Investments

by Walter Jon Williams

  The flickering lights were inviting. Severin thought he should probably get a flashlight.

  “I’m going to get a light,” he said. “Everyone else stand by.”

  His fingers released the webbing that he’d never quite fastened down, then he unlocked his display and pushed it above his head, out of the way, a maneuver that also pushed him more deeply into his couch. Now free, he reached out, found one of the struts of his cage, and tugged gently till his head and torso floated free of the cage.

  With careful movements, he jackknifed to pull his legs out of the cage, a movement that rolled the cage slightly. He straightened his body and his feet contacted the floor.

  He couldn’t push off the floor to approach the flashlights: that would send him the wrong way. Instead he flung the acceleration cage with both hands, a movement that sent the cage spinning on all three axes while he drifted gently to the nearest wall. Severin reached out a hand and snagged the handle on the battery charger.

  He became aware that was breathing hard. Even this little exertion had taxed him.

  There was a distant thump. Then another. Severin realized that someone outside the control room was pounding on the heavy shielded door, slowly and with great deliberation.

  He released the flashlight from the charger that was designed to hold it at high gee. He turned it on and flashed it over the control room.

  Three sets of eyes stared back at him. The others were awaiting his orders.

  From outside the command room door, Severin began to hear the muffled sound of screams.

  *

  Screams could still be heard faintly through the door.

  Severin shone his light on Chamcha long enough for the sensor operator to work his way out of his cage and push across the room toward another flashlight. Then he turned to the problem of the door. He pulled and locked down a hand grip installed for the purpose, then— floating on the end of the handgrip— opened an access panel, removed a light alloy crank, and inserted it into the door mechanism. With one hand on the grip, the flashlight stuck to the wall on an adhesive strip, and a foot braced against the bottom of an instrument panel, Severin began to crank the door open.

  The screams had stopped. Severin didn’t know whether to be encouraged by that or not.

  By the time Severin had cranked open the heavy door he was puffing and throwing off beads of sweat that floated like drops of molten gold in the light. The control room crew clustered around him, hanging by fingertips onto cage struts or instrument displays, and their lights were turned to the outside corridor. Severin heard a series of gasps, and the single cry, “Lord captain!”

  Severin looked out and saw Lord Go hanging weightless in the flashlight beams. He was wearing turquoise satin pajamas. His skin had turned bright red, and his eyes were hidden amid scarlet swellings. Large blisters were forming on his face and hands. His expression was slack.

  Burns, Severin thought. His mind whirled with the idea of a fire so fierce and sudden that it could knock out the ship and burn the captain before a single call for help could be made. But he saw no fire and could smell no burning.

  “My lord!” Severin called. With one hand still on the grip, he swung himself toward Lord Go, reached out, and took his captain’s hand. Another crew member, he saw, was hovering motionlessly a short distance down the corridor, and from the golden hair that floated in the absence of gravity he knew it was Lady Maxine Wellstone, the ship’s junior lieutenant.

  Severin drew Lord Go toward him by the hand, and his stomach queased at the slippery way the captain’s flesh felt under his fingers— it felt unattached, as if he could peel the skin from Lord Go’s hand like taking off a glove. He tried to brake Lord Go as gently as he could and brought him to a motionless halt just inside the door.

  “Bhagwati,” he said. “Tether the lord captain to an acceleration cage or something. Try not to touch him.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Nkomo, go find the doctor and bring her here.”

  Surveyor’s doctor was no doctor at all, but a Pharmacist First Class. She would have to do.

  “Very good, my lord,” Nkomo said. He made an agile dive into the corridor over Severin’s head, and Severin pushed off to Nkomo’s acceleration cage, where Lily Bhagwati was tethering Lord Go to a cage strut with her belt. Severin held himself a short distance from his captain’s face, and tried not to look too closely at the scalded, weeping flesh.

  “My lord,” he said, “do you know what happened?”

  Bloody eyes moved beneath the swollen lids. Lord Go sounded as if he were trying to talk past a tongue twice its normal size.

