The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  The Wreck of

  The River of Stars

  MICHAEL FLYNN

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  This is a work of fiction.

  All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  THE WRECK OF THE RIVER OF STARS

  Copyright © 2003 by Michael Flynn

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by David G. Hartwell

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Flynn, Michael (Michael F.)

  The wreck of the River of Stars / Michael Flynn.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN: 978-0-7653-0099-7

  1. Space ships—Fiction. 2. Space flight—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.L89 W7 2003

  813'.54—dc21

  2002040939

  Charles Sheffield

  A gentleman, scholar

  and good friend

  Contents

  Prelude: The Ship

  The Captain

  The Doctor

  The Log

  The Engineer

  The Engineer’s Mate

  The Passenger

  The Second Mate

  The Wrangler Berth

  The Second Wrangler

  The Accidental Captain

  The Missing Mate

  Interlude: Ship

  The Third Wrangler

  The Sysop

  The Void

  The Least Wrangler

  The Ping

  The Acting First

  The Sailing Master

  The Boat

  The Mean Streets

  The Third Watch

  The Brawl

  The Clinic

  The Balk Line

  The Ghost

  The Re-Berth

  The Reef

  The Cook

  The Vane

  The Stone

  The Survey

  The Cargo Master

  The Cutter

  The Gift

  The Ship’s Cat

  The Castaways

  The Last Supper

  The End

  The First Wrangler

  Epilogue: The Ship

  The Wreck of

  The River of Stars

  Prelude: The Ship

  They called her The River of Stars and she spread her superconducting sails to the solar wind in 2051. She must have made a glorious sight then: her fuselage new and gleaming, her sails shimmering in a rainbow aurora, her white-gloved crew sharply creased in black-and-silver uniforms, her passengers rich and deliciously decadent. There were morphy stars and jeweled matriarchs, sports heroes and prostitutes, gangsters and geeks and soi-disant royalty. Those were the glamour years, when magsails ruled the skies, and The River of Stars was the grandest and most glorious of that beautiful fleet.

  But the glory years faded fast. Coltraine was still her captain when the luxury trade dried up and the throngs of the rich and famous slowed from a torrent to a trickle, and even those who still craved the experience could see that it was no longer the fashionable thing to do. But as he told Toledo when he handed her the command, the luxury trade had been doomed from the start. Sex and vice and decadence were more safely found earthside. There were yet honorable—if more quotidian—pursuits for a ship with such wings to her.

  Mars was the happening place back then. Adventurers, sand-kings, ne’er-do-wells, terraformers, second sons, bawdy girls, and zeppelin pilots—Mars sucked them in, broke some and spat others out. Even crewmembers would sometimes cash out on reaching Mars and head for the gaudy enticements of Port Rosario. “Some of them struck it rich,” the old song had it,

  “And some of them Mars struck dead

  And some showed up in the hiring hall,

  Begging their old berths back.”

  Toledo and, later, Johnson and Fu-hsi carried hopes outbound and the shattered fragments back. There was a raw energy to the age that tired old Earth hadn’t seen since the taming of LEO during the Terrible Teens, and The River took greater pride in pushing the frontier out than she ever had in stroking the rich and famous.

  It was the Farnsworth engine that finally brought her low. Fu-hsi saw it coming and resigned, the only one of her captains ever to do so; and so it fell to Terranova to see the once proud vessel humiliated. Magnetic sails had ruled space for forty years, and The River of Stars for almost twenty of them, but Farnsworth engines made the Jovian moons the new frontier. The Luna-Ganymede Race went down in history, and the magnetic sail went down to the fusion thruster. Terranova should never have taken the bet; but it was a matter of pride—and pride loves loss above surrender.

  For a while, hovering in Jupiter’s magnetosphere, The River maintained a precarious trade harvesting hydrogen from the gas giant’s outer atmosphere. Passing the long hours under the maddening whine of the compressors, the Rivers told each other how important they still were.

  “The Farnsworths can’t fly

  Without the ‘H’ we supply.”

  But in their hearts they knew they were no more than water boys for the nukes.

  In 2083, Centaurus Corporation bought MSS The River of Stars and fit her with a quartet of Farnsworth cages in the Deimos Yards. To the crew it was the final humiliation. Sacrilege, some of the old-timers shouted as they resigned their berths; and the engineer and his mate received a less than heartfelt welcome from the remnant. She kept her sails and rigging—for flexibility, management claimed—and her precious MS designation. Officially, she was a “hybrid ship,” unofficially, a bastard. The sailing master brooded over the situation and, four days out of Deimos, cycled through the ’lock for the Long Walk, leaving the engineer behind with a knife in his heart.

  It was the scandal of the day. The Board of Inquiry was a sensation, the disposition, foregone. Centaurus put The River of Stars on the block without ever flying her.

