The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “Locked.”

  “Confirmed. Bridge, engines are ready.”

  From the bridge, Gorgas said, “Ignite. Sunboard engines at ninety-five. Starboard at full.”

  “Ninety-five, aye,” said Bhatterji.

  Miko announced, “Burn in three, in two, in one,” and hit the button a half second behind Ship’s autopilot. The gentle nudge of milligee accelleration pushed back into her seat, but relief pushed her deeper. She turned to Bhatterji, who grinned at her.

  “How did it feel?” he asked. “To move the ship.”

  “Jove,” she answered with a grin of her own.

  The Lotus Jewel, under the cap once more, struggled with feelings of guilt and justification. She hadn’t known that the fine-mesh ping would pull so much power from propulsion and that it would push both engines and sails to the critical point. Yet, by doing so, she had discovered a hazard with barely enough time to dodge it. Not for the first time, she wished that the ship carried three cheeseheads, so someone could be under the cap 24/7. What if she had missed the hints? What if she had not thought to ping the critical region at this distance? They would not have seen the atoll until they raised it on the short-range sweeper, and, with less than a half-minute’s warning, that would have been too late.

  Was that why Corrigan had tried to stop her?

  The Cook

  “What if,” Okoye asked Evermore, “the atoll is spread out more than Corrigan thinks?” The three sailors were donning their vacuum suits. It was standard procedure, but it carried an implication. Far more often than cages, sails required outside work.

  Certainly the possibility was on Evermore’s mind. “Then shroudsmen like us will earn our berths,” he said, striking a pose. “‘We’ll climb and splice in the driving hail.’”

  Ratline, who had been listening to the two youngsters with half an ear, snorted. “Boy, you been listening to Grubb too much. Ever been out there in the hail? Whoever wrote that song never done it, I can tell you. A stone hits you at transit velocity, what comes out the other end ain’t pretty. I remember…we near lost a sail coming through the Belt when Terranova raced the Calhoun to Jupiter. Me an’ Gooch Hatfield an’ Kin Dabwele an’—oh, God, I’ve forgotten so many faces—we were the watch above when Terranova tucked a little too close to one of the Phocaeas and gravel ripped the shrouds. We jetted up the sou-east de-long with a splice an’ halfway up, ol’ Gooch, he got punched clean through. A pebble no bigger’n my thumb. I was right behind him when he spilled his guts.” Ratline laughed and shook his head. “Spilled his guts,” he said again, more softly. “Coulda been me, y’know,” Ratline went on, “but Gooch wasn’t the fastest hand ever went up th’ ropes. He never hustled, and look what it got him. If he’d been on the bounce, it woulda been me.”

  “Or if he’d been slower still,” Okoye pointed out, “no one would have been hurt.”

  But Ratline shrugged her off. “When it’s time, it’s time.”

  “Why did Terranova send you up in the gravel anyway?” Evermore wanted to know.

  Ratline screwed his right eye. “If that shroud snapped, we’d’a lost the sail and the torch ship would’a won.”

  “So,” said Okoye, who recalled that the torch ship had won anyway, “he sent a man out to die?”

  Ratline turned on her. “He sent a man out to mend a shroud. The dying part was just lagniappe. It happens. A stone, a flare, a sail snap, a suit malf…It goes with the job.”

  “I wouldn’t be afraid to go out,” Evermore said. “I mean, what are the odds?”

  “On dying?” Ratline shrugged. “One hundred percent. It’s when and how that makes it interesting.”

  Gorgas remained by the plotting tank, watching the progress of Stranger’s Reef—the true Reef—as it edged starward against the notional sky. He imagined himself the very picture of a Captain On Deck. Upright, stern-faced, intent, and with a little circle of worry about his countenance. Duty was his Anchises. When Satterwaithe returned in a rumpled coverall and slippers, she spared a glance to the empty captain’s seat and another to Gorgas, but made no observation, unless to herself. “Where away?” she asked.

  Gorgas turned from the tank. “Would you join me for a moment, Number Two? I should like your opinion.”

