Death of a Starship (5 page)

Dr. Yee had never been one of his
surgeons. Golliwog’s relationship with them had been clear. He was
meat, they were talent. He had only ever talked to them to respond
to assessments or answer factual questions. “Does this hurt?”
hadn’t generally been one of those questions.

No, Dr. Yee was – had been? – his
cognitive template engineer. She had come and gone through the last
eight years of his training, loading routines into his internal
systems, testing his effectiveness, tuning his reflexes and pain
tolerance.

Golliwog didn’t hate or love very
much in his life, but Dr. Yee had always brought a certain
enthusiasm to her stressing of his systems. Golliwog found himself
wondering what last preparations she had for him now, before she
signed him over to the Naval Oversight agent.

The doctor’s office was much like
Yee herself – dark and compact, with glittering, dangerous edges.
He walked through a shadowed space where spider-armed machines
lurked in silhouette. A hatch ahead stood open, overbright, so that
Golliwog had to step from the dangerous shadows into the light of
her presence.

Shuddering, he went.

‡

It was a while before she bothered
to take note of Golliwog. He stood before her desk and patiently
watched. Dr. Yee was wearing a uniform, rather than her usual lab
coat and surgical smock. Golliwog studied her insignia. Navy, of
course, cream white against her space black skin. Captain, which
was a surprise to him. She’d only ever been referred to as “Doctor”
within his earshot. But her branch insignia indicated intelligence,
not medical.

More interesting to Golliwog were
the service decorations he’d never seen her wear before. Yee, all
one meter, fifty-five cents of her, was orbit drop qualified. She
also wore the tiny red skull of a Marine pathfinder. A hard woman,
in more ways than he’d ever imagined, even in his bloody, miserable
dealings with her. And in wearing this uniform, she wanted him to
be very clear on that.

With a sort of fascinated dread, it
dawned on Golliwog that she was the senior agent of Naval Oversight
who would be managing him on this mission.

“
Figured it out,
did you?” She glanced up at him. “I
know
you can go almost seventeen
minutes without breathing. Yet even with that much control, I could
hear the catch when you realized who your supervisor was. You’re
going to have to be better, Golliwog, if you’re going out in the
field with me.”

“
Yes, ma’am.”

Dr. Yee set down her light pen and
stared him up and down. “Do you think you could kill me,
Golliwog?”

He opened his mouth to
answer, then stopped. Dr. Yee didn’t waste words, nor effort.
She
was
a trap. “I
don’t know, ma’am,” he finally said.

She simply stared him
down.

“
No,
ma’am.”
Not yet
,
he added mentally.

“
Not yet,
indeed,” she responded, a tiny smile quirking across her face.
“Remember, Golliwog, I
built
you. I know what you’re thinking before you do.
Someday you will surprise me, but not this day.”

“
Someday, ma’am.” Then, on
impulse. “That’s a promise, ma’am.”

She caught his gaze and held it
with her own. Her eyes were pit-black, Golliwog realized. “Good.”
Yee breathed the words out as if she were biting off pieces of her
life. “And if you succeed in killing me, then I don’t deserve to
live.”

“
Yes, ma’am.”

Yee made a flickering gesture with
her fingers. The lighting shifted, becoming less harsh, and a
station chair popped up out of the deck in front of her desk. “Sit,
Golliwog. Let me tell you where we’re going and why.”

Golliwog sat. Somehow, he realized
he had just passed his true final examination.

“
Tell me,” she said in a voice
that was eerily conversational. “I know you’ve studied ship types.
That will be important later. But have you ever heard of a system
called Halfsummer?”

‡

Albrecht: Halfsummer, Gryphon
Landing

He got dragged into the watch
commander’s office without being strip-searched, which amazed
Albrecht. They’d taken his thigh pack, the credits in his pocket,
day permit, voided crew card and the codelock key and stuffed them
in a plastic bag. Albrecht still clutched the receipt
chitty.

