Death of a Starship (9 page)

Using the codelock key, Albrecht
lit up the crew workstations. The boat had power. It had actual,
live system power. A feed from the city mains, probably. It’s how
he would have done it. A commercial-industrial area like the Sixth
Wharf had all kinds of big customers with weird consumption
profiles – a standard two-kilovolt industrial feed would keep a
boat this small live and warm on long-term hold.

A few minutes fiddling with
the control panels made things clear enough. This boat was
Jenny’s Little Pearl,
a
Xiao-Gang Ye
-class cutter – very similar to the
Shostakovich
series. The boat
definitely thought it had touched down about eleven years ago,
though Albrecht wasn’t the least bit prepared to trust the
log.
Pearl
’s
systems were at 61% of optimal, which was pretty damned good for
something which had been sitting underground for years. No killing
failures, though redundancies left a lot to be desired. And it had
almost fourteen hundred hours of fuel load, bloc hydrogen stored in
ion-lattice sponges. Enough to go skiving around Halfsummer’s inner
system, if the boat could get into the air and out of the gravity
well in the first place.

So now he could turn it off and go
back to his five credit mattress. Or he could stay on board and eat
freeze-dried chow and wait for someone to come find him. Or he
could try to figure how the boat was supposed to get back out from
under here. As the fat man had said, make it go away.

As if there was any question
what he would do next. This wasn’t as good as being back on a
c-transit run, but it was hell of a lot closer to space than he’d
come since being busted off
Princess
Janivera
.

Time to start tracing
circuits
, Albrecht thought. The bad guys
would find him if they wanted him. They probably already knew where
he was.

Before he got to work, Albrecht
dismounted the hotwired hatch controls and locked himself
in.

‡

Four hours later he had eaten
a very bad bag of something which was allegedly chicken fried rice,
and established several key facts about
Jenny’s Little Pearl
. The boat was
indeed on the city power mains. He couldn’t see the billing
interface from inside the power shunt, but Albrecht would bet his
left foot the power authority didn’t know where that particular
five kilovolt line was terminated. The same umbilical which brought
in power brought in a ten millimeter water line, which kept
environmental systems sufficiently hydrated without needing to draw
down ship power in order to crack water out of the air. It also
brought in a local nöosphere link, which meant
Pearl
had a comm number and data
access.

Somebody had wanted to be able to
send out for pizza.

And they had, at that. Pearl had
four cabins, two port and two starboard. The portside cabins,
closest to the hatch, had obviously seen use as cells. There were
literally chains welded to the bulkheads. Albrecht wasn’t too keen
on examining the stains on the decks in there. The starboard cabins
had a more lived-in look. This boat had been a prison and a
hideaway both. Not a bad method of keeping out of sight for
extended periods. Store a few ships of food upstairs, skim some off
for provisions down below, with the unmonitored utility feeds, no
one would ever know.

Damn lousy waste of a good ship’s
boat, but at the same time, Albrecht had to appreciate the
ingenuity involved.

It wasn’t the only ingenuity on
board, either. He also found a soft control stack loaded in the
engineering panel which was highly customized and utterly
uncommented. Albrecht traced the circuit routings and eventually
located a second outside connection down in the engineering section
– a hand-built job which didn’t strike him as very trustworthy, but
there it was.

In effect, the unmarked
control stack was a big red button labeled, “Push Me.” Either you
were supposed to know what it did, or you weren’t supposed to push
it. Albrecht figured the control had to launch some process which
extracted
Pearl
out of the hole in the ground – somebody had gone to a lot of
trouble to keep her up and spaceworthy – but he was darned if he
could see how the boat was supposed to get out. Blow up the godown
and lift from the crater? Any explosion powerful enough to shatter
the poured concrete floor upstairs would seriously endanger the
boat.

He decided to ask for an opinion.
Albrecht used the command panel to open up a generic nöosphere
access and asked for a connection to The Newt Trap, along Sixth
Wharf.

“
Thank you for calling The Newt
Trap,” said the bar’s comm system, displaying a sort of titchy
fractal screen saver.

“
I want to talk to–” Albrecht
stopped. What was the man’s name. “The fat man. You know the fat
man?”

“
There is no one here by that
name.”

Damned machines. Any human would
have known exactly who he meant. How many four hundred kilo
monsters could there be hanging around the Sixth Wharf? “Let me
speak to a live person, then. Anyone.”

“
Please wait.” The comm switched
him over to a syrupy hold music which went on for about two minutes
before the screen flickered and the fat man came on.

“
Oh...it’s you,” he said.
“Enjoying yourself?”

“
More fun than a barrel of
junkies,” Albrecht replied. “I think I can make your problem go
away, but I need to understand something.”

The fat man’s piggy eyes narrowed
to flickering slits. “What would that be?”

“
Someone wired this thing to
leave. If it can find clear air, the right hands can make it go
away for good.” He flexed his fingers in front of the pickup.
“Mine, for example. But what happens when I press the go button? I
don’t see how it works.”

“
You don’t–” The fat man cut
himself off, glanced at something out of the pickup range. When he
looked back again his eyes had narrowed, his face pale. “Go now,
boy. They’re coming.” The connection dropped.

Albrecht sat and thought that one
over. Less than a minute later, the boat’s systems warbled. Someone
was trying the hatch.

