Death of a Starship (15 page)

A few moments later a rough female
voice crackled through the bridge. No video or virteo feed, of
course. “Shorty’s. Whaddayawan’?”

“
Jenny’s Little
Pearl
requesting approach vector and
docking instructions.”

There was snort. Then: “You must be
new here.” She launched into what was obviously a prepared speech.
“Come in dead slow, don’t hit nothing. Park it off the celestial
north axis and walk in. No weapons. Someone will shake you down at
the airlock. They prolly won’t be gentle.”

“
Uh...thank you,
Shorty’s.”

“
Whaddeva.”

Albrecht had always worked
major ports. The flight instructions here represented a fairly
unique traffic control policy, in his experience. On the other
hand, a station the size of Shorty’s Surprise didn’t come with the
sort of entrenched bureaucracy that infested the class I and II
ports
Princess Janivera
had called at. He cycled his main screen through
the closing vectors on his two pursuing bogies...six point one
hours for the God squad, and seven point eight hours for the
stealthy combat unit. Hammer and anvil. With
Novy Petrograd
nearby to document the
destruction. He wondered how mad the station administrators at
Shorty’s Surprise would be at him for bringing in that kind of
trouble.

With any luck, he’d be long gone
before either of the bad guys got here.

Albrecht cycled his screen back to
approach view, and went in on instruments rather than the usual
port control. Dead slow was dead slow. Given the sheer amount of
junk tethered to or orbiting Shorty’s Surprise, and that
three-balled bola whirling demonically just beneath his line of
travel, that was a fine speed for his peace of mind.

He didn’t hit nothing,
either. Or at least
Pearl
’s autopilot systems didn’t.
Albrecht found a place to park
Pearl
, tucked in fairly close to a
derelict gasbag apparently long retired from outer system towing
runs. The gasbag seemed to be stationkeeping with respect to
Shorty’s Surprise via an odd assortment of strapped-on thrusters,
as were the rather numerous collections of rock tugs, orbit
hoppers, runabouts, broom sticks and jack-built scooters parked in
a rough array around Shorty’s axis of rotation. Albrecht set
Pearl
up to keep station
with respect to the gasbag, with breakaway orders to go to a
ten-thousand meter standoff if the immediate area got violent or
junky, either one.

All he had to do now was walk
in. Which was to say, take a short, slow controlled excursion
from
Pearl
’s
airlock through the crap-filled vacuum of immediate localspace to
the lock at the celestial north end of Shorty’s axis of rotation.
Easy enough.

Then he realized his problem. The
main airlock was off the portside passage. The spacesuit locker was
off the portside passage. The portside passage was currently
occupied by a hundred kilos of pissed-off Halfsummer
newt.

“
Damn, damn, damn,” shouted
Albrecht at the empty, uncaring bridge of his little
boat.

‡

Ten minutes later he’d worked
it out. A couple of kilos of that horrid chicken fried rice in
the
aft
cross-passage, in front of the engineering section. Then
have
Pearl
open
the connecting hatch. The newt would go in to feed, he’d slip
through the portside passage into the suit locker and on to the
airlock.

Simple enough. All he had to
do was preprogram the sequence of his movements about the boat
into
Pearl
’s
systems. Albrecht figured on taking the codelock key with him, as
well as a pile of those credits he’d stumbled over, while securing
all the boards and boat systems against unexpected visitors.
Assuming they survived the newt, they still wouldn’t be able to do
so much as get a hatch opened without the key.

He decided to leave the aft
cross-passage open to the portside passage. When he needed to get
back, he’d deal with the newt, probably by having
Pearl
shift hatches ‘til
the newt moved on somewhere else.

No point in not giving it the run
of the ship, at least in the areas where any intruders were likely
to come in. There wasn’t much he could do if the bad guys decided
to cut through the hull.

He flexed his aching wrist and
wished whoever came after him the joy of the chase. Then Albrecht
finished setting his instructions into the systems, fired off his
letter to Public Safety Lieutenant Alma Gorova, primed the lockdown
routines, and went about luring the newt out of his way.

‡

“How much can one lizard piss?”
Albrecht grumbled, wading through the water toward the airlock. The
newt thumped against the closed hatch from the aft cross-passage,
trying to get back to its erstwhile home. His nose was being
assaulted by a rank, swampy odor that made his eyes water. He
didn’t want to think about what this stuff was doing to his
boots.

No wonder the watermen of Gryphon
landing were such an ill-tempered bunch of piss-takers. If this was
what their canals and marshes smelled like, they could hardly be
anything else. Not with spending their days out there breathing
this god-awful crud.

He cycled open the suit
locker. All the repair work he had done before he’d been chased out
of Halfsummer orbit by
Petrograd
meant that Albrecht had experienced a good
opportunity to work with the inventory. He’d actually managed to
cobble together an engineering hardsuit that more-or-less fit him –
the closest thing to combat armor a civilian could legally use.
Albrecht unclipped the welder and power feed attachments currently
in place on the suit arms. He figured whoever did the shakedowns at
Shorty’s front door would consider them weapons, regardless of the
manufacturer’s intended use.

He strapped in to the suit while
still standing ankle-deep in the mucky water in the passageway.
That meant his suit liner became wet, being infiltrated with that
same hideous smell. Albrecht was not very pleased with life by the
time he squeezed himself into the airlock.

Time to go for a walk.

‡

Golliwog: Halfsummer Solar Space,
In Transit

They flew wrapped in an inner
darkness which mimicked the world outside, breathing stale air and
the edge of one another’s sweat. Yee’s boat, nameless and
unregistered, was stealthy across all systems Golliwog could
analyze, stripped to the essentials except for a few operational
flourishes. Much of the hull was transparent to visible light –
inbound only, based on what he had seen in the boat deck – but
still the interior was quite shadowed. Golliwog presumed this
avoided light leakage through potential hull flaws, but more to the
point the low illumination kept the occupants extremely focused on
their surroundings.

