Death of a Starship (16 page)

From there he slid into silent
mediation, considering the life of St. Niphon as that venerable’s
earthly works and place in Heaven applied to one frightened priest
sliding through vacuum in the company of terror, bound for what
might be the greatest discovery of his age. Hope, and pride, were a
spark beneath his fear and worry.

‡

Albrecht: Halfsummer Solar Space,
The Necklace, Shorty’s Surprise

He’d be damned if he understood how
they got anything done out here. The immediate localspace around
the station was a fog of dust, ice crystals, loose tools, stray
scrap. He even saw a mummified cat drift by as his engineering
hardsuit’s tiny attitude jets eased Albrecht toward the airlock at
the top of the axis of Shorty’s Surprise.

The perspective was gut-wrenching.
Shorty’s balls spun around three hundred meters or so below his
line of travel with a velocity of about eighty or ninety meters per
second along their outer edge – making their rotation about once
every forty-five seconds. That was naked-eye fast, especially with
those rockballs massing so many tons. In space naked-eye fast
generally meant fatally fast. Like climbing into the Empire’s
largest coffee grinder.

The cloud of junk moved too,
traveling through The Necklace with Shorty’s Surprise, and swirling
in some vague convection of gravitational pull and constant tiny
collisions. It occurred to Albrecht to wonder why the orbiting crap
didn’t just head out of the little system. Did they actually herd
this stuff back into place?

The whole set-up was
frightening.

The old ice cracking plant rotated
with alarming velocity as well, though being at the core of the
little dynamic system it didn’t have quite the gut-blurring effect
of the tethered rockballs, not as far as Albrecht’s sense of
well-being was concerned. A huge shaft rose out of the central
core. The conning module from some long-vanished rock tug perched
at the tip, gimbaled and counter-rotating to provide a modicum of
sanity for the approaching traveler.

It was lit up, with “Do Not Enter”
spelled out in seven alphabetic languages, two sets of ideograms, a
script he didn’t recognize, and Imperial Standard Safety Glyphs. He
presumed that was the entry. The shakedown point.

Albrecht landed the hardsuit
outside a hatch about four meters wide by three tall – equipment
lock, then, but not big enough for boats – immediately beneath the
large, lit-up glyph panels. He looked around for a keypad to buzz
in. Nothing. He considered calling on Shorty’s frequency, but given
the enthusiasm with which his last call had been met, Albrecht
wasn’t sure that game was worth the oxygen candle.

Surely they were watching him. As
junky and weird as this set-up was, it was also a damned good
fishtrap for wayward bandits – both a spacer and his vessel could
fail to return from here quite easily. Most likely neither would
ever be missed if they hadn’t logged a good flight plan
somewhere.

He settled for powering his
right glove to max output and pounding on the lock panels. If the
intermediate chamber was under pressure, that ought to echo pretty
well within. He felt sort of like the newt, hurling itself against
the hatches of
Jenny’s Little
Pearl
.

Then the doors slid back in a
widening rhombus. He stepped forward into the light where three
burly gentlemen in skinsuits awaited him.

‡

The shakedown wasn’t so bad. The
gleesome threesome – close relatives, possibly clones or some such,
and judging from their size and muscle development, engineered far
past human norms of power and strength – popped the seals on his
hardsuit. None too brutally they skinned Albrecht out of it, patted
him down for blades, slugthrowers and energy weapons, impounded
half his cash, and shoved him out the other side of the lock. The
side with air pressure.

One of the monsters had trailed
after him, proffering a receipt for the cash and the hardsuit.
Albrecht took it. “Thanks.”

“
Drink,” rumbled his minder. The
man – Albrecht thought he was a man – had a voice which practically
possessed its own plate tectonics. It matched his muscle grafts and
subcutaneous armor.

Albrecht wasn’t sure if that was a
question, a suggestion or an order, so he replied, “Lead the way.”
It was a good bet that if he were looking for crew to hire, they’d
be wherever the booze was.

The interior of Shorty’s Surprise
was every bit as bizarre as the exterior. Whatever the central body
had originally been, that had involved a series of tall pressure
vessels. These were now in the fractional-g zone near the axis of
rotation, something down around .1 or maybe even lower. The locals
had taken advantage of the situation to intercut the old
thick-walled cylinders with balconies, walkways, ladders, and every
kind of dwelling or storage space human ingenuity could bring to
bear out of a good-sized orbital scrap yard and a pressurized,
low-gee environment. People walked, worked, laughed, screamed,
fucked, flew all around Albrecht. The air smelled of a hundred
scents, everything from the strange plastic odor of re-entry rated
paint to good old-fashioned sweat to cooking with spices he
couldn’t have named for a million credits but still made his mouth
water.

And there were children everywhere.
Scampering, climbing, leaping across open spaces like wriggling,
wingless birds. Human enough – he didn’t see muties or any evidence
of bione surgeries – and every shade of melanin in the gene pool,
all mixed together in one extended, screaming mass woven in and
around the mélange of commerce and architecture in which they
lived.

Albrecht suddenly wondered why he’d
never liked children. These people weren’t dregs, he realized. They
were a breeding ground, hurtling across empty space toward some
destination he couldn’t know, just as their children leaped
unheeded into open air. He continued to muse as his minder led him
along an intestinally complex path through several of the tall
caverns, in and out of fogs of cuisine and different varieties of
labor, before stopping in front of a storefront which appeared to
be made of actual wood – that a luxury more rare than gemstones out
in the Deep Dark, he knew.

“
Here,” the big man
rumbled.

“
Thanks,” said Albrecht, and
stepped inside.

