The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Miko wanted to bounce across the room for joy, but her innate gravitas kept her in place. The gratitude she felt at Bhatterji’s vote of confidence very nearly overwhelmed her desire to be revenged on him. “Sure, Mr. Bhatterji. I’m willing.”

  “What about me?” Evermore asked. “I can stand a watch too.”

  But Bhatterji shook his head. “Miko went through an intensive apprenticeship on the transit from Amalthea to Achilles. You’re a good machinist. I’ve seldom seen better at your age. But we need watchstanders now, not machinists.” And besides, although he did not say this, Evermore was far too prone to improvisation. If a crisis did arise, he would try to handle it himself and Bhatterji saw no good end to that. “When we need a flame monkey to replenish the boron canisters—”

  “Oh, thanks a whole lot.”

  Bhatterji reared up at the derision. “Listen, boy,” he said with an impaling finger directed at Evermore’s heart, “I know who you are!” Then, more softly, “You’re me, two decades back; and I know how raw and green that was.”

  “I can do it.”

  “No, you can not. You rely on your intuition too much.”

  “I know the engines,” Evermore said.

  “It’s not enough to know them,” Bhatterji told him. “You’ve got to feel them. Is ‘extuition’ a word? It ought to be. You’ve got to hear their song. Listen…” And in the silence he demanded was the distant throbbing cadence of the engines as they fused the boron and the hydrogen ions into small explosions and jetted the plasma before them. “You’ve got to feel that rhythm, so you’ll know when it’s wrong. You’ve got to see the colors of the plumes….” And he rapped his knuckles against the display screen where the sensors played the false-color images. “…so you’ll know when the tint is not quite right. If you wish to be an engineer, the engines must be here,” a slap to his belly, “and not just here.” A finger tapped his head. “You need seasoning.”

  “Yah. And I’m sure you’d love to season me.”

  Bhatterji went flat. “You’ve been aboard two years. You could have been my apprentice any time, if that’s what you wanted, and you’d be mate-first by now. So, don’t complain now that you’re not qualified.”

  “Up y—” Evermore stopped himself. “Up in the sail locker, they might not be so fussy.”

  “Up in the sail locker,” Bhatterji said, “they can’t afford to be fussy. It’s a dead end craft. It’s not for the likes of you.”

  “What do you care?”

  “I do care!” he said. Then, after a moment while the two of them stared one at the other and Miko remained quietly by the wall, he added gruffly, “Clear it with Corrigan, then.”

  “What?”

  “Reberthing. Corrigan keeps the assignment list. Tell him it has my okay. Right now, Sails needs more hands and Engineering doesn’t.”

  Bhatterji had begun to turn away when Evermore said, “You’re sending me to Sails?” He did not understand the devastation that seized him.

  The engineer turned back and looked at Evermore then at the control-room door as if puzzled by the distance remaining between the two. “If I ever need another crack machinist, Rave, I’d call you before I’d call anyone else on this ship. And before you say anything stupid, it has nothing to do with your beauty and everything to do with your skill.” The lie was a half-lie only. It really was the skill that mattered, but the boy’s beauty had more than nothing to do with it.

  Miko spent her first watch checking each of the engines in turn, noting plume temperature, plasma velocity, injector registration, boron depletion rate, field strength of the magnetic insulation, and a dozen other telltales and monitors—until Bhatterji, who had lingered to observe, took her in hand.

  “There are a hundred things to monitor in a Farnsworth cage,” he told her, “but only twenty of them matter. Ship does all the grunt work.”

  “That’s good,” Miko said, “because Ship and me, we’re friends.”

  Bhatterji chuckled, not taking the comment literally. “Ship will monitor the sensor data and warn you of any statistically significant deviations. What you focus on is whether those deviations have practical significance. Look for trends and correlations. Look for events outside the bounds of the engine sensors. Ship has been taught to recognize low probability events. Data far out in the tails of their expected distributions. But what does one chance in a million mean when millions of events are measured and logged? There are bound to be false alarms—it’s what we call the alpha risk. You’ll have to decide which are the false alarms and which are the true article. Ship has learned some search-and-decide algorithms over the years, but there will always be that one new thing that Ship cannot handle.”

