by Mel Keegan
“Maybe,” Jazinsky allowed. “But you better find out how and why before you chew a chunk out of Tully.”
The hangar was warm with the plane’s engine draft, aromatic with the acid chemistry of big engines. Travers’s sinuses prickled as he went aboard, and from a seat behind the pilot he watched Shapiro and Rusch walk out from the elevator. Tim Inosanto and Reuben Kravitz were loading Bravo’s baggage – eager to get back to what Inosanto called ‘the real world.’ They were due downtime, furlough, and Travers recalled the feeling. They would soon be in the danceshops, sexshops and veeree dens of Elstrom’s pungent citybottom, and once, not so long ago, Travers would have been with them.
“No bags, Harrison?” Vaurien wondered as Shapiro and Rusch boarded the plane. “You’re coming back to the driftship?”
But Shapiro gestured over his shoulder. “The Sherratts are loading a mountain of gear right now. Alexis and I just added our few bags to the pile. Dario and Tor are setting up to tear the AI chassis right out of the driftship. They’re staying back to take care of it – Mark’s already given orders to strip the main AI lab out of the Carellan.”
“Six or eight hours.” Rusch settled into the seat beside Shapiro. “By the early hours of the morning, shiptime, if you wanted to leave Alshie’nya, you should be good to go.”
“Where’s the hurry?” Travers wondered. “You said it yourself, Richard. We already lost the three months. We won’t get them back by running around in a frenzy.”
As he spoke, Jim Fujioka and Bill Grant strolled out from the elevator. Fujioka was eager to get over to the Wastrel and compare notes with Ingersol. She was his ship now. Like Grant, he had not wasted his time since the Intrepid, and his studies in Arago technology and its close second cousin, Weimann dynamics, would have put him on any commercial ship – if he had been certified. Like Ingersol before him, Fujioka was one of the best in the business, but his skills would not be recognized in the Deep Sky. He would find his place in Freespace, Travers knew – like Bill Grant.
Over the loop, Tor Sereccio was talking to specialists on the Carellan Djerun. They were gabbling their own language at such high speed, Travers could not get a word of it, but he knew they were making arrangements for the AI core to be lifted out of the driftship. A Resalq team would be aboard in an hour, charged with moving the massive holographic memory crystal and its housing. A lab was already being powered up on the Wastrel, and the Carellan’s sterntubes had brightened. She was maneuvering to come alongside and dock on.
The science team’s work never stopped, Travers thought, yet for himself and Marin, it was over. They would be at a loose end, and for the moment he was content to drift for the first time since his conscription notice had been posted when he was seventeen years old. If Shapiro had made the decision to remain on Borushek, or perhaps transfer over to Elstrom SkyCity in Velcastra’s stratosphere, Neil and Curtis might have been offered the security assignment. But like Vaurien, Shapiro was moving on.
“Like us,” Travers said softly as Perlman issued last calls to passengers before the Capricorn launched.
Vidal was the last aboard, a pace behind Mark with a gaudy backpack slung over one shoulder. Sherratt carried none at all. Their baggage would be loaded on the cargo sleds headed for the new lab; and Lai’a itself would be on the last of those sleds. Vidal plunked down in the seat behind Travers, beside Sherratt, leaving the seat beside Neil open for Marin.
“We’re missing someone,” he observed. And then, into the loop, “Hey, Curtis, you’re about to miss your flight.”
Over the comm Marin’s voice was light with amusement. “I got waylaid – I’m on my way. Hey, Gill, one more minute, and I’ll lock up your cargo hatches.”
The Capricorn was at capacity, every seat filled, and Travers doubted there was space for all their bags in the under-deck storage. Marin appeared from the elevator moments later and, sure enough, he brought three small bags aboard, handed one to Neil and kicked one underfoot, for the brief shuttle flight.
The hatches slammed and Tim Inosanto checked them. He gave Perlman clearance and she called into the loop, “Driftship Flight, this is Driftship 101, cycle the hangar anytime you want.”
Operations had been left under Joss’s control. The AI was as tranquil as the versions of itself on the Carellan and at the houses in Riga and on Saraine. “Standby, Pilot. Hangars will cycle momentarily.”
