The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Oh, hoist the sail, shipmates, and fly me away.

  I’m bound for Europa come morning.

  I’m docking at last at the end of my day

  And I’m giving you all a fair warning.

  I’ve plied acid clouds high in Venus’s air,

  And I’ve feasted on Earth’s blue and green.

  Ceres and Luna and Mars—I been there.

  But there’s one world that I haven’t seen.

  So, hoist the sail, shipmates, and fly me away, etc.

  On Europa, they say, a man’s soul can freeze

  So hard that the Devil won’t take ’im.

  Hell isn’t hot enough near, if you please,

  To melt ’im or thaw ’im or bake ’im.

  So, hoist the sail, shipmates, and fly me away, etc.

  The ice of Europa is laced with red blood

  Where many poor miner’s entombed.

  Those crevasses close with a dull, final thud

  And seal you in darkness and doom.

  So! Hoist the sail, shipmates and fly me away.

  I’m bound for Europa come morning.

  I’m docking at last at the end of my day

  And I’m giving you all a fair warning.

  Miko’s soul too had frozen up some time past. Amalthea, after all, is not so very far joveward of Europa. Yet the permafrost in her spirit was neither so solid nor so deep that the words of the song did not slowly melt into it. She had worked the first two watches with Bhatterji on the engines and most of the third with Ratline on the shrouds; nor was this the first day she had spent so. She had fallen into a dull haze of routine, responding by rote to commands that Ratline called down from the topmast. There was no past, no future, not even much of a present; there was only the motion of the work. Reality was hauling on the messenger with ’Kiru, arm over arm in time to the rhythm. Only after the two of them had fed the free end into the winch and the motors took over did the song’s meaning finally register. She stopped and stared at the suited figure beside her, wondering with what intentions ’Kiru had sung them.

  John Pavel Hidei had gone up to Europa one day and he never came back down. That was all she knew of him. That was all she would ever know of him. He was not much more to her now than a name, a vague and somewhat blurred face, and the dim recollection of the gentle crush of arms around her. A vapor, half constructed of her desires, half of her troubled dreams, with only a thin residue left over of the man he had actually been.

  Miko closed her eyes and tried to see him as he was before Europa swallowed him. Her mother she had never known; but her father, she felt, ought to come clearer than he did. She had spent six years of her life with him. All of hers that she had had to spend until then, and all of his that he had had remaining. A giant of a man—or had she only had to look up to see him? She had kicked her first transit into his arms, sailing across the single room of their quarters before Amalthea’s gentle gravity could pull her down. There had been a laugh—very deep, rumbling, almost like an ice-quake in itself. Somehow, there ought to be more left of him than that. It wasn’t right that he had disappeared so thoroughly.

  She saw him standing before her bed, one arm reaching out to stroke her hair. There was a smile on his face, but there was no face behind his smile. The was a twinkle in his eyes, but there were no eyes behind the twinkle. He was a Cheshire cat of a man, all attribute and no substance. Yet if she concentrated, if she focused, if she willed, it might all come as clear as a pristine hologram.

  But it did not. Instead, her father’s body became a river of stars across an endless sky; his smile, nothing more than a dark nebula. Stars and darkness surrounded her. Miko saw that the ship had vanished and she was now alone in the Void. Her father sang a lullaby and Miko closed her eyes and listened to the gentle music.

  Afterward, Okoye blamed herself for what happened. She might have made excuses, but it was not in her to do that. Ratline, high up the topmast, was not looking. He was focused on the delongator, guiding it through the way-grommet and the mast guides as the messenger line pulled it out. Okoye herself was watching Ratline who, alone of those out on the hull, needed no watching. Miko had been standing beside her the one moment and then she was gone.

  Okoye looked four other directions before she looked up, and there she saw the strobes on Miko’s suit blinking in a complex, colorful, and twisting pattern as the girl swung around every axis that she had. The gyre was—almost—beautiful to watch.

