Meaning that further magnification would only produce a larger blob. A small horseshoe formed in the skin above her nose as The Lotus Jewel worried at an unease lying splinter-like in her mind. “Deck,” she said over the voice link.
“What is it, Comm?” Corrigan sounded weary. The lack of sleep was telling on him.
“What does a Jovian passage do to an atoll?”
“That depends on how far the parent asteroid is from Jupiter when it passes.”
“I mean, in general.”
“Well, as the asteroid closes from the sun-west, it speeds up and moves higher—toward Jupiter. Then, after it moves on to the east—it’s faster than Jupiter, of course; lower orbit—Jupiter slows it down slightly and it drops back. Depending on circumstances—on distance and on certain resonance relationships—the ministroids might be pumped up or pushed down after repeated passages. That’s why the Trojan Gulf may have transients—like our tsunami—but is free of permanent residents.”
“The atoll spreads out, then. Thanks.” The Lotus Jewel switched back to sussing.
The Lotus Jewel quickly surveyed the rest of the sky and found nothing that needed attention during the time the paint would take.
“Comm,” said Corrigan, what are you doing?”
“Proving I’m not stupid.”
The Lotus Jewel was sufficiently beautiful that she was also generally accounted dumber than a stone, there being in vogue the peculiar notion of a conservation law regarding the sum of brains and beauty. Corrigan’s great sin was to believe this notion to be a fact, and he was guilty of it even when he did not intend it. Even when he had loved her—and in his way he still did—he had loved her as a man might love a child, quite differently than he had loved Miko, who really was a child. His very demeanor—and his great flaw of correcting others on questions of fact—made the accusation always implicit. That The Lotus Jewel did not know how to think only lent credence to the charge.
But thinking is often overrated—at least the plodding, pedestrian modus ponens sort of thinking that hops from premise to conclusion like a fastidious child crossing a creek on protruding stones. It would be fine to say that The Lotus Jewel had reasoned her way to her conclusion. That, firstly, Stranger’s Reef was last seen as a triplet; that secondly, it was surrounded by a cloud of small bodies that would not show up on a normal long-distance ping; that, thirdly, the Jovian passage had likely smeared the atoll directly across their path; that, fourthly, to wait until that load of birdshot was within short-range sensors would be to wait too long. But, The Lotus Jewel did not think that way. She liked to wade. Her answer felt right. There are any number of names for this process, but stupid isn’t one of them.
“Bridge,” said Okoye, “this is Sails. There’s been a power drop to the mains’l cladding system. What’s going on?”
“Bridge,” said Miko, “this is Engines. There’s been a power drop to the CoRE magnet cooling system. What the hell is going on?”
“Ship,” said Corrigan, “belay that ping.”
And the ship went dark.
Nothing sustains confusion like being in the dark. The red-lamps came on down in engineering and Miko ramped down the plume velocities even while she watched the field strength dim. No, she cried, though not aloud, not again! If the magnetic insulation went and the engines slagged once more, they would never find the means to effect a second repair. She placed one hand on the scram bar, with the other hit the alarm to waken Bhatterji, and waited.
There were no red-lamps up above in the Long Room. They had been scavenged long ago and no one had thought to replace them. Okoye could not see her hand in front of her face, and it didn’t help that the hand was black. Faux gauges glowed on the monitor screens. Yes…the cladding temperature was creeping up. If it hit the quench point, the sail would normalize—lose superconductivity—and the sudden appearance of eighty megajoules of heat from the spontaneous resistance would vaporize the damned thing. “Whiff the wire,” as Ratline had put it during training. She ought to reef the sail, yet the activators for the flux pumps were anonymous buttons under her fingertips. “Ship!” she called. “Wake Ratline! Now!”
What Corrigan was saying on the bridge was rather more expressive and certainly more colorful. Gorgas burst onto the bridge in the midst of this encomium and asked what had happened. The primary lights were just coming back on line (and in the basement and attic, Miko and Okoye breathed simultaneous sighs of relief, even while they hunted across their readouts and quizzed various avatars of Ship on their status.
Corrigan pointed to the sysop’s station. “She ordered a fine-grid paint! At maximum distance! With the ship at full braking power!”
“Well,” Gorgas responded mildly, “she may have had a reason.”
“We need every amp we have to keep the sails cold!”
“And the plasma rings focused,” Gorgas reminded him. He thought that running both systems in parallel had perhaps put too much of a loading on the power system. The River of Stars was laying rubber halfway across the sky, she was braking so hard. She’d be lucky if she didn’t end with an engine mangle. But no one supposed any more that the ship would ever leave Port Galileo, save as scrap metal and aerogel in the bins of a recovery barge, so all that really mattered now was stopping.
And surviving the stop. That was important too.
Satterwaithe, snatched from sleep by the alarum, reached the bridge in her underwear and Corrigan had to go through it all again to fill her in. He averted his eyes, but Satterwaithe was the very opposite of The Lotus Jewel in matters of her appearance.
Akhaturian arrived next but nobody tried to fill him in, so he scuttled to the navigation station and began running the data for himself.