“
Micah Albrecht,” said the watch
commander. It wasn’t a question. She was a big woman, heavy gravity
in her genes or a hell of a lot of gym time. She didn’t look
pleased to see him. Her office was eerily clean, devoid of
paperwork, personal decorations, or really, much of anything but a
desk and a single chair with her in it.

So he stood where piggy and the
smart guy had left him. “Ma’am.”

She stared at him for a while, then
shook her head. “People are idiots.”

That didn’t seem to call for a
response.

“
You care to explain to me, Mister
Micah Albrecht, why I got a hotshot detain-and-question order from
an expert legal system looking for people committing insurance
fraud on interstellar shipping? With respect, friend, you don’t
look like an interstellar shipping magnate to me.”

So we are all friends here
at Public Safety
, Albrecht thought. At
least he’d guessed right on the fraud, though he couldn’t imagine
why there was a flag on that data. “I’m a c-drive engineer, ma’am.
Old ship types are my hobby. Just reading up.”

“
Grounded, right? No union card,
no engineer’s papers.” She grinned nastily. “You want to read up on
old ship types? Buy a hardbook, read on the can. Stay out of my
library and don’t waste my officers’ time.”

He stood, breathing hard, his
knees aching from the takedown. At least they hadn’t
actually
used
the
shockstick.

She continued to stare. “Why are
you still breathing my air, Micah Albrecht?”

“
I’ll just be leaving, ma’am.” He
stepped backward, unwilling to turn away from her.

“
Good idea. Don’t let me see you
again. Ever.”

“
No ma’am.”

Then he was in the hall, being
stared down in turn by piggy. The cop said nothing at all, just
trailed Albrecht back to the front desk where his belongings were
returned, then to the front doors.

It was a long walk to the market,
but Albrecht didn’t want to stay anywhere near the shade of the
fat-leaved trees.

‡

He almost threw the codelock key in
the trash, but decided to hold off. The tool’s presence bothered
him. Instead Albrecht headed to the market to find the old Alfazhi
trader. The day was heating up and the crowd was thickening as he
made his way into the maze of stalls and booths and small-lot
auctions. Somehow he expected the old man to have vanished, but the
trader was right where he had been the previous day.

“
Good tool, ah?” said the trader,
looking at Albrecht with a suspicious glint in his eye.

“
Yeah. Valve bleeding great.”
Albrecht squatted on his heels opposite the trader, looking at
today’s merchandise on the solar sail. More small tools, still the
Higgs sniffer, along with a new a collection of vacuum-rated bolts,
bindings and toggles. The spill of an engineering hardsuit’s
utility pouch, he would wager a guess.

Then he broke the first rule of a
marketplace – he asked a stupid question. “Where do you get this
stuff from?”

The trader sat very still for a
moment, staring Albrecht down. Then, with a shrug: “Here,
everywhere, there. Smart man know where look. I sell you, you sell
pawn, what difference?”

“
Look, I don’t care. It doesn’t
matter. I just want to know.”

“
Why you want know if you don’t
care, ah?”

Albrecht sighed. That was a good
question. But the codelock key...something was wrong here. Maybe
there was more to it, some angle to his benefit. He slipped a
too-precious five cred chit out of his pocket, showed it to the old
man on the palm of his hand, and said the first thing that popped
into his head. “I got curiosity like a monkey, ok? My old man, he
died on the ship that codelock key came from. I just want to
know.”

The Alfazhi snatched the chit
away.
There went a night’s mattress
fee
, thought Albrecht. The old man grinned,
looking half-crazy now. “Beggar auction.”

“
What?”

“
Dead men, ah? They drink, they
die, nobody know them, nobody respect for them, bodies go for
reprocessing, stuff go for beggar auction. Not for you, ah. You go
now, sailor.”