  Save The Riv’! the cry went up; and sailing enthusiasts, brimming with nostalgia for the days of grace and romance, pledged their ounces and grains—though there was little of grace or romance to save by then. The crew threw their bonuses and hazard pay into the pot. Coltraine himself, on his deathbed, added a generous codicil to his will. The consortium bought her up, stripped her down, and rigged her for cargo. Long gone were the luxury modules, the Three Dolphin Club, the Black Sky Casino. Now she was reduced to the single, broad disk of the old primary decks—and large portions of its interior spaces had been abandoned in place. Only the long, faerie, aerogel main mast recalled sailing days gone by—but the mast was purely ornamental. The bottom line ruled and, after one last and all-too-brief flight under sail, the superconducting hoops were coiled into stowage.

  And so it was that in 2084 of the Com
mon Era, MSS The River of Stars cast loose as a tramp freighter, hustling after cargoes across the Middle System.

  After that, her luck turned bad.

  The Captain

  Even Dodge Hand, captain of the tramp ship The River of Stars, sighed and stared into the ventilation duct in the ceiling of his cabin. The pain now seemed a sometime and faraway thing, something not quite real, as if it were happening to someone else. His body was but a husk, a thing of no matter. He felt that he—the “he” that was himself—had begun to float above that very body, leaving it behind. “Mr. Gorgas,” he said to the first officer, who sat a little apart engrossed in a ’puter. “Mr. Gorgas, I feel as if I were floating.”

  First Officer Stepan Gorgas barely glanced up from his laptop. “Of course, you’re floating. The engines are shut down. We’re not under acceleration.” He wondered en passant why Corrigan had not yet reported on the reason.

  “Note this in the log, Mr. Gorgas: As a man is dying, his soul floats off. The observation may be profound. See that it is posted.”

  Gorgas sighed. “So noted,” he said as he moved his Austrian infantry closer to Austerlitz. The little regimental squares wriggled across the map board on his clipscreen. It had fallen to his lot to sit with the captain during the dog watch this night, but that did not mean he relished the duty or that it demanded his full attention. There was little enough to engage the mind in watching a man die. Gorgas had served with Hand for eight years, longer than anyone in the crew save Satterwaithe and Ratline, and he had detested Hand for ninety-five months of that.

  The captain became absorbed in a study of the ventilator grill. There were a great many squares in the grill, Hand thought. Perhaps countlessly many. An absurd notion, of course. They were discrete and so must be countable. The tally seemed somehow an important thing to do, and so Hand began to enumerate them. It grew cold in the cabin and he wanted to draw the covers up, but his arm would not move. It was as if he no longer had an arm. “Now, this is a curious thing,” he said.

  Gorgas was not paying close attention, but he realized after a few more minutes had gone by that Hand had not explained what the curious thing was. Glancing across the room, he noted the relaxed features on the captain’s face, the eyes staring into the void. Gorgas sighed in irritation. “Ship,” he said, rather curtly, as if the artificial intelligence had neglected a duty.

  “Waiting,” replied Ship.

  “Message. To: Dr. Wong. Text: Hand has died. Send.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Gorgas saved his screen with the French in mid-move and unbuckled from the seat so that he floated across the cabin. The Farnsworths boosted at just over four milligees, barely enough acceleration to give the room a vague notion of up and down, but Bhatterji had shut the engines down and Gorgas floated like an angel and hovered over the captain’s bunk.

  I have risen above the captain, he thought. So often true metaphorically and intellectually, the statement was now true literally. Gorgas did not touch the body or straighten its clothing or even close its eyes, but he did peer into the slack and peaceful face and note how those eyes seemed fixed on some distant sight. What was Hand looking at? he wondered. And why is he smiling?

  At relinquishing command, probably. Consumed with the humor of sticking Gorgas with the gallimaufry that he had collected for crew at every port in the Middle System.

  Fransziska Wong, M.D., the most recently-added component of that gallimaufry, seemed made all of sticks and twine, as if a good, hard shaking would be more g-force than her ligaments could withstand. Her forearms and lower legs were long and spindly, her breasts meager. Such was the curse of the spaceborn: That the flesh stretched out to extend the limbs was stolen from elsewhere in the body. At times, when she contemplated the images of beauty broadcast from Earth or Mars, this disturbed her.

  Wong had taken her medical degree from Leo University in Goddard City, Low Earth Orbit, specializing (by necessity) in the maladies of microgravity. She had spent two years in Goddard’s clinic, another two in High Nairobi, dreaming of adventure and the sight of far, exotic places. Then FS Ned DuBois had called into port shy a ship’s doctor and she had seized the opportunity.