“It’s over,” Marin said quietly as the familiar red spinners and sirens kicked on across the deck, and the hangar blew down fast.
At a few bars of pressure left on the scale the outer doors opened to space, and Travers saw the Wastrel and the Carellan Djerun framed there. Perlman took the plane out and down, rolled her over to approach the belly hangars in the big ship, and from there Neil caught a clear glimpse of the Esprit de Liberté.
“Damn, she was in some kind of a fight,” Vidal murmured. “Maybe you ought to see the other guy before casting aspersions.”
Vaurien was on the other side of the plane, his view not quite as good. “I’m not casting anything. I just want to know. She wasn’t supposed to fight – and sure, Lai’a came home beat-up, but we knew we were headed to war.”
“We also knew Hellgate wouldn’t be the safest place to cruise,” Vidal added, “until we talked our deal with the Zunshu.”
“Speaking of which,” Marin said in Vaurien’s and Shapiro’s direction, “the reason I was late getting down with the baggage was Roark. He and Asako are loading the Harlequin right now. They already worked out a cruise pattern to lay down the first network of comm drones … they figure they’re going to need maybe double the number in supply right now. The manufacturing bays are still working at capacity, according to Joss.”
“And they fabricators’ll need resupply soon.” Jazinsky was watching the red wink of the Wastrel’s acquisition lights. “Lai’a burned through a great deal of the original load – drones and ordnance.”
“I’ll task the Earthlight to reload,” Vaurien said easily. He lifted a brow at Shapiro. “The only floating question is, who’s picking up the bill? It’s not going to be cheap, and if we’re to go on and provide individual systems, much less Freespace systems, with the safety net of a chain of comm drones – well, it’d punch a big hole in the Fleet appropriation fund.”
“It’s an issue for President Chandra Liang,” Shapiro decided. “Open a tab. Start with Hellgate itself, figure on protecting Velcastra, Borushek, Omaru, Jagreth, the worlds that are too close for comfort … work the rest out later.”
“Not too much later,” Mark warned. “One mistake, and a hundred million people can be gone in an instant. Robert, Alec and the others don’t want to get complacent and learn the hard way.”
“I won’t let them get complacent,” Shapiro said grimly.
“And I’ll pick up the tab, Richard,” Sherratt offered, “for the protection of Saraine. It’s far enough out for the Zunshu approach roads to be quite narrow – much easier to defend than Omaru and Borushek, which are so perilously close to Hellgate, one shudders to consider the amount of luck involved in them surviving this long.”
Vaurien’s face was grim indeed. “The Wastrel caught the Borushek device, remember. And from hints Tully dropped, the Esprit might have caught a device intended for Omaru.”
“And the weapon didn’t run headfirst into one of our minefields in the Hellgate exit roads,” Jazinsky added. “It should have. What went wrong?”
“A very good question.” Vaurien flexed his left side, which stiffened every time he sat for any length of time, or stood too long. “Tully will have the answers.”
The Capricorn had nosed up into the hangar while he spoke, and Perlman set it down smoothly. The deck hatches closed with a deep rumble Travers felt through the bones of feet and shins as she called Ops. “Home again, home again,” she sang into the Wastrel’s busy loop, “jiggity jig.”
“Feel free to jig on your own time, lady,” Ingersol chuckled, “I got way too much to do. Hey, Rick
, come right on up to the crew lounge. Dinner. You got Resalq with you?”
“Just me,” Mark told him. “I’m easy – I’ve worked among humans for long enough to learn how to eat almost anything.”
“You mean, you can chow down on this muck we call food?” Ingersol chuckled again. “I’ll make sure the ’chef’s set up, Doc.”
“Wine,” Jazinsky suggested. “Anything dry and white, and keep it coming.”
“I have champagne,” Ingersol promised. “Been keeping it, hoping for … well, I guess I was hoping you’d make it back. After three months a lot of people started to doubt. After four, some gave you up. Me? I never stopped hoping.”
“It hasn’t been so long according to onboard clocks,” Sherratt told him. “Check the datastream.”
The Capricorn’s hatches popped with enough equalizing air pressure for Travers’s ears to protest. Perlman and Fargo were still running through shutdown protocols as passengers streamed out, and Travers permitted himself a groan of pleasure as his boots hit the deck. He shared a rueful look with Vaurien.
