Death of a Starship (2 page)

And while the Church had one set of
complex, nuanced views on this topic, the Empire had quite
another.

“
Jonah.” It was Bishop Antonine
Russe, his manager and a reserve commodore in the Church Militant,
the Patriarch’s fleet. Russe was every centimeter the spare,
ascetic churchman of the popular imagination, affecting the
black-and-white robes of the highest formal levels of the
Patriarchate. Russe shaved his head, and even his eyebrows, and
sported an elaborate tattoo across the curve of his scalp. His
pectoral cross was meteoric iron, heavy enough that its chain left
a raw circle always visible around his neck.

Menard inclined his head. “Sir. I
am reporting in.”

“
Skip the log-ins and pop down to
conference room Yellow-2 with me.”

The Chor Episcopos suppressed a
sigh. “Yes, sir.”

“
This one’s big. Worth the
trouble. Trust me, Jonah.”

The problem was, Menard didn’t
trust Russe. Not one bit.

‡

Golliwog: Powell Station, Leukine
Solar Space

Clutching the flint sparker in the
palm of his left vacuum glove, Golliwog flew tight and hard along
the curve of the hull. The exercise was being conducted in and
around the derelict hull of an old quartermaster’s transport bottom
– a dead slow pig designed to move enormous amounts of material
from one gravity well to another. Dummy or not, it wasn’t a
simulation. At some point in training, simulations became
meaningless. Golliwog could be killed here, yes he could. Even as
he brushed a meter or so above the highest hull protrusions he
watched for weaponsign.

The enemy was crafty. Golliwog knew
that. He knew the enemy well because the enemy was him.

There...he spotted a flash high on
his port flank. The assault sled’s primitive instrumentation began
blinking at about the same time. Golliwog flipped over, killed all
his power – thrust, instrumentation, comm, everything, and fingered
the switches he’d welded onto the panel that morning. They
controlled the release valves on eight bottles of high-pressure
oxygen welded to the sled frame.

Now he was a ballistic object
steered with squirts of O
₂
. His albedo, including sled
and weapons, was about one percent. Still high, but it was the best
he could do within the training parameters. Bright as nanotrace fog
in direct starlight, the sparkle of the oxygen venting would be a
dead giveaway, but he’d stayed in the shadowed side of the
monstrous ship so long the enemy had been forced to come looking
for him.

Golliwog cleared his mind and set
most of his internal systems into rest mode. Dangerous, that, but
useful, too. Shutting down both his internals and the sled meant he
was just a piece of junk, inert mass that had broken off the
training hull. Pay no mind to the kilos of protein: on a training
sled the enemy’s sensor suite wouldn’t be wired to look for that
anyway. He hoped. The enemy was, by definition, as clever as he
was.

Froggie never believed in giving up
advantages. Golliwog’s combat mentor would beat him blue and
senseless for a trick like this, but Froggie wasn’t out here alone
in the hard vacuum. Old Anatid, on the other hand, would probably
approve of the skewed thinking. Anatid was Golliwog’s strategy
mentor, an ancient bione with a cryptic manner who’d befriended
Golliwog even beyond the confines of the training rooms.

Unpowered, quiet as an empty
airlock, he hurtled along the shadowed side of the hull, twisting
the flint sparker in his hand for luck, or nerves. Where was that
flash again? Golliwog watched the high port flank, stalking the
enemy who was stalking him.

Then the other sled
was
in front
of
him, turning under sudden acceleration in a faint glow of ionized
exhaust gas. Golliwog flipped the triggers on his starboard oxygen
bottles and rolled along his axis just as his own sled took a solid
hit of a directed energy lance. The little instrumentation panel
flared bright, then glowed dead, even as the shock caused
Golliwog’s entire body to spasm. The only thing that saved him was
the fact that he was in shut down mode. Shunts and breakers
absorbed the invading currents before they could fry the idle
cognitive and reactive systems.