  “Don’t . . . know,” he said.

  “Was there a fire?”

  “No . . . fire.” Lord Go gave a long sigh. “Hurts,” he said.

  Severin bit his lip. “You’re in pain, my lord?”

  “Hurts,” the captain said again.

  “The doctor’s on his way.”

  “Don’t know,” Lord Go said again, and then fell silent, lids falling on his dull eyes. His breathing was harsh. Severin looked at Bhagwati and saw his own anxiety mirrored in her wide brown eyes.

  He had to get the ship working again.

  “Right,” he said. “Bhagwati, Chamcha, check the main breakers. We’ve got to get power on.” He remembered the flash of blonde hair in the corridor outside. “I’m going to check on Lieutenant Wellstone.”

  He pushed off the floor with his fingers and drifted into the corridor outside. He tried not to look at Wellstone’s burned, tortured face as he touched her neck in search of a pulse.

  There was none. When he returned to the control room, he felt a tremor in his hands.

  “My lord,” Chamcha said as Severin returned to the command cage. “My lord, it’s radiation.”

  Severin’s heart turned over. He turned to Chamcha. “You were monitoring the sensors. Did you see the spectra?”

  “I saw spikes, but I didn’t get a clear idea of what was happening before everything blew out.” Chamcha licked his lips. “But it’s got to be radiation, my lord, not a fire. It’s the only explanation.”

  Severin felt a cold finger touch his heart. Chamcha was right.

  There were several areas on the ship that had heavy radiation shielding. The control room, and also engine control. There were also hardened radiation shelters where the crew could hide in the event of a solar flare, but they were small and crowded, and unless there was a radiation alert the crew never slept there.

  “We’ll look at the recordings once we get power,” Severin said. “Get busy with the breakers.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Radiation, Severin thought. But what kind? And from what? They were alone in space, in transit from one wormhole to another, bypassing the one inhabited planet in the system. There were no other planets nearby, no stations, no other ships.

  The electronic failures could be explained in terms of a solar flare. The fast protons had a deadly habit of actually traveling along electric field lines until they could find something to blow up. But a solar flare so massive that it could knock out all electric systems in a ship the size of Surveyor, plus seriously irradiate any unshielded crew, and do it all in a very few seconds, had to be a solar flare larger than any recorded in history.

  A solar flare so huge it might be ripping the atmosphere off Chee right now.

  Such a flare, however, seemed very unlikely. Normally under a radiation alert the crew had plenty of time to get into their cramped shelters. Plus, Surveyor when under way generated an electric field from metallic strips planted along its resinous hull, a field intended to help repel any high-energy charged particles coming their way.

  Which left uncharged particles . . .

  “My lord!” Bhagwati called. She’d pulled her head out of a access hatch, and her face was angry. “These breakers are slagged. Whatever hit them destroyed them before they could even trip. We can’t just reset them, they have to be replaced.”

  “G
et replacements, then,” Severin said.

  Severin turned as he caught the gleam of a light dancing in the corridor outside. A grey-haired woman floated past the doorway, and reached out one hand to snag the door sill in passing. The woman halted and drew her body into the control room, and Severin recognized Engineer First Class Mojtahed.

  “Reporting, my lord,” Mojtahed said. She was a burly, middle-aged, pot-bellied woman with her hair trimmed short and a prominent mole on one cheek. Severin felt relief at the very sight of her: at least one of the two principal engineers had been in the shielded engine control station when Surveyor had been hit.

  “What’s the situation?” Severin asked.

  “A power spike tripped the engine,” Mojtahed said. “We’ve reset breakers, and replaced some others, and I’ve ordered the engine countdown started. We’re at something like twenty minutes.”

  “You’ve got enough power for that?”

  “Emergency batteries are good, so far.” She glanced around the darkened control room, and realized that Severin wasn’t in any position to be able to command the ship, and wouldn’t be for a while.

  “We can stop the countdown at any point,” she said.

