The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “You need to finish calibration on the Kandle brackets,” Satterwaithe reminded him. “If you dress the mast, who sets the brackets? I can’t do that while I’m on the bridge.”

  Corrigan sighed. “Yes, there’s always one more camel,” he said, to the bafflement of the others. He looked at his two coconspirators. “Four days,” he said again.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Satterwaithe commented. “If Bhatterji misses the balk line, we’ll need all four engines plus the sail to hit Jupiter Roads.”

  “That could happen,” Ratline said.

  The Third Watch

  As if she huddled close to a campfire in the night, Satterwaithe passed the third watch amidst the glow of readouts on an otherwise darkened bridge. She reviewed the logs and took bearings on Jupiter and on the asteroid that lay teasingly near their dead-ahead. Between pings, she monitored Ratline, who had taken the first wrangler and the engineer’s mate outside to dress the mast. Emerald lights on the ready board tracked the outside team’s progress, but Satterwaithe turned the command chair until it faced that segment of the darkness wherein sat the empty shell of the sailing master’s board. By rights, these indicator lights should have gleamed over there, and not on a virtual board conjured up by the ship’s AI.

  “Bridge?” It was the wrangler’s voice. Okoye.

  “Satterwaithe here.”

  “The motor for the—” A pause while Okoye no doubt consulted Ratline, for the words she spoke were then carefully pronounced. “—for the northeast mainsail delongator has been reconnected, and the messenger line has been fed through the intake winch. Mr. Ratline is preparing to carry it forward to the, uh, way-grommet on the topmast.”

  “Nor’east mains’l de-long, aye.” Satterwaithe glanced at the ready board. “Function confirmed, sailor. Shroudmaster is go for masting.” Satterwaithe did not for a moment believe that Okoye would understand; but Ratline was listening, and the words were meant for him. Old words. Satterwaithe could not remember when she had last spoken their like. This night’s watch was like awaking from an arid and soul-sucking dream. Something closed her throat briefly, and she swallowed to clear it.

  Ship reported a return ping and, turning back to the navigation board, Satterwaithe logged the adjusted position for the target asteroid. They still called the body Stranger’s Reef, even though they knew it was not. The closer they approached it, the more precisely they fixed its position. Corrigan had said as much at shift change, adding that the perfectly precise fix would therefore come when the distance was zero. Once we hit it, he had said, we’ll know exactly where it is. Satterwaithe never knew when the acting first was joking, or even if he were joking. If so, such a dark humor was not to her taste. In truth, humor of any shade was not to her taste.

  Still too near the ship’s projected course, she noted in the log. But if a constant boost could be initiated within the week, they would miss it. A dozen other bodies from the tsunami had been found in their forward cone. Three of them were creeping toward the dead-ahead. Five others were already clear misses.

  “Bridge?”

  “Yes, Miko?”

  “I just received a call from Dr. Wong. She says my medbots have detected a high fatigue level and she’s ordering me to bed.”

  “Why is Wong monitoring your—”

  “The ’bots tripped an alarm and woke her…Uh, she wants to know what I’m doing up at this hour.”

  “She has no need-to-know.”

  “I have to tell her something.”

  “Do you? Tell her you’re under my orders and if she has any questions she should call me.” Satterwaithe felt on safe grounds there. The doctor was a rabbit. Disputing an order with the sailing master would terrify her beyond measure.

  “Should I report inside?”

  “You went out there to do a job, sailor, and the job still needs doing.” Satterwaithe cut the link. If the girl really was too tired, Ratline would send her in.

  Satterwaithe turned her mind to other tasks. She reviewed the ship’s status; noted the vanishing point for the ship’s forward trajectory; set up the next suite of radar pulses; then, satisfied that all was in order, snugged herself into the command chair to resume her study of Chowdhury’s Sailing Master Handbook and Guide, with which she had been refreshing her memory.