  “Which are the twenty that matter?”

  “The what?”

  “You said only twenty of the indicators mattered. Which ones are they?”

  Bhatterji sighed. He sometimes despaired of Miko ever truly grasping the point: That it wasn’t ever any one thing, but always the combinations of many things. “It varies, depending on time and circumstance.”

  Miko found that answer less than specific. “Can you make me a checklist?”

  “A checklist is limiting. Dialogue with the engines ought to be open-ended.”

  “You mean I need to ‘feel the engines’ more.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Then why not chase me out like you chased out Rave?”

  Bhatterji had not seen that coming and missed the beat on his reply. “Because you have some experience,” he said after a moment’s silence. “He has almost none.”

  “You could have kept him as cadet and let him stand watch with you. That’s how you worked me on the Achilles transit.”

  Bhatterji grunted—and Miko, unsatisfied with the detail of this explanation, persisted. “I thought you liked having him around, because…Well…”

  “Because he’s pretty to look at?”

  “Yah.”

  The engineer completed a checklist, thumbed it, and handed her the comp-pad. “Here, use this, but don’t let it stop you from checking other things. Ship has a whole library of fault trees to guide you through the diagnostics. Maybe he’s not so pretty any more.”

  It took her a moment to resolve the pronoun. When she did, Miko stared at him. “You still love him.”

  “Miko, I still love you.”

  That startled the mate into silence. It was a sentence she had not heard in eleven years. That there might be love, she understood as a proposition. That there might be more than one sort, she had not considered.

  “Yes, of course, I still love him,” Bhatterji continued. “You can’t turn off feelings the way you can a boron feed. But he doesn’t love me, and that matters!” One time, he remembered, one time, on Outerhab-by-Titan, he had not let it matter and had learned, hard, how much it should have. Two men were dead, and one had not deserved it. “I sent Evermore as far from me as I could and still keep him inside the ship. He wanted that distance more than he wanted to stand watch down here. Do you really think he and I could have spent ten hours together without…” He paused and turned inward. “Well, it might not have ended well. You got your watch, Miko,” he added, “and Rave got far away from me. So both of you got what you wanted. I’m the only one denied.”

  Evermore made good his threat, if threat it was, and proceeded to the Long Room, which he entered in time to hear Nkieruke Okoye get her ass chewed out by Ratline. While a chewing out by Ratline was no uncommon thing, to find Okoye at the business end of the teeth was. More often than not since Evermore had signed the ship’s Articles, it was Okoye who handled things. He could not imagine that she had been derelict in her duties.

  But Okoye’s transgression was the very opposite of dereliction. “The catliner jammed…” he heard her say, but Ratline cut her off with a gesture like a slashing knife.

  “I know. Ship woke me up. I was on my way.”

  “…and the mizzen warped. I went out to free the shroud, that was all. I c
hecked the manual.”

  “Not everything is in the muffing manual! A malf like that isn’t critical enough to risk a lone EVAsion, not when backup is on the way….” He finally noticed Evermore standing in the doorway and turned on him. “And what do you want?”

  “Why are you yelling at her?” Evermore didn’t know he was going to say that until he did, but he had felt an odd quixotic impulse to rush to ’Kiru’s defense.

  “Because it’s my job, Evermore! I don’t have so many wranglers that I can afford to lose one.” He turned back to the First Wrangler. “Even you, Okoye! The next time there’s a malf up in the shrouds, you do what you can here in the Long Room, but you wait on me before we climb the tree. Understood?”

  “But you go out alone—”

  “That’s just old Moth Ratline. There’s not enough left of me to worry over its loss. But not you, Okoye. Not you.” He turned again to Evermore. “Now, tell me that you came up here for some reason other than to google your girl.”

  “I’m not his girl,” Okoye said.

  Ratline shrugged without turning. “Not my fault. Well, Evermore?”