  Satterwaithe was none too certain that Gorgas would like her opinions, but crossed to his side anyway. Gorgas pointed in silence to the blinking crosshairs of the dead-ahead just to sunward of the Reef. She opened her mouth to ask what in bleeding hell was she was supposed to see, but pride closed it. If Gorgas saw something in the tank, she assured herself, it could not be anything but obvious. “How long since the most recent paint?” she asked, marking time while she studied the display.

  “Ah,” said Gorgas, “you notice it too.”

  If anything, this comradely approbation irritated her still further. Gorgas was an elliptic man—most of what he said he did not say. A priestess to his Pythia, Satterwaithe had to decode his every utterance and fill in the ellipsis. Had she not been exceptionally good at this, Gorgas would have long ago driven her mad.

  “Where is the marker for the Reef’s original bearing?” she demanded, then, peering more closely, saw that it was partly obscured by the marker for their current position. She raised her head. “It’s been a quarter of an hour. The shift in our dead-ahead should be greater than that.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Bhatterji told Miko as he turned from the bridge talker. “Bridge says we’re only getting three-quarters of the calculated vector. Verify the magnitude and direction of thrust on both engines.”

  “All the readouts are nominal,” Miko told him.

  “That wasn’t what I asked. Check the plasma velocity—no, don’t read the gauge. The gauge may be what’s at fault. Work it out from the other data. What’s the Doppler on the plume? The temperature? Where’s the plumb line versus the gyro? The servos both agree that the focusing rings are canted six degrees starboard, but there may be mechanical slippage. Run alternative calculations and see if they yield the same values.”

  Bhatterji ran his own cross-check as well. Ship had been acting peculiar of late, but he did not believe there was an engine malf. A 25 percent error was not a subtle thing and he had calibrated those engines himself.

  Grubb ducked his head on entering the old cutter because the opening was smaller than an upright man and, in consequence, he seemed to kowtow to the man belted in the pilot’s chair. However, respect was the last emotion the chief could summon faced with the reality of Bigelow Fife caught in flagrante delicto. Grubb was a man who knew what he saw and what he saw was the passenger preparing to run off and leave them.

  The vessel had been quite properly stowed for departure, Grubb grudgingly observed. The lockers were battened and neatly hand-labeled. The sleeping cages were folded and lashed—and with the correct knot, too. The galley was laid in with a variety of foodstuffs, the range of which he could not fault. “All shipshape, I see,” he commented sarcastically.

  “I did the best I could, under the circumstances,” Fife responded. He did not regard his readying the cutter for escape as delictum, but rather as paratus, answering to the higher duty of personal survival; which is to say, of morality. He missed the sarcasm entirely.

  “You’re a smart man, aren’t you?” Grubb remarked.

  “I like to think so.”

  Fife was still missing the subtext. Grubb did not consider smart to be a synonym for intelligent, for while he admired the latter, he regarded the former with a lowering suspicion. “What do you think would happen,” Grubb said, “if you took the cutter out into an atoll?”

  “I wasn’t planning to take…”

  “Of course not, but just supposin’. The delta-vee between the boat and any objects freefing along this orbit is considerable—and the boat ain’t armored like the ship.”

  “But she does present a smaller footprint,” snapped Fife. It irritated him when dull-witted men played clever, which goes far to explain his chronic dyspepsi
a.

  Grubb shrugged. He had not thought of the footprint aspect, but was disinclined to debate rationales with a coward. “I think you’ll be safer waiting inside the ship.” Grubb maintained the pretense of persuasion.

  Fife very nearly defied the man, so frightened was he. “The logical thing,” he insisted in a show of reason, “is to have an alternative standing by.” But reason wasn’t in it. Deep inside, he was terrified—not of the hazards of space, but of the aptness of the crew.

  “Maybe logical,” said Grubb, “but logic isn’t the answer to everything.” (This remark, which Grubb thought a truism, terrified Fife still more.) “I’d wonder,” Grubb continued as if to himself, “at what songs they would sing.”

  The comment seemed to have wandered in from another conversation. “Songs,” Fife repeated, wondering if the cook had lost his mind.

  “Yah. What sort of song would they sing about a man who ran off on his companions?”