By that time, The Lotus Jewel had received the bounceback from her paint and she told Ship to display the data in the sistines. As she removed her virtch hat, four mouths opened for a barrage of questions and reprimands, but the sudden ripple of color and light overhead closed them. The silence that followed was not really very long, but seemed deeper for being so empty.
Satterwaithe was the first to speak, but all she said was, “Well.” The Lotus Jewel waited for her to say more, to indicate by some word that she had done the right thing, or a foolish thing, or perhaps both.
“Where away?” said Gorgas, stepping to the plotting tank.
Akhaturian answered from navigation. “Two minutes starward off the dead-ahead. Center of mass on the ecliptic. Debris cloud subtends two degrees of arc.”
“Master?”
“It’s Stranger’s Reef, right enough,” Satterwaithe answered. “A triplet, just like I was told. Comm, what particle sizes in the atoll?”
The Lotus Jewel groped the spattering of radar echoes her ping had harvested. “All the way from rubble to gravel.”
“What’s going on?” Ratline enquired over the Long Room screen. “What happened to the power? We near quenched the goddamned sail!”
“We’ve raised the Reef, shroudmaster,” Satterwaithe told him and Ratline fell silent.
“Very nearly on the bearing I initially calculated,” Corrigan pointed out, “only it was more distant than we thought and was masked by the first body.” These were o
nly facts, of course, not excuses.
“We’ll have to juke the ship,” Gorgas decided. “Engines, are you there?”
Bhatterji replied over the engine room link. “Ship claims it was told to run a paint, but that shouldn’t have drained—”
“You forget the power needed for the sails,” Gorgas reminded him. Bhatterji cursed and Gorgas, rubbing his unshaven cheek, turned to The Lotus Jewel. “Distance?”
“Point-four megaklicks,” said The Lotus Jewel. “Closing in one hour.”
Gorgas grunted. “At least we raised it in plenty of time. Engines, stand by for input. Number One, please calculate the available thrust for a sunward juke. There is a suite of scenarios already in the deeby.”
“A sunward juke?”
“I know it puts us farther off the grand secant, but the Reef lies off our star-side quarter. Choose the minimum possible deflection.”
Corrigan nodded at the dark humor, as it fit his own mood well, and crossed the deck to dispossess young Akhaturian from his seat. Satterwaithe laid a hand on his arm as he passed. “It would be best if we cleared the sail, as well.” And Corrigan, seized by an irrational burst of optimism, slapped her on the rear and said, “I didn’t hoist that suit to see it shredded by grapeshot.”
Satterwaithe reacted not at all to the slap. Perhaps she didn’t feel it, as she was said to be a hard-ass. “Madam sailing master,” said Gorgas, not taking his eyes off the dead-ahead display, “will it take very long to finish dressing?” Satterwaithe in an emergency would have come to the bridge buck naked—nevertheless, she did leave and, when she was gone, Gorgas suppressed a smile. “She must have been a striking woman in her younger days,” he commented to no one in particular.
The others turned and stared at him. “She’s still a striking woman,” The Lotus Jewel said, “as you’d learn if you repeated that remark in front of her.”
Gorgas grunted again, annoyed at his own digression. “Comm,” he said brusquely, “ping the atoll at five-minute intervals and have Ship compute the parallax. Number One, have you plotted a course? Good, feed your requirements to Engines and have them work out a burn schedule. Smartly, now. I’d rather not learn that we should have started burning five minutes ago.”
“If we have to,” Akhaturian said, “we can deliver half our thrust to starward and miss that rock easy.”
“Yes, cadet,” Gorgas told him. “Please calculate as an exercise by what delta-V we will fail to achieve Jupiter if we do so.”
Akhaturian felt the tips of his ears grow red. “Not by that much,” he muttered. Scowling, he touched his hushmike so he could speak with one of Ship’s avatars without disturbing the rest of the deck. He wondered what else he had overlooked.
Belowdecks, Grubb, deCant, and Evermore were battening the carniculture vats and securing their loose utensils when Dr. Wong poked her head in. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Twenty-four heard from the Li’l Cap’n that we raised the Reef,” Grubb responded cheerfully, “and the atoll lies square across our dead-ahead, so the ship will have to juke. That means high lateral accelerations. I’d rather not have dinner slosh out of the tanks.”
“Can I help? I’d like to help.” Wong lifted one of the vat lids that hung on the wall, then looked about at a loss for where to put it until Grubb tapped the lip of the porciculture vat. She lifted the lid into place, set it, and then struggled with the clamps. Grubb caught Evermore’s eye and motioned with a nod.
“Thank you,” Wong said when Evermore had helped her position the lid. “Do you think there’s any real danger?”
Grubb laughed. “I’d hate to think we were going through this muff for no reason.”
“I was on Johnny Todd when she docked at Vesta with too much vee,” the doctor volunteered. “Everything jounced and jangled when they scraped the rock, and the crew went ballistic because no one had strapped in. The captain struck the rockside bulkhead and broke his collar bone and the mate…oh, it was utter confusion. The harbor pilot had a heart attack as he was bringing us in. That’s why we hit. He was only seventy, if you can believe it.”
