by Joe Pace
“Mister Peckover,” Pearce shouted into the comm, “reef the sails, activate the converters, and let’s get out of here. There’s so much gravimetric current, we should be able to break free fairly easily.”
“Sir, I’ve been trying. The sails won’t respond.”
“What do you mean, won’t respond?” Pearce bellowed.
“Just that, sir. I get nothing from the automatic sheet controls. Something in the system isn’t functioning.”
Pearce rubbed his hand along his jaw. The kids have shown their mettle, he thought. If we get out of this, they might make decent officers. If we get out of this… “I see. Stand by. Mister Worth, how long before we’re dragged into the core? I know the pull isn’t constant, but assume an average rate of speed.” She did some quick calculations at her console.
“Twenty minutes, Captain.”
Christ.
“All right. Christine, we’ll have to horse the sheets home manually. Get down there and assist Peckover.”
“Aye, sir.”
As his first officer left the Quarterdeck, he wished he could be the one hurrying down that lift; that he could be the one organizing the starmen into the teams of two that would go outside the hull and furl the sails by hand. Hell, he wished he could be the one pulling on a pressure suit and risking his own life to save the ship. But he knew better. Not only was he needed here, but his days of climbing the shrouds in the vacuum of space were well behind him. All he could do was sit and wait, and pray that his ables could do their jobs. Unlike the green officers he’d been given, Exeter had been able to procure him some seasoned jacks. It might make the difference of a few minutes. At the moment, a few minutes would be all the difference in the world.
A welcome crackle came over the comm channel. “Sails coming home now, Captain.”
“Thank you, Mister Peckover. Mister Hall, stand ready to engage conversion on my order.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mister Worth?”
“Eleven minutes, sir.”
Christ. Eleven minutes to the hottest fire there is. He tried to find reassurance in the fact that they wouldn’t actually burn, that the Harvest would crumple from the sudden increase in gravitic pressures as they approached the core, long before they reached the actual inferno of the unborn star. Death should be fairly instantaneous for all of them.
What was taking so damn long?
“Sails almost home, sir.” Hall frowned. Perspiration dripped from his eyebrows and the tip of his long nose as he struggled to maintain manual control of the helm while still monitoring the disposition of the gravity sails. “There seems to be some problem with the starboard sheet.”
“Problem? What kind of problem?”
The comm chirped to life on his armrest. “Fletcher here, sir! The bloody tackles are fouled on the last starboard courses. The team’s working on it now.” Pearce tried not to think that it was substandard materials, tried not to think that this never happened on cruisers or frigates, tried not to think that his entire ship was in jeopardy because the Star Lord claimed limits to his own influence.
“Understood, Lieutenant Fletcher. We have precisely six minutes.”
He left the channel open, listening to the chatter down in the belly of the Harvest. One minute went by, then two, then three. Pearce waited. Looming in the center of the viewscreen, blindingly white, was the furious hydrogen-helium orgy at the core of Hitzelberg. Unless they could get those sheets in, it was the last thing he would ever see. A snippet of an old song danced through his mind in those terrifying moments. We are stardust…billion year old carbon…we are golden…caught in the Devil’s bargain…
“One minute, Captain.” Worth’s lower lip trembled, just a little, and her eyes were bright. She was, after all, not so much older than his own James. Pearce wanted to say something to comfort or reassure her, but his mouth was dry and his heart heavy. He wondered if Banks would try to send another ship on the same mission, perhaps one with a better commander.
“Captain, the sheets are home!” Hall’s cry was exultant as he reached for the conversion control.
“Sir!” It was Fletcher over the comm. “Sir, wait! Rowland and el-Barzin are still out there! Their harness split! Sir! Bill! They’re floating away, Captain! I need to send the other team to retrieve them – two minutes, that’s all we need!” In agony, Pearce looked to Worth, who shook her head, seeming close to tears.
“Thirty s-seconds, sir.”
“Request denied, Lieutenant. Secure the mast doors. Mister Hall, engage conversion.”
