Death of a Starship (6 page)

This thought came to
him:
We find no xenics among the stars, so
we make our own to watch over us.

The angel was an unfortunate fact
of life at the moment, but it was not what had been nagging at him.
Rather, his thoughts kept ranging to the Internalist position on
xenics. Sister Pelias had been quite insistent about her...well,
call it intuition. Menard had climbed over, around and through
enough alleged xenic sites to have a thoroughly jaded view of
Externalist thinking. To put it somewhat unkindly, he was quite
certain that there were no boojums hiding in secret bases at the
bottom of craters waiting to either save or destroy the human
race.

That being the case, were the
Internalists any closer to the truth?

He didn’t understand how they could
be. Not logically.

Whatever and wherever the
xenics might be, if they truly existed – something he very much
wanted to be true. Menard
craved
that belief – they hadn’t seen fit to announce
their existence through leaving behind any conveniently ruined
starports or abandoned ship hulls or anything like that. He simply
didn’t believe a mature, material, starfaring civilization could
have fled before the slow coreward advance of humanity without
leaving traces. Consider what humans did to an E-class planet in
the course of a few generations. It would take the passage of
geological eras to erase the road cuts in inconvenient ridges.
Millennia of abandonment to even weather them enough that a
planetologist might question the rounded edges.

If the xenics were out there in
some kind of physical force and presence, they’d never spent much
time on any world humanity had come to occupy or even bothered to
survey carefully. He’d stake his ordination on that, though
logically he couldn’t prove a negative assertion. As the old saw
ran, absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.

Of course when cornered by logic,
dyed-in-the-wool Externalists simply shifted the argument. The
xenics favored asteroid belts, gas giant moonlets, comets, hard
vacuum habitats, whatever flights of science fictional fancy were
common that year. But if any of those alternative theories about
living arrangements were true, they implied, even dictated,
morphologies and behaviors which would be barely recognizable to
humans as life. Let alone intelligent actors capable of jiggering
equity markets and rerouting comm traffic through their influence –
the only evidence, indirect as it was, for xenic
presence.

If xenics walked among the worlds
of the Empire, the Internalist argument had to be correct, in some
form or fashion. And never mind the raging debates over how they
stayed hidden, whether they were human in any sense, could they
take Eucharist or walk down public streets. As far as Menard was
concerned, there was far too much of the human race living outside
a state of grace for his peers in the hierarchy to be worried about
the theoretical possibility of xenic baptism.

The angel snorted, muscles rippling
in its sleep as it interrupted Menard’s line of thinking. He
overcame his discomfort and stared at it hard.

Canine and equine muscle fibers
bundled over spider web reinforced avian bone structures. A narrow
brain case not much over 650 cubic centimeters – fatally
microcephalic for a human – housing feline-derived neural matter.
All that dreadful bioengineering warped into a roughly human shape,
of course. Very dangerous creatures.

Doctrine regarded the angels as
art, of all things, given that much of bioengineering was quite
literally anathema in the technical sense of that term. All the way
back to its earliest roots, the Ekumen Orthodox church had an
uneasy relationship with technology – God had created the heavens
and the earth to be contemplated in pursuit of His glory, not
remodeled in pursuit of secular riches. At the same time, a
practical churchman was forced to recognize that the business of
the Empire would grind to a halt without genetic localization of
food crops for varying planetary conditions, not to mention the
measures required to maintain sealed environments in space.
Nevertheless the Church had never been at peace with wholesale
genetic manipulation. Even biones with their mainline human DNA
were forbidden baptism and sacraments. Yet these angels were
perhaps the most extreme chimeras ever bred by man.

But they were held to be art, like
a watered steel sword or a lacquered seat of pain.

Menard hated the things, for all
that they were beloved of the Patriarch. The Church Militant had
four million men under arms, thousands of hulls, the third largest
fighting force in the Empire. Why the Patriarch needed angels was
beyond him.

And he wouldn’t be able to move a
meter anywhere in the Halfsummer system without this thing
screaming to the world that he had come from the Prime See,
threatening all with judgment and bloody, final
absolution.

“
Secure for c-transition,” the
cabin told him in a soothing voice. It was mostly a psychological
issue, Menard knew. He’d never noticed so much as water spilled in
a c-transition, but body and soul rebelled when the moment
came.

The angel slept through the scream
of light as they left reality for points negative.

‡

St. Gaatha
made Halfsummer space about fourteen elapsed days
after leaving Nouvelle Avignon. The ships systems solemnly assured
Menard that eighty-seven baseline days had passed – the objective,
simultaneous calendar of the Empire, inasmuch as objective
simultaneity could be said to apply over relativistic distances and
trans-relativistic speeds.

As far as Menard had ever been able
to tell, baseline time was mostly used to mark Imperial
observances, coordinate military actions, and game the financial
system. None of which was particularly his concern. His own
lifetimer chip told Menard and his doctors what they needed to know
about his biological rate-of-aging.

Aging or not, he was bleary-eyed
and stretched. C-transition always made Menard feel as if he’d been
inexpertly reassembled. Every doctor he’d ever mentioned it to had
sworn the physical reactions were purely psychosomatic.

After kneeling before his
icon to give thanks to God for his deliverance once more, Menard
mediated a while to bring peace to his heart. Knees aching, when he
was done he found his way into
St.
Gaatha
’s ward room. This was another large
space, pillared like a seraglio, with a sumptuous galley and a
vastly ornate coffee engine all brasswork and valves and shining
stopcocks. Someone had thoughtfully bolted a small, plastic
consumer-grade coffeemaker next to it, which gave off an entirely
welcome warm, brown smell.