“Home … though you’ll forgive me if I forego the jigging,” Richard whispered. His right arm lay across Jazinsky’s shoulders, and with the slightly-stiff fingers of his left hand he pulled the tie from his nape, let the red hair fall loose. “Something about champagne –?”
Even the smell of the ship was welcome. All ships had their own feel, and Travers realized he had never considered any other vessel to be home, nor any world, since he picked up his bags and walked out of his parents’ house in Delaware, in the north of Darwin’s World, when he was not much more than a child. Fleet waited for him then, and an uncertain future. The future was more certain now, though it was unshaped; a role in it waited for him, and for Marin, if they wanted it. They followed Vaurien and Jazinsky, Shapiro and Rusch into the crew lounge, and pulled up short as Ingersol swore lividly.
“Holy fuck, what happened?” Tully had a flute of champagne in either hand. He had been about to pass them around when he watched Richard limp into the crew lounge – thin, pale, the silver strands noticeable in his hair, the left leg still a little inflexible, uncooperative.
“I died,” Vaurien said simply, taking the champagne and saluting him with it. “Nice to know you care, Tully.”
“He died about four times,” Jazinsky amended, swiping the second flute from Ingersol’s left hand.
“Five times,” Grant corrected as he headed for the ’chef, where he helped himself to a light ale and drank half of it at once. “I was counting … and we’ve got a nasty salvage job for you, Tull. We came home beat to hell. The Ops room was totalled.”
“Comprehensively.” Vaurien’s face darkened. “We lost two people, Tully. They’re still in there. Ops buckled up like a crushed can.”
“Oh, shit.” Ingersol’s eyes closed for a moment. “I’ll get a tech gang on it, right now. Radiation?”
“No, we did a good decontamination job. Just two bodies – still in the hardsuits.” Jazinsky sighed. “Don’t even try to get them out of the armor. Just bring them out. Uh, crate them. Sorry, Harry, I don’t know what other word to use.”
Shapiro’s head was shaking slowly. “It’s as good as any other.” He had taken a glass of Velcastran burgundy, and seemed to salute the presence of someone whose absence was painfully obvious.
“Omigod … it’s Jon,” Ingersol murmured. “You lost Jon.”
“And Tonio,” Vaurien said quietly.
“And he,” Jazinsky added in philosophical tones, “is the only reason Richard and Neil are still with us.” She drank the flute to the bottom and passed it back to Ingersol. “Refill. Thanks.”
“You got it. Hey, Mick, pass me another bottle, will you?” Ingersol busied his hands with the traditional wired-down cork, but his eyes were shrewd on Vaurien. He knew Richard was waiting. “You guys fought. You came home patched up – but you won the war, right? Armistice, or something just as good?”
“Something,” Vaurien told him. “I told you, it’s complicated. We still have a lot of work to do, but the Zunshu are history, Tully.” His brows rose. “Tell me you didn’t take the Esprit into a battle.”
The cork popped with an asthmatic thud. “The battle came looking for us, boss. I had the Esprit on Arago trials, just me and a small tech gang, and maybe fifty drones working on her. We got big, nasty readings off a monster Hellgate storm – kept a healthy distance, but suddenly there’s this thing cruising out of the event. I knew the signature. Same as we saw when the ‘Borushek bomb’ dropped out of the Drift at Oberon. Oh yeah, the bastards took a crack at Omaru, about a month ago.”
Jazinsky’s face might have been a marble carving. “It was supposed to fly into a swarm,” she said in a voice not much more than a rasp.
“It did.” Ingersol had refilled the flute, and passed it to her. “Problem was, the Hellgate monster showered the whole region in so much radiation – some of it so exotic, I don’t even know what I’m looking at – the swarm was slow coming online. Too much interference, Barb. The sensor drone scrammed, and scrammed again. It was late rebooting, and when it did come back up its brains were halfway fried.”
“Christ.” Jazinsky’s blue eyes closed. “This happens every time there’s an event?”
“No,” Ingersol said quickly. “Only when a storm crosses the Class Six line, tickling Class Seven, and they’re comparatively rare. But it was just luck the Esprit was in the area. We could’ve been on the other side of Hellgate, and Omaru … well, here’s to our guardian angel.” He lifted his glass, drinking on the words.