The midshipman executed the order, and the main engines of the Harvest roared to life, the ship careening out of the disk, leaving behind fiery gases, swirling currents, and two members of his crew. The best two. All was quiet as Pearce unstrapped himself and stood. He let his vision float unfocused around the command deck, trying in vain to swallow the growing lump in his throat. Finally, into that awful silence, he spoke, surprised to find his voice steady.
“Well done, all of you.” He placed a light hand on Hall’s shoulder, finding it slumped and drenched in sweat. “You are relieved, Mister Hall. Get some rest.”
“Yes, sir.”
The young midshipman rose from his station, and Pearce noticed that he shared a brief look with Worth before walking shakily to the exit hatch. Something there more than camaraderie? In any other circumstances, he would have made a mental note to consider it later; commanders should be aware of the relationships between officers. Now, it was forgotten as his mind was drowned by thoughts of the men he had left behind to die in the Hitzelberg proto-star, and of the eyes of the upper deck on him now. I saved them, he thought, and they know it. They also knew the price. He wondered if they would consider it a fair trade. He wondered if he ever would. Ordering the relief officer at the helm to resume their original course, he left the Quarterdeck without another word.
****
Pearce watched through the viewport as the not-yet-star retreated from view. His son, James, often watched holovids for school, and there had been one on ancient biology that he had seen with the boy, and never quite forgotten. Before the Great Extinction on Earth, a century and a half ago, there had been bewildering biodiversity on the planet. Plants, animals, and bacteria, in almost limitless variation. Apparently there had been bizarre creatures, tiny eight-legged beasts known as spiders, which subsisted by trapping luckless insects. The holovid he so vividly recalled was very old footage of a spider that had captured a winged bug, and was dragging it down into its lair to consume at leisure. That was what had almost happened to them in Hitzelberg. They had escaped, at the cost of two lives. And the Procyeans dead as well, he thought, trying to evoke some sympathy for them in his heart. After all, it wasn’t their fault that the United Kingdom had appropriated their homeworld a hundred years before and damned too many Procyeans to a life of interstellar piracy.
Then he thought of Arash el-Barzin and Gordan Rowland, abandoned to the crushing pressures of the hydrostatic core, and all the pity drained out of him.
A faint chime told him that he had a visitor. He sighed, not wanting to see anyone just then, wanting only to compose messages of condolence to the families of his lost crewmen. A glance out the small viewport in his star cabin showed the blur of stars, and he knew that they were improbably back on their way toward Cygnus, back on the errand of mercy that the best mind on Earth had told him was vital to the very survival of humanity. To that end, he supposed, all of them were expendable. The chime sounded again.
“Yes, enter,” he acknowledged, grudgingly dismissing the luxury of solitary grief he could not afford to indulge.
It was Christine Fletcher. Pearce ground a knuckle into his eye. All he wanted to do was sleep. She was angry, he could tell, full of sorrow and rage and fatigue, just as he was.
“Tell me Bill…Captain. Are men really dying for a garden?”
“What?” He had expected her to rail at him for his order to l
eave Rowland and el-Barzin behind, in that passionate way of hers, but this was cold fury.
“Tell me we’re not dying out here so the King can add another exotic topiary to his gardens. Tell me Arash and Gordan’s lives meant more than that.”
“Christine, there wasn’t time…”
“I know.” She stared at him. “I know you made the only decision you could. If we had lingered, the whole crew would be dead. But I have to tell you, Captain, those men were leaders belowdecks, especially Arash. And he was our best foremost jack. I don’t think anyone else could have gotten those sheets in. When that last course fouled, I thought we were all dead, but Arash and Gordan just went to work, swift and sure, like we were in spacedock.” Now the tears came, spilling one at a time and then in torrents, down her cheeks. “And they did it. Then, as we were pulling them in, their harness gave way.” She threw something onto the floor at his feet. It was a length of woven fiber-plastic harness, and one end was shredded and split where it had torn asunder.