Caffeine. He didn’t usually take
coffee, but it would help knit his miserable joints back
together.

“
Chor Episcopos,”
said Lieutenant Kenneth McNally, sitting at the back of a shadowed
booth. McNally was
St.
Gaatha
’s skipper, a young man with a ruddy
complexion and a strangely mobile Adam’s apple.

“
Lieutenant,” said Menard. His
mouth didn’t feel quite right, either. He fumbled with a stoneware
mug and the little coffeemaker, poured himself a steaming cup. The
scent alone was worth the trouble, but the way the chilly handle
bloomed a little warmer in his palm was comforting as
well.

“
That monster’s gorgeous, and
worth a small fortune,” said McNally, nodding at the huge coffee
engine, “but it takes two people the better part of an hour to
produce the first cup. Fun at parties, though.”

Stirring his coffee to cool it a
bit, Menard tried to work that out. “You have parties on
board?”

“
Representational work. In port,
Chor Episcopos.”

“
Of course.” He sat down opposite
McNally. “Tell me, Lieutenant. Do you have a position on
xenics?”

McNally quirked a smile. “I try not
to run into any.”

That
answer woke up his lagging synapses.
“Pardon?”

“
I’m a Freewaller,
sir.”

“
Jonah, please,” said Menard, with
a vague wave of the hand. “Freewaller...like the
battle?”

“
Yes.” McNally grinned. “Local
legend, sir– Jonah. I read your dossier in the public directory.
You’ve spent half your career chasing local legends. Ever been to
3-Freewall?”

“
No, can’t say I have.”

“
It’s in trailing space. Give us a
couple of centuries, we’ll be a ghost world somewhere behind the
Empire. But we’re historic. Still important, for now. Shiploads of
tourists coming and going. So many memorials in solar and planetary
orbit we have a uniformed service keeping them maintained and on
station. Funny place, sir.”

“
So what’s your
legend?”

“
Asteroids, sir.”

He’d heard that one a few dozen
times. Ancient ruins tumbling in eccentric orbits out in the Deep
Dark. “Externalists, eh?”

“
No, not exactly. Within Freewall
space, in the right bars late at night, people will tell you the
xenics fly around in ships fitted out like asteroids.”

That certainly wasn’t the stupidest
theory Menard had ever heard, but it wasn’t going to win any
prizes, either. “Doing anything in particular? Or just orbiting
with balletic grace?”

“
Wouldn’t know, sir. I just keep
an extra watch out for rocks when I’m making a c-transition run.
Just in case there’s any moving faster than my ship. Local
superstition, I suppose.”

Lord, save me from
superstition
, Menard prayed.
It looks enough like faith to fool the unprepared
mind.
“Well, it never hurts to watch for
rocks, I suppose.”

McNally leaned close. “You
ever get to wondering, read the
Ulaan
Ude
transcripts. From the battle. Last
couple of minutes, when the
Hoxha
blew, right before the old Navy struck their
colors to the Imperial fleet. That’s what started it
all.”

“
Ulaan
Ude
.” Menard made a mental note of the
name, whatever it might mean. He didn’t have anything like the
right dataset with him on this transit, but this certainly was
another one of those odd leads that had kept the xenic question
alive over the centuries. “Bless you, my son, and my thanks.
Creation is ever full of mysteries.”

“
Indeed, sir. Thankfully my job is
to get my ship where she needs to be, and fulfill the mission
requirements of the run as a whole.”

Menard smiled at the other man’s
tact. “The ‘run as a whole’ being me and my nanny.”

“
Well, yes. We’re a fast courier.
People usually aren’t that anxious just to see their paperwork, so
mostly we carry VIPs.” The Lieutenant crossed himself. “Holy
relics, sometimes.”

“
And sometimes those are one and
the same, eh?”

McNally grinned. “Nothing like a
Churchman, Chor Episcopos.”

“
Nothing like.”

“
Indeed. Look, do you want to come
up on the bridge in about twenty minutes or so? We’ve already done
our initial post-arrival orientation. We’re ballistic right now for
a systems shake-down and crew wake-up, but we’ll be pulling the
beacon chatter, setting our course toward the inner planets and so
forth. If you’d like to observe.”

Menard sipped his coffee. Advantage
of a small ship, he supposed. “I wouldn’t want to be in your crew’s
way.”

“
Oh, don’t worry
about that,” McNally said cheerfully. “We could probably hold
midnight mass on
St.
Gaatha
’s bridge.”

‡

Albrecht: Halfsummer, Gryphon
Landing

It took him almost a month to work
up the nerve to go down to the Sixth Wharf. He had to make mattress
money every day. Most days he made food money as well, sometimes he
ate his seed money. It was a losing game. The whole time, Albrecht
hung on to the codelock key. He’d taken a beating over this, by
damn that made the stupid thing his. He had been avoiding the old
Alfazhi in the marketplace, though. The bugger was too strange by
half.

Somehow the Sixth Wharf was never
far from Albrecht’s mind.

Eventually he had a day where the
morning came too soon and he was actually a few credits ahead of
his never-ending financial game.

He decided to go looking
for
Jenny D
. It
was something to do, some direction to take other than this endless
circling at the bottom of a well of both poverty and
gravity.

The Sixth Wharf was a riverside
dock. It was haunted by the watermen who moved barges up and down
the silted, hummocked swamps extending hundreds of kilometers
around Gryphon Landing. As far as Albrecht was concerned,
countryside was the colored stuff around a spaceport, but these men
lived among the creeper vines and the large, carnivorous cousins of
the hand trees which dotted the city. And watermen hated spacers,
with a sort of genial venom borne out of the mists of
history.