The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “I know why,” said Ivar, firmly deferential.

  He spoke softly and Corrigan was two sentences past it before he turned on the boy. Over by the plotting tank, Gorgas and Satterwaithe paused also. Satterwaithe looked impatient; Gorgas intrigued. Only The Lotus Jewel, immersed in her own world, failed to react.

  “This is no time for a prank,” Corrigan scolded him.

  Ivar wasted no time in formal humilities. “Ship doesn’t know about the sails!”

  Satterwaithe frowned. “Of course it does.” And Corrigan added, “LJ reinstalled the sail handling software from Ship’s own deebies. I’ve been getting regular feedback on sail status; and so has Ratline.”

  “But, Mr. Corrigan, that ’ware was written before there were any Farnsworth cages. And the Farnsworth software doesn’t take sails into account. There’s no handshake between the two avatars. No one’s ever written one, so when you asked for the required deflection—”

  “—Ship didn’t know there’d be a leeward drift,” Corrigan finished, “and it underestimated.”

  “By God,” said Gorgas from across the bridge, “that must be why Ship has been oscillating the thrust ever since we raised sails.” He turned and stared into the plotting tank as if truth could be wrenched from the glittering points. “We must jettison the sail.”

  “No!” said Satterwaithe. It was a cri de coeur, though it took her but a moment to find its justification. “We need the sail now. To make up the forward deceleration we’ve lost by juking.” It was a good reason, and no less good for being true. Yet it is often the case that the conclusion precedes the rationale.

  Gorgas stared at her for a moment, and in that moment he remembered his entire career in the Guard. It was a long remember, for all its brevity, for Gorgas also remembered the career he had never had. Who knew how it might have ended? Standing tall on the bridge, surrounded by silent deference, maintaining an eagle watch for ballistic smugglers, for yachters in orbital decay, for orbital habitats endangered by solar flares. By God, a man like that deserved respect! And all of it, all of it, all of it, wadded up and thrown away in a single day. Instead of comets on his collar tabs, he recalled the comet trail of the pleasure boat Dona Melinda, Port Recife, as it screeched into the atmosphere at too sharp an angle.

  “Suggestions, Number Two?” he said. “Quickly now. Quickly. Better to act on a good idea than to delay in the hope of a better.” The sound over the hailing frequency had been no sound from a human throat and Commander Stepan Gorgas, officer on watch, had turned down the volume while he considered what he might do. He had considered every option, weighing the pros and cons of each, until there had been, quite literally, no options remaining.

  Satterwaithe gave the acting captain a curious look, wondering at the distant expression on the man’s face, which seemed at odds with the decisiveness in his voice. “Flip and spread,” she answered. “It’s a maneuver we learned in the ’Stroids. Turn radial to the sun and sail large before the wind.”

  “To starward,” said Gorgas, unsure he had heard correctly.

  “That will take us,” Corrigan pointed out, “directly across the path of the atoll.”

  “Fuck the atoll,” Satterwaithe said.

  Corrigan turned back to his boards. “I would think it would be rather the other way about,” he muttered. But Gorgas blinked like an owl as, staring at the forward view past Satterwaithe’s shoulder, he weighed the proposal in his mind. The chances were poor, but they were poor either way, and there was something in the mad audacity that appealed to him. A slow grin spread across his face. “Go for broke, eh?”

  “If we flip,” Corrigan pointed out, “the engines will no longer brake against Jupiter.”

  Satterwaithe had flown cages for a great many years. She did not like them, but she knew what they could do. “We orient the ship so that three cages can bear on Jupiter…”

  Gorgas stroked his chin and examined the ventilation grilles in the ceiling. “If Bhatterji can squeeze ninety degrees deflection from his focusing rings…” he mused, “…we can brake with three cages against Jupiter while the sails hoist us out of the way.”

  “And make up the lost deceleration afterward with the sail…” Satterwaithe followed the bread crumbs of Gorgas’s mind. “Sideways, our footprint is slimmer. We could pass through the atoll without a strike.”

  “Sooner to port, then, eh, Number Two?”

  “Sooner to port,” Satterwaithe agreed.