“If this bloody shrub run is so important, they could at least have given us some good goddamned equipment. Why are we here?” Pearce bristled. Part of him longed to tell her, and part of him was out of patience with her. He had known Arash longer than she had, after all. He saved my life on Cygnus, he wanted to shout. He was worth ten of the rest of the jacks. Instead, he forced himself to swallow his anger, his sorrow, and answer Fletcher in a cool, even voice.
“We are here because our King desires us to be here.”
“If we die for his passing pleasures, he’s not much of a King, is he?”
There was stony silence then, the words of treason hanging in the air between them. Pearce coughed, stood as straight as he could manage, and clasped his hands behind his back.
“You’re exhausted, Miss Fletcher, and grieving, as am I. We’ll say no more of this.” Slowly, Fletcher nodded, though whether in agreement or for lack of anything else to do, Pearce could not tell.
“Dismissed, then.”
Fletcher left, saying no more. Pearce picked up the truncated strap and fingered the end of it. It was impossible, of course, but part of him felt the frigid cold of the void in those splayed fibers, the icy death that had claimed his two best starmen.
Dr. Reyes strode unannounced through the door that had remained open after Fletcher’s departure, without prelude or chime, poised and calm as ever. She sat, folding one slender leg over the other, and smiled. On her, a smile was a rare and remarkably predatory expression.
“I wanted to congratulate you, Pearce, on your skillful management of that encounter.” Pearce stared at the harness, and felt no pride at all. He had outsmarted an itinerant people, homeless because of the avarice of his world, and it had cost him two of the finest men in his command.
“A shame about the crewmen, but you shouldn’t work yourself up over that. There are, after all, thirty billion more humans to worry about.”
“Not on this ship.” It was all he could do not to scream in her face. How could she be so cold and unfeeling? How could anyone, gently born or not, be so callously indifferent to death? Rowland and el-Barzin. He forced himself to remember their faces as he remembered their names. Rowland he had only just begun to know, but el-Barzin…the man had saved his life, all those years ago on Cygnus. Now he had repaid that with cold death. He stared at the ragged end of the harness: a corner cut, a shilling saved, two lives lost.
“Secondary-market fiber, Doctor. Does the Minister even want this voyage to succeed? Does the Star Lord?” He paused. “El-Barzin spoke fluent Cygni. Do you?” Pearce was on brittle ground, and he knew it. Reyes was not his friend, and he was certainly not her social peer, but he was too tired and too stricken to be more politic. “Five of us became familiar with the tongue twelve years ago. The Harvest left Spithead with two of us on board. Now there’s just one. Me. More can learn with the linguistic programs before we arrive, but not to the relative fluency of someone who has been ashore there.” She shrugged, and then her face shifted from indifference to haughty conviction.
“You will overcome these obstacles, Pearce. You have no choice.” She leaned forward. “And if every man and woman aboard this ship dies to accomplish our task, the price remains nothing compared to what we are trying to save.”
Pearce rose, his rage burning inside him, hot as any proto-star.
“Dr. Reyes, you are the leading mind in your field, a member of the Royal Society, a colleague of Lord Banks, and above all, a gentlewoman. But you are still a civilian, and on this ship, I speak for the King himself. You will call me Captain Pearce, and you will obey any order I might give you.”
Reyes recoiled, as though he had slapped her in the face. She clearly wasn’t used to being spoken to that way, and for a heartbeat her mouth hung slightly open. Before she could respond, Pearce moved around his desk, and bent close.
“And right now I order you to get the hell out of my cabin.”
Their eyes locked together for more than a moment. Pearce could feel the animosity radiating from her, but he did not care. Gordan Rowland. Arash el-Barzin. Eventually, Reyes broke away, rising out of the chair, moving stiffly, with far less than her usual grace. She walked to the door, and left without looking back.
You’ve made your point, he thought, leaning heavily on his desk. And, it seems, an enemy.
