Strider's Galaxy (27 page)

"How safe do you think the
Santa Maria
would be?" she said. She pulled a knee up to her face for inspection. Dammit, somewhere along the line she'd picked up a bruise. She wondered when that had happened. "I have a responsibility to my personnel, after all. A very heavy responsibility."

"Can I be blunt?"

"You're normally more than that."

Holmberg laughed. "I'm not really qualified to judge, but I think the
Santa Maria
has every bit as good a chance of making it home safely under O'Sondheim's captaincy as it would have under yours."

She'd been long enough in the bath. The skin of her fingers was beginning to crinkle as the water cooled. She stood up, making waves that smacked Holmberg under the chin. Again she found herself slightly annoyed that her nakedness was having no effect on him. On the other hand, she suddenly reflected,
his
nakedness was having no particular effect on
her
. Even so, her confidence could have done with a dose of atavism right now.

"Oh, yeah," said Holmberg, washing an armpit. "I forgot to mention. There's a kid—a little boy—who wants to stay here as well."

Toweling herself, she stared at him. "We can't take a kid along. What about his mother?"

"She's dead. When you put five gees on the craft she was standing by her bunk. She fell and broke her neck on the edge of it. The medbots couldn't get there in time to help her."

Oh great,
thought Strider,
something else to be guilty about. I've created an orphan.
No matter how much she tried to rub herself dry, the area between her shoulderblades still stayed wet. She seemed to be on the verge of throwing away the chance of ever seeing Mars again. If what Holmberg had said was true, only a few of them would be joining the Helgiolath. Half a dozen human beings and a humanoid bot living in a community of beings that looked bad enough to make you want to turn away. Umbel alone knew how they smelt.

"I'd like to fight in this war," she said, working the corner of the towel into her left ear. "The funny thing is, I'd sort of assumed that you'd try to stop me."

Holmberg seemed to have found something fascinating in his navel. He was picking at it with a fingernail. "Why should you think that?"

"Well, you've been a bit of a difficult sod."

"So have you." Whatever it was that he'd been trying to scoop out now seemed at last to have come adrift. "This is the biggest adventure of my life. I don't want to go home now with my tail between my legs."

Strider climbed into her jumpsuit. Her back still felt wet. "You're not the man I thought you were, Marcial."

"I know. I've spent several years living with your opinion of me, and it hasn't been the best of times." He looked up at her with steady eyes. "Ever since this mission started it's been my duty to represent the personnel whose opinions you've far too often ignored, Leonie. I've told you before, but you didn't properly listen. Now it's time I started to take a few decisions on my own behalf."

She watched his bloated body as he sank himself further into the bathwater. "You've been shamming."

"Shamming about what?"

"About how things should be run aboard this ship."

"To tell you the truth," said Holmberg, "I think most of the people on the
Santa Maria
should have been left back at home. Have you got any nail-scissors?"

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I want to cut my toenails."

"No—I mean why do you say most of the personnel should have been left behind?"

"Because they're useless. If I'd been setting up this expedition for the SSIA I'd have made the crew no more than a dozen strong, and more likely half that."

"Hardly enough to colonize a planet," she said.

"My opinion, for what it's worth," said Holmberg with exaggerated gravity, "is that the first colony on any planet is doomed, no matter how many people are involved. There are going to be diseases—remember that killer diseases used to wipe out people by the hundreds of thousands? There are going to be creatures that want to eat us—not so much the big ones, which we can always laz if we're fast enough to see them coming, but the little ones, which we don't notice until it's too late."

"So why," said Strider, pausing by the door, "did you come along?"

"Because I wanted to." He smiled at her. "The stars are the final frontier, aren't they?"

His smile faded.

"Look, Leonie, I don't care what the rest of you decide to do. I want to join the Helgiolath. I want to help this poor bloody galaxy get itself out of the mess it's got into. Like Lan Yi, I want to see what happens when Polyaggle gives birth to her new brood. I want to be there when the Autarchy commander who decided to destroy Spindrift is suddenly faced by a fleet a million strong."

"Yeah, that's what I want to do as well. But . . ."

"But
what
? Let the
Santa Maria
go, Leonie, if that's what you really want to do. You've faced far more than you were ever expected to."

She ran a finger down the side of her nose. "So just the bunch of us stay here, huh? I dunno—just thinking about it makes me feel like I'm betraying the people under my command."

"I don't think that's the way they'd see it." Holmberg drew in his breath. "When it comes down to it, Leonie, the blunt truth is that most of the people on board don't give a damn who's running the command deck so long as they're doing it efficiently and, above all, unobtrusively."

Strider shrugged. "I'm going to make my mind up later." Once more she started to leave, then turned back. "How come you're so keen for glory yourself, Marcial? You've never struck me as being that type."

"I'm the last of a family of Reals. When I was fifteen we lived in Baghdad, where virtually everyone else was an Artif—hell, Leonie, we were unusual in being a family at all. One day my father got a bit stoned on ziprite and started telling all the people in the café he was in that Artiffing was immoral—that there was very good reason why we were all given just a single life. In the end they dragged him out into the street and drove a truck backwards and forwards over him."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know that."

"Then they came to our house and found my mother and my sister and did the same to them." Holmberg began to climb out of the bath. "It's OK to talk about it now. It was a long time ago, and most of the pain has gone. I was lucky—I was on the other side of town trying to make it with a girl whose name I can't now remember but who seemed very important at the time. What I
can
remember is getting home and discovering I didn't have a family any more. Toss over a towel, will you? Thanks. Polyaggle lost far more than a family on Spindrift. She doesn't seem to feel it the way you and I would, but I want to help right the wrong on her behalf, if I can. And there's not very much the good old human species—present company excepted, of course—has left to offer me. Any more explanations wanted?"