  “Very well. Mr. Corrigan, take your bearing on Regulus. Engines, we are changing orientation, thus.” Gorgas moved the cursor in the plotting tank, and in the red-lit engine-control room Bhatterji studied the repeater.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said to Miko. “Someone up there has balls, and I bet I know who.”

  “Yah,” replied Miko, “and she’ll get us all killed.”

  Bhatterji grunted and prepared to rotate the ship with the juke jets. They’d want maximum thrust against Jupiter and that meant three engines, and that meant one to the fore and two on the flank. “Get ready to curse the spinhall,” he said.

  Miko looked at him blankly a moment before she nodded. “Angular momentum. Right.”

  Bhatterji grinned, waited for his cue from the deck, then fired the rockets.

  The Vane

  “Madam Sailing Master,” Gorgas said. “You have the conn.”

  It was a peculiar thing, but Satterwaithe, who had so long dreamed of returning to command of The River of Stars, barely noticed when she did. She had always thought to settle into the captain’s chair like a queen restored to her throne, but now that the time had come, she remained at the sailing master’s virtual panel and took hold of the joystick there. It seemed to her as she looked into the screen that she lay on her back and stared into the night sky.

  Closing her eyes briefly, she saw all the pieces that would have to fit together. Sensor data, bearing, engine thrust, sail drag…And behind those: power consumption, boron depletion, coolant usage…A jigsaw puzzle, indeed! “Sails, Engines, prepare for power diversion to radar paint. Ease back your consumption in four. Comm…Comm! Refresh the paint on the atoll. I want distances and vectors on every body in our forward cone and anything beyond that could wander in during the next half hour, and I want it in five.” She turned and noticed Corrigan’s long face and grinned in fierce exaltation. “Don’t worry, Number Two,” she said, “we’ll pass through that atoll with nary a bump.”

  Corrigan grunted. A rock traveling fourteen kiss might as well be standing still from the frame of the ship. Yet, he had to admit that Satterwaithe’s idea was a clever one. If they did strike a rock flying sideways, it was likely to roll across the curvature of the hull. That was better than a frontal strike. He reminded himself that the ship had been designed for the slower transit speeds of a sail and for the less hazardous spaces of cisLuna.

  Which was not to say that he believed that Satterwaithe’s maneuver would end well. “Say not of tomorrow, ‘I will do that,’” Corrigan whispered to himself (though Akhaturian, sitting beside him, heard and cocked his head), “but say, ‘If God wills it.’” After reciting the passage he felt a strange contentment. He often used the expression God willing, but only as a figure of speech and he had long ceased to listen to the words. But they had come this time from his heart and brought with them the peace of Submission. He and Satterwaithe were equally vain, he realized now, to expect success or failure, for either fate might come upon them and only God knew which it was to be. All that a man could do was to strive and leave all else in God’s hands. “Well,” he said much to Akhaturian’s bewilderment, “let’s make sure our camels are tied.”

  Gawking at the First, Akhaturian almost missed the signal from the engineering deck. “Power load on engines ramping down,” he announced.

  “Power draw on sails at seventy-five,” Ratline proclaimed over the speaker from the Long Room, (then he turned to Okoye and Evermore and said, “Let’s hope it don’t stay down. You, Evermore! ’Ware thos
e temperatures on the cladding jacket. We don’t want to quench.” His own hand hovered over the scram button.)

  “Ping,” said The Lotus Jewel. (And she laid her hand upon the sky while she waited for the bounceback to prickle against her palm.)

  Satterwaithe called out. “Engines and Sails, resume full power. Initiate turn.” She pulled the joystick hard left. “Thus, thus.” High above her and many kilometers out, relays kicked amps into different loops, altering the magnetic shape of the sails, moving the center of pressure so that the wind pushed them more directly to starward. “Mr. Corrigan, we must shift the center of pressure on the sail suit. Activate the fores’l vanes.”

  “Flux pumps on,” Corrigan replied. “Vanes deploying.”

  “Shroudmaster, pay out the eastside delongators.”

