and fro. ‘Have R4s clear that one out, take blankets and what you need from passenger levels. You may stay there. I will not tell others. You will be out of their hair. They can scheme and plot and steam and smuggle and hustle across void and you will no longer notice or care. There is always work here. Always work.’

‘I think I’ve got attached to the cabin they’ve given me near the bridge,’ said Calder
. The one in Sane Land
. He could hear Zeno and Lana laughing right now. ‘Where are the instructions you spoke of?’

Paopao made that loud, disapproving tutting again as he left the table and came towards his quarters. ‘You will be day pupil among boarders should you commute here each day. Robots will know. They always do.’ He sighed sadly, at his perceived lack of wisdom in the ship’s latest crewmember. ‘Instructions on cooker. How to cook rice and make ochazuke.’

Sim service in the fleet wasn’t quite matching up to the reality of shipboard life for Calder. ‘I could program a robot to do that for you every day.’

‘Pah. You teach an oiler to cook for you, you do not eat food. You consume fuel. Ones like Zeno, high functioning AIs, they have enough subtlety to steam rice. But they are too smart to want to.’

Unlike the greenhorn rescued from an ice-age colonial disaster. I guess exiles don’t get to select their duty
. He went over to the cooker. It wasn’t anything like the gleaming auto-cooking slabs of steel inside the ship’s main bridge mess. Four gas hobs sitting over an old school induction oven. No LED panels, no voice command functions, no floating screen with a library of automated recipes. No reader to recognize the RFID chips in a meal packet. No five-second ration-pack heat-ups. No pulse cooking or wave boiling. There was a laminated sheet of instructions taped to the side of the cooker.
Make ochazuke: (1) Steam rice for ten minutes with bruised stick of lemon grass. (2) Add ho-ji cha tea, sprinkle on pickled plum and mitsuba. (3) Add jako. (4) Scatter top with bonito flakes
. Each ingredient was sitting in a porcelain jar, labels scrawled in both Chinese and Lingual.

‘The way you cook your food reflects the way you live,’ lectured the chief as Calder blundered around his makeshift personal space, searching for pans and water and checking the jars for ingredients. ‘Rice is born in water and must die in ho-ji cha, in tea.’

Calder had come from a society where most meals stank of ice whale blubber and oil, where vegetables under glass were every bit as expensive as the fuel it took to heat them through to harvest. So far, he had been content to be surprised at every sitting by the variety of food on offer. Hermetically sealed meal packs from a hundred cultures and worlds and nations; flavours richer and more exotic than anything he could have imagined before. But faced with a simple meal of natural rice, tea and jako fish – none of which had survived the cold march of Hesperus’s glaciers, even if they had existed at the start of the world’s lost hot spell – Calder came to appreciate that, in this one matter of culinary skill, Zack Paopao wasn’t quite as eccentric as he appeared at first glance. Back home, Calder would only enter the historian’s scrolls as the callow prince who had lost a thousand warships and sealed the hegemony of the Narvalaks over the world. Up here, at least, he would enter the rolls as the crewman who could steam rice and put up with the drive chief’s half-crazy ways long enough to master an antimatter pile and hyperspace matrix. The meal was finished in less than half an hour. Zack Paopao sat opposite Calder, both of them crouched cross-legged at a table so short it might as well have been a circle of rosewood resting on the rug below.

The chief scooped rice into his mouth with chopsticks while his neo-barbarian houseguest used a metal teaspoon. ‘Sufficient,’ opined the chief. ‘A man who steams rice may be trusted with the care of antiproton storage ring.’

‘Is that in the fleet manual?’

‘Found it inside fortune cookie on station above Kunjing Four.’

‘Do you have any idea how crazy that sounds?’

‘Pah, you have not talked much with other crew yet, then, if you think Chief Paopao is crazy one on board
Gravity Rose
.’

No, I suppose I haven’t at that
. ‘Well, I know you’re not mad from your time with the fleet. They’ve got entire hospital ships full of medical virus to take care of stress and combat disorders.’

‘Only if you submit to them, Mister Fighting Fourth. Sometimes it beholdens man to remember.’

‘Like where you got that tattoo?’

‘A mistake. Service with the fleet often is. All a mistake.’

Paopao didn’t say anymore and Calder sure didn’t feel like he had any right to push further. Must have been one hell of a mistake, to end up swapping the company of a well-resourced finely tuned legion of engine men and drive hands on a carrier for lonely duty at the ass end of an independent trading rust-bucket. ‘And ending up here was chance, just like me?’

‘Yes. Much like you.’ The chief halted eating, a chopstick hovering thoughtfully in the air above the meal. ‘This ship collects lost souls. At first, I thought it was Captain Fiveworlds collecting us. But later, I realise, it is ship herself.’

‘The ship’s computer isn’t rated anywhere near an artificial intelligence.’

‘Of course not,’ said Paopao. ‘I would not fly on a wilful ship. Yet, still, the
Gravity Rose
collects us. Even captain Fiveworlds is harvested.’

‘But I thought this ship had been passed down the family line, a business and a vessel both?’ That, at least, was something Calder could understand. Many a merchantman back home had been passed on as an inheritance, wooden decks on an ice schooner absorbing the blood and sweat of forty generations of the same family before finally being gnawed out by iron weevils, soaked in oil and burnt for fuel.

‘Passed on by distant uncle that Lana Fiveworlds had never heard of or met before? A couple of billion dollars worth of generosity. With so much money, you think this uncle would have taken trouble to father at least one heir. That’s what clones are for, if all else fails.’

The chief was beginning to sound crazy again. Madness leaking in from between the plates of a fissured reactor. He didn’t like the way he was impugning Lana Fiveworlds, either. ‘What do you believe happened?’

