Death of a Starship (22 page)

“
Biggest fish of all. Dictator
class battleship.”

“
NSS
Enver Hoxha
,” said
Dillon.

Hoxha
.
Hoxha
.
Why
did he
know that name? “What’s a battleship doing here in Halfsummer?
What’s a battleship doing
anywhere
? They were all scrapped
decades ago, before I was born.”

“
No one knows,” said Dillon. “Been
here since the civil war is all I can tell you.”

“
Bloody idiots need a place to
refit her,” Albrecht added.

The light of revelation bloomed in
Menard’s head. It was almost as powerful as that moment when God
had driven him to his knees at thirteen, and from there into the
priesthood. This was what had shivered his bones back when he had
been talking to Russe, when this whole mystery had first begun to
unfold. He wanted to sing.

At Your command all things
came to be,
he thought,
the vast expanse of interstellar space
. Then, in a whisper: “I know.”

“
I know,” he said.

“
I know!” he shouted.

Dillon twisted in his chair to look
at Menard, as Albrecht gave him a long, sideways stare. “You know
what?” Dillon finally said.

The words fought their way
out of Menard’s mouth. “McNally, a – well never mind, except that,
that he’s a native of 3-Freewall. He told me about
Hoxha
vanishing from the
battle. They’ve got a tradition at 3-Freewall about that. They look
for rocks.”

Dillon turned back to his piloting
with a snort of disgust. Albrecht continued to stare at Menard with
an expression of mild disbelief. “Rocks?”

“
My job is tracing xenics,” said
Menard earnestly. He had to make this make sense. God had handed
him what might be the most important discovery in human history.
“One, well, idea about xenics is that they are present among us.
Internalism, that’s called. One branch of Internalism claims they
travel in spaceships, or starships, disguised as rockballs.
Asteroids.

“
There’s
anecdotal evidence from the second battle of 3-Freewall that
Enver Hoxha
somehow
overtook or was overtaken by a rock which was making its own course
corrections, immediately before she vanished. Now you tell me she’s
here, several hundred light-years from her last known location.
Even though there’s never been a shred of evidence or rumor of her
traveling from 3-Freewall to Halfsummer. At best, that’s two dozen
c-transitions. There aren’t enough dark beacons in alignment to
make that many hidden legs to a journey.

“
And the clincher...ship
disappearances, or translocations, are one of the traces we’ve
always watched for xenic activity. Here you have the biggest
confirmable translocated ship in human history. On top of some
other evidence in my bureau that Halfsummer is a focus of xenic
activity right now.

“
We might be about to prove the
existence of xenics, and answer the Xenic Question, in one
move.”

Menard sighed. He felt
spent.

Albrecht finally filled the long
silence that followed. “And here I thought it was insurance
fraud.”

“
Fucking xenics,” said Dillon.
“Never liked them around.”

Menard and Albrecht both stared at
him.

‡

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

It didn’t work. He had about twenty
seconds to go, and the fog wasn’t reacting. Just swirling,
shimmering. It knew he was there, it wouldn’t touch him.

He needed a counterweight, some
thing to swing against or throw away.

Throw away.

Sixteen seconds.

Yee or the angel.

Fourteen seconds.

Who did he owe? What did he
owe?

Twelve seconds.

What was he? Who was he?

Ten seconds.

The memory of the priest’s sad eyes
brought Golliwog to tears.

Eight seconds.

“
God damn me,” he said, and
grabbed the line holding the life bubbles in place.

Six seconds.

He strained his muscles to shift
his orientation relative to Dr. Yee and the angel, transferring
momentum to the two life bubbles.

Four seconds.

He swung harder.

Two seconds.

He unclipped the line and cast one
bubble loose.

And his trajectory shifted. The
nano bloomed bright, the probability curves opened up inside
Golliwog’s head, as he hugged the remaining life bubble
close.

“
Go with God, Dr. Yee,” he
whispered.

If someone bothered to pick her up
in the minutes of life remaining to her, they might be willing to
help. The angel was a made thing, like him. They both stood outside
the kind regard of both God and man.

Any sane human would kill it on
sight.

And besides, whispered his traitor
voice, she would have cut him open for the secret of
c-transition.

Clutching the angel close,
trailed by a blaze of defensive nano, Golliwog headed for the mass
hauler. From there he could make a hop to
Jenny’s Little Pearl
.

He’d already made his hop away from
being human.

Golliwog wept.

‡

He was almost five minutes
into his ten-minute reserve when he made
Pearl
’s main airlock, the angel once
more lashed to his left shoulder. Golliwog could go a long time
without breathing, but his skin still respired, and even he needed
his next breath. Maybe he had a ten minute margin once his oxygen
ran flat. Sitting in all that carbon dioxide wasn’t going to do him
much good.

Golliwog studied the access panel.
Locked and dark. No wonder his benefactors had slipped him the
codelock key.

If he guessed wrong about which
ship it was for, he wouldn’t have very much time for
regrets.

Golliwog slipped the codelock key
from the utility bag. The bag itself wasn’t vacuum-rated, and the
fibers were brittle and crumbling. Much like his life. Golliwog
felt a shudder run through his chest, painful against his
distressed ribs.

The codelock key slotted into the
data port on the access panel. Status lights cycled and the lock
opened obediently.

No passwords, no overrides. Maybe
he’d live.

