Death of a Starship (18 page)

“
Golliwog took care of it,” she
said with a sharp satisfaction.

The sullen man nodded
slowly.

“
And you...?” Menard asked. “I’ve
saved your life twice in the past fifteen minutes. Surely I am
entitled to know who it is I have gone to this trouble
for.”

“
Captain Yee, Naval Oversight.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath as pain flickered across her
face. “I suspect we may not be working at cross-purposes, Chor
Episcopos.”

Of course.
“Micah Albrecht.”

She worked to control another wave
of pain. Then: “What do you want him for?”

“
Ah,” said Menard. “I am free to
walk away. You are under my recognizance. Answer me your own
question first, then I will tell you.” This was sort of like budget
meetings back at the Xenic Bureau, except with real
blood.

Yet more shudders, passing through
her in waves. Golliwog pushed off from his crate, drifted toward
Yee’s board with an odd light in his eyes. She tried to speak,
“I...I...Golliwog...” Her eyes flickered, fighting for
consciousness, then she slipped away into some private sea of
distress.

“
She said anything that happened
to her would happen to me first.” Golliwog’s voice was surprisingly
high and thin for such a big man.

Menard looked him over carefully,
searching for details. Golliwog had very fleshy features, signs of
severe hormone tuning in childhood, but there were also telltale
straight lines in muscles of his neck. And he carried himself
tightly, with an almost literally artificial stance. Close kin to
the angel, in a sense.

The Chor Episcopos knew what he
faced – a test, of faith and reason both. “You’re a bione, aren’t
you?” he asked, trying to keep the fear and horror from his
voice.

Cybernetically enhanced from human
stock, biones were, if anything, a greater abomination than angels.
They started out as human, after all, though the Prime See had
never formally ruled on what became of their souls under the knives
and drugs. Such as this miserable creature went against the nature
of both God and man. God’s creation, tampered with for man’s
imperfect purposes.

At the same time, he felt ashamed
once more. He had traveled with an angel, after all, no more human
than a cat. How could he find horror in this creature made from the
flesh of man?

Golliwog nodded. “And you’re a
priest, aren’t you?” he said, in almost the same tone.

“
Yes.” Then, almost unwilling: “Do
you need a priest, my son?”

To Menard’s shock, a tear gathered
in Golliwog’s eye, diamond-bright and no less cutting. “I am no
one’s son.”

A seeker
, thought Menard.
This one knows the
absence of God in his heart.
He reached out
toward Golliwog’s tear, knowing he risked life itself in touching
this killer. With his index finger, Menard traced a chrism on the
monster’s forehead. His hand trembled, his back
shivered.

Perhaps this was why God had sent
him to this place. To minister in this prison to this one
man.

For he knew that anyone who cried
for salvation must be a man.

The hatch opened and the red-headed
woman looked in. “Please to speak to the priest. The freaks to be
staying inside, yes? Everyone live longer that way.”

Menard broke off his contact,
reluctant to abandon a soul in such wretched need, but mindful of
the realities of the situation. Caesar had come calling.

Golliwog slipped backward but
snagged the cuff of Menard’s skinsuit. “Military grade combat nano
out there, priest,” he muttered in a low, squeaky tone. “The people
here are more dangerous than you know, to be able to have that.
Beware.”

“
Thank you, my son.” Menard nodded
as he drifted toward the hatch. “And may the Lord bless you and
keep you.”

He found himself praying
for...for...well, everything. And everyone.

‡

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

Golliwog watched the priest leave.
The little man had one last frightened, backward glance from the
hatch before the musclegirl outside took him away. A priest, a real
priest. Someone who had tried to tell him whether he had a soul, to
help him understand if God cared about him. His forehead tingled
with the drying salt of that single tear.

What had that meant? For one single
moment, there had been light in his head.

Freedom, whispered the traitor
voice within. Freedom to choose, to be.

There was so much he didn’t know,
yet.

Golliwog shook off the thought and
took a long look at Yee. Instead of small and tough, she just
seemed to be small and dying. He was amazed she’d fought the pain
and the drugs the medics had given her long enough to speak to the
priest at all. Now she had left him alone.

It was the first time in his life
he’d been alone. Truly alone, out of command, with no
controller.

He wondered if the priest had truly
cared for him, however briefly. Weren’t they supposed to act that
way toward everyone? The Navy had chaplains, shiploads of them he
supposed, but no chaplain had ever been the least bit interested in
the state of Golliwog’s conscience. Assuming he had one. At least
he knew what the word meant – inner moral judgment.

Golliwog turned his back on Yee and
kicked himself toward the angel. His right forearm was still dead
in both of its aspects, meat and metal. That thing was too
dangerous to be allowed to live. Nothing should have been able to
trump him so thoroughly. He braced his good hand on the crate above
the angel’s sticky-netting. Trapped in the fat, oozing strands, it
continued to keen, bent over as if something had been snapped
within.

He damned well hoped something had
been snapped within. Now he needed to finish the job.

Something pulsed on the carrier
frequency in his head. Was it trying to talk? Then the angel forced
its head to move against the webbing, rotating that narrow white
face slightly toward Golliwog. The red cross on its scalp seemed to
throb. Red eyes blinked open, smearing tears of blood.

Tears. This thing cried. Pain,
sorrow, regret. He had no idea what or why, but this angel
cried.

In that moment, Golliwog could not
kill it. Not tied down and crying. Not after what the priest had
just shown him about himself. To be human was to choose not to
kill.

