The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Satterwaithe had been paying no more attention to Gorgas than she usually did, but his last cry brought her up short, and a good thing too, as she had almost trampled the two junior wranglers, who stood patiently by the entry to the bridgeway. The two were easy stepped upon, being both of them shorter than the general run of crew. “What are you doing up here?” she demanded.

  “Mr. Corrigan is training me in navigation,” said Akhaturian.

  “Is he,” said Gorgas with some amusement. “Well, see to it that he doesn’t train you in apprehension,” and he chuckled, though Akhaturian did not get the joke.

  Neither did Satterwaithe. “I’m surprised our second officer can spare the time from his other concerns,” she said, which, while equivalent to Gorgas’s comment, was just as opaque to the wrangler. The pun was unwitting and unintentional. Gorgas too was briefly confused by her remark, until he realized that when the sailing master had said “second officer” she had meant Corrigan. In fact, he realized that he had yet to hear the woman use any of their brevet ranks. Some people, he reflected, never give up. It occurred to him that this might at times be a virtue as well as a nuisance.

  “The training is…” Akhaturian said. “Mr. Corrigan said. I mean, I—” He stuttered to a halt, fearful that his classes had been suspended and Gorgas would send him away.

  “It’s part of his contract,” deCant said, springing to his defense.

  “Oh, indeed, indeed,” Gorgas answered, recalling old days as a youngster on Pierre Delacroix. “Best way to learn the craft. Manuals can only take you so far. Why, I was only a little older than you when I went for midshipman.” Satterwaithe turned away so that Gorgas would not see her eyes roll. She herself had come up on a much harder orbit—for ballistic ships, OTVs, magnostats, sails, and Farnsworths had each required mastery of utterly different practices. Perhaps this is why she thought herself five times the ship-handler that Gorgas was.

  Akhaturian scooted past the two onto the bridgeway and Satterwaithe, turning once more to resume her interrupted journey to the mess, nearly stepped on Twenty-four deCant, who had lingered athwart her path. The two squeakers were so often seen together that it was hard to see them separately. Like monatomic oxygen, it did not seem quite the proper thing. Satterwaithe glared down at the third wrangler, as if it were the girl’s fault for being underfoot. “Are you learning navigation too? Or is The Lotus Jewel training you?” (This was not a kindly question, as she regarded The Lotus’ Jewel’s purported avocation a likely tutorial for Twenty-four deCant’s parturient condition.)

  “No, ma’am,” deCant responded, unaware of the subtext, but quite aware of the unkindliness. “I’m just a poor, simpleminded cargo-wrangler, me. ’Druther not have any more holes in my head than I can help. I come up here to see you, ma’am.”

  “To see me…”

  DeCant glanced at the waiting Gorgas and suggested, “In private?”

  Satterwaithe could not imagine any possible discussion between her and the young girl that would require privacy. In fact, she could not imagine any topic that would even require a discussion. “Yes, well, make it brief.”

  Gorgas took his leave. “We’ll take that snack at another time, then, Number Two,” he said, delighting in part in reminding her of her rank. “I have some calculations I want to get back to.” (That being the other part of his delight.)

  When they were alone in the ring corridor, Satterwaithe said to deCant, “Right, then. Is this ‘private’ enough?”

  It was not the setting that Twenty-four had imagined when she had imagined this meeting, but she knew from the woman’s frosty tones that it was the best she would get. So she unzipped her thigh pocket and with eager innocence handed the sailing master two sheets of hard copy that she had with Miko’s help printed out of Dr. Wong’s files.

  Puzzled, Satterwaithe examined them; but this examination did not resolve the puzzle, as she had no idea what the two diagrams represented. At first, she thought they were GC spectra—’stroidal assays of vaporized regolith such as survey ships often took. But the resemblance was superficial and, as she recalled from her rock-pounding days in The Black Diamond, would have evidenced astonishingly heterodox compositions for bodies in the Thule region. “What am I looking at?” she said brusquely, for she had no time for mysteries. In another five hours, she would be on watch again.

  “Genotypes,” said deCant. “Notice anything?”

