Death of a Starship (12 page)

“
Where is it?”

“
Where is what?”

“
It!
Um...a hundred kilograms of mobile biomass. The
lizard with an attitude, you idiot.”

“
There is an unknown party in the
portside passageway.”

“
Don’t let it out.”

“
Acknowledged.”

Could he vent the air there?
Not in a boat this size, it wouldn’t have the kind of vacuum-rated
compartmentalization of a larger ship.
Princess Janivera
‘s smallest single
vacuum-rated area had been considerably larger than the entire
interior volume of
Pearl
. He could maybe gas the damned
creature, but that would require some environmental control tricks
that weren’t Albrecht’s specialty. Besides which he wasn’t sure
this boat could handle something like that.

That steward’s nephew would
have come in handy about now
, he thought.
The little bastard could either have killed the newt, or he could
have been fed to it.

“
I need medical
attention,” he told
Pearl
. “Please initialize the sick
bay systems.”

“
Acknowledged.”

‡

He decided to let the newt
rampage for the time being. There wasn’t much he needed from the
portside passage. Since that was where the primary airlock was
located, it was also the most likely boarding route for whomever
Bourne sent after him. Assuming she didn’t blast
Jenny’s Little Pearl
to
scrap and haul Albrecht back to Halfsummer in a number of small
plastic bags. Let some Marine reserve sergeant meet that thing head
on, angry and hungry as the jarhead came through the lock. Albrecht
wouldn’t be surprised to see the big bastard bite through combat
armor.

Of course, the damned mud-and-crud
smell was truly everywhere in the air system now.

The probability curves on the
main screen had narrowed considerably.
Petrograd
had a turn of speed on her,
for an antediluvian warhorse. He had maybe four hours to go as a
free man. At least he would go out as master of his own vessel,
even if it was only a system boat.

Albrecht decided to amuse
himself by pretending he had a future. He started by sorting
through
Pearl
’s
log, looking back before the grounding date when the boat had been
settled in beneath the godown on the Sixth Wharf.

Astonishingly, nothing was
there.

He ran a debug trace on the memory
cores. Logs were write-once, for all kinds of very good reasons.
The only way you got a blank log was if someone ripped all the
black boxes out and replaced them. Which was almost a capital
offense, also for all kinds of very good reasons.

There was exactly one entry in the
log, before the grounding date. Albrecht studied it.

It was an ephemeris, a detailed
position-in-time record for an object in an eccentric orbit that
intersected The Necklace at regular intervals. Nothing but the
orbital plot, no notes about what was being plotted. A really good
astrogator might have been able to work out mass constraints based
on the orbital variance reflected in the plot as the object
interacted with The Necklace, but that was beyond
Albrecht.

He’d bet good money he was
looking at
Jenny’s Diamond
Bright
. Though that was a damned strange
orbit to park a freighter in. Obviously, someone hadn’t intended it
to be found.

Had the whole purpose of
hiding
Jenny’s Little Pearl
been simply to provide safe storage for that
ephemeris data? The boat, in effect, as key to the missing
freighter. The codelock key he’d bought in the market was key to
the hidden boat.

And someone had been mugged, or
died in their sleep, and lost that codelock key to the gray market
of junk and resold tools. Even to an apolitical civilian like him
that was an obvious drawback to the kind of cell systems the
terrorists used...it was hard to manage succession of
responsibility and chains of custody. He could only imagine the
fury of the Black Flag, or whoever had stolen and hidden this boat,
at losing track so thoroughly of something so important.

They must have been staking out the
warehouse down by the water for a long time. Hoping to get their
codelock key back. Albrecht wondered if the fat man had called the
Black Flag in on him.

No, those lunatics had to be the
deadly virus the fat man spoken so elliptically of when Albrecht
had mentioned the name of the ship.

And a ship
Jenny D.
was. If he
somehow survived Lieutenant Svetlana Bourne and her flying mortar
of a light cruiser, he could finally have a shot at getting out of
this damned system. He’d need to pick up some crew – no starship
could be flown solo. But there had to be hundreds of busted-out,
stranded or retired c-rated spacers in The
Necklace.

Albrecht looked at the probability
curves again. The intercept cone was slowly turning into an
intercept line.

‡

With an hour and a half to go, the
comm bleeped again. Bourne, wanting to talk. His wrist throbbed and
burned, he was hungry, and he was going to die soon. Might as well
talk. Albrecht flicked her into being. This time he got video as
well as audio.

She was pretty, in a sort of
ageing-elf way. Curly white-blonde hair, narrow blue eyes, a Naval
uniform cut for someone ten kilos heavier. Behind her in the camera
pickup he could see a couple of ratings working on a spaghetti of
wiring.

“
Calling to gloat,
Lieutenant?”

Comm lag had shortened, too, he
noticed, though she’d probably anticipated his first words. “You’re
an interesting man, Micah Albrecht. You have enemies, or possibly
friends, in high places.”

“
Excuse me?” Enemies he could
believe, but Albrecht had become remarkably short of friends
lately. He wondered if he could count the newt.

Again, she was leading him a
little, speaking even ahead of the lightspeed lag. “You and your
vessel appear to have come under a Patriarchal Edict of Attainder.
Which trumps even my orders.”

Albrecht’s heart skipped several
long, cold beats. “If it’s all the same to you, I think I could see
my way clear to surrendering now.” He could imagine a lot of things
he’d rather do than be dragged off by goons from the Church’s
Security Directorate. Which was pretty much what that Writ of
Attainder had to mean.

