Death of a Starship (14 page)

“
Chor Episcopos,” said McNally.
“I’m sorry, sir, but this may affect my ship. What’s an
Embedded?”

“
It’s an extreme form of
Internalism. Not academically significant, nor much in fashion
among serious thinkers of my generation.” Menard laughed. “I
strongly doubt it myself, but the Embedded Hypothesis might account
for more of the facts than any other xenic theory. Though truth be
told, I find it more likely the Black Flag is behind all
this.”

“
Extreme Internalism? Like my
rockships, but more so?”

Kewitt nodded. “Yes,
sir.”

“
He’s right, as far as it goes.”
Menard stood, found his way to the galley section tucked behind the
massive coffee machine and began looking for a steak of his own. He
called out over his shoulder: “Basically, the idea is that the
xenics are among us, but indistinguishable from human beings. They
might even be in positions of authority and trust, guiding our
affairs to their own ends. Not just moving among our culture, but
sitting at our desks, wearing our clothes. Possibly giving our
orders.”

McNally snorted. “Respectfully sir,
that’s ridiculous. Too many medical checks, for one.”

“
Precisely.
Consider this: we have hundreds of worlds’ worth of parallel
evolution to analyze. There’s only so many morphologies to go
around. Goodness, there’s only so many
biochemistries
to go around, at least
in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere with a carbon-based molecular
ecology. Even so, there’s never been a genetic structure close
enough to Earth-normal to fool even the most casual analysis. No
Embedded xenic would ever make it through any role more complicated
than farming on a newly-opened world. And that only seen from a
distance, probably.”

“
So where’s the non-lunatic part
begin?”

Menard set his steak in the cooker,
punched a few buttons, then turned to lean on the corner of the big
brass coffee machine. “Well, Ken, there isn’t a non-lunatic part.
Unless you’re willing to believe in mimics or doppelgangers or some
kind of brain-eating virus. For which there has never been any
evidence.”

“
Skipper keeps a rock watch,” said
Kewitt with a smile.

“
Lots of people believe in lots of
things,” McNally acknowledged, “but that one’s just silly on the
face of it.”

“
I agree,
Lieutenant. But still, I’d like to talk to Ser Micah Albrecht over
there in
Jenny’s Little
Pearl
. He set off a nest of something. If
nothing else, there’s a lot of money unaccounted for in this
system. Someone built that shipyard for some reason.” He paused.
“Tell me, Lieutenant, can you get me to Ser Albrecht’s destination
any faster?”

“
Yes,” said
McNally. “I could stuff you into a fast packet and shoot you off.
That would violate my orders to protect and secure you, and
probably contravene your own instructions as well. You’d be
completely vulnerable in transit, and
St.
Gaatha
hours behind you once you arrived.
And you wouldn’t enjoy the trip one bit, I assure
you.”

“
I’ll have the angel. I don’t
think it would let me go alone even if I wanted to.”

McNally chewed the last of his
steak. “There is that.”

‡

Albrecht: Halfsummer Solar Space,
The Necklace

Ignoring the burning pain in his
left wrist – the bandage and med-nano goop didn’t seem to be coping
very well so far with newt saliva or whatever had gotten into him –
Albrecht nuked up four kilos of that horrible chicken fried rice
from the galley. There didn’t seem to be any suitable containers,
so he tore a cushion off the number three crew station in the
bridge and piled the steaming mess into the cover. “Boat, is the
newt at the fore or aft end of the passage?”

“
It is currently at the aft
end.”

“
Moving around or
what?”

“
It is currently
stationary.”

Albrecht had flooded the passage
with a decimeter’s depth of water a few hours earlier. It seemed to
be the kindest thing to do, since the newt was an amphibian and he
wasn’t trying to kill it at the moment.

“
Cycle the
forward hatch to that passage on my say-so.
Don’t
leave it open.” Albrecht didn’t
want to find out the hard way how fast the damned thing could move.
Steaming mess of food in the upholstery in his hand, Albrecht stood
just outside the entrance to the portside passage. “Three, two,
one, go!” The hatch slid open with a hiss, and Albrecht dumped the
steaming rice over the coaming onto the floor beyond. “Close it
already!” he shouted as a hundred kilos of enraged newt scuttled
down the twenty-meter passageway toward him.

The thump echoed through the
bulkhead.

He slid into the command station
and called up a camera view of the newt’s passageway. It was
investigating the rice. “Best I can do for you, buddy,” Albrecht
told the image, then set the main screen back to tracking his
trackers.

Petrograd
still trailed him, keeping about a quarter
light-second of separation. The new bogie, which his boat’s systems
wanted to call
St.
Gaatha
, would overhaul him a few hours
after he hit The Necklace. Albrecht had laid in a course for
Shorty’s Surprise, a medium-sized port inside the Necklace. He
wondered how lost he could get in there.

Pearl
also helpfully informed him of a new arrival to Halfsummer,
something military and uninterested in advertising its identity
that had a forty-one percent probability of making Shorty’s
Surprise within eight hours of his own arrival.

“
Where the hell are all these
people coming from?”

While he was looking at the
pitifully thin data on the new bogie, he noticed he had mail as
well.

‡

To: Micah Albrecht/Jenny’s Little
Pearl/In Transit

Fr: Lt. Alma Gorova/Public
Safety/Gryphon Landing/Halfsummer

Re: Insurance Fraud

Ser Albrecht –

I would take it as a great
personal favor if, in the time before one or another of your
enemies finally succeeds in killing you and destroying the boat you
have commandeered, you might take a few moments and write me a note
outlining what you have learned about
Jenny’s Diamond Bright
and such fraud
issues as you may have acquired first-hand knowledge of. While we
are both clear on your attitudes toward law enforcement in
particular and authority in general, your information may prove
invaluable toward saving the lives of other spacers not so
atavistically inclined as yourself. Consider it a public
service.