  “Uh, I’ve been reberthed. I’m in Sails now.”

  Ratline seemed puzzled for a moment. He stood in that curious, half-floating pose that spacers take under milly, with his mouth partly open and his brow lowered as if uncertain of the words he had heard. In the silence, Evermore realized that it was not silence at all. A strange hum, something like a bagpipe, something like a distant chorus, pervaded the room. It was the tension on the cables, he was to learn later, transmitting the thrust from the sail loops to the body of the ship. It was a pleasant sound, though a little ominous too. The cords were dissonant and seemed to hunt for resolution.

  “You’re joining the Sail berth,” Ratline said at last. “Whose idea was that?”

  “Mine,” said Evermore.

  “You’ll apprentice on sails?” Ratline was not in denial, but he was at least in doubt.

  “Uh, yah. I guess so.”

  Ratline’s eyes narrowed, which made him look suspicious, but it was only because he smiled and Evermore did not know what Ratline’s smile looked like. “A ’prentice,” the shroudmaster whispered. “A ’prentice…” But he must have realized that too much of himself was showing, for he tightened up and added with a leer, “And it gets you out of Bhatterji’s clutches.” He thought this a sly cut at the engineer and did not realize that, although the engineer would have expressed it differently, it actually had been Bhatterji’s reason. “I’ll enter you in the Sail Log as shroudsman-apprentice. Wrangling is a good foundation for what a shroudsman needs to learn, anyway. Oh, it’ll take a year or two, but you’ll be top-jack when I’m through with you.”

  Startled, Evermore glanced at Okoye, whose eyes rested upon Ratline—until a clatter on the east side of the Long Room caused her to leap gazelle-like in the direction of a jammed machine. Evermore watched her disengage the machine, reset something that he could not see, and reengage it. The unresolved chord seemed to have changed in pitch. Evermore smiled and thumbed the comp-pad that Ratline handed him. A year or two of training? Evermore did not believe The Riv’ would still be flying a year from now, let alone flying under sail. And he certainly did not intend to spend the rest of his life as a sailor.

  Having entertained some notion of long, lonely watches spent with Okoye, Evermore found himself spending those watches with Ratline instead, an altogether less appealing prospect. Ratline worked him hard too, taking him up the mast and out the crosstrees, and causing him to study trefoil rigging. After his first shift, Evermore scored seventy on a simulation that the cargo master gave him, which, under the circumstances, was not too bad.

  “It was really you I came to be with,” Evermore told Okoye later, when the First Wrangler returned to take the next watch. “The Rat isn’t near as pretty as you are.”

  “The Rat isn’t as pretty as Dr. Wong,” she answered, “so that is no great approbation.”

  Fife had come to think of the cutter as “his” escape craft; so when he and the doctor entered the boat on the night of 3 November and found Mikoyan Hidei under the control panel busy with a snap-welder, his first emotion was one of offended propriety. He had even blurted out, “What are you doing in here?” before he recollected that he was not, in fact, the proprietor.

  The slender girl with the old-young eyes slid out from under the panel and studied her surprise visitors with her own mixture of vexations. She did not return the salutation, as she knew—or thought she did—what these two intended “doing in here.” There were only three concerns she had. One was that a passenger ought not demand accountings from a crewman. The second was that she was nominally replenishing the depleted boron canisters, and did not want word of her whereabouts to reach Bhatterji. The third was what she had come here to do; but since that was nearly finished, she slid back under the panel without a word and inserted the boards she had made, snap-welding them to the contacts.

  “Just a little engineering work,” she said when she emerged once more and began gathering up her tools. Whistling a tune she had learned from Okoye, she refastened the access panel and, because she had a certain malicious streak to her, she took her good old time doing it. She assumed that Fife was anxious to get to it—which he was, though “it” was not what Miko thought. “Well,” she said, fastening the dog pockets on her tool belt and giving the two a calculated leer, “have fun.” And she left them in possession of the field.

