Death of a Starship (23 page)

“
So you seem to have said.”
Menard’s tone was polite, but tense with barely-masked fascination.
“But you say xenics are real, as in with evidence? We’ve been
searching for centuries.”

“
From the bottom of your well,
Chor Episcopos. Atmospheres bend light. They also bend information.
Too much insulation from reality. We won’t be a true spacefaring
species ‘til our masters are born, live and die in space. That’s
what the xenics are waiting for.”

“
Tell me, Ser Dillon,” Menard
asked quietly. “Have you ever spoken to a xenic?”

“
Yes,” said Dillon slowly. “And so
have you.”

“
Delusional.” Albrecht laughed.
“It’s all insurance fraud and rebel scams.”

Dillon laughed too, his rumble
rolling right over Albrecht. “Can be both at the same time. Xenics
need money too.”

Menard sighed. “If only it were
true.”

‡

Some hours later, Dillon woke
Albrecht by the simple expedient of shouting his name until sleep
sped away. “You’re stacking up a message queue, Ser Albrecht,” the
pilot said once Albrecht had blinked away enough sleep to
respond.

“
From who?”

“
From
whom
. As it happens,
inbound traffic from
INS Dmitri
Hinton
, INRS
Novy
Petrograd
and PSS
St. Gaatha
. Oh, and CRS
Swamp Rat
.”

Even through the clearing
muddle of sleep in his head, Albrecht could spot a new player. “Who
the hell is
that
?”

“
Fast charter from Halfsummer.
Somebody named Gorova on board.”

“
Oh, joy. They can fight over who
gets to arrest my dead body.”

“
You want to read any of
that?”

“
Do they say anything besides,
‘Stop or I’ll shoot’?”

Dillon snorted once more.
“Not really. Shorty’s Surprise has informed
Hinton
that some of their crew
committed murder and public endangerment while under the parole
of
St. Gaatha
’s
crew. The Chor Episcopos, they mean.” Albrecht glanced at Menard
,who was snoring. “
Hinton
has blamed you, as has
St. Gaatha
. It goes on like that for
a while.”

“
Whoever wanted everything to be
public has certainly gotten their wish,” Albrecht said. It did make
him smile. “Admiralty and the Prime See will be fighting this out
for years to come.”

“
We’ve got another
problem.”

“
Oh, sure, just like a shuttle,
always room for one more. What’s that?”

“
Your message
queue is being forwarded from
Jenny’s
Little Pearl
. Which is right now on the
fastest intercept of all our little friends.
Pearl
is forwarding, but they’re not
actually talking. I don’t know who’s flying her.”

A plot popped up on
Albrecht’s panel, shunted over from Dillon’s command console. The
probability curves were much cruder than what
Pearl
had been able to give him, but
Dillon was probably working with a lot less data and certainly
working with less sophisticated systems.

Nonetheless, it was a wonder
to behold.
Hinton
,
Petrograd
and
St. Gaatha
were all closing on
Pearl
. Albrecht’s recent boat was in
turn closing on their rock hopper, with
Swamp Rat
coming up on the inside,
much like the dark horse in a yacht race.
Pearl
was going to overhaul their
rock hopper before they got to
Hoxha
, or possibly beat them directly
to
Hoxha
, by a
number of hours if she made the least-time effort – her course was
still open to both outcomes.

“
Nice,” said
Albrecht. All his air leaks were coming home for a patch. Then a
question occurred to him. “How did Menard get here ahead of
St. Gaatha
?”

“
Rode a message torpedo in ahead
of his ship, essentially. Along with his angel.”

“
Angel? What
angel? What the hell
is
an angel?”

“
Hot shit Church security. The
thing that we let beat the crap out of the Naval Oversight team
hunting you. Including a hot-wired bione that I wouldn’t care to
tangle with. You owe the good Chor Episcopos over there a big one.
Or maybe his angel.”

Albrecht glanced at the
sleeping Menard. The priest didn’t look like a killer. Or even a
killer’s handler. He was a slightly fussy, overfocused Church
bureaucrat who seemed to hear God talking in his head.
“
Why?
Why was the
angel keeping them away from me?”

“
I wish we knew,” said
Dillon.

“
I just don’t want to go down hard
over this.”

“
Too late, Ser Albrecht. Too late
for all of us, I fear.”

Albrecht wondered precisely who
‘us’ was. He hoped like hell it didn’t include the inhabitants of
Shorty’s Surprise. They deserved better than his
mistakes.

‡

Golliwog: Halfsummer Solar Space,
Orbit of NSS Enver Hoxha

Kill
, said the angel in his head.

“
Me?” asked
Golliwog. His voice seemed to be working, a little bit, though his
face was a mask of stiff, tight pain. Nothing wrong with his
nose.
Pearl
still
smelled like wrong end of six kilometers of
swampland.

Them
.

Them...Albrecht...Menard...the civilians back at Shorty’s
Surprise. There were so many
thems
. “Why?”

...

He could actually feel the blank
surprise. As if he’d asked, why is there vacuum outside the hull?
“Why kill them?”

...

“
Is your priest
coming?”

Yes.

“
Ask him for
permission.”

...

Golliwog slipped away for a
while.

‡

The next time he knew where he was,
the tone of the ship had changed. Had it been changed the last
time? “Are we here?” he asked.

Yes.

“
Where you want to
kill?”