He towed the angel into the lock,
the two of them crowded – this was a small boarding lock,
deliberately undersized to discourage rude strangers in combat
armor, he imagined. The outer hatch shut and the chamber began to
pressurize. As soon as the ambient air became thick enough for him
to hear the hissing of the valves, Golliwog stripped the baggie
helmet free.

He promptly gagged, clenching his
mouth against the bile that threatened to come up. The stench in
the air was unbelievable.

What the hell had happened
here?

There was no helping it. He was
pretty sure he’d seen the angel breathing vacuum, right before they
fought, but in its current state it wasn’t likely to be nearly so
tough. It needed air, too. He mumbled an apology and popped the
seals on the angel’s life bubble.

Blood red eyes blinked at him from
within. It was curled like a fried eel, tight and small for
something so freakishly tall. The angel stared, but did not
move.

“
Why’d you try to kill us?”
Golliwog asked.

Something tickled his carrier,
briefly, that same feeling as before, but that was all. The angel
blinked once, then continued to stare.

“
I think you’re dying, friend.”
Golliwog stared back a moment longer. “I’m sorry.”

He cycled the inner hatch. The
stink was worse. As he stepped through, something swept him off his
feet with a ear-rending screech, dumping him into too much swampy,
foetid water.

On a
spaceship!?
was Golliwog’s thought as
a great weight pressed against his damaged ribs and huge set of
stinking jaws closed on his face.

‡

He wasn’t unconscious for more than
a few seconds, he knew that already. But something was very wrong
with his eyes. Golliwog tried to blink, couldn’t make it happen.
There was a terrible thrashing squeal nearby, then a crack which
made the deckplates vibrate beneath his back. Something sloshed
through the stench, picked him up gently, and sloshed more,
carrying him along.

A few moments later a hatch hissed.
The angel – it had to be the angel, Golliwog told himself – carried
him through and laid him in a chair.

“
My eyes,” Golliwog tried to say,
and discovered his lips were not working well either.

There were various clicking noises,
and the hum of systems coming to life. Something touched his
shoulder, and the carrier tingled in his head again. Nano? The
angel?

Golliwog concentrated, trying to
find sense in the patterns. It was like getting a new implant from
the surgeons, the nerves had to learn their way into the interface.
He knew that his brain had never been allowed to canalize in the
classic juvenile developmental sense – he’d always been able to
grow new connections, route around damage or hardened
processes.

This had been tickling him for a
while.

“
Hey...” he mumbled
softly.

Now
,
whispered a voice almost like his traitor thoughts. But it was from
outside.

Golliwog relaxed his own
vocal cords and just thought about talking.
Now. Sure.

Now.

Yes
,
he thought.
Now. Go. Follow them. It’s
what you want, right?

Now.
But this time, a different tone.

He heard the angel moving
around the bridge, felt a shift in the vibrations as
Jenny’s Little Pearl
brought her engines online. It all made sense.
Dmitri Hinton
would
follow
Pearl
. So
would the priest’s ship, whenever it showed.

They would all come to
him.

Smiling, Golliwog slept.

‡

Albrecht: Halfsummer Solar Space,
The Necklace, In transit

“You’re both nuts,” he said.
“Delusional bastards. Xenics this, Black Flag that. Everything’s a
plot to you people!”

“
Does your recent experience
suggest otherwise?” Menard asked.

The priest’s calm only annoyed
Albrecht further, but the man had a point. “I don’t know,” he said.
Control, control. “Some of this is way too convenient. I happen to
find the codelock key, you happen to show up knowing about this
McNally and his rocks.”

“
Things happen,”
said Dillon. “We have about twenty-two hours, by the way.
Hoxha
is very close to
crossing over the plane of the ecliptic, so it is not a difficult
trip. You may wish to sleep at some point.”

“
Thanks.” Albrecht stared outward
at the quiet stars. He couldn’t escape properly, he couldn’t even
get killed properly. Most people drank themselves to death, or got
fatally mugged in some dockside corridor. Not him. He had to get
involved in revolutions. Or maybe counterrevolutions. “Is someone
pushing our buttons?”

“
Anything is possible with
xenics,” said Menard. “If they’re here, they’ve evaded official
contact all the centuries of the human experience in space.” He
added in a satisfied voice: “Until now.”

A thought flashed through
Albrecht’s mind. “Proxies.”

“
Pardon?”

“
Proxies.” It
made a weird kind of sense. “Every loudmouth in a spaceport bar
thinks the Black Flag is a Naval proxy. Provocations to justify the
budgets.” Dillon snorted loudly but said nothing to this. Albrecht
continued, “What if the xenics are using proxies? What if they have
their own disagreements? One set knows where
Hoxha
is, doesn’t want another set of
xenics to have her. Maybe the way to keep her out of their hands is
to let the ship become public knowledge once more. Navy would be on
that like stink on a recycling tank. So they tip and nudge various
of us to find this thing.”

“
You’re in the wrong line of work,
my son,” said Menard.

Albrecht couldn’t decide
whether to laugh or shriek at that. “No, I
was
in the right line of work. Far
away from all that wheels-within-wheels crap.
Now
I’m in the wrong line of
work.”

“
Xenics are real enough,” said
Dillon, finally re-entering the conversation. “People just don’t
talk about them. Like a lot of things out here in the Deep Dark.
World looks different down a gravity well than it does out
here.”