  Satterwaithe looked at them again. “No.” Her voice had lowered into the danger zone, but deCant had no ear for it.

  “They’re the same.”

  Satterwaithe frowned and laid one spectrum over top of the other and held them to the overhead light to align them. “The lines don’t match up at all.”

  “That’s ’cause one of the record’s been altered. You see, if’n you shift this group of lines this direction, and open up the spacing between these lines here—”

  Satterwaithe looked at the girl, then shoved the hard copies back at her—“I’ve no time for this rubbish”—and began to turn away.

  “But…but, Ms. Satterwaithe! You’re my ma!”

  The older woman had taken two steps, but the words stopped her as cold as if one of the airtight doors had been suddenly raised across her path. She turned on the wrangler like a falcon on a mouse. “What’s that you said?”

  “I’m a clone, and a clone has the same DNA as her mother. This spectrum is mine, and this other one is yours and so you see—”

  And Satterwaithe reached down and gripped deCant by the front of her coveralls. “Listen close, girl, for I shall say this only once. First, those two gene spectra do not match. Second, never in my life have I gone to an ‘egghead.’ And third, if you persist in this nonsense, I will investigate how you obtained possession of my personal genetic data.” And with that she released the girl, who staggered back pole-axed.

  “But…”

  “I will not say it twice.” And Satterwaithe turned so abruptly that, in the milligee acceleration frame, she spun lightly into the air and had vanished around the bend in the B-ring before her feet touched the deck again. DeCant, watching her go, said, “but…” once again and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. She did not move from that spot or say anything further for several minutes. When she could trust her hands once more, she smoothed out the two sheets that had become wrinkled in her grip, folded them, and tucked them again into the thigh pocket of her coveralls.

  Later, at dinner, when Akhaturian had caught up with her, he asked her how it had gone.

  “She’s in denial,” deCant said, meaning the sailing officer.

  The Reef

  Ivar Akhaturian was assigned to every other blue watch when, as he perceived it, he assisted Corrigan in the piloting of the ship. The lad was sharp, Corrigan told Gorgas, for someone who had grown up in a gravity field. (Gorgas, who had also grown up in a gravity field, took no offense—and a good thing too, for nothing breeds hostility more than taking what has not been offered.) But then, Ivar had been piloting a jove-boat since the age of ten, helping his uncle run a threelium barge from Callistopolis to Port Galileo. So, although his experience in Jupiter’s gravity well gave him a bent to think in circles—or at least in ellipses—it was a decent foundation for the more hyperbolic thinking of torchship pilots.

  “It’s not that orbital mechanics plays no role,” Corrigan told the boy during one of their shifts together. “If Bhatterji snuffed the torches, Old Man Sol would tug at our coattails until we hit the heliopause, so our course would not be exactly a straight line, but more of a hyperbole. Where is the sun today?”

  “Uh. I guess it’s still in Capricorn, but entering Sagittarius?” Many of Akhaturian’s declarative sentences were disposed to end their lives as questions. This was not a flaw in his character. Others on the ship could have benefited from hanging a question mark off the back ends of their pronouncements.

  “Never guess,” said Corrigan, who was not himself prone to question marks. “Always know. In the futu
re, I will expect you to know the house without looking, and to take a noon sighting each day for greater precision. Now, the ship will always feel a tug to windward, and that affects our secant bearing. Torchmen down in the inner system especially must always take careful note of the sun.”

  “Uh, what about Jupiter? I mean, it’s powerful big, and—” Amongst the folk of the Galilean moons and their dependencies, Jupiter occupies the center of their thoughts, and often of their calculations as well.

  “Work the numbers,” Corrigan told him. “At our present position, the sun’s pull is three-hundred and fifty times greater than Jupiter’s. Now, Jupiter does help keep the ship on its bearings. We are, in a sense, falling down toward the planet. But the Sun deflects our path one way, and our high speed deflects us another way. The question is, how much and on which vector? That’s what a ship’s navigator will want to know.”

  “Yessir, Mr. Corrigan,” Akhaturian replied. He said yessir a lot, but it was less from subservience than it once had been, and more from agreement.