  “Hold at one minute, then.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Severin looked at her. “How many were in engine control with you?”

  A hard sadness settled onto her face. “Minimum engine crew on this watch, my lord. Two.”

  That gave Severin at least seven people he knew of who had been in hardened areas of the ship when the radiation hit.

  Seven, out of a crew of thirty-four.

  Mojtahed hesitated for a moment, then spoke. “May I speak with you privately, my lord?”

  “Yes.” Severin turned to Chamcha and Bhagwati, who were still hovering by the access panel. “Bring the breakers,” he said.

  The two crewmen made their way out. Severin turned to Mojtahed.

  “Yes?” he said.

  Mojtahed pushed off from the door and brought herself to a stop a short distance from Severin. She glanced at Lord Go, and her face hardened. She turned to Severin and spoke almost angrily.

  “Have you considered that we may have just been attacked?”

  “No,” Severin said, though he found himself unsurprised by the question. His thoughts hadn’t yet stretched to that possibility, but they would have reached it in time.

  “Gamma rays and fast neutrons,” Mojtahed said. “That’s what we’d get with a missile burst.”

  “We saw no signs of a missile incoming,” Severin said. “No missile flares, nothing on radar. And there’s no sign of a fireball.”

  “A missile could have been accelerated to relativistic velocities outside the system, then shot through a wormhole at us.”

  Severin thought about this. “But why?” Surveyor wasn’t a military ship, or particularly valuable, and it was engaged in crossing a system from one wormhole to another, outside any trade routes. As the target for the opening salvo of a war, Surveyor hardly rated.

  “Why,” Mojtahed repeated, “and who.”

  Severin’s mind raced. “If it’s an attack, the first thing we need to do is get a message to Chee Station and to the wormhole relay station for passage outside . We’ve got to do that before we light the engine, before we maneuver, before anything. Because if an enemy detects a sign of life, they may finish us off.”

  Mojtahed took in a breath, held it for a moment between clenched teeth, then let it out in a big, angry sigh. “If they’re attacking the likes of us, I don’t hold much hope for Chee Station or the wormhole relay station.”

  The silence had reached into its third second when Nkomo stuck her head through the door.

  “Doctor’s dead, my lord. I looked for her assistant and— “ Nkomo hesitated. “He’s no better off than the captain.”

  “Thank you,” Severin said, but Nkomo wasn’t done.

  “Lieutenant Wellstone’s dead in the corridor just outside, my lord,” she said as she came into the control room. “And I checked in Lieutenant Montcrief’s cabin, and he’s in his rack. He’s alive, but I can’t wake him.”

  “Thank you,” Severin said again. He turned to Mojtahed. “Get back to engine control and lock yourself in, just in case we’re hit again. I’ll concentrate on getting communications gear up before anything else.”

  “Very good, my lord.” Mojtahed began to push off, then paused. “Could it have been Titan?” she asked. “If Titan blew, we’d get a hell of a lot of radiation.”

  Mojtahed’s theory would have explained everything so conveniently that Severin hated to dispose of it.

  “Not unless Titan was nearby,” he said, “and it wasn’t. Titan isn’t even in the system yet.”

  Mojtahed apparently regretted the loss of her hypothesis as much as Severin. “Too bad, my lord.” she said, and then another idea occurred to her. “Could it be something that happened in nature? We’re close to the core of this galaxy. Could something have blown up in the galactic center and the radiation just reached us?”

  “I don’t know,” Severin said. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”

  Mojtahed pushed off the acceleration cage lightly, with her fingers. Even so that was enough to cause the cage to roll, and Lord Go, tethered to it, woke with a gasp.

  “Hurts!” he cried, and Severin’s nerves gave a leap. He pulled himself closer to his captain.

  “Medicine’s on its way, my lord.”

  “Hurts!”

  Afraid to disturb Lord Go again, Severin let go of the cage and touched the deck with one shoe. He pushed toward a wall, pushed off again, and snagged the door sill.

  “We’re going to the pharmacy,” Severin told Nkomo. “Then we’re going to start looking after the crew.”

