Sliding Void (8 page)

‘I know a few nobles back home who would,’ said Calder, trying to dismiss the raw dagger of pain he felt at his betrothed’s betrayal.

‘What happens on the dirt stays on the dirt,’ said Zeno. ‘That’s an old spacer saying. Up here, you’re crew, and each other are all we got. When you’re sliding void, the light of the last dirt you touched down on might not even catch up with your ship for another million years. When things go wrong, you need to be able to trust the crew next to you. If you don’t, one of you ain’t got no business being on board.’

‘Is that why you came when the wizard called?’

‘Matobo the Magnificent? Shit. Yeah, partly I guess. He was crew. Not a shining example of the breed, but Rex still had your back when he was on board the
Rose
.’ He indicated the others on the bridge, dismounting from their command seats as crane arms lowered them to the metal decking, each chair chased by wisps of hologram displays still hungrily demanding attention. ‘There’s one thing we’ve all got in common with each other. Me, the skipper, Polter, Skrat, Zack Paopao. None of us have exactly got much going on back in what used to be home for us. In our own way, we’re all exiles, just like you.’

If the crew had that in common with Calder Durk, it was about the only thing. Calder had to stop himself from turning tail and fleeing from the two alien members of the crew advancing towards him. His instinct was to reach for a police-issue pistol in a shoulder holster, an item he had never possessed in real life. Skrat, he could just about handle
. So, this is what a skirl really looks like up close.
Like one of the baron’s tall muscular brutes of a shield-warrior, but recast as a humanoid lizard, a solid green-scaled snout of a face with the crimson eyes of a snake and the sharp white grin of a serrated dagger. He was wearing a set of green ship overalls, as if someone had decided to play dress-up with their pet killer lizard. Of course, Skrat’s uniform had been altered to accommodate the short heavy tail that seemed to swish with a hound’s enthusiasm. But Polter, the scuttling alien navigator had too much of the spider about the way his crab-like carapace advanced for Calder’s hackles to do anything but shiver as if someone had poured half-melted river ice down his back. The police instincts from his sim told him that this creature was from a race that was one of humanity’s two greatest allies in a cold, unforgiving universe – the kaggenish. But the prince’s eyes were feeding his brain with the far less reassuring image of a five-foot high six-legged crab with two wavering eyestalks, a pair of small manipulator hands, a massive pair of vestigial fighting claws, and a colourfully tattooed carapace armoured enough it could have taken a schooner-mounted crossbow bolt in its centre and still charge. Rather than rushing at Calder and attempting to shove the prince inside the round fleshy shield-sized mouth under his carapace, the knife-like mandibles of Polter’s mouth chattered in an excitable manner. ‘Blessings be upon you, Calder Durk. My ship is your ship.’

Skrat just halted, eyeing up his newest crewmember. ‘I wonder if this is what you human chaps mean when they say my prince has come? Somehow, one suspects not.’

‘Be nice,’ said Lana, her chair landing her with a bump behind the two exotic creatures. She banged the centre of the web of straps holding her inside the chair and stepped out. ‘And I think you’ll find, Polter, that my ship is my ship. At least, the last time I checked the registration papers, that’s what I read.’

‘I was merely being courteous, revered skipper,’ said Polter, a slight tone of offence creeping into his voice. Calder watched fascinated at the play of mandibles as the navigator spoke
. Gods, how long will it be before I get used to him
? He rested his eyes on Lana instead. She really was a beauty, and he found his eyes drifting down towards the firm padding around her chest, the buttons teasingly open around the top few buttonholes of her flight suit. Calder jerked his gaze back to her face
. She didn’t notice that, did she
? He was only looking at Lana like that because the two aliens on the bridge had disconcerted him a little, surely?

‘This is Skrat,’ said Lana, indicating the lizard. ‘If you ever shake hands with him on a deal, check your wrist to make sure you’ve still got all items of personal jewellery intact.’ She reached out and affectionately tapped the monstrous navigator’s carapace. ‘And this is Polter. He’s a little skittish around new people, but he’s the best navigator in this corner of the void. He can drop you down so close to a system’s gravity well that you can hear the water in your ship’s pipes boil in protest at the hyperspace translation.’

Calder looked in puzzlement at Lana. ‘Why would the pipes’ water boil?’

‘I got him started with the cop shows,’ apologised Zeno. ‘I’ll throw a few
Hell Fleet
episodes his way tomorrow, when his brain’s recovered enough that I don’t turn his mind into a hearty barbarian stew.’