  “She thinks we’re ridiculous,” Wong said after Miko had left. “She’s laughing at us.” Fransziska Wong might live in a dream world half the time, but there was nothing wrong with her perceptiveness. The thought made her angry and she chased through the umbilical into the rim-hall to reprimand the girl only to find it empty in both directions. “That child is fast,” she told herself, “to vanish so quickly.” She was peering at the bends in the corridor, but Miko had vanished tangentially, not circumferentially and was now watching from the peepery.

  When Wong returned to the cutter’s control room, she saw that Fife had removed the panel that Miko had just refastened and had crawled under it, as if he were searching for the vanished girl himself in the last place he had seen her. He reemerged with a puzzled look on his face. “I feared she might have been after gutting the panel,” he explained, “for some need of Bhatterji’s, but she has only added memory boards.”

  “Why?” asked Wong.

  “To give the cutter more memory,” he said. It was only an absentee comment, for Fife was considering the possibilities and had only restated the proposition, replacing the concrete act with its evident purpose; but the offhandedness of the insult wounded the doctor.

  Fife concluded that the ship’s crew must have finally realized that they might need to abandon ship. He was gratified that someone had begun to prepare for that eventuality, but he was also a little miffed. He had thought of the plan first and resented its co-option.

  He was wrong, however, in one major respect. The ship’s crew had not yet realized the possible need.

  Miko stroked the fur of the Cat-With-No-Name and wondered why the doctor and the passenger were taking so long inside. “You’d think she’d want to get it over with as quickly as possible,” she said, for Miko found no pleasure in contemplating the Lunatic as lover and could not imagine that Wong did, either. He was terribly attractive, and she meant that in a most literal sense. There was something terrible about those ever-seeking eyes of his. They seemed to have swooped on the doctor and carried her away. He was not right for her—Miko could see that.

  “I wish there was some way for me to tell her,” she told the cat. Unlike Fife, Miko knew that the truth could hurt dreadfully, and was often better served by shading it. Shading truth made it appear three-dimensional. “Best way to remove a patch is with one quick yank,” she said. “Try pulling it off slow and the hurt just lasts longer. Maybe I should…What do you think, Cat? Maybe it’s that Fife I should work on.”

>   Cat did not respond, but studied Miko with regal eyes before—enduring one final scratch—she quick-footed into the darkness of the serviceways. She was a slippery sort of feline—sometimes here, sometimes there—and far more aloof than Queen Tamar. Perhaps for this reason, Miko found the creature more companionable. She did not think Akhaturian’s name—Anush Abar—quite right and had given the cat several names of her own already, but none of them had stuck yet. She never did think to name the creature “Miko.”

  Her belt comm beeped and Ship reminded her that she had been absent from the control room long enough; and so Miko too quick-footed into the dark to finish her rounds of the boron canisters.

  “The bridge is yours, Number One,” Gorgas said. “Steady as she goes. The radars tell us that we shall miss Stranger’s Reef by a comfortable margin. You will pass it by on this watch.”

  The smugness in the man’s voice irritated Corrigan, who responded with a grunt and a petulant comment that the body was certainly not the fabled Reef.

  Gorgas raised his brows, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “Of course, of course. The Reef is part of a ballistic triplet and there is no sign of the other two. Yet, I have been thinking of it for so long as Stranger’s Reef that it seems odd to call it something else now. We ought to name it, though. Only fair. Perhaps a contest among the crew?”

  Corrigan, exasperated, turned to Satterwaithe. “And what of the atoll you mentioned? There may be other, smaller bodies about.”

  “Nothing that we have raised on the radars,” Satterwaithe said as she relinquished the comm station to The Lotus Jewel. “The sails remain parachute to the wind. There was some trouble with the mizzen during the night, but Sails put it right.”

  Corrigan nodded and thumbed the log. “Very well. I relieve you.”

  “I wish I could say that I was relieved,” Gorgas told Satterwaithe as they crossed the bridgeway to the B-ring on their way to take a late snack together. “Mr. Corrigan is grown somewhat fixated on catastrophe, and the difficulty with seeking is that one often finds, eh, Number Two? What, ho!”