“
Yeah.” He knew from nobody
knowing him. “I go now. ‘Ah’ to you too.” He stood up, wincing from
a sharp rush of pressure and pain. That takedown in front of the
library was making itself known to him.

“
Sailor. One more
thing.”

“
What?”

“
Maybe you go down Sixth Wharf.
Drink some, talk some. Maybe somebody know your daddy.”

“
Here?
From
Jenny D
?”
That seemed dreadfully unlikely. But then again, so did the
codelock key, when you got right down to it.

“
We live through our fathers, my
people, ah. I give you same respect.” The trader’s face closed into
a scowl. “Now go.”

‡

Menard: Nouvelle Avignon, in
transit toward c-beacon ∂318-f

The Chor Episcopos tried to ignore
the angel in his ready room and concentrate on the line of thought
which had been nagging at him since his conversation with Sister
Pelias. The angel was obviously content to ignore him as it slept,
after all. Menard prayed briefly to the power of the Holy Spirit
for forgiveness of his unkind thoughts regarding a fellow servant
of the Patriarch. Mind cleared and soul somewhat eased, he then
considered his situation.

They traveled on the Church
fast courier
St. Gaatha
. Being a c-courier, she was a heavy beast. The ship relied on
that strange trade-off of mass and acceleration that decreased
transit time and energy required to make the transition to a smear
of negative matter and perverse equations, resolving some few dozen
lightyears distant as an allegedly identical copy of ship, cargo
and crew. As a heavy beast, she sported large, luxurious
cabins.

It was obvious to Menard that his
quarters were ordinarily reserved for someone much more senior than
he. There was more gold filigree in here than he’d seen in most
churches outside the Prime See, and the entire compartment was done
over in blue silk upholstery and carpeting, with an ostentation
that was just short of bizarre. He had regretfully passed over the
ornamented altar with its beautiful iconostasis with Sts. Basil,
Gaatha and Tikhon rendered in delicate brushstrokes. Instead, with
a hasty prayer and a careful, sacred kiss, he set up his little
traveling icon of St. Niphon with his tiny thurible of Athonite
incense.

As strange as his quarters were,
they were not so bizarre as the sleeping angel, stretched long and
thin with its boots crossed at the ankles. And though Chor
Episcopos Menard had made more c-transitions than he could possibly
count without resorting to his personnel file, there was still
something fundamentally odd about this whole trip. Even without the
blesséd angel.

Still, he’d asked to be here. Meant
to be here. Following the shiver in his bones and the pricking in
Sister Pelias’ data.

Even in the face of Menard’s
interest Bishop Russe had forced the point – something had been
driving His Grace, some pressure invisible to the Chor Episcopos
but still real enough to affect the assignment.

“
Jonah,” Russe had said. “This is
important. Terribly important. The Metropolitan of Halfsummer will
extend you every possible aid and comfort, but that is a rude
planet in a rude sector. People who serve on the frontiers don’t
understand the logic of empire. Or the importance of our work.”
He’d leaned close, breath reeking of onions. “You will take an
angel. To watch over you, and deal with the xenics if you meet
them.”

An angel. Menard had never
heard of one leaving the Prime See, except in the direct company of
the Patriarch himself. He certainly didn’t need an angel to watch
over him. To keep watch
on
him, more like it, in obedience to whatever hidden
force Pelias had alluded to and Russe had so obviously been
responding to. Politics, of course, to which Menard had too often
willfully blinded himself.

And here was the result of his
deliberate ignorance of the machinations of power: the angel. It
was pale as all its kind – a hairless, sexless creature, close to
three meters tall, wearing red leather body armor, with a red
Maltese cross tattooed on its forehead. That cross was like a
declaration of war to any decent churchman, bloody and wrong. It
had no scent, either, except the faintest aroma of leather from its
armor. Right now it was sleeping, or least immobile, but when it
was alert the solid pink eyes were perhaps the most disturbing.
Like the wing of a beetle made from blood, perhaps, with no white
or pupil.