  “Meanwhile, take your bearings on Grubb and fetch us all a round of coffee.” Corrigan stretched his jaw until it cracked. “I’ll be glad when we’re through this patch and we can go back to normal watches. If we ever do make it through,” he added darkly.

  Twenty-four was assisting Grubb in the kitchen, one reason why Ivar ran the errand with such dispatch. She charged him three kisses—one for each coffee—and the boy paid the price with a will. Grubb was elbow-deep in a kneading vat. He wiped his bow with his forearm and smiled benignly. “What are you doing down here, Ivar? Thought you were flying this bucket?”

  “Oh, I let Mr. Corrigan take a turn at the controls.” Of course, Ivar over-paid Twenty-four on the coffee and then had to collect his change.

  After Akhaturian left, deCant put a convection pot into its dog box firmly enough that the other pots complained. Grubb raised an eyebrow in her direction. “What’s wrong, L’il Lumber?”

  “It’s not fair!”

  “I don’t expect it is. Least, I never found it so. Anything in particular, or just life in general?”

  “Ivar gets to fly the ship. And ’Kiru and Rave go out the mast. And even that Miko is standing watches below. What am I doing? Just muffing in the kitchen. Sand it raw! I’m wasting my life down here.”

  “Hey,” said Grubb, placing a hand over his heart, “nothing wrong with the kitchen.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean you, chief. I mean, this is what you want to do.”

  It wasn’t really, but Grubb did not correct the girl. “And what is it you want to do?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Then how do you know you’re not doing it? Look, I’ve got to run the mold inspections on the air filters in a few minutes. Why don’t you help me with that? Somebody has to keep this biosphere habitable. Might as well be you ’n’ me.”

  Utensils clattered as deCant took them from the sonic cleaner and returned them to their dog drawers. “It’s because I’m pregnant, that’s why they don’t let me do anything.”

  “Well,” said Grubb, scratching his head and leaving a streak of white there from the carnic he had been kneading, “Out on the mast, the radiation hazard is…”

  “And up on the bridge?”

  “That would be the Satterwaithe hazard—which is near as bad.”

  DeCant didn’t want to, but she couldn’t help the laugh, though she didn’t like it, either, after it had burst out. It can be a simple thing to make an angry person laugh. That does not mean it is a wise thing.

  “Besides,” Grubb continued, “you told me you weren’t interested in flight-deck duties.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is?”

  “I hate Satterwaithe!”

  The pronouncement startled Grubb considerably, as it did not seem connected to the previous string of conversation. It was an Athenic sort of statement, springing full-born off the top of her head. Offhand, Grubb could think of no one who liked the second officer, unless maybe it was Ratline, but hate seemed an excessive passion to direct at such a bloodless woman. “Why, what has she done to you?”

  “Nothing,” said deCant.

  “Well, then,” Grubb temporized, but Grubb did not understand that “nothing” could be a most heinous thing to do. “Here, why don’t you take this coffee and danish up to the captain?”

  “Sure…run some more errands.”

  “Ivar just ran an errand.”

  DeCant palmed the cat at him and Grubb said, “Here! There’s no call for that!” but by then damsel, drink, and danish had vanished alike.

  Although Corrigan had thought him unconcerned with the risks of penetrating a rubble field, Gorgas was more than concerned. At the ship’s current velocity, a body crossing their path would be like a farmer’s tractor pulling suddenly onto a superhighway. It would be no happy encounter.

  The trick was not to avoid such a meeting, which was trivial, but to avoid it and still enter HoJO. Constraints on a solution were like artful clothing on a woman: they enhanced the beauty of the problem. To meet this particular constraint meant a minimal angle of deflection—just enough to miss the obstacle and no more—and that in turn required detection occur at the maximum feasible distance. Yet feasible was a slippery sort of word. The inverse square law meant that The Lotus Jewel could see farther only by seeing less well, and many a man, his eyes fixed on the far horizon, has stumbled over a stone underfoot. Better resolution required diverting power from engines or life support. It was a pretty problem in juggling trade-offs, especially as the boundary conditions were continually changing with the ship’s deceleration.

