Counterweight (20 page)

Replenishment

The
Brisbane

“H
old
it there,” Thorstein grunted. “I’ll shut down the reactor and we can see if the
natives have a back-up.”

Rick frowned. A mag emitter had come loose on dropout and
he’d managed to immobilize it with a registration spike. He wasn’t sure why the
sharply pointed construction tool was even on the small ship but he suspected
one of the Midgaard thought it could be handy for repelling a boarding attempt.

The tip of the spike was through one of the bolt slots in
the emitter housing and it was the only thing keeping the fusion reaction from
spilling out and eating the ship. If the failure had occurred on Rick’s first
engine watch, he might not have caught it in time, even with his pre-cog
advantage.

Almost two weeks in distortion cramped inside a small ship
like the
Brisbane
had a way of trimming the mind. The distortion engine
warped space around the ship, creating a denser gradient to the front and, in
effect, moving the universe past the ship. When Rick’s existence became a small
fifty-by twenty-foot chain of three compartments, he soon found his thoughts
were easier to focus. Distractions failed to take hold.

The creative faculties, the libido – both were suppressed in
the artificial isolation.

He’d even managed to talk with Freya without turning red.
The risqué banter, common among the Midgaard, served almost as a reminder of a
part of life that had no place on the ship.

It had taken a conscious effort on Rick’s part, three days into
the voyage, to realize that he should have been flustered when he’d walked into
the crew compartment to find her suit emerging from the cleaning cubicle.

He’d been taking a closer look at it, comparing it to the
Tauhentan one he’d taken from the
Foxlight II
, when Freya had emerged
from the adjacent shower, ready to step back into her suit.

The Midgaard, when on active field duty, wore their suits
round the clock and they saw no need for extra clothing. Why build laundry
facilities into your ships if you didn’t have to?

Accordingly, when Rick looked over at the suit’s owner, she
was completely naked. “Your suits seem far more advanced than anything I’ve
seen so far,” Rick told her, feeling a vague tick at the back of his mind. “Of
course, I’ve only seen one planet so far…”

“We’ve been building them for tens of thousands of years,”
she explained. “Maybe we can get you one when we get back.”

“I’d like that.” Rick rotated his shoulders. “This Tauhentan
suit is very tight on the upper body.”

“Thorstein tells me you know your way around an engine
room,” she said as she backed into the open suit. The plates slid closed around
her body, even as she began to move out of the cubicle. “If you want a
permanent slot with the LRG, I can arrange it.” With a nod, she headed for the
bridge.

Now, in orbit and with the drive shut down, he was mildly
surprised that the primary thing he had taken away from that conversation had
been her offer of a place with the LRG.

The evidence that he’d been accepted by the small crew was
both thrilling and humbling. It was something he’d always been denied on 3428
but now he was left with the fear of letting the crew of the
Brisbane
down.

“Hold on, Thorstein,” he urged. “If we can’t find parts down
on the planet, we’ll be stuck here for gods know how long.”

“And if that field fails, we’ll be here for a lot longer,”
Thorstein replied, hand hovering over the shut-down button. “Or at least our
remains will be. Our young captain won’t thank you for scattering her pretty
little atoms all over the orbitals.” 

Rick grinned. “She is attractive, isn’t she? I don’t know
how I didn’t notice when I came aboard.”

“She is, I suppose,” Thorstein shrugged. “She’s not quite my
type but that has nothing to do with the matter at hand. I’m shutting us down.”

“No, wait.” Cal looked around the small compartment. “Trust
me; we can tie this down.” He nodded at the wall to Thorstein’s left. “Grab
that arc-tacker and come over here.”

Thorstein hesitated.

Rick gave him a confident smile. “This is more art than science
Thor. Don’t worry about the read-out.” A holo-screen between them showed a
thirty-percent probability of containment. If you believed the screen, then it
was only a matter of time until failure.

Thorstein grabbed the arc-tacker and approached Rick warily.

“Get ready to lock it down.” Rick nodded at the loose
emitter.

The Midgaard engineer kneeled by the emitter ring and held
the tacker to the edge of the base. “And what will you be doing?”