Anybody who watched virteos knew
what a belt miners’ bar looked like. Sort of a spacegoing version
of The Newt Trap back at Gryphon Landing – grubby, crowded, filled
with souvenirs and detritus of sweaty men and women laboring in
honesty toil. This wasn’t any such thing. This was...a bubble of
beauty inside the post-industrial chaos teeming around
it.

Everything wall-like was also a
wooden floor, arrayed in a rough dodecahedron. This close to the
center of Shorty’s Surprise, there was no real sense of “down.”
Brass rails served as rungs and handholds, and as Albrecht looked
he realized the floor had been laid in long, thin sections secured
with brass studs or nails.

It really was a work of
art.

The bar proper was a smaller
dodecahedron at the center of the room, connected by brass pipework
positioned normal to the axis-of-spin. That would carry utility
feeds, of course. The center dodecahedron had folding panels, so
that it had been opened up in a sort of underlit latticework inside
of which several people cooked, poured and otherwise tended
bar.

The patrons were clustered around
the outer rim of the room, hooked on to the ladders and railing,
some using little portable tables to secure their drinks. A few
people moved in groups of two or three in the open space between
the englobing floor and the central bar – microgravity dancing,
Albrecht realized.

“
This is what you dream here,
isn’t it,” he whispered.

“
Dreams are good,” rumbled the
minder, bursting into intelligible speech somewhat to Albrecht’s
surprise. “Sit here by the wall. I’ll get drinks.”

Albrecht sat. He looked. He
wondered what it meant to make a home in Shorty’s Surprise.
Obviously people were born, lived and died here. It was a sort of
fishtrap, all right, but a fishtrap for the future as much as for
the past. Offense, not defense, for a culture Albrecht had never
had much connection with.

It was the first place in the
entire Halfsummer system where he’d felt welcome. Or at least
comfortable.

The minder came back, two low-gee
drink bulbs swinging from one paw. “Here.”

“
Thank you,” said Albrecht. He
looked it over. Unlabelled.

His host grinned, a somewhat
alarming sight given the cracked ceramics that passed for teeth in
his mouth. “Sugar water. You’ve got trouble coming, don’t need to
be drunk.”

“
Excuse me?”

“
We watch the
newsfeeds.” He leaned forward. “
Carefully
. And your boat. We know
your boat. You got two kinds of problems chasing you, plus
Ballbuster Bourne floating around out there somewhere keeping the
box scores.”

“
Then you know about the Writ of
Attainder,” Albrecht said.

The minder shrugged.

“
Who are the other
guys?”

“
Naval Oversight.”

Albrecht choked on his sugar water,
spraying a cloud of the stuff. Spitting fluid in low gee was damned
near a cardinal sin for a spacer, but his host just swatted it
away. “They’re...they’re worse than the fucking Church...” Albrecht
had urgent need of a head call, given how his gut had just begun
gurgling.

“
Two problems, no waiting.” The
big man grinned again. “But maybe you’re the person to carry some
problems away.”

“
You guys
allergic to
Jenny D
too? They didn’t like her much along the water docks back in
Gryphon Landing.”

“
You might say that.”

“
Can I ask your name?”

The minder mulled that over for a
moment. “Call me Dillon.”

“
Thank you,” said
Albrecht. “Look, Dillon. I just came here looking for crew, people
that might want to ship out. Go claim
Jenny D.
from a cold orbit, if she’s
still c-worthy, and leave. I didn’t expect to find a...a...city
here.”

“
No.” Dillon’s eyes narrowed. “Who
does? We’re scum. Pirates. Fools. Ask anyone. The Empire, it’s for
rich people who walk on dirt, fly between the stars in pretty
plastic ships. We’re just who we are.”

“
People.”
Albrecht had never really thought about that, what it meant to
be
from
a place
like The Necklace. “Making, living, dying.” He stopped. “Killing,
too.”

“
Black Flag? That’s the anger of
people like us. Striking a blow against the past. This...” One huge
hand swept to include the bar, and possibly all of Shorty’s
Surprise beyond. “This is the future of people like us. I hope you
see the difference.” Dillon locked gazes with him. “You part of our
anger, Micah Albrecht, or part of our future?”

Around them, the bar had
fallen silent. Albrecht was aware of several dozen pairs of eyes
watching him. This question was important. Whether he ever got back
to
Pearl
, whether
he ever found
Jenny D
, might hang on his answer. And how many of the people in here
were Black Flag cell members? The minder had all but said Black
Flag was powerful here.

It was Micah Albrecht who hung on
the answer, he realized. Who he was, what he stood for.

“
What am I signing up for?” he
finally asked softly.

The answer was quick, brusque: “You
tell me.” Testing.

He thought that over carefully.
These people, hiding out here in the dark, they were building. Not
destroying. The violent opportunism of the Black Flag hadn’t
created this place. And Albrecht wasn’t a violent man either.
“I...I’m not made for anger.”

“
Fair enough. But mark this.
Anger’s been made aplenty for you. There’s angry people following
you out there. Black Flag has your name, too.”

“
That’s as it may be. I just want
to get on with life.”

“
So you choose the
future?”

Albrecht took a deep breath.
“Yes.”

Dillon grinned, more broadly than
before. “Good. In that case, allow me to show you the
past.”

Everyone in the bar around them
began moving with rapid, coordinated purpose.

‡

Golliwog: Halfsummer Solar Space,
The Necklace, Shorty’s Surprise

“These people need to be
exterminated,” Yee muttered on their suit band. “For the sake of
public health and safety.”

Golliwog steered his own skinsuit
toward the garish entrance. It was, he had to admit, so unlike the
localspace environment around Powell Station that he wondered if
this were a set-up. A graduation exercise. Surely no one could
build such an improbable installation as Shorty’s Surprise? The
architecture was bizarre, the maintenance nonexistent. Even the
name was ridiculous.

And this fog of garbage and scrap
and water ice. You could lose anything in it.