Death of a Starship (13 page)

“
Big,” snapped Yee.

“
Long-lost as well,” Spinks added.
“Most of us who work on these problems consider it a permanent
loss. Best it stay that way.”

Yee whirled on him. “But what
if you’re
wrong
?
What if it’s out there somewhere? What if the Black Flag or some
third-generation Republican cell gets their hands on it? Or just a
run of the mill shipping mob, for Armstrong’s sake! It would take
half the fleet to stop one of those old battlewagons. And we could
break the Navy’s back trying.”

She was talking a lot. That meant
she was angry again. “How do you know it’s here?” asked
Golliwog.

Spinks caught Golliwog’s eye,
shaking his head slightly. “She doesn’t, my friend. No one does. If
we knew, we’d have caught up to it long ago. We worry because a
ship like that could restart the Civil War. All the other
dictator-class ships were broken up after the Long Parliament
dissolved, under His Imperial Majesty Ivan the First.
Enver Hoxha
was reported
lost during Second Freewall. The question hinges on the fact that
no one’s ever found a large enough debris field to account for her
mass.”

Golliwog was fascinated.
Someone had lost an entire battleship.
If
a battleship could disappear, maybe he could too,
whispered a traitor thought. “Stolen?” he
said.

Spinks shrugged. Yee sat down,
tapping the table with a light pen, then glared hard at Golliwog.
He knew this wasn’t about him, so he just stared back.

“
If
someone has her,” Yee said slowly, “and they were
refitting her with materiel from any kind of cash or traded market,
we’d know. You couldn’t hide that much movement of mil-spec
equipment and parts. Even the black market leaves traces. So, deep
in the back offices of Naval Oversight, we track correlations on
several trends. Ship disappearances and excess yard capacity are
two of those trends. Lost ships have lost cargoes, and the missing
hulls themselves can be stripped for parts. Yard capacity could
mean refits under way, possibly in bits and pieces.” Her pen
cracked against the tabletop. “There’s a
lot
of excess yard capacity in
Halfsummer. There’s a historical overage of shipping losses in the
Front Royal sector in general. And just lately, one of the ships on
the loss list seems to have made a reappearance here.” She waved
the shattered barrel of the light pen at the hologram. “Her boat is
currently being very publicly pursued, but not overhauled, by the
Naval Reserves. Simultaneously drawing attention to the boat in
question and emphasizing the Navy’s role. As well as our apparent
ineffectiveness.”

Yee grinned. “We don’t like to look
bad.”

“
No, ma’am,” said Golliwog. He
wondered who the poor bastards were on that boat, and if they knew
how much trouble they were in.

‡

Yee and Spinks spent the next forty
minutes going through an apparently endless round of minutiae
regarding ship movements, ratios of parts and tool tonnage to
shipping tonnage maintained, and other logistical detail. They
seemed to be tapping Halfsummer’s nöosphere for local records, at a
deeper level of detail than whatever edited summaries found their
way into Naval Intelligence archives elsewhere in the
Empire.

An ensign sidled through the
briefing room hatch, saluted in a state of near-terminal
nervousness. “Captain’s compliments, ma’am, and there’s a fast boat
ready.”

“
Has the engineering crew stripped
our hull codes and transponders?”

“
Ma’am, yes ma’am.”

Yee glanced at Spinks. “Keep at it,
Jan. Tell me what I need to know when I check in. Golliwog, you’ve
got five minutes to be dressed and ready, civvies and class three
armament, boat deck. Go.”

Golliwog went.

‡

The boat deck was big, cold and
empty. Golliwog could see his breath fogging. There was a massive
hatch in the floor, and an overhead crane system folded up against
the ceiling. The whole space was a great white agglomeration of
machinery, workstations, and lockers, whispering with an echoing
hush. It was confusing to the eye, too uniform in color and complex
in form to be easily processed, except for the recognizable boats
clamped into cradles around the margins of the boat deck – two
cutters, a yawl and a runabout. One cradle was empty, and a slim,
black boat sat on delicate runners atop the hatch.

He studied her. Golliwog didn’t
recognize the hull type. Admittedly, identifying ships and boats by
external observation was a rare skill – not often did a person get
a good, clear view of the outside of a ship under way, and
stationside you mostly saw hull curves or individual nacelles
rather than entire shape.

This was a strange one, though. She
was black, with no visible markings. The reaction thrusters and
drive pods had a strange profile, to reduce the range at which they
could be detected, he presumed. She bulged to the aft, which
implied an oversized power plant. Fast, stealthy and undergunned,
or perhaps completely unarmed.

He was the boat’s weapon system, of
course.

Class three armament was only gear
that would pass a civilian security scan. No power packs, no
obvious blades. That left him with breakable plastics in his
grooming kit, wire stiffeners in the lapels and boots of his
shipsuit, and a number of useful cords woven into the seams. Still,
over a dozen distinct weapons, plus his barehanded skills and his
well-trained ingenuity.

In a way, Golliwog had always
preferred working without energy weapons or kinetics. They were
effective but graceless. Class three was
personal
.

The civvies went with the weapons
profile. There was no hiding that he was large, and dangerous. So
Golliwog went with a ballistic cloth shipsuit in a formal cut, with
a carbon-leather skidracing jacket. With his bald head and height,
it made him look like the dockside thug in any of a thousand virteo
adventures.

No one truly threatening bothered
to look this threatening. That was the theory, at least. Golliwog
was unconvinced of its effectiveness. He’d never been on a civilian
dock, not in his life. It would be a new experience.

Could a bione hide on a civilian
dock?