  Circum-Jovian Magnetic Environments.

  i) Summary: The Jupiter Roads are especially hazardous to sailing. Both the planet and its larger moons possess strong magnetospheres and produce plasma winds of their own. Jupiter’s magnetosphere extends four million kilometers along the ecliptic and half that in the solar-polar direction. In high winds his magnetotail has been known to engulf Saturn, a magnetic bridge known to sailors as the Giants’ Causeway (q.v.). The wind produced by the Galilean moons erupts from the Jovian magnetosphere at velocities exceeding those of even the prevailing solars. Io’s billion-amp gas cloud is the largest permanently visible astrographical feature in the solar system, its glow being visible Earthside. (cf.: Io Harbor Piloting, p. 121.)

  The Jovian windfield is not only broad and steep, but subject to eddies and currents where the planetary and galilean winds interact with the solar “pinwheel” and with each other. These local gradients are also affected by Jupiter’s rapid spin and by the revolution of the Galileans about their primary. Consult the daily weather reports from Galileo Tower before approaching the well. Sudden squalls and shifts can induce abrupt vector changes. Unless expertly handled, a magsail can be turned in seconds into a useless tangle, requiring decoupling and the runout of a fresh loop. The time delay required for sail-change, power-up, and circularization may be critical, especially if the Jovian shore lies under the ship’s lee.

  For these reasons, magnetic sails transiting through or docking in circum-Jovian space are required by international convention to surrender shiphandling authority to a harbor pilot. These pilots must be certified by the Galilean Union Board of Pilot-Examiners irrespective of other certifications and show a license bearing the Guild-validated “Red Spot” hologram .

  The darkness on the bridge was comfortable and drew Satterwaithe irresistibly from her reading into her thoughts. Memories could be oppressive things, even pleasant memories when nothing but disappointment had followed. Triumph ought never be the intermezzo of one’s life.

  One day she knew she would have to come to terms with Ratline. Awful chance had bound them to each other, but the two of them were a suspended chord, never resolved. That a resolution must come she did not doubt; but she could not guess at its nature. Forgiveness? Estrangement? Parting? Mercy? She was unsure which of these ends she sought or for which of them she might even hope. Understanding, of all possible conclusions, seemed beyond hope.

  They had met in Panic Town on the backward moon: she, the swaggering ballistic pilot, and he, the saucy sailor. It was just the sort of setting for careless love, passing ships, and bittersweet memories. The possibilities were unbounded, and the opportunities limited but by fancy. But a wound named Tiki Ferrér had still lain open and sore upon Eugenie Satterwaithe’s soul and Moth Ratline could not squeeze out the ointment for its salving. Worse, she had shipped with him aboard The River, and the fancies of what might have been dissolved in the day-to-day realities of what was. She began to hate him for not being the man she had wanted him to be, and when she fell in love at last and for the last time, it had been to the sail, and not the sailor.

  The worst of it all was that Ratline never noticed.

  Behind her there came a small sound within a large silence. Satterwaithe started from her reverie and twisted against her harness to look over her shoulder. But the light from her screader had dazzled her eyes and the gloom surrounding her was now a darker shade of night. It was oh-four-hundred Zulu and the ship slept. Only Ratline’s small work party labored, and that was Outside, so she dismissed the antic notion that the dried old man had come for her at last. She wasn’t sure any more that she wanted that. It was a fossil fancy, compressed into stone
by the layering on of years. It no longer lived. The screader’s glow lifted the shadows only in the center of the control room and suggested by the merest gradation of shading the bridgeway to the A-ring corridor. The sound came again: the creak of a doorframe. There was someone with her on the bridge.

  There was no logical reason to be afraid. The only two men who might wish her harm were dead. Yet one had died horribly aboard this very ship, and who could say whether his ghost might not haunt the corridors at night? Okoye, the First Wrangler, had once mentioned that when people died their souls became shadows, and that might be the reason why the ship seemed so perpetually dim.

  When a portion of the larger darkness moved soundlessly across the bridge, Satterwaithe sucked in her breath. “I never meant for it to happen,” she whispered.

  The shadow seemed to turn. “What was that? Did you say something?”

  And the voice broke the spell. “Captain!” Satterwaithe, who had stiffened like twisted cable on first perceiving the shadow, unwound slowly and only by force of will.

  “I’m sorry, Number Two,” Gorgas said. “I did not mean to distract you from your work. I came only to check the plotting tank.”