  Now, Fife was pleased to account himself a man of calm reason, but if the ice ran deep, it still wrapped a molten core, which could erupt through any crack in the shell. Anger juked him from his accustomed, cool trajectory. He would not endure chastisement from the likes of the cook. “I was not,” he said through his teeth, “running off on you.”

  “Wasn’t thinking of me.” Grubb, having finally lost patience with persuasion, laid a beefy hand on the passenger’s shoulder, and Fife heard something in the cook’s voice that he had never heard before; and that was judgment. Fife did not care for the sound of it, and not least because he considered that judgment to be false.

  Grubb knew what he saw, but this is not to say that he understood what he saw. He had found the passenger seated in a cutter that had been prepared for departure, but those were mere facts. They answered the what, not the why. Grubb would have made a fine scientist, but a poor philosopher.

  Grubb’s hand squeezed and Fife was startled to realize how big a man the cook actually was. He had always seemed small, perhaps because he had always seemed inconsequential. The grip persuaded where words had not. Fife acquiesced to its argument and unbelted, though with hard, abrupt motions that signaled his disagreement. Grubb pulled him from the seat and manhandled him through the umbilical into the rim corridor. Fife scraped against the rough, flexible tubing and called out in protest, but Grubb did not care. If Grubb drove Fife, fury drove Grubb.

  Tumbling into the rim corridor, Fife came up short in the presence of Fransziska Wong and Twenty-four deCant, who had accompanied the cook from the kitchen and had awaited the denouement outside the cutter. The snake and the nymph stared with blank expressions, until the need to fill in the blanks compelled Fife to speak.

  “I wasn’t,” he pled before any charge had been laid. “I was only getting the systems ready. Just in case. You know, ’Siska! You helped me stock the boat yourself.”

  “I can’t believe you would do this,” the doctor said.

  “Then don’t believe it.” So agitated had the passenger become that he took her by the arm, though such spontaneous touching was something he seldom did. “I would never leave you. You must believe me. I made you that promise.”

  But Wong responded to his plea with bitterness. “You could not help but make it.”

  Now, there was a desperate irony in all of this because, while Fife had been quite prepared to leave on his own, he had not actually intended to. He really had planned to wait until the very last possible moment before cutting loose, but he had been equally prepared to wait no longer. Nor was he an astute judge of last possible moments. He was quite apt to err on the antepenultimate side. Even so, as he had sat waiting, one thing had become unbearably clear to him. He would not have blown the umbilical without Fransziska Wong beside him. That realization had disturbed him quite as much as the impending atoll or Grubb’s intrusion. In the game of gland and brain, the gland sometimes wins.

  Oddly enough, only Twenty-four deCant, of that small group, sensed that Fife’s motives had been prudential rather than selfish—even Fife himself had doubts on that score and tormented himself with visions of having abandoned Wong—and, given the passenger’s reputation for careful reasoning, deCant found those preparations freighted with greater meaning than the funk that Grubb saw or the servility that Wong perceived. Fife’s reasoned preparation, Wong’s assistance, Grubb’s discovery of their plan—There was a greater ethical significance to these actions than any of the actors knew, for the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. This was deCant’s intuition, although she might not have framed it in quite those words. Had she known religion, she might have said that God moved in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, and so in consequence fall upon her knees to praise Him, for it was certainly not by the intent of any of the participants that this escape had been prepared for them all. As it was, the drama of the moment appealed to her in a purely secular manner, for the moment, like she herself, was pregnant with possibilities.

  “We gotta let the others know,” Twenty-four said. “I mean, if we do need to, you know.” It was important to get the pick of the litter of all those possibilities. She was much like Wong, but that she was ebullient where the doctor was very private. Safety mattered a great deal to her, which was understandable considering that her entire life was sequel to a series of close calls. But escape meant nothing if some were left behind. There were her parents to consider also.

  “You think the cap’n and Satterwaithe don’t know what they’re doing, girl?” Grubb asked, but seeing deCant’s frown, he relented. “Okay, okay. Ship!”

  “Waiting, Mr. Grubb.”