“That’s in snake years,” Grubb whispered aside to Evermore, who snickered.
“There were a dozen major fractures among the crew,” Wong remembered, perhaps with some nostalgia, “compound, simple, a few noses out of joint, and one case of hypobariatric anoxia when the second engineer tried to patch the air leakage in one of the cargo holds.”
“What,” said Grubb, “he went in without a suit?”
“He thought he could weld the fracture before the pressure dropped too much.”
“That sounds pretty stupid,” Evermore suggested.
“Well, the hold contained a shipment of young sheep, and they spoil if they suffocate.” Wong had lifted another lid, this one onto the poultriculture vat, and waited while Evermore positioned it. “I felt useful, then,” she said distantly, fingering one of the clamps. There had once been a dysentery outbreak on Gryffydd’s Hope and the usual spates of colds and fevers, but the Vesta incident stood out in her memories. She could still remember the whistle of the escaping air, the cries of the wounded, the hiss and stink of the patch welders somewhere out of her sight while she fought to stem the flow of blood from a compound femoral fracture. There had been blood everywhere, not because there was so much of it but because the globules split and spread and coated everything with a thin, vile film.
“Mr. Evermore,” said Ship. “Mr. Ratline requests your presence in the Long Room.”
The second wrangler (and apprentice shroudsman) grinned. “Ship, you must be paraphrasing. Ratline hasn’t requested anything in the last twenty years.”
“Mr. Ratline has expressed his desire in the most emphatic terms.”
“I bet he has. Sorry, Mr. Grubb, duty calls.” Evermore waved the chief a casual salute and loped off as easy and as confidant as a gazelle.
Wong wiped her hands against her coverall. “He’s a dutiful boy.”
Grubb finished closing the dog cabinets, then rapped deCant on the arm with the back of his hand. “Go check the kitchen. See if any knives are sitting out. Wouldn’t want them flying this way or that when the juke jets blow.”
When the third wrangler had left the carnic room, Grubb said to the doctor, “Notice anything peculiar about Ship?”
Wong shook her head. “No, not really.”
“It’s been growing awful polite and eloquent lately.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Doc, it’s always a problem when a machine doesn’t do the way it’s supposed to.”
“I don’t always think of Ship as a machine. It seems like a person sometimes.”
“That’s what they call the touring fallacy—when you can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s just a simulation. It’s bad enough when people give you indeterminate output. You don’t want the equipment that runs your propulsion and life support to do the same.”
“Be careful the way you talk about Ship,” Wong teased him. “It might be listening.”
The thought startled the chief, who looked at the grille in the ceiling. “I’m worried, is all.”
“Well, if it’s any comfort, Ship picked up a greeting-and-response library when it shook hands with the cutter. Cutter still had deebies from back to Coltraine’s time.”
Grubb had been pulling his kitchen smock over her head. He paused now and looked at her, then balled the garment up and shoved it in a laundry sack tied to the end of the counter. “The cutter,” he said. “I thought the Zacker gutted that boat ages ago.”
“No, Big’ and I found it. It still works.”
The doctor was hardly a boat pilot and wouldn’t know an injector port from a Stannish loop. Grubb did not know, either, but at least he knew the terms and that gave him a superior form of ignorance. “Is Fife a boat pilot, then?”
“Well, he plots all those trajectories and things for Mohammed’s Mountains.”
“That’s free-fall.
Torchflight is different. Why were you in the cutter?” That the Lunatic and the snake had gone off to do the deed was his default assumption, but then, being a romantic, he was ever ready to construe the most fanciful interpretations to events. Ineluctably, he believed that others led more interesting lives than he did.
In the engine room, Bhatterji had obtained a burn solution from Ship. The half-milligee acceleration that Corrigan had computed required a six-degree cant north by starward on Numbers One and Two focusing rings. Since this would reduce the ship’s forward vector, Numbers Three and Four must be throttled back 95 percent to keep the ship from yawing.
Gorgas received the word on the bridge. “Very well, people,” he said. “Sunward, six degrees. Maintain attitude.”
“Six degrees, aye,” said Corrigan and he nudged the joystick at his station until the crosshairs were centered on the target point 32 kilometers off the narrowest spread of the atoll. There were probably a few rogues in that region, as the atoll did not have a sharp boundary, but the probability of a miss improved exponentially the farther from the primaries one passed.
“Engines to neutral,” Gorgas said.
Down in the engine control room Bhatterji turned to his mate. “Quickly. Be sure you reorient the magnets before the rings cool. We don’t have time for a cold start.”
Miko nodded and swallowed to wet her throat. “Ziggy,” she warned the ship, “in two, in one,” and shut down the engines. Her left hand began rotating the focusing rings the instant the plasma plumes died. “Thirty minutes of arc,” she told Bhatterji as she watched the progress on the two starward engines. “One degree…Two…” The huge gimbals on the rim seemed to take forever to move. That was the trouble with mechanical systems. “Six degrees,” she announced when the second engine finally reached its set point. She glanced at the clock and was astonished to see that less than a minute had passed.
Bhatterji nodded. “Lock them in.”
The Wreck of the River of Stars Page 39