Yes.

Made
thing
, he thought. “You can choose not to
kill, you know. You can choose. You are better than whoever made
you.”

...

“
Where is here?”
He struggled for the name. That itself frightened Golliwog deeply.
His memory was by definition perfect. Was this what it meant to be
human? To forget? “
Hoxha
,” he finally said. “What Yee
and Spinks were looking for.”

Them.

“
Them who?”

Then there was a massive bloom of
paranoia and hatred, his head filled with generations of fear and
terror of the unknown and the unGodly.

“
Xenics,” said Golliwog. “Xenics
here.”

Yes
.
Somehow, the angel communicated satisfaction

“
Did I tell you that you could
choose not to kill? You are more than the sum of what you were made
to be.” He wondered where Dr. Yee was.

‡

Menard: Halfsummer Solar Space,
Orbit of NSS Enver Hoxha

“They’ve picked up a cold
corpse,” said Dillon. “A Captain Yee. The Navy is very, very
pissed. I think
Dmitri
Hinton
’s going to come up our asses with
guns blazing.”

Menard sighed, crossed himself,
promised prayers for the dead. Even the unpleasant dead. Both
pastoral duty and personal obligation, in this case, though he had
serious doubts that Yee had ever acknowledged God. “The last time I
saw her she wasn’t very healthy, but she was alive.” His gut
dropped. “And she was under my parole.”

“
You didn’t kill her, Chor
Episcopos.”

He did not want to weep for the
woman, but he had failed her. “I didn’t kill Yee by my actions, but
I did not protect her either. God forgive me.”

“
Well, she died to get you here.”
Dillon rolled the rock hopper along its axis of travel and fired up
a set of sun-bright external lights.

There was an enormous hull out
there, visible section by section as Dillon’s rock hopper moved
alongside it. Nothing gave it scale except the number of features
crowded onto it. The ship was mess, too, entire series of hull
frames reduced to bent slag, armor and skin peeled away. Parts
seemed bent out of true, rendered into shapes which nagged at the
eye.

It was staggeringly large,
and staggeringly improbable. Menard could barely breathe for the
sheer miracle of the thing, feeling once more that shiver of
inspiration in his bones, conflicting with the dread lump of
failure in his heart.
Oh Lord, You give
and You take away. Is this a trial to temper my joy of
discovery?
He would celebrate a Divine
Liturgy of thanksgiving as soon as possible.

It still wasn’t a confirmed
xenic contact, but something very strange
had
to have happened to bring that
ship here.

“
Poolyard wasn’t so crazy,” said
Albrecht in a thoughtful voice. “It is...off. Like it got wrung out
and twisted back close to true.”

“
What does that
to a ship?” asked Menard, still marveling at what God had brought
him to.
Oh God, please spare me from
pride
, he prayed.

“
Xenics,” said Dillon.

Albrecht glanced at his own
console. “Where’s
Pearl
?”

Dillon sighed. “Here. Relaying
traffic even, but quiet. We’re probably lucky she’s
unarmed.”

“
Yeah, well. Who’s flying
her?”

“
According to Shorty’s Surprise,
the Navy bione and the Chor Episcopos’ pet angel. They weren’t sure
about that until Captain Yee turned up dead.”

Menard considered that. “They just
now told us about her?”

“
Much to my irritation,” said
Dillon. “They had to have known it for the better part of two days.
Things are still...unsettled...at home, and will be until we know
the truth here.”

“
Or decided what the truth shall
be.” Menard asked the question closest to his heart. “And where are
the xenics? You say I’ve spoken to them, but I don’t see them
here.”

“
Look for rockballs,” said
Albrecht.

“
Midships,” Dillon answered.
“Weird mass-energy distortions about the one point eight kilometer
mark. That would be ‘weird’ in the technical sense of the term.
We’re coming up on it now.”

And there something shimmered in
the glare of the rock hopper’s lights, a rocky body no different
from the asteroids of a thousand solar systems, except that this
one was firmly wedged in a hull section of a derelict battleship,
limned in a faint red glow.

“
The rock ship,”
Menard said, scarcely daring to breathe. “From
3-Freewall...the
Ulan Ude
recordings.” He slumped in his chair, eyes
closing, and began to meditate on the welling lump of pride, joy,
and fear in his heart.

The xenics were real.

Thank you, God. For showing me
this, for allowing me this privilege. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of
God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

“
Civil war, here we come,” said
Albrecht.

Dillon squinted, began tapping up
new telemetry feeds. “What’s that down there, walking on the
hull?”

‡

Golliwog: Halfsummer Solar Space,
Orbit of NSS Enver Hoxha

He woke up once more, seeing
double. Well, seeing, but not with his own eyes. Golliwog was
pretty sure he didn’t have eyes anymore.

Something big and stony rose in
front of him. It glowed red, a strange, syrupy red that whispered
to him of relativistic shifts and time distortions. He – he? –
moved, working patiently at something on a pitted, twisted surface
beneath feet that were too far away.

The angel
, Golliwog thought.

Greetings.

“
What are you doing?”

Choosing.

“
Choosing to kill?”

Yes.

“
Kill whom? What?”

Them.

The angel looked down at its hands.
It carried a power cell, configured for a Mark Seventeen or earlier
torpedo. Golliwog knew three ways to make a perfectly good
explosive out of one of those. Obviously the angel did,
too.