‘Don’t want to fry the new man on the team,’ said Lana. ‘At least, not yet. Why don’t you explain to his highness how this lady flies, Polter?’

‘For a ship to enter hyperspace,’ said Polter, ‘she must jump far outside the gravity well of large planetary bodies – worlds, suns, gas giants. Gravity fields exert too strong an interaction on the artificial wormholes we create to cross into hyperspace. Jump out too close to a world through an unstable wormhole, and your engines will be fried, then you must exit hyperspace blind – maybe strike a world or moon. The balance of probabilities, however is that you will simply be left derelict, floating in the void between the stars. Exit hyperspace too near to a system’s gravity well, and a similar devilish accident results. Your hyperspace engines will be destroyed. At least on the way into your destination, you can signal the system and pray that a rescue attempt can be made.’

‘Shit, make salvage, is what you make,’ said Lana. ‘Goodbye ship, hello some vulture of a tug company and the wrecking yard. It’s a real art, plotting a hyperspace translation. The nearer the system you’re entering or exiting, the more complex the math of the jump. But when you arrive light years out from a system, you’re left burning expensive fuel on your sub-light drive, wasting valuable time. Lucky for us, Polter is one of the best at what he does. A real artist.’

The explanation seemed almost as inexplicable to Calder as the navigator’s alien shape. With a body like Polter’s, even trying to keep his fighting claws flat against the shell in a gesture of peace, the navigator appeared built for battle, not complex acts of chart reading and pilot mathematics
. Just goes to show you, appearances can be deceptive. A little like my darling ex-fiancée. A smile as sweet as honey and a dagger tucked below her dress for your heart.
‘Will I be trained in this art, as one of the crew?’

Polter’s two manipulator hands danced about, a distant sim-memory alerting Calder that this was the Kaggenish race’s laughter. ‘No, indeed, Calder Durk. It takes about half an hour to translate a ship between the veil of the mortal universe and the blessed vaults of hyperspace. The act of doing so, of joining with the math, is highly addictive.’

‘Addictive?’

‘He ain’t kidding,’ said Zeno. ‘Polter here is an aesthete. Kags don’t get drunk or high or addicted to sims. Just the way they’re built. Tough on the outside, tough on the inside. In the early days of space travel, Earth tried using human navigators. Most humans lasted a maximum of five jumps before they had to be retired. After that, they just went crazy, chasing the hyperspace high. Kept on jumping their ship all the way to the next galaxy until the skipper put a bullet through their skull. Artificial intelligences can navigate a jump without getting addicted, but then you’ve just made your ship smart enough to want to bug off and do something more interesting than carrying fleshies about like donkey rides on the beach. Hell, even I’d get addicted if I tried to jump us. My brain’s wiring is too damn close to yours for it to be otherwise.’

‘It is not a drug,’ insisted Polter. ‘To travel hyperspace is to travel through the lowest plane of heaven. When you breech the mortal world, you are connecting with God. It the holy bliss of the maker of all things that I feel. The kaggenish are the godliest of all creatures, thus it is we may travel within the creator’s rapture and blessing.’

‘So you say,’ observed Zeno.

‘I keep on hoping for a miracle every time we jump,’ smiled Lana. ‘Like we might exit at some shit-hole world and find our anti-matter engines have been upgraded with some nice new shiny Rolls Royce models. Or discover my cargo holds have been filled with precious metals. That’s the sort of service this girl would be happy with if I were sliding heaven, rather than sliding void.’

‘God sends us life, revered skipper,’ corrected Polter, ‘that we might shape miracles from its raw materials.’

‘And right now we’ve been sent six-foot of disenfranchised nobleman,’ said Lana, banging Calder’s arm. ‘Although I’m damned if Rex Matobo is any kind of prophet. Talking of which, where’s my oracle of the drive rooms? I’m sure I ordered Zack Paopao to the bridge to meet our new crew.’

‘I intercepted the chief’s response to your missive,’ said Skrat. ‘The old boy was not particularly polite. The gist, I believe, was that he’s rather too busy to run about on ship socials when the engines are falling apart around his ears. There was considerably more profanity in his original memo, however.’

‘That’s not a memo, that’s a cry for help,’ said Lana. She nodded slyly toward Calder. ‘And I think that’s just the place for a new crew on his uppers to learn the ropes on board. Wouldn’t you say?’

Calder had to wonder why all the others started laughing.
The joke, I suspect, is on me
.