  “Eastside delongs, aye,” replied Ratline, who then snapped at Ship, “You heard the lady,” and to his shroudsmen, “Keep a sharp eye for jams and mechanicals, kids.” As he watched the tension readings on the rigging, his heart tore at his chest like a caged lion, half-fearing, half-hoping. It had been like this, once, long ago when he’d been young. He felt young now, and immeasurably old, as if the story of his life had become a snake biting its own tale. “The good news,” he told them, “is transit speeds’ll take us through the rubble in less than a minute.”

  Okoye looked at Evermore, whose smile was drum tight. Neither of them asked what the bad news might be.

  The River of Stars sped sideways across the Trojan Gulf, braking for the Jupiter datum and leaving thin streamers of carbon exhaust in the vacuum. Her sails glowing, she clambered to rise above the oncoming atoll. Only three engines bore, and those at a slight angle, so her vector was no longer directly against her destination. Bhatterji and Miko had ratcheted the focusing rings as close to 90 degrees as they could, but there are limits, if not to geometry, then to cantilevering and the strength of materials. Consequently, The Riv’ did not spill her forward velocity as rapidly as need required, and Corrigan, above on deck, tracked her status glumly. There was a limit, also, to how far they could deviate from the grand secant and still enter Jupiter Roads. If Gorgas and Satterwaithe enjoyed throwing the dice, Corrigan did not. Bhatterji grumbled that the sails, having caused the problem in the first place with their leeward drag, may as well solve it too; but he was disinclined to spurn rabbits, regardless how empty he had thought the hat. Meanwhile, he fought the plasma plume, which being of ionized gasses, was drawn toward the sail’s magnetic field, where it created coruscating auroras—and threatened to poison the cables.

  “No wonder no one ever flew a hybrid,” he complained to Miko, but the mate only shrugged.

  “It wasn’t a problem before we rotated the ship.”

  Flying sideways meant that the deck beneath her now seemed to lie at a pronounced slant and she rested in the back of her clip-chair with the panel slightly above her. The acceleration was weak, so it was no great strain to reach up to the controls, but it was peculiar and it seemed to her that the panel hovered over her head ready to fall and smash it.

  She also kept a wary eye on the Number Two CoRE magnet temperature, which had been slightly high following torchlight and now seemed to creep incrementally higher. Now she knew what Bhatterji had meant when he said that only a handful of indicators mattered at any given time. She checked the other gauges and she checked the other engines, but the Number Two CoRE readouts lured her like a siren. If the magnet quenched, the focusing rings could no longer direct the plasma. Bhatterji, when she pointed it out to him, affected indifference, but the temperature ought not to have increased at all, however slowly, and Miko’s concern inched upward with it.

  Satterwaithe had a choice. She needed another paint of the dead-ahead to refresh her bearings, yet she was loathe to reduce power to the sail—for reasons that had little to do with piloting. She could feel through the soles of her slippers the humm of the wind against the sail’s magnetosphere, translated by the rigging to the vessel itself. It was the feel of a ship come alive once more. Indeed, that humm seemed to have run up her very limbs, for she herself had come alive as well, and this is a remarkably vigorous feeling for a woman who had been for most purposes dead a great many years. Perhaps it was the contrast, this lively awareness abutting so against those years of numb indifference, but it was much like the sexing she remembered with Tiki Ferrér and, as in those old days when she had been young, she did not want it ever to stop.

  “Comm,” she said. “Are we close enough to the atoll to paint it without diverting power?”

  “Ship says no,” The Lotus Jewel replied.

  Now, here was paradox. A body may be far off in kilometers yet very near in minutes. Satterwaithe was silent for a moment while the moans of the rigging blended with other moans deep in time and on another planet. It was a costly moment—the law of supply and demand made it so—but she spent it on something golden. Oh, she heard her own voice in her memory, and her lips rounded to the syllable, oh, though she uttered no sound now.

  The Lotus Jewel had flipped up her goggles to look at the sailing master, and now bore a puzzled frown, almost as if she had heard that moan herself. “Shall I ping?”

  But if Satterwaithe had rusted, she was still iron underneath. She knew what was needed in order to do what was needful. She had known that long ago and had made hard choices then as well. She could not dodge the atoll, but she had to know its interstices. Break for daylight, an old saying had it. Dodge and weave. She longed for a more responsive craft. “Yes, warn Sails and Engines. Make it a tight pattern. Here.” She traced the region on the screen with her light pen.