Despite his denial, she sensed that all this was a painful area for him. "No. Thanks for—well, for opening yourself to me this way."

"Even if I find I'm the only human being left in The Wondervale, I want to be here." He grinned at her. "I'm perfectly accustomed to loneliness."

#

Looking at the Helgiolath was never going to be easy, Strider thought for what seemed like the thousandth time. The faces of Kortland—assuming they
were
actually faces—were in the communications Pocket now. Strider steeled herself not to turn her gaze off to the side.

"We've discovered how we might be able to get this ship home," she said, "but a few of us have decided we want to stay here in The Wondervale and help you people as best we can. Will you allow us to do that?"

Kortland didn't answer immediately. "I think it may be possible," he said after a while. "There are difficulties."

"Such as?"

"The air we breathe has less oxygen than you are accustomed to. If any of you want to live aboard one of our vessels, either you'll have to bring your own environment or you'll require surgical modification."

Strider gulped. The thought of remaining suited up for the rest of her life was an unpleasant one. The thought of "surgical modification" was not particularly attractive either. She didn't like the idea of Helgiolath surgeons poking around in her entrails.

"The modification would be neither painful nor gross," Kortland was saying. "It is a very common procedure. I have myself undergone it several times when it has been necessary to meet other species face to face."

"What sort of modification are we talking about?" No way was Strider going to spend her remaining days looking like a Helgiolath.

"Your lungs would require alteration. The bacterial infrastructure of your body would need to be changed. The outer surfaces of your eyes would be toughened. There would need to be some minor brain surgery to alter a few of your sensory impressions, notably your sense of smell—and there'd almost certainly be a few trivial changes to your own bodily chemistry as well. Species of utterly different forms, as yours is to ours, normally stink intolerably to each other."

Yeah. Strider could imagine that Kortland and his kind would stink. It hadn't occurred to her that the same might be true the other way round.

"This doesn't sound like minor surgery to me," she said.

"The practices are well established," said Kortland. Ten Per Cent Extra Free was introducing a touch of weariness to the alien's voice. "We have machines that routinely perform such tasks."

"I need to think about this. I need to talk it all over with the few of us who want to join you."

"Please don't be too long." She could sense that Kortland was becoming utterly exasperated with her. "Your assistance is not very important to us. In fact, to be frank—to use your word again—your presence among us would be more of a nuisance than a help. But we're prepared to put up with that if we can have your Images and the Spindrifter as well."

"I have a better idea," said Strider. "Give me a moment."

"Granted."

"Listen here, Ten Per Cent Extra Free," she subvocalized.

I'm listening. I could hardly be doing anything else.

"You and the others have already done a lot to the
Santa Maria
. What more could you do to it?"

A great deal.

"Could you turn it into the best fucking fighting vessel in The Wondervale?"

We could make it a good fighting vessel. We are unable to give it the power of procreation.

"Then we stay here and fight. Damn what the personnel want to do. We can go home later."

This will not be a popular move.

"I don't care."

Very well.

"How long will it take?"

Four hours.

Strider put her forehead back into the communications Pocket. "Within four hours you'll have an extra warcruiser," she said to Kortland. "Our Images will transform it within this time. Can you wait that long?"

"Possibly. Probably. Yes."

IT WOULD BE BEST IF YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE WERE UNCONSCIOUS WHILE THE TRANSFORMATION IS BEING EFFECTED,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"We make contact again in four hours," Strider told Kortland.

"Agreed."

The Helgiolath's semblance vanished from the communications Pocket.

"What do you want me to do?" Strider impatiently asked the Image. "Go all over the ship knocking everyone over the head?"

That will not be necessary. I am speaking with Pinocchio at the same time as speaking with you and explaining to him what we are about to do. He alone will be aware of it all. As for Polyaggle and you Humans,

#

you have been unconscious for three hours and fifty-three minutes.

Strider slumped by the communications Pocket. There had been no sensation of the passage of time at all, yet her mouth tasted the way it always did when she had just woken up from sleep. She rolled her tongue over her upper front teeth, feeling their griminess.

"That's it?" she said.

The task has been performed.

She moved to an adjacent Pocket and called up into it a representation of the
Santa Maria
.

"Oh hell," she said.

The craft she was looking at was virtually unrecognizable. The
Santa Maria
had been designed for the mission it was intended to accomplish. It had not been pretty or sleek: it had been competent, if perhaps clumsily so. The Images had modified it so that it looked a little better and had been able to make planetfall, but still the
Santa Maria
had not been a truly elegant craft. Now it was an altogether different fish. It looked like a long dart, complete with tail feathers—in fact, it looked much like one of the Helgiolath warcruisers that formed the fleet among which the
Santa Maria
floated. It was visibly a creature designed purely for space: planetfall was no longer an option.

"What have you done?"

What you asked us to do.

The command deck itself had changed. The Pockets were still there, but in front of each of them there was now an elaborate keyboard. She looked down at the one before her and realized that she could understand not just the conventional Argot symbols on the keys but also all of the others. This one here would open one or other of the blisters on the side of the
Santa Maria
, the blister concerned being determined by the use of other keys. Two of the blisters still contained shuttles; the others were each armed with twenty-three missiles of various types. Twenty-three seemed a perfectly natural number for the Images to have chosen, and then she remembered . . .

"It's not just the
Santa Maria
you've modified, is it?" she said. "You've modified
us
as well."

That was an essential part of the alteration you asked us to make. You are components of the warship.

Strider could feel the difference. It was as if her blood were coursing more swiftly through her arteries. She drew herself up to her full height, reached out her arms to either side and slowly clenched her fists. She felt
stronger
. And
faster
.

"These aren't just illusions I'm sensing, are they?" she said.