They killed people with toothpicks.
And worse.

Her smile crisped into being some
seconds later. “I don’t blame you, Ser Albrecht, but you’ve had
your chance. I must yield to the tender mercies of the most
excellent servants of His Holiness. If it’s any consolation, I
shall continue to shadow you in your travels as an observer on
behalf of the Imperial Resident.”

His bowels gurgled. “They’re
coming for me
now
?”

Another shorter-than-lag
response. This woman was
good
. “Inbound from the Trivagaunte
beacon. Forty hours out of Halfsummer orbit, perhaps. I’m
transmitting their course profile. Purely as a courtesy, naturally.
I don’t suppose you’d consider standing to and awaiting the arrival
of your new pursuers.”

“
Uh...no thanks.” The Trivagaunte
beacon was about a hundred and fifteen degrees around the ecliptic
from his current heading. God seemed to have just given Albrecht a
few more days of freedom.

This time she waited out the entire
message lag. She had been giving him a chance. “Well, I thought
not. It’s been a pleasure serving you, Ser Albrecht. May I say good
luck.”

He was a dead man sailing. May as
well keep heading for The Necklace. Maybe some other even higher
power would intervene.

Albrecht wasn’t a praying man, but
he wondered if this was time to start.

‡

Golliwog: Halfsummer Solar
Space

“Someone has called up the
Reserves.” Dr. Yee was furious. Golliwog could tell by the way she
paced, with a twitch in her step. Her arms were clenched behind
her. The three ship’s officers in the briefing room shrank in their
station chairs. None of them would meet his eye, but then, none of
them had met his eye the entire voyage. The air dampers in the
ceiling were clicking madly, trying to ionize the air and scrub out
the stress hormones.

A holographic rendering of
the Halfsummer system spun slowly over the conference table. It was
distance-compressed, the courses of relevant ships rendered in
dopplered color vectors to indicate degree of compression. Golliwog
could see three ships of interest: their own heavy cruiser,
INS
Dmitri Hinton
,
a Naval Reserve light cruiser – a
Ciudad
Boise
-class ship, from a very old keel
series long since decertified for active service – and a civilian
boat.

The boat was heading for the
Halfsummer system’s asteroid belt, the light cruiser tailing but
not overtaking.
Hinton
was on an intercept from c-beacon

005 a, locally known as the
Feodora beacon. Their least-time course involved arriving at the
civilian’s belt destination some nine hours after both the civilian
and the Reserve cruiser were there.

Yee paused in her pacing, a
finger stabbing down toward the display. “That was bad enough.
Someone else
then
interdicted the Reserves. That, gentlemen, is worse. We look
incompetent in the eyes of the locals. We draw attention to our
purposes here, and to the Navy’s involvement in events.” She stared
around the table, finally settling her glare on one luckless
officer. “Commander Marek, you will interface with the Naval
Intelligence local observer here on Halfsummer and determine whose
idiocy has put our movements on center stage of this system’s
newsfeeds.” Her stare shifted. “Captain Hawking, I’d very much
appreciate a fast boat at our disposal. Golliwog and I need to be
at the course intercept point prior to the civilian’s
arrival.”

“
Yes ma’am,” said Hawking and
Marek together.

“
Go.”

They went, leaving behind
Lieutenant Spinks. He straightened up, brushed off his cuffs, and
smiled at Yee. “You’ve put the fear into them, Suzanne.”

Yee sniffed. She still looked angry
to Golliwog, but he could see her relaxing already. “Motivational,”
she said.

Spinks glanced pointedly at
Golliwog. Golliwog stared back. Spinks resembled Yee...small build,
big eyes, very dark, very tough.

“
He’s mine.”

“
Yes ma’am.” Spinks gave Golliwog
a quick wink.

So
,
thought Golliwog. They weren’t that much alike.
That
was something he’d bet his left
thumb Yee would never have done. But still, a
connection.

“
Jenny’s Diamond
Bright
,” snapped Yee, obviously picking up
a prior thread of conversation.

Shaking his head, Spinks
said, “Not with that drive trace. A system boat. Quite possibly
off
Jenny D
. Too
much of a coincidence not to be connected. But public newsfeeds
aren’t naming ship names right now and we haven’t got a packet
from
Novy Petrograd
or the NILO yet.”

“
Is the big girl here,
though?”

Spinks once more glanced briefly at
Golliwog. “We’ve been over that, Suze. Time and again.”

“
She’s
somewhere
, night take
her.” Yee stepped closer to the hologram, stared into it as if
wisdom might be found there.

“
Maybe...” said Spinks. “Maybe.
That’s an inconclusive analysis at best.”

The worm of rebellion stirred once
in Golliwog’s heart. He spoke up: “What analysis?”

Yee snapped him a glare as Spinks
grinned. “We’re looking for a missing ship,” she said.

“
Jenny
D
?” Golliwog asked.

“
No.
NSS Enver Hoxha
.”

Golliwog had never heard of that
ship. He wasn’t even sure what an NSS designation was. He gave Yee
his blank look.

She sighed. She knew him too
well. “
Artemis Powers
-class battleship. One of the old dictators, from the
pre-Imperial Navy.”

“
There is no battleship class in
service,” Golliwog said.

“
Precisely. Do you see the
problem?”

Golliwog thought that over. “That
class must have mustered more than two hundred terawatt/seconds of
firepower, to be considered a battleship. More than four times the
throw wattage of anything in service now. And big.
Right?”