Kill it he would, if need be –
facing the angel once more in open combat, for example. He would
kill God himself if the Creator came after Golliwog with a knife in
His hand and murder in His eye. But not now, he could not slay the
angel while it existed as a wounded experiment strapped to a crate.
He knew the horror of being a made thing. After all, he was
terrified of Yee cutting him open to work out whatever it was that
had happened during c-transit.

“
Soon,” he told the angel, though
Golliwog was fairly certain he was lying even to himself. “Soon we
will be free, and we will make good our pain upon the man who led
us here.”

The angel’s mouth opened, blood
bubbles popping out, then it sighed and closed its face.

‡

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

He stared in amazement, one of
Dillon’s paws upon his arm, as the bar’s patrons stripped the wood
away from three of the triangles comprising the dodecahedron. It
was obviously designed to come apart. Underneath was a huge
painting – a mural? – of a starship. The image was intended to
represent something here in the Halfsummer system, given the bright
silver braid that was The Necklace crossing the sky behind the
ship.

He found the details hard to
assess. The painter had been no artist, but was obviously driven to
render this image by some powerful inner fire. A better hand with
the paint might have helped, though.

“
This was in the original Shorty’s
Bar,” rumbled Dillon. “Been there seventy, eighty years. When we
finally scrapped that module, we salvaged the art and brought the
panels in here. Built this version of the bar around
them.”

Albrecht was fascinated by the
sheer obsessiveness of the thing. The painting was about ten meters
wide, rendered in a level of detail that spoke of years of effort.
He wondered if he looked closely enough would he be able to count
the explosive bolts on the hull segment joints. And the vessel in
question was huge, inasmuch as scale could be judged in something
as impressionistic as a painting. There were recognizable
structures – radiator towers, for example – that implied the ship
was impossibly large.

It was all...wrong...though. Cocked
into unrecognizability by a hundred mistaken visual and engineering
cues. Like someone who’d been told about right angles but never
personally experienced one had decided to illustrate a text on
plane geometry.

“
What ship is it supposed to be?”
he finally asked. “Is it real?”

A sharp breath from Dillon. Then:
“We thought you could tell us. It’s called the Poolyard,
hereabouts.”

“
Poolyard
’s the name of the ship?”
Albrecht asked.

“
No. The painter.” Dillon rumbled
through a snort which might have been a laugh at one time in its
history. “Stumbled in to the old Shorty’s blind as a pulsed-out
sensor array. Talked about colors a lot, for a blind guy. Screamed,
too.”

“
In his sleep?”

“
No, just in general.”

“
Right.” Albrecht glanced at his
companion. “May I look closer?”

Dillon tightened his grip on
Albrecht’s arm and kicked them both off to drift across the central
core of the bar.

He studied the picture with a
careful eye to the details of size. “If those cooling towers are to
any kind of scale, that thing’s several kilometers long. Nothing
was ever built that big except stage-one colonial transports and
those dictator-class pre-Imperial battle–” He suddenly stopped
talking as Dillon’s grip tightened to a crush. “Oh...”

“
Yes,” said Dillon.

Albrecht winced. “So why do people
want to kill me?”

“
Because you know where it
is.”

“
Like hell!” Then
he thought about that a moment. “
Jenny
D
. The...virus. What people live and die
for.” And the ephemeris on
Pearl
.

God damn it. He’d left the key to
an entire pre-Imperial battlewagon parked out there, defended only
by an angry newt.

“
Yes,” said Dillon. He nodded. The
rest of the bar began re-assembling the floor panels. The big man
then grabbed a brass stanchion and slingshotted the two of them
back toward their original table.

“
It’s not really that big a
secret, out here in The Necklace. That she exists, I mean. No one
admits to knowing where. She’s cold-parked in some eccentric orbit,
that’s obvious. It’s implied clearly enough in the painting, if you
look at the angle of view on The Necklace. High up, out of the
plane of the ecliptic. And if she was anywhere simple, that
battlewagon would have been found long ago. There’s always some
idiot thinks that bringing her back into the light might be a good
idea.”

Albrecht nodded. “I wouldn’t count
on the painting for much in the way of useful perspective. It’s
crude as a child’s work.”

“
Oh, Poolyard painted what he
saw.”

“
I thought you said he was
blind.”

“
Well, yes, there’s a problem,
isn’t it?”

Albrecht glared at Dillon. “Does
this riddle have a valve-bleeding answer? Or are you just going to
stay all cryptic on me until the bad guys shoot their way
in?”

“
The bad guys have already gotten
here,” Dillon said. “They’re otherwise engaged at this
moment.”

“
But both ships are hours
out!”

“
They each sent pathfinders. It’s
been ugly outside.” Dillon grabbed Albrecht’s arm again. “Not your
concern, not yet.”

“
Fine,” said
Albrecht. “That’s the past. It’s cold, it’s dead, no one knows
where it is except me, and whoever recorded the data I’ve gotten
hold of. And whoever copied it out for backup. And whoever has
maintained
Pearl
’s
systems in the past decade. But that’s a secret. I get it.” He
pried Dillon’s fingers off him, glaring again. “So you asked me
about the future. What does a dead battleship mean to your future?
You planning to crank up another Civil War?”

“
Not if its humanly possible to
avoid it,” said Dillon sadly, with some trace of irony. “Don’t want
one, don’t need one. Wouldn’t matter anyway. That thing gets found,
put back together, she outslugs any twenty percent of the Imperial
Navy all massed together. Won’t be a Civil War. No one could stop
her fully armed and under way. Question is, what would follow.
Making a new order would be damn near impossible, but anyone could
smash the existing peace with that ship. They built them big, in
the old days.”