Rick was testing out adjustments with his fourteen-second advantage,
quickly sorting out the proper direction and amount of force needed. “This,” he
muttered, nudging the top end of the spike to effect a minute adjustment of the
loose emitter. “There!” he suddenly shouted. “Lock it down!”

Hyped by his nerves, Thorstein pressed his finger down on
the trigger without thought, creating a tiny arc that liquefied the metal of
both the emitter base and the mounting ring. As his mind regained control of
his hands, he began to move the unit along the edge of the plate, joining the
two pieces of metal in a process that was an art in itself.

He had to be careful not to let the electrodes get too close
to the metal. If that happened, the arc-tacker would get stuck to the piece.
Usually, you could work it loose, but when fine alignments were at risk…

He finished and looked up at the screen. “Norns,” he cursed
softly, turning to look at Rick in amazement. “Ninety-nine point eight?” He
stared at the young Human, narrowing his gaze.

“How in Niflheim did you manage that? There’s no way you
could do that, unless…” His eyebrows dropped in the middle, head tilting
slightly to the right. “Are you a seiderman?”

“Seiderman?”

“A man who practices seidr,” Thorstein replied, as though
that made it any clearer. Seeing Rick’s incomprehension, he took a deep breath
and framed his thoughts.

“Seidr,” he began cautiously, “is the possession of a
sensitivity to higher dimensions – the ability to see the future is one
manifestation. The Norns themselves, the three maidens of Jötunheimer who tend
the roots of Ydggrassill, are völur – women who practice the art.”

His gaze slid down to the steel staff in Rick’s hand. “The
word seidr refers to the distaff they used to spin men’s fates.”

“I’ve never heard of seidr,” Rick admitted. “Is it a bad
thing?”

A noncommittal shrug. “Yes and no. Some are made uneasy by
such abilities, fearing the practitioner has powers over them, and some
consider it unmanly.” He grinned at the flash of anger in Rick’s eyes. “But
Odin himself, our lawgiver, is a seiderman.”

“And how do you feel about it?”

Thorstein nodded at the containment array with a
good-natured grin. “I’d say it’s a very manly art, when applied to an engine
room!”

“So our captain won’t mind?”

“Mind?” Thorstein grunted in surprise. “She has the sight
herself, though she prefers to be a warrior. That’s why she’s here on the
Brisbane
– learning the ropes before they give her a bigger ship.”

“She can see the future?” Rick fought to hide his
excitement. If true, then she was the first humanoid he’d met since leaving
3428 who had the ability.

A nod. “It comes to her when it feels like it. She had us
stow an extra hammock on this run but wouldn’t tell us why.” He waved a hand at
Rick. “Then we get an emergency link telling us to come get you.”

The iron spike in Rick’s hand slid through his fingers until
the butt struck the floor. Freya had a different kind of sight. For her to know
she’d be taking on a passenger, she would have had a pre-cognitive vision
months in advance. Did she have a constant barrage of future awareness with
such a huge lead time or did she get occasional flashes of insight?

Thorstein headed for the forward hatch. “She doesn’t like to
talk about it,” he warned, stopping at the still-closed hatch. “I’ve seen her
break a man’s leg because he didn’t know when to shut his hole. Her family have
been… strange with her since she started having the visions, so just leave it
alone.”

Nodding dumbly, Rick followed him to the bridge.

“We’re ready to land,” Thorstein reported.

Freya looked up and nodded. “What parts do we need?”

“Nothing.” Thorstein grinned. “Thanks to my second engineer,
here.” He jerked his head toward Rick. “He managed to get the emitter adjusted
better than those worm-dung techs at the shipyard.”

Freya frowned. “I’m no engineer,” she began, “but I’m pretty
sure we don’t have the equipment for a ring calibration, let alone the room to
store it, seeing as they had to remove the dorsal hull plating to do it last
time.”

Thorstein looked reluctant to explain, so Rick jumped in. He
knew she didn’t care for the subject but he definitely wanted to open the topic
with her.

Even if she didn’t discuss it, he wanted her to know. “Thor
seems to think I’m a seiderman.”

Her eyes showed a brief flash of surprise but it quickly
faded to something else. There was a haunted, pitying quality to her gaze.