  With economic motion, she muted the display and the link to the Outside party, lest they call in and Gorgas hear. She had called Gorgas “captain,” which she had vowed she would never do. “You couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  The plotting tank flickered into light as Gorgas activated its view function. “No,” he said. “No, I couldn’t sleep.” He looked suddenly at Satterwaithe. His face, weirdly lit from below, seemed a motley of flesh and shadow. “It occurs to me that you may be the only other person on board this vessel who could understand that.”

  Satterwaithe grunted, as astonished by her own abrupt comprehension as by Gorgas’s equally abrupt admission. Yet she was loathe to acknowledge fellowship, and so said nothing. Gorgas sighed and studied the tank. “Do you know what the Pole Star is, Number Two?”

  Satterwaithe was accustomed to Gorgas’s abrupt conversational leaps. The man seemed always to flit from topic to topic. “The Pole Star? Yes. Surely.” She fussed a bit at her board and, noticing that her ping had returned, told Ship to display it in the plotting tank. “I used to watch Polaris from my parents’ back garden on summer’s nights. I would lie on my back in the grass and stare up and up.” She paused for a moment as she remembered the tickling of the grass and the clover on her legs and neck and the warm musk of a summer’s night. Once—it had only been the once—she had not lain there alone. “It was different from all the others, Polaris was. All the heavens turned around it. The Hinge of the Sky, I called it.” She finished briskly and turned with fussy attention to her board. “Maybe that was why I went to space.”

  Gorgas nodded. “I fancy it sits higher in the heavens above England than it does above Hungary.”

  “I fancy so.”

  “It does move, you know.”

  “Precession. Yes. The Earth’s axis wobbles.”

  “Thuban was the pole star once; and after that, Kochab. Polaris is still inching closer to the true pole but, during the next century, it will begin drifting away.”

  “By then I will no longer care.”

  Gorgas chuckled softly. “But there will never be another. Did you know that, Number Two? Afterward, no other star bright enough to draw the eye will ever lie so close as Polaris to the celestial pole. It saddens me. I wonder at what young girls will gaze from their parents’ lawns at night.”

  Satterwaithe still did not see what Gorgas was getting at. “I’m sure there will always be something. A faint star, perhaps. If not from Earth, then from Mars.”

  “We cannot seem to shed our own pole star quite so easily, can we,” Gorgas said turning once more to the plotting tank.

  At last Satterwaithe understood. Gorgas had not been topic hopping, after all. “It does appear that every bearing we take finds it incrementally closer to the dead-ahead.”

  “Near enough to trouble the mind.”

  “Well, we shall have acceleration before long,” Satterwaithe replied.

  Gorgas looked up and there was a faint smile on his face. “One way or the other, eh, Number Two?”

  Satterwaithe frowned, unsure. “And once our acceleration is restored, we will miss the Reef. Surely.”

  “Aye, perhaps. Though Mr. Corrigan told me that, as we do not know our own True Position, any course change will probably lead to the very collision we hope to avoid.”

  “He said that, did he.”

  “Mr. Corrigan is an ironist.”

  Satterwaithe snorted. “Mr. Corrigan is an old woman,” she said with no sense of her own irony. “The Reef does not subtend a very great arc across our forward trajectory. Any measurement bias will be of minor consequence.”

  “And a miss is as good as a mile? Yet, it takes time to alter our vector. If there is wiggle room, we must begin to wiggle rather soon.”

  “Had Bhatterji repaired the engines more quickly—”

  Gorgas sighed and waved his hands in mock surrender. “Oh, good Lord, yes. How I miss Enver Koch! Sometimes I think the first wound the ship suffered was his death.”

  “Really?” Satterwaithe said. “I had thought it to be Hand’s.”

  Meaning that Gorgas had taken command. Gorgas heard that as plainly as if she had said so aloud. “Hand was a poor manager,” he said. “It is boorish to speak ill of the dead….”

  “But…” There was always a but lurking in statements like that.

  “But he did not staff the ship well. Consider some of his choices. Less than wise, I think. Bhatterji—insubordinate and self-willed. And Wong—was she truly the only doctor available on Achilles? Corrigan—Well, he is a sterling navigator, I will grant you, that; but hardly officer material.”