  The Lotus Jewel spoke with Engines and with Sails and with Ship, and the vibrations faded to a more subdued note. Satterwaithe remembered that she did not know whether Tiki Ferrér still lived. If thine hand offendeth thee, cut it off. If thine eye offendeth thee, pluck it forth. Tiki had offered no offense, but the child had died, and when choosing one path over another, it was better to consign to the memory hole all that had lain along the other. And so whatever the fate of the corporeal Tiki, the intentional Tiki had perished, and grass now grew over his grave and his place knew him no more.

  The ping having been sent, power surged back to the sails and the melancholy faded with the rising humm—though it did not leave her entirely. She was not one like Gorgas to agonize over possibilities and certainly not over possibilities that once had been. She let the dead bury the dead. And yet, for the second time in this transit—indeed, for the second time in many years—memory moistened the cheeks of Eugenie Satterwaithe.

  Argos, it is said, had a great many eyes. Ratline had but two, yet those two did yeoman’s work. “I see it,” he said even before Okoye pointed out the feedback from the foresail vane.

  “Field strength in the vane won’t go over half,” she said.

  “And the cladding temperature is too high,” Evermore added.

  “A connection’s loose,” Ratline decided. “Damn it, I tested every line before we even started the project.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Evermore, fetch a spool of cable. We’ve got to find that dead spot and replace it.” Evermore loped off and Okoye spun her seat to face the shroudmaster, who had gone to the vesting rack. As this was behind the control station, it seemed to be at the bottom of the room with herself looking down upon him.

  “You’re going out,” she said.

  Ratline pulled the welding harness over his vacuum suit and adjusted the holster for reach. “Why do you think the SOP says we dress up like this? To pose for a portrait?” Evermore had returned with the reel and Ratline took it from him without breaking eye contact with Okoye. “Hard to fix things from in here,” the old man said.

  Evermore glanced at Okoye, saw fear there, then said breezily to Ratline, “What’s the rush, boss? It’ll take, what? Fifteen minutes jetting out the long-line just to reach the vane. How long to locate and fix the malf? By then, we’ll be right in the thick of the atoll.” That Evermore was a sine
wave, up and down, up and down. Only moments before, Okoye had heard him sing foolishly about doing just that.

  Ratline thrust his face forward like a snapping turtle. “If that vane goes, boy, the heat flash’ll quench the fores’l interlock, and if that normalizes, we lose the whole segment. If you’re curious to know what a couple dozen megajoules of instantaneous resistant heating will do, I’m not.” His curiosity on that point had been satisfied decades earlier.

  “But,” said Okoye, “to go out in the hail?”

  “If we just wait until we’re past the atoll…” said Evermore.

  Ratline pulled back and looked at the both of them. “I won’t order you out. No man gives orders to another in a case like this. We take our orders from the sail. I thought you understood that, I thought you were sailors; but…” He turned away to fetch his helmet from the headball. “…maybe not.”

  Evermore said muff under his breath, then, “I’m coming.” And he too pulled his helmet off its headball.

  Okoye felt a blow to her stomach. “Rave!”

  He turned and, finding a grin somewhere, he used it on her. “Well, I’d hate to think we got all dressed up for nothing.”

  “But, you just said…”

  “I know what I just said, but the Rat is right. If the vane blows, it could take the foresail with it. And that’s three-quarters milly that we’ll wish we had, come Jupiter Roads.”

  “But you don’t know how to locate a dead spot.”

  “Ratline does. Don’t worry, ’Kiru. I can figure it out. How hard can it be?”

  Okoye left her seat and slid downhill to where he stood. She laid a hand on the arm of his suit and leaned close. “He’s hoping to die, you know,” she said quietly.

  “The Rat?” Evermore turned his head and found Okoye so close that a kiss might be had, were kisses subject to quantum tunneling effects. Her eyes were great brown pools deep enough to drown in. He could see his own reflection in their liquid surface, as if his homunculus had already dived into them and had splashed water over their rims. He swallowed, hesitated, but ’Kiru’s lips remained in the rest state. “Well, then,” he said, accepting her judgment, “he’ll need someone to see him off.”