  “Message. To: Gorgas. Text:—”

  “Captain Gorgas is not to be disturbed. The bridge is engaged.”

  Grubb made an irritated sound. “Two-four, why don’t you run up to the bridge and tell Ivar about the cutter. Ship. Message. To: Bhatterji.—”

  “The engine room is performing critical analyses. Distraction is not advised.”

  Grubb tried not to show it, but that both Engines and Bridge were in do-not-disturb mode troubled him, and he could see by the passenger’s smirk, that the Lunatic had reached the same conclusion. (He was not entirely correct. The twist in Fife’s lip was mostly apprehension.)

  “Ship. Is there anyone on board we can talk to?” He spoke with sarcasm, even though Ship was not equipped to recognize figures of speech.

  “The sailing berth is on standby in the Long Room. The sailing berth is not engaged in critical activity.”

  Okay, a literal response would do. “Message.—”

  “The sailing berth has been informed.”

  “I haven’t framed the muffing message yet!”

  “Waiting did not seem expedient,” Ship said.

  “Who made you the judge of that?” Grubb spoke now with genuine fear.

  “Not ‘who,’” it replied, “but ‘what.’ Application of game theory, using payoff matrices, indicated optimum—”

  “Abort.” Grubb wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He was not interested in which algorithm had caused Ship to autoinitiate, only in the malf itself. “Two-four—” He turned, but the girl was gone.

  “She’s gone to the bridge,” Wong reminded him.

  “Doc,” he laid a hand beseechingly on her shoulder (at which gesture, Fife bristled), “could you run down to the engine room and tell Miko and Bhatterji about the cutter. I better check with the Long Room and see what humm Ship just gave them. Jesus.”

  “Is there something wrong with the AI?” Wong asked with genuine puzzlement.

  “I don’t know, and LJ is tied up, but…” He wanted to say that it might be a good thing after all that she and Fife had prepared the cutter for flight, but he did not want to say it in front of the passenger. “Tell the Ram about Ship, too. Tell him that Ship is ‘autoinitiating.’ Did you get that? ‘Autoinitiating.’ He might remember something useful from Iskander.”

  Fife spoke up. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Grubb favored him with a gla
re. “Haven’t you done enough?”

  “Evidently not.”

  Now Grubb bristled. “How stupid do you think we are?”

  The answer to that was “very,” but Fife, though his anger nearly drove him to say it, retained a modicum of prudence and decided that now was not the time for a verbal joust with the ship’s cook.

  “Ship,” said Grubb.

  “Waiting.”

  Accustomed by then to Ship’s use of honorifics, Grubb hesitated before continuing, though he did not wonder about the omission. Fife did, and listened more acutely. It seemed to him that the AI had snubbed the cook, which was a curious thing for an algortihm to do.

  “Cutter,” said Grubb. “Access. Lock out.”

  “Denied.” The portal remained open.

  Fife enjoyed the cook’s confusion for a moment before he suggested in cavalier tones that the ship’s cook normally lacked the authority to lock out the likes of Gorgas and Corrigan from anywhere.

  “All right,” Grubb snapped. “Ship. Cutter. Access. Limited lock out. Passenger only.”

  “Denied.”

  Grubb seized Fife by the arm. “I don’t have time for this muffing grammar. Come with me.”

  But Fife brushed the cook off. He had other tasks in need of doing, and primary among them was to repair the damage he had suffered in ’Siska’s eye. Fife’s form in the mind of Fransziska Wong was no less real than his body in the rim corridor. Injuries to an image may wound as gravely as a bit of bloody bone poking through torn skin. Indeed, his viscera seemed twisted into skeins because she had thought him gutless. This is not voodoo, but philosophy, which is not quite the same thing.

  Ivar Akhaturian stiffened and sat upright at the satellite work station to which he had been relegated by the first officer. “Mr. Corrigan!”

  “Not now, Ivar,” a somewhat distracted Corrigan told him. “Captain, all I can say is we need more delta vee on the normal. No, I don’t know why we haven’t seen the calculated deflection. Bhatterji’s verified both magnitude and direction. All the data check out.”