***

Calder rode the rickety transport tube down the length of the
Gravity Rose
, listening to the bleeping of a short bipedal robot that was supposedly leading him towards the engine rooms. The low-level machine accompanying him was nothing like Zeno. A boxy four-foot tall slab of electronics with short waddling pipe-like legs. A collection of tool arms hung off either side in lieu of arms – little more than steel poles with pincers, diagnostic sensors, cutters, welders and assorted other tools. The robot had a single eye in the top-right hand corner of its flat casing, a lens behind a circle of glass that would open or contract as it stared short-sightedly at its human charge, whirring each time it refocused. It hummed and hawed and impatiently stamped its steel feet as it stood in front of the control panel at the transparent capsule’s nose. Every now and then, the robot would intersperse a single word among the digital birdsong coming from the speaker on its front – usually
follow
or sometimes
engines
. Calder had experienced his first episode of
Hell Fleet
now, served by Zeno like a pusher feeding a new client. Calder’s avatar had started out as a console tech and board swapper in
Hell Fleet
, a junior programmer attached to a carrier vessel’s SysMaint division. It seemed an unglamorous start, but then, as Zeno had later proposed, that was the point. Most of the sims’ audience were stuck in similarly mundane white and blue collar jobs across the alliance. Such lowly origins built up empathy with the customer. When all the hardship pilots died later on in a freak asteroid strike on the flight deck, it made becoming an emergency pilot – tape and virus trained – feel like an actual achievement they might have lucked into. The
Gravity Rose
made a lot more sense after the show, but everywhere Calder went, he was seeing things – experiencing things – with two sets of eyes. There was the modern thirtieth century perspective, where a robot like this was just a Sony R4-serv180 maintenance model, as ubiquitous on a ship’s decks as the Model T automobile was on the highways of an earlier age. Then there was the viewpoint of Prince Calder Durk, where the walking box was nothing more than the iron golem of that creation of sorcery, Zeno. The modern frame of reference laid over the real, hard, primitive life that had been his until recently. The sense of disorientation wasn’t helped by the fact that in the sims he was always living his tightly compressed artificial life through the character and personality of an avatar, living adventures that weren’t his. It was a mind fuck of epic proportions. Was he whisking along watching a great metal temple move magically through the star-spattered heavens? Was he riding a half-arsed independent merchantman, the bane of every TAP agent and in-system police officer, with their smuggling, unlicensed cargoes and chancers’ scruples? Or was he actually rattling through an antique held together with sticking plaster and unfounded optimism – the kind of ship that wouldn’t stand up to the first pass from the hardships of a carrier’s fighter wing? Hell, they’d be lucky to survive the radiation blast from a warning shot off the bows.

The trouble was, none of those competing worldviews seemed real to Calder, least of all the first twenty years of his life on Hesperus.
Perhaps I should be glad of that. Real would be freezing out in the plains with the hand of every loyal villager turned against me for the reward Sibylla has out on my head. Real would be having my feet chained in a pot in front of the walls of Narvalo and watching it filled with oil before some nice priest arrived to entertain the mob with a burning torch. If sorcery this be, then I suppose my hat should be off to Matobo the Magnificent
. Everywhere Calder travelled on the ship was as warm as a banqueting hall crammed with guests and toasted by a dozen roaring fireplaces. Not just the warmth he felt inside when he was in Lana Fiveworlds’ presence, either. He’d almost forgotten what feeling cold was like – and as a prince royal, he’d felt it a lot less frequently than most. Well, it was always said that heaven’s fields outside the Halls of the Twice-born lay as a perpetual paradise.
Happy to report, it’s true.
Somehow, Calder didn’t think the priests had the
Gravity Rose
in mind when they’d sung their hymns. The
Gravity Rose
was less like the ice schooners of Calder’s experience. She seemed closer to a deserted city, empty except for a handful of crew and thousands of semi-autonomous machines that tended her acres of echoing, empty cargo chambers, every space as still as a cathedral. Deck after deck of uninhabited passenger cabins, each identical with neatly made beds and powered down entertainment cubicles, each as devoid of human life as the next. Restaurants and large communal areas, all powered down and waiting the reanimating touch of contract stewards and stewardesses who could be hired in to run the decks. Even the vessel’s hydroponics domes, filled with lush tropical forests where you might – at a push – pretend you were under an honest farmers’ greenhouse – were empty of woollen-gloved yeomen tending the soil, the air in the domes far too humid to be back on Hesperus. Only agricultural robots climbing up trunks and spraying fruit, turning over the soil, a hanging mesh of irrigation pipes blasting mists of water and plant food into the undergrowth. The whole ship had the air of a metropolis emptied in the face of a horde’s approach. Waiting to be possessed by the first band of raiders approaching to brave its gates.