  Gorgas had Ship ponder the infinity of options, solving in real time for the optimum angle. He was looking for a sign or, more precisely, for a sine.

  When the wrangler brought him his danish and coffee, she set the tray on his stay-put pad with enough force to startle Gorgas from the warm haze of his computations. The captain blinked, glanced curiously at the departing form, then bent once more to his figures. He took a bite of the danish without tasting the effort Grubb had put into creating it, which was a shame because the chief had labored mightily with essence of cherry and faux frosting and the like. As he sipped the coffee, Gorgas scowled and muttered, “Damn!” although this was not a verdict on Grubb’s bean. He had only now recollected that the sails were sixty-four kilometers in diameter, which gave the ship a far larger footprint against the sky than he was accustomed to consider. A minimum deflection would let the asteroid pass through the sail.

  Now, the sail was only a circle of cable, but seen head-on the interior of that circle would be a spider’s work of shrouds and stays. An object passing through that cat’s cradle would shear through the shrouds like a cannon ball. “Ship,” he said.

  “Ready, Mr. Gorgas.”

  “Message. To: Corrigan. Text: What procedures safeguard those lines attached to your sail should a body pass within the perimeter? End text. Send.”

  “Message sent.”

  “Thank you,” Gorgas said absently.

  “You’re welcome, sir.”

  Gorgas started, but then remembered that Ship had accessed a relict memory base from old cruise ship days. The AI’s new mannerisms were not at all unpleasant since, in consequence, at least one intelligence on board had begun to show a modicum of respect.

  Ship relayed the reply a few moments later. “Mr. Gorgas. Message from Corrigan. Text: ‘We send shroudsmen out to cut away the torn shrouds and attach new ones.’ End text.”

  “In other words,” Gorgas muttered, returning to his calculations, “no safeguards.”

  He worked the problem a little while longer, decided that in the event of a close approach he ought to strike the sails, then realized that a loop sixty-four kilometers wide would require longer to furl than the time between detection and encounter. Better to jettison the sail—but he could imagine the reaction from Satterwaithe or Corrigan, if he ordered that. So he decided to work t
he Ürumqi Campaign instead, taking the part of Chinese Eleventh Army Group. He had been pondering, off and on, a forward strategy to prevent the Kazakh seizure of the Jinghe railhead and was anxious to game it.

  But when he unbelted and turned around, he discovered that Mikoyan Hidei had (duplicating General Abdulhassan Karmazetov’s surprise thrust with the 8th Airmobile Brigade) appeared mysteriously in his rear. Gorgas reacted much as General Jiyung had, by pulling back in a precipitous manner.

  In milly this meant that, while he did manage to keep his feet, he did so only by executing a buck-and-wing across his dayroom. Gorgas was conscious of the clownish aspect of this dance. Had her teeth so much as peeked from Miko’s lips, he would have erupted like one of Bhatterji’s engines, and with much the same effect on the girl.

  A good thing then, that Miko gasped instead. She had not meant to startle the captain. (She had never heard of Ürumqi.) And in fact, his sudden leap had caused, Newton-like, a reciprocal jump on her part. So, while he sputtered, Gorgas did not explode.

  “Well,” he said when he had steadied himself and had contemplated the situation. He did not ask What do you want here? because the more interesting question at the moment was How did you get in here? The door to the ring corridor stood directly before his desk; those to his quarters and to the bridge were situated to his left and right, respectively. No one, however stealthy, could have entered from any of those three doors without causing him to take note.

  “There is another entrance to this room,” he said.

  “Captain,” she said, “you are the very first to realize that.” Her expression puzzled Gorgas, as it was one of respect and he was not accustomed to seeing that.

  “Well,” he said again; then, following another pause, “And where is it?”

  There were a dozen prevarications she could serve up, but she found honesty wagging her tongue by default. “The old stewards’ passageways,” she said. When she pointed toward the wall behind her, a vague discomfort affected her and she checked, incongruously, to see that her coverall was zipped.