It was sort of like being projected
through space in a reasonably comfortable chair.

Ahead of them The Necklace gleamed,
a bright spill of water braiding its way through space. Golliwog
knew that Halfsummer’s belt was considered beautiful, but his
aesthetic criteria had always been largely functional. Like this
boat, for example. If something cut well, without wasted material
or motion, it was elegant. Even so there was something moving about
the sight, that spoke to the human soul buried somewhere beneath
all the gene grafts and surgeries and biomechanical enhancements
that made him the bione Golliwog instead of one of Eve’s
grandchildren.

Or perhaps
great-grandchildren?

The traitor voice which was slowly
unfolding in his mind wondered if the feeling created by this view
was what Holy Communion tasted like.

Holy or not, Yee’s little vessel
was the finest boat he’d ever flown. Golliwog felt the sheer joy of
the overpowered drives reacting to his touch. Nothing that moved
had unlimited acceleration – no matter how efficiently the hydrogen
conversion process was tuned, physics and fuel capacity set limits
– but Yee’s dark, illegal little craft was close as he’d ever come
to that experience.

“
We’re going to miss him by about
an hour,” Yee muttered. She was watching a low-lux screen that
plotted their intercept. “I expected to do better than
this.”

Golliwog heard the reproof in her
voice. “It flies, ma’am. And quite quickly. But that’s all it
does.” Nothing beyond the possible.

“
Not your error,
Golliwog. We could perhaps have optimized a launch curve
from
Hinton
, but I
didn’t assess the need quickly enough. Captain Hawking is
worthless.”

“
Ma’am.” He didn’t need to comment
further on Naval politics. Golliwog was perfectly aware that he
existed on the sufferance of his late training partners, the
various Examining Boards, and distant committees of men and women
much like both Yee and Hawking.

“
I’ve been going through the files
on our destination. Shorty’s Surprise. Typical belter
crap.”

His scalp prickled. Yee rarely used
profanity.

She continued: “We could make a
hard entry, but that would not serve our purposes. They have a
fairly crude protocol which we can walk through. I am an
information smuggler, you are my muscle. I will make sure to carry
sufficient credits in hardmoney to get us past the door wardens.
Stick to your class three armament, but don’t argue if they take
anything away from you.”

“
Ma’am, yes ma’am.”

“
Inside...we want to speak to Ser
Albrecht privately, at some length. We do not wish to terminate him
unless he seems to be breaking free of our control in some
irrevocable manner. Are we in agreement?”

“
Ma’am, yes ma’am.” Golliwog
wondered where she had gone while he was waiting in the boat bay,
what Spinks had told her or what comm signal Yee had received which
now made her so furiously, dangerously tense. “Ma’am?”

“
Yes?”

“
What do I do if something happens
to you?” Free, walk free, said the voice inside his head. Don’t let
them strap you down and study whatever’s wrong with your mind in
c-space.

She laughed. It was an edgy sound,
buzzed, full of hormones and little knives. “Anything that happens
to me will have to finish happening to you first,
Golliwog.”

“
Ma’am, yes ma’am.”

He concentrated on flying.
Golliwog found himself sincerely hoping that Captain Hawking had
managed to extract some additional acceleration out of
Dmitri Hinton
. He wasn’t
feeling very confident in the face of Yee’s obvious
stress.

‡

Menard: Halfsummer Solar Space, In
Transit

McNally had not been jesting about
Menard finding the experience unenjoyable. Menard wondered if he
could hold his breath for the next several hours. Doubtless the
angel could.

The two of them lay close together,
stretched out flat, side by side in a simple, enclosed tube. Menard
wore a skinsuit, with softbubble helmet and a ninety-minute bottle
stowed somewhere just above his head. The angel still wore its red
leather armor, which strongly implied the blesséd thing was
vacuum-rated.

Their fast packet was just
that: a fast packet. A single h-q conversion engine, just enough
gravimetrics to keep the inside of the tube from being filled with
passenger jelly upon maneuvering, and some little idiot AI pilot.
Building small was expensive. Menard shuddered to think what this
thing cost. The equivalent of a significant portion of
St. Gaatha
’s entire
construction budget, he’d wager.

The same peculiar math that
required the fast courier to be massive in order to optimize the
process of entering and emerging from c-transition worked against
the ship in realspace. A couple of equation values flipped back to
what Einstein or even Newton might have understood. Once that
happened, down in normal space
St.
Gaatha
was a big, slow chunk of metal being
pushed around on an exhaust column.

Hence fast packets. When
something, or someone, had to get somewhere without delay.
C-transitions simply weren’t possible too deep within gravity
wells. Otherwise the Church Militant vessel could have just skipped
like a stone across the Halfsummer system.
That
was a piece of math and
engineering that had eluded the hopeful for over a thousand
years.

So here he was, scooting across too
many light-seconds’ distance stuffed in a pipe with a stone killer
committed to the glory of God.

This was why God had given man
prayer. As a comfort in times of trial.

“
Be mindful, O Lord,” the Chor
Episcopos began, then wondered why he was muttering. This was an
angel next to him, crowded up against him. Surely it did not resent
prayer. At least his knees did not burn, folded in here. He
addressed himself to God: “Mindful of those who travel by land, by
sea, by air and by space; of the old and young, the sick, the
suffering, the sorrowing, the afflicted, the captives, the needy
and the poor; and upon them all send forth Thy mercies, for Thou
art the Giver of all good things.”