She turned to the helmsman. “Erik, take us down.”

It became increasingly apparent, as they descended, that she
would say no more about the matter but Rick stayed on the bridge anyway. This
was his first landing on a planet and, when he said as much, Freya and the
weapons officer looked at him in surprise, as he knew they would.

“But there’s your own world,” she said, “and you went to
Benthic…” She cut herself off. “Right. You don’t land
on
Benthic – you
land
at
the counterweight and take an elevator.” She looked over her
shoulder at him, the haunted eyes making his heart skip a beat. “What’s it
like,” she asked, “riding an elevator under an ocean?”

“It was pretty amazing,” Rick admitted, “but nothing like
this.”

Outside, the local sun took on a halo as they dropped into
the outer reaches of the atmosphere.

The ride down was relatively smooth compared to Humanity’s
earliest efforts at returning to the surface of Earth. There was no need for
heat shielding as the small craft made its slow, controlled descent on powerful
maglev engines. Gravity was a light-weight compared to a planet’s
electromagnetic field and the scout ship drifted down like a feather on a calm
day.

The settlement wasn’t what Rick had expected. Thorstein had
talked about trading with the natives and he’d imagined thatched huts and
primitive customs. The natives, however, were merely descendants of the first
colonists, seeded there by the old Empire and then largely forgotten.

The
Brisbane
put down at a ramshackle spaceport on
the fringe of a small city that reminded him of the old west frontier towns
he’d seen on movies in the
Canal’s
database.

Concrete and metal structures had an air of neglect, as
though they’d been built on a world that didn’t have the industries to repair
them. Timber-framed pedways connected them above street level. Maglev vehicles
shared the road with wooden carts, drawn by what passed for oxen on this
planet.

Citizens wore a bizarre mix of homespun cloth and modern
textiles. Those who could afford to import new maglev vehicles were mostly
dressed in modern clothing but Rick saw few of them in the low-rent area around
the spaceport.

And the place was an assault on the nose. A moldy odor
pervaded the damp air – a pungent mix of dung from draft animals, hydraulics
and ozone from vehicles, and tree resin from the surrounding forest.

“The business district almost looks like a miniature of
Xho’Khov,” Thorstein told him as they followed Freya and Erik into a bustling
open-air-market. “Though it’s kind of seedy-looking.”

“They depend on trade?” Rick asked absently, distracted by
the dead animals hanging in the stalls on the left.

The market was a jumbled rabbit warren of shoddily built shops.
Most were simple wooden frames with corrugated steel sheets for a roof. Roughly
half of them were further enclosed by walls.

“Nobody even remembers why the Empire planted them here in
the first place,” Thorstein said, stopping to turn a dead… something… to
inspect the meat. “So the whole place would fall apart if it wasn’t on a minor
shipping route. Ah, good! Emerie’s in today.”

Rick followed Thorstein’s gaze to see Freya talking with a
tall, strongly built man, possibly an Eesari, who looked to be the owner of one
of the shops. Heavier carcasses hung above his counter and Rick stepped up to
have a closer look, the hunter in him intrigued by the strange animals.

He turned one of them to find an arrow hole. He looked up to
find both Freya and Emerie looking at him.

“We don’t buy off the rack,” Freya advised him in Midgaard.
“Unless you’ve grown up here, your immune system won’t be able to handle the
germs that grow on game meat as soon as you cut into it.”

“Emerie keeps a clean room to service offworlders like us,”
Erik explained with a nod to the doors behind the shopkeeper. “So we go out
with him to make sure he’s using fresh game and not just shaving the outsides
off an existing joint of meat.”

“But what do you hunt them with?” Rick asked in Dheema,
wanting Emerie to join the conversation. “It looks like you use a bow and I’m a
bow hunter myself.”

The Eesari chuckled, reaching up into the rafters of his
awning.

“He’s going to make you try his bow,” Freya warned him in
Midgaard. “If you can draw it, he’ll loan you one so you can join the hunt but
nobody I’ve ever heard of can get more than a few centimeters out of it.”

She turned to Emerie, switching to Dheema. “This one’s a
Human,” she advised. “You don’t need to humiliate him just to…”