Still
alive
, thought Golliwog. Old Anatid would
be proud.
The enemy believes me fried to a
ballistic lump
. He triggered his aft
ventral bottle, calculating the pull to vent the escape valve at
just the ride speed to flip his sled end over end and send it
crashing into the enemy’s sled stern-first, the relatively heavy
propulsion unit slamming into the enemy’s
fairing.

“
Where’s your power now!” Golliwog
screamed, breaking protocol. He laughed as he hotstarted his combat
mods and popped free from his safety clips, one hand on the sled’s
steering bar so he didn’t spin loose. The exercise required him to
wear only a skin suit, no combat armor, and he could carry no issue
weapons. (And where had the enemy gotten a DE lance? asked a
traitor voice in his head.) Instead he had another oxygen bottle
strapped to his waist, along with a bottle of liquid hydrogen –
each of them with a line rigged to one of his gloves.

Where was the enemy?

The enemy solved that problem by
presenting himself, leading with a long handled hook. A deadly
weapon in a vacuum fight, that. Golliwog twisted around his own
axis with a tiny squirt of oxygen from his left wrist. He grabbed
the enemy’s hook just behind the blade, then swung his left leg up
for a grip. He brought his wrists together pointing at the enemy,
opened the valves on both bottles, and clicked the
sparker.

In the blooming light of thrust and
fire, Golliwog saw the surprise on his own face within the enemy’s
helmet.

‡

Albrecht: Halfsummer, Gryphon
Landing

Micah Albrecht had always liked
ship models as a child. R-class hunter-seekers, the old
pre-Imperial battlewagons, even spin-racing yachts. He’d built them
all, filled two rooms until his dad had thrown the ships out, along
with him. Which, in a sense, was why he now wandered the too-hot
open-air market in Gryphon Landing, too many light years from
anywhere he belonged, angry and desperate.

His fascination with ships
and all their doings eventually led him to be a c-drive engineer.
Well, he
had
been
one, damn it. Albrecht had lost his certification thanks to a
witch-hunt and a bought-off tribunal on board the
Princess Janivera
. They’d
needed somebody to take the blame for the environmental crash that
had left three paying passengers brain dead. The union steward
wasn’t about to let his nephew go down for it, even though the
little bastard was rotten as month-old milk – guilty but
uncharged.

Albrecht had been lucky to stay out
of prison. Of course, if the whole mess had gotten into criminal
court, the fix might have been uncovered, so the owners had
generously ensured that charges were not brought.

Now he wandered the cramped alleys
between market stalls under a powder-blue sky somebody had told him
was a dead ringer for old Earth. How the hell they’d known that was
beyond him. The market was chaos, of course, crowded and pulsing as
any dock, even if this was the last port of call for most of the
people and the things they bought and sold.

The booths ranged from a bit of
fabric between two saplings all the way to powered cargo containers
with their own internal cooling and feelie shows. The merchandise
ran the gamut of everything he could imagine finding for sale in a
third-rate port town, with the possible exception of human beings.
The whole place reeked of machine oil and the ozone-sharp scent of
distressed electronics, with a side of the eel curry which seemed
to be the ground state of dirtside food.

When all else was done, eat the
damned eels out of the recycling tanks. Last rule of survival on a
dying station. Eating eel was one step away from death.

He paused before a gnarled man in a
grubby dhoti sitting on a tarp cut from solar sail fabric. Spread
out before the old man were an array of oddly-shaped tools and
parts, most of them with that dull luster of space-rated
equipment.

Oh ho
, thought Albrecht.

He squatted opposite the old man.
Without making eye contact, he scanned the merchandise. These had
come from a c-drive ship, Albrecht was certain. There was no
mistaking the Higgs sniffer, used for fault tracing in a c-drive
secondary transform block. Some of the mechanical tools had wider
applications, to be sure – that mil-spec valve corer was out of an
environmental maintenance kit.

He picked up a codelock key, mostly
from sheer curiosity.

“
Three creds,” the old man said
with a heavy Alfazhi accent.