  “Ratline!” Okoye shouted. “Miko’s tumbled!” And then, with no other thought, she snapped her lifeline to a padeye on the mast and dove furiously after her companion. “Miko!” she shouted over the suit-to-suit channel. “Stabilize your spin!” She knew from Ratline’s countless safety lectures how disorienting an uncontrolled tumble could be. Why, the girl could fire her jets at just the wrong point in her spin and waft away from the ship like a fleeing bird. “Don’t you leave us, girl,” Okoye said in her mother’s voice (and her mother for once did not begrudge her its use). “Don’t you go before you’ve ever come.”

  She centered Miko in her crosshairs, told her suit, “Go there,” and prayed that her lifeline would not pay out before she reached her target. She wasn’t sure who listened to her prayer. Her own ancestors were cool shadows in the hot, dusty groves near Afikpo and did not look after Amalthean elves in any case. “Miko’s father,” she called. “Help me catch her!”

  Okoye’s suit was smart. It knew the play of each of its components. It knew that if it reached the end of its rope at full velocity, the sudden jerk could tear the fabric. And so, when it sensed the tether nearing its end, it fired the suit’s braking jets, stopping her well short of Miko’s receding form. Okoye sobbed for one ragged breath. Miko’s father had not helped, after all. It was hard to hear prayers buried under all that ice.

  Fear slowed Okoye’s hand as she reached for the tether’s decoupler. She was a full cable-length from the ship. If she cut loose, she might catch the elfin girl and bring her back free-jet, as Bhatterji had with Evermore. But she was not the expert suithandler that Bhatterji was and might as easily tumble herself into the Void along with Miko.

  So fear slowed her hand, but it did not stop it. The tug of her lifeline relaxed as she decoupled and she knew that it now curled free behind her. After she caught Miko, she could reverse course and grab hold of the line again. Maybe.

  She never found out.

  Ratline was suddenly with them in the Void and he had one arm around the engineer’s mate and with the other snapped a clip onto Okoye’s belt, binding them all together. But Okoye, nonetheless, reached out and seized Miko by the wrist.

  It was what she had come out here to do.

  Okoye had never seen Dr. Wong angry and marveled at the novelty of it. The mouse is become the lion and rules the forest! Wong’s anger was all fused with fear, bound so tightly that you could not tell the one element from the other. Floating among the braiders and knitters, webbed by cabling that gleamed like the ice of an orphan moon where it faces the distant sun, Wong held the half-suited Miko to her as if the girl might yet slip like a ghost between the strands of running lines, between the very plates of the hull, and back into the Void that had nearly claimed her.

  “How could you have done this?” Wong asked. “How could you?” Her voice echoed within the sail-maker’s ready room. It was a broad room, well-suited for echoes. If you counted the voices instead of the bodies, there was a mighty crowd gathered there. Ratline and Okoye continued desuiting.

  “She’s all right,” Ratline said. “She wasn’t even scared.”

  “That’s not the point, is it? It’s what could have happened, not what did.”

  Ratline laughed and snubbed his helmet on the headball. “If we lose sleep over what could-have-been, we’d none of us ever get any rest.”

  “Not even on down pillows,” Okoye added to herself. And, for certain, to worry over what might have been is to worry over what is less than a ghost, for a ghost must ha
ve once been in order to be, and the subjunctive mode has not even that much vitality. Yet some folk do linger at the crossroads to stare in horror at what lies down the road not taken. Okoye found the taken road horrid enough. She would not look at Ratline while she squeezed herself into the desuiting rack to wriggle out of her hard torso. While thus pinioned, she saw Satterwaithe and Gorgas push into the room, with Corrigan a heartbeat behind them.

  Corrigan had been calibrating the last of the Kandle brackets when Satterwaithe called him from the bridge. An accident with the Outside party! Satterwaithe hadn’t known what the problem was—she had muted the link—but Corrigan knew who was in the party and he didn’t bounce through the passages from the B-ring because he feared for Ratline’s safety.