Eight
Command Decisions
Christine Fletcher liked it here, down in the fat belly of the ungainly Harvest. She knew why Pearce had chosen it, and she had to agree. Certainly there were practical and logistical reasons that this kind of vessel was so well suited for a deep-space commercial voyage, matters of propulsion and vacuum-displacement and freight capacity, but there were intangibles as well. Like the captain, she felt at home on a cargo ship. The Harvest simply felt right. Her hull design, her navigation, her schematics: all were similar to the Britannia, that dear old tub. Fletcher tried to imagine herself at the helm of a shiny new naval cruiser, and the thought both amused and terrified her.
The Harvest’s hold was not fitted out with the stacking storage units she was accustomed to. Instead, she walked along row after row of empty, dry hydroponic planters, vats that once filled with nutrient-rich solutions would house the array of new flora they were to acquire at Cygnus. All was gray and sterile now, but Fletcher could imagine how it would look when the vats were full of green, flowering life, and how the air in here would smell of growing things.
She thought, too, of Cygnus, and of Bill Pearce. In all the years she had worked with him in the close quarters of space, she had never seen him so tense, so quick to anger. He had always been brusque, but now he was driving the crew hard, jumping on the smallest mistakes with disproportionate punishments. Was it simply a matter of being back in the Navy? Or was it this return to Cygnus? She knew, everyone knew, that the famous Captain Baker had died there, when the natives attacked the crew of the Drake. There had been a holovid made six or seven years before dramatizing the event, and like everyone else in the Kingdom, Fletcher had seen it more than once. She knew that Pearce had sailed with Baker, but had been surprised to learn that he had been right there with Baker when it happened. That hadn’t been in the vid. Arash el-Barzin had told her about it. And now he was gone.
And we’re going back there for plants? It didn’t add up. For most of the crew, their thinking was classic starman stoicism. Questioning your orders just didn’t happen in the King’s Navy. You did your job, and let the officers worry about where the ship went and why. There was a certain fatalistic logic in it, she supposed. Why be concerned with what you can’t control? But Fletcher wasn’t steeped in the Navy tradition of blind obedience. She was a product of the more egalitarian merchant marine, and used to knowing the score. It doesn’t make any damn sense, she thought for the hundredth time, gripping the edge of one of the planters. Going back to a world that was known to be dangerous, because the King wanted some flowers? Had the Kingdom become that decadent, that wi
lling to put lives at risk on a royal whim? There had to be more to it than that, but Pearce refused to take her into his confidence. That was what confused, and angered, her the most.
A sound came from beyond a nearby set of doors, from one of the secondary bays. It had been a kind of thumping and a cry, all muffled and faint. Frowning, she pressed the access panel and the door slid open. Inside, she saw able starman Isaac Pratt sitting on the floor, long yellow hair unbound, rubbing the back of his shaggy head. It was hot in the small, box-shaped bay, and all the hydroponic equipment stored there had been stacked against one wall. One of the robot Machrines, Luther-45, stood over Pratt, as impassive as ever. A handful of other crewmen lounged on boxes or leaned against the walls.
“All right, Pratt?” she asked, and noticed the sheepish grins and stifled laughter of the others as Pratt hurriedly clambered to his feet. He was a big brute of a man, but surprisingly graceful.
“Just a knock to the nugget, sir. No worries.”
“You were wrestling with Luther.” She looked at the Machrine, who still had not moved.
“Yes, sir. We’re allowed. It’s part of our rec time allowance.”
Fletcher nodded. That was true, but something nibbled at the edge of her memory, something she had read in the endless datastreamed regulations the Admiralty had sent upon her commissioning.
“All safety protocols observed, I assume?” This was greeted with silence, and furtive looks, which were all the answers Fletcher needed.
“Robot roulette, then.” Again, there was no response, and she knew she was right. They had been caught at their illicit little game, and now it was up to her to decide how to handle it. It was specifically against shipboard regs, and she should report it directly to the captain. It would be the proper thing to do, and maybe that was partly why she didn’t do it. Another reason was that she knew the crew got bored on long star voyages, that they needed outlets for aggression and boredom. It was something that Pearce also knew, but he had never developed an instinctive feel for where the line was between recreation and mischief. Fletcher was very aware that one of the reasons he had brought her along was that she did have an instinct for that line.