“You took the device.” Vaurien’s brow creased in a frown. “Obviously you took it – Omaru’s still there, and so’s the Esprit.”
“We took it.” Ingersol drained his glass and poured another. “And we got hurt – you saw.”
“I can see the dark engines from here.” Vaurien had taken the big chair by the long viewport, where he had a good view of the ship – and the driftship beyond it, and the Carellan Djerun – against the shattered backdrop of Hellgate. “You want to tell me what happened?”
“Gravity tides,” Ingersol said baldly. “The only way I was going to catch the Omaru weapon was with gravity mines. The Esprit still doesn’t have geocannons, much less railguns. We’re still waiting for delivery. They’re coming out from Lithgow, but the dockyards there were thoroughly banged up in the mutiny. They’re being fixed, but freight’s so backlogged by now, we’re just in the queue and waiting our turn.
“So there was the Omaru device,” Ingersol said darkly, “and there was the Esprit, with good engines, great Aragos and tractors, and not even a peashooter on us. What the hell was I gonna do, Rick? I had the deactivation code for the swarm, so I used it – the Zunshu weapon had already gotten through, the swarm was useless. So I shut down about a dozen of the little buggers before I caught them in tractors and lobbed ’em at the Zunshu thing. Transmitted the activation code when they were close enough to acquire the ‘Omaru bomb’ instead of us.”
“Ouch.” Jazinsky drank again. “You were too close to the implosion.”
“We were trying to get away with everything we had,” Ingersol said cynically. “I had the sublight engines redlined, we were waiting for a Weimann ignition – five more seconds, and we’d have made a clean jump out of there.” He shrugged. “Major gravity tides hit us in the tail-end. Not enough to crunch the airframe or squish the hull, but more than enough to scram the drive engines. Uh, permanently.”
“Fixable?” Vaurien wondered, frowning at the ship which seemed a mirror image of the Wastrel.
But Ingersol’s head was shaking. “Nope. There was massive damage to every delicate little thing in there. Sublight and Weimann. All gone.”
“You got anything coming in from Lithgow?” Jazinsky sank into the seat beside Vaurien and looked out at the Drift.
“Not from Lithgow, no.” Ingersol gestured vaguely. “I tried every source I knew, looking for engines, then I hitched a ride over to Omaru
, Rick. I used your name to get an audience. Alec Tarrant’s dead easy to talk to, but you got no idea how hard it is getting through the secretaries when you want ten minutes with the president.”
“My name got you through the door.” Vaurien’s eyes glittered with amusement. “And you told Alec what you’d done, the price we’d paid for Omaru.”
“Told him,” Ingersol went on, “I needed new engines … and I even knew where to get ’em, but he’d have to talk a deal with Prendergast on Jagreth.”
For a moment Travers was blank, and then he chuckled. “You’re kidding. Salvageable?”
“Oh, sure,” Ingersol said readily. “It just wasn’t going to be cheap or easy, and I sure as hell wasn’t signing no checks for the job, not after how we got hurt!” He shrugged. “Right now we’re frying drones, about a thousand a day, decontaminating the engine deck on the London. She’s still where we saw her, after the battle. Prendergast’s people just put a bunch of beacons on her, screaming about rad and navigation hazard, but I knew the engine deck was intact. We saw it, remember?”
“I remember.” Vaurien was impressed. “You went out there, took a look for yourself?”
Ingersol nodded thoughtfully. “I was out there in armor for two days, making sure. Tarrant said, find out if it’s doable, give me a budget, time and bucks. Then he talked a deal with Prendergast. Turns out, Prendergast didn’t want to come up with a dime – according to him, it was Omaru’s trouble. Tarrant negotiated some kind of a trade deal … Jagreth comes to the party with drones and raw materials and support crew. We do the work, we get the engines. Omaru picks up two dollars in three of the cost. The Wings of Freedom’s been there for the last two weeks, wrangling the show.”
“Well, now.” Vaurien looked up at Travers, Sherratt, Vidal. “Looks like we’re in business.”
“The engines from a super-carrier,” Vidal added, “are going to put one hell of a sting in the Esprit’s tail.” He lifted his glass to Ingersol. “Cheers.”