  That Miko might visit him after her shift had not been beyond his thoughts. In fact, he had laid out a small board of fruits and cheeses for the two of them, on just that chance. She had been doing so regularly, and regularity alone was enough to endear her to Corrigan. There was something about the girl that tugged at him. When he heard what had happened, he learned how hard that tug was, for his soul was yanked right out of him.

  Okoye understood this immediately. It was why a person had two souls. “She is only sleeping,” she told the First Officer. “She can sleep upon flint, she is that tired.” At those words, Wong turned to face the wrangler and it was the face of terror. Okoye did not understand that.

  Ratline had by now finished racking his suit and Wong turned on him with sudden fury. “You almost killed her!”

  “You’ve got your signs mixed,” Ratline said. “I’m the one who saved her.”

  “The poor girl was exhausted! You had no right to put her out there! In the Void!” Wong astonished them all. She had not used so many exclamation points in consecutive order since coming aboard ship. Satterwaithe, who had been silent throughout, began to wonder if there mightn’t be steel after all somewhere deep within the other woman.

  “I had every right,” Ratline said, swerving like a barracuda and putting his face inches from Wong’s. “The safety of the ship is worth a few hours’ sleep.”

  But Wong did not pull back. “The safety of the ship doesn’t matter,” she said deep in her throat, “if we lose the people in it.” Oh, she was the lioness, in truth. Logic and reason would show her wrong, but logic and reason were not in it.

  Ratline only shrugged, but it was he who turned away. “The Void’s a dangerous place,” he muttered.

  “All the more reason. She’s just a girl.”

  “Doc, in some ways she’s older’n you are.”

  Ratline spoke truer than he knew. Wong still treasured her childhood fantasies, while Miko had but lately abandoned the only one she’d ever had.

  Gorgas sought to restore peace: “No need to hurl accusations. There will be a proper inquiry.”

  Corrigan seized on that assurance. “Yes. Yes, an inquiry.” An inquiry would find reasons. An inquiry would insist that there be reasons and that his near loss of Miko had not been wild chance. He turned to Okoye. “I know it was Ratline who rescued you both,” he said, “but I won’t forget that you tried.”

  He had, of course, noticed Gorgas among those gathered in the prep room, but he had not thought through what that might mean for Plan B. The charts and figures on the tally boards, the active cables running through the forward cat-holes, were obvious signs of use. But he had other things on his mind just now. “I’ll take her back to her room,” he said, and no one objected. Not Miko, who was barely aware of the offer. Not Ratline and Satterwaithe, who still had the mast to dress. Not even Dr. Wong, who let the First pry the sleeping girl from her arms and carry her away. Watching the two go, Okoye silently bade them luck. The elf from Amalthea had a small and shriveled soul, but if watered, it might yet grow.

  The Brawl

  Satterwaithe was certain that she had marshaled the sail project outside the boundaries of Gorgas’s attention. She had scheduled the tasks in out of the way places and at out of the way times and kept the circle of those who knew small enough that she could ensure confidentiality. Yet somehow Gorgas had learned. The boundaries of my attention might be broader than you think, his smug and knowing face told her when she had followed him back to his dayroom. It was the self-satisfied haughtiness she read there that infuriated, for none feel more outrage than the clever on finding themselves outmaneuvered.

  For Gorgas, who had overlooked every snatch of tangible evidence that had fallen his way, could not overlook the theoretical possibility of the sail project. The more he thought on the matter, the more he realized that deployment must also have occurred to the ex-sailors and, knowing them as he did (which was not so well as he thought, but better than they believed) had concluded that they must in fact have embarked on the venture. He did not suppose them stupid, only insubordinate.

  The one thing he could not bring himself to do was to intervene and block them. By the time he had awoken to their activities, too much time and materials and—most of all—ego had been invested by too many of the crew. To stop the work would have meant white mutiny.

  “How long have you known?” Satterwaithe asked him.

  “Since the beginning,” Gorgas lied. “It seemed reasonable to have a backup plan in case Bhatterji failed—as he almost did.”