  “This isn’t the Guard…Stepan.” She had almost said “captain” again. Why, tonight alone, was she prey to that usage? Because any man who loses sleep over the perils to his ship deserves the title? His concern had raised him in her estimation, but it had raised him only a little.

  “I know this is not the Guard, Madam Second,” Gorgas said in a voice like driven nails. “Every morning, I remember that this is not the Guard.”

  “And it was Hand who chose you.” Satterwaithe shook her head with frustration.

  “When he could have promoted you? I suppose he had his reasons.”

  They both knew what those reasons had to be, but neither was inclined to speak of them. The Board of Inquiry had exonerated Satterwaithe of culpability, but no one would hire her for captain afterward. That Satterwaithe had not, even yet, exonerated herself was reason for the barb she next aimed at the man who occupied her position.

  “You knew Oberon O’Bannion, didn’t you?” she said, suggesting by her tone a willful change of topic.

  Gorgas smiled, though only to himself. “OB-squared, we called her. Yes, she and I ’prenticed together.” They had done a few other things together beside, he and Obi, but Satterwaithe did not have Need To Know.

  “She’s Number One in Pride of Pimlico, I heard. That’s a first-rater.”

  “A twenty-four,” Gorgas said. There were other difference between a Four Planet liner and a tramp freighter beside the number of cages each bore; and Gorgas was well aware of them. That might have been him, he thought. In a different life.

  “She must be a capital shiphandler,” Satterwaithe suggested, still all innocence.

  Gorgas was a proud man, but he was an honest one too, and therein lay his vulnerability. “A better one than I,” he admitted.

  Satterwaithe swallowed the canary. “Really?” she said, just as if she did not hold half the ships’ officers in the middle system to be better than Gorgas. “Well, your O’Bannion was Number Two in the old Henry Joy when Ranulf Echeverry left us to take over Olympus Mons. Ranulf was a good man too. We were sorry to see him go.”

  “Or to see me come?” Gorgas suggested, not yet seeing the trap.

  “Your
friend Obi bid on Echeverry’s berth and Hand turned her down. I’ve always wondered why.”

  Gorgas pushed away from the tank, his face a mask. “If you’re that short for things to wonder about, wonder about this: Hand signed on Corrigan for Second two years later. Why did he pass you over twice?”

  If Satterwaithe knew how to deal wounds, she knew also how to take them. Gorgas’s sally barely pricked the scar tissue, it was that thick around the wound. She watched Gorgas swim toward the doorway to his dayroom. “I’ll start costing maneuvers,” she called after him. Gorgas turned but said nothing, so she explained. “If we have to wiggle around the Reef—deviate from the Grand Secant route. I’ll see what resources we’ll need. How much boron and such.” When Gorgas still said nothing, she added, “The ship comes first.”

  Gorgas nodded. “And last, Number Two. First and last. When can you have the sail ready for deployment?”

  Some questions, by their very unexpectedness, create a silence about themselves within which they seem to echo. Satterwaithe found her voice only with difficulty and, when she did, found only enough of it to say, “The sail…”

  “Yes. Your sails can give us another milligee or so, can they not?” Gorgas paused and pulled a sweetball from his jacket pocket and placed it between his lips. “Every little bit helps,” he said around the candy, “eh, Number Two?”

  Satterwaithe thought furiously. “Ah, we will need to perform a readiness check. And a feasibility study. Learn what ‘make and mend’ is required. Perhaps…a week?”

  Gorgas grunted. “I would have thought but four more days. Still, you know your craft better than I.”

  The bridge squawker saved Satterwaithe from the need for further reply.

  They sang as they pulled on the messenger line, an old ballad of sailing days that Okoye had learned from Eaton Grubb. Ratline knew the words, and Miko followed along on the chorus as best she could. Okoye’s voice was a sweet, high lilt. She really should have spoken up more often. The ship would have been the pleasanter for it. Ratline’s voice was nothing to speak of, but he did no violence to the melody; and Miko, as tired as she was, added a slurred and muddy mezzo-soprano somewhere between the drone of a bagpipe and a ground; but then she was not a singing sort of girl, even in her best voice.