Sliding Void (11 page)

One day, while searching for rice in the chief’s den, Calder found an old fleet dress uniform sealed inside a rug-covered crate. A short blue jacket with three buttons on either side, rank stripes on the sleeves and a chief engineer officer’s striped shoulder boards. The sole clue to the uniform’s origin was the ship’s name on the cap – the TAFC
Warrior
. Later on, back in his cabin, he looked up the vessel’s name in the ship’s archive, but the only thing he found was the teasingly vague title of a redacted and recalled news item from fifty years ago.
Mutiny on the jump carrier Warrior. Story sealed under NAVCOM authority. Declassification expiry two hundred years
. Well, that put a new light on things. Not so much collected by the ship, as avoiding collection by the fleet’s master-at-arms. It certainly explained why a crewman with Zack Paopao’s experience was holed up in an antique tramp freighter.

‘Everyone’s hiding from something,’ Calder told the dog-sized robot cleaning his cabin’s metal floor. ‘And they won’t find any of us out here.’

‘Please repeat your instructions…’

‘I want to go home,’ said Calder. ‘But I no longer know where that is.’

‘Indicate where you wish me to start…’

‘Everywhere and nowhere. Just like me.’

‘I need specific tasking…’ said the robot, brushes underneath it rotating as it washed.

Yes, I know how that feels.

CHAPTER FOUR – The girl from nowhere

Lana sat behind her desk in the day cabin, a hologram model of the
Gravity Rose
floating above it, colour coded for the areas of hull fatigue, systems maintenance and ship repair requirements. When she had started out as the vessel’s skipper, that model had been painted as emerald green as a field of verdant grazing land. Now it was a blotchy red patchwork that looked almost as sick as the accounts of Fiveworlds Shipping. A little less healthy after every trip
. Damn it, I’m not going to sell out. This ship is my life. She’s all I’ve got
. But surviving meant Lana was going to have to take on cargoes that would pay better. And out in the Edge, those were just the kind of loads that would be under surveillance by TAP agents. Smuggling was a dirty business, a trade as spotted as the model of her ship, but it was also a lucrative line of work, and the universe wasn’t exactly offering Lana too many alternative choices if she was going to stay afloat.

‘Which would be the cheapest repair to carry out and remove from our most urgent register?’ Lana asked the ship’s central computer, granny.

‘Our solar panels,’ said a disembodied, honeyed voice from her desk’s interface. ‘Replacement would also save on the costs of main engine fuel being diverted to power our internal systems.’

‘What efficiency are the panels running at?’

‘Forty percent while in-flight at optimum range from a sun.’

Lana waved the ship’s model out of existence as a knock on her door sounded.

‘Calder Durk,’ announced the computer.

‘Let him in, granny.’

Calder entered the cabin. He was looking hale and healthy on a proper diet, putting on weight under his crew overalls. But then, after seal fat and whatever the hell else they hunted back on Hesperus, anything probably tasted good.

‘Mister Durk.’

‘Skipper, you said you wanted to see me.’

She signalled the chair in front of her desk. ‘Just wanting to check that Zeno isn’t burning out too many of your synapses with his education regime. Being able to find your way to my cabin means you’ve passed my test. Also, I wanted to say that we’re all quietly impressed by how well you’re adapting to life on board the ship. Life in the modern age as well. You’ve probably already realised you won’t get too much praise from Chief Paopao, but the fact he’s not bombarding me with calls demanding I transfer you to bridge duty is as good as it gets at the business end of this vessel.’

Calder shrugged as he sat down. Was it Lana’s imagination, or was the man uncomfortable receiving praise? ‘Where I came from, captain, you didn’t get too many opportunities to learn things twice. Not even when your father was king.’

‘My father’s king. That’s a hell of a pick-up line. Well, you’re good to stay if you don’t feel your royal bloodline is being squandered kicking about the
Gravity Rose
. Otherwise, we’ll be heading for the closest thing to civilisation out in the Edge, a world called Transference. Transference Station is the largest port around these parts. Plenty of work to be had there if you want it, on the station or the world below, and a pretty solid state safety net to make sure you’ll never starve or die from lack of medical treatment.’