  The sangfroid was another lie. Gorgas had been angry and terrified upon learning of the clandestine effort and he embraced the rationale he had just given only as a means of justifying his own inaction. In fact, he did not regard any plan that competed for the same resources as a “backup,” but as a “cannibal.” Inevitably, there would be a conflict: for materials, tools, personnel, or time. He had expected it to be the hobartium, which he knew to be in tight supply. He had not expected it to be a sleeping girl. Yet, Gorgas was a great believer in all’s-well-that-ends-well and was willing to forgive even major transgressions if acceptable results were forthcoming. For he had always had one solitary goal since the night the engines had gone down and Hand had died, and he had worked toward it with a single-minded intensity.

  That goal was to bring the ship and her cargo in to Port Galileo with a minimum loss from the late-delivery penalty clauses. In this, he went beyond Bhatterji, whose goal had been merely to fix the engines. That Gorgas had worked on this goal only sporadically did not detract from its singularity, only from its continuity. Calculating the likelihood of success from time to time had resulted in an ill-defined stomach ailment that he treated with sweetballs and pastries in a private regimen of which he was only barely conscious.

  “Still,” he told Satterwaithe, “it ought to have been done above-board, you know. There would have more efficient usage of resources. Better scheduling. More effective.” What he intended, in his elliptical way, was to rebuke the sailing master for her improper conduct. He believed that the crew accepted this oblique manner of admonishment more readily than a direct dressing-down, but in this he was mistaken. For a chewing out, genuine teeth are needed.

  This did not apply to Satterwaithe, however. A jigsaw puzzler can see the shape of a missing piece, and Satterwaithe could hear the shape of an unsaid scold. Gorgas had accused her of negligence, of endangering the life of a crewman, of embezzling parts and materials. But what could she say in her own defense, given that it was all true?

  When she had worn captain’s rings, Eugenie Satterwaithe had believed that justification could be read as uncertainty and so she never gave excuses for her actions and seldom gave even reasons. In this she differed a great deal from both Gorgas and Hand, lacking both the thoughtful detachment of the former and the friendly engagement of the latter. She had often appeared arbitrary to her crew, though never irresolute. She offered no excuses now.

  Gorgas had bent over his keyboard. “I shall brief Bhatterji,” he said. He could imagine the engineer’s reaction: Surly, sullen, pouting; serving up derision and unhidden contempt. “The coordination between the two projects,” he told the sailing master, “will be my responsibility.�
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  Satterwaithe frowned and flexed her hands once or twice, not liking the sound of Gorgas and responsibility in the same sentence, but she could see no easy way around it short of dealing with Bhatterji herself, which, while satisfying in its prospect, promised less than happy in its outcome. In any event, the acting captain was concentrating on his screen and Satterwaithe supposed that he was already adjusting and coordinating the two work schedules.

  Gorgas was coordinating more than that. He was deploying the entire Army of Virginia around Union Mills. Pope had made a sound initial estimate of the situation, but had been niggardly in the assets he deployed. Hooker’s and Rickett’s divisions were too small for their respective missions, and McDowell’s entire III Corps should have been directed toward Thoroughfare Gap to block Longstreet’s arrival. Grave errors, he thought. Grave errors. “Everything has turned out well,” he told the sailing master, meaning the business with the sail and not Second Bull Run, which had not turned out well at all, at least for Pope. “I will expect a summary report of your project to bring me up to matching velocity, and progress reports daily thereafter.”

  Pope’s strategy had been good, Gorgas decided, but had been frustrated by poor intelligence of enemy movements and by the feckless initiatives of some of his commanders. Gorgas, resolving not to repeat Pope’s errors, attached Buford’s cavalry to headquarters to maintain cognizance at army level of the battle space and was rewarded when his first reconnaissance showed Jackson present in strength at Manassas Junction. Yes. Surely more force than Hooker would be needed to shift that mass. When he glanced up a moment later, Satterwaithe had gone. Gorgas opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a sweetball to suck on.