‘This vessel is not right. And I say this as someone who has slid void on dozen or more ships of line and tramp freighters. Pah, she looks right, on surface. Grand old lady who huffs and puffs for every one of her seven supposed centuries. Modules from here, hull extensions from there, just like real ship would grow over the ages. Lucky cargo run two hundred years ago to coincide with refurbished navigation system. Known parts and manufacturers. But when things get tough for
Gravity Rose
, when environment turns to what fleet would call hostile space, target rich and hostile heavy, then act is dropped and coughing lady is replaced by courtesan assassin. Little too fleet of foot and fast in processing speeds for her ranking.’

‘So, what do you think?’

‘I think that I locate serial number on jump drive’s main matrix, and shipyard it was supposedly manufactured in went bust a decade before engines were supposedly commissioned for
Gravity Rose
. False. All false. We are not sliding void on genuine ship, we are sliding void on something
pretending
it is ship.’

Calder hummed at the unlikely tale. ‘Yet you’re still working here?’

‘Paopao has been collected. Where else can I go? This is my haven, right here. It can be yours also.’

‘Do the other crew know?’

‘Why should they? This is only ship that captain or Zeno has known. Polter has navigated for other ships, but who knows how a kaggen’s mind really works? Besides, our ship has collected both Polter and Skrat too.’

‘You haven’t told them? Not even Lana, I mean the skipper?’

‘In here, shielding protects against everything. But not out there. I am thinking armour protects our minds too. You can think clearly here, without interference. Mind is safe. Mind is clear.’

Calder warily finished off his rice. Maybe the chief had deserted before they could decommission him via a hospital ship. That would explain a lot. Or maybe he had been collected, just like he claimed. He wondered what Lana Fiveworlds would think of the chief’s odd theory. But then, Calder had been thinking a little too much about what was going through Lana Fiveworlds’ mind, lately. It couldn’t only be because she was the only real woman within a couple of millions miles of their metal vessel, could it? After all, when it came to scratching itches, there were plenty of side-plots in every sim intended to get you closer to your fellow actors than ever would have been considered decent in a theatre circle back on Hesperus. And it wasn’t just that when Calder had Lana on his mind, he was able to stop thinking about Sibylla and her callously expedient jettisoning of him. It wasn’t even the liberating freedom that came from this being the first time Calder had come into contact with a member of the fairer sex when he wasn’t a noble, and therefore didn’t have to worry about the woman’s gaze continually flicking back towards the throne behind the man, rather than the man himself. He couldn’t blame it on homesickness, space sickness or the boogie. When it came to such matters, the heart knew what the heart knew, and it had to be admitted, there was something about Lana. Of course, she was also the captain, but then, Calder had recently been the master – more or less – of an entire nation, so what was a little differential in rank between the classes compared to that?

Thus it was that the pattern of Calder Durk’s first honest job – non-noble and definitely unregal – was formed by daily repetition, the labour allowing him to forget what had gone before and ponder what might come after. As the
Gravity Rose
built up speed and pushed out of the system, Calder would ride the ship’s tubes to the hermit hunkered down in their armoured stern for each day’s labour. When he emerged from the drive rooms, it would be with scraps of paper containing lists of manual tapes, halfway between an information virus and a sim – less painful than the former, a hell of a lot less entertaining than the latter – to locate in the ship’s archive, play and master. Calder was glad that Zeno was still feeding him a selection of sim episodes – all in the name of civilising the prince and playing catch-up for the last ten thousand years of history his abandoned world had missed out on. It made for a disjointed experience. A day of grafting under the exacting tutelage of the drive chief, followed by time-compressed months of high octane excitement, violence, sex and power trips in virtual landscapes. Then back to the real world, where only an hour had passed and the virtual would slowly fade and become as insubstantial as a dream. Given the choice, the chief wouldn’t even leave the ECHO core, using the necessity of manning the main command table to justify his ten-foot journey from the makeshift den to the centre of the drive room and no further. Given that the tube network didn’t extend over the ship’s drive section, that meant that Calder had to spend a lot of time riding small onboard vehicles down seemingly endless drive corridors. Dropping off and collecting maintenance robots, or laying human eyes on their work to make sure it was up to standard. The only company on his trips was the robots. They were more like dogs than droids, albeit hounds that could weld, hammer and diagnose engine faults. Following him around and grumbling in machine language, parroting simple instructions. They might not be the demonic artificial intelligences of Amish mythology, they might lack the laconic street-jiving charm of Zeno, but the robots had a simple animal intelligence about them. Calder still couldn’t read the Chinese characters painted on their bodies by the chief – little black marks of calligraphy whose brevity mocked the long names Paopao had given them…
Electricity Bird That Rivets Well, Iron Turtle That Acts As Antihydrogen Reaction Analyst
. Once he found a missing robot stranded down a side-corridor, narrowly avoiding running it over as the motion-activated lights sprung into life ahead of the rubber-wheeled cart he was driving. The robots on the back had dismounted from the flatbed and surrounded the bot, warbling sorrowfully and poking it, before they arranged for a jump-lead to siphon electricity from the cart’s batteries into the robot’s powerpack. When it had been powered back up, they shepherded the lost robot onto the cart’s rear, chirruping ‘Broken positioning system’ at Calder for the rest of the journey. As if they expected him to disassemble the cart’s mapping system and swap it for the robot’s. In that one incident they had – at least to Calder’s eyes – demonstrated concern, pity and happiness. They might not be able to pass whatever tests of sentience that had transformed Zeno from property to citizen, but Calder could see why over time you would grow fond enough of them to give them names. It wasn’t an attitude Zeno shared. Zeno always acted perfunctorily emotionless towards the robots across the rest of the ship he was gang boss for. But then perhaps the android was close enough to their kind to be more realistic about robot management in the first place.