Now Calder seemed more worried than embarrassed. ‘And what would I do at such a place?’

‘Whatever the hell you like. You’re not in the Middle Ages now. Take an apprenticeship, go for a corporate indenture, sign up for tape learning and accept whatever work comes your way. Shit, live in social housing, eat greasy vat-grown crap and do sims every hour you can remain awake. You can relive the last millennia of human history in a year or so, catch up on everything you and your ancestors missed freezing your sorry asses off on Hesperus.’

‘That wouldn’t be living.’

‘Smart man. You’d be amazed how many people waste a lifetime coming to that conclusion.’

‘I’d like to stay on board.’

‘Most worlds that get settled by humanity aren’t like Hesperus,’ said Lana. ‘After you’ve felt a real breeze on your cheeks and the sun warming your hair, you might change your mind. When winter arrives on Transference, it won’t seem so different from home. And if you don’t like the midges and drizzle dirt-side, there are plenty of orbital habitats inside the alliance that are larger than worlds now. Inside those places, you can set your watch by the time they turn on their artificial rain.’

‘I’ve only just discovered the rest of the universe exists,’ said Calder. ‘At least, I’ve realized the night sky isn’t a heaven full of warring gods…’

‘…and now you want to see it,’ said Lana. ‘I remember that feeling.’

‘But you were born on board one of these vessels, weren’t you?’ asked Calder. ‘I mean, you’ve inherited a starship. That means you must have been part of a ship family. The stars in your blood and all that…’

The stars in my blood. Maybe they are.
‘Hell if I know,’ said Lana. Calder’s chiselled features appeared more puzzled than usual, so she continued. ‘You’ve boarded free trader vessels in those
Hell Fleet
episodes you’ve been skimming, right? Look around my cabin. What’s missing from the room?’

‘Pictures of the previous skippers,’ said Calder. ‘Maybe a few busts of them, too.’

‘Full marks. The way previous captains are venerated by a ship family is close to ancestor worship. But the truth is, I’m not sure if I was raised in a settled community or born on board a free trading vessel. About the only thing I really know about myself is my DNA-dated true age and the fact that Lana is probably my real first name.’

‘You were adopted or raised in a children’s home?’

‘Not even close,’ said Lana. ‘I arrived at Transference Station as an adult, steerage on a refugee fleet escaping the civil war in the Truespitze League, an independent confederation of twenty supposedly highly civilised systems that completely went to pieces over whether they should seek membership with the Triple Alliance, stay self-governing, or join a rival superpower called the Skein. You’ve got to give it to humanity, when we turn on ourselves; we know how to do it properly. I was one of half a million fleeing refugees racked and stacked in cold storage. What the evacuation fleet didn’t over-advertise about travelling in cryogenic suspension, though, is the same shit they inject into you to allow your body to survive hibernation sleep in a coffin has a one in hundred chance of giving you brain damage. A hospital put me back together again at Transference Station, but I lost all my memories escaping the civil war; although what Zeno tells me of it, I didn’t miss much.’

‘Zeno was there too?’

‘Crewed with the refugee fleet. As an android he was perfect for the duty – Zeno didn’t need oxygen during the voyage, and even in hibernation, that many refugees places a hell of a strain on a ship’s oxygen recycling systems. Zeno stayed on Transference Station a while working for the same refugee charity that had paid to pull us out of the war zone. That’s how we met – he’s been with me ever since. So what do I really know about myself? I was wearing a bracelet with Lana etched on it, so that’s either my first name or maybe my favourite cat. I have my true age, with a few years’ margin of error, from the hospital’s medical scan. I’ve never been matched to any known bloodlines, but then the closing arguments inside the League were debated with nukes and bioweapons, and there wasn’t a whole load of databases left to query after that. Must have been pretty desperate to be travelling steerage in a hibernation coffin, though.’