“
Worthless,” Albrecht responded
automatically. In point of fact, a codelock key was worthless only
off its programmed ship. He turned the device over in his hand.
Also mil-spec, Naval issue. Though it had the oddly-squared look of
some previous generation of tech. Most Naval stuff you saw today
was streamlined, as if even their coffee makers had to survive
re-entry.

Someone had punched out the
smartspot on the inventory tag, then ground the ship’s name off
with a file, though a keel number was still mostly visible. A lot
of trouble for a thief to go to, patiently whittling at the metal
of something which was essentially three hundred grams of junk.
“See,” he said, “no ship for it.”

The old man grinned and waved his
hand. “You buy else more, I give you. Nice paperweight for busy
man, ah?”

Albrecht needed a paperweight about
as much as he needed a waterlung, but he smiled anyway. He sorted
through the rest of the gear. Albrecht knew to the decicredit what
the portside pawnshops paid for usable ship’s tools. He couldn’t
take the valve corer – pawning mil-spec was illegal. Some of the
other stuff was fine. The inertial torsion wrenches were generic,
no inventory tags. The Higgs sniffer would be nice, if it worked,
but it was tagged. Too easy to trace.

He touched the three wrenches and a
pair of ion coupling spacers. “Five credits all.” They’d be worth
fifteen, two, maybe fifteen, five over at Honest Al-Qadi’s. If he
could clear five on the deal, that was tonight’s mattress fee
paid.

“
Twelve,” the old man said through
another smile.

He only had ten on him to start
with...his day’s seed money, tugged from a diminishing stash
carefully hidden away in a portside wall. Albrecht held out, and
they settled at eight, five. Taking his seed money back out, that
left him mattress money and enough to buy a bowl and twenty minutes
of seating in front of the stewpot at the Crewman’s Rest that
afternoon.

Eel stew.
Every day’s just another day
, he told
himself, walking away in his perpetual slump.

“
Hey, sailor!” shouted the old
man.

Albrecht turned and to his surprise
caught the code key out of the air.

“
For your papers, ah!” The old
bastard laughed. Albrecht just nodded, then continued
walking.

‡

Menard: Nouvelle Avignon, Prime
See

Conference room Yellow-2 hosted a
colloquium of Xenic Bureau division heads. Nothing was more boring
than a division executive meeting as far as Menard was concerned.
At least, not usually. They were in the dark, a big virteo screen
running a rapid series of graphics. It smelled like a meeting, too
many people with onions for lunch and the faint sweat of
boredom.

Oh God
, Menard prayed,
grant me the
strength to suffer whatever this is that Your servant and my master
has put me up to
. He was immediately
ashamed at praying for such trivia, but not ashamed enough to
express contrition.

Sister Pelias was talking. She was
the lone woman in the entire Bureau, division head of Systems Trend
Analysis, which mostly did pattern matching on equity market trades
and communications routing. Chor Episcopos Menard privately thought
she was a compelling argument against the sheer idiocy of barring
women from the hierarchy. It wasn’t his job to comment on
that.

“
Chor Episcopos
Menard,” she said, her light pen bobbing as she nodded at him. “I
was just discussing the Kenilworth-Marsden hypothesis. If one is
willing to take K-M analyses at face value, they would indicate a
strong possibility of xenic influence in the Front Royal sector.
This is based on the, well,
bending
, of comm routing primarily.
We’ve also seen some out-of-norm fluctuation in the futures markets
traded in Front Royal and several neighboring sectors, again
mapping into K-M.

“
Now, in and of itself, these
aren’t terribly significant. I can pull positive K-M events out of
any corner of the empire within any annualized data set. But...”
She paused to switch viewing modes on the display. “If we track
public health reporting across Front Royal, we can correlate
incidents of schizophrenia, paranoia and...well...please excuse me
Bishop, religious mania. This is, of course, the classic Whitley
hypothesis. Much like K-M curves, I can build a Whitley curve in
any number of places.”