Remain in health, so long as you
are able.

–
Lt. Gorova

‡

Such a humorist the watch commander
was. Albrecht cursed under his breath for a while, offered up a
vain prayer, then wrote out an explanation of his experiences to
that point. All he wanted to do was leave – he didn’t give a damn
about the Black Flag, insurance, the Navy or anything else. He just
wanted out.

He made that very clear in his
note, then stored it on a hotkey to squirt back dirtside in case
things got terminally interesting before he made port at Shorty’s
Surprise.

‡

Albrecht managed to feed the newt
twice more over the next day and half. He had a feeling he might
want its help later. The creature seemed to be less enthusiastic
about charging the hatch each time he opened it, though the smell
could have stunned an AI. Albrecht preferred to ascribe the hanging
back to low animal cunning rather than any instinct to be tamed for
handfeeding. He’d considered turning the gravimetrics off to
confuse it. The repairs he’d been able to make were a bit dodgy,
and the animal was by nature a swimmer anyway and thus presumably
equipped to cope with moving in three dimensions, so he figured he
was best off leaving well enough alone.

In the idle hours of transit
he caught up on his sleep and established that yes, the military
newcomer would almost certainly be closing vectors with him in the
belt. He still had no idea who the hell that was. Exploring
Pearl
further in his
spare time, he found some of the smuggling compartments, which
conveniently yielded to his codelock key. Albrecht suddenly didn’t
have money problems any more, though he had shit all to spend it
on.

After he’d counted out a few
thousand credits, he tried tapping into the system-wide nöosphere.
Dirtside newsfeeds were more attenuated this far out, but it looked
like the Imperial Resident had clamped down on the holy heck he’d
unleashed back in Gryphon Landing. There was one city he probably
shouldn’t expect to ever return to.

Oddly, though Albrecht had seen his
own name in the ‘casts, no one had ever identified his boat. He
tried to decide if that was good for him or bad for him. Like
everything else lately, the whole business was a bit of a
toss-up.

By the time he made The
Necklace and Shorty’s local space, he was heartily sick of
Jenny D.
, Halfsummer, the
newt, the Navy, the Church and pretty much everything and everyone
else in the universe not named Micah Albrecht.

‡

It was, he had to admit, a sight to
behold. Albrecht wasn’t really an aficionado of belt industrial
complexes. He was a c-spacer, not a local yokel, and his crew time
had been aboard liners and high end freighters that moved
station-to-station. Still, he’d seen enough adventure virteos set
among rough-and-tumble belt miners and their hard-bitten crews to
have some notion of what a belt port was supposed to look
like.

The Necklace, and Shorty’s
Surprise, did not disappoint.

For one, The Necklace had an
unusually high albedo. That was what made it visible from
Halfsummer’s nights. Up close the belt glittered like a sky full of
diamonds. Which, in a sense, it was – a significant proportion of
ice chunks and a high concentration of metallic salts and crystals
in the rocky bodies created the bright reflections of light from
the primary, and also made The Necklace a rich environment for
mining.

The individual rocks and snowballs
of The Necklace didn’t tumble and shift, like asteroid belts always
seemed to do in the virteos. Rather, they were strung along in a
staggered line, resembling nothing so much as a poorly-maintained
gas giant ring system. Shorty’s Surprise sat embedded in this
glittering arc of sky like a jewelry mount waiting for just the
right gem cut to come along.

The core of the mount was a large
chunk of hardware – maybe an old ice cracking plant? – to which
three rather substantial rocks had been tethered and spun up to
rotation. That would produce a useful illusion of gravity via
centripetal force, but not normal to the intended gravity plane of
the original structure. And of course, the axis of rotation would
be in microgravity.

That was a lot of trouble to go to
for some g-force, given the prevalence of gravimetrics, but the
whole business made Shorty’s Surprise damned hard to get into in a
hurry, Albrecht figured. Also made it less vulnerable to power
failures. All that rotation was better than armor, assuming the bad
guys didn’t just settle for blowing the whole thing up. Cut down on
the armed raids, at any rate, he’d bet.

He couldn’t quite tell what the
station had been made from because it had been built out, ramified,
turned into something very unlike the crisp, clean lines he was
used to seeing in space operations areas – all the work apparently
done by crazy people. As the rocks turned on the ends of their
tethers, Albrecht could see they were covered with huge, obscene
carvings. Amid the massive, distorted genitalia and assorted
protest symbols was a collection of stone buildings, bubble
shelters, gutted rock hoppers, a scattering of engine mounts – to
manage gyroscopic precession? – and supply dumps, all tethered down
to keep it from flying off into space.

The cables connecting the rocks to
the core were clear and unobstructed, either out of some
rudimentary notion of safety, or perhaps as a transitway. The core
itself was a jumble of metal sculptures – he spotted a giant,
eyeless face spinning past, lips curled in disdain, nostrils flared
wide – boat hulls welded or tethered into place, biofactory pods
and glowing spots where something arced free with a purple-blue
glow he wouldn’t care to be any closer to.

It was a station as designed by the
artistic and the insane. It was junk and movement and life, and
even to Albrecht’s prosaic and battered soul, an obvious shout
against the cold darkness of life in hard vacuum. It was also a
maintenance nightmare and a cold metal deathtrap that wouldn’t pass
a restaurant health inspection.

“
Boat, what’s our
approach?”

“
System info says under local
control. There is no standard approach documented.”

Uh huh. “Well, would you please
patch me in to localspace approach control.”

“
Of course,”
said
Pearl
. “Stand
by.”