Calder indicated the walls of her cabin. ‘If you were a refugee, how did you inherit the
Gravity Rose
?’

‘The ship arrived a year after I’d been discharged from hospital, through a blind trust and a lawyer who’d traced me, insisting I was the rightful heir of the Fiveworlds legacy. The lawyer told me the
Gravity Rose
’s entire crew complement was down on the League’s capital world when the first of the weaponized plagues struck. Whole planet was placed under quarantine and every shuttle that tried to leave was shot into atoms. The captain was the last to get sick and die, but before he did, he called the
Gravity Rose
and ordered granny to push on out on auto-pilot, sub-light speed, and head for the nearest alliance peacekeeping station.’

‘But what about the crews’ logs, the ship’s records? Granny must be able to tell you more about your family?’

‘Story I heard from the lawyer was that granny had been ordered to engage a law firm to trace any surviving kin, hand over the Fiveworlds family’s DNA profile to make that happen, then granny was to erase her data banks. Fresh start and a blank slate for any surviving heirs. The ship’s robots had been ordered by the old skipper to clean out every crew cabin, load up all personal effects and records and jettison them into the sun. They did a thorough job. For all of the centuries on her clock, I got the
Gravity Rose
more or less factory fresh. My DNA was the only match the lawyer ever found among the refugees or in any alliance database. Maybe I was crew dropped off on another League world to work some side-deal? Maybe I was the skipper’s daughter, my parents suspected things might get hairy and they wanted to keep me safe, so they found an excuse to drop me off early? Whatever happened, it meant I was just lucky enough to get lifted out before those idiots in the League switched off the lights on their civilisation.’

‘Shit,’ said Calder. He sounded like he meant it.

Calder’s worried eyes tracked her as she got up and walked over to the porthole, gazing out on the universe he wanted to see. ‘I’ve been following up various leads over the years, trying to piece a little more together about who I might be, but there’s very little to go on. I think the
Gravity Rose
’s previous crew were using the Fiveworlds Shipping name as an alias, a front company. They were into smuggling or worse, and operated off the grid as far as possible. There are no legitimate records of shipments run by this ship prior to me inheriting her – not as the
Gravity Rose
, and there’s no data trail inside the Edge of a ship family called Fiveworlds. So I don’t push too hard anymore. If I ever find out who I really am, I suspect I might not like the answer. But as I said, my first name probably really is Lana. As to the rest…?’ As she finished the story, Lana realised that she wasn’t even beginning to be ready to hand her nearly bankrupt vessel over to one of the big corporates
. The Gravity Rose is the only home I’ve got, and all that’s left of my family, too. Damned if that’s worth swapping for a bank account stuffed full of money. What would I do without her? Buy a bar on Transference Station… sell drinks to spacers and bore strangers with stories of all the planets and the places I saw when I still had the stars in my blood? Fuck that. And what the hell would Zeno, Skrat, Polter and the others do without me, without the Rose
? But deep down she knew the answer to that. They’d find another ship to crew on. Maybe Lana could too, although no sane captain would want an ex-skipper with a second opinion flashing in her eyes every time an order was issued. Lana would have to fake her license and change her name, and as it was, she was barely clinging onto her fragile second identity.

She turned around and found herself facing Calder, the warmth of his kiss as much a surprise as his body manoeuvred in front of hers. It lasted far too long until Lana recovered her posture and shoved him back. ‘What the hell! Where’d that come from, Prince Charming?’

‘I know what it’s like to walk away from everything in my life, Lana.’

‘Don’t think that we’re alike! You know what you’ve lost. Far as I’m aware, Calder Durk, I might be married with children waiting for me in some refugee camp wondering where the hell mummy’s got to. So you reserve your sympathy for your sorry ass and remember the bars on my shoulder means that saluting me doesn’t include pushing your tongue down my throat.’