“
Guess you got my
address,” he told no one in particular. “Time to press the big red
button.” He initiated hot-start pre-flight sequencing from the
command panel. It would take about twenty minutes to get
Pearl
ready. Unless his
visitors had brought a thermic lance or some serious machine tools
with them, they weren’t getting in that fast. Not now that he’d
secured the hatch.

The command panel bleeped. Incoming
comm link.

He tried to imagine a downside to
answering. Whoever was out there knew he was in here. The fat man
wouldn’t be hard to sweat. Public Safety had already shaken
Albrecht down once, a month or so ago after the library incident.
If they had been following him around, they knew it was him, and
they knew he was down here.

If it was the bad guys, whoever
they might be, well...same logic. No one was getting in without
some damned hard work, and he wasn’t coming out now. Albrecht felt
oddly cheerful. It was sort of like jumping off the cliff and
hoping like hell there was more water than rock under that mist
down there.

He answered the call about
the time a dull banging began echoing through the hull.
“
Jenny’s Little Pearl
, flight deck.”

A hard, familiar face flickered
into being on the panel. Of course – it was the Public Safety watch
commander who’d briefly interrogated him those weeks
ago.

“
Oh,” she said,
almost sadly. “It
is
you. I’ve just lost a hundred credit bet.”

“
Hello, ma’am,”
said Albrecht with a sort of preternatural cheerfulness. If he
didn’t get
Pearl
into orbit quite soon, he was going down so hard and so far
he’d have to tunnel up to find a shallow grave. “I’d make it up to
you if I could.”

She leaned into her pickup, eyes
large and bright on his panel. “What the hell are you doing? I’m
getting screamed at from several unexpected directions, my little
ship type collector. I can’t even get a decent trace on this comm
number yet. I don’t know if you appreciate how truly annoying that
is for someone in my position.”

“
So it’s not your goons knocking
down my door?” Albrecht asked, surprised.

“
Micah Albrecht,
I don’t even know where your door
is
.”

“
Hmm.” Was there harm in telling
her? “Might want to get a rapid response team down to The Newt
Trap. It’s a waterman’s bar down along the Sixth Wharf.”

“
I know the place.” She glanced
away, catching the eye of someone out of his view and nodding.
Then: “You’re not there, are you?”

“
Close by. Let’s just say bad
people knocked over The Newt Trap a few minutes ago looking for
me.”

“
Black Flag,” she muttered, then
looked away from the pickup again and shook her head before
returning her attention to Albrecht. “What about you?”

Black
Flag
, he thought.
Of course
. No wonder the fat man had
been worried. Vicious anarchists, one and all, with deep pockets.
Albrecht had never understood what they wanted. It might explain
how this boat had wound up under a building. Their kind of move,
slick and clever and undetectable. But the cop had asked him a
question. “It seems I’ve accidentally landed in the middle of your
insurance fraud problem. Despite not being...um...what was the
term? An interstellar shipping magnate?”

She looked interested in spite of
herself. “Do you plan to survive the experience?”

The echoing bangs intensified.
Serious machine tools it was, perhaps. “We’ll both know in about
fifteen minutes. In the meantime, if the fat man tells you to duck
and cover, I’d listen very carefully.”

“
Listen...” She closed her eyes
and sighed, then shot him a hard glare. “I’m Public Safety
Lieutenant Alma Gorova. You live long enough to tell more of the
story, you call and ask for me. I’ll listen.”

“
You’re about to know a lot more
than you realize,” Albrecht said. “That’s a prediction, not a
promise, but I’m standing behind it with my life.”

“
Good luck, Micah Albrecht. Don’t
do anything I’ll have to kill you for later.”

“
My fondest wish,
ma’am.”

When she signed off, Albrecht
amused himself by arming the antipersonnel defenses around the main
hatch. About fifteen seconds later, the banging on the hull
stopped.

He had thirteen minutes to go. That
time went by without further terrible ado, and with a relieving
absence of additional distressing comm links. Albrecht kept a close
eye on the hot-start protocols and on the upward and downward jumps
in systems readiness. All he had to do was make orbit. Then he
could effect repairs if need be. He tried not to think about
hunter-seekers running him down. Surely the Halfsummer system had
never bothered to arm to that degree?

When the hot-start was ready,
Albrecht put it on ten-second hold, then shifted to the engineering
panel. He looked at the anonymous, jerry-rigged control again, then
initiated its sequence.

The damned thing didn’t even
have a password. It just kicked off a wailing alarm as something
began to boom loudly outside his hull. He lit up all the screens
and watched
Pearl
’s structural integrity very carefully.

Much to Albrecht’s amazement, hull
sensors showed outside pressure and temperature changing. He
toggled through various external camera views until he found
something visible.

Water was rushing in around the
hull. He could feel the deck rocking slightly.

That wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t
immediately disastrous. More to the point, why? He studied the
screen. All he could see was shadowed water and foaming mud.
Something fairly large surged in and clunked against the
hull.

Wood.

“
Oh, crap,”
Albrecht whispered. He called up the nöosphere window and searched
for a map of the Sixth Wharf.
Zoning
overlays
, he thought.

Light bloomed on the viewscreen.
Sunlight. Outside air.

What the hell had happened to
the godown above his head? Obviously this was
Pearl
’s escape process, but what was
he supposed to do?

The control stack on the
engineering panel warbled its ready state.

Ready. Yeah, right. As far as
he could tell, he was still under a building. Igniting
Pearl
’s atmosphere drives
would simply destroy ship, building and Albrecht in one go. But
here was light, and water.