  On Nkomo’s face was a look that combined anxiety and relief. “Yes, my lord,” she said.

  Severin looked at the body of Lieutenant Wellstone. “Let’s get her to her cabin,” he said, and he and Nkomo carried the body a short distance down the corridor. They put Wellstone in her rack, then raised the netting at the sides to keep her from floating away.

  On their way to the pharmacy they encountered Bhagwati and Chamcha returning with boxes of replacement electric parts. Severin told them to try to get the comm station working first, then led aft through a bulkhead. The pharmacy was in a shielded area of the ship: if the pharmacist had only been at her duty station instead of asleep in her rack, she would have survived.

  Two crew had come to the pharmacy in their agony, but had been unable to open the locked door. One was unconscious now, and the other curled in a ball, whimpering. Severin used his lieutenant’s key to open the pharmacy door and then the medicine locker. He pulled out a med injector, then began looking through the neatly-labeled white plastic boxes slotted into the heavy metal frames that guarded the contents against heavy accelerations. He found Phenyldorphin-Zed, pulled out one of the boxes, and handed it to Nkomo. He took another box, opened it, slotted a vial into the injector, and stuffed the rest of the vials into one of the leg pockets of his coveralls.

  Severin switched the med injector on. A tone sounded. Colors flickered on the display. A tiny bubble of air rose in the clear vial, and the injector flashed an analysis of the contents and a range of recommended doses.

  The software in the injectors was as idiot-proof as the Exploration Service could manage.

  He floated toward the nearest of the two crew, the one that whimpered with each breath, and he anchored his feet against the frame of the pharmacy door, pulled the woman toward him, and gently tipped her chin back with his fingers. He placed the med injector against her neck, waited for the display to signal that he’d placed the injector correctly, and fired a dose straight into her carotid.

  The woman’s eyelids fell. The whimpering stopped, and her breathing grew regular. Severin floated to the unconscious recruit and treated him likewise. Then he offered the injector to Nkomo.

  “You go to the female recru
its’ quarters and then take care of the petty officers. I’ll look after the male recruits, the warrant officers, the lieutenant, and the captain..”

  Nkomo looked at the med injector without touching it, her dark eyes wide. “What about doses? What about— ?”

  “The highest recommended dose,” Severin said. “I’ve already set it on the injector.”

  Nkomo didn’t move. “Isn’t that dangerous, my lord? Because these people are so sick, I mean.”

  Severin felt a sudden blaze of hatred for Nkomo. Nkomo was going to make him voice a thought that he hated himself for thinking, let alone for speaking out loud. The anger showed in his voice, and it made Nkomo start and stare at him.

  “Nkomo,” he said, “does it look to you as if the quality of life for these people is going to improve anytime soon?”

  Nkomo was cautious. “Ah— no, my lord.”

  “They’re dying,” Severin said. “We can’t do anything about it except try to make them more comfortable. If you give someone an accidental overdose, then as far as I’m concerned that’s fine. It just means that she won’t have to spend days dying in agony. But use whatever dose you want, I don’t give a damn.”

  He held out the injector again. Nkomo hesitated, then took it with fingers that trembled.

  “Yes, my lord,” she said, and left very fast.

  Severin floated in the corridor shaking with rage and badly wanting to hit something, but he knew that if he punched the wall in this weightless state he’d just start ricocheting around the corridor. It wasn’t Jaye Nkomo’s fault that she was eighteen and had been in the service for less than a year. It wasn’t her fault that an officer had given her an order, an order fraught with all the weight of authority and the regulations and the awesome power of the Praxis, who told her to give massive doses of narcotics to the dying women she’d been laughing with and serving with and sleeping alongside, and that if she killed any of them by accident that was all right. Nothing in Jaye Nkomo’s training had ever prepared her for this.

  Nothing in Severin’s training had prepared him giving such an order, either, and the knowledge made him furious. He went back to the pharmacy, found another med injector, loaded it, and went to the male crew quarters.