  But the inside of a ship looked remarkably like the inside of an orbital habitat and, as she soon found, the insides of the warrens under Luna and Mars. Tight little rooms and tight little corridors; recycled air and recycled water and, after a time, recycled thoughts. Little by little over the years, she had given up the search for far exotic places, though she never did quite give up the hope that they existed.

  The captain’s body upbraided her. She had failed to save him; failed even to diagnose him. Carefully, she straightened the limbs, closed the eyes, covered the face. The dear man looked so fragile in death: smaller somehow, as if something inside were missing. Wherever else fancy might suppose he had gone, Evan Hand had departed The River of Stars.

  First officer Gorgas, hunched so intently over his ’puter, had barely acknowledged her entrance, and Wong supposed him deeply involved in some administrative task required by the captain’s death. She recorded the time in the ship’s medical log and entered her confirmation. Legally, at that moment, the captain died; and it struck her that in some arcane, bureaucratic fashion she had just killed him.

  “I suppose,” she said as she tucked the sheets around the body to prevent it from drifting off while she fetched a body bag from stores, “that the ship will not be run in so ‘Evan Hand-ed’ a fashion now.”

  The first officer looked up from his ’puter. “What’s that?” he said. “What’s that? You’re making a joke? With our captain only now passed away, you’d make a mockery of his name?”

  Wong bowed her head at the rebuke. The pun had been one of Evan’s favorite lines. He had often used it himself, and she had repeated it as a way of maintaining something of his antic humor. She hadn’t meant it as mockery; but Gorgas, who had flown with the captain for many years must be taking the death most cruel hard, keeping it inside, as men so often did, yet needing, nevertheless, some word of kindness. “The ship will miss him,” she said.

  Certainly, she did. Evan had been lighthearted, always with a smile, always ready with a joke or a courtesy. The first officer struck her as serious, but with all the vices and none of the virtues that seriousness implied. Yet, she had been aboard The River only a short time and Gorgas’s solemn demeanor, his snappishness, might be only a mask for the grief he felt at the passing of his old friend.

  Gorgas, for his part, focused once more on his simulation of Austerlitz. The game’s intelligence had shifted the French forces in a most unexpected manner. A glitch in the neural net’s training? A subtle move whose implications he failed to see? He tried to concentrate on the miniature counters, but the doctor’s remark kept coming back to him. What had she meant by such a joke? Hidden contempt? He had puzzled over Wong’s presence ever since Hand had brought her on board at Achilles. She had the face of a horse and the disposition of a sheep; but Hand had worn such a broad grin that Gorgas wondered if she had given him more than a set of credentials. The Acts required that any transit of more than three months carry a medical doctor on the ship’s Articles, but Hand had not hunted very long to fill the berth. A stroke of luck, he had said. A doctor left behind by her previous ship when she’d overslept and missed the departure. Yet it seemed to Gorgas, Achilles being as small as it was, that the Krasnarov’s crew could not have hunted all that diligently for their missing physician.

  Down in the bowels of the lower decks, in the dim, red-lit confines of the engineering control room, surrounded by sharp, electric odors and bagpipe hums, Ramakrishnan Bhatterji considered the diagnostic display as another man might a longtime lover who has suddenly—and for no discernable reason—refused to come to bed; or more accurately, who has lain in his bed stiff and cold, making no response to his caress.

  “No fusion,” he said, half in shock and half in umbrage. “No power whatever.”

  “The timing
might be off,” his mate pointed out.

  “Yes…” The engineer batted his palm with the test harness while he considered the point. “Timing is everything,” he said, “in Farnsworth engines as in love. Everything must come together at the proper moment: the insertion, the clamping, the rapid pulsing, and the all-too-brief release of raw energy.” He noted how his mate’s smooth, young cheeks darkened. The flush ran to the scalp, so that the blond stubble there seemed to redden as well. Bhatterji smiled, but he did not allow his mind to stray to future delights. That such innocence existed was to be prized; that it must soon be lost, regretted; but that it would be lost to Ramakrishnan Bhatterji was to be anticipated and savored. He laid a hand on Miko’s supple and graceful shoulder. “Engines must be coaxed,” he said. “They must be teased into performing.” He squeezed and felt how firm the flesh was under the concealing coveralls.

  Mikoyan Hidei had signed the ship’s Articles at Amalthea and had been aboard now for a little over a hundred days, and every one of those days had been exquisite agony for the engineer, for his mate was lithe and supple and beautiful—the most beautiful youth he had seen in many years, Rave Evermore not excluded. Figures far less graceful adorned the Majapour temple, where every posture known to love had been frozen in ageless stone. Miko’s age on the Articles was seventeen, but that was surely hyperbole. A runaway, most likely—bored with farming or with oxygen mining or only with parental authority, and seeking now after far horizons.