He waited a while for Yee, almost
fifteen minutes. Golliwog had made the deadline, it was up to her
to set the next move.

I am a
weapon
, he thought.
I await my trigger.

When she came, she was bright to
the point of absurd. Yee had traded her uniform for a swirling,
smooth fabric of a dozen or more colors, and a matching headdress.
She looked like a walking explosion, rendered in
textiles.

“
Ma’am,” said Golliwog.

“
The less said the better,” Yee
growled. A hatch on the black boat folded open. “Get in. You’re
driving.”

He got in. He drove.

‡

Menard: Halfsummer Solar
Space

“Jenny’s Little Pearl
is running for the asteroid belt, Chor
Episcopos.”

Menard looked up from his
contemplation of a data dump out of the Halfsummer nöosphere.
“Wasn’t she doing that before?”

“
Yes.” McNally
grinned. “Looks like our Naval friend,
Petrograd
, told him the good news,
then backed off to see what happens next. We’re not getting direct
transmissions yet, but the information wavefront is close enough to
adduce this from observation.”

“
I think I know
who Alma is. There’s a Public Safety watch commander in Gryphon
Landing by that name. She’s got her fingers all over this.
Pearl
made a big mess
bugging out dirtside. There’s been something approximating an
abortive coup going on down there. The Imperial Resident has
declared martial law.”

McNally snorted. “Over a boat
launching?”

“
Black Flag’s involved.” Just
saying it gave him the chills. If the xenics were the hidden,
maybe-real terror out there in the Deep Dark, the Black Flag were
the all-too-real terror that sometimes came screaming into the
light, guns blazing, fighting against rational order.

“
I see. We’re chasing xenics, not
terrorists, right, sir?”

“
The Black Flag is no friend of
the Church either, my son.”

“
They’re hardly xenics,
though.”

“
Someone would
have noticed.”
Right?
Menard sighed. Analyzing this sort of thing was his entire
life’s work, and it still sometimes gave him a headache in short
order. “How are we set to intercept
Pearl
?”

“
Not before she makes the belt,”
said McNally unhappily. “I’d much rather overhaul in open
space.”

“
And there’s never such a bunch of
libertines and free-thinkers in any solar system as your average
belter. They’re about as likely to listen to that Edict of ours as
they are to sprout reaction jets and float away.”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
You think much about insurance,
Ken?”

“
Insurance, sir?”

“
On shipping. Somewhere at the
bottom of the current dustup here on Halfsummer there seems to be
an insurance scam. Something that might well show up on Sister
Pelias’ Kenilworth-Marsden diagrams. I’m trying to connect
insurance scams to xenic activity.”

McNally chewed that over. Menard
watched as the Lieutenant’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down a
while. Finally: “Why in the universe would xenics want to run an
insurance scam?”

“
If I could answer that, I might
have a piece of the truth.”

“
With respect, Chor Episcopos, you
need more sleep.”

“
The angel’s moved back into my
cabin, Lieutenant. I think it wants me awake and
thinking.”

“
I’ll put on more coffee then,
sir.”

Menard bowed his head in thanks,
then while he was there decided to pray a while for
wisdom.

Why had the angel focused on the
missing ship?

‡

McNally and Kewitt tucked into a
pair of steaks while Menard continued to work. He’d prayed long
enough it felt like a nap, thankfully off his knees, though Menard
experienced a vague muttering of guilt over that. There was sense
of elusive thought in the air that he wanted to pin down before
resting for real. The smell of food was bothering his stomach a
little, especially the vile tangy sauce that Kewitt seemed
compelled to squirt all over his meat.

“
Did you know,” said Menard,
trying a fact on for size, “that they have a blesséd huge shipyard
in the belt here? For refitting ore trains and comet tugs,
supposedly, but this market analysis from the University of
Southport says it will take two generations to recoup
capitalization, and will almost certainly be obsolete before that
point.”

Kewitt paused between bites of
gristly protein. “Big comets, Your Grace?”

“
I am not My Grace,” Menard
answered mildly. “You may call me Chor Episcopos if you wish to be
formal, Chief.”

“
He knows that.” McNally favored
Kewitt with a sidelong glare. “Been listening to too many rocks.
What do you make of it, sir?”

“
I don’t make anything of it yet.”
Menard considered nuking up a dinner for himself. “I just find it
interesting.”

“
Whose money?” asked Kewitt
through another bite of steak.

Menard flicked a few screens along
his dataslate. “Belt consortium. Small investors, big
dreams.”

“
Making a bid for independence,”
said McNally. “Slip a few gunboats in the build line, buy off any
inspectors or reporters that happen by. This system isn’t armed
worth a da– Excuse me, Chor Episcopos. This is an ungunned system,
that antique the Naval Reserve has flying around out there
notwithstanding. They’re building hulls.”

“
What about the Black Flag?” asked
Menard, feeling a sick drop in his gut.

“
Not likely,” McNally stated
flatly. “Anarchists running an investment consortium? Seems odd to
me.”

Kewitt again:
“Embeddeds.”

A number of things slid into
place in Menard’s head in that moment. He wasn’t sure what, or how,
but he had that prickling feeling that came when an idea was
materializing. Along with the bone chill.
Am I close, Lord?
“Embeddeds...”

McNally glanced from his CPO to the
Chor Episcopos and back again. “Embeddeds?”

Menard waved him off.
Think, think.
The
Embedded Hypothesis was the least credible of the non-lunatic
theories about xenics. In fact, a lot of people considered it the
reverse, the most credible of the lunatic
theories.

But Embeddeds would care about an
insurance scam. And Embeddeds might have some reason to build a
shipyard.